【推荐2】After a tough year, friends have proven they have always been there for us. Choose Friendship Day 2021 to appreciate the connections you have in life or use this holiday to reach out to past friends and rekindle that bond.

National Friendship Day occurs every year on the first Sunday of August — August 7, 2022 — and celebrates the importance of loving, platonic relationships. For more than a century, we’ve celebrated the strength of friendship, and thanks to social media, we’re able to continue celebrating with our friends no matter where they are in the world.

Humans are the most social beings on earth: we need to relate to others, just as Abraham Maslow exposed in his Hierarchy of human needs. Our sociological needs motivate our behavior, encouraging us to make interpersonal relationships and connect with others on a deeper level. With such a huge need for human connection with people other than our significant other, it’s no wonder that we celebrate an entire holiday based on the importance of friendship.

National Friendship Day was originally a marketing strategy for Hallmark Cards in the 1930s. Founder Joyce Hall designated the day would take place on August 2 and decided it would be a day to celebrate the people closest to you — and send them a card or two in the process. It soon became a bigger deal than originally planned when the 1935 U.S. Congress pronounced the first Sunday of August as National Friendship Day.

The holiday continued gaining popularity, and in 1998 the United Nations named Winnie the Pooh as the world’s Ambassador of Friendship. In 2011, during their 65th session, the U.N. designated July 30 International Friendship Day.

Nowadays, we celebrate National Friendship Day on the first Sunday of August. Thanks to advancements in technology, it is easier to get in touch with friends, to share, and to be thankful for them.

This August 2, celebrate the lover you create and share with the family that you chose — the friends who get you through hard times and cheer you on during your most successful moments.

【推荐1】Sherlock Holmes once asked Dr Watson about “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”. When Watson pointed out that the dog did nothing in the night-time, Holmes responded, “That was the curious incident”. In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon introduces another detective obsessed with discovering the truth. Christopher is a fifteen year old autistic savant who has trouble understanding other people but knows every prime number (质数) up to 7,057.

The story begins when Christopher discovers a crime scene across the street: a dog named Wellington lies dead. When the dog’s owner found him there, he was suspected and put to jail. After being got out by his father; he pledges to solve the mystery of its death.

As Christopher investigates the killing, he is directly confronted with a deeper mystery: other human beings. Like most people with autism, Christopher has trouble reading single facial expressions. People are confusing to him. By contrast, he likes dogs because he can always tell what they are thinking. They have only four moods, happy, sad, cross and concentrating. And they don’t lie since they can’t talk.

Haddon deepens the theme of mystery by exploring the complexities of human language, For example, Christopher never lies. A lie means saying something happened that didn’t happen and Christopher cannot see the point of it. For him, the only things worth speaking about are facts and mathematics. Christopher also doesn’t understand jokes and metaphors, such as “apple of my eye”. He writes, “When I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head, it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot.

Christopher’s quest for truth leads him inevitably to discover even deeper mysteries. Two years before the beginning of the story, Christopher’s mother died of a sudden heart attack. At that time, Mrs. Shears, the neighbor woman who owned Wellington became a family friend who helped him deal with their grief. Her friendship with them ended on the night that Wellington was killed. But the question is whether the friendship ended because of the dog’s death or the dog died because the friendship ended. As Christopher investigates, he strips away years’ words of lies and discovers the truth.

At the beginning of the book, Christopher writes, “This is a murder mystery novel”, but it is much more than that Haddon uses the theme of mystery to show how deeply mysterious human expressions, language and relationships are to a person with autism. At first, the book seems to show the limits of being autistic, but in the end, it shows the limits of being normal. Christopher himself describes it best in the final sentence of the book: “And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? ...and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.”

【推荐2】Like any other child growing up, Nicole LaMont was an outgoing, adventurous and free-spirited child with the dream of becoming a scientist. “My childhood was filled with imagination of adventure and curiosity, ”Nicole said. She experienced a normal childhood, but when she was 12 years old, a terrible illness led her to lose her hearing in both ears.

“My world was turned upside down,” said Nicole. “I went from being a talkative, joyous child to being quiet and depressed. ”However, she came to realize she had to fight when it was determined that her hearing would not return. With her family’s help, Nicole began to learn American Sign Language(ASL).

A year later, she received an operation where she was implanted (植入) a hearing device, which brought back some light to her life and she also learned how to adapt to the new life. It wasn’t until she attended Gallaudet, a school for the deaf, that she fully devoted herself to ASL and the deaf community. “Becoming fluent in ASL and having total communication allowed me to feel a sense of acceptance again,” said Nicole. “I found my confidence and ‘visual (视觉的) voice’ in the performing arts.”

It was then that she made her first request, demanding subtitles (字幕) for movie theatres in Alabama. After much struggle, Nicole’s efforts proved successful, and today nearly all movie theatres in Montgomery and Birmingham offer subtitles for the deaf. After graduating from Gallaudet University, Nicole continued to use her new found “visual voice” through taking part in several activities, becoming Miss Black Deaf D.C. “By doing this, I want to show that deaf people can achieve much. It’s very important to educate and support hearing families that struggle with making the best decisions for their deaf children’s education.” said Nicole.