The Potato Eaters

I would recommend zooming in to see all the small but big important details. (Look at Faces)
        
       I really don't know why I like this poem so much. When I look at it I just can find a way to take my eyes of this thought provoking work of art. Maybe it's the lighting or the facial expressions of the people. Maybe I  will never know. Anyways all in all I definitely think this painting should get noticed so i'm including it in this blog post.In the painting portrayed named "The Potato Eaters"(by Vincent Van Gogh) 5 old ragged tired looking people crowd around a table. One lady on the right pours something that looks like coffee as two other people on the far left share a small plate of potatoes.All of the people look very famished and struck in the depths of poverty. At the top of the painting one stray light hangs aluminizing the table . From the men and women's hats I predict that it takes place some time in the 1700s in England. At first I couldn't think of any observations good enough to match this very sophisticated poem. After some thinking I came to my theory.This is that the lighting in the painting is part of the reason that this painting is such a good looking and intriguing piece.It really helps us to infer a lot about the painting and just make us want to think about the picture. Without it this painting would look like a simple work of art.



       When I say lighting I don't just mean the light itself. I mean all the different elements of lighting such as the shadows on the small walls and the dark spots on the peoples faces. I think that even the lamp hanging from the ceiling and barely lighting the table has lots of significance. The dark spots on the peoples faces lead us to think that they are tired. Maybe we could even go further and infer that these people are peasants that do hard work throughout the day. From there dark bony hands we could infer that they do there work mainly with their hands. The fact that the they only have one light which hardly lights their house could lead us to think that they can't afford another light because of their wages from their job. The lack of color in their clothes could lead us to think that they either didn't have access to other colored clothes or couldn't afford it. The overall darkness in this painting even sets the main, depressing, sad mood showcased.


     All in all this picture really does it's job.Whether it's supposed to inspire, or just press thought into someone it succeeds. In my opinion if a painting changes someone than it's doing it's job. This poem is doing exactly this. I could really connect this paintings characters to myself (sometimes). These people look like they are just waiting for something better to begin. I feel the same way sometimes when i'm in a bad mood or just sad overall. I get over it but I don't if these people ever would. These feelings that I share with this picture are definitely also shared in society. Anyway this is a great painting  and should be seen by everyone. Good job Van Gogh.


        

ALL Star Mentor goes to MATISSE

                     After reading Matisse's blog post Peak i've decided that he should me my mentor. His writing exemplifies the good writing habits that we have been talking about this whole year. For example he crafts thought provoking concepts and puts them in his first paragraph. He also does a great job at turning the blog post into a personal level by making many self to book connections. Including all this he gives a great summary to help explain/support his concept. All in all he has done a great job. Good job so far and keep it up.

The mind of an aspergian socially

          You walk up to your best friend very angry with your test grade. An F. You know your parents are going to be very angry and even you are really mad at yourself. You come up to him scowling all over with your eyebrows pushed down in anger. Im so angry you mutter to him as you pass him by. He glimpses back at you for a second and asks why. You reply  "I got a stupid F on my test and my parents are going to kill me". He starts to smile on the corner of his face and as he turns to look at you it gets broader and broader. For a second you wonder why he's smiling but the next thing you know you're covered with anger. "WHATS YOUR PROBLEM" you yell at him as you walk away in anger. Sadly this interaction is happening without people having the knowledge about people diagnosed with Aspergers and stopping it in it's tracks. The truth is the person who would smile in this situation with asperger syndrome is doing nothing wrong and just simply acting on his brains judgement. Because Asperger syndrome effects the way people think this choice of smiling in this situation would be totally normal to them and has deeper meaning.

             In the situation I described instead of the aspergian just acting rude or mean they really are almost doing the opposite but the normal world can't seem to figure that out. In this situation like the one i read in my book the person may just be smiling because they are happy that there friend isn't mad at them and is  just mad at school. The aspergian is honestly just worried about their friendship with the person. The book goes on to tell me (which you probably can infer by now) that Aspergians (people diagnosed with Asbergers) have a very hard time reacting well to and noticing small emotions. As quoted in the book "I knew enough to run if a guy came yelling and screaming at me with a baseball bat but a girl with a subtle expression on her face...as she smiling at me? Laughing?Quizzical and curios?.I had no idea" on page 99.

             All in all I find this type of thinking very interesting. I think it's very important to know all this stuff if you know someone barely or even have a friend diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. I think that this way of thinking even helps me "understand" my parents a little better even though they definitely don't have this syndrome. I hope that someday everyone will come to understand that we all react differently to things being introduced to us. People should know not to get angry or even creeped out if someone acts differently than we expected because we are all different inside.

           

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Be different No really be unique Blog post

              Im currently re reading a book called Be Different by John Elder Robins.  Even at my first pages of this book i'm already immersed into a complex way of thinking that is very amazing to me. I feel like I need to give a brief introduction about the book so I will continue to do that. Basically the book is about the life of a person that has and is diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. For a quick explanation Asperger's effect's your brain by making you think much differently. For example someone with Asperger's might find solving math problems and finding theories very easy because there brain works more systematically almost like a robot. In a sense the brain want's to find the rule for solving an equation (life or math) and then finds the answer and moves on. All this may seem like a lot of great traits to have but it comes in a bundle with some other bad traits. Some of these problems associated with this syndrome can be having a very hard time with socializing whether it involves talking to a friend or asking out a girl etc etc. Be different goes very closely into the positive traits of Asperger's syndrome.
          
    
           I really want to go into the topic of the positive traits of Asperger's.  Like i mentioned before Asperger's syndrome can really corrupt your social life but it can also enhance other things. The author explained that he had an incredibly hard time socializing with his classmates for along time. He also was very rude at times to other's because the different brain type he had. He recalled on one chapter that he started getting happy when someone came up to him looking sad and said that there grandfather had died. His reasoning was that he didn't want the person to be sad and he was happy because he was glad tht the person wasn't mad at him. Event's like this would happen to him all the time and yet in his later years he managed to save someone from a burning car with a second's reaction and tie a tourniquet to save the person from bleeding.


           I can kind of connect with this type of thinking because my grandfather and possibly my dad have Asperger's. I might even have a small case of it myself. This book has really kind of helped me to help understand my grandfathers and dad's behavior. They anger me a lot sometimes but know I can really help understand where they are coming from. As much as they might act very different sometimes they honestly are just going along with there differently developed brain. I now know that some of the smartest people in the world have this syndrome and if i do have it im proud too have it.