{"id":664,"date":"2011-11-29T06:00:40","date_gmt":"2011-11-29T14:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=664"},"modified":"2011-11-25T11:21:36","modified_gmt":"2011-11-25T19:21:36","slug":"mark-reads-looking-for-alaska-one-hundred-ten-one-hundred-nine-days-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2011\/11\/mark-reads-looking-for-alaska-one-hundred-ten-one-hundred-nine-days-before\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads ‘Looking For Alaska’: one hundred ten \/ one hundred nine days before"},"content":{"rendered":"

One hundred ten days before it happens, Miles is kicked out of class for the first time, bonds more with his new group of friends, and the situation with Kevin gets more confrontational. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read Looking For Alaska<\/em>.<\/p>\n

one hundred ten days before<\/strong><\/p>\n

I can’t say that I’ve ever been thrown out of class before. I once dramatically stormed out of a classroom with a few students my freshman year because our professor was gross and disgusting and wouldn’t stop hitting on the girls in class. I don’t think he taught at Cal State Long Beach after that, though I can’t be too sure. However, there’s not much I feel sympathetic about here when Miles is kicked out of Dr. Hyde’s class for daydreaming. Yes, daydreaming happens; long before I went to college, I was caught doing the same thing and I understood how annoying that was for teachers to have to deal with. I don’t actually think Green’s trying to show us how much he totally understands what vicious fascists<\/em> teachers are; instead, it seems pretty obvious to me that he is painting these characters as being rather petty and vindictive about something they’re clearly in the wrong for.<\/p>\n

Well, maybe not initially<\/em>. Miles was<\/em> daydreaming, but it was technically on-topic??? RIGHT??? Either way, the incident is embarrassing enough for Miles, who doesn’t put up a fight when Dr. Hyde asks him and Alaska to leave class. It’s Alaska who vocalizes her discontent with him, and\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6look, it’s not my favorite thing she does. Hardly at all, actually. I think she’s rude about it, and her insistence that Dr. Hyde can’t be a genius because he’s not an artist is ludicrous. But I also think that’s the point: Green is not trying to make<\/em> her perfect. It’s just that through the eyes of Miles, she is everything he wants. That<\/em> is more important, I think, because we have the luxury of oversight. I think Alaska’s flaws might also play a larger role in the story later.<\/p>\n

For now, Miles spends more time with his three new friends, who take him to their group’s smoking hole out in the woods. There’s no need for me to discuss the intricacies of an impromptu rap battle (though I do have friends who do this and they are so goddamn good at it<\/em>); what I take away from this is that Miles is slowly becoming part of this group himself. He makes a comment here that he generally just listens to what the group says, and I think any of us who have joined an already-existing social group or group of friends can understand how this works. Obviously, it depends on just how social a person is. If I feel left out or I feel like I can’t contribute anything worthwhile to a conversation, I take the same approach as Miles did here. However, if the environment is right and there is<\/em> something I can offer, I can get past my social anxiety and make an effort to be a part of things. (Make no mistake: it does take me a lot to get past that anxiety, though I am getting better at it these days!)<\/p>\n

Perhaps Miles being part of this group is just a practical thing; he’s the one who got stuck with The Colonel as a roommate. I can accept that, but I believe there’s something more to Miles than we’ve seen, and at least Alaska and The Colonel can see this. I’m not sure about Takumi yet, though; I don’t feel like I really know him.<\/p>\n

“Why do you smoke so damn fast?” I asked.<\/p>\n
She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, “Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
WELL, OKAY. THAT’S NICE.<\/p>\n
one hundred nine days before<\/strong><\/p>\n
Oh, school sports. I had an interesting relationship to them. I’ve always been pretty physical; I started running long distance in junior high, and I loved volleyball. (Small side story: I currently have the school record at Loma Vista Middle School for highest consecutive serves in a game: 45. YEAH WE WON ALL THREE GAMES 15-0. BOOYAH. Then I got to high school and guys weren’t allowed on the volleyball team–until after the year I graduated. <\/em>BIGOTS.) I still run a few days a week and do long distance cycling; I get a good hike in a couple times a month, too. And despite loving all of this? I generally loathed the culture that came with high school sports. I was fortunate enough that my high school track and cross country teams really didn’t experience much of this, but I tried to do swim and soccer and I couldn’t handle the intensity of the coaches, the parents (UGH THE PARENTS) and the violently competitive nature of the entire thing.<\/p>\n
What I didn’t like was that no other sports aside from cross country or track were fun<\/em>. There was no room for pranks, for well-timed jokes, for camaraderie, for being friends. Everything was so ruthless<\/em> and planned out. Add on top of that a healthy dose of hyper-masculine absurdity and homophobia and it was an utter disaster.<\/p>\n
I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn’t hate people who watched or played them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is my life motto<\/em>. Okay, it’s not. It’s a bit too hardline and ridiculous for me. I just don’t like all the bullshit that comes with sports. I once say two parents beat the shit out of each other because their sons weren’t playing well. THEY WERE ON THE SAME TEAM. I saw a teacher give a student a passing grade on an exam so he could play in that week’s game–and this was in front of the whole class. Literally! I once thought, long ago, that those were stereotypes, but then I saw it in action. (Though that’s not to say there isn’t<\/em> a stereotype, but sports culture has a lot of problems in it.)<\/p>\n
All this is a way for me to say that I wish<\/em> I had as much fun at high school games as The Colonel and his classmates do. Our football team was good for a year or two, but those years I wasn’t allowed out of the house to go watch games. Both my track team and cross country team were damn good all four years, but who cares about those sports? We got some of the least funding and support from our school, despite consistently winning. By the time I could<\/em> see games after school, our team was pretty terrible, and watching your team lose isn’t fun. Perhaps we weren’t a creative bunch, either, because we certainly didn’t have extremely complex call-and-response cheers meant to completely distract the other team. (And the silence technique is RATHER BRILLIANT.)<\/p>\n
Kevin decides in this chapter to take what was an uncomfortable situation and escalate it by trying to make a truce with the Colonel. I think that this is going to be a huge, significant moment for Miles in relation to his friends: he’s won the respect of the Colonel with his unique interest in the last words of famous people. In this case, it’s here that Miles uses this (and a nice bit of sarcasm) to reject Kevin’s offer for a truce. A truce! What nerve Kevin must have. Unless, that is, he’s right, and The Colonel really did<\/em> rat out Marya and Paul. I still don’t believe he would; it doesn’t even make sense. I’m interested to see how<\/em> Kevin came to believe this. For now, though, I’ll just appreciate this:<\/p>\n
The opposing team’s cheerleaders tried to answer our cheers with “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire! Hell is in your future if you give in to desire,” but we could always do them one better.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
WHY DO I BELIEVE THIS IS AN ANECDOTAL DETAIL AND NOT FICTIONAL AT ALL. Bless this book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One hundred ten days before it happens, Miles is kicked out of class for the first time, bonds more with his new group of friends, and the situation with Kevin gets more confrontational. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[125,23,123],"class_list":["post-664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-looking-for-alaska","tag-john-green","tag-mark-reads","tag-mark-reads-looking-for-alaska"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}