Materialism = #1 Value

Thursday night I found myself at the Old Orchard Apple store with my friend who was arguing with a "genius" for a new iPhone. It was only one week ago when she bought herself an iPhone from a friend for the low price of $100. Now this was the top-of-the-line iPhone with the most memory/GBs in it so getting it for only $100 was fairly cheap. I guess she thought that this phone was invincible like her previous phones, because she told me buying a case for it was unnecessary (although it does come with the 'all glass screen' feature). As you could probably guess, she dropped it. Falling a mighty two feet out of her back pocket resulted in a very shattered screen. Naturally, she was furious that the phone/iPod broke in under a week of having bought it. But of course-- the friendly people at the Apple store would understand and give her a brand new iPhone...right?

No, not quite. We waited a good two hours just to be told she should've bought a phone case and that to repair it would cost around $299. She stormed out of the store in tears and started ranting about how ridiculous the people working there are and was freaking out about having no cell phone and no iPod. Just so happens, she got a new "LG Shine" phone right before she got the iPhone (and those aren't inexpensive phones). It wasn't an iPhone so it wasn't good enough. In the meantime I tried to be as comforting as possible because she was upset, but the whole situation was getting me angry. It wasn't like she broke something extremely important, but she kept on about how she could have bought something else with the hundred dollars that were wasted. It's just money though, it wasn't the end of the world. Is it so wrong to think she was over-reacting? Do you think the Apple store have given her a new phone?

Personally, I don't own a working cell phone, nor do i have an iPod anymore, and it's not that hard living without either of them. Most of my friends have said "it must be impossible living without a cell phone," or "I could never live like that" (both things were actually said, sadly). "Impossible"... really? Not having a cell phone is far from impossible, I have all the numbers I need memorized, and I don't really mind being unreachable at times; it's relaxing. The fact that someone could never live without a cell phone is overwhelmingly sad. Am I missing out on something by not having these things? At the end of the day, these things are just metal and plastic. Materialism is taking over people's lives, and I think it's here to stay. Try going a whole week without using your cell phone or your iPod. Is it all that difficult? And if it is, what does this tell you?

Mom, you too?

Today during class as we listened to the "Giant Pool of Money" from NPR, and I could finally understand exactly what my mom was doing for a living. As a mortgage broker, she was giving loans to anybody who needed one. Before today, I had no clue what being a mortgage broker intailed other than loaning money to people, but I would have never guessed that anybody, yes, anybody could get a loan. How could you just loan somebody thousands of dollars without knowing anything about their background? It just makes no sense. But when it's not even your money that you're lending out, does it really matter to you who it's going to? I guess not. So all that time, my mom was making money off these loans, good and bad ones, just like all of the other mortgage brokers. So who is to blame for the economic downfall? Is the entire system just too messed up to fix? Once you've become so overwhelmed in debts from the loans you get, how do you get out of debt if you don't have the money?

Definitely not the whole story

Over the weekend I watched a movie online at a website called www.zeitgeistmovie.com. It's a four-part movie documentary, but I only had time to watch the first three parts. The main part of it that really caught my attention was part II, about the attacks on 9/11. I was only in fourth grade when it happened, and as I grew up it wasn't widely talked about in school, so I didn't know a whole lot about the topic, only what was said on the news. The theory in this movie is that the government planned everything and that there were explovsives in the buildings as well. They put interviews and speeches into the documentary so it seemed to me like it was a legitimate theory. What I noticed as I began to pay more attention to the clips, were that they were all cut really short and only gave a few sentances, at most. This made me wonder what parts they were leaving out. If their theory was in fact true, how could so many people not know what really happened? I think that the documentary brought up a really good point though. The WTC building 7 collapsed at 5:22 on 9/11, due to the "fire theory". If you were to compare the collapse of this building to a controlled demolition building collapse as they show in the movie, it's hard to know what to think. How could a building that had fires on maybe two floors completely collapse a 47-story building? I'm not trying to say that the government planned it, I just think that there is a lot about the collapse that is unexplained. What do you think?