Can We Have The Coffee Together?

George Saunders writes about human behavior with some modern and not so modern examples. He invites the reader to imagine themselves at a party where someone is speaking into a megaphone. Soon the focus of the party becomes the topic the megaphone speaker is flooding into the party atmosphere. Saunders also talks about new broadcast,he mentions a news reporter reporting busy shopping activity at a mall during holiday season . What a surprise!

One of the challenges of growing up is loneliness. As a small child living in Brooklyn Francie had no friends her age, the kids in her neighborhood that would have been candidates for friends either found her too quiet or shunned her for being different. "So

Joyce Carol Oates intrigues readers in her fictional piece “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by examining the life of a fifteen year old girl. She is beautiful, and her name is Connie. Oates lets the reader know that “everything about her [Connie] had two sides to it, one for home, and one for anywhere but home (27). When Connie goes out, she acts and dresses more mature than she probably should. However, when she is at home, she spends the majority of her time absorbed with daydreams “about the boys she met”(28). This daydreaming behavior is observable to the reader throughout the story. From theories about dreams, theories about

The connotations of “drunk” and “infatuated” evoke the impression that people who move around are foolishly overcome by the ideas of transience and are not thinking straight. This impression supports the notion that his way of life is better than theirs and creates his self-righteous and moralistic tone in the piece. Sanders even describes people who move around as “a danger not just to their parish but to the planet” (13). In making this extreme statement, Sanders attacks those who hold a different philosophy from his, reinforcing his self-righteous tone.

In the short story, The Fall of a City, by Alden Nowlan, Teddy is a young boy has many dreams and hopes for his future, but his biggest goal is sharterred by his guardians. Moreover, he should follow his dreams and that his dreams should remain valid till the day he achieves his dreams. It is also important to pursue the personality and dreams children want to take with them into their future life. Firstly, stereotypical behaviour of adults in particular can influence a child's future decisions, but children should have their own dreams and goals to pursue so they get the life they deserve. “Paper dolls and doll houses.

Yet whereas we are never left alone by our technology, we are increasingly lonely, alienated from our deepest selves. For we have lost touch with our own feelings, being educated to ignore them in order to function in a technological world. Like Bergman's "intellectual illiterates," we are so uneducated about our inner feelings that we only learn to talk about them when we "break down," and have to be repaired by the analyst, at the Group, or in the asylum. For, we learn, our feelings distort our "objective" perceptions, and thus prevent us from functioning like our machines. In this vein, Andy Warhol wryly recalls that he had always wanted to be like a machine, for then it was easier to get along with people. We thus find ourselves fragmented, our feelings alienated from our world, our lives as well as our literature being characterizable by T. S. Eliot's phrase, "dissociation of sensibility."

Everyone has felt left out before, and would’ve loved to fit in. But as the price of fitting in really worth it? Three authors-- Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Kij Johnson-- all use this feeling in their stories. In “All Summer in a Day”, by Ray Bradbury, Margot lives on Venus after moving from Earth, and remembers the sun, which her peers do not, and have been waiting all their lives to be able to see and remember the sun. The story, “Harrison Bergeron”, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Takes place in the year 2081, and everyone as equal due to the handicaps forced upon upon the people to eliminate all superiority. Kij Johnson’s story, “Ponies”, as a gruelling story of Barbara and her alicorn, Sunny, as they are invited to a cutting out party with

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.” (Death in Venice, 78). Everyone in today’s society is supposed to fit the expectations that has been created, but this individuals to lose their ingenuity. Although many believe that the best ideas and realizations are conceived through the sharing of ideas between multiple people, in all actuality, some of the best inventions were created by single people. These actions can be seen from characters in “Anthem,” “The Odyssey,” “The Pedestrian,” and “Lord of the Flies.” Isolation leads to clarity due to the lack of external influences tainting one’s perspective.

Gopnik learns about the busy lifestyle of Charlie Ravioli and begins to understand more of how a New Yorker lives. Gopnik also realizes that the environment contributes to the personality of Olivia’s imaginary friend. Gopnik states “Why is busyness the stuff our children make their invisible friends from, as country children make theirs from light and sand?” (Gopnik 156). According to Gopnik, children base their imaginary friends from the type of environment they live in. For example, since Olivia lives in New York, Her imaginary friend, Charlie Ravioli, has the personality of a busy person living in New York. However, a child living on the countryside would create an imaginary that has a personality based off that environment. These two quotes exhibit the idea of different lifestyles based off different environments. Gopnik beings to understand the busy lifestyle of people in New York and understands why Charlie Ravioli never has time to play with Olivia. He learns to appreciate this type of lifestyle and will eventually grow accustomed to it especially living in such a busy city. Gopnik also learns to understand more about his lifestyle and that in order to adjust to the busy lifestyle, he has to get involved with the routine.

The narrator is not the only person on her block to be secluded from the people who are so physically proximate to her. The boy from number eighteen wrote on the back of a photograph, “ There are so many people in this world he says, and I want to know them all but I don’t even know my nextdoor neighbor 's name”. (216) The fact that all of these people are jam packed together so closely, yet their lives seldom overlap, shows a communal disunion. Globally there is such an expanse of beauty and wonder, yet nobody stops and examines the beauty that is surrounding them.

I left Novi High School on a bright yellow school bus full of student council members. We passed large houses with gorgeous manicured lawns, and multiple cars in each driveway. I looked down to send a text to my friend, and before I knew it, the bus looked like it was in a whole different world. Everywhere I looked I saw abandoned houses covered in graffiti so thick you coundn’t see the brick. Boarded up buildings and neighborhood streets with houses so packed together you could reach out and touch your neighbor… if only every house was occupied and safe. The streetlamps were burned out, and every store had bars guarding their windows and doors. I was so involved in the scenery passing before my eyes, that I didn’t even notice the bus coming to a complete stop.

Catherine Fishel once wrote, “Creating visual imagery is a state of mind. It involves the reproduction of what we see. But much more than that, it becomes an outlet to express feelings about what we experience.” In Adam Gopnik’s Bumping Into Mr Ravioli, creating visual imagery based on the experiences around is at the forefront of the story. In other words, we create a paracosm, or an imaginary world inside of our brain that is shaped by the observations we make on the world around us. The story details of a young three year old girl named Olivia, that has invented an imaginary friend named Charlie Ravioli. However, Charlie is too “busy” to play with Olivia, instead opting for bump and run tactics that exemplify the hectic nature of living in New York City (156). Furthermore, Olivia’s paracosm tells us that she is influenced directly from the lives of Adam Gopnik and his wife, who are unaware to the fact that they live a wealthy and hectic lifestyle that is prototypical in the city. As a result, the overall paracosm created by Olivia is negative because she is following in the footsteps of “busyness”, as opposed to industrious pathways that were led by historical legends such as Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Pepys (156).

In daily life, we must be able to filter out the multitude of distractions which any physical environment can impose upon our senses. By creating a tunneled vision approach to moving about the environments which are a part of our everyday existence, we can more efficiently complete the tasks which are required of us in our various roles in society. In his essay “On Habit,” Alain de Botton, writes that people have become habituated in their own daily lives. In his first section he details himself returning from Barbados to London who discovers the weather isn’t what he expected. He expected his mood from the weather of Barbados to stay the same in London. De Botton illustrates that people in general are unhappy when it comes to observing

The short film we conducted, Two Men Hanging Out, relates to Lumiere’s films Baby’s Lunch and Partie de Cartes due to its simplicity. In Lumiere's Baby’s Lunch, the film involves a form of social gathering in an outdoor setting. The main focus was a baby being fed by her two parents. The film does not have a plot, it was an ordinary film focusing on a daily task. In our film Two Men hanging Out, we wanted to create a similar idea but shift the main focus on the two men outside of a coffee shop. The idea was to have two men lounging across from each other in a social setting but focus their time on their cellphones. In the film Partie de Cartes, there is a group of men around a table playing a board game. This film shows up what a social gathering

“Untitled” by Paul Kuczynski also contains satire, however the author of this portrait uses satire to depict the theme of isolation, instead of misery, poverty, ruin and neglect. This simple, yet thought provoking picture, shows a man looking through a periscope that is shaped like the Facebook symbol, to see through a window above an open door. The door is not barricaded in any way, shape or form, so the man is able to walk outside and see what is going on in the world first hand. Instead, he chooses to stay inside by himself and view the world through Facebook. Through “Untitled,” Kuczynski conveys the message that social media interaction is overtaking physical interaction. People are more likely to go on social media to find out what is happening than to go out and experience it themselves. Kuczynski’s painting greatly showcases that even in its simplicity.