Review

Intense , dramatic and eye openingly honest the move "Taken" directed by Pierre Morel is one of the best films made to date about sex trafficking in modern day Europe and a fathers plan of attack to save his daughter. The movie is completely thrilling the whole way through not to mention casted perfectly. Liam Neeson wastes no time in saving his daughter from the underground sex trade. The film has no useless dialogue or slow moments just pure full forced action the whole way through. The brutal honesty really catches any viewers eye about how real sex trafficking is and how it still very much exists in today's society.So not only is it a great action drama hit it is educational as well.The strength and emotion the film carries out to its viewers reaches out to all of its audience and is sure to leave you thinking and wanting more.

Self Awarness Leads to Meaningful Change

There is steps to healing. Whether its a personal trait or an addiction you want to correct being aware that there is a problem is a big first step to making a meaningful change. You may not be aware that you harming others around you let alone yourself but the only way to get better is to change.

Realization is a hard concept to intake but once you do change is in the near future. Personally this topic applies to my life. Growing up without siblings I was always getting everything my way and never had to share or put others into consideration. When I got to the age to go to school this mind set did not go over so well. I struggled my elementary years and was always in trouble with teachers for not sharing and leaving classmates out or talking over others. I got away with it for most of my younger school years and than middle school was just around the corner. It was my second day of sixth grade and it was all new kids from different schools. My friends from elementary dealt with the way I was due to the fact that they had been around it for five years but kids from the other schools to them I was that obnoxious snob. We were having a class discussion about what we were excited for in the next three years at our new school. This girl was explaining her enthusiasm for sports and me being me budged right in there and over powered her with what I had to say about sports. Before I new it I was an annoyance to my whole class. It was about half way through sixth grade that I had to learn the concept of letting everyone state their opinion and that everyone perceives situations differently. My teachers noticed a change in me and so did I. Before I new it me and that girl from the second day had become the best of friends and still are to this day. She still talks about how we met and we look back and laugh. I mean I haven't changed too much I still have my little fits when I don't get my way and when I cant voice my opinion but no one is perfect.

Therefor through realization of my self centered antics I made a best friend that I plan to have by my side throughout my life beyond schooling and I'm much more personable and easy to be around.

Rant Blog

Why is it that highschool is supposed to be this big preparation before the 'real world' and the second we graduate majority of kids have no clue what to do or do not have the life skills to become what they aspire to be? In highschool we are still nagged at to get homework in on time and to do assignment a certain way or read and copy from a textbook. My question being how is that in any way going to help you in the real world? Learning the square root of two hundred and forty-five or the life cycle of a plant isnt going to get you a job or make you enjoyable to have a conversation with. Being in my final year myself I still feel very young.Every teacher still tells me when my homework is due and sends anyone to a lunch homework club if its not completed on time. At my school we have a no zero policy so for four years of our education we never have the option of getting absolutley no marks. But what about the students that go of to university right away? In university if you dont hand something in you simply do not get a mark and move on to the next assignment. If all of us are so used to a routine of being nagged and having no worry of not being able to get a mark the shock of university could be overwhelming. In my senior year ive reflected over the past four years and try to remember things that ive learned. I dont remember any test I have ever wrote or any notes I have taken but what I do remember are the class discussions and debates about politics , humanity issues , laws and what is going on in our world today. Those things I feel like give a better grasp on the world than reading a text book and writing a test. Im not saying that you dont need to do that everyone needs to know basics. Alot of the time in classes though I find myself asking "when will I ever use this?". Ideally I would like to see the education system progress into more humanities course and more public world issues being discussed. Even from leadership I have learned life qualities and it has opened my heart to helping the world rather than spending all my time studying for six years studying and writing high level exams I wanna go out and explore the world and meet people learn new concepts. That is what the world is about not equations and historics. You can come out of university and have trouble finding a job because you have no social aspect about you. Many students flunk out first year because they cant handle the self responsibility of post secondary education. Who is to blame for all of this? Highschool! I am just hoping when my generation is having children and they are starting their path of highschool that the system has realized that reading a text book isnt everything to life and that everyone needs to be aware of what is happening in society today and have a good background knowledge. I want my children to have a passion for school unlike I did and I think that is very possible with a few simple tweeks and some fine tuning.

The Road Less Traveled

1) Do you believe it is important to be passionate about your job? Think about adults you know well, and how they feel about their jobs.

Personally I would not be able to have a job that I am not passionate about. To be able to wake up every morning and not dread work would be the most amazing lifestyle. Learning from your job and being enthusiastic and happy to be there is a key importance to having a possitive lifestyle. My mom always tells me that I need to find a career not a job. Right now I currently work for Par-t-Perfect and absolutley love it. I'm great with kids and every day its something new and its always fun , who wouldnt love playing in a bouncy castles? I also serve at the Ramada Poolside Terrace in the summer and have become very fond of that job aswell. I am truly a people person and I love being able to be social at work and have people enjoy my company. If I can make someones expierence more memorable at either their birthday party or their saturday night dinner I'm satisified. My mom for a long time was in dental and enjoyed it she worked very hard to get to where she was and was proud how much she learned over the years and how dental is always progressing. Eventually she wanted a change of pace and went back to school got her accoutning 1 and 2 and now runs our family business it is a more high stress job but she enjoys it because she is her own boss and is always busy learning new tricks about the office and she really enjoys financing.

2) What are you going to do with the rest of your life (career wise) and how are you going to get there? (Yes, it is certainly ok if you don't have concrete plans, but at least write about a possible path you could take).

Honestly it is very up in the air for me right now. Somedays I want to nanny for a few years go to school get a business degree and open my own daycare and than somedays I want to go into psych or social justice and learn about human rights and help the world. My only set plan is that I must get a degree of some sort definitely after travelling though and finding out what I truly want to do with my life because being in an un happy job just wont cut it with me.

Novel Research

Kathryn Stockett is the author of the novel 'The Help' she grew up in Jackson , Mississippi where the scene is set for the book. She graduated with a degree in English and Creative writing from the University of Alabama. The Help is her first novel and it has been greatly succesful she published it in New York and stayed there for nine years. Kathryn currently lives in Atlanta with her family. Her book spent over 30 weeks on the New York Times best sellers list this was greatly unexpected for Stockett. Her inspiration for the book came from being homesick growing up as a white girl in the south she had a maid who was the base of the main character in the story , Aibileen. Throughout writing the novel she had many rejection letters from literary agents and was worried about being so young and writing about the dialect of African Americans.She is currently writing a second novel and there is to be a movie of The Help coming out in summer 2011.



http://www.kathrynstockett.com/

Perception Is Everything

The theme of Beau Ottos presentation on optical illusions is he shows how everyone perceives everything differently. I may see a red poster but that's because Ive always learned that the colour red is red but my colour red could be someone elses perception of blue. In my own life I encounter many moments like this one imparticular sticks out. I was at a friends hockey game and at the end I was waiting outside for him afterwards and one of his team mates came out. All these boys ran up the stairs in matching yellow livestrong shirts and i asked him "what are the boys doing?" and he said "oh the guys in the orange shirts" and I started laughing and asked if he was blind and he shook his head in confusion. To me the shirts were yellow but to him the shirts looked orange. Everyone perceives everything in the world differently not only with colours but signs building actions people usually not one thing is the same to more than one person.

The Perils of Indifference

1) The Perils of Indifference in my perspective means that being ignorant to evil can be worse than the actual source of evil itself. Example being any sort of genocide or human massacre throughout history. The Holocaust wouldn't of occurred or been as bad if more people would of stood up and changed the way Germany was.

2) What you learn when you grow up and what you are surrounded by is what you grow up to know. In "The Lottery" at a certain point in the year the whole town stones someone to death simply based on a coloured dot on a piece of paper that you pick.In history alone there is many comparable situations to this. In the movie "Taken" a young girl goes to Europe with her best friend and they both get kidnapped into the sex trafficking circle. Throughout the world there is many sex trafficking rings and its a very underground business but the things that are done to the women who are taken into it are horrifying. This circle of terror could easily be stopped if someone we're to realize how wrong they are being. It takes a lot of workers for this to happen and work properly in the movie it shows the people who are "attractors" and than the people that pay to have sessions with the females and than the business men who buy and trade the women. Even the people who are going in to have sessions with the women are apart of this horrible event. Also in the movie it showed that the people working in the airport and bus depot new what was going and who the attractors were. Without anyone standing up or doing anything more women and girls will be taken each year and put into a sex trafficking world.


3) In both texts the link that I noticed was that they are both showing how being ignorant is equal to being the ring leader. In "Perils of Indifference" they talk about many of the political events that have happened and how it could of been different and in "The Lottery" in the end it surprises us with the whole town stoning someone to death and the townsfolk being so humble about it. Ignorance is no excuse , watching evil happen is just as harmful and it can spin out into massacre just like the holocaust.

Creative Pursuit #6 "write about a weird day in your workplace"

Basically I am a modern day clown. It is hard to pick just one day that's a weird day in my workplace. I work for a party company and have learned the ways of entertaining children. I can face paint , make balloon animals , run bouncy castles and of course I dress up in any costume I'm told to. One day stands out too me though. It was one of my first events with Par-T-Perfect. We were doing an event up in Kelowna and I was running the face paint station and my friend Amy was running avalanche mountain , this bouncy castle has a fake blow up helicopter on the top of it just for show. As I'm doing my job these five boys come up all asking to be painted as princesses , a little out of the ordinary but i wasn't one to judge. I stamped the boys tickets and off they went. About fifteen minutes later I can hear Amy yelling "get down from there!" so I run over sure enough the five boys have tried to climb to the helicopter which is not only not allowed but its really dangerous because it's super high up. The boys scatter down the castle quickly and try to run off while yelling "attack of the princesses!". So we laugh it off and get back to work soon enough the day is over and nothing I had thought had happened after the once incident we all meet with out bosses and the other two workers and every single one of us asks if any of us had trouble with the five princess boys. Discovering that they had raised trouble at every station in all different forms. Now all of us joke and call it the "princess day" and I do not think I will ever face paint a group of boys princesses ever again.

21st Century Education

4. Describe what you are doing next year.

My plans for next year at the moment are fairly up in the air. For most of my life I've planned on travelling to Australia and becoming and aupair for three months and than travel around the destination for three as well. As of right now I am going to wait until summer break after college to head down under. I am planning on going into the criminology program at Okanagan College and stay in penticton as well as sticking with the company i work for to save money. I will possibly move out but my mother has persuaded me to stay at home which works for me because than i save more money for Australia. I would like to participate in charity events still but it could be a little bit harder because the ones i do now are through Maggie but its worth the challenge. Whatever I do in my life it has to involve benefiting others. The criminology program I am going into is a 2 year program and has great reviews at the end of it I would like to help work with child services or counselling children who have been through traumatic events. Friends and family wise I plan to stay close with the ones that matter the most right now and they have been around for years so I cant picture us all not being friends after graduation. This summer before college starts i will be working full time possibly two jobs just too keep busy and get a feel for the real world. I am both excited and nervous to grow up but if anything I think I am ready for it and high school had a big part in that. I think in high school classes and grades matter to a certain extent but if you can become a bigger and better person with a good head on your shoulders the teachers and administration have done their job because for the most part after high school you forget everything you learned and all the tests you took but life lessons stay with you forever. So work school friends family and travelling that's the big plan for me I cant wait to begin!!

Walk A Paragraph

I could tell by the definite lines in his cheeks that this man had led a happy life. There was no doubt in my mind that those lines had gotten there from smiling and laughing over the years. He was wearing a simple grey sweater , black pants and practical white sneakers the only thing not so simple about his outfit was the hat he was wearing. It was an odd hat something you would see in an Italian mob flick feather and everything. His left ring finger was bare. All I could wonder was why someone who looked so kind was not sharing it with someone else. I watched him put two sugars and one cream into his coffee and slice the top off of his it looked like to be a blueberry muffin this seemed very routine. He had kind eyes the eyes you look into when you are sad and it makes everything okay he seemed as if he was some sort of saint I have never seen anyone look so nice from a first impression. He was playing Keno again it seemed like this was an every day event for him. He did'nt have any distinct facial expressions be he looked very content with his life. Today i realized how much you can tell about somebody by the lines in their face.

Super Power

Hiding from angry moms and teachers, spying on your cheating boyfriend, getting into a party you weren’t invited too. You could do all these things if you had the ability to be invisible. There are so many things you could tune in on and no one would ever know. If you were an everyday prankster being able to be invisible would be a necessity! Also one could never be caught stealing. I won’t encourage that though. I would mostly like my invisibility abilities so I could get into places where I am not legally allowed at this age or for when my mom is having a cranky day and I could just get right past her and out the door! Yes if I could have any superpower it would be the power of invisibility.