The Uglies Part 2

So, for the first part of the book, all we see are the Pretties and Uglies.  Then, on the day of Tally's surgery, she was told there was a problem and she was introduced to the Specials.  They are pretty but kind of pretty in a scary way.  On page 104, Tally is talking about the Specials and her encounter with Dr. Cable from Special Circumstances.  "The woman was a cruel pretty.  Her nose was aquiline, her teeth sharp, her eyes a nonreflective gray.  Her voice had the same slow, neutral cadence as a bedtime book.  But it hardly made Tally sleepy.  An edge was hidden in the voice, like a piece of metal slowly marking glass."  The Specials are people that rarely ever interact with the Pretties or Uglies.  They are the people that are just talked about, and a lot of people consider them more of a myth.  They are blamed when things out of the ordinary happen.  Peris comes to visit Tally after everyone finds out about her little visit with the Specials.  He says, "Specials are like gremlins; you blame them when anything weird happens.  Some people think they're totally bogus, and no one I know has actually seen a Special."
I am trying to figure out what group of people the Specials represent in our culture.  The Pretties represent the people obsessed with beauty and perfection and will sacrifice anything to be considered pretty by everyone, where the Uglies represent the people who do not care what others believe and are willing to stand up for themselves and things that truly matter.  The Uglies are the outsiders, the plain ole normal people that are not considered special to many people but value the beauty on in the inside per say.  So are the specials people that care about their appearance but also prioritize their lives and are not obsessed with perfection and beauty?

The Uglies Part 1

So far I really do like this book.  I think it is really interesting that our society is classified as the "Rusties."  I thought it might be possible to connect this with the effects of technology on society.  Basically, I think the book is implying that if societies do not continue to improve and develop and better with technology, so the Rusties did not improve and develop with technology, which is why the Shay and Tally visit the ruins of the Rusties.  There may also be a connection between technology and freedom of expression and obsession with appearances.  The increase in technology capabilities, such as plastic surgery, lead to the obsession of appearances and basically this world and separation of the Uglies and Pretties.  This obsession has lead to the decrease in freedom of expression.  All the Pretties look very similar, and the teens have no say in what they look like.  Tally reveals all this when she is trying to convince Shay to make what she could possibly look like after the surgery when all Shay wants to do is go hoverboarding.  The doctors that perform the surgery decide what look each teen gets.  The authorities, whoever they are, do their best to keep these two worlds separate.  The Pretties are not supposed to interact with the Uglies, especially not in person.  The Uglies are punished if they are found in the Pretties Town.  The decline of freedom of expression leads to the decline of personal rights.  The Pretties basically live the care-free, no responsibilities, party life, while the Uglies have more strict schedules and live in a much more dull world.  The Uglies actually have responsibilities and work that they have to do.  They are punished and discriminated against for not being pretty, even though they cannot be pretty until a certain age.

The Uglies

I have decided to still stick with the Uglies to read. For some reason, it just appeals to me more than the other books, even though I am sure that all of them are great books.  I think that the fact that I have heard so many good comments about it from people who read it for fun has probably influenced my choice. No matter the reason, I am reading the Uglies!

"Abstracts"

I guess we could apply this section on abstracts, from the Rhetoric of Inquiry, to our conclusions for this iSearch paper.  I have a hard time visualizing or planning out my conclusion before I write it, but I guess we could either write a conclusion based off of the problem that we researched, our research findings, what we conclude from our research, and how the topic is applicable or how it effects our world and everyone in it.  Or, we could write a conclusion based on the central argument, then the main supporting arguments without reporting the specific data, and end with how the topic is applicable or how it effects our world.  We would also add in if there needs to be more research done on this topic at the end and include the main sources that we used in the paper.
I am not so sure how this is helpful to us right now.  I would understand more if we were publishing this paper, but I do not have any intentions of doing any such thing, so I am not quite sure I see the point.  I am guessing it is good practice for maybe something else we will be doing in the future...I am sure Mr. Bevill will answer all of my questions in class on Friday.

More of The Road

On page 131, it caught my attention that the boy mentioned the little boy that he saw/ thought he saw a while ago in the book.  Do you think that the boy actually saw a little boy, or do you think that the little boy was delirious and imagined seeing a little boy?  What do you think that this little boy represented?  In my opinion, the little boy represented the old world, before the apocalyptic event, but the little boy disappeared.  I am curious if that means that there is no chance that the world will return to order and be anything like the world before the apocalypse. 
On that same page, the father flashes back to remembering the mother, and then thinks "each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins...so be sparing.  What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."  At the beginning of the paragraph he says, "Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from.  Things no longer known in the world."  I cannot help but think that he had dreamt of the mother, and hates dreams like those because maybe he is afraid of romanticizing their relationship in his head, which might catch him off guard.  Catching him off guard will not allow him to be as aware as he needs to be in order to continue protecting himself and the boy and to keep them both alive until they finish their journey to the South.  These  memories or dreams make him very jumpy, so jumpy that on the next page, "he almost raised his pistol" at the reflection of themselves in a mirror.  It has obviously been a very long time since they have looked at themselves, so long that he probably had forgotten what they looked like.  This world has definitely taken its toll on the father, but amazingly not so much on the son just yet.

My definition of "apcalypse"

I have been thinking about what Mr. Bevill said this morning in class about defining apocalypse.  The first definition of "apocalypse" from Merriam-Webster is "one of the Jewish and Christian writings of 200 b.c. to a.d. 150 marked by pseudonymity, symbolic imagery, and the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil and raises the righteous to life in a messianic kingdom."  I do not think this definition is fitting for this class or assignment, so I am going to mix this with the more common meaning that almost everyone mentioned in their presentations- "the end of this world."  My basic definition of the "apocalypse" for this assignment and class is "the events that bring about the end of this world as we know it that God uses to destroy the evil authorities and take His children to His kingdom that He has prepared" (Erika Blalock and the Merriam-Webster dictionary).  This definition will shape my paper and affect how I look at the War between the Arab countries and Israel.  Did anyone else mix and match definitions to create their own?
So, I am really wrestling with this concept of defining my argument now. I do not really understand what I am supposed to do about that in this stage of research. Does anyone know exactly what to do and how to do it? Is our thesis just supposed to be if we think that our topic could be apocalyptic and how our event would affect the world?

The Apocalypse

   I was interested in these 5 topics from the Slate magazine:
       1. Diet (more people become obese and contract heart disease and die)       
       2. Rapture
       3. Big Brother (a supercomputer that takes over the government)
       4. Wealth gap (a gap grows between the wealthy and poor, so the desperate poor attacks the wealthy)
       5. Israel and Arab War
I was able to throw out the first one because I did not think it was very likely that heart disease would be the end of the world. I do not know anyone that believes that this would cause an apocalyptic event. Now to the Rapture. I had planned on making this my topic, but then I could not think of much research that I could do other than the Bible. I also did not want to bias my paper due to my strong religious beliefs. So, I decided to do something that I did not have any strong notions about. On to Big Brother, this was my number two choice, but I threw it out because I thought it would be very difficult to find many hard facts for this topic. The wealth gap also seemed a little out there and very unlikely, so I threw it out. That leaves the Israel and Arab War.

   The war between Israel and the Arab countries have been going on for many years. I know that they have been fighting over the land that they both claim is theirs. I read a book in high school about it, and the book really peaked my interest over this matter. It is important because what happens in one part of the world affects all parts of the globe, especially when nuclear weapons enters the picture. Also, our country has been an ally of Israel for a long time, but I know that President Obama has taken a different stand and declared our country otherwise. So this is a current problem that now directly affects our country because of President Obama's speech on that war.
   My research plan is to:
     1.  Research the background of this War
     2.  Research what our country's position in the war was up until Obama
     3.  Research what exactly Obama changed our position to now
     4.  Research how this war threatens the whole world, via nuclear weapons
     5.  Either interviewing a history or political science professor or surveying students to see what they think about this war and if it could possibly become an apocalyptic event.