Love in Popular Music?

Contemporary love songs today don’t even compare to these poems. I think that, compared to today’s popular love songs, poems have deeper feelings and emotions regarding love. In my opinion, songs that are popular, the ones that are usually over played on the radio, seem so shallow to me. I remember back when love songs were like poems accompanied with music. The popular songs on the radio used to be about genuine love and feelings, not just all about sex. Now a days, the only genre, in my opinion, that has the capacity to have real emotion in music and within the lyrics of their songs is country, which is the one genre that a lot of people I know won’t listen to. Thinking of modern songs that we hear every day as poems, I think just the diction alone completely separates songs from poetry. Contemporary songs usually have profanity throughout the entire song, which completely destroys the emotional feeling, if any, that the writer was trying to achieve. I think the writers of these songs, rather than coming from the heart, just do it for the money. Poets have that compassion in their work that makes it desirable to read; poems themselves have a romantic and emotional connotation within them which makes them the perfect candidate for expressing love. Writers seem to have the drive and desire to express these feelings, while song writers seem to do it for popularity. There seems to be this pressure for song writers to write that new number one hit and they’re based on what they feel the public wants to hear.


I know when I turn on the radio, there are always songs on there that, regardless of what it’s about, it’s related somehow to sex. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely songs out there that don’t, that are tasteful. However, I think it’s getting more apparent that the songs about sex are not only the most popular, but there’s so many of them! I know I may be going on a tangent here, but I starting thinking about just the concept of listening to music and reading alone. When I was younger, I was really into reading, in high school I couldn’t stand it and I turned to listening to music. I see that a lot; a lot of people I know would rather sit in a room by themselves and listen to popular music rather than reading a book. Looking at our society today, I think it’s really obvious that this is occurring and it seems to be getting worse. Especially after being in college, I’ve learned the rewarding aspects of reading, and the emotion within poetry can even be overwhelming, definitely an experience that I could never get listening to contemporary music.

What Do You Truly Believe in?

I think it’s important for us to learn about different creation myths, and learning about them poses questions about our own beliefs regarding earth’s creation. We all have our own idea of how the earth was created- some believe that God created everything on earth, some myths suggest that different gods and symbolic figures arose from the dark abyss that we call earth and created everything on earth in their way. And we can’t forget the belief in the scientific approach and believe that earth was created after the Big Bang and earth became what it is today through the process of intense and ongoing evolution. It seems that many people stand their ground; what they believe happened that created earth as we know it today, that’s exactly what happened and there’s absolutely no dispute about it. I can completely understand why people are this way because I was the same way until I started college and I studied intensely about evolution and how legit that evolution really is. I’ve even had the opportunity to examine my own beliefs under an academic microscope to, in a way, compare the validity of my own beliefs to science. As horrible as it sounds, it actually taught me a lot about what I believe in and why I do believe in it.


I think sometimes studying and learning about other creation myths, in a way, gives us a gut check. When I was watching the different creation myths that others believe in, it made me think about my own creation myth that I draw myself to. And I personally think that it’s really interesting to learn about all these different myths and how one event that could be interpreted in so many different ways. I felt really narrow minded when I realized how many different versions of the same event there are and how I just didn’t get myself out there to explore them. It also surprised me how a lot of these creation myths have the same basic “plot” to them. Each one I saw seemed to have some kind of traumatic event that cause some kind of creation of something on earth, and it’s interesting how my own creation belief seems to have the same theme throughout as well. I’ve always been one to believe in the traditional Genesis creation story of how the earth and heavens were created, and I noticed that there are trends that are embedded in the other myths I saw and my own. I think that the experience is very rewarding if we could just be a little more open-minded. Even if someone stands by their beliefs to the very end, I’ve found that in carefully looking at my own beliefs compared to others and that of science, it has made my beliefs and faith in what I believe in that much stronger and I now appreciate my beliefs and have the respect for others that I know I can have in better understanding them. I’m not too sure if I hit the nail on the head with this blog since I kind of jumped around a bit, but through this exploration through learning about different creation myths, the learning experience in itself is incredibly rewarding.

The Weight of Life's Burdens

I think the heaviest burden of knowing is carried by Lily. The biggest burden is introducted in the beginning of the story as she reflects on her mother’s death as a young child. Her mother passed away when she was very young; however we learn the cause during this introduction of her deceased mother. Lily was told that during a fight between her father and mother, she accidently shot and ultimately killed her mother. She carries that burden with her throughout the story and eventually catches up to her when she ran away with Rosaleen to Tiburon, a city that knows of her mother and her passing. Knowing she would be banished from this town and not wanting to return home, she hides the fact that she killed her mother from those around her. I think this burden is incredible at this point in the story since there is so much riding on her keeping this secret to herself; if this burden of knowing is bestowed on the townspeople, her entire time there would fall apart and she would have no other choice other than to go back home with her abusive father.

The other smaller burden she carries is knowing about these bees that she says fly out of her wall and she struggles to catch them. As opposed to hiding this like she did about her secret behind her accidently killing her mom, she does try to tell her father about them and her trying o catch them in her jar, but he doesn’t believe her. Rosaleen does believe her, which relieves the burden of those around her not believing, however, she carries the burden of wanting to capture these bees which Rosaleen doesn’t quite approve of. I think this is a way to lighten this burden for her, having indefinite evidence that there are in fact bees in her walls. Although the burden may have hindered that aspect of her relationship with her father, it was these bees that inspired her to move away and start anew.

One burden that all of the characters here carry is the immense racial inequality within their living environment. Lily sees this inequality firsthand when she accompanies Rosaleen to go register to vote. They were harassed and Rosaleen was beaten so severely by the police officers that she ended up in the hospital. Although she was being harassed by exercising her right to vote and be a part of politics, she was beaten by those who were supposed be in a position to protect her. This inequality is seen throughout the story, including Lily’s relationship with Zach. She believed that African American men were never considered to be handsome, that seems to only correlate to Caucasian men. However, she grew close to Zach and began a romantic relationship with him. In this case, Zach lifted this burden about unattractive African American men that Lily carried to allow her to open up to have a healthy relationship with someone who did lift this burden and could potentially lift many others.

The Love of a Child

If I understood this prompt correctly, I can definitely think of an event where I felt like I had some kind of animal instinct. As soon as I read this prompt, I knew that I had to write about this particular situation. I was raised to care and be a positive role model for younger kids. Especially those in my immediate family, I feel the need and obligation to protect my family from any kind of harm. While I was babysitting my six month old cousin, she was content but incredibly fussy just as younger children can definitely be. I’m still trying to get used to her ever changing schedule and she started crying; the only thing I can think to do to calm her down is to fix her a bottle. I did everything I could to keep her calm while I made her bottle, and when it finally came time for her to take the bottle, she lie down on the couch and fell fast asleep, with her bottle in hand. She let me hold her while she slept and even let me move her into her room, into her crib to lay sound asleep until her father came home from work.

At that point, I felt that I had to do everything in my power to keep her safe while she was sleeping. I also felt an almost overwhelming feeling of trust from her towards me that she feels safe to sleep under my care. I think, whether you’re a mother or not, that’s one of the most amazing feelings someone can ever have in their lifetime. Although it doesn’t seem very difficult to earn their trust, it really is. Children can almost sense when they’re in some kind of danger, that’s usually why they’re really shy and even start to cry when they are around people they don’t know. I went through the same thing with my cousin; I’ve only babysat her for a couple months, and it took me that long to earn her trust because she absolutely refused to sleep while I had her. Just because babies aren’t developed completely in a mental state, they still have their own instincts; this also explains why babies tend to trust and have a close connection with their mothers, and difficult to get the same kind of trust with children while their mothers aren’t around. It gave me the sense of accomplishment and respect from this child, which to me, means the world and more.