Titus is a jerk. Violet wants to go on a weekend trip with Titus to the mountains. Titus has been ignoring and deleting her messages. She finally just shows up at his house and tells him that she wants to go to the mountains. He is kind of rude and being really short. He doesn’t want to go with her. He decides to go anyway, they get a room together and get pizza when they get back to the room, Violet decides she wants to go ‘all the way’ with Titus. Titus isn’t feeling it and he tries to go along with it for a second and then Violet asks what’s wrong, she can tell he’s not into it. Finally after a little bit of prying he says “ I keep picturing you dead already. It feels…” he stops himself for a minute and then says “It feels like being felt up by a zombie, okay? That’s what is feels like.” After he hurts her feelings they leave and barely talk on the way back home. On the way home she is still making effort. She messages him and she still wants him. All you can feel is bad for violet this entire time; all she wants to do is experience as much life as she can before she dies, and he continues to treat her like she’s nothing. 

After time passes, they don’t talk at all. Titus starts dating Quendy. Titus goes about his life. His dad comes home from a business trip and they are watching memories from it. While watching them he gets a message saying time is up and it’s from Violets father. He goes to Violets house and goes to her room, he sees her pretty much lifeless. She can’t move and she can’t even really blink. The father is upset, and maybe not directly at Titus but he takes his anger and hurt feelings out on Titus and they yell at each other for a second, until Titus runs out and leaves.  Which I think he deserves anyway because I don’t like him.

He comes back to see Violet, he doesn’t know is she can hear him or understand him, but he starts to tell her about what’s going on in the world, things he has no interest about but tells her, because he knows that’s the kind of stuff she likes knowing about. What’s frustrating is when she’s dying and he’s upset, he gets an ad saying “ feeling blue…”. It shows that the ads never stop. Big companies don’t care about the well being of the people. They one care about selling.

After reading the second installment of Feed, I have to say I got a little more into it. Violet’s body is shutting down because her Feed isn’t working. She can no longer move her body at times, and for hours at a time. The worse it gets the more Titus seems to want nothing to do with her. She keeps sending him memories, and messages, but he continues to delete all of them. He avoids her. She sends him a list of things she wants to do before she dies, a bucket list of sorts. He doesn’t even listen to it really; he does in parts, but skips over some parts. I think he’s a jerk and I feel for violet because she is dying and the one person she wants to spend time with is ignoring her and doesn’t want her. I could see from his point of view that it makes him uncomfortable to know she’s dying but to ignore her and be mean to her I don’t know, I have mixed feelings.

I like when Violet and Titus go to the party and when they are playing spin the bottle Marty lands on Violet, and she loses it. She goes off on everyone and calls Quendy a monster. She basically calls everyone at the party a slave to the feed, which I suppose is true but the party goers still don’t see it.

Violet and her father call Feed Support and to get a free repair or funding from donors for a repair, they say they will get back to her later. When they finally do, the Feed Support says her warranty is up and that because of the time at the mall when her and Titus ask about random things at the mall and never bought anything. It made her shopping interests random and unpredictable, so the donors decided she wasn’t worth fixing because she wasn’t a regular and predicable consumer. Which is scary, because she didn’t benefit big business by being a consumer she was left to die. You have to feel bad for Violet. She continues to get bad luck and it keeps coming.  

After finishing the first part of “Feed” by M.T. Anderson it actually made me mildly uncomfortable. We are reading the book from the character, Titus’ prospective. Which is almost hard to read because he says the word “like” a lot and it seems as though he never learned about proper grammar. 70% of the human population in the book has something that’s called a “feed”. The feed is basically a smartphone, but it’s in their brain, it’s apart of their physical person. The book begins with Titus and his friends on the Moon, while they are the moon he meets this girl, Violet. Titus begins to talk to her and has some sort of interest in her, after talking to her for a bit they all decide to go out together. While they’re out a man hacks into their feeds and they end up in the hospital. While they are in the hospital their feeds get turned off and they are forced to go without it for a little while. When it’s turned back on they go about their lives and go back to earth. Which has been the basic premise of the book so far, but the book actually gets really deep.

So starting off with the Feed itself. The Feed controls everything pretty much. Anyone one with a feed can send messages, similar to text messages, has internet, its takes them only a second to look something up, it has the news, and it gives them ads every so often. This concept is actually pretty scary, because of the feed they no longer have to really go to school; everything that could ever imagine knowing, or wanting is on the feed. They are always “plugged in” they never can get away from social media, they will always be linked to it. Teachers and books are now obsolete because if they want to know something they can just look it up in their head. Every so often an AD plays, or the president makes an announcement, and from the announcements that are displayed, he’s not every bright. Which all of those could bring us to today’s society. Technology is everything. You cant even be a college student without technology. Everything is done online, and not only is a necessity, it’s an addiction. When Titus gets his feed turned off, he says it makes him feel empty, just nothing. When I look at my brother who is now 16 years old, he is addicted to media: gaming, socializing over the Internet, being “plugged in”. When he’s not on his phone or somehow on the internet, its almost like he doesn’t know how to interact with another human being, when you go anywhere in public majority of the people you see are on their phones. Technology is our entire lives. Marketing is also a vital part of the interent. When you Google “Vacation in Hawaii” you look at the results, and then you go to Facebook, almost every ad that you see is going to be about a vacation somewhere tropical. Marketing is how a lot of business make their money, but what if these Ads were playing in our heads constantly, you would probably be influenced at some point to buy the item being advertised. The advertisements in the book see the person’s interest and then continue to play ads trying to convince them that they need that item they’re interested in, it even goes as far as when Titus was looking at cars and he doesn’t know which one to pick he sees an AD for a sports car and Violet with him in the car trying to convince him to buy the car because his feed knows that he interested in Violet, and it used that to try to convince him to buy that car. In the book also Violet mentions that big business is who controls the feed. Big business now has control of the population which is what we’re seeing today. Knowledge is power, and the less knowledge someone has the easier they are to persuade. Which is what seems to be going on in the book they give majority of these people a feed and then take away schools so these people have no chance of education, their brains just melt constantly having the Internet and entertainment right their in the brain 24/7. Without the Technology, they have no knowledge of anything. They’re basically all Brain washed. We see that when Titus gets his feed turned off.

As a environmental studies major, the environment is extremely important to me. In the book the president makes an announcement and part of it said something about their being no more forest, the eagles were flying over the city because there was no place left for them to go, that was really depressing to me. When Titus and Violet go to the mall, they talk to a guy about a light beam at one of the stores and the sale associate said that he could see the black under the landing pods they are literally living on top of pollution because they ruined the entire earth. Violet and Titus also made plans to go to Jefferson Park to see trees and Titus’ father tells them that there are no trees left, that it was cut down to make an air factory, a factory that creates breathable air. Violet gets upset and explains what trees make oxygen that people can breathe, and the father replies and says that what’s the point of trees if we can cut them down and make room for an air factory. Which is a problem that we have in today’s society, we continue to ruin our environment for big business to expand and maybe this book was written as a warning that if we continue the way we do, it’ll all be gone.

This book can relate to our society today which is why I think that this may be an important book for people to read. We need to take the control back and stop letting technology take over our lives.  

Finished the book Eleanor and Park, and I loved it.

Now, after reading the second installment of the book, we knew someone was writing very vulgar things in Eleanor’s book, we figured that it was Tina, because she is the class bully. When Eleanor comes home and finds her box had been written on by Richie, she recognizes the lack of punctuation and capital letters, and she connects it to the awful things said in her book, and figures out that it was Richie writing in her book. This DEEPLY disturbed me, mainly because of the content. Her stepfather was writing, he was writing sexual things in her book to her on a regular basis. He never in the book came on to her in that way, but it was gross to think that someone of that age, and of the role in her life would be thinking of her in that way. It made me extremely sad and really uncomfortable.

Part of Eleanor finding out about who was writing in her book, she knows her stepfather is angry with her, is looking for her and driving around the neighborhood. She jumps out of her bedroom window and knows she needs to hide out, she begins to run to Park’s house but finds herself in front of Steve’s house instead and sees Tina, to everyone’s surprise, Tina see’s that Eleanor is really scared and chooses to help her. Eleanor hides out in Steve’s garage until Eleanor decides she needs to see Park. Eleanor then explains what been happening, and makes the decision to runaway to her uncles and eventually makes it there with Park’s help.  

Parks parents were so understanding and if I didn’t love Park’s father before I definitely loved him now. He caught Park sneaking out of the house to take Eleanor to her uncles. When Park was finished explaining the situation he gives Park money, and lets him take the truck, and told Park that if Eleanor’s uncle didn’t take her in to bring her back to Park’s house so they could figure something out for her, which I think showed more of his soft spot for Eleanor which I love.

The entire part of Park driving her there, and how upset he was, truly broke my heart. He really did care about her, and I think he did really love her. He tried staying optimist about a possible long distance relationship. He wrote to her the day she was dropped off. At the very end he gets one postcard and it says “just three long words”. Which from both of my previous post I obviously hope they’re “I love you” but its been left up for interpretation.

Park talking about his time without Eleanor made me so sad. Heartbreak is never fun, at any age. They were best friends too, they were the only people that that understood each other, and when you go to having that one person to having no one…