The overall readings in my English 1A class, I honestly love all of the readings.  I would have to say that my favorite book is The Things They Carried.  The book is just so intriguing that I would highly recommend everybody to read it.  It is not going to be a disappointment and it surely will not be a waste of time.  I also like the Book Signs of Life in the U.S.A because there are a lot of very interesting articles from many authors that have a strong opinion.  It has many articles that people can relate to or stand against, it all just really depends on the person. Honestly, the books were wonderful.  Never did I think that it was a waste of time reading.

For my extended essay, I have chosen to extend the paper that I feel I can talk about the most.  The paper can have so much good qualities if the time was taken to write and revise it.  The paper that I have chosen to extend more is the one that I personally chose to write which talks about high school, and how social media portrays it as something different. I already included the movie Mean Girls because I found it as a perfect example to use because it had plenty of examples that I needed.  Other examples that I thought about using are certain movies such as Never Been Kissed and Superstar.  These movies also help media portray high school as something evil and show other students what the expectations are like in high school.  A quote that came to my mind, which I though was a perfect example from Never Been Kissed is a quote from the character Rob Geller, “All you need is for one person to think you're cool, and you're in. Everyone else will be scared to question it”.  These kind of quotes give a perfect example of what children and teenagers will be looking forward to when they hit the high school age.  I wanted to talk about how they’ll (social media) uses these things and put images in their (teenagers) head to let being popular become the number one priority.  Overall, my goal is getting my point across and expanding my ideas and opinions onto this paper that I have chosen to extend.

The Thngs They Carried

From the chapters "Enemies" to "The Dentist" it mostly talks about the Curt Lemon and his death. Curt Lemon's death was caused from a booby trap in VC while playing a game that included tossing smoke grenades with one another. After the loss the best friend, Rat Kiley, goes a little insane. He ends up shooting a baby water buffalo, not to kill, but to torture. From what I think of Rat Kiley's actions, he is probably feeling angry, hurt, and sad from the death of his friend. He must've taken his emotions out on the baby water buffalo and which caused him to shoot it multiple times and leaving it heavily injured.