C'est pour vous, mon chou.

It’s strange how life works.  One of the most important relationships of my life was also the most confrontational.

This friend and I used to be complete opposites....I guess we still are, but not really, because we’ve grown.  Regardless.  We used to get into conflicts all of the time.  We would fight, and without being conceited, I would always win.  That’s because when I argued I used logic that was completely impossible to oppose.  I’m overly logical, and it’s difficult to oppose logic without sounding unreasonable.

He was more emotional.  Everything he said he said out of passion.  Which, in its own way, is equally as important as proposing rational thought.  But because we were so different in our ways of thinking, me being completely rational, he being completely emotional, we never agreed on anything.  In the end, it was our inability to accept the other way that led to the end of our friendship.

I wasn’t the same.

I realized how important it is to have a balance of emotion and logic.  By only using logic, I made a stranger of one of the biggest aspects of being human - the capacity for passion and emotions.  But without using logic to drive that passion, it’s often too whimsical to be realistic.  I learned to balance myself.  I learned to stop using brute rationale to cut people down....at least, for the most part.  It’s still an old habit, and you know how those go.

I’m a different person.

Your friends and all of the relationships in your life....they’re all experiences.  Experiences are what shape who you are.  Even the negative ones.

Dead. Forever. k.

We killed Osama.

But now there are so many more issues that are going to arise....First of all, he’s going to be looked at as a total martyr by the other extremists.  Secondly, they’re going to want revenge.  We might as well just up security even further, now.  I think I’ll stay in OH for a while where there’s nothing relatively important for people to bomb.

Oh, I also found out that there’s basically another pentagon building in Hawaii where all of the really important stuff is.....clever.

While I do understand why people are so excited over killing him, few people actually realize what was truly important about this event.  The place that he stayed in allegedly had a lot of information in it - plans, names of other people, etc.  We can use this information to completely devastate the organization to a point where it’ll take them decades to rebuild.  If we can end a terrorist group like that, that will be the true accomplishment.  The true accomplishment is the information we were able to obtain.  

Not killing some guy.  Because violence and murder....never the answer.

Artistic freedom? No thanks..

I’ve legitimately learned to appreciate artistic freedom.

You only really appreciate something after it’s been taken away from you.  The other day, we had our annual Aurora Schools art show during the musical.  I put out my first spray paint, which is the image of a woman on a stained piece of plywood.  She’s supposed to be nude, but in reality there isn’t anything vulgar about the piece because it’s not detailed at all, and it’s just the profile view of a body.  Kind of like a silhouette.

However.....the “powers that be” as Mr. Berrodin calls them told us that we had to remove it from the show.  I don’t understand why.  There is literally NO detail; it’s a spray paint done in two colors juxtaposed against each other to create a form.  Yes, you see the shape of a breast, but you don’t see any detail of it....so basically the same thing you see any time a girl wears a mildly fitted shirt.  Walking through a high school and looking at the way teenage girls dress is more vulgar than my piece is, and yet they told me I wasn’t allowed to keep it out.

Mad.

It’s a cool piece...and my first spray paint

FURTHER this woman moved all of my art from the display boards in the main section into a hallway that not many people even go down...after I took over an hour to set up the show.  Thanks.  You’re considerate.  She put elementary school art up instead, where mine was.

No one cares about that poop.

1494....always so close to maximums.

Tradition proves to be resilient within modernizing cultures.  Aissatou and Mawdo enter a marriage based upon love; Fumiko herself represents modernization, and she and Kikuji swear to stop drinking tea.  Regardless of their prior intentions, both sets of characters end up reverting to traditions.  Mawdo takes a second wife, even if he says it is only to appease his mother.  Kawabata alludes that Fumiko kills herself, and the only person Kikuji has left is the person who connects him strongly to the tea ceremony.  However, both polygamy and tea are more than just aspects to individual lives.  They are traditions which the characters are surrounded by and raised within, because they are practiced by a whole people.  To this end, traditions are traditions because of what a deep part of culture they are, and so it is not surprising when characters turn back to them.  It consistently proves difficult to release things that, because they have been around for so long, are just natural.  It is hard for humans to deviate from natural routines, because humans are creatures of habit.

Word Count: 1494. Boom.

Let's see you fail.

Characters consistently return to traditional practices, regardless of their initial attempt to stray from it.  Mawdo, offered another wife by his mother, decides to take young Nabou; he says it’s only to please his mother and keep her from dying of shame, but Aissatou retaliates by saying that it is impossible to separate emotional love from love of the flesh.  When Nabou calls Mawdo to say that her, “brother Farba has given you young Nabou to be your wife, to thank me for the worthy way in which I have brought her up,” Mawdo is still free to stay in a monogamous relationship, even though she says that, “I will never get over it if you don’t take her as your wife’ ” (Bȃ 30).  Ultimately it is a choice between his mother and Aissatou, and he chooses his mother; situational irony reveals the power of traditional roles, because regardless of his previous promises to Aissatou, he still chooses tradition.  My taking on another wife, he reverts back to the practice of polygamy.  However, if it had not been for his mother, he may have stayed monogamous with Aissatou.  His mother provides the link to a traditional practice, and when, “Every other night he would go to his mother’s place to see his other wife, so that his mother ‘would not die’, to ‘fulfill a duty’ (Bȃ 31) he chooses tradition and his mother and tradition over Aissatou and new perspectives.  Similarly, Kikuji returns to tradition in Thousand Cranes.  After Fumiko shatters the Shino bowl, he says, “I can’t just leave it,” characterizing him as a person whom can’t let go of his past, which is is only link to tradition; without his past he is free to move on and make his own choices towards a more modern way of life.  When he, “picked up the pieces again, and put them in the sleeve of his night kimono,” he is symbolically picking up pieces of his past, and keeping them with him, preventing him from moving on (Kawabata 144).  Even though Fumiko shatters the bowl, which demonstrates her the distance she tries to put between herself and her mother’s mistakes in the past, she reverts back just as much as Kikuji.  When he goes to find her, it can be inferred that she committed suicide prior to Kikuji’s arrival.  By doing that, she follows in her mother’s footsteps; though that isn’t a cultural tradition, she takes the same path that her mother did, and her mother provides her sole link to the traditions in past generations.  With Fumiko gone, Kikuji realizes that, “only Kurimoto is left” (Kawabata 147).  Irony demonstrates that sometimes, what one tries the hardest to get rid of is often times the most ever present aspect in one’s life; Kikuji avoided Chikako in any way possible.  Kurimoto Chikako links together all of the members of the affair through the tradition of the tea ceremony, and even attempts to arrange Kikuji’s marriage using it.  With Chikako being the only person left for Kikuji, it proves inevitable that he will return to her, thus returning to tradition.  Though characters within So Long a Letter and Thousand Cranes attempt to abandon traditions, it is suggested that their links to tradition through their families among others, make that impossible.  When Mawdo’s mother provides him with an opportunity to return to polygamy, he takes it, and Kikuji is left only with Chikako, his father’s mistress, whose tea ceremony binds those who were affected by the affairs.

Let's see you try and get away from it

Characters attempt to abandon the traditions within their cultures.  In So Long a Letter, the character Mawdo comes from a privileged bloodline.  To follow tradition, it was expected that he marry a woman of the same status as he.  Within the novel, polygamy exists as a common practice, and even his mother has many co-wives.  Marriage seems to be more of a means to an end, rather than a union.  Nabou sets a standard for what tradition is in this culture because “She lived in the past, unaware of the changing world.  She clung to old beliefs.  Being strongly attached to her privileged origins, she believed firmly that blood carried with it virtues” (Bȃ 26).  The characterization of Nabou demonstrates the traditional values of marriage, where a man takes multiple wives that can provide a monetary benefit.  Contrary to this, Mawdo and Aissatou marry out of love, which proves to be, “a controversial marriage,” and Ramatoulaye describes how she, “can still hear the angry rumors in the town: ‘What, a Toucouleur marrying a goldsmith’s daughter?...Mawdo’s mother is a Diofene, a Guelewar from the Sine.  What an insult to her” (Bȃ 17).  Mawdo and Aissatou attempt to abandon the tradition of marriage because Aissatou’s family exists on a much lower status than Mawdo’s, as is revealed through the characterization of their families.  Her father is a goldsmith, while Mawdo’s mother is a sort of princess.  Similarly, in Thousand Cranes, the character Fumiko represents modernization within a tradition-bound culture.  It is first portrayed when she visits Kikuji to ask him to forgive her mother.  Instead of wearing a kimono to the meeting, “She was in a European dress, and a necklace set off the beauty of the throat” (Kawabata 37).  Characterization of her dress represents a passive change into a modern state of mind.  Further, as Kikuji attempts to get closer to Fumiko, and it demonstrates that he is also attempting to abandon traditional ways, as he moves closer to the modernization that she stands for.  Together, they decide to give up tea, and at one point Fumiko is so desperate to rid herself of things that bind her to her past that she, “had flung the Shino against the basin before he could stop her” (Kawabata 143).  The Shino had been her mother’s, and by breaking it she actively tries to rid herself of things that tie her to the affairs in her parent’s, and Kikuji’s, past.  The tea ceremony, an extremely traditional practice, connected all of the characters whom participated in the affairs.  By letting go of tradition they would be able to free themselves of the affairs of the past.  Characters within the novels are connected to tradition by their parents: Mawdo through his mother’s privileged bloodline, and Kikuji and Fumiko through their parents affairs, and the tea ceremony.  They all attempt to break away from tradition by rebelling against the ways of life which their parents expect them to follow.

15% of my English HL grade here I go

Henry James, an American writer, said, “It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.”  Traditions are traditions because they’ve been practiced for so long.  Humans are creatures of habit, and thus, one would not expect them to deviate from things they have done for a long period of time.  In So Long a Letter, the characters exist in an Islamic culture where polygamy is a traditional practice, and marriage is more of a monetary contract than a bond between individuals.  Similarly, the Japanese culture of Thousand Cranes has traditional garments, as well as the traditional practice of the tea ceremony.  In both of these novels, the characters try and abandon the traditions within their culture.  Aissatou and Mawdo Bȃ enter a monogamous marriage where one person exists on a completely different social level than the other; Fumiko and Kikuji claim that they will abandon the tea ceremony.  However, both sets of characters are eventually drawn back into their traditional practices.  Bȃ and Kawabata use characterization and irony to suggest that tradition remains resilient in a modernizing culture.