Process Analysis: Swing Dancing

SWOOP ME! 

Response to "Behind the Formaldhyde Curtain"

This essay made me squeamish primarily because of the disgustingly detailed description of the entire process, however, the concept of embalming itself made me uncomfortable as well. While Mitford outlined at length the painstaking process of preparing a body after death each process was disconcertingly fake and unnatural. The concept of open casket allows the deceased's family and loved ones to say a final goodbye, however, natural process make this unreasonable and unpalatable in the real world. No one wants to see a rotting corpse. But as Mitford implies and I felt while reading the essay, the most disconcerting part is that this is all a ruse, a ritual create to ignore death even at a funeral. Mitford notes that the funeral director is content in making "the funeral a real pleasure for everybody concerned." Like euphemisms which skirt the issue of death and mortality, embalming perpetuates the concept that ignorance is bliss. Sure Aunt Helen "passed away" last week but she still looks vital and peaceful in the casket. Even the term casket seems less threatening, more bearable than "coffin."
I think that embalming may be a veritable coping method for some people and though I would personally not want my body or any of my loved one's bodies embalmed, I respect other peoples' desires to use to process. Some may argue that it allows for the people present at the service to appreciate the person as they were in life and to say a final goodbye. And while this is a possibility, to me the injections and reconstructions, perfumes and make up, while necessary, defeat the purpose. I would personally rather see my loved one in my mind as they were in life, lively, vital and real, not a reconstruction of a person lying in a coffin. It may be everyone's choice but open casket ceremonies to me are unnatural and evasive.

Comparison essay

In an ideal world of public transportation...

Let's Lead by Example

Here is an essay that I wrote. 

Response to "The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society"

                When reading Jonathan Kozol's "The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society" I was shocked. It's always kind of been an unexplained assumption of mine that in a civilized society, the majority of people are literate and those who are illiterate are few and minimally affected. Reading this essay, it is painfully obvious that it is a much larger issue than I originally thought.
          The essay is meant to shock the literate population who was hardly phased by reading the article itself. To reinforce this idea and to convey the severity of the problem, Kozol utilizes a repetition of the phrase "Illiterates cannot." Obviously, illiterates cannot read however the author explores the broader expanse of things that illiterates cannot do because of their position. Many paragraphs begin with this phrase and provide examples for simple things that the majority of the population take for granted. The phrase suggests that because they cannot read, illiterates are disabled in a society which is created for those who can read. The repetition suggests that the list of problems is endless and this is only a small portion of the examples that makes illiteracy such a serious problem in society.

Narrative Style

I know we were only supposed to imitate the style of one the passages we read last week, so I feel a little cheap for leaning so heavily on Amy Tan's "Fish Cheeks" in both theme and focus on Chinese ethnicity (food in particular), but I couldn't really help myself. Here it is, A Chinese New Year.

Life as an Only Child

                I’ve always said that my childhood devoid of siblings was fantastic conditioning for my future as a crazy cat lady. I love being alone, I am self-sufficient, and would be content with only the company of a warm, furry ball to spoon at night. Sure it might get a little lonely, but, hey, I’m used to it!
              Joking aside, a significant part of who I am stems from the fact that I am an only child. Sometimes when people find out that I am an only child they smile knowingly and say, “Oh, that explains so much.” What does that even mean? Am I marked from the other people who grew up in the company of brothers and sisters with some strange social quirk that only single children have?
               Maybe it isn’t particularly obvious, and while I can’t attribute general social awkwardness to my only-childness (yes, I’m making it a noun), I am marked as an only child. In my case, I have an unfortunately extreme form of only-childness with not only the absence of brothers and sisters but of close family relatives my age. I was born in a period when all of my extended family for some reason decided to take a hiatus from child rearing. So when I was a toddler, my cousins were just graduating college. Watching my four younger cousins born a decade after me, I realize that I was denied the opportunity to escape from the adult world in pillow forts and water balloon fights. I always sat at the adult  table.
               So here I am. A product of my.childhood.  Some would say that I was denied a proper childhood though this isn’t something I really identify with. So for this free choice blog, I wanted choose a topic that I could write about from personal experience but also something wanted to learn more about. While I feel like a life with siblings would have made me a different person, I am not entirely sure how or why.                            Psychologically, it would make sense that people who grew up in an environment with adults will have certain behavioral habits different from people who grew up sharing a room and the attention of their parent(s).
Obviously there is a wide range of possible experiences for only children though there are a few trends that I would like to identify and explore further in future blog posts.
-ambition to live up to parent’s achievements
-tendency to not want to share/to prefer privacy
-to prefer peaceful environments and shy away from conflict
-feelings of stress to behave correctly
-independence/self-sufficiency
-morality based off parent’s views
-ability to communicate with adults
-preference to being introverted
-feelings of self-consciousness
There are common traits that I have noticed in myself and other only children. I would like to make this a somewhat personal case study of my own experience and the impact that this upbringing and these characteristics may have on an individual in the future.

Greasy Lake Response

The short story "Greasy Lake" by T.C Boyle recounts the night that a group of teens spent up at Greasy Lake. While in the opening, the writer depicts the boys forcibly and almost comically trying to be "bad characters." While they live in the suburbs, drive their parents' station wagons, drink cheap liquor and try to look like they aren't trying, things escalate out of their control on that night. While the writer implies that they do little more than innocent, adolescent shenanigans,  that night they go on to almost kill a man, rape a girl and find a dead body.

    The boys act the way they think they are suppose to and respond to situations not because they are necessarily bad or without morals but because they constantly strive to be “bad characters.” Even the phrase, “bad characters” is forced and kind of bumbling and awkward. The phrase is often repeated and reinforces the image that the boys have of themselves and this weak image they try to project themselves as. When they get in the fight with the man who they thought was in Tony’s car, digby uses the tire iron which he keep under the driver’s seat. He admits that he had only ever used it to change tires and had only been in a fight once before in sixth grade though he kept it there to seem tough and grabs for it instinctually, pushed by his determination to be a bad character.

A quote that stood out to me the most was “I was nineteen, a mere child, an infant, and here in the space of the five minutes I’d struck down one greasy character and blundered into the waterlogged carcass of a second.” Digby recognizes that he is a child and that while he has been trying to act older, even though he is on the brink of his teenage years and feels like he is above everything else, he is still innocent and inexperienced. I love the parallel comparison of the greasy character, the man who they fought with, and the “waterlogged carcass of a second”, the lake. The imagery is fantastic and portrays the lake as a putrid, disgusting body of water, though dead because it is a carcass.

I wonder if the three boys would actually have raped the girl. It was a shocking twist to me because while the fight with the man was more of a reaction, the rape was preemptive. The scene is hectic and jumbled, and while they are in a passionate impulse it seems like they might actually do it. I wonder if they would have carried on with it had they not been caught first.

At the end of the story, the boys turn down an opportunity to party with some girls. By the end they are shaken and don’t want to get into any more trouble. All the want to do is sneak back into bed and the safety of their homes. The night’s events made Digby realize his innocence but it is unclear if he has learned his lesson.