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One is that some my school, students make posters to advertise upcoming events and clubs to be joined.  The girls who make these do a good job and convey color and enthusiasm in their work. There have been two recent notable incidents involving these posters.

One is that someone used the number 8 instead of an ampersand. I did a double take and saw that yes, indeed, whoever created this poster intended "8" to mean "and." I shudder to think that this young lady uses this ampersand shortcut in the rest of her writing.

I, for one, took pains to learn how to draw the beautiful ampersand and proudly use it every chance I get. I no longer have to use the plus sign when I am in a hurry and need to add a few words together.

I have pride issues.

However, the poster is beautiful. It is monochromatic (pink) and features many different fonts of different neat handwriting to advertise wearing pink on Fridays to support breast cancer awareness (wearers donate $3 to some cause or other).

I witnessed two staff members strolling through the school and discussing ways to make it more attractive to possible future students taking tours of the building.

Minding my own business, I heard one lady pointing out one such and saying, "now, these are ugly." As if that was the end of the matter and perhaps they should be taken down.

Ugly.

I talked to the other teacher later about that and she said she had to bite her tongue.

Good.

Students should be able to express themselves on the walls of the school.

I watched the movie "Gravity" with my friend the other night. It was a good choice because I had heard only negative and neutral criticism about it, so I knew I would not become emotionally invested in the movie and thus become emotionally exhausted. Also because of my indifference I expected I wouldn't experience much emotional reaction to anything that happened.

This is good because I avoid movies as they become a huge emotional investment for me.

My friend, on the other hand, had heard good things about the movie.

She became bored about a half an hour in.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked the movie. And I did react emotionally to a lot of things that happened, and that was okay. At least I wasn't scared going in.

I like that our opinions met in the middle of the relatively extreme positives and negatives we had heard about.

I'm so happy I was able to finally form my own opinion after being negatively biased against it for several months.

A major theme in the movie is choosing life over death, even when death is the easiest way to go and nobody could be blamed for giving up. I liked that.