Terry's 3M's
I stayed home on the fourth of July. I was happy just to vegetate for the afternoon and evening without the kids.
I got into my pj's shortly after everyone left. I had a lunch of eggs over
easy on toast, dinner was a bunch of grapes, and I made popcorn to munch on
while watching Independence Day on tape. I played a game on the Nintendo
while listening to the oldies station on the radio. I taped an episode of
X-Files. Like I said, I vegged.
I've been reading--as if that were something new. I just finished Michael Crichton's The Lost World. If you've seen the movie and thought that the premise sucked...don't be misled. The book is almost totally different. There is one scene in the book that made it to the silver screen..and even that was quite different (the putting the splint on the baby rex). And there was a Site B, an especially made trailer, a high hide, and stowaway kids (just one in the movie). Other than that...
As is usually the case, the book is much better than the movie.
I saw a list of banned books. One of the books that has been banned from some school libraries is Judy Blume's Blubber. I wanted to know why the book would be banned, so I read it. After reading it, I decided that the book was probably banned because it contains a scene where the girl (a fifth-grader) is in the girl's room and tells her friends that her teacher is a bitch. The word bitch has gone through transitions over the past few years. Transitions in the sense that fewer and fewer people consider it vulgar and a cuss word. The word itself has a couple of different meanings. As the word for a female dog, it is considered appropriate. But the word also is a verb that means to complain. As an extension of that, the word can be used as a noun meaning a complainer... usually used as a descriptive for a female. So, while I do not encourage it's use by the kids in the house (in fact, I actively oppose it), I am not naive enough to believe that the kids don't use it outside of my hearing. In fact, my memories are quite clear on this-- kids think that the word is cool...especially since grownups don't approve of the kids using it. The kids today are not different in that aspect. They still consider the word cool. And they still use it amongst themselves. The book itself is about a fifth-grade girl who is in the "in" crowd. Although she is uneasy with the amount of cruelty that she and her crowd show to another girl who is not one of their group, she goes along with it. Later, she finds herself out of the "in" crowd and the recipient of some of the same cruel behavior that she once showed to another. The book is designed to make one think about peer pressure and the cost of going along with a group of people...especially when that group is engaged in behavior that is detrimental to another. In spite of the fact that I didn't much care for the narrator of the story, I thought the book realistically portrayed the kinds of cruelty that kids show to one another...and as a Halloween prank..to an adult. The Halloween prank backfired as the adult found out who the girls were and exacted a penalty that was designed to make them think.
These were not ghetto kids or poor kids. These were upper middle class kids
who were doing these things. Their parents were not abusive in any way. So,
the book also shows that peer pressure is prevalent in all classes of people
and that, while it is uncomfortable to go against the tide, sometimes it is
necessary if you want to feel good about yourself. And it also shows the
truthfulness of the cliché: "What goes around, comes around."
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