Yayin Ruan 5/1/20 Period 2 - Blog #3

YaYin Ruan

Modern Mythology pd 2

5/1/20

Blogger #28

Blog 3.2

1. Today’s lesson is about the history and origin of zombies. Zombies have their origins in voodoo and the Haitian plantations. Slaves who worked in the sugar plantations led a harsh life, and they saw death as the only way out. In voodoo belief, death means the return to Africa (lan guinee) or heaven, where they can truly be free. If Baron Samedi, the lord of cemetery, refuses to bring a soul to lan guinee, they will become a zombie. Zombie is a dead slave, who will be stuck in an eternity of servitude. Later, during the Harlem renaissance novelist, Zora Neale Hurston took a picture of a woman who was supposedly dead for 29 years. She believed this woman to be a zombie. She was criticized for this picture because the woman was most likely mentally ill and suffered a social death. The movie “Night of the Living Dead” caused a cultural change in the perception of zombies. It changed the connotation of zombies from slavery to a more violent image of the undead eating human flesh. This movie also criticizes consumerism with people acting like zombies fulfilling their materialistic desires by rapidly and massively consuming without thinking. 
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2. New York is currently experiencing declining statistics in the number of new cases and deaths. The newest update is around 1,000 new cases and 289 new deaths per day. These numbers are still very scary but we are slowly on the way to recovery. We should thank all the doctors, nurses, paramedics, and essential personnel, who are risking their lives to ensure everyone's safety and keep society functioning. Currently, the projection for New York to reopen is still on May 15th. New York City alone has 170k confirmed cases, and it doesn’t seem like reopening this soon is possible. 
3. Today Gov. Cuomo announced all public schools in New York state will be closed for the rest of the academic year. It feels weird to know that this is the rest of my senior year. Working at home is working out fine for me. There are ups and downs. I’m not sleep-deprived, which I would be if I was in a traditional school setting, and I am procrastinating less than I expected. However, the downside is that I often get distracted easily. I have two younger siblings and sometimes they can be very loud, which is not ideal when it comes to studying or writing. Secondly, the thought of the impact of the virus is always in the back of my mind. The pandemic is very real, especially living in New York, the biggest hub for the virus, and it is very sad and depressing to know that people around you are suffering. This combined with senioritis can be unmotivating.