Could you be loved?

I guess I'm still to young to really understand what the word "love" means. Or perhaps I'm trying to understand what it means, but it really doesn't mean anything beyond just the word that it is. Maybe its a word like death where you hear it and you have a good visualization of what it is but never really experience it, because I mean you can't experience death, you just die. But I wonder what it is that makes people love each other, like what goes through one persons mind. Is it really because they love that person? Or is it because both people are at a point in their lives where they just want to settle down and they are just very compatible with each other? I've had two longer relationships for my age, one for 9 months and another that is currently at 17 months. I have told both of these girls that I love them, but I know I couldn't marry either because I just would not be able to put up with them all the time. But, maybe its just because I'm not ready for that stage in my life yet. At some points I guess I do feel like I am just playing the role of being in love and I would designate those moments of when I don't really want to be with my girlfriend but I know I don't want to lose her. For example, when shes angry at me or whatever I pretend to be compassionate and promise to make things better, but sometimes she is angry at me for things that I feel are ridiculous. Or she'll demand that I change or we won't work out. Of course I say I will, but maybe I don't want to at all I am just pretending I am going to. There are other times though where I feel like when I'm with a certain someone I don't need anyone else in the world. But then there are the other times that I am more so role playing a perfect boyfriend just so I can have those previously mentioned moments again, or so that I have someone to hang out with when there is nothing else to do. There are also other things involved in role playing a boyfriend, for example, overreacting and being overprotective at times. Like, sometimes I have to make a huge scene when she does something I don't totally agree with just so she gets the point that I don't like it. In reality sometimes I could really careless, but I do it anyway to get my point across. Or if some guy I don't like talks to her or something, of course I have to be intimidating toward him just so reassure that nobody is trying to step in. I guess that kind of sounds like an animal that protects their territory. Anyway, from my experiences I think love is a lot of role playing and I'm not sure if "love" is something that really exists and can be felt or if it is just an idea and ideal that people aim for. It could be easily confused with settling down and being comfortable and I guess in a pair it makes life a lot easier to manage and to achieve goals perhaps. It's probably just finding someone that just continues to intrigue you and make you happy and is compatible at the same time, I wouldn't really know though.

Don Quijote played by Alonso Quijano

I have chosen to write about the topic regarding whether Don Quijote is mad or just an act. For a while now I have had the view point that Don Quijote is just a character being played by Alonso Quijano, which was prevalent in my second paper. Today's reading gave me a huge insight and argument for why Don Quijote is a character played by a man. So I will be arguing on the side that Don Quijote argument with the puppet show incident and Don Quijote reimbursing Maestro Pedro for breaking his puppets. If Don Quijote were truly mad he would have never paid the puppet master for what he had done. To me this definitely shows that there is a man playing a character. I can come up with many arguments for why he is merely a character, but I will have to think more so into why he may be mad. Perhaps I could state specific events and argue the mad side and the character side. I mean I can see how some people see him as mad, even though I personally see it as acting. So I figure either I debate both sides over particular events or I try to demonstrate moments where he seems more so crazy than acting and vice-versa. I don't know exactly what I'll do, but I do know for sure that I'm a believer that Don Quijote is played by Alonso Quijano and not a complete madman.

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Hallucinations

I think that the entire sequence when Don Quijote was lowered into the cave was all a figment of his imagination. I mean, its possible that he could be insane and hallucinating and saw all of that in a hallucination, but that doesnt really correspond to how I view the story. From the way I see it, Quijano is playing the character of Don Quijote, the chivalrous knight. As his journeys progress he is becoming more imaginative and better at the role he is playing. I think that he is just making up the entire story up as he goes. He has a large wealth of knowledge of how typical chivalrous stories go and then uses his own imagination to create the story. It is easy to argue whether Don Quijote is mad since he talks about things like this that are obviously not real to a common person. But, I think it is also easy to argue that he is just running with the role he is playing, he knows how to be a knight-errant in fiction. One thing that I picked up from the latest reading that I found interesting was the encounter with the cousin on the way to the cave. The cousin began to talk about how he writes about different sides of modern topics and modern books almost like a parody of those books, so it seemed to me. I found it interesting because Cervantes himself is writing a parody of chivalry books.

Lady Dulcinea

Since Don Quijote is role playing a knight-errant, his love for Dulcinea is part of the role play. He created her as part of his role play. Since Don Quijote takes interest to stories about love and ladies, he himself needs a love. His character focuses upon serving Lady Dulcinea and she is the reason for his knightly duties. In some of the chivalrous novels he had read the knights had their princesses that the knights honored and wed. In order to be the ideal knight that he dreams of he needs a princess. When it comes down to all the actions that he does he relates to Dulcinea. She is what makes his knight-errant character make sense and worthy. He could have used other ideals or objects for his reasoning. Such as the love for God and Christianity. He also could use his service to a particular monarch. Instead of telling defeated enemies to go pledge their allegiance to Dulcinea del Toboso he could have told them to go pledge the allegiance to the Church or to King so and so. But being a knight, Don Quijote must have a purpose for his doings. Perhaps he chooses to focus on love as opposed to the Church or Monarchy because it is more appealing to him in his readings. So when the character of Don Quijote was being created, it was based upon what the man behind the character has found most appealing in his readings of chivalrous knights.

Apocryphal

While flipping through Don Quijote today in class during discussion, I noticed something at the beginning of chapter five of part two. In the pre-text heading it uses the word apocryphal (I had to use the dictionary) when describing the chapter, because of the way Sancho speaks. Yesterday when doing research on Amadis de Gaul, I noticed the same thing was mentioned about the sixth book of the story, which was the first by an author other than Rodriguez. When I saw it in the novel today my mind was like "a-ha!" Because since much of my research has taught me that Don Quijote is a parody of many chivalry novels. Earlier in the novel there was another reference to Amadis when the priest and someone else that I'm forgetting were burning Don Quijote's novels. So I thought it was cool to have the word "apocryphal" appear to describe the chapter as a way to parody Amadis. It has also been interesting to see how Sancho Panza has changed from part one to part two. In part one Sancho had small dialogues and for the most part he was portrayed as not being very smart. However, right from the beginning of part two Sancho comes off as being much more smart, deep and goal-oriented than originally portrayed. Now he has extensive dialogues and the readers see more into his thoughts. In the first part he was more focused on gaining an island and questioning some of the crazy actions of his master, but yet eating up all of Don Quijote's reasoning.

Knight of the Dark Face

I don't know if later in the novel Don Quijote encounters a "dark knight" figure but I think it would be cool. Today in class we assumed our roles for Friday's exercise and I decided to be the antagonist of Don Quijote, my character will wrong the rights instead of righting the wrongs. Really for my role to effective I will need the person that portray Don Quijote to be present in much of the dialogue because I will essentially base my character on doing the opposite of Don Quijote. I'm thinking that maybe since Don Quijote is known as the "Knight of the Sad Face" then perhaps my character could be the "Knight of the Happy Face." Actually scratch that my character will be known as the "Knight of the Dark Face." And in reality he would have an all black armor suit including a black steel sword. As the dialogue continues I would just like to do the opposite of whatever Don Quijote does, but behave in an equally mad way. For example, if Don Quijote were to save a beautiful damsel from being robbed by a group of criminals, I would save the group of mistakenly convicted from the heathen devil woman. Also it would be neat to create a battle between Don Quijote and his dark nemesis and have them end in a tie. Of course since they are equal matches they find out that they are long lost brothers. The "Knight of the Dark Face" is also named Francisco Quijote de la hampa de La Mancha. I mean I guess that I have a plan going into the role play, but we'll see how it goes because after all there are plenty of other people playing characters within the story.

SmartCars and Bombs

To go along with some of the things discussed in class, I also feel it is ridiculous that all Americans do not have health insurance. I feel that is a governments responsibility to maintain the health of their nation. I would have no problem with a few more of my tax dollars going into my personal health insurance provided by the government. Perhaps some of the money that is pumped into the military could be rooted towards national health insurance. The US leaders are just more concerned with leaving up to the ego of being the most dominate nation in the world in terms of brute force. We've always figured that if we can blow 'em up then we have the upper hand. Perhaps this is why nations like Spain have developed much faster in the social sphere and why we have the most technologically advanced military in the world. When we started talking about how European countries develop faster than America I immediately thought about how for over five years SmartCars have been all over the European streets because of their efficiency. Just now plans have been made to have the cars sold in America next year. Another thought that came across my mind during class is how a nation like Spain funds education in relation to America and how the education systems compare as far as percent of people with college degrees and so on. Perhaps education or the way that they are educated makes a difference in how one society develops both technologically and socially faster. But if any nation with more ATMs or legal gay marriage tries to mess with us we'll blow them into smithereens, because we're the United States of America and we like blowing things up and being the protectors of the world. And if any other nation tries to gain power through weaponry or tries to challenge our power then we'll blow up everything and sacrifice thousands of our soldiers to show how "badass" we are.