The Pura Principle

I actually found this short story, I guess you can call it, to be really interesting.  It kept my interest the whole way through and I think it's because of the casual language Diaz uses throughout.  The story was not dense and it was very easy to read.  I also took a lot of Spanish in high school so I was able to understand some of the references.  Like, I laughed when the mom called Rafa's "girlfriend" Pura Mierda.
Obviously, this story addresses illness because Rafa has cancer and is dying from it.  He is very sick and lost a lot of weight due to cancer.  But, Rafa is not exactly the most honest, good-intentioned person.  I personally do not like him too much, and although he has cancer, the speaker almost makes it difficult to feel bad for him. Today, people usually look at people who are sick differently or feel extremely bad for them and how they have to deal with the illness.  But, it's really the opposite in this story, which i find interesting.  I think Diaz wanted to bring up the fact that people who are ill have personalities outside their disease, and sometimes illness doesn't change them.  Rafa did not become a "better" person after he was diagnosed with cancer.  A lot of time society believe that those who are dying become better people and live every moment as if it's their last (because it very well could be) but that is not necessarily true.  The fact that it was a short story definitely kept me more interested because I feel like if it was in "article" or "research paper" form, it would have been boring.

 

Waltz with Bashir

At first, I found this movie to be very confusing. I think the animation contributed to that because it was almost like a comic book and it make the movie seem "kid-like." And i feel like the animation also made the movie choppy.  It also made me take the movie less seriously, at first, because it was a cartoon.  The animation helped because it really made me pay attention to try and figure out what exactly was happening. Once i got used to the fact that the movie is animated, I was able to understand what was happened and actually enjoyed it.  As the movie progressed, I realized that the animations actually made the movie somewhat eerie, which I think was one of the goals of the making the movie animated because it wanted to highlight the horrors of the war.
 The scene that stood out the most to me, was the one when the soldiers were running for their lives toward the sea.  Many of them were actually shot down while running and the main guy (i forget his name) had to hide behind a rock.  I could only imagine how horrifying this would be and i feel like the scene really highlighted the horrors of the war.

5 New Annotations

 Food Inc. is documentary that talks about a wide variety of topics that deal with the different issues surrounding the fast food industry. A lot of the movie explains the ways fast food is processed and how extremely unhealthy it is for us. I want to narrow in on the part of the video which features a family in poor health.  This family is of low socioeconomic status and wants to eat healthy but cannot because healthy food is outside their budget.  It is much easier for them to buy cheap calories at McDonald's than buying fruit, which is more expensive and less filling.  
 Kenner, Robert, Dir. Food Inc.. Magnolia Pictures: 2008, DVD.

This article from TIME magazine specifically talks about food deserts in America.  Many statistics are provided to back the assertion that poor communities are specifically targeted by the fast food industry.  Also, supermarkets tend not to build a store there because they know people cannot afford their food.  So, not only are more than enough fast food restaurants available for the inhabitants, but supermarkets with fresh foods are not available.  Most black and latino Americans live in these areas; more people of these groups tend to have higher obesity rates than white or rich Americans.
 Gray, Steven. "Can America's Urban Food Deserts Bloom?." Time 26 May 2009: n. pag. Web. 2 Apr 2011. <http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1900947,00.html>.

This documentary is more about the lack of nutritional value of fast food. Spurlock ate McDonald's for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to prove that eating too much fast food can make you unhealthy.  Before he started, he was a physically fit man who had no health problems, but after he ate McDonald's, and only McDonald's, for a month, he had a lot of health problems. I can use the information he gathered to prove how people should not only be living on fast food, although it is cheap.
Spurlock, Morgan, Dir. Supersize Me. Samuel Goldwyn Films: 2007, DVD. 

This report from the US Department of Agriculture explains everything a person would want to know about food availability in low-income areas. It provides a lot of facts and statistics about low income households and I can definitely use this to support my argument that more fresh food supermarkets need to be available to them.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/AP/AP036/

A lot of people have the perception that people who are poor are extremely thin and malnourished.  Well, today, most people of low economic status are malnourished, but they're overweight or obese. But then, the author also talks about those who are in fact starving, which he calls "The Bronx Paradox." In the Bronx, there are people who are food insecure and "hungry" and there are people who are food insecure but not hungry. Both are a problem obviously.  This article explains the efforts the city is making the help the latter group of people.
Dolnick, Sam. "The Obesity-Hunger Paradox." New York Times 12 Mar 2010: n. pag. Web. 2 Apr 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/nyregion/14hunger.html?_r=1&src=me>.