Responses to "Cancer Made me a Shallower Person," "Caring for Your Introvert," and "June: Circle K Recipes"

I found Miriam Engelberg's "Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person" motivating in a strange way.  I thoroughly enjoyed her dry sense of humor throughout the comic (particularly the allusion to a mechanic working on a car), especially given the subject matter.  I also liked that she was very forthcoming about her own flaws, like the fact that she felt a need to tell everyone with whom she came into contact about her diagnosis.  It was interesting reading what she went through, and while I've never been through anything similar, it seemed that her thoughts and feelings (and more particularly the way she recounted them in the memoir) were very realistic and human and therefore relatable on some level.

I was not sure what to think of Jonathan Rauch's "Caring for Your Introvert."  The first thing that I noticed was that the introduction was very elementary (a series of rhetorical questions leading to a "here's the answer" statement of thesis), but as I got further into the essay it occured to me that the introduction may have been satirical in some way.  Sometimes Rauch seemed to be tongue-in-cheek, and others completely serious, and I wasn't able to decide which tone he was aiming for.  He made some statements, particularly the one about introversion being an "orientation" rather than a choice, that seemed a little extravagant or strange, but not so much that they must have been satire.  I finished the essay having enjoyed it for the very reason that I did not know what to make of it.


The last reading, Karen Tei Yamashita's "June:  Circle K Recipes," was the least enjoyable to me.  It seemed to have little focus other than listing recipes and using them to set up vaguely related stories or sentiments, and I found her style very choppy in a way that was hard to understand.  She used many fragments in her writing, and while I understand that this is a perfectly acceptable use of literary license, it seemed to me that she didn't preface these fragments with enough context to make them easily understandable.