Classmate Response, Final Week

Brett, in your Oddity you deal with Facebook, which is so engrained in our society that it is difficult to separate it from the strong connotations that comes with it. Facebook seems to be one of those things where everyone has an opinion on it, and it’s usually a strong one.  I think to handle Facebook is such a difficult opportunity. The main point of this piece seems to compare facebook to life’s progression—which is interesting but a little used. Facebook itself has a timeline feature, comparing your facebook usage and history over your life’s timeline—it’s almost depressing how empty mine is from 1991-2010. That aside I think you touched on something almost a little more interesting—the opening, “Facebook tells me my friend has a cold.” It seems so distant, so mundane. Facebook reports, like a newspaper. There’s a almost journalistic distance to Facebook, which is so interesting because it is an application intended to keep us and our relations closer together. I would have liked to have seen more investigation in that regard. Also, consider some tweaking here and there. “Communicates the word of God in approximately twenty to thirty words, usually in the form of a quote.” Can be sharpened and works just as efficiently without the “usually in the form…” part. Also, “Catching up felt like reading a short story written by your friend.” Can be reworded to something simpler, like, “Catching up is reading your best friend’s story.” I think you found something fresher in Facebook, and that’s saying quite a lot. 

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Final Week

1.      1.  (after pasting MDA shamrocks around the store)

“Our arch on the door doesn’t look half bad if I say so myself.”

“Yeah, it kinda looks like the archway to shamrock land or something.”

2.    2.   I realized today just how much I should value the youth given to me, because after seeing some of the people I work with up close, it’s all downhill from here.

3.     3.  “Well what do you know…”

“I don’t think it’s what I know that’s posing the problem here.”

4.     4.  “And you seriously didn’t think your dog would jump through the window?”

“Yes, excuse me for not imagining the unfathomable. I’ll start anticipating the seemingly impossible from now on. I await the day you tell me you were born a woman, you know why, because I’m imagining the impossible.”

Original Prompt and Improv, Final Week

To say that Purpura is a poet really shows in her work, from her beginning with the usage of her anaphora and her startling images—even the way she plays with the lines—the long sentences juxtaposed with a couple short, simple ones—really works well in creating the tone in this piece—very poetic, which I think helps ease the reader into Purpura’s reflection that takes place soon after the setting is described. Lia Purpura has a way of using both logic and questions to guide her reflection, for instance: “The opening was familiar. As if I’d known before, this…what? Language? Like a dialect spoken only in childhood…” She uses these questions under the guise of musing to further push herself into recognizing both meaning and connection. Perhaps some of the strongest, but most minute, strengths in this work are the use of Purpura’s verbs, which are strong, surprising, and precise: soaked, slicked, and dizzying just being a few. In relation to my own work, I struggle most with my verbs—the “to be” verb is my greatest downfall. I suggest that by following Purpura’s example and using stronger verbs, the work will improve drastically—thus, attempt a piece that uses “to be” and all its forms no more than three times.

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Improv:

Because this was something I struggled with in one of my workshop pieces, I decided to rewrite the opening paragraph using better verbs and as few articles as I could. Wish me luck.

Original:

If everyone is human before I pull out the money marker, then they are identical twins after. Each customer is a blip in a sea of distant faces. They all have the same jokes. “Don’t touch it,” they tell me “the ink is still wet,” or “just printed it this morning.” They all chuckle and wait with their hands shoved deep into their pockets, praying for this brief, defenseless moment to pass. I smile and swipe without a word because if money changes people, it makes us all exactly the same. The same jokes. The same impatience. The same moments spent holding our breath. All of us judged saints or thieves by a money marker, and somehow afraid we’re going to fall up short.

Rewrite:

When I pull out the money marker, people twin each other. My customers, once a blip in a sea of faces, joke and chat until they morph, indistinguishable. “Don’t touch it,” they tell me, “the ink is still wet,” and I watch as they chuckle with hands shoved in their pockets, praying for this brief, defenseless moment to pass. We are led to believe that money changes people. Well, if it does, it makes us exactly the same. All of us impatient, holding our breath, waiting to be judged and that’s just how we like it. No one truly lives for the unexpected anymore. We break out, claiming to search for adventure but we all turn back to what we know sometime—the same comforts of technology, the same vacation spots, the same three course meals, all experience. But we all return home. Isn’t the mantra, there’s no place like home, truer now than ever? Don’t we all like to venture out only to return to the expected, the typical—the exact same thing? I’ve learn to appreciate that sameness, because it’s a little easier to deal with each other when I treat you, not like the individual, but generic customer number one, because I know exactly what generic customer wants and exactly what they like me to say: and generic customer number one may I please have your Kroger card thank you and how are you today? 

Oddity, Final Week

My first trip to a consignment shop and the only thing I bought was a little glass dish. It’s small, obviously round, with high sides. No bigger than a saucer. The bottom is webbed and spiked with a sunburst of cracks that I can’t touch but I stare at through the bottom. There’s nothing special about the dish, save for its repetitive design of Technicolor fruits—watermelons, grapes, oranges, lemons, and strawberries all pressed together in one graphic still-life and then stamped repeatedly on the signs.

                When I picked it up, held it in the air to inspect the price scribbled at the bottom in black Sharpie—15 cents, my mother laughed at me. “Of course my child would pick that up. I guess you could use it as a candy dish.”

                A candy dish. It was just what I needed. It was just what this bowl needed—definition. What sort of aimless life does a fruited bowl lead—a bowl, too small for any type of substantial breakfast and certainly not big enough for fruit—less it be a couple small handfuls of grapes. This tiny bowl, before its brief stint of insignificance, had meant something. It was loved until it was worn—its purpose built cracks into its glass that I picked at, but could only be surveyed like pretty rays. I wanted so desperately to understand what it meant to be this bowl before, to be it now—a utensil without a purpose. To sit and wait in dust until someone found you again, gave you purpose—to be a candy bowl, in a new apartment, sitting on the countertop, full of foiled chocolates. Is that why the fruit never faded, though the glass faltered? Perhaps the fruit knew this day would come—another sweet moment, a moment of importance, filled up with someone else’s expectations—what a simple but mundane existence. 

Memory, Final Week

I really wanted a dog. I mean, who doesn’t want a dog? Those big eyes and wet noses—humans can’t have those attributes and still seem cute. That’s why dogs are clearly superior. And I wanted one, wanted one like people want air. I’d watch the stray dogs wander the street with a hungry eye as I drove past, my feet hovering over the brake pedal. I wanted a dog so bad I could almost feel the stroke of their hair beneath my hands, the soft bristle. When my parents promised me their dog I was ecstatic. When they told me they weren’t going to give her away anymore, I was broken—damaged, no better off than a crumbled Oreo cookie. I needed a dog to complete me.

                Part of it might have something to do with the fact that I grew up with dogs most of my life. My first dog was a terrier named Max. He was a demon, and I hated him. When had a mutual dislike for one another—he would bite me as often as he could to show it. When my parents told me he ran away I don’t remember being that disappointed. Time went on and new dogs showed up. I found out later in life that they had lied, that Max had been hit by a car and had to be put to sleep. I don’t know if it was the time distance that led to my apathy or the fact that I just never liked Max—who loved ripping my sheets more than he liked me—but finding out that he died left no traceable effect on me outside of finally knowing the truth. Perhaps I should have treated Max better. Or, perhaps, he shouldn’t have eaten my stuffed parrot. But Max was replaceable.

                I’ve had a German Shepard, two Pittbulls, a Pomeranian and a Terrier-mix. There was even the brief stint with that braindead Chihuahua dog Sophie. But when my parents moved to Maryland and I moved to my dorm room, we were all finally dogless for the first time in years and somehow I felt empty. I pined over and over about a dog. When my parents returned and got a Shih Tzu I permeated obvious jealousy. I babysat dogs just to be around them. I needed a dog.

                Perhaps that was why I was so excited when my coworker called me about the stray dog in the parking lot. I had just left work, tired, late, with arm loads of groceries. We made it home and emptied the car of bags. I was ready to rest when I got a phone call.

“Hey, there’s a dog up here. Do you want her?”

                I don’t remember how I responded. I don’t even remember the drive, sitting in open anticipation, wondering what this dog looked like. I just remember pure, trembling bliss and a vocal prayer that, please, don’t let this dog be ugly. I wanted, so badly wanted, a dog of my own—one that would fit me and reflect me, complete me. I wanted my dog to be the beauty inside me that I never even knew I had, and I wanted everyone to see it and fall in love. I guess, through my dog, I wanted everyone to love me.

                And when my coworker handed me the puppy, the trembling bundle all close-eyed and whining in my arms, I almost cried. And when the puppy nuzzled her head into my neck and nipped at my uniform I knew this was it. This was my dog. This was Chewy. I had no idea at the time that my dog was only three weeks old, but holding her up against my neck, feeling her soft warmth, that dog cradled ahead of it, a lifetime of responsibility. She has a lot to live up to.

Reportage, Final Week

The first thing that struck me was the smell—the stinging stench of cigarettes. I wonder, what made them, the last people to live here, decide it was ok to stand in the living room and puff just one last drawl of their cigarette; what were they going through to make them heave out that heady cloud of smoke and paint the room with smell. My throat ached and I climbed through the darkness to make out anything, any saving grace among the typical apartment amenities. What I got was peeling wooden floor tiles, bent window screens, broken patio blinds and cracked glossy mirrors. I imagine the last tenants grasping another puff between their teeth in the bathroom for the seven years bad luck they were about to get for that last one.

Still there was something fundamentally defining in this tiny apartment—some metaphoric space redefining my character and my circumstantial outlook. It was at the threshold that I ceased to be Diamond and in the smoky haze received the looping laurels of responsibility, crowned into some greater being beyond knowing, beyond true understanding. It was like that abstract concept of adulthood became literal, concrete. It slammed shut behind me like the apartment door, with urgency and gravity. And in that moment I was lifted in the smoke. In that choking cliché, that eye-watering blaze of sensual assault and there, hidden like nugget in the floor cracks, was the sweet stench of victory—a scent so subtle you had to breathe it in again just in case. I coughed, stepping back into the living room and peeking out the patio, watching some hornet lull in the glaze of sunshine. With him went a silent prayer that this scent of victory didn’t start my allergies into a tizzy. Of course, it always does. And it did.

Classmate Response

In Response to Susana's Reportage Week 7

This is the most interesting Waffle House occurrence I've never had but wished I did. it's definitely a shocking moment, realizing the guy at the gas station next door is wandering around with blood on his shirt. However, I feel like there are more things begging to be dealt with here. Starting in order, though your Waffle House description successfully makes me envision every Waffle House I've ever been in, I feel like there are other details begging to be touched. At my Waffle House, for instance, no matter what time I seem to go in there, there is always the same guy cooking--middle-aged, peppered hair, and huge, thick glasses. Because we know some of the best strange cases occurs in the workers at Waffle House. I would have liked to seen these characters manipulated more. What were they doing? And more on how they reacted when the man with the blood stepped in? I imagine, open 24/7, these people seem so strange characters. I'd like to know their response a little more.

I'd also like to touch on your relationship with your son. Are these dinner dates common with you guys or is it just a way of catching up? Give me a little more on your relationship.

As well, I feel like some reflection could be integrated here. The gas store attendant, for example, is briefly noted and then even more briefly noted is the trusting woman. I feel like this is the writer's moment to delve into that "strange" behavior. Why does the man cower while the woman trusts? Why do she feel compelled to help him? What is this man from the crash feeling, do you think, while interacting with these characters and how do you as the narrator feel about them?

The wedding characters are literally the toppers on this cake, please write more on them as well. This kinda cheered me up tonight, so I really appreciate this tidbit. :)