People or things??

When I was reading the second section of the book, I noticed that Janie describes Jody getting old as well, pretty gross. It pretty much sounded like he was melting...which to me is a mean and just weird way to describe the aging process. I just don't understand why the author did that unless she just wanted to really get across that he didn't age well, while Janie was.

Another thing I noticed was that it seems that the "gold digger" ideal was reversed. Nowadays its the young women going after older men for money. But in the book it pretty much says that the young men will go after the older women for money. I think that this is a pretty interesting change in what happens during different time periods and just different cultures. Either way I think it's wrong but in our recent books the women never held that kind of power, but in this book they hold a little bit at least.

An interesting question we talked about in class was if we orient our lives around people or things? In the book Janie wants to orient her life around people but gets forced to orient it around things. I would love to think that we orient our lives around people but honestly we may try and some of us may succeed, but with how much we spend on things, or how much we love our things, I don't think many of us really succeed. It's really sad too, if you think about it because we would get so much more out of life if we didn't focus just on things or at least so much on them. But it's hard with all the ways companies have of getting us to buy things and with how having a lot of things is considered good or powerful a lot of the time!

Lastly I just wanted to comment on how people were criticizing Janie for going off with Tea Cake. I think that she gave it plenty of thought and hesitation. She lived so much of her life by doing the responsible thing or the "right" thing that now is her chance to live and experience things her way. I mean if she isn't hurting anyone and is happy then everyone she just be happy for her.