I am currently enjoying the extremely dirty thoughts and words of Nick Twisp, the narrator of Youth In Revolt by C.D.Payne. Nick Twisp is a 14 year old boy, living in California, trying to loose his virginity and impress his girl. To impress, he must act as devilishly rebellious as possible. He burns cars and scares his parents, he lies uncontrollably and scares his friend's parents, he runs away and occasionally does drugs. While reading this story, I started questioning what is rebellion and is rebelling the only way to truly live?
According to Google, rebellion is "refusal to accept some authority or code or convention". According to the Canadian band, Arcade Fire's song Rebellion(Lies) being rebellious is doing things that aren't good, then lying and keeping it from others. According to BBC, rebellion is " often symbolic. They want to look grown up and impress their friends." To further explain, BBC explains taking risks: " teenagers have well-developed emotions and feelings but have still not acquired the ability to think things through."
If you never act out, and never do anything against the rules for all of your life, are you wasting your life?
I believe that wasting your life, has nothing to do with your level of rebelliousness, but your level of happiness.
Are you happy doing what you are doing?
This reminds me a lot about social/peer pressure. Maybe the people around us or what the big things is, is driving us to do things that we never really would do.
ReplyDeleteYou have a great thought provoking blog, and it really makes us think of why we do the things we do. Does experimenting help us live life to the fullest or should we just play it safe?
Abosotivly posilutly nice work!!!!
Great post! Its odd, I guess, how in order to get someone to like you, you have to be bad. It's weird, right? In my opinion, the BBC definition of rebellion is offensive and "age-ist." It supposedly depends on how "mature" you are and how you decide to do things. Being "young", I disagree with this silly issue of being "mature", but I am sure many people disagree with me. great post!
ReplyDeletebrilliant work at unpacking.. well everything :) research and bringing in other sources really makes the post shine (for lack of a better non-clichéd word) The piece was very meaningfull and thought provoking towards the end (as always)I definitely agree with ben, rebellion doesn't always have to do with age although teenagers are stereotypically rebellious idiots who try to impress each other with stupid tricks (see the chainsaw decapitation triple dare story in indiana)but anyway there will always be people young and old who are insecure or sad about their lives and do drastic unnecessary things to try and improve it. my only criticism is try to add more of you thoughts towards the end and unpack what you thought about all of this otherwise stupendous work i am very proud of my little isabelle wow thats a lot see i can type ridiculously long comments as well! yay oh, take care now
ReplyDeleteHaha thank you all!
ReplyDeleteMolly, that's exactly what I was going for!
I agree with ben and pia, not being mature doesn't always mean you are underage...
and next time I plan to add more thoughts, but the thing about this post was that I kind of wanted to keep it annonomys, this way you could see different opions, not just the normal one!
Thanks again
isabelle
this is greatness on a roll, fizzy urnbandezz. i personally feel like people are overusing the tern "rebel" to describe things that really aren't rebellious, like purple tights. i am so glad you could really let your readers know what it truly means to rebel, and all the while connect it to the book you are reading. nice description, too. good work!
ReplyDeletewell thank you annie!
ReplyDeletelol i hear people say stuff like that all the time! "those purple tights are so rebellious"
Hi! I used this as a mentor: http://benselablog.blogspot.com/2011/02/my-blog-mentors.html
ReplyDelete