more "Dew Breaker"...

There are sooooo many different characters in the " Dew Breaker." Each separate story has it's own list. Each story has a character that is affected by the dew breaker in some way. Each fragment of the novel is told through the story of the a different characters. In the end they are all connected. There are also endless themes throughout this book. Here are some that i can think of; immigration, culture, family, love, confusion, evil, remorse, regret,hate, violence,the past, family, secrets, and forgiveness. Basically everything that happens can be put into a theme so it's hard to pick them out.
The section i was assigned today was "Water Child." I understood the section far better after analyzing it than after just reading it. Having to list the characters in order of importance also made me look at it a different way. Each section of this book has so much more in it that whats on the surface. I think i will have a far better understanding of how they all connect when i can read what the other groups did today. It will also be easier to understand the novel as a whole.

r.i.p. joosey joose

So i am very upset about this but it looks like were going to have to say goodbye to a few of the drinks that are conveniently found at any seven- eleven. Supposedly there is now a "settlement" with MillerCoors banning alcohol based energy drinks. A reason that they gave is that sparks makes kids go " Nutso." I don't understand how this can even be legally banned. I thought this was a free country. Sure, i bet drinking a sparks is probably not good for you, but neither is drinking any alcoholic drink? If they are banning this because it's bad for kids then why aren't they banning all energy drinks in general. What about red bull and vodka? or jagerbombs? Can those be banned too? I just don't really understand.
The official announcement says that caffeinated alcoholic drinks can "distort judgment, weaken inhibitions and encourage risky behavior, especially in young people." Aren't those the effects of alcohol in general? It also says that the effects can hide how drunk the person really is. They will be under the same affects of alcohol but feel more alert. Kids are going to get drunk no matter what. I would think that being more alert would be a good thing. Maybe i am just upset for personal reasons. Soon I will no longer be able to purchase a night of energy and fun for under three dollars. Maybe we can all just start chopping up caffeine pills and putting it in shots or or just buying energy drinks and alcohol and mixing it together ourselves. People want to get drunk, stay awake, and have the energy to enjoy it and a ban is not going to control this, it's just going to make it a little bit harder.

article- http://johnnycalifornia.com/?p=2649

"Tricked"

It says that this is a " childhood narrative of becoming self aware." I wonder how long it took the author to realize the significance of these events. How long did he hold in his hostile feelings for the Tomkeys? Did he only realize the importance when looking back on his childhood? I think this essay was a good example to read while working on our own. It showed some pretty straightforward ways to put outside resources into your paper.
The point of view is the author looking back on the past just like in " Death of a Fish." They are similar for obvious reasons, they both are personal essays, and they both focus on a main event. They are different because "Death of a Fish" is from the parent's point of view and " Tricked" is the author writing about what happened to himself as a child.
The television references used were probably aimed more towards an older audience than me but they were still publicly relevant. Television doesn't show things how they are in the real world. Most things on TV can give you false hopes or standards. Most Americans can relate to Halloween and can think about or remember their own huge bags of candy that they hid away from others. He used real trademark names that his readers would recognize. The essay doesn't really give off a good impression of the authors character; it shows him to be selfish, greedy and judgmental. I guess that's what he learned and is trying to communicate, not to be those things.

" Death of a Fish"

This reading made me think of the many childhood pets that i have lost. This might be weird, but in my backyard at home we have a tiny pet cemetery. I've lost count but between me and my two sisters it has about 4 or 5 different small rodent type animals in it. Mine was named pineapple. One time my little sister's hamster,Bean, died and she was so upset that my mom put together a little hamster wake and and funeral. We also have these pet urn type things with the ashes of our childhood dog and our recently deceased 23 year old cat.
This essay looks at it from the parents point of view. It must be hard to have to explain things like death to your child. You want to protect them from everything bad in the world for as long as you can but eventually things start happening and questions start to come up that have to be answered. Death can be a hard concept to grasp even when you are an adult. I know that i was extremely afraid of it when i was a child and maybe because it wasn't something that i had even been aware of until the first death of a family member. Maybe i would of understood or dealt with it better if i had had a Bluie in my life.
The essay is about more that just the death of a fish. It taps into questions about different views and beliefs on death, parenthood, and the minds of children. The experience is easy to relate to. It is publicly relevant to anyone that has ever had a pet and lost them or even lost anyone that was close to them. The essay was published in the New Yorker and was definitely relevant to it's audience. It talks specifically about having pets in New York and it is from the parents point of view which is suitable for the older audience that is more likely to read that magazine. There is a lot of outside research and i almost don't even like the ending because of it. Maybe it's because i haven't even seen that movie but i just don't like that ending for some reason.
The parents end up learning a lesson from the child i think. She was connected to that fish and even though she is young she is not a fool. Even though they did it with good intention, replacing the fish and trying to pass it off as Bluie probably wasn't the best thing to do. You can't hide your child from something that is real, and death is something that everyone is going to be affected by throughout their life and even experience themselves. When this happens to my kids, i know what i won't do.

"Vital Signs"

Today nobody in our group had done this reading and we all sort of picked a section of it to try and skim over so that we could somewhat participate in what we were supposed to be doing in class. The section i got was the end part of how the girl remembered the incident and how her mother found her and how she got to the hospital. I just finished reading the whole essay and obviously now it makes more sense. It's not just a memoir of how she got attacked by vicious huskies. The opening of the essay is about her stay in the hospital and then the essay tells you how she got there. The end part with the fish shows sometime in her life after the attack. I like the "Small Purchase" section the best. What happened to her as a little girl was so horrible and there are many people who have gone through something like that. When something like that happens to someone, they may loose all hope but they also may get something surprisingly good out of the experience. I think it is really cute that she found a fish that also lost his eye and that she could connect to it.The way she describes what the fish does in its tank lets us know some of the ways that she went on living her life after the attack. This essay is a sad one and it is about something scary and unfortunate that happened but it is also an essay about hope,strength, courage, and resilience.

peer revisions

I always hate peer editing. I hate having to read out loud or let people read my papers, especially when they are incomplete and shitty. It makes me very uncomfortable unless i am proud of my work, which i am usually not.I think it is just embarrassing to me and awkward. The way we did the revisions in class was helpful. We had no choice of who would read our papers so it wasn't as easy as just pairing up with a friend and switching papers with them. I wish it would of been anonymous or something. I like this way a lot better than having to hear your paper read out loud to you that sucked. I got a lot of helpful feedback that i wouldn't of noticed on my own. I like that we got to ask questions that they had to address. As far as editing other peoples paper goes, i can give my opinion but i am not sure that my advice is too great. I tried to give good feedback but if i can't even figure out my own paper than how am i supposed to help someone else.

unit 1 paper topic

I think the hardest part of my Unit 1 paper will be coming up with an idea that works. The writing exercise we did in class had some interesting results. Some of the people and things that popped into my head were obvious but some of them were either really random or things or people that i haven't even thought about in a while or i guess just never even realized that they were significant to me until having to write down this list. It's hard to look at your life and everything that has ever happened to you and pick out some important moment. I don't even remember a lot of the moments that made me who i am today. I can list the changes that i have gone through but it is very difficult to pick out the events or moments that caused them. The moment that i ended up writing about in the activity was when i met my dad's dad a few years ago. I guess technically he is my grandfather but i feel strange even saying that word because he was a stranger that had no part in my life until my junior year of high school. The moment was an odd and significant moment in my life because it made me think of myself, my family, my past, and my whole life a little bit differently. There are many ways i could make my paper publicly relevant. I didn't do this on purpose, but like "The Dew Breaker" this moment greatly affected the way that i saw my own father and obviously my grandfather, along with other member's of my family. It made me rethink what family really means and how being blood related to someone connects you to them or how you can define who a relative is. It made me feel the importance of knowing about your past and where and who you come from and how it can affect you or even not affect you. Also how is it possible that an encounter with a stranger can affect you as much as this did me. The problem i am having with this topic is that it is an event that was unexpectedly very emotional for me. I have yet to even fully grasp the situation and i have found myself trying to force my brain to stop even thinking about it because of the different emotions that it surfaces. It is something that is not settled in my mind and i just don't know if i should pick a topic that would be easier or just simpler. I would pick something else but a rough draft is due tomorrow and i haven't thought of anything else good yet so i guess i am going to just give it a try and then if my rough draft is even shittier that it's supposed to be i will just have to try something else.

articles

I just finished reading the four Dew Breaker articles. I thought that " Home is Where the Heart is" was obviously very long and detailed and it had a ton of information in it about Danticat's other book which confused me a little. It also had alot of information about Daticat's personal history and some parts of it really helped me to further understand the book like the Homecomings section that picked apart "Night Talker's." My favorite of the articles was Bob Corbett's comments. It explains how the the book has traces of real events and how the book is neither a book of short stories or an average formatted novel. The articles all point out important themes present throughout the stories and story as a whole.
I like the way the stories fit together as a puzzle. A book that makes you think helps to keep your interest. Also having to put things together really makes you remember and connect to the stories. " The Dew Breaker" is a book that brings you to awareness of a real issue in a different way. You can see what happened in Haiti and the effects is through the characters. You can almost feel the horror, sadness, loss, and the fear that fill the lives of the victims that are portrayed. I feel like this method of bringing awareness is more affective than just reading a history book or listening to the news or something along those lines. For example, think about the Holocaust. We can read about the number of people who died, what happened, why, when, and where it took place and we can learn about it that way. Or, we can read "The Diary of Anne Frank", watch a movie like "Schindler's List" or even visit the remains of a real concentration camp. I think that you can only truly grasp the effect or significance of something if you find way to see it though the eyes of the people that experienced or were affected by it. You can better understand something if you can somehow relate it to yourself and your own life and i think that the "Dew Breaker" does this for us.

1 year

I missed a couple days on here so i am trying to make up for it now... It's sort of hard to find things to write about. I saw the Dark Knight for the first time a couple of days ago which is strange because i am a big fan of many comic book heroes,Batman being somewhere at the top of the list. It's also strange because today, January 22, 2009, marks the one year anniversary of the passing of Heath Ledger. I can remember last year when everyone was finding out the shocking news.I'll admit, i was at a school basketball game and i had to go to the bathroom to hide and cry over it. It was weird because of course i did not know him as a person or anything but it just seemed like such a huge waste of a life full of talent. We've seen him as the modern day Petruccio, a knight, a cowboy, and even the joker. I can't even imagine how many amazing roles that he would of played throughout his life if he would of had the chance. It is crazy that this happened a whole entire year ago. It is still just as shocking to me. It makes me realize that this year has gone by very fast. Everything seems to be going so slow while it is happening but then once it has happened is seems to of flown by so quickly. So much has happened to me this year. I had my senior year of high school, graduation, the whole summer, i left my friends, family and home,started college and made new friends, and finished the whole first semester. All that remains from that all is a few memories, lessons, and changes. It really seems like that day, January 22, 2008, had just happened. It's also weird to think about who we, as a generation, will see die in our lifetime. Specifically, the famous people that we all know from the movies and songs we've grown up to. I wonder who's next?

yes we did

I didn't have class on Tuesday because the one class that i dad have was canceled. I think that it was ridiculous that classes were scheduled during the inauguration. We get off for "reading days" and stupid things like that but not for Obama's inauguration. I wasn't surprised by how many people showed up. It looked insanely ridiculously packed. I would of liked to go but i had no way to get there. i had a sort of odd feeling while watching it. It was such momentus day for our country and it really made me feel like things are going to start looking up for America. I was very affected by something Dianne Feinstein said in her welcoming remarks. She said that "future generations will mark this morning as the turning point for real and necessary change in this nation. They will look back and remember that this was the moment when the dream that once echoed across history from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial finally reached the walls of the White House." her statement gave me the chills and it made me realize just how significant this day really was in our history and how important it is pertaining to the state of our future. I am looking forward to how and when these changes that have been promised to us will come to place

Why is it like under twenty degrees outside? i can not stand how cold it is here. I have basically stayed in the past two nights in a row only from fear of the cold outside. I wore two coats, a scarf, and earmuffs today and i was still freezing. My nose and face felt like they were frozen. The wind hurts and it it almost unbearable to even walk to class. I know am going to get sick soon because of the weather and because everyone around me is getting sick. The dorms are like a cesspool for whatever is going around and it's disgusting. I hate having to go out looking for food here. It takes too much time to eat because you have to go somewhere in order to do so. I miss my kitchen and i miss my dog and right not i am especially missing my hot tub.

The Dew Breaker

To me, Elements of Fiction seemed to be basically just a list of definitions and explanations of literary terms that i already knew. As i read it i thought of how each term was used in Danticat's book. The Dew Breaker has a different set of plot and characters in each short story but they all come together to form the plot of the novel as a whole. I enjoyed reading a book that was formatted in this way because my attention span is quite short and the length of the different stories helped me to keep interest in what was going on. It was like a puzzle, trying to put everything together and see how everything was connected or related. The elements of fiction are always present in a story but i guess this reading just gives us the terms to talk about them and point them out.
The way Danticat wrote the different settings throughout the book really gave you an understanding of the mood of the environments that the characters were placed in. It was easy to visualize what was being described. The tone of the novel changed, some parts were obviously more serious than others. There were also many different themes throughout the story; The violence and political corruption in Haiti, culture, family, love, forgiveness, remorse and others.
The research that i did showed me more about Haiti and about the author, Edwidge Danticat. Even though it is a fiction story, there is factual information and characters throughout the novel and Danticat is also obviously writing from some of her own personal life experiences. In my research saw that Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere and among the poorest in the world. Because of it's location and weak government, Haiti is a major transport point for all of the cocaine coming into america from Columbia. Almost all of the Haitian people are descendants of African slaves brought over to harvest sugar cane or mulatto descendants of the French settlers. There was also a ton of depressing information of the widespread poverty devastationg the nation.
At my high school we had an exchange student from Haiti whose name was Emmanuel. He was in my French class but quickly got moved to AP, since French was his main language. He was also in my ceramics class and was extremely talented. His parents were still in Haiti and he was living with some family friend. This book reminded me of him a lot. He would always get asked questions about Haiti and would try to explain things to us about what is was like but i never really understood what he was talking about. Now i do. I actually did enjoy reading this book( waaaaayy more than covering..) and i am looking forward for the movie to come out.