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.