Response to "Household Words"

This piece was so focused and overtly political that I really wouldn't have thought of it as "creative nonfiction".  It read more like a persuasive essay with a clear thesis that it tried to argue throughout.  I think the author, for the most part, did a good job of backing up her claims, though a lot of her support were simple appeals to the pathos of the reader.  I would like to point out that, based on my own experiences (which are, granted, anecdotal), European cities have as much or more homelessness as those in America, and that people in these cities seem to have the same attitudes attributed to Americans in this essay.  Also, I think the link between watching the woman being beaten up at the stoplight and the plight that is homelessness in America was an obscure one, and I don't think that it added much as an introduction.

Response to "The Dead of Winter"

This piece was very moving for being so short.  I think it encompassed a lot of issues that women may have to face, and particularly it dealt with abortion without getting overtly political.  The honest, almost confessional tone of it made it seem very personal and realistic, and the artwork made it even more so, particularly the frames depicting a fetus with wings (presumably angel wings?) and her reaching for it.  It was sad but not overly so, only enough to make the author's point, I think.  I also enjoyed all the depictions of snow and winter, because I think that such a "cold" setting and tone was appropriate for the piece.

Response to "The Things They Carried"

Demetria Martinez's "The Things They Carried" was a short work, but accomplished much in its roughly two pages.  The whole thing was just the creation of a certain image or sentiment.  It asked for the reader's sympathy when detailing all the things found left behind by the corpses of Mexicans that attempted to immigrate to the U.S.  Some of the things listed were mundane, normal, or expected, and others, like those that implied the deaths of small children and babies, were quite emotionally gripping.  The essay, though short, offers an interesting perspective on immigration and has a strong emotional effect on the reader.

Response to "Uncle Tony's Goat"

This piece was about a young Native American girl and her Uncle's strange attachment to a goat.  The uncle was depicted as a stern disciplinarian, and it seemed the children were somewhat afraid to set a foot wrong with him, like in the beginning when he got on to them for shooting arrows and such.  Toward the end, the narrator had a run-in with Uncle Tony's belligerent goat and then the goat escaped.  The goat seemed to developed somewhat in parallel to the Uncle in that they were both hornary and a bit unreasonable.  It seemed that in the end when Uncle Tony decided to give up chasing the goat, it may have been a way of reconciling with the narrator or "giving up" some of his sternness in some small way.

Response to "A Sea Worry"

This piece was very short, and I feel that when a piece is so brief it should aim to accomplish a lot with its few words.  I'm not sure what you could say this piece "accomplished", but the only thing I picked up on was a hint about the difficulty of being a foreigner in America (the narrator talking to one of the surfers so that he didn't "lose language").  I would also add that, stylistically, it struck me not so much as "blurring the lines" between fiction and nonfiction, but it really came across as completely fictional.  Other than that, I had little reaction to this essay; it mostly struck me as a brief narrative that said little.

Auto-Pilot

Throughout high school I worked at Zaxby's, an aesthetically pleasing, slightly overpriced, fast food chicken restaurant.  The store at which I worked was right across the street from the high school, so of course most of our customers were of that demographic.  It was a fun place to work; most of the employees were also high school students and our oldest manager was 28.  This created a very laid back, permissive, fun atmosphere in the workplace.  Sometimes, one might say, too fun.  When work was as lassiez faire as my job at Zaxby's was, it was easy to go on auto-pilot, relying on only the most basic and repetetive instinctive functions to get you through the shift. 

So one night when I was the drive-thru cashier, as I stood in the little offset drive-thru station with my headset on, idly leaning on the counter out of boredom, the headset beeped to alert me to the car that had just pulled up.  "Thank you for choosing Zaxby's, this is Jake, how can I help you?" came automatically out of my mouth as I was surely preoccupied with what I was going to eat for dinner that night, what homework awaited me after I got off, or something of the like.  Not really paying attention to the customer, I let my fingers react to his order, pressing the appropriate menu buttons reflexively until I noticed he had stopped talking.  "Will that be all for you?" I asked.  "Yeah, that it," the customer said.  Normally I would have repeated his order, asked whether it was correct, given him a total, and asked him to pull around.  However, running on the intellectual auto-pilot that I was, I reflexively said "Okay, love you, bye."

It took me a moment to realize that auto-pilot was running the wrong program there.  What was worse, it seemed to take everyone in the store a moment too; the speaker for the drive-thru was audible loud and clear in the kitchen (so as to give the cooks a head start on the order) and they had heard every word, but for three or four seconds, everyone in the store stopped what they were doing and looked around as if they had just realized that they forgot to put on clothes this morning.  Then all at once everyone fell to laughing, myself included.  That night I realized what I had long suspected, that customers never really listened to what you were saying anyways, as they assumed it to be all as pre-programmed and ritualistic as it truly was; the customer pulled up to the window and I answered him with a red face and body language that screamed of restraining laughter.  He could surely hear the laughter coming from the kitchen.  I think he thought we did something nasty to his food.

Responses to "What Fundamentalists Need for their Salvation" and "A Girl Among Trombonists"

The first essay, "What Fundamentalists Need for their Salvation," by David James Duncan, struck me as a very fresh and interesting perspective:  someone who calls himself an "evangelical Christian" writing an essay criticizing rightist fundamentalism.  I thought his opener was very appropriate and attention getting; censorship is an issue that is more widely agreed upon than some other controversial topics (especially among college students, I would think), and the anecdote about him reading his own book in a school where it had been censored was interesting.  From that point, his essay largely became a very focused and, for the most part, well-reasoned rant (an ironic statement if ever there was one).  The conclusion summed it up nicely, basically saying that what the fundamentalists need is the people they are excluding.  This piece was very well-written and provided an incredibly relevant perspective on the matter.

The second essay, "A Girl Among Trombonists," was less interesting to me, though I wouldn't say it was bad.  The way I read it, it started off promising some exciting social struggle with the intro about her being such a trailblazer of ban geekettes, but immediately went into a drawn-out and tedious account of what they wore, how they marched, how they traveled to their competitions, and so on.  The middle was very hard to get through, but I found the end a bit more colorful, in which her male bandmates used her to "practice" boob-groping.  Overall I think it was her conclusive reflections that made it worth the read; this conclusion seemed to be the only part in which what she was trying to say actually came out, and I think it was driven home nicely by the last line about the female trombonist in the San Diego Symphony never having been a "girl among trombonists".