SYMPATHETIC

I felt sorry for Holden after I read chapter five. It was really depressing. I had no idea before than that he had had more than one sibling. By the sounds of it, they were kind of close.

I thought it was cute that he would look for Allie, places. That kind of added a flare. I liked how he described his red hair. He also described the baseball mitt. That was a good idea to put poems on it so that he could read them while waiting on the field. He sounds like a guy that I wouldn't mind meeting.

The depressing part of the story was that Allie got leukemia and died. The night that he died, Holden slept in the garage. Holden got really mad and punched all the windows in the garage. He broke his hand doing it.

I felt bad. I can't really relate because I haven't had someone really close to me die before. But I can sort of imagine the pain. Obviously not as much as I would if I had gone through it myself.

WHEN DOES ADULTHOOD BEGIN?

The topic of adulthood is under debate by many people. Everyone has their own opinion. A common opinion is that you become an adult when you turn eighteen. Many would disagree and say it is when you reach a certain maturity.

That maturity though, is under debate as well. In my opinion, you reach that maturity when you are capable to take care of yourself and possibly others. That means that a ten year old could be as mature as an adult. There is no limit of age. You could be ten or fifty. You could die of old age and never have become an adult.

It is all about how you reacted to how you were raised. Their are those children who have to become an adult because their parents are not there to raise them or their siblings. They have to miss out on their childhood so that their siblings can have one. That is a true adult.

When you give up acting like a child to take care of others, you are an adult. I'm not saying that you can't have fun or act childish every once in a while. You just have to act mature for the majority of the time. You can have fun while being mature also.

EMPATHETIC

I felt like I was passing judgment on Holden. He is so different from myself; but yet he is just the same. I think he has a little of all of us in him. We all have our opinions about things. We all judge, whether we say it out loud or not.

Like Holden, we don't like the smell of old people. Some of us are even as lazy as him. I'll admit to being as lazy. I admit that I don't care about certain things either. We all have those times. It isn't like Holden doesn't care about anything. He just is selective about what he cares about.

He cared about getting a goodbye. I'm like that too. I get the feeling that something doesn't have an ending until I get some kind of conclusion. So, I get why he was sad that no one was there to tell him goodbye or sound like they would miss him. I think I would be like him and say goodbye to my teacher too.