Quote of the Day ~ Kant

I like to think that the tears that welled up in my eyes when I submitted my first college application today was some sort of bodily disorder, but five hours on and I'm still alive. 

I think I cried of relief when I clicked that submit button. 

Oh well, one done; six to go...

Anyway, I should probably introduce this quote before I go start a pity party haha. I was going to do a Cheshire Cat themed Halloween post (I appreciate Hollywood's latest depiction of that cat; now he's just creepy enough to be a Halloween costume!), but then Immanuel Kant came along, and I now have a Cheshire Cat meets Kant quote analysis..

I was a bit shocked when I first read this quote. That’s the kind of blatant pessimism no one really wants to hear. That happiness is impossible in our world unless we imagine it is probably the rudest thing anyone could say about it. Right?

Is the American Dream dead?

But, before I pronounce the idea dead, I need to find its corpse (excuse the analogy), because the American Dream is as elusive as the Higgs Boson.
        I posted a discussion on BlogCatalog last week, and I received such an overwhelmingly diverse collection of definitions for this one ideal, that I've decided to clarify what the American Dream is (or at least what I think it is) before I hold a funeral service...

Here are some of the ideas I heard from my discussion:

"[the American Dream is]getting a good job, getting married, buying a house and having kids who did a little bit better than you. " ~ Rhumperd

Quote of the Day ~ Carl Sandburg

Last week my English teacher pointed out that "quote" is a verb, and the noun form of the verb should be "quotation". So this post series of mine, should actually be named "Quotation of the Day" (I don't like it either). Isn't that ridiculous?

             We've all gotten so used to saying "Quote of the Day" that we don't even realize that it's grammatically wrong (can you imagine the number of other things we're doing wrong and don't notice because we do them all the time?).

Anyway, here's the quotation:

   

At one time, Carl Sandburg was one of the most talked about men in America. I can imagine that he comes from a time when the American dream of a rags-to-riches story was still alive and burning, a time when the country was still idealistic. 

I'm not a (complete) nostalgic, but maybe the world was a better place in the 1960s...I mean what's happened to the American Dream today? Where's the idealistic optimism for change?

What's the Use of Social Experiments?

My weekly art requirement is met by my weekend movie (or two or three). Last week, I watched a TV movie called The Pregnancy Project. It’s an adaptation of true-story about a Washington State high schooler - Gaby Rodriguez - who pretended to be pregnant to study the social stigma towards teen moms. This was, I learned, a social experiment.

                 I’ve never thought of society as a laboratory, and I’ve never dreamed of testing my hypotheses. But that is exactly what Gaby Rodriguez did- she had a hypothesis: that girls who accidentally became pregnant in high school were stereotyped and belittled for their mistake, and she had her model to test the hypothesis: pretending to have an unplanned teen pregnancy. What she found were what was expected, people sighing about her being a waste, and classmates jeering at her unideal future prospects.