Enterview To Dani

Thanks for your help Dani  =)
I really appreciated

THE SECRET GARDEN

by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Registration code 813 b964s 2003 C 01

“The amount of happiness that you have depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart.”  Is possible to be happy while losing all the things you used to know as part of your life? This book explains that even the most bitter and unlucky person in the world is able to reach happiness just by opening the eyes and seeing what the world has to offer. As a result of her own new experiences, Mary discovers that simple things in life are the ones that are going to make her feeling what a real life is, without the pressure of being somebody she is not.

Firstly, Mary is bitter and spoiled just for one reason, she had never had the opportunity to be in a different way; she just was what their parents forced her to be, a cold, selfish and indolent person. However, once she was taken out of her bubble, she started to uncover her own personality, not the one other people imposed in her, but the real one. Second, by meeting new people, like Colin and Dickon, she saw that life is better while having nice, tender and beloved persons next to you and by opening yourself towards other it is easier to find that slippery happiness. Finally, a simple garden showed her what freedom was, and I deeply think that such event was the one that marked her whole experience, only then she discovered a new feeling in her heart.

In conclusion, I strongly believe that without having clear what you are, or what you want, is quite difficult to reach that so-called happiness. People must be natural from the beginning, by being your self, not representing something others want you to be. I think that the bitterness that Mary showed during most of the book, was just a facet imposed by the way she was raised, at the very instant she discovered how she really was, she was able to open her heart, and be this reaching the happiness she needed so desperately.

Education, Parents, and Teachers…

After searching a bit on the web, I found a website that is not 100% dedicated to what’s education in terms of formal academic school but for parents also. The page is called Education.com, and it is a complete page committed to help and guide those teachers or parents that are a bit confused on some conflicts related to kids and teenagers. The page is divided in several topics to organize the information provided and to bring a bigger emphasis to some points that are more in the headlines nowadays. Some interesting topics that this webpage tackles are bullying, paying for college in today’s economy, obsessive compulsive disorders in children, or just how to know when an adolescent is lying. Besides it has an item called from “A to Z”, and there you can find any problem in alphabetic order, for instance if your kid has problems with his reading part, you just have to go to the letter “R” and find the word, then click on it and several option about reading are going to appear in order to make the your search easier. What mostly called my attention was the debate of the week, the name of the topic was “Should teachers have tenure?” (Tenure is like the right of a teacher of holding his/her position at his working place, a school for instance, not caring if he is no longer capable of giving proper classes anymore) and to debate the idea they put the opinions of two different experts in the education area arguing about the subject. In addition, the page gives you the possibility of commenting your own opinion, and by this opens the possibility of free expression among parents and teachers. Really interesting to read, quite similar to what’s going on in Chile nowadays, since it give us the perspective of what’s going on with the same subject in other countries, and by this getting different ideas of what a solution could be. If I were a parent, I would probably take a look of this page if a problem is presented in my child education’s life. Really helpful website, more for parents than for teachers but good anyway.

Websites....

Since I discovered the magic of internet, I’ve been searching for my soul mate there in the endless universe of possibilities. However, one day not trying to found anything more than a good movie, this incredible web page came to me as the greatest of the angels, it was called kick-ass torrents.

The page isn’t exactly the funniest or the prettiest, though it has a really good layout. What’s interesting about this page is that is not for everyone, let me explain myself. I’ve been always felt attracted to music and movies, those two are my passions, yet downloading them has always been an issue, not just for me but for everyone.  Some time ago, when a was used to utilize a method of download called direct, which is slow and hard to find, a friend of mine told me about torrents,  a downloading  way that is special for those big and complicated files. After like two hours searching in the web, I found the page I told you before (kick-ass torrents), that is better than any other one because of the simple fact that is well organized, has all the movies music or any other file you may want to find, and has this big amount of people using it which makes it faster than any other one (torrents work faster in so far as there are more and more people trying to download the same file).  The page has only one problem, files that are not in english, like South American movies or something that’s not really popular in the United States, are really hard to download. 

I try to see at least one or two movies per week, and I’m often downloading music, so I visit this page like three or four times a week. The coolest is that the movies you’re about to download here have their own comments in the page, so if the file is not so good or has a really good quality, the same users let you know in order to make your job easier. Well, there isn’t much I could say, besides use it, it is an excellent page ;)

http://www.kickasstorrents.com/ 

A GOOD SONG FOR ME!!

Tire Me

Rage Against The Machine

(Even if you are rich, famous, powerful you still aren’t immortal)

Yeah ya tryin' ta tire me, tire me
I can see you in front of me, front of me
Ya tryin' ta tire me, tire me
Why don't you get from in front of me?
Oh she's got everyone's eyes
Yeah!
In every home there's a sickening distress
Yeah!
Of roll that film she's a precious, a precious one
But we're all gonna......nah we're already dead!
We're already dead!

And those colorful words for tha Laos frontiers-man
Who passed away with the truth
Amidst the eulogies of bliss
Who will know now what I know about you?
Now that history's a flowery cancerous mess
Yeah ya tryin' ta tire me
A mess!
Overbearing yes ya tryin' ta tire me
A mess!
Yeah ya tryin' ta tire me, tire me
So get the fuck from in front of me
Nah let's see it broken, bloody and undressed!
We're already dead!

In a violent time

I wanna be Jackie Onassis
I wanna wear a pair of dark sunglasses
I wanna be Jackie O
Oh oh oh oh please don't die!
Yeah ya tryin' ta tire me, tire me
I can see you in front of me, front of me
Ya tryin' ta tire me, tire me
Why don't you get from in front of me?
Ruh!
We're already dead!
We're already dead!
We're already dead!



I don’t even remember the first time I listened to this song, since I’ve been listening to this band since I was in seventh grade. But, what I can say about it is that has been stuck in my head since kind of three weeks ago. Well this Monday is RATM’s concert, so I’ve been listening to their songs a lot, specially this one. I think it must be for the energy it releases. It’s a powerful song, and every time I listen to it I imagine myself on Monday jumping, singing it (or screaming it), and of course enjoying it. Well like I said before, this song is by Rage Against the Machine, from the disc Evil Empire (1996), and actually, this song never had a video, never had a radio airplay, or any media format ,and anyway it won a Grammy on 1997 for best Metal Performance. Every time I listen to this song something starts to twist inside my stomach, maybe it is because I really like the song, or maybe just because I’m waiting to live it (the song) on Monday. By the way, the song’s meaning is a bit complicated, is about Jackie Kennedy (after that Onassis, she married one of the most powerful and rich man of the world, a Greek one) and the death of her first husband, John Kennedy.

IDENTITY

Well, for me the only good things about this holiday are that I don’t have to work this weekend, and that I can party five days in a road… About the other things, I really don’t care. This bicentenary is a fake. The so renowned freedom said around these days is just a promise of fidelity to the Spaniard crown, a promise that after they ended their conflict with the French ones we would be here for them. But instead we killed our people; we took their lands and we gave them to foreign people; we denigrated them till the point they now have to pray for a little compassion by doing a hunger strike. If being a Chilean is forgetting our roots and killing my own people, I don’t want to be one. Lately, I just don’t feel any proud of being Chilean, I don’t like the thing we’re turning into, we’re just being as selfish as the people with power want us to be. I don’t want to get in the populism of our beloved president, but the thing that’s going on with the Mapuche people really is an issue. We cannot discriminate our own people, we cannot treat them like foreign (not that we have to treat them badly either) when the owners of this land in first instance were them.

El Túnel, by Ernesto Sábato.

Registration code A 863 S113t 12a. ed. c.1

The title of my book is “El Túnel”, and the name couldn’t be more related to what the whole story is about. Juan Pablo Castell (the main character) is quite depressive, analytic and complicated, so for him, his entire life is considered a dark, and lonely tunnel. When he analyses the life of her beloved one, Maria, he tend to think that his and her life are somehow two parallel tunnels, but in some point of the road, they were going to get together. Sadly for him,  the final results weren’t as he was expecting them to be. He discovered that she wasn’t in a dark, lonely tunnel like him; she was part of the outside world, she was like the others, she wasn’t reachable anymore. Now she was out there, and he could only see her through little windows installed in his own tunnel to see the exterior. And there was she, but only her image, because he wasn’t able to touch or listen to her. Their tunnels weren’t going to join anywhere, she wasn’t traveling in a tunnel.

The story of my book is about a painter, Juan Pablo Castell, and how he fells in love with a woman, the development of the relationship, and the dramatic end of it. Juan Pablo found in her something special, something that other women didn’t have; she shared with him the interest for some specific detail in one of his painting, something that was really important in his particular way to understand life, he thought that she was the only person able to understand him, she wasn’t just a new love for him, but an obsession. They saw each other for several months, but the relationship was all the time complicated and the more things he found out about her, the more he became mad. At the end everything was so blurred, that he started to assume some issues about Maria’s past and present, and by this taking some extreme decisions that would drag him till the bottom of darkness. He kills Maria thinking that she was cheating on him, and by this he made their lives get together forever.

The writer tries to create a character more than complex, Juan Pablo is unique, like nobody we’ll ever meet in our entire life. Not only because he’s mad and a psycho, but for the way he sees life, how he analyses everything, or because of the way he’s able to interpret some situation that for us would be just another simple thing.  Even though for a normal person understanding a guy like him is hard, the writer is capable to make us analyze issues at the same time he’s narrating them. You’re able to see that with a little bit of effort (or a lot of it), you could get to some similar result. However, it’s never easy to understand how someone can get that crazy about a person, to reach the limit of killing him/her just because he suffered a deception.

I would say that the main lesson of the story is… Never get involved with a person who shows some weird behavior… he could be a psycho. Seriously, the main lesson could be that your own life can not be held in somebody else’s hand. Not because a person in particular doesn’t love you, everything is going to be ruined for you. Love comes and goes, getting obsessed with somebody in particular is many times an option, whether you could or not help it, a matter of self-love. Any person with a bit of respect for his own person wouldn’t do what Juan Pablo did, by giving his life away for nothing more than an obsession.

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1.03.01

Functional Language and Expressions

Make it easier: To arrange things in order to make them easier

Make do: make sth happening

Make a difference: To stand out (something or yourself) in order to establish the difference among the others

Make a point: To emphasize your own opinion about something

Make time: to dedicate some time to do something specific

Make or break: something decisive for something or someone

Make the most of something: to take advantage of a situation or object in order to make it more productive, lasting, etc.

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To name but two, three, etc.: to give to or three examples about sth

To name but a few: Just to name a couple of thing among a world of possibilities

To mention but two: the first one 

Such as: like

In particular: something in specific

Among other things: between many other things

For instance, for example: to give examples about something

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 Idioms

To be under the weather: to feel down

To be given a clean bill of health: to be in a good state of health, having good health

To be at death’s door: to feel so ill, that you can’t handle it

To be going/coming down with something: you’re about to get ill
A bug going around: there’s a virus in the environment. Everyone is getting sick

To be in good shape: to have a good physic, being physically fit


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Functional language “Changing the subject”

That reminds me: because of something said recently, I remembered another thing

Anyway, as I was saying: taking up again something said before

By the way: related to that, I’m gonna tell you something

Come to think of it: now that I remember, this or that happened…

Talking of: we’re talking about something/ someone, so we’re starting a new conversation with another details of the same thing

As for: and related to you… and about you…

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1.03.01

Relationships...

American Crime Stories

Retold by John Escott

Registration Code: 813 A512c 2008 c.02

Relationships in this book are one of the most important elements, since a crime is always somehow related to a relationship, whether by love, money, jealousy or selfishness, etc.

The book has seven different stories, which aren’t related in anyway. So, since it’s kind of boring to analyze the seven of them, I’m going to show how I understood relationships in the most interesting tales.

(Death Wish) What can pass through a man’s head to make him want commit suicide? At the beginning it’s hard to say, my case, I’ve never felt that, which only makes me more curious about it. But reading the whole story, you can understand that he didn’t want to kill himself. Another man was taking his place to make everybody believe he wanted to and then murder him giving no clue. The reason… a woman of course. Most of the biggest tales in the world begin because of a loving issue. When Mr. Wright’s wife commited suicide he wasn’t the most affected one, but her lover. The relationship between these three characters was so complicated that, the husband killed her wife and made everyone believe it had been suicide. Can you see? A relation ship can be so complicated that not only can lead to death, but to lie, to pretend, to plan complicated stuff just to get revenge. Maybe it’s not always like this, but in this book most of the stories have this similar characteristic.

(The heroine) Lucille was a nice and beautiful twenty one years old girl. Her issue… The relationship with her mother. She was so traumatized with her mother’s death that she felt like wasn’t fitting anywhere, until she gets to work at the Christiansen’s house. The relationship she created with the kids of the house made her feel so comfortable, that made her thinking about staying there for a life time. The only problem was that she wasn’t normal at all, and the connection she started to feel with the house started to disturb her head. Always trying to impress the  householders, one day she reaches the extremes. She planned something to remain as the heroin, burn the house and herself rescue the kids in order to amaze the Christiansen and get their love and affection. A relation can be tender and loving, ‘till one of the parties starts to feel that it’s not enough. Hard to make a comparison with my own life, since the relation ships appearing in the book are kind of… sick.

(The Gutting of Couffignal) A detective is hired to watch the presents in a wedding ceremony at a really rich house located in a very particular island, kind of private, only for wealth people. Everything goes ok ‘till night comes and the disaster starts. The bank next to the house and the house it self are being robbed by really violent bandits. The issue here is that they didn’t have a detective in their plan, which made the whole thing even more complicated for them. The relation here is simple, the one between a man and his profession. He made to discover the entire problem here, who were the robbers and why. But at some point he has to protect his relationship, since some temptations like sex or money appear to silence him. Of course, when you have a strong relationship, it’s unbreakable. I strongly believe in this kind of relationships, because these ones can be applied to any other one. I’ll make my self clear. A person who’s really in love with her couple, style of life, job, etc., is the one who is going to live happy and secure, since there’s nothing more satisfactory than knowing that you are faithful to something you love.

Relationships are complex and weak. You never know when these ones are going to die or when your feelings about it aren’t going to be same. Protecting them is only up to ourselves, and even though sometimes it is complicated to decide whether they are good or bad to our lives, having one is most of the times the most rewarding thing ever.

A new way to discover YOUR OWN personality ...

I think that’s absolutely impossible to know somebody’s personality with such an impersonal test. Even tough it’s interesting to do something like this, after seeing the results I realized that they only got right a minimum percent of the things. But, why to be that bitter??... It was a fun thing to do anyway, and the thing I said before… was a lie, they really got most of the things that really represent my personality, it is just that I still cannot understand how a thing like this can interpret something as complex as somebody’s personality. It’s even scary because I discovered things I didn’t know about my self (jajaj joking). Speaking seriously, they’ve impressed me. The progress in psychology now a days are so awe-inspiring that almost anything is impossible for them. About the percentages… I was almost alone in some of them, does that makes me feel special? Of course no, I feel weird, nobody thinks like me and that’s scary, I’m never going to find my match jaja. About the web site, I think it is a good thing in order to have fun or something like that, but I still don’t believe 100% in the results of it. It’s not as simple as saying “Oh great, now I fully understand my behavior and actions”. To get the answers about yourself, a conversation with yourself is necessary, nobody else than you can answer that.

Things I learned in today’s class:
•A movie buff is somebody who really loves watching movies.
•Cozy is a word used to express that you’re comfortable in an environment or something like that.
•A buzz is a persistent and loudly noise that you could hear for instance in an stadium or down town.

A BREAK TO REST

My winter break was something I needed desperately. Last semester was extremely stressful for me, not just because of the classes, but for the external issues I had to solve. Many things have happened in my life this year, and most of them haven’t been good at all, that’s why I really made a great effort to enjoy this small break the most I could. The first week, I tried to sleep more than twelve hours per day because I was tired and sleepy, so most of the days I used to wake up around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. The second week I went to the beach with my friends, and even when most of the people could think that a bunch of teenagers (or close to it) alone in the beach is a sure disaster, the only thing we did was resting and having nice times. The only bad part of my vacations was that on weekends I had to work anyway. However, I’ve recharged all my batteries and now I’ve got only one purpose for this new semester; to be better student than the last one. I know I can give more, and now I’m decided to develop the best of me in order achieve my gold.