Sailing

Well class,

I was sick with food poisoning today so in case you wanted to hear my brilliant remarks on Billy Collins's poems I have posted them here:

Consolation (47-48)

            Traveling is an activity that almost every person places in high regard. In college, people tell me that if I don’t travel abroad, I will regret it for the rest of my life. While I agree that it is important to see other cultures at some point, I agree with Collins premise that getting to truly know your home can be even more important. I was pleased with the idea of “grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard” (47). Fort Worth may not have “crumbling frescoes or famous domes,” but it is my home, and in many ways, that is enough for me.

Piano Lessons  (76-77)

            When I was younger, I was obsessed with the piano. For years I wanted to take lessons, but my family couldn’t afford the piano itself. Finally, our church gave me a piano and I began taking lessons. Piano Lessons shows how beautiful the piano is through its words. I loved the imager of each key being a different room that the player, a blind man, must learn to walk through. When Collins describes his fingers as climbing down the ladder of notes and coming back down without turning around, I remembered the days when I practiced my scales as well. It all made me very nostalgic. Collins also made a very clever point about the left hand and how difficult it can be. “I have to drag him into the music like a difficult and neglected child. This is the revenge of the one who never gets to hold the pen or wave good-bye, and now, who never gets to play the melody. He is drawing my attention to something so obvious, but that I’ve never really thought about before.

Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House (3)

            I immediately started laughing at this poem because recently there has been a bird that has made its perch underneath my window. Everyday he begins chirping between 7am and 8am. Most days, I’m not too annoyed because I’m waking up around that time regardless, but on Saturdays and Sundays, I feel like shooting him. Many times I have thrown rocks at him and I have even requested my mother bring me a BB gun so that I might shoot him. I currently have the black BB gun sitting by my bedside, waiting for the morning when his incessant chirping gives me enough courage to do what I am currently too much of a pansy to do.

Forgetfulness (29)

            I might be too young to be complaining about forgetfulness but I will anyways. The first stanza immediately caught my attention because Collins was speaking about forgetting about a book you’ve read. One of my biggest frustrations in life is not remembering the amazing books I read. I remember I loved A Tale of Two Cities. It was easily my favorite book, but now, I have a hard time recalling it completely, which is upsetting. I read The Bell Jar several years ago and can now hardly remember the plot. I used to know the quadratic equation and the order of the planets, but not anymore. It was all very relatable. I especially loved how he wrote, “whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall.” That is such a common problem: knowing the first letter of something you are trying to remember but not being able to grasp the full word or thought.

Nostalgia (42-43)

            As I move on to a new phase in my life, I can’t help but be nostalgic for the old one. I could see myself editing Collin’s stanzas to fit my life. It almost made me sad, remembering. However, the end woke me up a little, because he hardly mentions the present, and when he does, it seems negative. It helped remind me that sometimes too much time is spend longing for the past and dreaming of the future and not enough time it spent enjoying the present moments.

Budapest (69)

            I LOVE the imagery in this poem. Looking at a pen as the snout of an animal, rooting around, just makes me smile. What I imagined was adorable; like an ant eater for a pen.

           

            

PREGNANT girl singing GERMAN OPERA while serving APPLE STRUDEL

Cross Country Snow seems like a typical Hemingway story. I don’t mean that in a negative way though. I’m not bored of his stories. I actually quite enjoy them. I love how he always hints at the nature of men and women. In Cross Country Snow, he portrays two men enjoying a physical activity together and having little to no conversation. This seems so typical of guys. I can just picture two friends out skiing or fishing or hunting, going about their day in almost total silence, but content nonetheless. After I read the story, I thought to myself what it would be like had Hemingway wrote a more strong female character into the story. I can imagine all the talking she would be doing, trying to stir up conversations about how great the skiing was. I can picture George saying that skiing is “too swell to talk about” and her just continuing on anyways.

I will take a moment here to say that I’m not a fan of these reading quizzes. I feel like they are so specific that at this point I’m not even reading the story, I’m merely jotting down details. I focus so much on the fact that they at APPLE strudel and the waitress was singing GERMAN OPERA that I sometimes miss the big picture. I’m less focused on the meaning of the story and more focused on looking up the definition for funicular and undulation. I understand the need for reading closely but the quizzes cause me to focus on minor details sometimes so the point of the story escapes me. Typically reading the story a second time around right before class solves this, but nonetheless, I felt like my blog was the perfect place to air this small grievance.

And I want to take this moment to tell whoever is reading this to go youtube Rusted Root’s On My Way for old time’s sake.

Moving on to Ten Indians. I absolutely loved the jesting that the boys were doing in the beginning. Once again, Hemingway wrote about a situation that is so true to boys’ nature. It is sometimes shocking how easily I can see my friends in that same situation; one guy giving his friend a hard time about the girl he is dating and then getting shut up because he can’t get a girl to start with. It’s sad when he discovers she’s doing whatever it is that she’s doing with another guy. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of this story (probably because I’m brain dead) so I’m going to wait and read it again tomorrow.

Holidays in America

Today was all about holidays. I’m really excited that I finally found a way to maintain steady conversation and teach her about American culture at the same time. It was so strange to think that not everyone celebrates Easter or Halloween or Thanksgiving. But it was fun explaining it to her!

        We started with Mardi Gras. I asked her if she did anything for Mardi Gras and she just gave me this puzzled look and repeated the phrase. I got out my laptop and tried to begin explaining what this big festival was all about. I showed her a map of the United States and pointed out Louisiana and New Orleans, telling her that this is where the main festival is held. We then googled pictures of the Mardi Gras floats which she found endlessly fascinating. I showed her the Mardi Gras beads and she had an “ah hah!” moment. She had seen people around campus wearing beads but was clueless to their meaning.

        After giving her some information about Mardi Gras, I thought it might be helpful for her to know about Ash Wednesday. I went to a private Christian high school with almost no practicing Catholics, so when I came to TCU, I was shocked by this practice. I remember walking through the BLUU last year on Ash Wednesday and seeing so many people with the ash on their foreheads. So I wanted to fill her in on the practice. I began telling her about the black on people’s foreheads and she immediately starting smiling and nodding and patting my arm. She kept repeating, “I thought it mistake!” I told her that it was intentional and that throughout the day she will see increasingly more people with the ash on their forehead. Once again, google images proved to be a wonderful tool.

I’m not sure how much of my explanation she understood. She had no idea what a Catholic was so I tried my best to tell her about different types of Christianity and why Catholics were different from what she believed. She is a Christian but more specifically, attends a Bible Church and had no idea there were other sects of Christianity. It’s really hard to explain the idea of the Pope to someone who doesn’t speak English and knows nothing about Catholicism. I was pretty shocked that she didn’t know who the Pope was. I always knew that Asia had it’s own religious beliefs but I didn’t realize it was so far removed from the West that they didn’t even study it.

Eventually we moved to talking about Easter. I explained to her that kids have an Easter egg hunt completely with baskets and candy. We were both sad that we are too old to participate. ☹

After Easter came Thanksgiving. She was in the United States for Thanksgiving this year and from what she told me it sounded traditional. She said they ate lots of food and had a turkey. It was nice bringing this up because I forget sometimes that America is the only country that celebrates Thanksgiving!

Lastly was Halloween. We looked on google at a huge selection of costumes and she was really excited. We laughed at the different costumes people put their dogs in and smiled at baby costumes. It was interesting seeing what characters she recognized, like Scream. We ended our day looking at my facebook pictures from my Halloween.

This was probably my favorite meeting with Shinhye. For the first time, there were no awkward pauses and we even shared a lot of laughs. It also wasn’t artificial conversation, but instead flowed naturally. I feel like I actually bonded with her. This time it was less of homework and more like just hanging out with a friend, and that’s a big deal for me. My main complaint about this assignment is that if I’m going to devote an hour of my week every week to have a conversation with someone, there are so many people I’d love to do it with. At this point, I talk to Shinhye more than I talk to some of my closest friends, and that has always bothered me. But with this last meeting, I didn’t feel that, so things must be on track.

Old Times

            After LITERALLY forty minutes of searching, I have found an extremely old copy of Time Magazine. The library data system is so bad at telling you where things are. I searched the basement of the library for a solid half hour before I gave up. It was only once I was on my way through the main floor that I started to see the bound periodicals that I had been looking for. I still can’t find Vogue and Vanity Fair only goes back to the 1990’s so I guess I wont be writing anything about fashion as I had hoped. Oh well. So a helpful tip for anyone who manages to read my blog before starting on their own, stay on the main floor, quiet section!

            I managed to find a Time Magazine published on my exact birthday, although obviously not the same year. The Time I’m reading was published August 29, 1932. I’m a little confused already because there doesn’t appear to be a cover. I’m not sure if maybe that’s how they did things back in the 30’s or if there is a page missing. The most obvious difference between this Time and Times that are more current would be color. It is strange seeing everything in black and white. It makes it feel much more like a newspaper instead of a magazine.

The first three pages are solid advertisements. They are extremely strange though because they come off as actually articles in the magazine. They are set up with a few pictures and an informative story about the product underneath. It is nothing like the full-page picture advertisements we see today.  In addition to the unusual set-up, the ads are for unusual things as well. There was an ad for Tomato juice (Heinz of course), gas heating equipment, and life insurance. The life insurance ad might not seem too out of place except that it is a picture of several men pulling what one can assume is a dead body out of a car while two other people comfort a crying woman. You certainly wouldn’t see that depicted today. 

The articles are almost solid text, which bores me. It’s so much like an actual newspaper that I’m really just shocked right now. They have these extremely concrete categories that I’m not used to seeing like “Education, National Affairs, Foreign Affairs, and Science.” The advertisements look like modern day magazine articles and the articles look like modern day newspaper articles. It’s crazy!

The use of language was very entertaining. One sentence began with “For nine days last fortnight…” It is just interesting to see the old-fashioned words like fortnight being used in the popular press. I also got a kick out of a quote used in the one ad that read. “I never owned, hired, or saw a truck so good.” I can’t help put laugh at that grammar.

Ultimately, I don’t think I would be a fan of going through old magazines. Maybe I would’ve found the Vogue more interesting, who knows? I just hated the layout: It was so bland and boring. One day I’ll come back and make the librarian take me to the Vogue section. I honestly would really enjoy seeing those fashion ads!