Oranges at 5:39 AM

I would like to take the analogy to The Matrix’s idea of choosing to believe one step further. Instead of taking the blue pill, or the red pill, instead I like to see belief as more of vitamin supplement. There are several kinds out there, but only you can choose which one is right for you. If you miss a few days of not taking the pill, it wont kill you, and you can pick it right back up again when you find it necessary. Other vitamins might do the same thing for me, and I can’t really prove that any of the others are the wrong choice. I do know that when I get sick, it is usually because I have not been taking my vitamins.

My beliefs have been significantly challenged. As a conservative pre-med major I sometimes find it very difficult to bury down the “knowledge” that I have gained on my Sunday mornings. My biology courses talk of Darwin, Evolution, Natural Selection, Genetic Drift, and call the Big Bang as the key influences of who we are today. I pretend to believe this for the exam, but I find that I still resort back to my roots in the church for my true beliefs.

Oranges seems to ignore or avoid anything that it does not accept. Up until now, whenever Janette encounters something that her mother does not like, or finds inappropriate for the mind of a faithful child, she [the mother] removes it completely from her life. The book foreshadows that Janette is homosexual. In the beginning of the book Janette gets her comic books from two women who like to give her treats of banana bars, Janette finds the ladies strange, but does not know exactly what it is about the women that make her different. When her mother attempts to repress the homosexual influence in Janette’s life, she offers her an orange, which seems to represent heterosexuality moreover they represent the entire repressive system that Jeanette's mother espouses.