Tuesdays with Morrie (pgs. 23-47), Week 2, Post A

VOCAB: 1. Tabouli (pg. 28) -- a salad of fine-ground bulgur, parsley, tomatoes, green onions, mint, olive oil, and lemon juice. This is one of the things that Morrie is having for lunch while Mitch visits him for the first time.
2. Alienation (pg. 47) – the state of being withdrawn or isolated from the objective world, as through indifference or disaffection. This term is used when Mitch is talking about how he wasted away all his time since he graduated from college, how he alienated people be burying himself in his own accomplishments.

APPEALS: Emotional appeal - pg. 44. Mitch talks of the time when he lost his job because of a strike that happened in his workers’ union. I believe this is an emotional appeal because of how many others in the world have lost their jobs because of a union strike. Emotional appeals can relate to other people and make them remember things that were traumatic and important in their lives. This was definitely an important point in Mitch’s life because without the strike going on, he wouldn’t have been able to make the time to see Morrie every Tuesday for their “life lesson classes.” And these are the whole point of the memoir.
Logical appeal – pg. 45. “I picked up the phone and dialed Morrie’s number. Connie brought him to the phone. ‘You’re coming to visit me’, he said, less a question than a statement. Well. Could I? ‘How about Tuesday?’ Tuesday would be good, I said. Tuesday would be fine.” This is logical. It makes sense. Lots of people make arrangements to meet like this.

QUOTE: “So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into our life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning” (pg. 43). I really like this quote because it talks about how people can just go around their whole entire lives and never get to do anything that they really want to accomplish because they are too concerned with going with the flow, and paying hardly any attention to the world around them. People can do that, and then I’m absolutely positive that they regret it a whole lot later in life when they’re retired or the lives are just less stressful. I don’t want this to happen to me because there are so many things I want to be able to do. But I don’t want to do them and then never appreciate the fact that I did do it, because I’d want to remember forever how I changed someone’s life by what I did. You can’t go through your life without giving something purpose and meaning. It just isn’t logical. At some point in everyone’s lives, I’m sure we all really want to do something that will make a difference in the world. Some of us live up to that, and some of us don’t. That’s okay. Just so long as it has meaning and a purpose to you. I like to think of it as, “You must change your own life before you can change the world’s.” This is part of my philosophy of life, as well as it is Morrie's.

EMERGING THEME: The emerging theme of the book at this point is pretty much just to live life up to the fullest, and don’t waste your precious time on earth by doing things that aren’t that important to you.