Journal 9 by Max Balderson

     Active reading has been going much better for Callings, than it did for our previous two books. I feel like active reading is something that is much easier with practice. Now that I have two books of active reading under my belt, I find it much easier to write key details and elements while reading callings. The biggest strength of Callings is that is personal. It is a book of combined stories, from real people, about the thing that we all think about, their jobs or their "callings". It allows us to put ourselves in their shoes, and understand the emotion that is supposed to be in the text. The challenges of this book, is that it can be repetitive. You know what the premise of each story is going to be about, and ,for someone with little interest in this subject, I would imagine the book would be near impossible to read.
     My favorite story so far has been about the father and son firefighters. I enjoyed the amount of pride that they both had in what they did. The son looked up to his father so much, and knew from a young age that he was going to be in the same line of work his father was. The son, Dekalp III, even says, "Back in the nineties, when Micheal Jordan was really famous and everybody wanted to be like Mike? Well, Mike was good-but me, I wanted to be like Dekalb Walcott Jr. You were my Micheal Jordan." Seeing both their pride in what they do, I was curious about their line of work. Why was there such a need for firefighters in the area they lived, Chicago. I found that Chicago being such a densely populated city can cause a huge fire hazard. One of the biggest piece of evidence for this danger is the great chicago fire. It was a fire that lasted two days in 1871, and left 100,000 homeless. It can be led to believe that this is one of the many reasons for Chicago having such a huge need for their fire department, and could be another reason why this father and son are so proud of their work.
     There are a lot of reasons why staying in Ohio would be beneficial to me. For one, I could get a job at Honda being a translator. That would be nice, because it is very close home, and Honda is the same company that my dad works at. I would be able to live in Marysville, in the same town as my family. If I had to live in another state, I think I'd like to live in California. Now I understand that it is pretty far away from Ohio, but I would have a lot of benefits living there that I don't get living in Ohio. California is a much more globally connected state. This gives my job a lot more need in California than it does. It would also be a nice change of pace. I've been in the eastern part of the country my whole life. I was born in Florida and raised in Ohio, but the furthest I've gone west is Illinois. I personally think that California would give me a much different experience than Ohio would.

One of the Many Companies I could work for in the future