3/25

    Today we walked outside for ten minutes and wrote for ten minutes about our ten minute experience with nature.  Here is what I wrote,

Slight chill.  Busy yet not.  The wind makes the trees come alive, like a puppeteer.  Bicyclist more careful than I, about where they are going.  Although I miss the squirrels.  It is around 7 pm, i guess dinner must be fresh from the oven and so that come from playing and working all day.  A lot of random litter.  "Natural Plastic" as described by a classmate.  The sun certainly isn't giving off enough heat, I guess even it knows when it's almost quitting time.  Who wants to put in so much effort when it's almost time to clock out.  Nine people passed me by.  and, a third of which gave me some sort of interaction.  My legs are feeling heavy, probably a sign of me being out of shape.  I wanted to see the ice rink but the rules wouldn't allow me to do so.  Rules... Signs also gives rules.  "Yield to pedestrian traffic" said one sign.  "Do not touch" said another.  And "Emergency" said the last.

That's all I had time to share in ten minutes.

    After we looked at some essays.  We noticed how very detailed they are.  We look at "Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird".  Which is a story about.. you guessed it hummingbirds and how fragile their lives are.  The most amazing fact I got it that most hummingbirds die in their sleep, because that can't jump-start their heart from 36 beats per minute to 500 bpm.  We also looked at "An Unspoken Hunger" which was about eating avocados with a friend.  Or so you would think but don't be fooled, like I was, under careful inspection it's really about a relation between two people and maybe a forbidden one.  And lastly we look at "Lenses" about a woman who godly when she was 12 because how she toiled with the lives of microorganisms through a microscope.  But then, when she got old she realizes that her life is just as small as those microorganisms compared to the world.

And the last thing we did was pick a word and write about it.  I chose the number 4, because i'm a rebel.  And here is what I wrote.

   The fourth number.  The number four, or an upside down 'h' is the calculator, has been around since people could count.  Four on the calendar could stand for one of the twelve days of the year or a very special month for me.  At 4 pm the sun is always on the eastern side of the sky, as well as, the moon in the am.  Four or two squared can cut things into a quarter or a fourth when dividing.  Four, one of the easiest number to count to, is after three and before five, just in case you did not know.  Quatre, si, vier, shi/yan, quattro, etc.  Four is referred to in many names.  In the eastern, western, northern and southern parts of the world four has a name.

That's all I had time to write.

3/18

   Today in class we Edwinge Danticat "Night Women".  It's a story about a mom who works as a prostitute to take care of herself and her son because her husband is either dead or left.  We know this is her profession because of when she speaks about the blood red-scarf she lefts her son sleep with, to let him be able to have something of hers since they have to sleep separately so she can work.  That scarf is what she uses to pick up suitors.  She learn she is very observant and care deeply for her son.  Because when he awakes from sleep, she'd put him back to sleep and tell him that his father came from heaven to visit her if he sees the silhouette of another.  She would test to see if he was asleep by rubbing her finger on his lips and messing with his eye-lashes and if she got no reaction she figured he was sleep.  Although she doesn't like what she does, because of the way she questioned about one of her suitor's wives, but she knows working like the other woman won't keep them both fed and clothed.

   We also read Ntozake Shange "Indigo".  Which is a story about a very charismatic girl and her violin.  Now she and this violin are very close, it's her best friend so to speak.  We know she can play very well by all the songs of that decade she can play.  But, she chooses to play her own music, which she plays very loudly, so much so that it disturbs her neighbors.  But she does play well, so well, in fact, that it brought a grown man to tears.  She played his pain and that played a happy tune for him which brought him to tears.

Today's task was to pick a paragraph from either story and replace the words while keep the structure the same.  Sadly, this endeavor is hard than it looks.  Still working on that share with you later.  Maybe.

3/11

Joyce Carol Oates: The Girl with the Blackened Eye

     The main character of the story is the narrator, who recalls an incident that happened to her when she was fifteen years old.  She was abducted, raped, and beaten.  In the beginning, she talks about the black eye she had when the man had beat her and how nobody, who saw, wanted to be involved.  At first she was scared of him, but in the story she talks about how she submit to him to keep him happy. "You learned to be weak to please him for you did not want to displease him in even the smallest things." pg 208  Somehow, she knew that if she kept him happy she made live through this ordeal or be killed quickly.  

    

     Before the incident we learn that she liked to wear tightly fitted clothes and kept her hair in a mane.  But after her hair to messy to do anything with and had to be cut.  We also see that as a young girl she is easily trusting because she carelessly speaks to a man she doesn't know just because he reminds her of her father.  She should already know, not to speak and be careful around strangers.  While being chained to the bed she had a vivid dream of saying good-bye to her family, which shows shes prepared to die.  She compares personality to flame and said it could be extinguished at any moment.  She describes what he did to her but she says it was not done to her but her body.  Both examples show she probably withdrew from herself, an unconscious defense mechanism that prepared her for the worst.  "When you give up the struggle, there's a kind of love.", she submitted to him in hopes of living.  And even when granted to escape with the red-haired woman, she couldn't because she was to afraid to break his trust, which she seemed to value more than her own life and the life of this woman, probably because he already said he'd let her go.

     "When the found me, my hair was wild and tangled like a broom sage.  It couldn't be combed through, had to be cut from my head in clumps."  This detail tells me after this gruesome encounter she had become a different person.  When she talked of the pale-yellow butterflies and the jays, perhaps she compares herself and the other women as the butterflies and the him as the jays because the jays swooped in and ate the butterflies.  When she talks about seeing her mom at that store where they picked up the red-hair woman, maybe that alludes to her family moving on without her.  When she speaks of gangrene and her body rotting, she probably feels she died or wanted to die because of what he did to her.

3/4

We continue with our fiction writing and reading after coming back from break.  Today we get to chose a story from another packet.  I chose to read August 25,1983.  Which was about a guy who meets himself from twenty years in the future.  The future self seems to have checked into a hotel room the man's mother has history in and had began to kill himself by drinking something ominous from a bottle.  He seems surprised at first then rather annoyed by his future self who tells him one of them is a dream and the younger guy insist the older one is a dream.  By the end I can only guess the younger guy was a dream since when the older one finally died the world became black.

We also looked a the The Falling Girl.  About a nineteen year old girl named Marta who jumps off a skyscraper in this beautifully described city.  As shes falling she sees other girls falling and she jealous of how they're dressed better and some seem to be falling faster than Marta which I found odd because unless Marta has a bigger surface area she and other girls should be falling at the same rate.  I also found it odd that only girls were falling and not men and how near some floors Marta seemed to fall slower.  I took it as Marta peaked in her life at age nineteen and her life went downhill from there.  Because the story says the at the lower floors only old women can be seen falling.  So I believe that skyscraper represents life.

Lastly we looked at The Fifth Story.  Which was about a guy who told us about his hatred for the cockroaches in his home that were coming up from the pipes below.  In the collection of the five story the first was very straight forward. He complained and a woman gave him some advice as to how to deal with his problem and  the intruders died.  The stories were pretty much the same story but got more and more detailed by the third and fourth story. And by the fifth story he made it seem like he was writing an epic novel.

2/18

We fully began fiction today.  We read numerous stories today, a few I liked and a few were totally confusing.  We had to chose one story from the packet to read alone and then share our thoughts to the class.  I read Walking the baby to the liquor store.  I like this story, I was quite easy to understand.  At first I thought the author was a procrastinator, if the author is his our character in the story, because of what was described in the first paragraph about how his work was piling up.  But then I saw it was piling up because he was caught up in being a father, then i thought what's wrong with that.

We looked at another story: Misdemeanors.  About a stupid criminal who went to jail from robbing a bowling alley.  It was funny because when he told the story made himself seem like a hardened criminal because he went to jail by what he was telling the kids but his wife told a different story.  You can tell he didn't plan this robbery properly.  I'm no expert criminal but I think you should've had a more reliable getaway driver and not someone who was passed out at the wheel.  And he should have wore a belt if he was going to fill his pockets with coins because at the end of the story his pants were around his knees as he was running for the cops.

We also looked a the mystery stories.  Which I found more confusing than mysterious.  The old Japanese man was by far the most confusing because I couldn't tell who was real the boy dreaming boy or the Japanese man.  The jackets one was funny because the character is always unlucky enough to get her coat stolen at parties.  The talking cat seemed to make the most sense because it's about a woman who's jealous her cat made a new friend.

Dialogue story

A girl's awkward encounter.

It was a sunny mid-afternoon on a rather boring Tuesday.  I had stopped in the cafeteria for a quick bite to eat.  Looking around for a moment I noticed how full the place was, feeling very lucky that I even managed to get a table.  It was crowded and it was loud.  People's voices filled the room completely, I could barely manage to hear myself think.  And yet, I notice a table of two girls directly beside me being just loud as everyone else.  

The girls were rather young, probably around my age.  I could see them both smiling and laughing from their conversation.  One of them had long, brown, and straight hair.  And, she wore a graphic tee that had a big heart on it and the word "You" written under it.  I assume you read it as "love you". The girl across from her had short blond hair and had on a bright blue jacket, which kept attracting my attention.

A couple minutes later, I was in the middle of my eating lunch, when a third girl walks up to the two girls across from me and says very loudly "My life is like a fucking soap, I swear!"  Her crass language quickly catches my attention.  Not having looked over yet, I could hear the other two girl ask "how?" almost simultaneously.  She begins her story, rather loudly, as if bragging.  "I had one night stand with this guy last night in the dorms..."  She was interrupted by her two friends who both said "What!" in perfect unison this time.  Even I thought "What!" and "How could someone say that out loud like that."  

Graphic tee girl asks "How was it?" and giggles.  I had to look at graphic tee girl and question in my head "how could you ask something like that."  That when I notices the third girl.  She was still standing next to the table.  She had short, dark brown hair.  With thick, black frame glasses and had on a black leather jacket with a satchel strap going across her chest.  She grinned and replied to graphic tee girl "It was good.  But that's beside the point."  She continued her story.  "It turns out this guy was in my chemistry lab and he had the balls to come up to me and ask if we could have some "fun" again tonight.  Fun! His words not mine."  She used the quotation hand gesture every time she said the word: fun.  

The two girls sitting down began to look at one another and grin then look back at her.  Even I had my eyes fixated on her, her story was quite "fun" and fascinating.  She continues, answering everyone unasked question.  "I told him no."  She smiled.  "I said look buddy that was a one time thing and I got a boyfriend, so back off,"  Bright blue jacket girl asked "You got a boyfriend?"  Graphic tee girl replied for our storyteller.  "Yeah, remember she brought him to my party a while back."  Bright blue girl shook her head.  

Our storyteller butted in "The point is.." as if there is a moral to this story.  "..it's gonna be awkward to see him in lab from now on."  She laughs and looks at her phone.  "Okay, I got to go.  I'm gonna be late for my next class."  She begins to run along and the other two girl and I resume eating. I'm not sure how to take her story but the other two girls seemed to have enjoyed it. 

Short Story Assignment 1: The Plant

My sister is two years younger than me.  We have a close relationship, like best friends.  We started to take care of a plant in our childhood after seeing our mother toil around with gardening.  When we asked her why she to become a gardener she replied "so she can measure her happiness with the plants."  We became inspired, for we wanted to be happy too.  We begged to help her in the garden, she seemed reluctant.  So she gave us a plant and told us both to take care of it together and that we must nurture with love and feed it every day.  We happily agreed with big smiles on our face.  The plant was nothing special, just a seedling for a fern, but we loved like it was a playful little puppy.

At 10 and 8 years old, having the responsibility like that felt like I could do anything for this little plant.  My sister and I would often argue about who got to feed him that day and we ultimately decided we would alternate each day.  We named him "Dog” and wrote it on the pot we kept him in.  He stayed in the living room on the window sill in that little pot no bigger than a mug.  We were surprised when he began to bud and a leaf grew.  Amazement was written all over our faces, for we felt like we accomplished something.

A year later, Dog survived and thrived.  "It's almost time to move him to a bigger pot." our mom explained.  She told us "If we want Dog to remain healthy, he’ll need to stretch his roots".  So a couple of days later we went shopping for a new pot for Dog, than we moved him into it.

Another year has passed and I joined the soccer team at my middle school and my sister is now in 5th grade.  It's becoming harder to take care of Dog because of practice and playing with friends after school.  My sister also made friends with a couple of little girls in her class.   Even so, we still find the time for Dog.  Feeding him, cleaning the dust off him, talking to him always brings us joy.  But we have noticed that the tips of his leaves are beginning to wilt.  We're not worried we know he'll get better.

Another year has passed and I am now heavily involved with my soccer team and I mostly leave Dog's well-being to my sister.  But I have noticed that his leaves aren't as green as they once were they'll getting lighter could just be my imagination.

Another year has passed and I noticed I haven't spoken to my sister in days nor have been feeding Dog.  I get out of bed to look for them both.  As I approach Dog, I noticed he has wilted beyond recognition.  I begin to panic for a second then I just get a depressing feeling.  Dejected I show my sister, who have also forgot to feed him due to her school life, you can see her eyes beginning to water.  She apologizes to me.  I asked him why she apologized.  She said for forgetting to feed Dog.  I tell him I am also at fault.  We ask our mother is there anything that can be done to save him and she replies that there isn't.  We both feel bad, my sister sheds a few tears, and our childhood best friend is dead.  My mother gives us a new seedling and asks if we want to give it another go.  We agree and my sister and I agree that once a day we find time to take care of this new plant. And never let the busyness of our live get in the way.