Final Short Takes Post

For this final post on pieces from "Short Takes", I read "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris, "The Ghetto Girl's Guide to Dating and Romance" by Sonja Livingston, and "Bullet in My Neck" by Gerald Stern. All three of these pieces were very well written and had a lot of detail, and they all related to one another because they all dealt with struggles. Different types of struggles, but struggles none the less. "Me Talk Pretty One Day" was about a student's struggle to speak French while studying in Paris, and I thought that this piece really did a good job at describing his struggles in such a short essay. "The Ghetto Girl's Guide to Dating and Romance" I turned to this essay expecting it to be somewhat humorous, since the title sounded like it would be. However, it was far from it and dealt with an incredibly serious subject. I really did like how she took such a heavy topic and wrote about it in a list-like form instead of just a straight narrative essay, so I think that the format really worked for this piece. In "Bullet In My Neck", Gerald Stern talks about how he got the bullet in his neck due to a shooting. In this short take, Stern writes more about his feelings about the event more than what actually happened,  I would have to say that I would like to know more about what happened in that specific moment in time. As far as how these all connect, they are not so much similar in structure as they are in subject. As I stated before, these three essays are about some sort of struggle or tragic event, and even though the events are all very different each one captures the idea of the inner thoughts, feelings, and emotions that come with various types of tragedies and hardships. These are all great examples of creative nonfiction because they do this, and also because they state the raw facts themselves to tell the story, especially in "The Ghetto Girl's Guide to Dating and Romance". I did notice that these essays seemed to have a similar tone, a tone that educates the reader about what happened, yet used lots of creative language to tell each of their stories. "Ghetto Girl's Guide" had a much more serious tone than the other two due to its intense subject along with having no dialogue, however "Me Talk Pretty One Day" and "Bullet in My Neck" had a very similar tone and structure, using dialogue and paragraphs, rather than list structure. I hope that someday I can learn to master that list-style essay like Livingston though, because even though it wasn't structured like a standard essay, it was still very deep, detailed, and most of all powerful, and I hope that I can learn to write like that.

Short thoughts on "Lady Olga" and "Holiday Pageant"

For this assignment, I read "Lady Olga" by Joseph Mitchell and "Holiday Pageant" by Michael Winerip. In "Lady Olga", I thought it was quite interesting to hear about the life of a "circus freak" and how lonely it can be being the outcast because of being a woman with facial hair. I thought the writing in his was really good and really dove into her perspective, and it was an overall great profile piece. I really loved the part about Edelweiss the cat It was cute, and I also love cats, so I enjoyed that part of the essay. "Holiday Pageant" however, was very short, and was really cute and touching, but I think that it lacked a good writing style and it definitely lacked detail for sure. Out of the two, I would have to say that "Lady Olga" was the better essay.

Response/annotation to "In Bed" by Joan Didion

This whole piece was, (I'm gonna use the word) so relatable to my life! Especially in high school during a growth spurt, I suffered from migraines. I had the kind where they weren't usually headaches, but rather they were attacks of vertigo, where I would get incredibly dizzy and feel like I was about to faint at any given moment, so this piece really made me go "I feel you, sister!" I still get them occasionally, but it is livable, unlike back then when I had to miss school because of it.

1. The first passage that grabbed my attention was on page 689 where she says "for I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches." it made me go "yay, I'm not the only weirdo out there that the doctors could find nothing wrong with but have terrible head drama and determine it migraines!" (yes I said drama)

2. Page 689 "Migraine is something more than the fancy of a neurotic imagination." Why does she state the illness like this? Like, I have always said "I have migraines", but she just says "migraine" as in one singular headache, throughout the piece. I don't quite understand this because I don't know about most people, but in my experience of the condition I have had multiple migraines. Not just one.

3. Page 689-690 "Thomas Jefferson had migraine, and so did Ulysses S. Grant, the day he accepted Lee's surrender" this is interesting because I am actually related to U.S. Grant. Must run in the distant family too. Probably not the case, but I also just found this factual information an interesting addition to the piece.

4. Page 690 "I will drive through red lights, lose the house keys, spill whatever I am holding, lose the ability to focus my eyes or frame coherent sentences, and generally give the appearance of being on drugs." This totally happens. There have been numerous times when I just can't think at all when I have a migraine. It literally just numbs you. (This was another "yeah!" moment)

5. Page 691 "All of us who have migraine suffer not only from the attacks themselves but from this common conviction that we are perversely refusing to cure ourselves by taking a couple of aspirin, that we are making ourselves sick, that we bring it on ourselves." Gosh, tis woman just won't stop peaking the migraine truth!

Overall, this was a well-written explanation of migraines, and that detail, as well as how much I can relate to it, is what made this piece nice to read.

New Creative Blog Post Inspired by APE: 3:30 A.M.

(This was inspired by the APE book as a whole, as well as the essay Death by Lu Hsun.)

3:30 A.M.

            I sit at my desk on a finals week Tuesday night, and it is 3:30 in the morning. I open a book of essays, and flip to one on the topic of death. Perfect, I thought. This is totally representative of how I feel this week. Finals are hitting me hard, and no matter how much coffee, Red Bull, and Mountain Dew that I consumed I could barely stay awake. I have been awake since, since, oh crap, when was the last time I went to bed? Sometime Sunday. perhaps? I honestly have no idea. My caffeine supply is running low, and my roommate has already gone to bed. I cannot turn on a light, so I aim the light of my laptop on the pages of the book. Why did I choose to read this essay of all essays? It is so depressing, talking about ghosts and funeral protocol. Maybe I chose it because it was short, and I the sooner I finish it the sooner I can go to sleep. No. Sleep is for the weak. Woman up Alicia, this is college, the real deal. You aren’t paying thousands of dollars a year to fall asleep on your homework, and the world’s most famous novelists didn’t get famous by sleeping, they got famous by reading and writing. I don’t feel any potential to be famous right now. I feel failure, sadness, caffeine withdrawal, and the DEATH of my hopes and dreams sitting right in front of me. Oh the irony…

One page, down. Two pages, complete. Three pages, accomplished. But that fourth page. Oh, that fourth page. Every essay that I have read in “The Art of the Personal Essay” I have ended up falling asleep during reading, even when I wasn’t this tired, and that is why I chose to sit at my desk instead of in bed. That fourth page however, really made it tempting for me to just fall asleep with my head down on the desk. No, Alicia, you must press on. Finish strong, you can do it. And, I did it. I finished the first APE essay that I have read completely all the way through and not ended up with the book on my face the next morning. My biggest failure in my nonfiction writing class has finally turned to success! My dreams have been brought back to life, and now, because I read that essay without going to sleep, I can do anything! I felt this grand rush of energy and satisfaction, a rush that let me move two feet over to crawl into my little dorm bed. It was my own personal fluffy, soft cushiony marshmallow pool of comfort. It was pure sleepytime bliss.

Short Takes in Relation to Classmate's Essays.

When reading my classmate's essays along with the pieces from Short Takes, I related them in some way. When I read "Men at Night " I found similarities to it in Danielle's essay "Innocence to Womanhood." The similarity that stuck out to me the most between the two was that they both were pieces with a reflective subject, and described in detail an experience with an event or person, with Danielle describing her mom and David Huddle his experience in the military. When I read "Slipping Into Reality" By Emily, and "The Trains" in Short Takes, I compared the two in the way that they both had the same sort of tone and style, using short, yet descriptive sentences to show the emotions that they were feeling.

Post on "Relatable"

When reading this, my first thought was how much I disagreed with this teacher's statements on the subject of the word "relatable". I love the word relatable, and I really love using it because it is a much better way to describe something that you can relate to than just saying "I can relate to that". I think that there is a point to how relatable a piece of writing can be before you feel like you are just reading about your own life, and that is definitely a problem if it is. However a piece, whether fiction or nonfiction, needs to grab the reader's understanding on some level, and writing about things that relate to the readers lives as well does a great job of doing that. Our culture does overuse the word in everyday life and on social media, I will agree with that, but if used correctly in a mature academic setting I don't see any problem with writing something that the reader can relate to or using the word to describe and discuss.

Post About Solnit.

When I read "The Faraway Nearby", I thought that the metaphor behind the apricots is a good example of our inconsistency. According to the apricots in the book, we change over time, even when we cannot see ourselves that anything has changed. We age, we learn, and we sometimes become entirely different people over time, often when least expected. Like Solnit's mother's Alzheimer's, which could not  be anticipated at first, the disease changed her mother as a person entirely. Day by day nothing had really changed, but back over weeks or months, it is apparent that everything has changed, much like the apricots. First, they are picked fresh off of the tree, then they could follow a few different paths, like us with our paths in life. The fruit could get set on a kitchen counter, being forgotten and rotting within a week or two. Or, they could be canned and stored in mason jars, lasting for a year or more before they begin to expire and eventually turn into a pungent liquor. This is how our lives go, different choices leading us down different paths, determining our fate in a way that we can often not predict.

Short description of who I plan to write about.

This is in a way, the beginnings of my essay. For my essay, I plan to interview Vicki Butcher, who was the advisor of Kappa Phi last year and lives in Athens. This is a description of her from my point of view, before I interview her.

Vicki is a person who reminds me a lot of my grandmother. She is patient, kind, and loving toward all of her Kappa Phi girls. Maybe that's why we call her "mom", because she cares about us as if she were the mother of our whole group. Vicki is somewhat short, wears glasses, and dyes her short hair a shade of brown. She lives in Athens, but I don't think that she has always lived here her whole life. I know that she has kids. I forget their names, but she talks about them all the time. I remember every week at chapter meetings she would sit quietly in the corner of the room in what we all called "Vicki's chair", which was an old rocking chair that was painted black with gold detail. She would just watch the meetings, just smiling and keeping to herself as us students discuss details of our service projects ad socials. I really only knew her for one semester before Michelle, our new advisor, took over. However, even though I only knew her for a short time, I was sad just like the other girls when she announced to us that she was retiring. She comes back every now and again to see how we are doing, and Michelle is a wonderful advisor too, but all of us miss "mom". 

It is very obvious that I need to gather more information and perfect this... a lot.

Review of Gary Smith piece.

This one was much better than the last, no crazy ranting review here! I must say I actually kinda liked the bitter-sweetness of this essay, with Takes Enemy's basketball fame to hitting rock bottom to rising up again was certainly more uplifting than the piece about cannibalism. I also enjoyed how the author makes a contrast between the past and the modern age of the Crow tribe, as well as his explanations of the expectations that are present for those in that community. I do think though, that while basketball is certainly a central theme here, I think that Smith relied a little too much on this one aspect to tell a story that was much bigger.

Response to the Piers Paul Read Piece

Okay, okay, okay. This piece I am just not okay with. Just visualizing this cannibalism stuff in my head in all of that detail was flat out disgusting. To be quite honest, I couldn't even finish reading it. I tried, I really did, but I just got too queasy at the thought about 4 pages in and I just couldn't do it! I do have to appreciate the author's very detailed descriptions that paint a very vivid picture, so he did his job well in that department because believe me, the picture in my head was VERY vivid. It is really gritty non sugar-coated facts, and honestly I think that is what bothered me the most, knowing that it actually happened and knowing all of the details of it. I also must give the writer props for being able to write about it without being too disturbed, that would take some talent. Overall, Alicia's review here says that out of all of the survival stories that I have read, this one was not the best, I mean, I couldn't even finish it and the whole thing was about cannibalism. Maybe I just couldn't see the deeper meaning because I was so grossed out, I don't know.  1 out of 5 stars.

Short response to "the Night Trucks"

I have to say that I can relate to "The Night Trucks", and that once again, it makes me think of my youth spent at my grandparent's farm, and how one particular memory comes to mind about the same sort of subject. A lot of things that we have read in this class makes me think of those days! My family's farm is not as large of scale of a farm as Kent Meyers' was, with our main emphasis being soybeans and corn, not so much livestock. But, we did have some, mostly consisting of cattle, swine, and a few chickens, just enough for the family and to occasionally sell meat to a few local friends. When I was about eight or nine years old, there was this one little piggy that I really loved. It was the runt of a litter of pigs born on Christmas day one year, with a black and white saddle back pattern and a long scar running down its back, and I named it Holly since it was born on Christmas. The spring and summer of that year I watched her grow up, finally catching up to the size of the rest, but still keeping her gentle nature, being especially nice and patient for a pig. I was the only one who could feed her, mostly since the other pigs would get to it all first since she was so passive. So, every day, I would take her out of the pen and give her her own scoop of food. But then, quite some time later, My uncle Scott came in with the routine bucket: the bucket filled with cheap beer and sliced bananas. I knew what that meant; it meant that the pigs, including Holly, were going to be fattened up to be sold or slaughtered. As a little kid, I was devastated. Holly was my friend, as weird as that sounds. I took care of her ever since she was born, and the day I saw them loaded into that rickety brown livestock trailer, I cried and sat in the house, unable to watch them drive my piggy away.

Mini Essay Inspired by "Street Haunting"

Old books have always fascinated me. They look interesting, with their yellowed pages and often frayed and faded binding. They even smell good to me, for if literature had a smell, that would be it. I remember going through my grandma’s attic as a kid, looking at all of these old books. I don’t remember the titles of any of them off the top of my head, none were any that I had ever heard of, but what I do remember and still have today is my desire to read each and every one of them. I want to unlock magical worlds trapped between the pages of those tattered and ignored volumes, worlds that my friends will most likely never enter unless they come across some old books too. This is why I love old books.

Response to Woolf Piece in Relation to Classmate's Essay.

First off, I would like to say that I was completely and thoroughly confused by these essays, especially the first one. I understood that she was writing about a walk through town and the different things that she saw, but the pencil thing baffled me. She brings up the pencil a lot, and I’m not quite sure what the hidden meaning behind that is and I feel like I should. This is difficult, so it probably won’t be correct, but if I had to relate a classmate’s essay from this workshop day to one of these Woolf essays I would have to say that Braden’s is closest simply because they both use vivid descriptions to talk about their surroundings.

Response to "January"

I really enjoyed “January” because I found this piece to be really relatable to me personally. From my experience and childhood years at the farm, I knew all of these uses for baling twine and more. We usually used the orange kind though, it was a little stronger and had uses of all sorts. It was great for tying down tarps, temporarily tying together fences, and even for hanging laundry on, if the laundry was light enough. I don't know much about horses, but I am very familiar with baling twine and on a farm, it is the thread of life, so I really enjoyed that reference in this piece.

Short essay inspired by "Muskgrass Chara"

My nose is cursed and I can thank my father. I always had a stronger sense of smell than most people; I could smell everything, the good, bad, and often, the worst. It was more of a curse than a blessing, but there were some occasions when I loved having my super sensitive nose. Like, when I’m in a flower shop or a bakery it is the best thing ever. Whenever I walk into Fluff on Court Street I can smell the cookies and cakes baking right down to the ingredients. Caramelized sugar will taunt me to buy a cookie, and the scent of cinnamon sends a delightful tingle to the tip of my nose, allowing me to experience the joys of sweet scent more than anyone else I know. When my nose becomes a curse however, is pretty much any other time. For example: when someone farts, when I pass a sewer, when there is rotten food in the fridge, my room last year when I had a roommate that didn’t shower, when I go to a gym, a heaping basket of dirty laundry, cat litter, smelly shoes. The list goes on and on. If I were to list all of them, you may fall asleep before you finish reading. However, one thing that I have always found useful about my strong nose is that I am able to tell when people are going to be sick, up to three days before they begin showing any symptoms. Sometimes, I can even smell when I am going to be sick. I can smell ashes on the breath of people who are carrying a virus, and I had no idea what that smell that I have sniffed all of my life was until my dad told me when I was about 12 years old. He is the only one I know who has the same talent, and he explained the whole thing to me. “It’s carbon dioxide, Alicia. People produce more of it when they are sick because they are fighting a virus. That’s what you smell.” So, basically, I can weird my friends out by letting them know that they will be sick in the near future. Those who are unaware of my curse think I am a basket case when I tell them, but then three days later when they are in bed coughing up a lung and not in class, they think that I am a witch who practices some sort of black magic. Nope. I’m just a girl with a really sensitive nose who decided to be nice and give her friends a heads-up.