#6

Live a long life, but remain known only to a small group of people..

ORRRR

Live large, die in my early twenties, but be insanely famous for the next 1,000 years..

If I had to pick between the two, I would definitely choose to live a longer life. I want a family, I want grandchildren, I want to see what happens to the world as I progress through life. I don't need to be known by everyone. As long as I'm famous to the people I love, that's all that matters. Dying early is not worth fame, especially if I'm not going to be alive while I'm famous.
I didn't have to think about this choice very hard. Sure, we all want to be famous at one point, but having a family is ten times greater than any fame or fortune. In the words of Forrest Gump, "Thats all I have to say about that."

#5

When I was young, my favorite book of all time was Rainbow Fish. I remember having my mom check it out of my kindergarten's library almost every week, until she eventually bought the book for me. Of course what initially drew me to it was it's colorful and shiny cover. The book itself though, I could relate to. It's about a fish with unusually shiny and colorful scales who doesn't want to share his scales with any of the other fish, so they stop talking to him. He asks for advice from the Octopus lady..oracle woman.. and she tells him to share his shiny scales with the other fish. He does and then he's left with one shiny scale but he doesn't mind because after that, everyone had one shiny scale and he had friends. I could relate to it so well because, as an only child, I had a big issue with sharing. I remember slightly agreeing with Rainbow Fish, thinking that he shouldn't share. That was the beesssttt book.

#4

"The world, friend Govinda, is not perfect or on a slow journey toward perfection; no, it is perfect every moment; all sin already bears its forgiveness within itself; every little boy already bears the old man within himself, every infant bears death, every dying man bears eternal life. No one is able to look at someone else and know how far along on his journey he is; in the highwayman and dice player lurks a Buddha, in the Brahman lurks the highwayman."

p. 77 Siddhartha

"No one is able to look at someone else an know how far along on his journey he is.." because he, himself does not know how far along on his journey he is. Westerners, we believe that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. One of our main values is striving for success and attaining that through money, popularity, religion, etc. The main value with the Eastern philosophy is their self and the world surrounding them. They believe in moving forward through self-development. What this passage from Siddhartha is stating is that life doesn't need to get better because life is eternal. "The world...is not perfect or on a slow journey toward perfection; no, it is perfect every moment..." The world is perfect every moment because everything eventually contradicts itself. Death cancels out life, forgiveness cancels out sin, etc. The irony of this all is that Herman Hesse, the author, was German, therefore was raised in the Western mentality.

#3

The conundrum of high school.. this is tough. Maybe it's that we all say how much we don't care what anyone else thinks so we're trying to be independent and original, and we believe it too.. but really, we all care. When we go to the mall, into a shop, pick up something off the rack, we're secretly thinking what people would say or think if we wore it into school the next day. The way we act is based so much off of the media and others around us, yet we constantly state how original we are. Is that a paradox? Maybe it's a paradox for teenagers, I'm not sure it is for high school though. Maybe it's that we're taking all of these classes we know hardly anything about, just because we have to. We try so hard and do so much work for classes just to get a good grade, just to pass the class and move on. We're trying so hard because we all want to get out as soon as possible, but really high school is comfort for most. Because I bet anything that when we finally do get out, out into "the real world" that we'll be begging to come back. College is going to be a very rude awakening for most of us, but in the end, it has to be done. Is that the paradox of high school? IS ITTT?!