luck favors the prepared.

Okay. Let me be honest. I went to the concert because the teachers promised the students to give out extra credit. I went there to meet my friends. I went there to tell my mom I was involved in a school activity and use it as an excuse to come home late. It is just a concert, and how can a concert change the world? I thought. However, one man, Mr. Burell, did make a change. Yes, one concert inspired the entire school. Now I believe that this school and I are capable of changing the whole sphere.

PGC concert’s intention was to let people know how serious the problem of global warming is and to inspire the audience to participate in the approach to a change. The dark atmosphere of the club was fascinating. The bands were awesome, and the songs rocked. The concert was a great success, I would say. However, I modestly propose: the concert did not a good job in really emphasizing its intentional goal. Most of the audience, as they were high on music, gradually forgot about the main theme, global warming, and began to accept the event as a simple amusing, socializing opportunity.

Let’s focus. Let’s remember. Let’s realize. Let’s act. We were supposed to be there to be the part of the group that changes the world. Even though what first attracted me to the event was the charming luster of the extra credits, I soon realized how trivial they are. What good will 5 extra points for my English blog grades do? The planet where we all live on is slowly yet surely dying. Denying and forgetting about the issue will provide no solution.

We all tend to think one person is incapable of making an actual, noticeable change. However, you can save the earth, and so do I. We all can save the planet. Stand up, people. Take actions. Turn off your air conditioner. Walk. Stop wasting energy, and stop killing the earth. Let’s be part of this global cooling project.

        I panicked. How can I not panic? It is four weeks before final exams; and I have 3 projects that must be done using i-movie. Let me get this straight. It was not me the one who killed my macbook. I will not mention the name (because blaming the person will not bring my computer back to life), but it wasn’t me. All the assignments and files that I have saved are still in there. Fortunately, the IT office safely rescued my hard-drive and all the data.

There are two types of people in this planet: people who create back-up drives and people who do not. I was a type of person who never bothered to create back-ups. Now, I sincerely warn you all–especially the ones who attend my high school where we use one-to-one laptop system. Buy a hard drive. Create an online account in which you can save your works. This computer crisis almost made me pass out. I thank God for my rescued files. However, this type of accident may take place again (although it should not). I have no room to freak out every time this happen. Additionally, I do not hope my friends to realize the importance of back-up files when computers are already destroyed. It is just too late.

Walking down the hallway, laughing out loud with my friends, I suddenly stopped my steps after a glance at an object hanging down from the ceiling: a candid camera. With its one eye, it was facing directly at me and my friends. Perceiving my actions, reading my lips–these were what the camera was doing. With a strong, abrupt uncomfortable feeling, I refused to act as myself. Yes, I stopped being Dabin, yet started to act as a machine that performs restricted actions forced by school.

In one science fiction movie (with a title that I cannot remember), one of the main characters reveals top government secret: the satellites will be soon used by the government to observe actions of each citizen. When I heard it, I gave a snort of laughter. Invasion of privacy, I would call it. Yet with candid cameras watching over me, my friends, everyone in school, I started to think of it as a quite reasonable theory. If international schools where the authorities claim to respect their students start to invade their privacy, it only proves that the authorities suppose human nature as evil and unworthy of trust.

Although the original purpose and intention of the cameras are to prevent certain misbehaviors of students, it still feels like being a prisoner in panopticon–a specially designed prison where everything can be seen by observers.

“I just want to live. I don’t care how,” Lincoln Six-Echo says.
“You’re not real. You’re copies of people out here in the world,” people reply.
The movie, The Island, impressed me.

Having no ceiling to limit it down, technology has continued its growth and development since its first arrival. Nowadays technology has even started to intrude the divine right of nature: People have begun to desire the creation of life. Human cloning is the ultimate destination they hope to arrive at. “To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number,” Neil Postman argues in Technopoly. If a man develops a new technology that can invent human beings, humans will begin to be seen as objects. Human cloning must never happen.
No shortcut existed in the past. One by one, word for word, people had to copy out a written document with their hands to create its replica. Pouring significant amounts of time and labor, each transcription was treated with great values in return. However, starting with the engraving block technique of Egyptian, humans developed printing technologies, such as Gutenberg’s Printing Press. Finally the development reached its destination where pressing a button using one finger is the only task required to create words and texts. No more admiration is aroused for a written edition due to its commonness. If developments in cloning humans take place, it will result in a similar sequence with insignificance and cheapness of human life.
Cloned humans would be nothing different from other people except for the fact that they are born without chronic pains of mothers. Some people claim that human-cloning should be allowed for medical usage, such as creating organs for transplant. All human beings are born or created holding natural rights that follow the privilege of living as humans. A person should never be allowed to decide the purpose of another person’s life. It is a trespass against a person’s civil liberties to create the person for certain purposes, but cloning could easily lead to this. “You’re special. You have a very special purpose in life,” says the God-like man to the clones in the movie, The Island. The clones’ “very special purpose” is to devote themselves to serve their owners by providing organs: They die for their identical being regardless of their will. Although this has not taken place in reality, it is very likely what the situation will look like if cloning becomes possible.
Another possible problem with cloning is that with emergence of identical beings, society may be situated in chaos. Loss of uniqueness will occur, and the concept of individuality will be gradually but surely be lost as well. When border lines among these individuals fade away, the whole society will sink below the manageable surface. No human is perfect; therefore potential human errors take a big role in resisting the allowance of human cloning. The possibility of a cloned human being deformed and disabled cannot be ignored. There is a case in which Dr. Wilmut of Roslin Institute of England conducted the birth of a clone sheep in 1996. At first, the experiment seemed successful; the sheep, Dolly, was healthy, and was praised as the very first mammal created by men’s hand. However, side effects began to rise up on the surface. Its abnormal speed in aging led to serious lung disease, and it had to be euthanatized. As a result, it barely complete half of normal sheep’s lifetime. This may happen during human cloning process; in that particular case, no payment can pay the price of it.
Human dignity will crash down with demise of individualism among people. Life of a person will be treated as if it is accessible effortlessly. Eventually, the existence of a human will be considered easy and cheap as a paper copy of a document. Humans are not papers. Humans are not documents that can be copied whenever they are needed.
Human cloning is the box of Pandora. It is the Eden’s apple. Once we open the box and eat the forbidden fruit, our entire species will suffer. Euthanizing a person is more serious undertaking than euthanizing a sheep. Are we ready to deal with the moral question involved?

Lately, in April 21^st, news was reported about a 40-year-old woman who committed suicide after going through melancholia due to devastating consequence of cosmetic surgery.

Humans are beautiful due to their physical diversity and mental particularity; yet the current society began losing its balance, tending to attach greater weight on the outward aspect. Present trend of empowering beauty of external features stirred up the species, especially the feminine gender, to refuse to open their eyes that look deep in people’s souls but to have visions providing glance over outer appearances only. An obsession with physical beauty has formed a twisted blind faith in which the exterior became the utmost criterion in judging people. Realizing that external beauty is only skin deep is urgently needed; the true charm of a human being radiates from one’s inward nature that cannot be transformed by any form of artificial surgery.

People receive cosmetic surgery in order to improve their appearance assuming that it will eventually compensate them with better lives. Earning confidence in daily life, gaining more self-satisfaction, and obtaining better treatment from others—these are some of the main “excuses” why people choose to put artificial objects in their faces, pull out natural part of their own body, and transform themselves into factitious creatures. Believing that such a surgery would empower oneself with confidence is fatuous; and it simply serves as just another unreliable excuse. It is not the outside of a person that brings out his or her real figure. No cosmetic surgery makes a person truly happy or confident, but trusting oneself with respecting one’s natural innermost grace. Moreover, self-satisfaction is obtainable only if a person begins to sincerely accept oneself as who he or she is.

The media is practically the one to blame for starting to establish certain standards of being beautiful neglecting the ultimate value, uniqueness. Television programs and magazines unceasingly play enormous roles in arousing “lookism” among teenagers. Celebrities are esteemed and praised for how gorgeous faces and bodies are giving impression to immature ones that having good looks equals to a significant factor that generates deep admiration and raise recognition. When one of the celebrities gain fat or turn into unpleasant forms by any chance, the media immediately attacks and gives humiliation. Being fat and ugly is severely criticized as if committing serious crime; the whole society seems to offend a person when he or she does not meet the criterion of being beautiful.

I do not condemn those who receive plastic surgery. But we all should realize an important fact. If the one cannot recognize the one’s true value, then what good will the transformed body skin bring?

Oh, no. he has done it again. He has gotten a detention for the second time. Why? It’s because he has done the serious crime: speaking his words in Korean at the school.
Walking up the stairs with my friend, talking about a foreign drama that we were watching all night, I got too excited and spoke in the forbidden language. “Maja, Maja! (??, ??!)” I said, and before I even move on to the next word, I felt someone tapping my shoulder. I looked back. A teacher (whom I never have seen before) was displaying a big evil smile on her face. She asked for my name; therefore I answered, and she wrote it down on her yellow folder, the list of criminals.
I, as a citizen of Republic of Korea, have the freedom of speech, the liberty of expression. However my personal rights and freedom had been trespassed by the school policy. No-Korean-speaking-at-school-policy shows no respect not only towards the Korean language itself, yet towards the students who owns preserved rights.
The major reason for establishing this no-Korean-speaking-rule is to encourage students to speak English so that they can prepare for their school years in American universities. However, as high school students we are capable of preparing our own future and managing our own behaviors. Those who don’t act maturely without thinking deeply will face failure in the future. Tough, but that’s real world where one should be responsible for oneself. Although guiding its students by using certain rules is one of the roles of school, imagining students’ rights cannot be considered as guiding, but controlling the students using authorities.

“Try a bite of this dried saury! Green tea flavor has been added.” An old lady arranged a table with a plate full of sliced raw fish in front of her fish restaurant, as if she was serving sample to people in a supermarket. Soon, her loud voice began to draw people’s attention. In Guryongpo, dried fish is now in season. From house to house, dried fish, instead of laundry, were hanging with their mouths tied to strings under the winter sunlight. This unique scenery presented as a part of the whole picture of the winter beach.

On the eastern edge of the boundary of Korea, which forms a shape of a tiger, you will meet Guryongpo. The gulf located between the tiger’s back and tail is called Youngil. It has served as an efficient port throughout the history with the support of natural conditions, leading prosperous fishing industry. The Eastern Sea is also well known for its clean seawater due to frequent tidal current; this serves as an essential reason for its fish being recognized as one of the best.

Guryongpo as a firm base for fishery provides 80 percent of fish including squids, mackerel pikes, and scombroid. Although the ocean is considered as a gift of nature, there is nothing else near the region for its residents to rely on except the sea.            “You need to work in order to feed yourself. We have to go out to the ocean despite nausea and fatigue.” said Keun-yi Kim, a 67-year-old fisherman who has lived in Guryongpo for a half century. Almost everyone living in Guryongpo does work that is closely related to the fishing industry: people actually catch fish, sell fish, or process captured fish.

The car chooses its driver, and the story begins. The movie Transformer illustrates the visit of robots from outer space to our planet, earth. The robots are capable of “transforming” themselves into cars or other machineries. Throughout the plot, they not only transform their outer shape, yet also alter a boy’s life and destiny of humanity. Despite its wonderful imagination, breathtaking action scenes, and entertaining plot, the heaviest theme that the movie handles is the role of government and its current situation in the United States: how it has transformed itself compared to its beginning and how it should transform for the future.

Based on certain scenes, authorities in the movie often appear rather abusive toward citizens, the ordinary people. A police officer who captures the main character, Sam, in the beginning, does not even try to listen to the innocent boy’s explanation of what has actually taken place. The policeman presumes that Sam is on drugs due to his desperate descriptions about his new car transforming into a robot, then forces him to confess so. Policemen are the ones who should pay attention to the voice of citizens, protect them from any danger, and hold their hands when needed. They are the emblem of justice, yet their actions shown in the scene are absolutely unjust and unfair. This scene clearly points out the corruption existing in the present police force. It is true that the number of incidents where police officers misuse their power upon people.

Another negative aspect that the movie revealed about the current foreign policy of US is its warlike characteristic. Without any definite evidence, the Secretary of Defense assumes its opposing country, Russia or North Korea, as the attacker who has destroyed their army base at desert and as the penetrator into US supercomputer. This behavior of the United States expressed in the film directly censures its ongoing war with Iraq. George W. Bush had claimed that his reason of invading and sending young American soldiers to Iraq was to confiscate weapons of mass destruction possessed by Saddam Hussein. However the reality was different. Iraq had no such weapons that would threat the world. Moreover, the setting in desert presented in movie where the battle occurred tries to remind the audience of how their invaluable young generation is being lost.

Despite its corruption, the government in the movie brings itself a huge change when the safety of its citizens is threatened under attacks of the Decepticons. The high officials start to listen to the voice of the young boy. They cooperate with the Autobots admitting their previous mistakes and successfully defeat their common enemy. Through their actions, the movie directly suggests that a hope still exists for American government. The ultimate peace will arise on the surface if only the government plays its true role taking care of each member of their community and merging with other cultures, represented by the Authobots in the movie.

Even though Transformer is supposed to be entertaining, it certainly depicts deeper theme beyond being just a fun movie to watch over the summer. The United States began its history under a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Unfortunately its dignity recently has been transformed; and it needs to be transformed again into a different, hopefully a finer, form.

Macbeth, as a brave general who devoted himself in serving his monarch, wins trust and faith from the king, Duncan. Duncan’s reliance on Macbeth is clearly shown in Act 1, scene 2. Praising Macbeth’s bravery, Duncan calls him as a “worthy gentleman”. The captain’s descriptions of Macbeth in war also reveal the captain’s respect and strong credence towards Macbeth. “Brave Macbeth…deserves that name” says the captain, describing how he has been crushing the rebels with outstanding courage. Both Duncan and the captain share their admiration for Macbeth throughout their conversation.

           Banquo, a good friend of Macbeth, demonstrates his fellowship with “[his] noble partner”. Banquo worries about “[his] partner [going] rapt” with greedy hope of gaining the crown.

           The most frantic follower of Macbeth is definitely the Lady Macbeth. She desires Macbeth to take an action to grab the throne and wants to make herself a queen of the Scotland. Although desires for herself come strong, it is her loyalty towards Macbeth that lies in the basis of such behaviors. When Macbeth feels uncomfortable killing his leader, she encourages her husband by giving a powerful speech: “We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail.”

A dictionary states a term ‘evil’ as wickedness, moral offensiveness, or anything bad. In Christian church, not following God’s words and being heretic is considered evil and bad. Being bad in normal society is little different. Actually, definitions of evil vary in every different community.
As a student, not following school rules are considered bad, but no one in the court find a student guilty and punish him or her just because he or she chewed gum during class period. People call a murder as an act that is morally wrong. Yet, several nations still perform death penalty. Government kills people—conducting a “legally protected” crime, eliminating a human life under a law.
Some group of people view an abortion as a murder. Suppose that you are someone who used to go against the idea of abortion, and your daughter is raped—and I am so sorry to mention this, but I need an extreme example—and to make it worse, she gets pregnant. Would you still disagree with having abortion? Is abortion an evil thing in this case?
Recent news that handled an issue in Islamic culture gave me a huge shock. It was about a case in which a girl was raped by five boys. This situation itself was awful and sad, but what actually disgusted me was the fact that the victim, the poor girl, was killed by her own brother after the happening. In certain nations with strong Islamic conservatism, women’s status is unimaginably low; and when this type of problem occurs, male citizens have no responsibility. Five boys raped a girl. But none of the five boys neither went to jail nor punished. I consider this unfair and evil, but do I have a right to judge them? They say its their culture and tradition.
The definition of evil depends on each situation, point of view, timing, and culture. Nothing can be determined as absolutely wrong, evil, or bad. Then, how can something possibly be evil?