OkZoomer

Rufus is someone who grew to have everything given to him but at the same time nothing at all. His mother would give him everything he ever wanted while his dad would give him absolutely nothing. Growing up like this gave Rufus a twisted sense of taking whatever you want to (In a way he's getting everything he wants but also he has to "work" for it.) Rufus also has a narcissistic personality as he is a white man growing up in the south during the 1800s and the fact that his mother holds him above everything else. We can look at all of these traits showing up during his interaction with Alice. Having being rejected by Alice, who is a black woman, is too much for his egotistical narcissistic self. He orders Dana to get her for him (much like how his mother used to hand him everything). He doesn't understand that he can't just take anything he wants. When Alice killed herself because of Rufus, he wants Dana to stop blaming it on him. He couldn't take the guil...

In my recent panel presentation, I choose the article "Spastic Time" by Adam Barrows. I want to elaborate on some points I didn't go into dept or didn't touch on in class. The article, in short, revolves around the fact that we shouldn't be trying to diagnose Billy's mental condition. When we try to diagnose Billy, we input our own and society's own preconception of what is normal in the diagnosis. Here lies the problem: Our preconception of what is healthy or normal is very different from someone else's. But, is Billy really mentally ill? Is any of the Trafedorians real? We find ourselves asking this question when we learn more and more about Trafedorians' idealogy about time and death. Adam makes a point that we shouldn't be asking this question in the first place. He said, " The point is not to prove whether Billy is sane or lying. But rather, the point is that Vonnegut wants us to be suspicious of our overwhelming need to ask ...

Mumbo jumbo has been very interesting and has a lot of aspects that are similar to other books yet a lot of traits that draw my attention. This book, being a detective book, has all the suspense and traits that we are used to seeing in other books. Yet, the most interesting part to me is that even though we the readers eventually find out who is guilty, there is still enough going on that I still super drawn to the book. Unlike other stories, it was never one-sided and always a battle between two people that is everlasting. This also brings up the point if what we are reading is actually something that happened or entirely myth. Did something like this actually happen in the world of mumbo jumbo? To me, I believe it was a myth. We are so used to reading and hearing these kinds of stories from our family and on assigned these books at school. There is always one main character who goes through some stuff and always comes on top. This story is in many ways different from that idea but ...

In Ragtime, Doctorow's implements ways of imprisoning each of his characters. These imprisonments don't have to be physical imprisonment but also emotionally and socially. Almost every character has a prison of their own but I'm going to only talk about a few of them that looked interesting to me. One of them is Houdini's prison. It's kind of ironic that his career is made feats of escaping the inescapable prisons.  He is imprisoned by his emotions when his mother died. He was obsessed with communicating with his dead mother. For someone who likes progression, he was stuck in place. He even dressed as his mother when trying to establish contact with the afterlife. I also felt like Houdini was imprisoned by society. I think society didn't accept Houdini as a member because he was a performer. An example is when he was publicly shamed in the hospital while visiting a hospitalized man. Because of this, he was afraid to perform when he was invited to perform fo...

Honestly, this entire book just feels like OK Boomer before it was cool. All I've learned from this book was that if you are a boomer you won't enjoy life. Hear me out... The Father holds on a lot of traditional beliefs and thoughts. We find that he is happier when people abide in their gender roles and their social expectations. We see that he doesn't really live in the present but rather constantly comparing the current time vs the old days. An example of this situation is at the ballgame where all he did was compare the game versus his Harvard games from ages ago. He couldn't enjoy the game because of the fact that there are immigrants in them. Like, I thought he was an old man just from the way he behaves, except he's not, he's like in his 30s or 40s. As a result, He felt isolated, lost, and chronically unhappy. He reminds me of that stereotypical cranky old man telling you to get off his lawn. Mother, on the other hand, accepted the change. Because of F...