Hannah Hecht's Blog

The first reading for this week was about urban legends and scary stories. It was interesting to see how there may be common themes and deeper meaning behind those middle school “scary stories” that kids would swap at sleepovers. Common themes such as isolation, the unknown, and growing up prevail across all of the legends.

I thought that some of the urban legends were kind of stupid and lacked true literary value. For example, one of the stories went like this: “There once was a lady who had lots of poodles. She gave her poodle a bath and wanted to dry it off. She put the poodle in the microwave and it exploded. The end. ” How is that a story!?! “The Hook and Other Teenage Horrors” included many such stories that, in my opinion, are being overanalyzed. This specific story sounds like something that a five-year-old would make up and tell to his classmates, not anything of true merit. While reading about how urban legends are formed is interesting, none of these stories were exactly well-written or spine-chilling.

The second reading (or listening) for the week was much more interesting, in my opinion. “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone” pondered the disappearance of a once-popular fad, hitchhiking. It claimed that one story of a women getting kidnapped has scared people across the globe from hitchhiking. This article compared hitchhiking to swimming in the ocean: there is a risk that one will get hurt, but, the article stated, the rewards outweigh the costs.

I disagree with the article. It states that people don’t hitchhike anymore because of the risks, but I think it has more to do with the availability of automobiles to everyone. Back in the day, it was considered good etiquette to pick up hitchhikers; if you were privileged enough to have a car, then you would give back to the community by helping out people who weren’t. Nowadays, just about everyone has a car; therefore the necessity to hitchhike has been dramatically decreased. Because there are less people hitchhiking out of necessity, shouldn’t that mean that there’s a larger chance that the hitchhiker you’re about to pick up has an ulterior motive? Conversely, because regular people are less likely to pick up hitchhikers, doesn’t that increase the likelihood that hitchhikers get picked up by kidnappers? On the other hand, I did think that it was interesting when the article mentioned that most cars were never filled to full capacity. This dramatically contributes to our ecological footprint, but hitchhiking probably isn’t the safest alternative.