Indian Epics Fall 2019

A family of five stand in the long line at the Mexico/US border trying to get through. The mother asks the father if he has the correct paperwork needed to cross through. They believe there will be no issue as they are only seeking refuge in the states. With anticipation they wait. Longer and longer as the sun beats down overhead. Finally, after about six hours waiting, their turn comes. The border patrol asks for their paperwork. He stares at it for a long time as if trying to find something wrong with it. Eventually he hands it back to them and tells them to pass. The children start to get excited, but the mother tells them to calm down. They are not in the clear until the border is no longer in sight. As they begin the cross the bridge by foot, they are stopped by another patrol. He tells them to come over for a random inspection. The father does not know what they are going to inspect. All they have are the clothes on their backs. The officer searches each one of them, even t...

The two sites I tried were KeyHero.com and Typing.com. I was a lot better on KeyHero at 54 wpm and 47 wpm on typing.com. I have never considered myself a fast typer, so I never know how good I should be. I also have really fat fingers, and I think that causes me to make a lot more mistakes than people that don't have sausage links as fingers. One thing that people always tell me is that I type very loudly too. I always get made fun of by my friends for always typing so loud and distracting them. I have tried to type more quietly but I do not feel like my point is getting across as well as I want to. It also goes back to the whole sausage fingers thing. They are too heavy that every keyboard they hit has a ton of course behind them. In middle school we had to take a typing class for 9 weeks. We would always get a document that we had to type and also some games to play on a software for typing. I do not remember much about it other than we always got to do our own thing whenever w...

For the second half of my reading, I read more Jataka tales from the same book as before. This is one of my favorite collections of Jataka tales so far. The first story that I really enjoyed was the Great Elephant. It brought together sadness, a great message, and a happy ending. I mention sadness because that is something that is not seen very much in Jatakas, but this one was particularly emotional. Elephants are known to be noble animals and seeing one be so distraught over the safety of man hit a heart string with me. Because I have seen elephants in real life and even bathed them, I have a close connections with them. These men were not bad men either. They were trying to escape a terrible leader. This story also parallels modern issues. There are often immigrants that travel to try and find safe refuge from their country, but many do not make it on the way. Thinking abut someone who is willing to risk their life for people to be able to reach safety is something that could go rea...

Reading Jatakas is one of my favorite things to do in this class because they are such easy reads and they remind me of all the stories that I would hear as a child. One of the stories that I read today that stuck out to me was "The Empty Lake." there was nothing of significance as far as people surprising or out of the ordinary, but I loved how it took personification to the next level. It gave things such as wind, rain, and thunder life and I pictured them in my head that way. When Mother Earth's came down to drink the water away, I actually pictured Mother Earth as a human, coming and drinking the water from the lake. When Queen Rain began to fill back up the lake with King Thunder, I saw both of them working together to try and refill the lake. If I were to write a full story with this as my source material, I would try an elaborate on the King Fish. They did not give him as much insight to him as they did the other characters. I dislike when a character is made a s...