My brother

My brother is the most important person in the world to me. He is my best friend and my only brother and I am glad he is both. He is 7 years older than me and one would think that with the large age gap that we wouldn't get a long or talk much, but that is simply not true. I did not even really spend hardly any time with my brother, that i can remember, until I was 18. When I was growing up in most of high school and middel school he was not there. He was in college far away and then as soon as college was over, moved away. When I was 18 he came in town and took me to a concert and I had one of the best times of my life. Since then we both started realizing that we had a lot in common and shared a lot of the same interests. Since then we have spent as much time together as we can. He has come to every tennis match that I have had since then and we have attended numerous music and arts events such as Bonnaroo, professional tennis events, and many other events. He has always been able to provide me with sound advice and has taught me so many things in my life I do not know how I could ever truly thank him.

Atlanta

I just got back from Atlanta because I had to visit my grandmother. unfortuantely, it was not a happy visit. My grandmother has been on dialysis for the last three years and had been doing ok up until about three weeks ago. She stopped eating, but did not complain of any pain or anything. Two weeks ago she weighed about 90 pounds so the doctors decided it was finally time to see what was wrong. They performed a colonoscopy on her, but while they were doing this she was so frail that her body could not handle it and she had a heart attack. She then got pneumonia in both lungs. She thought she had recovered this past monday and when the doctors told her she needed to go into assissted living and do physical therapy, she freaked out. She left the hospital with my grandfather without permission and went home. She then had to call 911 because she could not even make it into bed. Now she is in the icu and trying to recover. She now wieghs no more than 80 lbs and is steadily declining I fear. She will not eat even though I tired to feed her several times and now it seems that all she wants to do is have morphine. I wish there was some way I could make her realize she needs to eat, but I fear that she is just so tired from the dialysis and everything that she just does not want to feel any pain and leave us all. I can not imagine being in her situation and how I would feel if i was her. Who knows? I might have the same feelings if I was in her situation. I also had an interesting conversation with my granfather talking about how it is so weird that now he has to depend on his two sons and he can remember when they had to depend on him. It is the cycle of life. People grow from a baby to responsible adults and then after a while, they regress back into the baby stage. It is sad, interesting and true.

O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor is both a southerner and a catholic and she uses both to fuel her characters and plots in her writings. I am also a catholic and somewhat of a southerner. I was born in Chicago, but moved to Memphis when I was pretty young. In her stories, she incorporates the old southern way of thinking and dressing and such into many of her characters. For example, the grandmother in “A Good Man,” the wife and Parker in “Parker’s Back,” and the wife and husband in “Revelation.” Each one of these characters shares some traditional southern traits. She does this, I feel, because she does not want her writings to become ordinary. She wants her writings to reflect how people in the old south behaved. Traditional southerners behaved in a way that for many was very religious, racist, and a way of showing respect to elders and the way life was. All three women characters in the three stories that we read are very religious and two out of the three were very racist. They believed that they were part of a higher class of people and that if you were from a good family then you were part of the higher class, and of course if you were white. By making these people reflect traditional southern customs, she makes them unlike what most people are writing about. Most writers are writing about modern people in gray suits and not paying attention to what O’Connor called ‘the greater freaks’, which to her where the traditional southerners. It is also interesting that she would include religion in many of her stories because she was a Catholic, which was, and still somewhat is, frowned upon in the south. Most southerners were raised Baptist which carries a whole different set of norms than Catholicism. I believe that she included religion because, although not Baptist, she was very religious and saw that religion was the only way to see the good in the world.

creative response

For our essays, instead of writing an essay I decided to do the creative response. So, me and three other people from our class made a video on the Glass Menagerie. We did sort of a modern take on some of the scenes from the Williams' play. I played Tom the the drunk son wkho just wanted to get away from his mother and see the world. I was put in charge by the mother, Amanda, to find a date for my sister Laura played by Carly. I think Carly did a great job in the video especially when it comes to the dancing scene. We put a twist in the play and made the gentleman caller, Jim, for Laura an African-American. Amanda's character of course does not like the idea of having a black man date her daughter, but as the video goes she is just happy to have a gentleman caller for Laura. I think that had this been written into the original play, Williams would have had Amanda act a lot worse towards the caller than we had her portrayed as doing. All in all it was a fun and interesting learning experience. Not only did I learn how to incorporate scenes from a play into a movie and mash them with some modern takes, but I also got to learn how to use windows movie maker and how to edit which ended up taking a lot longer then I thought. The video turned out great though. A+ material of course!!

Peer editing

I am always nervous a little bit when we do peer editing. I like criticism but sometimes I do not like receiving it from classmates. A lot of times I feel like they do an inaccurate job of looking over my paper for mistakes. It also really bothers me when someone inserts their own opinion in to how they think this idea of mine or that idea of mine should be incorporated into the paper differently. A lot of times I think that people are also just editing just to say they did some work. I know that it is good to hear criticism and other people's ideas on how they think something should be, but when it comes to my writing a lot of times I feel like I have a certain idea of how I want the paper to play out or how I want the speech to play out. I really feel like I need to be more open to people's ideas when it comes to my work because I always expect people to be open to my ideas/criticisms when I offer them. When we do peer editing it is cool to kind of see how others feel/view certain topics differently or the same as you. It's interesting to see if people interpreted a story the same way you did or if the saw something completely different.

Homework for 10/22

1. O’Connor foreshadows the ending events very early in the story. Within the first two to three paragraphs the character of the Misfit is already introduced and then the audience finds out that the family will be traveling to the same area where the Misfit is. The scene from Red Sammy’s all but confirms because Sammy talks about how if there was a Misfit, he certainly would come here which foreshadows that he will be in the area and the traveling family is very likely to see him.
2. The grandmother is a very annoying character. She seems like she has a set view of the way things should be because that’s how they were when she was growing up. She is constantly nagging or talking to any member of the family that will listen to her. She is a static character because she does not change at all through the story. At the beginning, she is trying to get her way by going to TN instead of Florida and nagging and talking to the children and their father. In the middle, she is still annoying by talking Red Sammy’s ear off about the way things used to be in and at the end of the story she annoys the Misfit the whole time until he shoots her.
3. The grandmother had a moment of clarity right before she was shot. She realized that she was going to be killed no matter what. The Misfit had already killed everyone else so logically she was next. She maybe thought for an instant that she could save him by showing the love that Jesus showed, but it proved to be futile as she was immediately shot.
4. From the conversation between the Misfit and grandma, we learn a couple of things. We learn that the Misfit is taking the other family members to the woods to be killed. We also learn that the Misfit has a very pessimistic outlook on life. The only thing he really believes in is enjoying the pleasures of life which to him include killing people and harassing them. He does not believe in Jesus and His stories because he was not there to see them so he has no idea if they are true. He has no faith.


6 . The answer came back to her as clear as day because even though she was not talking to anybody. Her answer came to her because she finally was starting to realize that the way she thought about people and their classes and distinctions were not correct.
7. Mrs. Turpin has a vision of all different kinds of people, black, white trash, all going to heaven and her class of people is in the back of this line. She realizes that in God’s eyes everyone is foregiven and equal. She is not better than anyone else just because she is white and blacks are not worse or less respectable just because they are black.


5. Parker not liking long views because they made him think about religion and government shows the audience that Parker is very insecure. He is not very smart and worried about things of which he has very little or no control over.
6. Parker is motivated to get the tattoo on his back because he thinks that his wife will finally like a tattoo he gets. He thinks of the idea for the tattoo when he crashes the tractor into the tree and someone yells OH GOD.
7. Parker shows a lot of self awareness. He shows this when he know that he would not be happy with his wife and he also shows this when he realizes that the Christ tattoo is just something for his wife that he does not really want. He realizes that all these things he does are bad for him or knot in his favor but for some reason does them anyway.
8. The quote shows that Parker believes that people get what they deserve in life and getting the things you get in life has nothing to do with religion. By these standards, Parker gets exactly what he deserves because he did not want to better himself with school and could not stay in the navy and knew he should not get in a relationship with his current wife, yet he did it any way. He suffers, but only because he has put himself in the position to be one who suffers.
9. Sara Ruth does not recognize OE by his initials because she prefers what his initials stand for instead, which are two classic biblical names. This shows that she has control and making Parker do this makes him feel like she is in charge of him and she has all the control in the relationship.

Glass Menagerie Creative Option

Here is the link for the video and creative option that Tara, Jordan, Carly and I did. We did some scenes from the Glass Menagerie. Hope you all enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uASlR5mMLfw

vacation

I saw someone else write about their idea of a dream vacation so I started thinking about my own. If i could have any vacation I wanted it would span the globe and last probably about a year. I would spend a month in Australia. I went to Aussie land once when I was a senior in high school to play tennis. I was there for a month and went to three cities and had the best time ever. The air there is so clean and the beaches and people were so nice. And everyone there surfs and is just so friendly. If I could move anywhere right now it would be there or California. The next month I would travel to Europe and spend about 3 months there. I would just travel around from country to country and check out all the fine points. I would go to Germany, France and Great Britain and Spain as well as others. I have never been to Europe but have heard it is amazing. I would spend one month in Northern California and one month in Southern California as each region has a uniqueness to it's land and culture. I would spend a month in Mexico, but only if I could do it in a protected area since that place is a haven for murderous drug lords, but they also have amazing beaches. I would spend three months in South America because I have also always wanted to go there. It would be sweet to go to the rainforest and to go to beaches in Brazil. I also love latin american food so that would be an added bonus. I would spend one moth in Asia, probably China and Japan just to check it out. I know China is very strict and has a terrible government but it would still be sweet to go. The last month I would spend partially in Chicago, visiting family and the city as that is where I am from, and the other part at my house in Memphis, relaxing from a year long vacation.

Menagerie

For our upcoming essays, instead of writing one, me and three other people from my class are making a video. I am looking forward to it as it should be interesting. We are all getting together this week to write the exact script for it, but it should not be too entirely difficult. For the script is pretty much already written for us since we are just doing a couple of scenes from The Glass Menagerie. We are going to open with Tom(me) doing his opening narration. Then we will mostly be doing the scenes and scene surrounding the gentleman caller's arrival and feast. We are going to, of course, insert a few of our own takes on how the action should be, but overall I believe we are going to mostly use Williams' ideas. Hopefully it will be entertaining for all and will earn us all a's. I am excited to make it!

A Streetcar

Yesterday I went to go see A Streetcar Named Desire. I went to the Hattiloo theatre right by Sun studios to see it and it was very interesting. I have read the play and seen the movie already so I was interested to see how it would actually look in play form and it was very interesting. The theatre was definitely the smallest theatre I have ever been in, but it was cozy. My seat was very uncomfortable though. It was cool because it felt like the action was so close that we were all almost part of the play. It was easy to hear when any one in the audience was doing something because of the small theatre so that made the play extra interesting. I like most of the actors however, I did not enjoy the male lead. He was trying to use an accent the whole time and it just did not work. It sounded like he was trying to fuse a northeastern accent with a cajun accent and what we ended up getting was some sort of jumble. I mean he almost sounded like a duck most of the time he talked. I really hope he was not trying to pull of a Polish accent, since he was supposed to be Polish, because I have many relatives who still speak mostly Polish and he was far from it. He was also very far from a Creole/Cajun accent. I also thought the lady playing Blanche did an interesting job. I say interesting because she forgot a lot of her lines and would say the line that was coming up instead of the one that she was supposed to be saying and then stop and say the correct line. That part was bad. However, I do feel as if she did a really good job portraying the actions Blanche would make. She was very good at being flirtatious and acting as if she could not be in the light. All in all I would not say it was the best play I have ever seen, but it was pretty good.

MNF

The Vikings are playing the Packers tonight in Monday Night Football and I really hope they have a draw, but that it is a really high schoring draw. I hate both of these teams because I am a die hard Chicago Bears fan, and those two teams are our biggest rivals. So naturally I hope both of those teams play to some sort of deathmatch, like they used to have Celebrity Deathmatch on MTV, where no team wins. I do also play fantasy football and unfortuantely I have players on my fantasy team from both of these teams so I really hope that only these three players do well and everyone else has some sort of weird accident or something. I am sure that if any of my family in Chicago knew I had these players from our rival teams, I would end up in some freak 'accident.' Either way, as long as I get like ten points I win my league game, again I might add, and go undefeated in my league. Not that any of this matters and I feel really dorky for talking about fantasy football and even dorkier admiting that I have a fantasy football team, but whatever. If you're calling me a dork for that you would probably have to call about a million other people, maybe more, who play fantasy something, whether it be football, baseball, basketball or some other sport. I have even heard of fantasy golf and Ill be honest, I have no idea how that would work. Golf goes on all year and there are about a million different tournaments they play in. That just does not sound like fun to me.

Cell phones

I really feel like cell phones and text messaging our destroying the way we communicate with eacth other. For example, whenever you need something quick done or you just want to mention something briefly, most people from my generation are going to text message. It's not only for small things that people text about but people text about going out on dates, setting up events, etc. There is no personal one on one communication anymore. You no longer have to be good at conversing with people, but all you have to do now is be aware of what lingo or words are 'in' and use them in a text. People are no longer directly communicating. You can not tell whether someone is happy or sad or emotionless in a text message. All you get to see is some sort of electronic emotion, not really what the people are feeling. When talking to someone on the phone, you get a sense of how some one feels by the way they react to what you say. It is also easier to tell via phone if the person you are talking to is genuine or not. On text messages you have no idea how the person you are texting really feels. It is so much easier for people to hide their emotions because they can take as much time as they want to respond and respond they way they so chose, not necessarily how they feel. There is no warmth in electronics, but limitless emotions in human beings.