Assignment for Wednesday 9/24

I really enjoyed talking about how texts work in conversation with each other. I thought that the different pieces of Ralph Waldo Emersons essay, Self Reliance, really were easy to connect to the pieces we have or are studying. For example, in the essay he says, "accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of you contemporaries, the connection of events." This immediatley made me think of the monkey king from the story American Born Chinese. The monkey king will not accept to just be a monkey, he wants to be human, he wants to be more. Because of his foolishness, he spends an eternity underneath a pile of rocks (500 years to be exact). I think this need to want to be something other than yourself is also explained by the quote, "imitation is suicide." If you spend all your time trying to be like other people, you loose the real sight of yourself. I think that this happens everyday, for people in middle school and highschool or really anywhere that are trying to fit in. It seems to me that you want to be more like the person that is kind of shunning you. I think its dumb, where would this world be if everyone was the same? It'd be boring and unrealistic. So why is there the need to constantley be the most popular, and in order to do that, put everyone else down on your way to the top. I personally beleive this social norm is embedded into our culture. Emerson also says, "to be great is to be misunderstood". It seems to me that the ones that are trying so hard to be someone else, are the ones that are clearly misunderstood, and they are the great ones. People need to realize that to be yourself is to be great.