The Breakup Letter

Dear friend,

            Hey pal, how have you been? I’m alright. I've been thinking a lot lately and I'm getting stressed. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about us and the last 3 years we have spent together. Our four year relationship is running out and I am feeling quite nostalgic and despondent. Let’s start from the beginning.

          Do you remember our first day together? I do. I was strutting down your tiled floor, a mosaic of brown and white which is very outdated however also incredibly comforting. My hands were shaking and eyes were wide with admiration for those older than me. The seniors were terrifying and I just wanted to nestle back under the comfort of my old home from the year before. The middle school. Back then you seemed so big and intimidating but as we grew closer and saw more of each other, your walls didn’t seem so claustrophobic and your classrooms weren’t so barren. I have grown to see little things that make you feel like home. Like how my locker never opens unless you give it a little shove at first, or the small, barely visible, engravings in the desks which used to be jokes or lovers initials from years before, your metal chairs which always hug my bare legs in the hot summer, the way the whole student body comes together for homecoming week and your hallways are filled with blue and gold, and of course, the distinct smell of chlorine when you cross by the pool during swim season.
           With every great memory however comes bad memories. Since freshman year I have spent a total of 28 months waking up at 6:15 in the morning for you, most nights after staying up untill ungodly hours finishing work. And that brings me to the subject of homework. Oh how i sometimes comtemplate whether or not you truly want me to hate class or not. I recive piles upon piles of papers everynight and mixed with sports events and club meetings and instrumental concerts, by the end of June my brain is literally fried. Like an egg. I have handled this all very well untill now and I know that when graduation comes I legally cannot attend class anymore, but if I could get it done sooner I would. Schools in the future will offer me classes to specialize in my future that you do not and I need to grow up and live on my own. We both contribute to this relationship and in the future you will limit me on my options while I want to be free from this drama-filled repetative high school life.
          The next year is going to be very challenging my friend and I regret to say that I am looking at other schools. I need to move on and become reliable and dependent on myself to create a life for me in the future. Don’t worry, you will have plenty others coming in to replace me, young girls creeping around your hallways trying to find their way to the next class without getting glanced at by an upperclassmen and boys getting a large dose reality when they walk through your doors thinking they could run the show like years past but now getting shut down. Ill inform you the second I make my decision on where I would like to attend and maybe someday in the near future I will come back and visit! You will always be a major part in my life, so I thank you for that. Goodbye.

                                                                                    Sincerely,

                                                                                Cassie Webber

Revenge!

Elements of revenge can be found in many works of art like plays and novels and our favorite movies. Revenge is the act of inflicting harm on someone in response to them hurting you or someone around you. I mean, I can speak for many of us when I say that revenge can sometimes be a natural instinct. The moment someone wrongs you. or your best friend or family member, you want to hurt that person just like how they hurt you. In most situations, this is not the best option however it is probably the most favored and chosen one.

In the movie Hanna, with actors Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana, the topic of revenge came up quite alot. The movie is about a girl named Hanna who grew up living in the snowy woods of Finland with her father, Erik. He trained her for her whole life to be the perfect assasin with amazing strength, speed and smarts. What Hanna doesnt know is that her father Erik used to work for the CIA in a project where they tweaked fertilized human embryos to create the perfect solider. Erik found the mothers at abortion clinics and happened to fall in love with one. The baby that she allowed Erik to perfect was Hanna. After two years into the project a women named Marissa Veigler scrapped the project and eliminated all the mothers and babies. Erik, however, was too attached to Hanna and he fled to the wilderness with her, knowing that Marissa would always be looking for them because he held many dark CIA secrets. One of them being Hanna. As she grew older, Erik trained Hanna and told her that Marissa was out to get her, but did not tell her why. When Hanna was ready and strong enough however, she was going to find Marissa and kill her. As she goes on her journey throughout Europe to find Marissa, Hanna finds out the truth about her childhood and questions humanity.

One display of Revenge in this movie is how Marissa wants to find and kill Erik and Hanna because he holds many secrets from working in the CIA, secrets that Marissa wants eliminated. One of those secrets is Hanna because she is evidence of the secret program Erik worked on to create the perfect soldier. Another display of revenge is when Hanna and her father were running from Marissa and her team and when they split up, Hanna heard a gunshot and knew that Marissa killed Erik. After this moment, Hanna gained much more motivation to kill Marissa now that she killed her father.  This scene here takes place right before Erik was killed. Hannah was frustrated because she just found out about her past and she thinks that she might be in over her head. This was the last time Hanna saw her father. From this point on Hanna worked hard to get revenge on Marissa, eventually killing her at the very end.

The movie Hanna ties into Hamlet in the very obvious way of how when Hamlet found out about the murder of his father by his dear uncle, Claudius, Hamlet felt very revengeful and throughout the whole play sought to develop and execute the perfect plan to kill Claudius. This relates to Hanna because of her revengeful acts caused by her fathers murder by a woman named Marissa Veigler. Although we have not finished reading Hamlet, i predict that in the end, Hamlet will somehow manage to kill Claudius whether that includes himself dying also or not, because of how strong Hamlets feelings of hatred are towards Claudius. This is similar to the movie because Hanna does suceed in revenging her fathers death by killing Marissa Veigler. These two works parallel each other quite nicely in the end.

Satire

Satire can be defined as a practice of  making fun of human weakness or character flaw. It is made to be humorus while also derivving a reaction of contept from the reader or veiwer. Satire can easily be found in our daily lives on the television, on the internet and also from what we are reading whether that is your favorite book to curl up in bed and read at night or just the daily newspaper you like to enjoy with your coffee. Satire can be very difficult to understand unless you actually analyze it and look for it's signs. Before writing this blog i never even thought once aboout what kind of humor i was witnessing i only thought, "hey if its funny i'll laugh" and thats about it. I am still having a difficult time understanding the true meaning of Satire but once im finished writing this i hope it will be easy to grasp for myself and you, the reader.

One show that uses satire very well and is very popular is Saturday Night Live. One skit on SNL that can show satire in a very humorous way is when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler imitate Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. If you haven't seen this video you can watch it here.
 
In this skit, Tina and Amy take actual speeches things that Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton have said and exaggerate them. They turn these serious political speeches into funny and humerous skits for the audience to enjoy. This humor sometimes can gets to be too harsh and it fills the veiwer with comtempt and sorrow for the person being made fun of, however you still somehow squeak out a laugh.

This Saturday Night Live skit shows satire in two different ways. One way is in a parody. A parody is when someone imitates another in a serious matter in order to make fun of them. This is shown through the imitaion of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton in the way they act, talk, the way they dress and the things they say. This picture indicates the way that Tina Fey completely mimicks the way Sarah Palin looks. Fey is on the left and Palin is on the right.

 

The second form of satire in this skit is exaggeration. This is when something is increased beyond the normal for effect. This is shown in the video through the exaggeration, or stretching  of the truth, of the Senator's own words. One example of this is when Tina Fey, posing as Sarah Palin, says, "I can see Russia from my house!" This is exaggeration because Sarah Palin always talked about how she lives in Alaska and how much she loves it and  because it is so close to Russia, it became a funny, satirical comment used very often.

These uses of satire are very similar to the ones shown in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. An example of exaggeration in Huck Finn is in the beginning of the novel when Huck describes all of Tom Sawyer's adventures and when they start their robber's club. This club was all phony and the adventures were all fake. For example, they raided a pre-schools picnic instead of killing a bunch of Arabs. A way that Parody is shown in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is when Huck and Jim come in contact with the Grangerfords and Shepardsons. They are a parody of the Hatfields and Mccoys who were historical feuding familes, that were around when Mark Twain was writing Huck Finn.

Satire is a very complicated and confusing subject and can be hard to explain however the example of Tina Fey posing as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hilary Clinton can break it down and show how it makes fun of human weakness and flaw. In Huck Finn, Mark Twain uses satire very srategically and it can be very humourous but also brings out contempt in the reader which is sometimes needed.