Looking back on my blog, I feel like it overall was a good exercise. Being about the receive feedback on ideas, but no to your face, was a good way to get things out semi-anonymously. It was also nice to be able to read what other people thought of things that I had also read and clear things up about stories or poems (or whatever the blog of the day may have been) before we started class. 

The biggest problem I had with the blog was that it just makes me a little uncomfortable. I feel funny knowing someone is sitting and reading what I thought about something for class, or my essay, and not being able to see a reaction. Just being self-conscious about my work made me feel funny about posting all of my ideas online. I feel like since writing these fairly often, I'm starting to get a little more comfortable with it. I guess I just need to not feel like it's such a personal thing to write about how I feel about things in a blog. I feel like now, however, I am able to be more candid about what I am writing on here (obviously), and writing on her has helped me to just not worry about things and get it over with. I really did enjoy being able to get feedback on things that I was thinking about the assignments for the day, especially when I didn't say the things that I thought in class. It was a good way to be able to get everyone to participate in a "class discussion" without having to take face-to-face. Everyone could be candid and write what they thought, get feedback, and be honest. That's a cool idea. 

Another thing that I would do is type everything up in Word, and then completely forget about it. For some reason I thought I had all of these blogs already posted, and then it turns out I was just an idiot. That's no one's fault but mine... I guess I'm just a little more absent minded than I thought! This made it hard for me to actually get the feedback that I should have on my assignments, and defeated the whole purpose of the blog. If I did this all over again, I would have to leave myself sticky notes everywhere not to forget to post my blog. 

One last problem that I am realizing as I write this is that the blog has made me feel very informal about writing. I reread the prompt for this essay, only to see that it is indeed an essay, with paragraphs and main ideas and a format. Mine doesn't have that. Writing on a blog just makes it feel like I'm sending an email, telling how I feel about things and then having someone on the other end read it, nonchalantly. Maybe I'm being a little too candid, but I feel like at this point, that's what this blog deserves. It has served as a place for each of us to write about our assignments in a casual way. Get to know each other without actually knowing each other and talk without actually talking. It's actually a little strange. 

So, overall, I'm really thankful for this informal blog I have going on, and I think it was a great way to share ideas with everyone, and for everyone to be able to get out just what they thought about a topic without being interrupted, and with the privilege of getting to sit and think about it, and put it in thought-out words (and in my case thought-out stream of consciousness). 

ROUGH DRAFT

Everyone has seen a missing person’s ad, newscast, or flyer at some point in his or her life. News teams with “Breaking coverage” for what they think might help to solve the case. The missing person’s parents on TV, just wanting their child back, showing old pictures of said missing person when he or she was younger, full of life. Everyone follows these stories, hoping the best for the family, hoping the person is found, unharmed, and the kidnapper is caught. People talk about it at work, home, or at friend’s houses, “Did you hear? They think it might have been her father after all! Can you believe that? He’s been on TV everyday saying he’s trying to find her and it turns out he did it!” Stories are told to make people feel better; People who did not ever even know the missing person or their families. Everyone is a suspect, shunned for possibly kidnapping their loved one.

June Spence’s Missing Women is a short story based on her experience working for a college-town newspaper. Three women in the town go missing and the people and the news in the town go crazy.  Everyone seems to try and “do their part,” trying to help out the cause, trying to put pieces together in order to find the women. The author writes that the media served as a source for the town to not forget these women, but on the surface, it seems like that is exactly what the people of this small town eventually did. The people all “jumped on the bandwagon,” trying to help, until there was no longer a real “story” to follow. The women go forgotten, from being in the “B” section of the news to not at all. The people, however, still have these women constantly in the back of their minds, knowing that it could happen to anyone, wondering what actually happened.

 

            This story is written in a way that it feels rushed. The details of the three women, Kay, Vicki, and Adelle, are unclear, but the things that are mentioned are rushed. The sentences are written in almost fragments, pushing the reader through the material. The author writes The Women in a way that makes it feel like the reader is actually in one of the townspeople’s heads in first person-plural tense. Knowing the things they do, how they would think about it- going over details quickly, making assumptions about what could have happened, and what they have done to try and help the case. “We” is littered all throughout the story, showing that the author wanted the short story to feel like someone from the town was actually talking to the reader.

            Spence also shows how people will get involved while the story is still fresh, and then eventually put it aside for something new. The people in this city, as in all places, are fickle with their news. They need something new, all the time. Even though the women have yet to be found, their story continues to get smaller and work its way to the back sections of the newspaper, and eventually is no longer in the news. The people in the city eventually propose to put a monument in the middle of the town to remember the women who are still missing. They decide to put up a monument for their own consciences. If they pass something on the street everyday, they will not feel so bad about bumping the missing women out of their news and no longer talking about them. If they erect this “eternal flame monument,” they will feel like they have done their part and can move on the new things.

           

All throughout the story, the author shows how people tried to use this story as a means for local fame.

Some march right into the police station or the newspaper editor’s office. Some hold press conferences. A man calling himself a freelance private eye and soldier of fortune says he helped the women conceal their identities and relocate, to where he is forbidden to disclose, but rest assured they are alive and well, enjoying lucrative careers in finance. (30/30: 292)

Spence explains how people will try to make up things about a story to get themselves in the spotlight. Out of someone else’s pain comes another person’s fame? People will do anything for attention.

People also used the case of the three missing women for fun. They would call the police, giving false leads to the case investigators.

There are leads. A reporter gets an anonymous call about a box, hidden in the park, containing information about the missing women. The caller will not disclose the nature of this information, will not linger on the line. Police are dispatched to the park, locate said box nestled amid gazebo shrubbery, examine it for explosives, dust it for fingerprints, pry it open to find: a map, hastily sketched, of a floor plan… Police converge in the apartment building…Nothing. Wild goose chase, read the headlines. Police vexed by fruitless search. (30/30: 291)

The tragic case of these three missing women was being used for someone’s fun. The author seems to be saying that people do not treat such cases with enough respect. She is making a point that people do not take things seriously, leading police all around, making false leads, and forgetting about these women when they are just that, women. They are people that are missing.

            Although this is certainly a tragedy for this town, gossip is spread about these missing women. They have no way of defending themselves, and the town is rampant with news about things that they have “done” and what types of people they are.

Kay had maxed out her credit cards and was falling behind in her mortgage payments. Was Vicki pregnant? Some say police found an unopened urine-test in her bureau. Adelle the consummate perfectionist was failing precalculus. Running off might have been easier to contemplate as a group… (30/30: 290)

Things about these women (along with made up things) that they would want no one to hear were being talked about all over town, and even printed in the newspaper. The author recognizes this as a real-life phenomenon. People are so hungry for details about someone they do not know, newspapers will print anything.

            In this short story, June Spence shows how people truly react in situations such as a local missing person. It is human nature to want to know more, but the terrible part is how things get made up and distributed that have nothing to do with the case; Gossip. This story shows how people reach in these scenarios and then forget all about them. They will, however, always know in the back of their heads what really happened the night these women went missing, and refuse to admit it to themselves. Coming up with stories and saying that they all ran away together is a mask and excuse to not think about what really happened. Whatever makes these people sleep better at night.

 

I know it's a little late...

but I was looking over my blogs and realized that I had saved Word documents that I never put on here... so anyway. 

In Aleksandar Hemon's "A Coin," he describes a woman looking back on her experiences living in war-torn Yugoslavia. I was most interested in this short story because my family is from both Serbia AND Croatia, and we still have a lot of family living there, so I guess I felt like I had a small connection to this story.

The confusing part about this story was the flip-flopping between time. One minute the narrator was dodging bullets in Bosnia, and the next minute writing letters from America. I also had a hard time with some of the descriptions. The parts about the dogs eating people and snipers killing dogs just for fun made me a little sad-face. 

Another part I had trouble with was that the speaker turned out to be a woman. For the first I don't know how long reading this, I thought that the narrator was a gay man trapped somewhere with his morbid-cameraman lover. Once I found out the speaker was a woman, I felt like it made a little more sense, but based on the fact that the author is a man, I assumed that the narrator would, too, be a man (I guess you know what they say about assuming...). 

Knowing that the speaker was truly meant to be a woman, I have a hard time believing some of the descriptions, and looking back I can see why I thought it was a man (aside from the author being male). From a female prospective, I just feel like the morbid details of the suffering and warfare would be ignored and that a female would focus more on the actual people around her. The relationships she has (in more depth) and the people around her and how they are reacting to the situation. Not just that they had to run from snipers, had no food, blah blah blah. 

I guess that's just me. 

Overall, once I finally realized that the author was flashing back and forth and that the speaker was truly a woman, I enjoyed reading this short story... I think.  

Dead Man Laughing Response

"And then, when he was truly beyond it, far out on the other side of nowhere, a nurse offered me the opportunity to see the body, which I refused. That was a mistake."

I think that this quote from Smith's article says a lot about the relationship that she had with her father. They seem like they were very close, and she had a hard time dealing with the fact that she was losing him. The fact that she refused to see him after he died makes sense. She would not want to see him as anything other than what he was when he was living. To see his body laying there with nothing inside would mean that he is truly gone. However, to know that he is truly gone and to have that realization sink in would also have been an important experience for Smith. She ended up putting herself right in the middle of the kind of joke that she and her father had always enjoyed so much; a tragic mistake. She ends up clinging to the dust remains of her father, and even tasting them at one point, perhaps because she did not have any closure with her father.

Not so tough

T.C. Boyle's Greasy Lake is an interesting story of three guys that think they are tough. They smoke, drink, keep tire irons under their seats (to look tough), and go down to Greasy Lake to hang out. They're bad... So they think. 

They realize they are not quite so tough when they actually get themselves into trouble. They get beat up, almost rape someone, and stumble across a dead man floating in the lake. 

These college boys realize that this is NOT their lives. 

After looking back on the story, it seems like when they stumble across the dead man in the lake (while the car is being destroyed), the boys realize that if they continue down this path, this is where they will end up. 

They realize that they aren't really as tough as they have always thought. 

I've come across this in real life, having friends that think they are ridiculously tough, thinking they could fight anyone. And then something happens and really snaps you into reality, making you realize that you just aren't as tough as you might have always thought. 

You'll Never be Great

In Jamaica Kincaid's Girl, she goes on and on about all of the things that she has been constantly taught all of her life by her mother. Washing clothes on Monday, only doing certain things on Sundays, not doing other things on Sundays, not being a slut, catching fish, bullying men, how to smile at different people, and so on. The mother is teaching the girl how to be an adult, how to take care of herself, and how to make it in the world without her mother there. 

At the end of the story, the narrator questions her mother about the bread and "what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?" The statement here is not necessarily important, but what her mother says and the meaning behind it is: "you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?"

Her mother goes on and on about how to be a woman, but at the first question, she shows that she has no faith in her daughter. She does not believe that her daughter will grow up to be a "good woman," and do the things and act the way she should. 

It seems like the author is truly scarred by this experience (as I would be), always being told what to do. Her mother expected weakness. To not have your mother's faith would be a terrible feeling- knowing that she did not expect you to succeed... awful. 

Blog Assignment 2

John Donne's Holy Sonnets #14 really stood out to me in the reading for today. The author is speaking to God in a very personal way. He wants God to "batter my heart." This seems really interesting to me. The relationship that the author seems to have with God is very personal, and in certain parts of the poem, Donne sounds like he kind of wants God to "whip him into shape" so to speak. 

It seems like a lot of John Donne's poems are about love. This, too, also seems like a love poem. The way he chooses his words and "talks" to God is in a very private way- the way two people involved in a relationship would speak to eachother, or the way someone who is completely infatuated would speak. An example of this would be lines 12-14:

Take me to you, inprison me, for I, 

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, 

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Donne wants God to be his "one and only." He wants to focus his life on his God, and that is what is most important to him. 

He also speaks of the devil and how he tries to take over. The speaker says that he is "betrothed unto your enemy." By this, as I understand it, he is saying that he has sinned. He has done things that he knew were wrong, and is now asking for God's forgiveness: Divorce me, untie or break that knot again...

John Donne wants to be relieved of his sins, and wants to go back to living his life with God.