1. Does it need transitions, or is it best left alone?
2. Does a piece like this need a conclusion?
3. How can I write to "show" my shyness early on in the job?
4. Was I able to convey a growign comfort level/happiness with the bar by the end of the piece?
5. Are there any unnecessary genres or genres that are missing?
6. Does the Twitterive engage the reader enough, and if not, wht

1. Who are the characters? Me, coworkers, and patrons
2. What connection do you feel to your place? It's become my second home and everyone there has become another family to me.
3. When does the story take place? 2 1/2 years ago to present day
4. Where does the story take place? The bar I work at
5. Why does the story take place? My job has become a big part of my life, it's not just a job to me anymore
6. How are you "delivering"/presenting the story? Through narrative, microfiction, lists, pictures, interview, recipes, character descriptions, songs

I thought that discussing the Twitterive was helpful.  It made me more comfortable with talking about what is going on in my piece, and I feel more confident about it.  Seeing where other people are with it helped me to realize that we are all on the same page with the project, and it is helping me to feel less stressed about completing it.

Stephanie Slammer? Like I’m really scared. My record is like, what, like 50-0 somethin? Whatevs! I got this girl beat! I fight like I fist pump.  You wanna talk about a situation? I’ll give you a situation. So what if I broke my jaw this past summer when that ugly bartender punched me in the face? So what if I got a little tipsy off of the juice and have a hangover? I'll take her even with a broken nail! My personal trainer got me ready – we walked up and down the boardwalk every day, did like 10 jumping jacks twice a week or something – I could fist pump circles around that girl.  I’ll get my GTL on and show this grenade how it’s done!  WHERE'S MY PROTEIN?!

Experimenting with writing in different genres has shed light on differnet aspects if my writing.  For one, I need to vary my sentence structure, and I noticed this the most when searching through my microfictions for the found haiku poem.  Almost every single one of my sentences has the same rhythm to it, and it annoyed the hell out of me when I went back and reread it a few times.  If I could, I would go back and change up the micrifiction about the fire. and developthe style a lot more.  I could stress different feelings just by rearranging the rhythm of the sentences.  It is definitely something I will awnt to pay more attention to.

Another thing that I noticed while writing in different genres is how so much of what I write connects to one specific person/place in my life.  I'm not sure if this leads to something that should be used for e twitterive assingment, but there is most definitely a clear subject and theme that is emerging throughout.

This is a haiku taken from both of my microfictions.  It was constructed like the found poem.  I might add in a few more, it was fun messing around with these. :)

It is all gone now
A monumental failure
Losing sanity


Found Poem:  This was a little more difficult to put together.  It was taken from 11 tweets from my twitter account. Oh, and don't laugh. I HATE writing poetry. Haikus don't count. :P

The tweets (with used phrases/words in bold):
1. "You must not have seen that it was supposed to get cold tonight." Thanks captain obvious.
2. "I could not write that photo."
3. In complete shock
4. "He assimilated and disassimilated the orange." I get that we're talking about Tron, but couldn't you just say "broke up"? interesting language...
5. Clearly misunderstood the blog assignment and did it all wrong. how? i don't know, but i feel really dumb.
6. Desperate to get out and see something new.  I need one damn day off for an aimless roadtrip to get me out of this funk.
7." It takes an ocean not to break"
8. Organized chaos
9. Going to overcome one of my fears, now if only someone would tell me how to convert .3g2 -> mpeg. HELP!
10. I thought my twitter microfiction would be easier. SURPRISE. 250 words of "I just can't get it right."
11. GA(anxiety)D: The little switch to make you feel better is burried deep within you, you just can't access it when you need it most.

Overcome
We were a microfiction,
Disassimilated in complete shock.
Pretending - we must have have seen it coming,
Now both overcome and burried deep under an ocean.
I could not write our future, you could not stand the anxiety.
Desperate to see something-
We clearly misunderstood
Organized chaos.
Dig out and overcome.
If only you would tell me how.


I tried to keep both poems related, just to see what would come of it.

This is another 250 word micro-fiction that is based off of a tweet “Your elbow touch, mine the green wire, yours red. I feel sparks, warmth, and hope. You're a stone with nothing to ignite.” 

            I pulled up to meet you at the walkway.  The ice tinged against my windshield, and you slammed the door as you eased yourself into the passenger seat.  I remembered the last time you eased yourself into my car in that same way when we left the hospital.  It was warmer then, and so were you. 

            We drove to the theater, you filled me in on the prequel that I never got around to seeing.  Your voice was deep and smooth, and it calmed me to the point of discomfort.  I wasn’t ready for this.  I turned up my music.

            “There’s no saving anything, now we’re swallowing the shine of the sun…”

            I tried to ignore everything, but was once again reminded of my monumental failure to you and me.  You noticed and dutifully turned down the volume, and repeated several steps back in the story you had been telling.  You didn’t think I noticed you backtracking over the music, but I did. I always did, and I still thought it was as endearing as it was five months ago.

            We sat side by side in the uncomfortable seats.  I shifted my weight to keep my foot from falling asleep.  Your elbow touched mine. I flinched.  My arm was the green wire, yours was the red. I felt sparks, warmth, hope. Your eyes remained transfixed to the screen. You were a stone with nothing to ignite, while I felt electricity trace up my arm and to my brain.  Something was about to explode in me, and all I could do was sit and wait for you to detonate with me.  The tension had been increasing with every “casual” meet.

Micro Fiction Practice, from Borderlands, by Gloria Anzaldua

This is a 250-word micro-fiction based on the quote “Taking my usual walk I run into sirens flashing red, turning and a small crowd watching the dark-haired man with the thin mustache..” (Anzadua 145).

 

            “Taking my usual walk I run into sirens flashing red, turning and a small crowd watching the dark-haired man with the thin mustache” (Anzadua 145).  He frantically paces around the parking lot, shouting to himself in what sounded like Hindi.  His arms are flailing in the air.  Everyone is frantic, but all I can do is stop, stand, and watch.  I had seen him a few weeks ago, hugging large boxes as he staggered up the cement stairs to his new home on the third floor.  It was all gone now; the flames ate hungrily at the attic space and descended relentlessly to the floors below.

            I felt guilty for even shedding what tears I had shed that night.  I lost my purse, my wallet, and a few other replaceable pieces of my life in those ashen walls. I glanced over to John, whose face had remained in complete shock since we had returned from our walk to find his apartment up in smoke.  He and his brother had also recently moved in.  His drums were gone; his brother’s soundboard had been taken.  What else could possibly be taken from him this year?

            The Hindi man’s family was left huddled under a tree several yards away from me.  They were not sure what to be more afraid of; losing everything they had or losing the sanity of their unemployed patriarch who was losing his American dream.  They were left to the mercy of the Red Cross trailer that night. John turned and asked to stay with me.

Billy The Kid

                A lover who is with a woman who is having an affair? A family friend? A lover who is trying to understand depression?  I wasn’t sure what to make of this story.  I felt that there were so many clues that were left so wide open; it was hard to get a legitimate impression of anything.  If it weren’t for the notes scribbled in the margins, everything would have been a bit of a lost cause, but even those notes seemed like minute details that did not connect to any one true story. 

            It seemed as if this story is about a woman who is reduced to tasks without John (I’m assuming he is her husband):

“On weekdays anyway, she'd sit like that on the bed, the sheet tight around her top and brought down to her belly, her legs having to keep themselves warm. Listening for noises around the house, the silence really, knowing John had gone, just leaving a list of things he wanted her to do.” (Ondaatje 31)

, and when he is gone she shuts herself away from the rest of the world.  When he is around, she does not open up any more to him because she knows he will be leaving at some point anyway:

“They do not talk much, Sallie and John Chisum, but from here I can imagine the dialogue of noise-the scraping cup, the tilting chair; the cough, the suction as an arm lifts off a table breaking the lock that was formed by air and the wet of the surface.

On other days they would go their own ways. Chisum would be up earlier than dawn and gone before Sallie even woke and rolled over in bed, her face blind as a bird in the dark.” (30).

            The only things that seemed to bring any life into the household were the animals that cohabitated there.

            I’m honestly not sure what this story is meant to tell us, I feel like I need more than just that little bit to understand what is happening.

Paris To The Moon

            Throughout this reading, I could not help but think that the person who wrote this is extremely brave for doing what he had done.  To raise your child in a foreign country to adopt customs that are so foreign to you must be a huge thing to swallow.  You are not only trying to digest and cope with what new things are being thrown at you, but you must teach your child according to these customs in order for her/him to survive.  The only solace the writer seemed to find was in the class he had been taking, but even that lead to disappointment.  No matter where he looked, there were things that contradicted what he was learning:

“There Is No Regulon in the Semiosphere is an abstract way of saying that there is no "natural predator" to stop the proliferation of movies and television; they do overwhelm the world, and with it reality. It is hard to see how you save the carousel and the musical horse in a world of video games, not because the carousel and musical horse are less attractive to children than the Game Boy, but because the carousel and the musical horse are single things in one fixed place and the video games are everywhere, no Regulon to eat them up. Game Boy, but because the carousel and the musical horse are single things in one fixed place and the video games are everywhere, no Regulon to eat them up.”

               

                Even though the writer is living in France and is experiencing a more simplified life that doesn’t have all of the adaptations that American life provides ( universal plugs, for instance),  there is still no stopping the need and want for advancement, and there is no way to outrun it, even if you are moving to a foreign country.

I enjoyed this piece, even if it was difficult to understand throughout.  There were many times that I felt that the writing was so detailed about certain things that it did not add up to the comprehension of the entire piece.  Even so, there was something about it that drew me in to read more; I cannot help but wonder if it is because it seems to be about something that is real, unlike the Billy the Kid piece, which I felt repelled me.

Narrative Life & A Native Hill

                Narrative Life is a piece that seems to exemplify who we as writers should be…which should seem simple enough: we need to be ourselves.  The most difficult part of what this is saying to us is simply that we need to be ourselves.  This is telling us that we need to draw from out past experiences and embrace what we have seen and learned from these past experiences to make things come to light.  These experiences are what we know best, we can describe every last detail.  Giving our own perspective can give us more insight to what the audience will experience than what we realize, such as creating “narrative sympathy”. 

                The thing that I loved most about this piece was that it reminded me of what we should be doing as writers.  I am too often forced to write in terms of research, and am separated from myself in my writing.  I’m writing to prove a fact, not to put someone in my perspective and to help them see what I see, or to create another world for them.  A Native Hill is an example of what Narrative Life is telling us to do. 

                Native Hill is an example of a writer writing purely from his perspective.  He writes what he knows, thus giving us the opportunity to see things as he sees them, which makes the experience more real to us.  Because he is able to give us more detail, since he was a part of the scenes which he describes, we are able to place ourselves in his shoes, and he accomplishes what every writer seems to strive for.

                The thing that scares me the most about this type of writing is whether or not people will care about the world as I see it.  Making people care is such a large undertaking, and I’m not always confident that others will be able to relate to my stories.  I hope that I will be able to develop a style that will allow others to care about the things that I care about.   Because of these things, this class makes me incredibly nervous.

Dubliners - James Joyce

An Encounter
    This piece spoke loudly to me of the expectations society places on people as they grow.  While they were younger, the Dillon boys and the narrator were enjoying imaginative adventures in the back of a garden.  The narrator claims that they "opened doors of escape", where they were able to live out the wild fantasies that the "Wild West" had given them (Joyce 20).  They were able to do this without going against anyone's wishes, as children are usually able to do through play.  
    Once in college, the boys are no longer allowed to experiment with their readings as they once were as children.  They are expected to read and report, read and report, and to take on "responsibility" that the priests place on them.  Reading for enjoyment was looked down upon as the boys were expected to take on more of an "adult" role.  They feel confined to the classroom and to school, which contradicts the freedom they experienced in the garden as children.  When they attempt to go against these expectations by bringing in The Halfpenny Marble, they are not only rebuked for having them, but the priest speaks to them in a way that suggests that the boys should feel privileged to be expected to take on the mundane role of a student in such an elite educational establishment ("I could understand it if you were ... National School boys") (20). Clearly, the idea of privilege is not enough to ease their hunger for adventure and excitement, and they once again try to break away from the expectations placed upon them by leaving the school for a day and visiting the Pigeon House.  
    While the boys are out in the empty field (representing a place with no expectations, for it is blank), they meet an old man.  Leo Dillon is able to find his escape again by chasing after a cat (perhaps showing that he is less mature than the narrator), but the narrator is left to converse with the old man.  He is bored with most of his stories, but the only thing that he gives us any detail about is when the old gentleman brings up having a "sweetheart".  Once again, the narrator is met by expectations for his age in society, and is left alone to wrestle with the fact that he is not yet meeting them.  He turns his eyes away, exposing his shame for what he has not yet accomplished, and awkwardly manages a way to leave the man.  As he leaves, he is terrified of the man catching up to him and tackling him, perhaps symbolizing the impending responsibilities of life that will soon be levied on his shoulders, regardless of how many times he tries to escape.

Arbay
    This reading left me slightly confused - I wasn't sure of the age of the narrator - clearly he still needed permission to go to the bazaar for the girl he has feelings for, but he is old enough to go out late at night by himself.  I wasn’t sure if the reference to her “convent” was meant to be taken literally – was this girl actually a nun, or was this a metaphor for her age and innocence – the narrator could have brought this up to show the difference between himself and her: he is noticing her in a very different light than how she seems to be noticing him, and perhaps in a way he feels guilty. 

                There were two main differences between Arbay and An Encounter that I noticed.  The first difference is that the narrator does entertain the notion of romance in Arbay, while in An Encounter the narrator appears to be indifferent about it.  The second major difference is that the narrator is allowed the ability to escape and go to the bazaar, while in An Encounter, the boys and the narrator were forced to sneak off. 

Micro Fiction

Wrong Channel

                This reading was both humorous and sad at the same time.  It’s amazing how small miscommunications can change a person’s life. 

Mockingbird

                There was a contrast in this between the family that the couple was discussing and their lives.  The woman seems to give credit to the hardworking family and the fact that they have earned all that they have, while she and her “husband?” do not seem to have to put out the same effort to have what they have.  They have the luxury of sipping vodka in the evening, relaxing through dinner, making love whenever and wherever they please, while the hardworking family barely has any time to themselves.  This story honestly reminded me of Christmas Vacation (yes, I’m sorry, but I am comparing this to a Chevy Chase movie…I’m willing to accept whatever punishment the literary gods may bestow upon me), and the difference between the Griswolds and the neighbors Margot and Todd.  Margot and Todd had every luxury they could afford, but didn’t have the same love that the Griswolds had to keep them together. 

Land’s End

                I found this reading a bit odd, because I usually only hear about people running from Mexico to America, but it was clear where her heart belonged.  The frivolity of American life just didn’t seem to fit for her.

Waiting

                This girl seems to be caught in a transition in her life that I feel as though I will end up going through after graduation.  She’s in a time when she is doing whatever she can to make ends meet and to please everyone else, but has yet to find her own happiness and meaning in what is around her.  Her father tries to give her hope regarding being offered a full-time position as a teacher in the school she is working for, but it seems like her hopes of becoming  a teacher (if that is in fact what she was going for) just have not met her expectations of what it would be like.  She finds little things throughout the day to keep her going, just as many of us do with our jobs.

                The interesting thing about what the readings is that these are all little snippets of life that took time and reflection to find meaning.  Every little moment in someone’s life could be written about and be given some sort of importance only because that small piece was put into writing. Perhaps this relates to our Twitter postings?