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 |  For the Rising Stars Program |
Welcome to the Rising Stars Blog! This blog will be different than my other blog "Soul's Windows"  in that it's dedicated to a singular topic: My Rising Stars Pursuits :) |
| Samuel Clemens was born November 30th, 1835, in Missouri. Mark Twain died on April 21st, 1910, in Connecticut. But in between was a life lived that no one could have prepared for, one that gave us the classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Roughing It. Twain was born 6th in line to a couple named John and Jane Clemens, 2 moths early. He was in poor health up until age 10, when he became healthy again. His large imagination served him well in boyhood, as did his Tom Sawyer-like tendencies to test his mother’s patience. He and his friends would often play games, like pretending to be Robin Hood, or a gang of pirates. Although it seemed like his childhood must have been great, it was, at times, anything but. His sister died before he was 4, then his brother 3 years later. The measles swept through, and then cholera. His father died from pneumonia, making the family’s financial situation all the more precarious. In 1844, he discovered the dead body of a man in his late father’s study, left there by the murderer, and a year later saw a man get shot to death in the street. The incident was the inspiration for the Boggs shooting from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His friend drowned in 1848, and then found the dead and mutilated body of a slave a couple of days later. Needless to say, his childhood was cut short by the violence around him. He worked several jobs from the time he was about 13, although he was allowed to stay in school and get an education. In 1850, Orion Clemens returned home and started up a newspaper. Samuel and hs brother worked for Orion, and occasionally he would put short stories into the newspaper. It wes then that he started using synonyms, such as “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins” and “Josh”. He officially started using Mark Twain before the age of 17. He left his home and worked for a number of years doing different things, but it was not until his 37th year that he discovered that he was a “literary person” in his own terms. Twain worked for many years until he found his style: Humor. His first published book was called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and didn’t sell particularly well, and following the lack of sucess, he moved to New York City. His next book, “The Innocents Abroad” was a major success. He met a girl named Olivia while he was on the boat on which he wrote “The Innocents Abroad”, and he fell in love with her, and they married in 1870. His first son, Langdon, died at 2, but eventually, his daughter was born. He had another daughter, Clara, and moved to a farm. He lived out the rest of his life a well known author, and he was happy. In present day, he’s a household name. People still read Tom Sawyer, and several of his books never went out of publication. Mark Twain’s story is a story of endurance through hardship, ad triumph over tragedy. |
| In today's society, everything is digital. It's out there, and sometimes, there's no telling what's real and what's fake. This presents a new slew of problems for upcoming generations, particularly on body image. Photoshop is a pandemic run rampant. Body image issues are on the rise, not only in girls and women but in boys and men too. In order to solve this problem, magazines should start putting labels on their covers or inside covers, warning the readers of unrealistic ideals. According to HerCampus.com, In a survey done of over 2000 women, 15% could not tell what images were photoshopped, almost 50% said they struggled with body confidence, 24% said they only felt confident when not in public spaces, and 33% of the surveyed said they were trying to achieve a body type that was impossible. This response of disheartening truths of women today is caused by the over prevalent flow of photoshopped images. These women who try and achieve the impossible are related to the ever-rising plastic surgery statistics in the US. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons Statistic Report from 2016 shows that the number of plastic surgeries has risen 4% in the last year and a 37% increase since the year 2000. All of the media that surround us from a young age through adulthood greatly affect our self-confidence and can leave lasting impressions on our own identities indefinitely." What this is trying to say is that half of women and girls aren't self-confident and dissatisfied with how they look. But the statistic we want to address is this "15% could not tell what images were photoshopped." This may not seem to be much, but suppose there are 4 billion women in the entire world. Now, this isn't an unrealistic number, as there is 7-8 billion people on the planet at any given time, and the ratios tend to run pretty evenly. 15% of 4 billion is roughly six hundred million. That's more than the population of the United States, Britain, Italy, and Canada combined. Seems like a bit more now, doesn't it? But say we scale it back to the women in the US. There were 166.7 million women in the USA in 2019. 15% of that is 25,005,000. Twenty-five Million. How many women in your life don't know that the models that they're looking at, wishing they could be like, even starving themselves for are a reality that doesn't exist? Your mother? Sister? Friends? And women and teens aren't the only group that this affects. In recent years, studies have started to focus on how men are affected by media advertisements. Several of these studies have found that men of all ages become more self-conscious and even develop eating disorders as a direct effect of media advertisement. Sixteen percent of high school boys have an eating disorder and many report that they are more afraid of gaining weight than getting cancer or other terminal illness. While females are the most directly and heavily affected, men are affected as well, and the point still stands with both genders. |
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