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".

Response to "Holocaust Girls/Lemon"

First of all, the title of this piece is a little weird to me, and I'm not sure if I missed something, but I didn't pick up on the post-slash portion of it.  A lot of this piece didn't make much sense to me; for instance, I thought the introductory bit that defined a "Holocaust Girl" as not necessarily a Jew or a woman was interesting, but I didn't see much explanation of that.  I did appreciate the author's distance from the piece (which she pointed out in the interview, talking about the various ways in which she cloaked the personal pronoun "I"), which I felt gave it a more universal appeal than the limited one you would expect.  Overall, to be honest, I probably didn't get much out of this piece because my roommates are throwing a moderate-sized party right now, as they do pretty much every weeknight, and it makes it pretty hard to think about the horrors of the holocaust when you can hear people throwing up in your bathroom.  I think the immediacy of the latter makes it a little more horrifying.

lol

to me the worst thing sum1 can write is a formal composition for a class that is written with a total disregard for grammar or, worse, in chat lingo.  im kinda a grammarian at heart and i find it hard to even force myself to write like this, bcuz its like my fingers have the muscle memory of proper usage and even some kind of respect 4 english.  newayz, i figure this topic is probly pretty boring 2 most ppl, bcuz most ppl dont really care about grammar at all, so i get 2 indulge myself with my own idea of bad and at the same time write to the prompt of something that will b boring and sucky 2 everyone.  whats sad is so many people probly wont even notice how horrible this is, bcuz in a time of facebook and iphones its like proper english has become totally irrelevant.  there should b a paragraph break here but w/e.  i know every1 in this class is either an english major or someone whose at least a lil interested in writing, but most ppl are in the antiformalist camp of disregard for all but the most basic elements of grammar and taking quite liberal literary license.  im not.  i was the random weird nerdy kid on the edge of his seat in high school when the english teacher was talking about syntax and misplaced modifiers.  ive gotten even more neurotic as ive studied it more in college, for instance, i wanted to throw a "sic" after the word "whose" earlier to seemingly indicate that my misuse was intentional, but even that was going to be an intentional misuse that i thought was too technical for anybody thats not as interested in linguistics and grammar as i am.  at this point my body is physically rebelling against going any further, i meant to throw in some more chat acronyms or phonetic misspellings but i dont really no how to express my thoughts in english that bad (sic [lol]).  so i guess ive not only rattled on about grammar, a dull subject to most, but also made myself look incredibly dull thru the process.  thats either gonna make u say well i gess his essay cant be any worse than this or o shit now i really dont wanna read his essay lol

Responses to "A Path Taken with All the Certainty of Youth," "The Ashes of August," and excerpt from Louis Riel

The first essay, "A Path Taken," was short, but I felt like it did considerably much in its few words.  Despite the fact that it seemed intended to be a brief memoir, I felt that on another level it was a sort of profile of the author.  It showed her eccentricity and at the same time her genuineness; I expected it to start with something to the effect of "In second grade I wrote my first poem, and then I knew...".  It was a very interesting and different perspective on how a particular person became a writer, and I think the information was enlightening and useful to someone in this class.

"The Ashes of August" was probably the most intensely "lyrical" essay I've ever read.  Every sentence was packed with flowery language and elaborate descriptions, to the point that I lost track of what the memoir was actually saying quite often.  Of course the language was elegant, but I don't know if I personally view this as a good thing (or at least, the extent to which it was taken) in this particular example.  However, I thought it was very skillful how the author paralleled memoir with historical exposition and place narrative, the first two in particular seeming hard to develop so well within the same essay.

The excerpt from the graphic novel Louis Riel was unlike anything I've read before, in that it was a historical graphic novel.  I must admit that I let the introductory biographical piece color my interpretation of the writing probably a bit too much, reading it with the assumption that the author would be a bit more "out there" than necessary.  Overall the narrative didn't make much sense to me, probably because I am unfamiliar with the person it profiled and the context of the events.

"Nothing More Universal than One Person"

I think that this statement by Satrapi in her interview is well in accordance with one of the themes of this class (at least, as I have perceived), which is the inherent allure of the individual.  Memoir taps into that individuality.  Despite the apparent contradiction, there really is nothing more universal than an individual, because it is the most basic commonality shared by all:  we are all people, pursuing our lives as individuals, participating in the human condition.

Once, when I was seventeen, I was driving down Blanding Boulevard, the main highway in my home town of Orange Park.  The speed limit on the particular stretch on which my story takes place is fifty five miles per hour, which, for the locals, translates roughly to "at least sixty five in the right hand lane".  As I drove down the road that day, probably somewhere between sixty and seventy miles per hour, the hood of my car abruptly flipped back and shattered my windshield.  The rearview mirror went flying past my right ear as shards of glass went everywhere.  I knew this stretch of road very well, so it wasn't as incredible a feat as it sounds for me to ease on the brake and pull off the road without being able to see the road in front of me.  I was very calm as I put the car in park, turned on my hazard lights, unbuckled my seatbelt, and stepped out of the car.  But as soon as I was out of the car, panic set in as I checked my body for wounds.

That's not the only time I had a near-death experience in my '95 Honda Accord, nor was it the most extreme, believe it or not.  It malfunctioned in freak ways roughly once every other month, and I eventually named it Joan Rivers because it was so old but its parts were constantly being replaced.  Plenty of people have car troubles, but I'm pretty sure many of my experiences in Joan are unequaled.

Yet still, the hood-through-the-windshield scenario can be called a universal experience.  I don't know anyone who hasn't had some kind of trouble with or been in a dangerous situation in an old car.  I don't know anyone who hasn't after twenty years had at least one moment where they thought "holy shit, I could have just died."  I don't know anyone who hasn't been that stupefied by something that unpredictable happening, so scared, so confused, so at a loss as to what to do, or any other emotion I felt that day.  That said, there's nothing more commonplace or universal than your hood abruptly flying open and shattering your windshield on the highway, because we're all human.