Peer Response 1, Final Week: Diamond

First of all, your first sentence reminds me of a T-shirt one would get at small attraction: "I went to Ruby Falls and all I got was this shirt." Immediately caught my attention. Secondly, I agree with Jenna that the journey, or walking through the thrift store, would add a great amount of detail and "meaning" to your essay. Show us how your child-like mind came to pick up this particular item. What did you bypass to get to this bowl? Third, I find the price written in sharpie to be interesting. If you are attempting to apply definition to this "candy dish," what does "15 cents" marked in Sharpie do to this? I'd like to see you juggle this idea in as well. Fourth, you start to flesh out your reflection extremely well, but then I become lost in the idea that you want to become this bowl. Like Jenna, I'm not completely convinced that you "desperately" want to understand its history. Maybe flesh this out a little more to convey the desperation of your speaker and lose "desperately." Fifth, when your mother makes that blanketed statement, who is she talking to? Does this play any importance? If she is talking to another mother, does this reinforce your want to understand how the bowl came to collect so much dust?

Original Prompt, Final Week

"I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language -- the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with." 


"Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shaped the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world." -Amy Tan, "Mother Tongue"


After completing my Bachelor's degree in English in Decemeber, I plan to pursue a Master's degree in Speech and Language Pathology, and Amy Tan's essay "Mother Tongue" reinforced the desire to understand the development of language among children with special needs. First, her technique of introducing what "she is not" in the very beginning of her essay pushes the reader into a specified direction from the get-go. She ensures that her reading audience understands that this is not an essay about dialect or language but instead about genuine experiences involving language, which allows for more reader intriguement. Second, she "suggests" particular point of views that people hold in regards to people who do not speak "perfect" English without ranting or raving about them. She seems to have hot emotions toward such people but keeps her prose quite cool. Overall, she utilizes strong technique to illustrate how language plays to the writers advantage regardless of presupposed opinions about one's background or status. From reading her essay, I developed the following prompt. 


Describe a conversation you overheard between two or more people in which at least one person used "broken" English or a unique accent or a conversation you were directly involved in where the other person used "broken" English or a different accent. What were your initial thoughts about this person and their "status" in life? Did you think they were poor or rich, educated or not, etc. What was the conversation about? For example, was it a conversation about Wall Street spoken with "broken" English? Or was it a conversation you overheard or were involved in with a special needs individual that had difficulty expressing his/herself. 

Junkyard Quotes, Final Week

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."  -Oscar Wilde


‎"How you live in the moment affects how you live in the hour, and the day, and the lifetime."



"I can't wait for Kelly to get older...so she will start sleeping in!"  -My friend talking about her little sister


‎"The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them." -Albert Einstein 



"AXE Rise helps you keep up with a brainy girl." -Axe Commercial

Original Prompt, Week 7

“We walk back to the first body, unmingling stories. They divide up the bodies. They take the clothes off. What I thought before seeing it all: never again will I know the body as I do now. And how, exactly, is that?”  -“Autopsy Report,” Purpura

Purpura’s essay explores the process of conducting an autopsy, and she begins with snippet introductions/ physical descriptions of different people. As the story continues, Purpura focuses on the details of these individuals while describing how the body is processed at the scene, the thoroughness of the notes of a medical examiner, and the thoughts that fly between the investigators and the ME. While reading this essay, it reminded me of the stories I have heard while at the hospital and doctor office’s waiting rooms. Everyone seems to have a story to tell, and human nature” forces” us to yearn for someone to just listen. Just like in a grocery store checkout line, the middle-aged lady in front of you starts out making pleasant conversation, and the next thing you know, you are being told about her teenage escapades of last night. However, I find stories relating bodily injury to be more interesting and often funnier. You can’t help but wonder why he was jumping of the second story of his house into an above-ground pool with a trampoline sitting in it.

Prompt: Describe a person you’ve met or seen in the hospital waiting room or a doctor’s office. What were they there for and what was their story? Did they injure themselves in a go-cart accident or split their head open on a set of bunkbeds? 

Oddity 1, Week 7

Each morning, I go to outside garden to conduct daily price changes and validate the occasional bay, and each day, I walk past the exotic plant stand lined with a variety of cacti, aloe vera, and other desert plants. Usually, I don't pay them much attention. Cacti have never really dazzled me in terms of beauty. Strange and practical, yes. Usually it's the tulips that attract me this time of the year. Last week, when I walked by, there was a small flower top lying on the floor next to the cacti. Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was actually fake and had been spray-painted and hot glued to the tops. Unbeknownst to me, the plant vendors from Pure Beauty conduct this ritual to encourage customers to purchase them. They feel that if customers see an element of beauty, such as a flower, then they will be more inclined to purchase the plant. I don’t understand the need for fake beauty when the plants produce their own flowers as time goes on. Perhaps it merely reinforces this obsession to keep things pretty and in place, no matter how fake. Much like the stars seen on the cover of Starz magazine in the checkout line at Kroger. People like fake. It’s comfortable and something to aspire towards. 

Response to Diamond's "Improv 1," Week 7

I think you should build upon this "topic" of lack of community utilizing the various slogans of the businesses in Douglasville. This would be an interesting toggling technique for such an essay, and you could even tie in history of Douglasville or companies or strip malls to help develop it. Personally, I would like to see a tie-in of the environment and how these “community” slogans contradict the goals of an environmentalist area. For example, Lowe’s is located in the same strip area as Applebee’s and their slogan is “Let’s build something together.” Do communities as large as Douglasville actually build things or do they destroy as they expand? Are they working more towards a “neighborhood” or merely “more saving, more doing” as Home Depot suggests? You could even play with idea of why Atlanta would want to keep its charm there? 

As far as reflection goes, remember to avoid the obvious. Yes, this essay could focus on the lack of community and how the slogans contradict the idea, and it could tie-in environmental issues and how the community takes advantage. But how does the message in your essay differ from others? How will you keep this from becoming propaganda for EPA? Most importantly, to me anyway, why is this so important to you? Convey it to your reading audience.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 7

1) From "How I Met Your Mother" Season 1, Episode 7

Lily: Just play cool, don't Ted-out about it.

Ted: Did you just use my name as a verb?

Barney: Oh, yeah, we do that behind your back. “Ted-out”: to overthink. Also see “Ted-up.”  “Ted-up”: to overthink with disastrous results. Sample sentence: “Billy Tedded-up when he tried-”

2) "You gotta mark your territory, and I don't mean missing the toilet."

3) Walking on campus, overheard two girls talking about a girl in their class: "Slut alert!"

4) "All men are brothers, Like the seas throughout the world, So why do winds and waves clash fiercely everywhere?" -written on a whiteboard in the library [Later I googled the quote and discovered that it was originally used by Emperor Hirohito.]

Memory 1, Week 7

Disclaimer: I started thinking about my uncle and this is what came out. Still working with it, but I attempted to avoid high emotion and hot prose combinations.

He wasn’t really alive the night before. More content, comfortable, complacent with his decision. Standing in the kitchen of his home in Carrollton, my uncle Tim and I swapped band stories and talked about the prospect of a Spring wedding in his backyard. My wedding. The idea was abandoned the next when my aunt found him in the basement leaning against the water heater. Gun still his right hand and a note in his left. “I can’t go back to the hospital.”

To this day, the bag of Reese’s Cups he bought the night before remains on the bottom shelf of my aunt’s refrigerator door. Unable to toss them out. The suicide didn’t bother me the most nor did his lack of reasoning in the letter left behind. I can even understand how we misconstrued the smiles into believing that he was getting better.  It was the receipt for the gun he tucked away in his wallet—purchased seven days prior. It takes seven days to obtain a permit in the state of Georgia. How could he have been so comfortable with killing himself that he waited seven days without uttering a word? It was probably the best seven days of his life. He made peace with himself and left a broken family behind. I confess that anger came first and still lingers. It’s only natural, right? Selfishly, he left my aunt—his wife—alone in this world.

I think my cousin, Colin, handled it best. He carried the weight that a child of fourteen should never have to bear. But wisdom came from it. A few weeks after Tim’s funeral, Paula underwent her daily breakdown, and he mentioned something I had not considered for anger blinded me.

 “Mom, why are you so angry?”

“He left us alone, and that makes me so angry.”

“He couldn’t help it. He was sick.” What if Tim saw this as his only escape? What if he believed that he was relieving of headache and heartache? Can we blame him for wanting to stop his treatments, to stop feeling trapped by his own mind, to find peace? Two years have passed since that Good Friday. I have a son now and couldn’t imagine him fading in such a manner. I surround him with love and ensure that he knows the support that will follow him for the rest of his life. Perhaps suicide isn’t entirely selfish. It is us, the broken left behind, who are selfish to ask them to remain miserable? Once they are committed, who are we to stop them from becoming free?