4/8

Today we went over the second half of the book and discussed a few sections from there.  We looked at Live wire, which was about a down power line that scared everyone, although no one got her everyone in the neighborhood stared at it.  It was compared to the death of his brother and how no one saw this coming, although the knew the day would come, they were not ready for it.  But, who could be ready for the death of a family member?

We looked at the house of the future which talked about the author's trip to Disney World with his family in his boyhood.  He thoroughly described the House of the Future attraction that they had back then.  And how the house had all these gadgets and did all these cool things.  Like how the house had mobile lighting that bathe the rooms in a glow and warmth like that of the sun's light.  He also, talked about how the house had ten times as many windows as a normal home.  He talked about the large pool the house had and compared to a kiddie pool and how much more amazing it looked with it's amoeba shape.

In the same work, he spoke of his brother's death and how it affected the family.  That day in November, how it was cloudy before the days leading up to his brother's death and how it rained non-stop on that day.  He also, talked about how his parents were out of it.  How blank they were.  with his mother just holding an unlit cigarette and his father just driving almost directionless.  I pictured such a sad sight.

My 1st grade classroom

            My 1^st day in 1^st grade.  Unlike, kindergarten there weren’t many crying faces and the classroom was not as colorful as the predecessor.  Since it was a Catholic school, everyone seemed to blend together since we all wore the same thing, with the only exception being that the female half of the school wore skirts and their male counterparts wore pants, naturally.  The board hung on the wall in front of the room.  Above, was stabled the number line which was all colorful and the numbers were personified with cartoonish eyes, arms and legs, this nonsensical thing attracted much of my attention.  The doorway to the hall stood beside the blackboard which was, for some apparent reason, greenish in color.  When you come into the classroom on your right would sit everyone’s desk.  Which were individual desk all facing the board, aligned perfectly with its row and column.  On the left were the coat racks which pretended to be lockers or where made into lockers unknowingly.  Everyone had their own coat rack, which was always over stuffed and spilled out onto the floor.  They were quite messy when the classroom was active and full, papers were always everywhere.  In mine, hid my bad progress reports. 

            Toward the back of the room sat the teacher’s desk, which also face forward.  And behind that were the big window or perhaps at the time they were bigger that mine which probably made them seem bigger than they were.  Even though they were big the only thing you can see outside them was the adjacent building, which was the Cathedral.  The Cathedral was huge on the inside and I always found it beautiful.  We went there often for prayer and sometimes communion, I remember doing a confessional once, too. But, I don’t remember what I confessed.  But back to our classroom.  The ceiling had lights that hung down but, not too far from the ceiling.  Those lights, I remember whenever the classroom was real quiet you could hear them silently hum a bored buzzing sound.  The classroom smelled like old library, which gave off a dusty somewhat ancient book smell.  On the wall to the far right of the classroom beyond the desk, were all types of posters.  There were posters of animals, sesame street characters, tele-tubbies, power rangers, Jesus, Santa, etc.  The wall even had the alphabet poster, which was used when we covered the letters, spelling, and sounds of letters.  Although it was dull compared to the colorful kindergarten class, it had a comfortable feeling.

4/1

My birthday.. yay...

Today in class we started reading the Maps To Anywhere by Bernard Cooper.  We looked over the first half of the book and talked about a few of the sections.  I looked at Capiche?, the title caught my attention.  I read it think about a mobster movie.  But it turned out it wasn't that kind of story.  It was a tale about an adventure in Italy.  although in the end the whole story turned out to be a lie, which I found kind of funny because why the lie, although it was a good one.

Someone mentioned Atlantis, which asked an interesting question about where did barber poles originate from.  And, talked of the relationship of the author and his barber and how he and this man were closer than him and his father.  We also look at How To Draw, about how his art teacher said his art wasn't art because it didn't meet her standards of what art should be.  I also found this one funny because isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder, how can one person defame someones art or compare someone's art to another.  That hardly seems fair.

Then we read sleeping with my father, which talked about the author's father.  This talked about his father's marriage to his mother and his job during the author's boyhood.  How his father, a lawyer, would cheat on his mother with the secretary.  Then after the divorce, his religious second wife and his third wife who seemed to always be in heat.  Then the author talks about how sad his father seemed to be later in life and how they began to form a real father son relationship because his father was distant and busy at work during his childhood.

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.