My Favorite Season of the Year

My favorite season of the year is autumn. There are three main reasons why it is my favorite of the four seasons. During this season nature is an absolute wonder to see, Thanksgiving holiday occurs at this time, and the weather is perfect for many outdoor activities. The first reason I enjoy autumn so much, especially down here in the South, is because nature is such an absolute wonder to see during this time of the year. There are many animals that are preparing for the cold winter. A good way for me to get out in the wilderness and watch these spectacular events take place in nature is to go hunting.It really is a great experience for me. While hunting in the woods, I am enjoying listening to the different sounds that the birds are making. Then, out of nowhere, I hear the sound of dead leaves rustling all around me. I look around to see what is making the noise, and then I see them. Two squirrels are digging around for food. Then, all of a sudden they begin running, and they shoot straight up a tree one behind the other. After they get close to the top, they begin jumping from limb to limb and from tree to tree, one still following the other.Then they eventually disappear. I have seen this happen quite often with both chipmunks and squirrels. They like to sneak and hop around on top of the dead leaves, quickly searching and competing to gather the most nuts and acorns for their families for the winter. Something else I get to see in nature while hunting in the woods is the different beautiful colors of the leaves both up in the treetops and down on the floor of the woods. Some of the leaves are variations of red, golden yellow, or maybe even a combination of the two.Another way I like to see the beautiful leaves that autumn has to offer is to just ride around and take in all the wonderful sights. Seeing the different colors of the leaves is my favorite part of nature during autumn. The leaves really are quite a sight to see. The second reason autumn is my fav orite season is because Thanksgiving occurs during this time. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. It is the holiday for giving thanks to all of those in my life whom I love and care for. There are many things I like about the Thanksgiving holiday.One thing I like is the road trip my family and I take every year to visit our families. My family includes me, my dad and stepmom, my two younger brothers who are seventeen and twelve, my little sister who is nine, and my cousin who is fourteen. On the way traveling to Madisonville, Tennessee, we get to see nature at its prettiest. The treetops are absolutely beautiful with their different shades of red and yellow. It takes us about two hours to get to where we are going, so we have to figure out things to do to entertain ourselves while enjoying the beautiful scenery.One way to spend the time is to talk. We all discuss what has been going on in our lives, such as school, work, politics, and many other areas of life. Something else we do along the way is to play different games like I Spy. We see who can spot the most cars of a certain brand or color, or we play trivia games. Another favorite activity we like to do is to sing songs and just have a grand ole time. For me a road trip like this is a great way to spend quality time with the family. The second reason why Thanksgiving is so appealing to me is because of our great family reunion we have every year.It is a very good time for family members who have not seen one another in a year or more to reunite for Thanksgiving. Some family members who usually show up are the following: of course my great aunts and uncles and my cousins and their sides of the family who live there in Tennessee where we have our reunion, my family from Georgia, including my grandfather and my aunt and uncle, and my aunt and uncle and their children who travel all the way from Texas. It is quite a pleasure for me to see everybody talking and laughing and just having a great tim e enjoying one another’s company.Third, and probably my favorite part about Thanksgiving, is the massive amount of deliciously fulfilling food I get to eat on this wonderful holiday. I probably gain around ten to fifteen pounds throughout the Thanksgiving weekend! Let’s start with appetizers. We have nice, juicy, mouth-watering turkey and chicken, homemade mashed potatoes, green beans, corn on the cob, those sweet English peas that just dissolve in my mouth, homemade macaroni and cheese, all different kinds of pastas and veggies, and one of my favorites, the freshly baked, sweet-smelling, buttered rolls. Mmmmm!I am becoming hungry just thinking about them. Then there are the delicious desserts. My favorites are that creamy banana pudding my aunt makes, pineapple upside down cake, and the sweet, moist strawberry shortcake. But do not be mistaken. We have brownies, different kinds of cakes such as red velvet, German chocolate, regular chocolate, and cheesecake. Oh, and w e have many varieties of tasty pie. So those are some good reasons I enjoy Thanksgiving so much, making autumn my favorite season. The third reason autumn is such an awesome season is that it provides excellent weather for several outdoor activities.I really can appreciate the perfect weather fall brings along with it. Taking a weekend hiking and camping trip with my friends or family out in the wilderness of the mountains is always fun. This is especially true when the sun is out, the temperature stays around fifty to sixty degrees, and the winds are calm throughout the day. On this trip I spend with my friends, we fish from the ice cold river or creek to catch lunch and dinner with the warmth of the sun on our backs. Later, during the evening when the temperature drops, we get the fire started and everybody sits around it and sings, talks, tells stories, and just has a grand ole time.Sitting next to the hot fire, I can feel the heat from the flames warming my face, and my nose bec omes filled with the sweet smell of wood burning. There are other things I like to do as well. I like to go cycling or running and feel the nice cool air blow over my skin to cool my body down. These two activities have three advantages to them. It is good exercise, I can do it almost anywhere, and it is a good way to enjoy those cool days fall has to offer. It’s a three for one deal, baby! All of these are enjoyable activities for me to do with my friends or family, but sometimes I like to do them alone.Mainly, these are some activities that bring people closer together and are enjoyable to do during the fall because the weather is perfect. Autumn is neither too hot nor too cold. It is a season that keeps me active. In conclusion, these are three positive traits about the season of autumn I enjoy the most. Nature is an absolute wonder to see during the season of autumn, Thanksgiving occurs, and the weather during this season is perfect for many outdoor activities. All in all , autumn is the best season of the year and my favorite for these three reasons.

My favourite film Essay

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), poet, playwright, novelist, philosopher, composer, painter, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was the towering figure of the Bengali Renaissance. Among his lasting achievements was the founding in 1921 of his â€Å"world university,† Visva-Bharati, at Santiniketan, some 120 miles north of Kolkata. In 1940, the nineteen-year-old Satyajit Ray enrolled there to study arts. Ray’s father, Sukumar—who died when his son was two—had been a close friend of Tagore’s. But by the time Ray arrived at Santiniketan, the Nobel Laureate had only a year to live, and the young student saw little of him, feeling daunted by his venerable status. Nonetheless, Ray always retained a deep regard for Tagore’s work, and when, in 1948, he was planning a career in the cinema, he collaborated with a friend on a screen adaptation of one of Tagore’s novels, Ghare baire (The Home and the World). The project fell through, and some years later, rereading the script, Ray found it â€Å"an amateurish, Hollywoodish effort which would have ruined our reputation and put an end to whatever thoughts I might have had about a film career. see more:essay on favourite movie † (Ray eventually did film the novel, from a totally new script, in 1984. ) In 1961, now internationally established as a director, with The Apu Trilogy, The Music Room (1958), and Devi (1960) to his credit, Ray returned to Tagore, filming three of his stories as Three Daughters (Teen kanya) and a documentary, Rabindranath Tagore, to celebrate the centenary of the great man’s birth. Ray described the latter film, an official tribute to India’s national poet, as â€Å"a backbreaking chore. † But there wasn’t the least sense of a chore about Ray’s next engagement with Tagore’s work. Charulata (1964), often rated the director’s finest film—and the one that, when pressed, he would name as his own personal favorite: â€Å"It’s the one with the fewest flaws†Ã¢â‚¬â€is adapted from Tagore’s 1901 novella Nastanirh (The Broken Nest). It’s widely believed that the story was inspired by Tagore’s relationship with his sister-in-law, Kadambari Devi, who committed suicide in 1884 for reasons that have never been fully explained. Kadambari, like Charulata, was beautiful, intelligent, and a gifted writer, and toward the end of his life, Tagore admitted that the hundreds of haunting portraits of women that he painted in his later years were inspired by memories of her. Right from the outset of his career, with Pather panchali (1955), Ray had shown himself to be exceptionally skilled at conveying a whole world within a microcosm, focusing in on a small social group while still relating it to the wider picture. Virtually all of his finest films—The Apu Trilogy, The Music Room, Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), Distant Thunder (1973), The Middleman (1975)—achieve this double perspective. But of all his chamber dramas, Charulata is perhaps the subtlest and most delicate. The setting, as with so many of Ray’s movies, is his native Kolkata. It’s around 1880, and the intellectual ferment of the Bengali Renaissance is at its height. Among the educated middle classes, there’s talk of self-determination for India within the British Empire—perhaps even complete independence. Such ideas are often aired in the Sentinel, the liberal English-language weekly of which Bhupatinath Dutta (Shailen Mukherjee) is the owner and editor. A kindly man, but distracted by his all-absorbing political interests, he largely leaves his wife, the graceful and intelligent Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee), to her own resources. The visual elegance and fluidity that Ray achieves in Charulata are immediately evident in the long, all-but-wordless sequence that follows the credits and shows us Charu, trapped in the stuffy, brocaded cage of her house, trying to amuse herself. (At this period, no respectable middle-class Bengali wife could venture out into the city alone. ) Having called to the servant to take Bhupati his tea, she leafs through a book lying on the bed, discards it, selects another from the bookshelf—then, hearing noises outside in the street, finds her opera glasses and flits birdlike from window to window, watching the passersby. A street musician with his monkey, a chanting group of porters trotting with a palanquin, a portly Brahman with his black umbrella, signifier of his dignified status—all these come under her scrutiny. When Bhupati wanders past, barely a couple of feet away but too engrossed in a book to notice her, she turns her glasses on him as well—just another strange specimen from the intriguing, unattainable outside world. Throughout this sequence, Ray’s camera unobtrusively follows Charu as she roams restlessly around the house, framing and reframing her in a series of spaces—doorways, corridors, pillared galleries—that emphasize both the Victorian-Bengali luxury of her surroundings and her confinement within them. Though subjective shots are largely reserved for Charu’s glimpses of street life, the tracking shots that mirror her progress along the gallery, or move in behind her shoulder as she glides from window to window, likewise give us the sense of sharing her comfortable but trammeled life. The only deviation from this pattern comes after she’s retrieved the opera glasses. A fast lateral track keeps the glasses in close-up as she holds them by her side and hurries back to the windows, the camera sharing her impulsive eagerness. Under the credits, we’ve seen Charu embroidering a wreathed B on a handkerchief as a gift for her husband. When she presents it to him, Bhupati is delighted but asks, â€Å"When do you find the time, Charu? † Evidently, it’s never occurred to him that she might feel herself at a loose end. But now, becoming vaguely aware of Charu’s discontent and fearing she may be lonely, he invites her ne’er-do-well brother Umapada and his wife, Mandakini, to stay, offering Umapada employment as manager of the Sentinel’s finances. Manda, a featherheaded chatterbox, proves poor company for her sister-in-law. Then Bhupati’s young cousin Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) unexpectedly arrives for a visit. Lively, enthusiastic, cultured, an aspiring writer, he establishes an immediate rapport with Charu that on both sides drifts insensibly toward love. â€Å"Calm Without, Fire Within,† the title of Ray’s essay on the Japanese cinema, could apply equally well to Charulata (as the Bengali critic Chidananda Das Gupta has noted). The emotional turbulence that underlies the film is conveyed in hints and sidelong gestures, in a fleeting glance or a snatch of song, often betraying feelings only half recognized by the person experiencing them. In a key scene set in the sunlit garden (with more than a nod to Fragonard), Amal lies on his back on a mat, seeking inspiration, while Charu swings herself high above him, reveling in the ecstasy of her newfound intellectual and erotic stimulation. Ray, as the critic Robin Wood observed, â€Å"is one of the cinema’s great masters of interrelatedness. † This garden scene, which runs some ten minutes, finds Ray at his most intimately lyrical. It’s the first time the action has escaped from the house, and the sense of freedom and release is infectious. From internal evidence, it’s clear that the scene involves more than one occasion (Charu promises Amal a personally designed notebook for his writings, she presents it to him, he declares that he’s filled it), but it’s cut together to give the impression of a single, continuous event, a seamless emotional crescendo. Two moments in particular attain a level of rapt intensity rarely equaled in Ray’s work, both underscored by music. The first is when Charu, having just exhorted Amal to write, swings back and forth, singing softly; Ray’s camera swings with her, holding her face in close-up, for nearly a minute. Then, when Amal finds inspiration, we get a montage of the Bengali writing filling his notebook, line superimposed upon line in a series of cross-fades, while sitar and shehnai gently hail his creativity. In an article in Sight & Sound in 1982, Ray suggested that, to Western audiences, Charulata, with its triangle plot and Europeanized, Victorian ambience, might seem familiar territory, but that â€Å"beneath the veneer of familiarity, the film is chockablock with details to which [the Western viewer] has no access. Snatches of song, literary allusions, domestic details, an entire scene where Charu and her beloved Amal talk in alliterations . . . all give the film a density missed by the Western viewer in his preoccupation with plot, character, the moral and philosophical aspects of the story, and the apparent meaning of the images. † Among the details that might elude the average Western viewer are the recurrent allusions to the nineteenth-century novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–94). A key figure of Bengali literature in the generation before Tagore, Bankim Chandra (sometimes referred to as â€Å"the Scott of Bengal†) wrote a series of romantic, nationalistic novels and actively fostered the young Tagore’s career. In the opening sequence, it’s one of Bankim Chandra’s novels that Charu takes down from the bookshelf, while singing his name to herself; and when, not long afterward, Amal makes his dramatic first entry, arriving damp-haired and windblown on the wings of a summer storm, he’s declaiming a well-known line of the writer’s. The coincidence points up the affinity between them; by contrast, when Bhupati recalls incredulously that a friend couldn’t sleep for three nights after reading a Bankim Chandra novel (â€Å"I told him, ‘You must be crazy! ’†), it emphasizes the empathetic gulf between him and his wife. Music, too, is used to express underlying sympathies: Both Charu and Amal are given to breaking spontaneously into song, and two of Tagore’s compositions act as leitmotifs. We hear the tune of one of them, â€Å"Mama cite† (â€Å"Who dances in my heart? †), played over the opening images, and Amal sings another, â€Å"Phule phule† (â€Å"Every bud and every blossom sways and nods in the gentle breeze†), that Charu later takes up in the garden scene as they grow ever closer emotionally. (Manda, who has observed the pair together in the garden, afterward slyly sings a line of this song to Amal. ) Ray weaves variations on both songs into his score. Another that Amal sings for Charu was composed by Tagore’s older brother Jyotirindranath, the husband of Kadambari Devi. The film’s underlying theme of pent-up emotions trembling on the verge of expression is counterpointed both on a political level—Bhupati and his friends see in the Liberal victory at Westminster in April 1880 the chance of greater self-determination for India—and in the situation of Charulata herself, a gifted, sensitive woman yearning toward emancipation but slipping unconsciously toward a betrayal of her husband. To Western eyes, all three members of the triangle might seem willfully obtuse or impossibly naive. This again would be a misapprehension born of unfamiliarity with Bengali society, where, as Ray pointed out, a husband’s younger brother—in this case, a close cousin, which is much the same in Bengali custom and terms—is traditionally entitled to a privileged relationship with his sister-in-law. This relationship, playfully flirtatious, â€Å"sweet but chaste,† between a wife and her debar, is accepted and even encouraged. Charu and Amal simply stray, half unknowingly, across an ill-defined social border. Ray was always known as a skilled and sympathetic director of actors. Saeed Jaffrey, who starred in The Chess Players (1977), bracketed him and John Huston as â€Å"gardener directors, who have selected the flowers, know exactly how much light and sun and water the flowers need, and then let them grow. † Soumitra Chatterjee, who made his screen debut when Ray cast him in the title role of the third film of The Apu Trilogy, The World of Apu (1959), gives perhaps the finest of his fifteen performances in Ray’s films as Amal—young, impulsive, a touch ridiculous in his irrepressible showing off, bursting with the joy of exploring life in its fullness after his release from the drab confines of a student hostel. He’s superbly matched by the graceful Madhabi Mukherjee as Charu, her expressive features alive with the ever-changing play of unaccustomed emotions that she scarcely knows how to identify, let alone deal with. She had starred in Ray’s previous film, The Big City (1963); he described her as â€Å"a wonderfully sensitive actress who made my work very easy for me. † The other three main actors had also appeared in The Big City, though in minor roles. Shailen Mukherjee, playing Bhupati, was principally a stage actor; this was his first major screen role. Despite his professed inexperience (Ray recalled him saying, â€Å"Manikda [Ray’s nickname], I know nothing about film acting. I’ll be your pupil, you teach me†), he succeeds in making Bhupati a thoroughly likable if remote figure, well-intentioned but far too idealistic and trusting for his own good. Gitali Roy’s occasional veiled glances hint that Mandakini isn’t, perhaps, quite as empty-headed as Charu supposes; she certainly isn’t above flirting with Amal on her own account. As her husband, Umapada, Shyamal Ghosal expresses with his whole body language his envy and resentment of Bhupati—signals that his brother-in-law of course completely fails to pick up on. Ray rarely used locations for interiors, preferring whenever possible to create them in the studio, though so subtly are the sets constructed and lit that we’re rarely aware of the artifice. Charulata includes few exterior scenes; almost all the action takes place in the lavishly furnished setting of Bhupati’s house. As always, Ray worked closely with his regular art director, Bansi Chandragupta, providing him with an exact layout of the rooms and detailed sketches of the main setups, and accompanying him on trips to the bazaars to find suitable furniture, decorations, and props. The result feels convincingly authentic, evoking a strong sense of period and of a class that ordered their lives, as critic Penelope Houston has put it, by â€Å"a conscious compromise between Eastern grace and Western decorum. † Though he readily acknowledged the contributions of his collaborators, Ray came as close as any director within mainstream cinema to being a complete auteur. Besides scripting, storyboarding, casting, and directing his films, he composed the scores (from Three Daughters on) and even designed the credit titles and publicity posters. Starting with Charulata, he took control of yet another filmmaking function by operating his own camera. â€Å"I realized,† he explained, â€Å"that working with new actors, they are more confident if they don’t see me; they are less tense. I remain behind the camera. And I see better and get the exact frame. † Charulata was the best received of all Ray’s films to date, both in Bengal and abroad. In Bengal, it was generally agreed that he had done full justice to the revered Tagore—even if some people still harbored reservations about the implicitly adulterous subject matter. After seeing the film at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Silver Bear for best director, Richard Roud noted that it was â€Å"distinguished by a degree of technical invention that one hasn’t encountered before in Ray’s films,† but that â€Å"all the same, it is not for his technique that one admires Ray so much: no enumeration of gems of mise-en-scene would convey the richness of characterization and that breathless grace and radiance he manages to draw from his actors. † From its lyrical high point in the garden scene, the mood of Charulata gradually if imperceptibly darkens, moving toward emotional conflict and, eventually, desolation—a process reflected in the restriction of camera movement and in the lighting, which grows more shadowy and somber as Bhupati sees his trust betrayed and Charu realizes what she’s lost. Inspired, as he readily admitted, by the final shot of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Ray ends the film on a freeze-frame—or rather, a series of freeze-frames. Two hands, Charu’s and Bhupati’s, reaching tentatively out to each other, close but not yet joined. Ray’s tanpura score rises in a plangent crescendo. On the screen appears the title of Tagore’s story: â€Å"The Broken Nest. † Irretrievably broken? Ray, subtle and unprescriptive as ever, leaves that for us to decide.

Abnormal Psychology: Abnormality

1) Abnormality is defined from an average where common behaviour is defined as â€Å"normal† and rare behaviour is defined as abnormal. These characteristics can be shown and placed on a scale â€Å"graph† that would reveal how common their score is in comparison to everyone else. There are problems deciding how rare behaviour has to be to be considered abnormal, phobias could be defined as normal as they affect a lot of the population. Different cultures have different definitions of being abnormal. Something that is rare to use might be defined as normal to a different culture. Statistical infrequency is a way to define events that are more or less common, this frequency is represented with a curve the most common events are the high part of this curve and the less common are the lowest part of the curve. The most infrequent occurrences are considered abnormal and statistically infrequent; these are events that occur rarely. In some situations statistical infrequency is used to define mental retardation, but statistical infrequency doesn’t focus on the bad points only, abnormal behaviour isn’t always undesirable e. . being better at sports, genius’s. Using statistical infrequency means we are unable to distinguish the good and bad abnormalities. 2) The diagnostic term for the patient is schizophrenia the doctor will evaluate the patient and ask about symptoms, medical history, and see if theres anything physically wrong with the patient. There are no tests to identify mental illnesses, the doctor would send the patient for tests to rule out any other illnesses first. If theres nothing physically wrong and the symptoms persist the doctor may refer the patient to a psychiatrist these people are trained for treating mental illnesses. These trained people use a specially designed interview to evaluate the person, they also see how the person is within themselves and socially, and watch the persons attitude and behaviour, the doctor would ask if they have Hallucinations,Delusions If extremely bizarre, they would see if their speech is Disorganised They can usually diagnose a mental disorder based on these factors. Doctors may misdiagnose patients suffering with schizophrenia symptoms, the patient may be embarrassed about being diagnosed with this condition so may not tell the doctor about hallucinations or any other disturbing behaviour, its difficult to diagnose schizophrenia with it being a mental disorder an may be diagnosed as another mental condition. 3) Discuss evidence that schizophrenia has a biological cause. Twin studies show that they have a higher concordance rates than dizypotic twins. The closer the relative the higher the concordance . Biological causes schizophrenia Our genes are involved with the inheritance or development of schizophrenia, multiple chromosomes are transmitted to people in generations and are later diagnosed with schizophria, there is a 70% chance of inheriting schizophrenia. Evidence shows that identical twins do not develop schizophrenia, i resent study shows that 28% of twins have a chance of developing schizophrenia if the other twin already has it. Stress can cause episopes of schizophrenia, there are also other factors like poverty, poor diet, ill health, drug use. Researchers have found that people suffering from schizophrenia tend to have been born in winter. There are no definite causes of schizophrenia. Chemotherapy is used to treat chemical imbalance’s in the brain, its changes the way the brain and body works. 4) Discuss the role of the family in the causation of schizophrenia. The double bind theory states that schizophrenia is a abnormal patter n in family communication, a person is given mutually contradictory signals by another person, this places the person in an arkward situation causing conflict. Liem et al compared communication patterns within the family with an without a schizophrenia, there was evidence that families process a role in relapse of schizophrenia patients following stabilisation. Familys hign in critgicism, hostility lead to more relapse, the double bind theory is a distressing communication within the family, the use of confusion makes it difficult to respond or to resist conflict. 5) Evaluate the effectiveness of cognitive therapy for schizophrenia, and discuss problems in assessing its effectiveness. This treatment is increasingly popular this has good success rates for epression, OCD, eating disorders and anxiety, its less effective with schizophrenia and dipolar depression. It works by the way we think at attitudes that influence our behaviour, irrational thinking is seen to be the cause of the mental disorders; it also works by changing the way the client thinks. This therapy has fewer side effects than any other treatments, this is a long term strategy but could make the patient worse if it doesn’t work and it’s not a quick recovery process. People could give up on this treatment feeling it’s not working because it takes a long time.

Has technology made us lazier Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Has technology made us lazier - Essay Example New age technology which we apprehend in the twenty-first century, has completely changed the way we perceive life. Not only is life much simpler in certain aspects, but life now has a marked demeanour which was completely unconceivable even a 100 years back. One very important and very perceivable wonder that technology has achieved in recent times is the envisaging of globalisation, where the world has visibly shrunk, in terms other than referring to the earth’s size. Today technology, in a literal sense, has managed to place the entire world within the palms of a human hand. This is however just the glorious part in the chapter on technology, and a closer look will reveal that the entire story is not so rosy, after all. There is also a darker vista that remains hidden behind all the pomp and glory that is typically portrayed, a dark facet that shows a technology dependent human mind becoming useless. Too much reliance on technology also tends to make man lazier, thus he becomes physically incompetent too, and which is now quite prominent in the rising cases of child and adult obesity problems, that we see all around us. So we stand at a crossroad, where we will have to decide and the take the reins of our future into our own hands. We will have to take decision as to whether technology should be allowed to take over our lives, completely. This article will examine both the positive and negative effects of technology on our lives, and will discuss what our future will looks like if indeed we allow technology to become our master. It will explore the possibilities as to whether technology is actually making us suffer from obesity, both mentally and physically. A brief history of technology: â€Å"From the beginnings of human society on earth, human beings have struggled to survive and flourish, and they have used technology as an aid in the struggle† (Ferkiss, 1993, 1). The first man made technological