Extra Credit

      When did it become culturally alright to air a family's dirty laundry to the general public?  I've had a habit of blaming the copious amounts of Jane Austen movies I watched as a child for my deeply ingrained habit of segregating the worlds of my family and my friends.  If something’s happening in my family life that upsets me, I never share it with any friend, no matter how much like family they might seem themselves.  I have a strong sense of loyalty to the privacy my family deserves and take my responsibility to maintain that privacy very seriously.  I doubt more and more the reason for my reservations to share personal stories, but my actions remain steadfast. 

      Today, a friend of mine who has, many times, complained to me of her mothers behavior, posted on facebook that "after a long screaming and crying battle with my mother in which she called me a "bitch," a "worthless piece of shit," a "whore," the "worlds worst daughter" and told me to "f***ing back off" i won.  i am now officially signed up for an online drivers course."  While I can't imagine my mother calling me any of those things, I would never consider sharing it with anyone, particularly in such a public format.  When reading the post, I cringed with embarrassment for my friend that she would publicly make her mother look bad, although I'm sure I'm one of few who cares, a theory reinforced by the comment: "ahhaha i love your family."  Another friend of mine frequently refers to her mother as a Nazi.  Her mother is a wonderful, reasonable person, but my friend simply cannot see her as anything but tyrannical. 

     It's impossible to know if my friend is paranoid or her mother is crazy behind closed doors, but the fact that she regularly insults her mother and calls her names behind her back makes me incredibly uncomfortable for her in the same way the guests of a dinner party would silently squirm if one among them suddenly began to eat their salad with their hands.  It's a sheer awkwardness out of a breach of social decorum. 

      But my friends aren't just rude to their parents to me, their insulting to their own parents.  A different friend habitually calls his parents "Bitch."  I'm certainly not stilted and Victorian with my parents, but I couldn't imagine ever using vulgarity with them.  My peers simply don't limit how they talk to their parents.  This and disappearance of the what-is-apporpriate filter make a more familiar, but sadly unstructured culture.  Maybe it's just furthering the idea that we're all equal, but I like the inequalities.  I appreciate seeing my parents and others I respect and speak to with deference as role models.  I don't know how this shift between, the "Yes, mother I'll run along and play" of 50 years ago and the "Hey bitch, will you come pick me up?" of my peers.  Maybe the middle ground I'm trying to stand on is unnecessary, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the propriety of older social structures. 

9-7-5-3-1

I stared at her with intense rage, angry for treating me like a child, angry for leaving me towel-less, and most of all that she had disobeyed the universal laws that dictate that when counting back from 10, you must go to zero and then stop.

I stared, angry about how she had treated me.

I stared, angered by her poor treatment.

I stared angrily at her.

I stared angrily.

Angry.

I can’t understand by what processes, but somehow this made everything she had done instants before alright.

This simple, meaningless gesture made me instantly forgive her.

At this gesture, I instantly forgave her.

With this, I forgave her.

I forgave her.

Forgiveness.

We flapped around with the towels for another 15 or 20 minutes before I got bored and decided I was ready to face the cold, and she acquiesced when I reminded her of the cookies we were going to make.

Once we bored of playing, we left the pool.

We bored of playing, so we stopped.

We got out of the pool.

We exited it.

Gone.

Forgiveness Essay Reflection

My essay is about forgiveness.  Not forgiveness out of compassion, but out of a need.  A need to forgive out of a need to keep peace.  Searching for the compassion in your heart and finding what little bit of it there is and embracing it, instead of letting it find you.  It’s about not having the choice to forgive.  The hardest part when writing it was trying to join together my memory and the example from outside of my life.  Creating that connection which was seemingly so random required a little feigned memory to draw them together.  If I were to change anything, I would probably change to format of the paper to keep my original questioning paragraph because it allowed the reader more creativity in their reading and they could ponder their own answers to the questions rather than me concentrating their focus on one topic and telling them my opinion.  It may have led better to self expression, but I enjoyed not guiding the reader and letting them almost read the essay as though they themselves had written it, and allowing them to explore their own opinions instead of mine.  This made me prefer my original copy more precisely because it was less exact and less polished.  Additionally, I had never really thought about the need to forgive in Romeo and Juliet.  The example had originally come to mind when I was previously writing about anger in my rough draft and had been brought to the front of my mind.  Although I abhorred cliché, the new direction was both interesting and the only thing I could think of now that my mind was filled with Romeo and Juliet.  It surprised me when I came up with it, not just because it had never occurred to me, but I really liked the new side of forgiveness that I had never considered before, but both before me and in my own experience were a multitude of examples.  This discovery was the most unexpected portion of the writing of my essay. 

Concepts for Memory Story

Senselessness of anger

- why seemingly insignificant things can trigger such violent reactions (drop of the towel)

- volatile anger, lashing out at people you love

- what we are liable to be hurt about changes in different people (don't mind bossy, hate counting fail)

Revenge

- how small things to get back at people can make you feel so much better

- why a little pay back disolves anger

- the victim of revenge doesn't even need to know - personal, mental aspect

Competition within a friendship

- bring together causing anger in somebody and need for revenge

- being able to cause anger = power - to know somebody well you know what frustrates them and can use that against them - vulnerability that usually isn't preyed upon

- can't just let something go - friendship is among equals and therefor payback is deserved

Forgiveness

- simple step, even unknowningly made, makes a huge difference

- involves self sacrifice on their part - why do we need this from people?

Stubbornness: Sticking an idea

- infatuation with a concept

- "good idea at the time" or "it made sense in my head" - refusing to think things through or ignore the effects you know will come

- playfulness of the intense determination

- refusal to consider other ideas

Memories

      Charlotte was domineering by nature. Though I was by no means docile, I had found in less than a week into our friendship that it was always easier to simply give in. Since it usually led to fun for me and she had the satisfaction of “winning,” the dynamic worked well enough. Especially in the case, I was particularly lenient to her whims because it was Charlotte’s birthday and she had the intense argumentative ability to convince almost anyone to give her anything she wished. This power of persuasion applied event to me who as a general rule sees no need for more privileges in order on a day when the person in question already gets cake, presents, and usually an awesome hat. Instead, Charlotte was able to wheedle out of complete strangers more than more 5 year olds can get out of their grandmothers.

      Her birthday was January 25th and was, and as late January often is, rather dreary. The clouds were oppressive: a thick blanket of dusty cotton balls, suspended by the aggravating masters of the skies. With the grey came cold, but Charlotte, in characteristic caprice, decided she wanted to go swimming, the words hypothermia and pneumonia never entering her thought process, for though swim and splash tend to be words found in a colorful and bold font and accentuated with an exclamatory mark, shiver is a much meeker word that has a habit of shirking its responsibility to show itself as a potential negative effect. The plan was decided, so I brought my swimsuit to her house dutifully, despite the fact that I was fruitlessly though desperately hoping the plan would be forgotten and accordingly hid the suit in the darkest corner of my bag.

      Alas, the plan was in full swing and although I was given the false hope of a new, much more appealing cooking baking agenda, it was merely an addition, not a new direction for the course of the day’s events. I put on my swimsuit without protest and immediately went outside and jumped into her pool, knowing the heated water would be infinitely superior for my exposed stomach. After sitting alone submerged on the steps into the shallow end and splashing the water with my feet for a curiously immeasurable period of time, I began to fear that Charlotte had moved on to the baking and left me to figure this out on my own, uncomfortable and wet.

      Moments after I got out of the pool, I was proved wrong as she emerged from the house, padded like the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of Ghostbusters. Her arms and legs were bare and fit as always, juxtaposing the unbalanced stuffing around her entire torso. Her stomach was swelled, but at least uniform, a red one piece left over from her days of diving was partially covered by a bright blue bikini. Under the Speedo was an array of at least 20 swimsuits, ruffles and ties causing various bumps and protrusions. The ties of her 8 or 9 bikinis bore a welt into her back, and up top a mess of multicolored strings at the base of her neck, tangled up in her hair like a knot of thin chains that’s impossible untie. She was spontaneously struck by the genius of putting on every swimsuit she owned on, one over the other, simply in the name of theatrics. Although an interesting idea, as soon as she jumped in the pool and realized the weight of her apparel. With the subsequent attempt to remove just one, she also discovered that she had trapped herself, struggling to get off each with my help until she finally gave up and left the last 2 or 3 on, exhausted from the intense wriggling required to liberate herself of the other 20 suits now splayed around the sides of the pool.

      We hung out for the pool for a while, and eventually Charlotte bored and decided she really wanted make the cookie dough sitting in her fridge. Reluctant to get out of the pool and return to the cold, I stayed in when she, dripping, went searching for towels. She returned shivering but wrapped in a fuzzy jade towel and offered me an identical one, but I refused, instead asking her to get back in to postpone the inevitable cold I would have to face. She refused, and after a little back and forth, she started counting backwards from 10. Appalled by the manner she was treating me in, I stayed exactly where I was. At 7 she held my towel over the pool, clearly threatening to drop it in. At 3, she released it, letting it hit the water with a swish, then quickly absorb the water and begin to sink. I stared at her with intense rage, for treating me like a child, for leaving me towel-less (for it never for a second occurred to me she’d get me another one although in actuality she probably would have), and most of all that she had disobeyed the universal laws that dictate that when counting back from 10, you must go to zero and then stop. I probably wouldn’t have appreciated a “1 and a half… 1 and a quarter…” but it would have been far superior to simply stopping at 3. All this anger flashed through me and I was opening my mouth to scream “CHARLOTTTTTTTTE” when she jumped into the pool, towel around her.

      I can’t understand by what processes, but somehow this made it all ok. We flapped around with the towels for another 15 or 20 minutes before I got bored and decided I was ready to face the cold, and she acquiesced when I reminded her of the cookies we were going to make. Instead we ate it raw and played Monopoly. She won, but I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had stolen hundreds of dollars from her while she wasn’t looking. 


Note: In the original mini-version, I talked about getting trapped in a net.  After further reflection, I decided this was probably a figment of my imagination, which is why that section of the story was removed.  

Tobias Wolff?

1) Why did you choose to write about violence so often in your stories?

2) What inspired defining a life in things terms of the things a person didn't think about when they died in Bullet in the Brain?

3) What did the school in Nightingale really do?  Why were there no adults and an incorrect photograph?

Changes in Time

My jacket pocket had caught on the armrest of the seat across the aisle and 4 rows up, and as my hand absentmindedly flapped in the general direction of my mother, I lowered my eyes to survey the damage below the windowsill.

Real time:  I sat down reluctantly, not wanting to be on that bus, wanting to be home in bed, not lying to anybody.  The rough whisk of my jeans rubbing against the cheap, stained seats reminding me of the soft yellow sheets I was leaving behind and their noiselessness.  I saw my mother, filled with hope for me but regret of what she felt she had had to do.  Her waving was rhythmic, constant, mechanical.  She'd started it with spirit, but lost purpose with the redundancy of the motion until she started to resemble those creepy little cats in smaller sushi restaurants.  He mimicked her, they're hands falling in and out of sync but he was as distracted with his torn pocket as she was with the contents of her handbag.

Too many things, too little time: I sat down with a thump, I'm sure, but I didn't hear the noise.  I subconsciously remember waving at my mother, but it was a reflex, certainly not something my attention was focused on.  I was trying to remember when I had first begun to lie.  I couldn't.  I knew I had snuck sweets as a child, and when confronted denied it, but my stories weren't lavish then.  They were much more direct and I had never gotten caught.  It was only when I made larger lies that they ever led me into trouble.  Maybe it was the risk that had gave me the thrill.  Having the power of knowledge.  But I'd always be confused as to why about illnesses, just like the doctor was.  I couldn't explain it, and not being able to understand my own motivations is frightening.  I remember playing whiffle ball in PE one time and despising the game.  I assigned myself to outfield with the intention of boycotting the whole thing and figuring I wouldn't get in trouble if the ball didn't ever come to me.  But then it did.  This scrawny little kid managed to hit the ball straight between my legs while I was daydreaming about a movie I had just seen.  I started sprinting after it, not even noticing what I was doing until after I had thrown the ball to second and gotten him out, being congratulated by my teammates for going so fast as I panted.  And I had no control.  And that terrified me.  I still don't know why I do some things.  So I was on the bus waving idly at my mother and she was waving idly back. 

Time slows: The sound of a popping seam is one of those noises that forces you to freeze, like the moment just after a glass filled with red wine slips, shatters, and spills over a white couch, shards embedding themselves over the leather.  The caution you wish you had shown moments before finally kicks in and your entire body is caught in the horror of what you've just done roughly resembling a Rodin sculpture. This instant I quickly overcame with the shove of the person behind me swiveling around and shoving their backpack into my shoulder and shuffled forward, forgetting who I was, where I was going, who was outside tearfully watching my first moments of involuntary exile.  Everything in my being was focused on that single, minuscule act.  I could feel the armrest against my hipbone, the noise echoing in my mind, the tug on my opposite shoulder as the mass of fabric had been moved as a whole.  I put so much analysis into this flash of time, so much import on the phantom senses that stayed with me that I thought I could remember exactly how that moment felt for the rest of my life.  Of course, as soon as I found an empty seat and looked out the window, I remembered my mother and the memories were erased.  I looked down to  examine the damage and dutifully waved at my mother.