Just Kids

     Patti Smith had a life like no other. Troubled childhood as a kid dealing with disease and a not so stable household shaped her up to be strong and independent. She has no apparent vocation, but she liked to write poetry. Deciding to pursue her dream of being a poet, she decides to go to New York City, the city that never sleeps. Her adventure had no planning ahead and she had no place to stay, nor did she have money. She was homeless for quite some time, sleeping in different parks, public bathrooms, and sometimes fellow artists that offered her to stay at their apartments. Smith could not hold a job for longer than a week, and being a waitress was not even an option for her. She was a reading fanatic, so she started working at a couple bookstores to make some money to at least buy food and some art supplies. It was then when she met a shy, talented hippie named Robert Mapplethrope. He was a painter and had the clear goal on his mind to become like Andy Warhol, his idol. Together, Patti and Robert decided to move in and pursue their respective artistic dreams. Robert was a frequent drug user, smoking marihuana on the daily and using LSD (or acid) to create his art pieces. Along their troublesome lives that consisted on barely having anything to eat and struggling to reach their breakthrough point, Robert had serious problems questioning his sexuality. Leaving Smith and the Big Apple behind, he travels to San Francisco to find inspiration for his art and perhaps the answer to his questionable sexuality. Some time after her comes back with even more questions and gonorrhea from being sexually active with other men. From then, their relationship had ups and downs, (from this point on there will be spoilers) and their artistic careers finally start to blossom. Robert starts finding his passion and point of expertise, nudity, and Patti begins to reach out to more people with her poetry, to the point of becoming the lead singer for her own band. Their lives would change completely, finally becoming successful, meeting celebrities like Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Dylan just to name a few. They finally became wealthy and Robert finally had everything he could possibly want except health. The last chapter of the book is dedicated to honor Robert's death. He was diagnosed with AIDS and died a few months after. At this point Patti and Robert were not together, but they were very close friends.

     Overall I think this memoir is incredibly well written with a lot of detail and passion. I am amazed as to how detailed Pattie's memories are of what happened all throughout her life. There are points though, where her plethora of detail becomes slightly obnoxious and almost unnecessary. I did not think that I would like this book, but once I got into it, Smith's crazy life adventures and the crazy places she went and all the people she met, it was hard for me to stop. I read this book in the span of three days in about 8 hours, so it was a pretty fast read for me. It would be helpful to have some background knowledge of what was going on at the time the book was written and if you like the art, music and culture involved with it too. I would most definitely recommended to anyone trying to read a great memoir.

Men vs. Women

     Upon reading these two very opinionated and controversial essays I have been questioning why in our society men and women are regarded so differently. Perhaps the nuances are notable in the physiological aspect, but not in the personality traits of each person. Every single individual has a unique personality to him or herself. There are men that are very soft and cry easily and women that are incredibly tough and enroll in the military or do "manly" things like fighting (prime example is UFC fighter Ronda Rousey), therefore, I strongly believe that all the wrong assumptions made about each gender are extremely out of place and should be disregarded. You need to be happy and to achieve this you need to be free to be the person you want to be.  
     Going back to the essays, I am going to start with "The Great Lawsuit" by Margaret Fuller. Beautifully written and with a very strong argument, Fuller addresses various issues with sexism in her era. The language employed is appropriate to the seriousness of the topic, and quite old school, but this is obvious considering this was written over 170 years ago. It is inspiring to me that despite all the judgement she knew she was going to get, she published her works in which she strongly believed. That is one of the components that makes a literary piece good. If the author is passionate about the topic, the piece will certainly reflect that and be more engaging with the reader. The way the essay ended was remarkable, I loved how Fuller combined the topic of sexism and God together to prove her point.
     To be frank, "If Men Could Menstruate" was not appealing to me in any way. I found myself very uncomfortable throughout the three pages that seemed an eternity to read through. At the beginning I thought all the sarcastic regards towards menstruation and men being proud of it were hilarious, but later on I thought it was too overdone, and although her argument was stated, she failed to back it up, in fact, I thought it was totally invalid. I agreed with her up until the fourth paragraph, then it went down hill. I highly doubt any females like menstruating, for all I have heard, it's awful, and I know for a fact that that feeling towards it would not change if roles changed between men and women. Steinem failed to mention all the symptoms and after effects of menstruating like cramps and mood swings. She portrayed the whole process as painless and barely noticeable, when in reality it is not, and even me, being a guy know that.  I can personally say that if I started menstruating all of the sudden, I would not be happy about it.
   

Seeing

       Speechless. Perhaps that is the best way to describe how I felt after I finished reading Annie Dillard's "Seeing". Confused and dazed I made my way through her stupendously written essay, without knowing the significance or motif of it. Certainly not my style of reading, but she did make me realize how oblivious we are about the things that surround us because we take them for granted. I found it fascinating all the studies she incorporated into the essay about the surgical procedures Dr. Von Senden performed on blind-from-brith patients and the consequences after performing them. I certainly did not expect to see such drastic reactions like wanting to be blind again or even suicidal contemplations. Yes, such big lifestyle change can be overwhelming, but I never expected it to be to that extreme.
     Although I struggled comprehending Dillard's claim in "Seeing", I really did appreciate how descriptive she was, especially when she talked about her adventures at Tinker Creek. Her lively descriptions of her interactions with nature make the reader feel like he/she is actually in the scene along with Dillard. In my opinion, she over used her encounters at Tinker Creek, but her excellent way to describe the things she saw made the story not dull. This just goes to show the importance of getting the reader involved in the essay by successfully describing what is occurring in it. It stimulates the brain and makes it easier to read.

Google is Making Us Stupid, or Is It?

     "Is Google Making Us Stupid" is a splendidly written article that addresses the problems and changes the Internet as a whole has made in us since it was introduced. Nicholas Carr's skeptic views and arguments certainly make one think on how times have changed since all of the revolutionary inventions (books, the printing press, the clock, computers, the internet) came into the frame of time and history and how our brains have modified themselves to use these tools as efficiently as possible, perhaps like an automatic update to a new, more useful software. 
     Carr's claim was very negative towards the use of the web, and it seemed like he was scared (not to mention he wrote this article after watching "A Space Odyssey") that this new technology would indeed make us more dependent on it and ultimately more stupid. I disagree with that. Yes, it is obvious that the way of thinking in this "Internet Era" we live in has changed from "convectional" ways, but that is because the mediums have changed too. He mentioned that himself in his essay, when he wrote that the same research that used to take him hours in a library would take no longer that 10 minutes in the Internet. New mediums are by nature far more efficient and help getting tasks done faster, but he sees them almost as a doomsday device (Futurama reference). I do agree though, that we are very dependable on it. How many times have we not known perhaps the meaning of a word or the location of a placed and have just googled it? Heck, Google is now a verb that can be conjugated in the English language in almost every tense (yeah, the foreign guy is talking about the English language). Some of us have hit rock bottom and have not even take the time to open our phones but to just hold down the "Home" button and asked Siri the burning question we have in mind. That same efficacy that helps us get stuff done faster has also made us lazier, but that is the beauty of innovation and technological break throughs. They help us do more in less time, and also do things that we have not done before. With all of this being said, of course we are going to think differently! We are always bound to change the way we think and process information because settings never remain the same. It is quite obvious with technology, but even nature or our own body. The way we think about ourselves changes in the daily, and majorly as we hit different life stages. I doubt a seven-year-old thinks about him/herself exactly the same as a 15-year-old would. There are different interests and different perspectives, but that is the magic of time. I would personally think that we are more knowledge-full on average than people were 50 years ago. Here is why: by performing quick searches in our preferred browsing engine, most predominantly Google, we are able to gather more information about personal inquiries than people could back then. If I have a random thought about what is the lifespan of a Green Sea Turtle, I can just search that, and in less than a minute have my answer to it, and in less than five minutes have learned about specific facts that make that species unique. Now, if we backtrack to 50 years ago, it would have taken me 15 to 20 minutes to get to my local library, another 15 or so to find the sections that talk about turtles, and finally another five to find out the book is no longer there, but they have one available in a library 10 miles away. The information in the net is limitless, and our knowledge can be too, it is just a matter of time until our brains adjust to this colossal medium to start noticing the changes.