Hamlet

When I was told we were going to have to read half of Hamlet by Tuesday, I thought that it was going to be a lot of work. And then I started reading Hamlet and realized that not only had I already read it twice in high school, but I had also seen the movie version with Mel Gibson in it. I was happy about this because reading Shakespeare to me sometime is like solving a math equation. You have to go over it several times and sometimes decode the old English words to figure out what he is trying to say or what he really means. So this time reading it through was more of like a refresher instead of the agony of having to do like 50 pages of math homework. I hate math. Math is my worst subject and specifically chose a major in college where I would be doing as little math as possible, Thank God. I have always liked the story of Hamlet though, except for the end. I wish that everyone would not die and just Hamlet’s uncle, and well maybe his mom too because she should not have married his uncle. I mean, how could she not see that they guy was so evil and that he murdered his own brother, Hamlet’s daddy, just to be with this women, oh and to also become king. What a tool. And then you have the love of Hamlet’s life in Ophelia and her father thinks that Hamlet is that bad one. It is just amazing the naiviness, if that’s even a word, of all the people who think Hamlet is awful. And then when Ophelia dies you just know that Hamlet is going to take down his uncle for all the atrocities he has committed. All in all I think it is a good story/play.

Football

I, like most people in America, love football. Tonight on Monday Night Football the Saints are playing the Patriots. This is going to be a sweet game because the Patriots are and have been one of the best teams in the NFL for a very long time and they have one of the best quarterbacks, Tom Brady, coaches, Bill Belichik, and wide receivers in Randy Moss. So they are pretty much stacked. And they have also made the playoffs for like 9 straight years and won 3 of the last 5 super bowls. The Saints are more of an up and coming team but they are undefeated and the best team in the NFC. They have one of the best quarterbacks in Drew Brees. He has set multiple records in his career and it seems like every year he just gets better and better. Much like Brett Favre who is 40 years old and playing some of the best football of his career. In fact, he(Favre) just led the Vikings to a win over my favorite team, Da Bears. Unfortunately for me, the bears are just awful this year, which deeply saddens me as I am a die-hard bears fan. It is even more disappointing because they spent all this money on a new quarterback and he has been awful, I mean it is painful to watch him play because he throws a million interceptions. He was supposed to be the qb of the future, but instead he is just awful and a waste of money. The bears have hardly any talent on any side of the ball it seems, as they are being blown out pretty much every week, and they started off the season 3-1. They have won one game since then and lost 6 of 7. I wish they would fire the person in charge of hiring and/or scouting players because he is obviously blind. I did not mean for this blog post to turn out as a rant against the bears and how much they suck and waste my time on Sundays, but its hard not to be so pissed when it seems like every year they say they are going to get better and then blow more than the last year. And I am also a Cubs fan so life pretty much sucks for me.

thanksgiving

I had a really fun Thanksgiving this year. This is one of the first years since I was 12 that I have been able to spend the holiday with my family. Every year since I was 12, I went to Louisville, KY to play in a tennis tournament and I always went with my coach and other players and never with my family. We went to Atlanta because my aunt, uncle, 2 cousins and grandparents live there. My brother and his wife also came down. I enjoy spending time with my 2 cousins because they are both a little younger than me and I feel like they have always looked up to me a little bit. Unfortunately, I do not get to see them very much but when I do, I like to make it count. We all played tennis together and then they took me to this farm where they keep their dirt bike. I had ridden a dirt bike several times when I was in middle school so I figured I could still do it. I was riding in a big fenced in circle and on my second lap I told my cousins I thought I had the hang of it and then proceeded to crash into the fence. I hurt my ankle and hand and also broke off the front fender of the bike and side. I got back up though and after awhile I even taught myself how to ride wheelies. It was sweet. Afterwards, we all played ping pong and I dominated, as I have never lost to my little cousins in any sporting activity, and hopefully never will. All in all I would say it was one of my favorite if not favorite Thanksgivings because I actually got to spend it with my family and we all got a long and had fun.

Decisions

I have a very interesting decision to make regarding Thanksgiving weekend. My parents are going to leave the Friday after Thanksgiving to go to Atlanta. They are going to visit my dad's mom who has been sick for awhile but it recovering, sort of. My grandmother has been on dialysis for three years and is almost 80 years old. It has finally taken a toll on her body and it appears to be shutting down. She was in the hospital for two weeks last month because she had pneumonia and a heart attack and possibly a stroke. We do not know exactly as neither do the doctors. The reason she went into the hospital in the first place was because she refused to eat anything. She was down to 90 pounds and still losing weight. So a few weeks ago me and my family went down there and spent a weekend with her in the hospital and it appeared as if she was not going to make it. My brother's wife, a doctor, suggested that they move hospitals because it appeared to her that she was not being properly cared for. After she moved, she began to eat a little and recovered somewhat. She was then released to her home and my parents went down to make sure everything was going smoothly ( I was at a tennis tournament or I would have also gone). So now she is home and has two different caretakers to help her out, but now she is not eating again and weighs only 80 pounds. My parents said they were going to go there for Thanksgiving to see how she was doing and see how my grandfather was holding up. My parents gave me the option to go with or stay at home, citing that I am an adult who can make his own decisions and I don't have to go if I do not want to. There are some people coming in for Thanksgiving break who I am really excited to see and it would be very advantageous, for several reasons, to be able to have the house to myself for this time. On the other hand, I would feel like complete shit if I had the opportunity to see my grandma before she dies and then dies before I get to see her again. I have asked a few friends and surprisingly they were all on the side of staying home and seeing my grandmother at a later date. But what if that is not possible? I also have to factor in that My uncle and his family live there. My family does not really get along at all with their family especially my aunt. So those times are always really fun. My aunt is this super crazy baptist, I love Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck and everything to do with conservatism and FOX news. So what will I do? Either way I will be somewhat upset that I could not have both, but "You can't always get what you want."

Friends

I first started college at a small university in Tennessee called Austin Peay State Univ. It is located in Clarksville, TN. I went up there because I really wanted to play tennis and they offered me a scholarship so I thought why not? While I was there I became more disenchanted with tennis because of the coach and lack of help and overall sense of team unity, so I wanted to branch out. My second year at the Peay I started hanging out with a lot of guys who were in Kappa Sigma. I hesitated to join because I did not know how long I was going to be there and didn't see a point in spending the money. My last semester there most of my friends in the fraternity convinced me to join, but I hesitated until they offered to pay my initial fees. I couldn't say no to that. So I joined and now I talk to maybe a handful of my old fraternity brothers. There are two in particular who I keep in very close contact with. One of them, Miguel, left Austin Peay the same year I did because he needed to go to school closer to home, Brownsville, TN, so he went to Southwest. We hung out all the time last year because he was coming to Memphis a few times a week and occasionally I'd go to Brownsville and stay with him and his family, who always greeted me with open arms and made some of the best mexican food I've ever had, hands down. Well, at the end of last spring he told me he had no more money to go to school or really live and it sucked because I, being a broke college student, could do nothing to help one of my best friends. He decided to go into the national gaurd and it made sense to me. Once he got done with training and all that, he would pretty much get paid to go to school and live. The only drawback is he might have to go to Iraq, or more likely now Afghanistan. I had not seen him for 7 months until last Friday. He finally made it home and his parents threw him a huge surprise party. I, of course, drove up to Brownsville to finally hang out with my friend. He had not changed much, thank God, and was still hilarious and loved to have a good time. He of course had plenty of crazy stories and interesting stories about some crazy drill sgts he had. He starts school in January and I hope we get to have many more good times and that he does not have to get deployed. He is a true friend.

POV A Worn Path

I think that watching the movie version of "A Worn Path" hurt the point of view originally presented in the story. In the book version, we start off o a journey with an old black lady who is going on a journey into town to get some medicine for her assumed to be alive grandson. We get to walk with this lady and hear all her thoughts, as she pretty much says them aloud. In the book we get to read what she thinks when she passes certain areas and sees certain things. I do not fell like the movie version did this justice. In the movie, the old black lady definitely says almost the exact same things that are in the book, but her movements are a little different and her mannerisms, or at least different from how I imagined they would be. When she encounters the hunter in the book, you get a sense of how she feels toward this man and how she feels. Not necessarily by what she says, but how the author describes her movement. Maybe I am just being too hard on the movie version. I feel like it is really hard to do a good book justice in movie form. It is just really hard to capture, or at least I belive it is, the way a book can make you feel versus a movie because with a book you can personalize it. You can make the characters almost your own and imagine, based on reading, what they would look like and how they would be. Needless to say, I liked the book version much more than I liked the movie version of "A Worn Path."

tennis

Tennis season for the fall is finally over and I am pretty excited about it. I suppose maybe I would feel a little differently if I was a player on the team, but being manager definitely is not as fun. I played tennis for two years at APSU in Clarksville, TN. It had its ups and downs but since I realized that the coach there would never be honest with me or help me with my tennis game I had grow so frustrated that I just decided to quit. Tennis had no longer become fun to me. When I first came to Memphis, I had no intentions of doing anything with the tennis teams, but since I had a long relationship with both the men’s and women’s coaches as well as a couple of players on the team, it was hard for me to turn down being manager. It is nice to still be part of the team and none of the guys or girls treat me with any disrespect, which is nice. When I first agreed, I thought maybe that some of the guys would think that they were so much better than me and could treat me poorly because I was just the manager, but that was not the case. I was well received by all the players and of course I already knew the coaches so there was no problem there. I am glad the fall is over, but I am excited for the teams’ to realize their potential and dominate in the spring, when it really counts. Go Tigers!

being sick

I have been sick now for the last two days and it has been awful. I hate being sick and not being able to do anything. It is one of the most annoying and worst feelings in the world because even if you want to do anything, you can’t. I began feeling ill about three days ago and have had my head in the toilet for the last couple of days. However, I am starting to feel like the worst is behind me, thank God. I did not miss any school because in most of my classes we are getting to the time where if you miss something, it becomes really hard to make it up and to catch up. I am really looking forward to get over this flu and living a normal life again. I really hope that I am better by the weekend. One of my really good friends and old fraternity brothers, by the way I have not been active in a fraternity for two years as I joined one at another school and decided I had to grow up when I came to Memphis, is getting out of the national guard. When he told me he was going, I did not think he was going to be gone for long. However, I haven’t seen him in 6 months because he kept getting in trouble while he was at training camp or whatever it is called. But it is not like he was doing anything bad, he was just hooking up with female officer, which apparently is against the rules in the army. Whatever. I am excited to see my buddy and see how training was on him.

homework

1. Sonny’s Blues is told from Sonny’s brother’s perspective. We never do find out his name though. The narrator is a very straight person meaning someone who is always trying to morally do the things he thinks are right such as not doing drugs and abiding the law. His view affects the story because his brother is the opposite of him. So we know how Sonny’s brother feels about the things Sonny does but, not until the end of the story do we get a peek into how Sonny really feels.
2. The older brother is a school teacher suggesting that he is not a wild person who likes to go out and go to jazz night clubs and do drugs. Also that he is a very straight person
3. If the story were told by Sonny we would be able to know why Sonny made the choices he made and how it has affected his views on life. We would also be able to know what Sonny was going through when he was in rehab.
4. The death of the narrator’s daughter prompts him to finally write Sonny.
5. The mother makes the narrator promise to always look after Sonny and make sure he is doing well. The narrator fails to fulfill this promise until he writes Sonny and then Sonny eventually comes to live with the narrator. Then they both open up more to each other and the narrator lets Sonny know that he does not want him to die, or kill himself by overdosing on heroin.
6. With the writer deciding to keep the main characters’ names simple, it lets the reader become more involved in the story for a couple of reasons. One, they do not have to remember so many characters to try to keep up with the story. Two, it makes the story seem like the reader is more a part of it since the writer is calling the characters mom and dad and the brother by the first name. The audience almost feels like they are in the role of the older brother(narrator) since the story is told from his view and he is never named.
7. Sonny has made the music his own by not letting drugs control the way he plays. He most likely was only playing before under the influence of drugs and now that he is drug free, he will be able to play what he wants to play and not be under the control of heroin.

A Worn Path
1. The story is told from the writer’s perspective, but it may as well have been told from the old Phoenix’s perspective because she lets the audience know all of her thoughts out loud any way. It is not told from Phoenix’s perspective because she is not describing the action in the story, unless she is speaking.
2. Phoenix is aptly named because she acts as a phoenix would. She stays strong even as she gets old and is extremely loyal to her grandson.
3. By having Phoenix tell us pretty much everything that is going on in her mind, it does make it a little hard to separate reality from fantasy. However, it really makes it easier for you to put yourself in Phoenix’s shoes and realize that what she is doing is not easy and that sometimes people have to amuse themselves to get through things.
4. She is not treated well by the white people, but she is not treated very poorly either. The audience should be able to tell from this that the story is set after the end of the civil war but definitely before the 1950’s in the south.
5. She admires the black dog because he, like her, looks as if he has persevered through some tough times but that does not stop the dog from keeping on.