Short Takes #7: Amy Tan - Confessions, Kelly Cherry - Planet Unflinching

Both of these essay were very short and dealt with some dark themes.  "Confessions" is about Tan's recollection of a time when her mother threatened to kill her, as in hold a butcher knife up to her throat for several minutes.  This was after Amy's father and brother died in a terrible Eggers' like coincidence.  What is really strange about this is the young Amy's thoughts as her mother hits her and threatens her.  She downplays the seriousness of it and appears nihilistic as she contemplates whether it matters if she dies or not.  She continues this emotionally obstinate idea until she finally breaks down and pleads for life and her mother relents.  I read about Tan on Wikipedia and found that here mother had a previous husband who was abusive and was forced to leave behind three daughters in China to come to the US.  Adding another tragedy to this must've driven her mad at times.  Tan was unable to remember this terrible memory until 25 years later and she finally approached her mother about it.  She had developed Alzheimer's by this point and laughed and denied that she ever even needed to spank Amy.  She ends the essay with this line: "How wonderful to hear her say what was never true, yet now would be forever so."  For me, this line is maddeningly ambiguous.  One level, I see that Tan is denying that she was a "perfect" girl who never needed spanking but now becomes true because this is how her mother remembers it in her addled mind.  On another though, I read this as Tan conceding that this memory of her mother's abuse effectively is made false because it depends entirely on her mother's remembrance of it.  Subjectivism in action.     

Short Takes #6: Mark Spragg - In Wyoming, Ann Daum - Those Who Stay and Those Who Go

Both of these pieces were unexpectedly connected.  Mark Spragg's dealt with the wind in Wyoming and Ann Daum's dealt with wind in South Dakota, neighbors geographically and thematically.  Both essays don't reveal the "I" until about halfway through.  I see Spragg's essay as less forgiving to the Plains compared to Daum's.  The short break from the wind has its brightness dimmed by the looming shadow of the wind's return, and I see this as an allegory to life's hardships.  The momentary breaks we get amidst our toil ("We remember we are serfs.  We know the lord is only absent, not dethroned") are dulled in their excitement by the "big wind out there, on its way home to our high plains."  Both writers refer to the way people, animals, and plants all become used to the wind and live their whole lives slanted, so that when the wind stops, they still lean instinctively.  This goes along with Spragg's previously-discussed claim a little more obviously, but in Daum's piece it is more ambiguous.  Jackie's bruises are ever present as long as she lives in Murdo, even "when the wind stops."  Daum and Spragg both highlight the constancy of suffering, although they both show joy in different ways.   

Short Takes #5: Stuart Dybek - Confession, Sebastian Matthews - Kind of Blue

Sebastian Matthews' essay "Kind of Blue" takes a different approach to the genre of essay that we have been exploring.  It is written entirely in the third person from the point of view (presumably) of a son narrating his father's drunken train of thought.  This form of writing is at odds with the idea of an "I" focused essay.  Like my previous "Short Takes" post, this essay is a sort of prose poem.  The father is with his dog , Underdog, behind their house listening to "Kind of Blue" on speakers.  Matthews takes his father's decisions of whether or not to leave the family and combines them with his movement in the backyard.  I did not particularly like either of these Short Takes ("Daylight's Savings Time" and this one I mean), both because of their ambiguity.

Short Takes #4: Ann Pancake - Capital Realism, M.J. Iuppa - Daylight Savings Time

This essay caught my eye for an obvious reason: it was written by someone named Pancake. How could I resist?  Considering that this essay dealt with Thai economics, it was surprisingly lyrical.  Pancake has a way with words and she really shows it off here.  For example: "In my neighborhood, village loudspeakers rousted everyone at first light, frantic rapid-fire rat-a-tat Thai."  She often employs alliteration and assonance like she does here and creates a sort of prose poem overlaying the essay, much like the other "Short Take" we read, "Salt Hay."  While she is living in Thailand, she documents what she sees as unsustainable capitalism that speeds along at breakneck pace under promising billboards belying reality.  She deems this "Capital Realism."  She is promised a job at a college that is being built by near-slaves across the street and while it is going up she watches the progress of a disconcerting bulge in the shoddy structure, anticipating both the collapse of the building and a country growing up too fast.

Long Essay (really, just a reworking of a previous blog post): Planxty Marie

“If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”

-James Connolly

            “Play Danny Boy, play Danny Boy!” the crowd yelled.

            “No!  We don’t know play that one,” Kevin retorted.

            “Play it!”  The judging eyes were upon us.

            “No!  That song was written by an Englishman anyways!” 

            Holy Mary Mother of God, we were about to die just from the paralyzing stares.  The room was silent as death.  Luckily for us, the dozens of people were well past their prime and their canes a little too short to reach us, because we had just committed two capital crimes of Irish music.  The gall we had to refuse such a beautiful song, and then to speak of the great evil England at the same time was appalling.  We were heretics.

To tell the truth, that song blows and it was in fact written by an Englishman.  It is one of the many Irish-American standards that we refused to play, along with other ear-splitting atrocities such as “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” and “If you’re Irish, Come into the Parlor.”  My Dad still laughs at our stalwart defiance of cheesy crowd-pleasers.  Just play the damn song! But it wasn’t that easy: those songs are awful substitutes for true folk music.  They are the songs you find on compilation discs around St. Patrick’s Day, with someone singing in a fake accent backed by the quintessential Irish instrument, the MIDI file.  For us to play that was like a wine connoisseur opting for a bag of Franzia.  We were too proud to stoop down to the level of the shamrock-and-corned-beef-McWhatevers that prowl the streets on March 17^th. 

We were never that good, which makes our pride slightly hypocritical, but nonetheless it was an amazing year and a half for me.  They were formative years and introduced me to what is now some of my favorite music.  From our first show at grungy, metal-head Peabody’s in Cleveland to my last at the Irish cultural center of Avon, we played at many different pubs and festivals around Northeast Ohio.  But above all, it showed me the truth in the maxim concerning Irish Alzheimer’s: you forget everything except the grudges.

•

“Megan, I’ve got your back.  I’m also a McMahon.”

“Mrs. Waltz, what about me, I’m a fellow Gael.  Where’s the love?”  I quipped.

“Cormack?  That sounds like a Scotch-Irish name.  You probably came over and took our land!”  she jokingly retorted.

            “No, actually my family’s from Banff.  We were fishermen.”

            “Sure…”

            “Mrs. Waltz, don’t you think your bitterness is a little too pervasive?”  Jesus, why did I just say that?  This was about to be worse than the Danny Boy incident. 

            While she was half-joking at the start, she became genuinely incensed at my question and the veil of humor was noticeably thin.  She yelled back at me. 

            “Are you making light of 800-years of oppression by the English?”

            Think Tristan, think… diffuse the bomb.  Which wire do I cut?  Oh man, the red one, right? 

            “No, not at all!  I’m completely aware of the situation; I just think it’s ridiculous to let the grudge make you hate all English.” 

            The rest of the argument amounted to her half-yelling at me, half-laughing at my audacity.  There we were, my history teacher and me verbally battling in the school library.  As more heads turned and the class began to laugh at our situation, the bell rang and I was able to slink into the crowd and our yells blended into the chorus of shuffling feet and conversation. 

•

At the first annual tribute show to Cleveland Irish musician Sean Moore, we were among the several acts chosen to play.  We knew many of the other musicians performing that day at the Westside Irish American Club in Olmsted and were both flattered and excited to be part of the event.  The crowd loved us, mainly for the fact that we were six strapping young lads playing music for a Gaelic geriatric ward that knew all the words.  Talent was marginal and pandering cardinal.  But even that has its limits, and the line is drawn at Danny Boy.  It can be an emotional song, especially within the Irish-American community.  Played often at funerals, it brings tears to the eyes of friends and relatives.  Knocking it may seem harsh and insensitive; however, I offer a defense.  As with any song, it is emotional because of the memories inexorably tied with it.  If a person has fond memories of their loved one that are associated with a particular song, they could cry just as easily at Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” as at Danny Boy.  I still will hate both songs without remorse.  And we can even the playing field more: I promise you I won’t be spinning in my grave when you write about how much you hate The Pogues’ “Transmetropolitan.”

After we finished our set, Pat and I went to the table that my grand-parents were sitting at and started conversing with the old women who had sat down with them.  They had hit it off well with my grand-parents and had my grandma rocking in her seat with laughter at times.  When Pat asked the accented woman where she was from, she replied cheekily “Oh, Ireland’s a little island off the coast of us.”  Pat took this to mean she was from England (understandably so: there is a huge ethnic Irish population in England so the accents can carry over).  When he replied “Oh, you’re English?” she gave him a petrifying death glare which immediately killed the jovial mood.  It turns out she was from one of the Aran islands, a set of three tiny islands in Galway Bay in the west of Ireland.

•

The next day, being the first person in the classroom, I felt compelled to smooth over our feud.  “Mrs. Waltz, I want to apologize for any misunderstanding that we had yesterday.  I know more of the history of Ireland than you’d expect.  I was in an Irish folk band for quite a while and I feel like I know the culture pretty well.”  Evidently, she was unimpressed.  She must’ve heard about our “Danny Boy” incident.   She walked out of the room into the hallway to talk to Mr. Pierce, my former history teacher.  Amidst the noise of the rest of the class filing through the doorway, I could catch snippets of their conversation: 

            “You know Tristan Cormack?”

            “Yeah.”

            “He tried telling me that the English oppression in Ireland wasn’t a big deal.”

            At the sound of this I rushed out of the room to defend myself.  I quickly interjected.

            “No, that’s not what I said at all Mr. Pierce.  Please don’t listen to her.”

            Once again she yelled back at me in that half-laughing, half-serious voice.  As we talked back and forth, Mr. Pierce looked increasingly confused, his eyes darting back between me and Mrs. Waltz with every flip of the pulpit.  The conversation culminated with these two lines:

            “Mrs. Waltz, all I am saying is that I think retaining bitterness is a terrible way to celebrate your heritage.”

            “HAVE YOU EVER MET A JEWISH PERSON IN YOUR LIFE?”

            After her attempt at a joke which came out as an awful blurted generalization I was dumbfounded and sulked back into the room.  Snickering, other students told me how much I fucked up and I didn’t know what I was talking about.  I ignored them because I did know what I was talking about, and Mrs. Waltz fucked up.  They found the situation hilarious, which it was, but it was illuminating as well.  She was not the first of her kind that I had encountered, 3^rd-generation Americans who had this bullshit romanticization of the conflict and loved the IRA.  

In my passion I am painting perhaps an overly critical portrait of Mrs. Waltz.  She is extremely knowledgeable of the history, more so than I, which makes her bitterness all the more mystifying when she still clings to some strange hand-me-down nationalism.     

•

James Connolly was born in Edinburgh in an Irish neighborhood and served in the British Army before deserting because of the Irish and Indian occupations.  He became possibly the most prominent activist and theorist of his day in Scotland and Ireland with a stint in American politics.  He spoke with a noticeable Scottish accent his whole life.  Ewan MacColl, possibly the most prolific folk-song writer in history was born and raised in England to Scottish parents.  Many of his songs have been absorbed into the “Irish” folk tradition to the point where listeners assume they are in fact Irish songs.  Andy Irvine, one of the pillars of Irish music for the past fifty years was raised in London and became interested in music through Woody Guthrie records.  He has spent years as a vagabond and his interpretations of folk songs from the British Isles are as much informed by Balkan music as they are by tradition and he plays them on a retrofitted Greek bouzouki.  All of three of these men are socialist.

•

I am not dismissing the Irish Question; on the contrary, I am attempting to answer it.  But I don’t answer with admiration of the violence.  I fully support a united Ireland.  Fuck the British and their domineering imperialism, but also fuck the bitter Irish who rested on their laurels after their independence and let their revolution be hijacked by conservatives and religious nutjobs.   More specifically, the Irish-Americans who view themselves as continuing some kind of legacy in America.  How?  Because you’re Catholic?  Because you dress up in green on St. Patrick’s Day?  Because you drink Guiness and yell “Up the ‘RA!” at your Irish-American clubs?  You don’t do anything to solve the problem in Ireland.  You are defined by a unanimous hatred of the British.  The revolution wasn’t just about independence; it was about equality and the march of progress.  The fallen of 1916 were led by Communists.  The dispossessed in England faced the same problem that they were fighting for.  The dispossessed in India, South Africa and every other nation painted red on the map faced the same problem.  Sharecroppers in the American South faced it too.  It was as much economics as it was nationalism. 

After the civil war, Ireland was a marionette strung along by the Catholic Church and marched back to a reactionary culture.  One where it was illegal to get a divorce until 1995.  Where you could be banned from professional athletics if you were seen playing an English sport.  Where it is still effectively impossible to get an abortion for any reason.  Where families could imprison their “slutty” daughters into hellish Magdalene laundries. Where the Catholic Church covered up sexual abuse of thousands of children.  No, I’d rather not join your ranks.  I’ll stick with Connolly. 

•

My heritage is a mélange, much like the heritage of Cleveland.  It may come as a surprise, especially in an essay drenched with Irish politics that I am also a policy-holding member of the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Association.  Guess which of the three demographics I am.  I am as much of a Slav as I am a Gael.  My off-the-boat Slovak great-grandmother berated those in our family with darker complexions, like my grandmother and aunt, because, you know, fucking gypsies...  My mother’s good Serbian friend growing up wasn’t allowed to hang out with her best friend because she was Croatian.   I went to school with dozens of first generation Bosnian- and Croatian-Americans who hold an acerbic hatred for Serbians.  Last year my grandpa began doing genealogical research on his family.  He found out we are also German.  We had gone our whole lives without knowing this.  We are all ratty mutts pretending to be show dogs.  Remember though, even poodles would rather be sniffing ass than flaunting their pedigree.  Your heritage becomes meaningless.  Éamon de Valera, the dominant executive in Ireland for half a century was born in New York and is half Cuban.  There are black people in Ireland.  They are Irish.  There are O’Reilly’s and Murphy’s in America.  They are not Irish.  And so they sit in their Irish-American clubs and vote Republican, whilst singing praise of the fallen of 1916.

•

The characters I encounter in old folk songs are strong individuals.  They are gruff mountain-men, sailors separated from their home by the sea, desperate highwaymen with no choice but to steal, displaced tenant farmers, widows of soldiers, victims of abuse and trickery: people downtrodden by the upper echelons of society.  Their tales are those of adventure, vengeance, forgiveness, murder, love, drinking, war, nature, politics and peace.  This is not music about or from the gentry; this is by and for the salt-of-the-earth. When I listen to traditional songs, it breaks down the prejudice we have developed for those in the past.  People have always had their moments of doubt about religion, opposed war, and even partied.  Hard.  The amount of songs about men coercing women into sleeping with them is staggering.  These girls lose their virginity and are promptly abandoned, pregnant.  This really puts the impact of birth control into perspective.  These people would have killed for access to it (if the Catholic Church would just take a cue from this music…).  I love it because of the glimpse it gives me into the lives of these people.  I love it because it is honest.  I love it because it is often cheeky.  I love it because it is both indicative of the culture and thematically cosmopolitan at the same time.  I love it because of the romance: I’m inspired to sit with my arm around a girl and softly call her a ghrá mo chroí.

•

“Cormack?  Oh, Irish!”

“Christ no! Scottish.”

Agus fágfaimid siúd mar atá sé.

Wikipedia (Pop-culture Essay)

          I suffer from an addiction, although my vice is benign.  I, however, choose to consider it an affliction, a disease borne not from my own poor decisions, but a veritable assault of the information age.  I was borne in 1994.  Wikipedia launched in 2001.  I have been on the site so many times that I didn’t need to look that up.  By the time I started to hit the crack, Wikipedia had already developed into the inconceivably large tank of knowledge it is today, and it grows by the second.  I can be looking up Robert Burns and in a series of clicks, with no textual input from me, not a single typed word, I could, and sometimes do, end up at modern Indonesian economics.  It is the only website that I have donated money to because I honestly believe in their creed and like an addict, I need it, and I’m willing to pay when they gently suggest that they need my money.  Why yes Jimmy Wales, I think I will donate to your wonderful site because you made such an eloquent personal appeal, even if it scrambles my brain further every time I use it. 

The internet is just another rung in the ladder up to true connectivity.  The initial step was made before our memory, sometime after fire was harnessed, when a brave Homo sapiens cried out and realized their thought had penetrated the aural sphere of existence and meant slightly more than the bird’s chirping or the wind’s whispering.  Speech brought ideas out of people’s heads, and through a chain of relayed messages, these ideas could be misconstrued and rumors started.  The next step was writing, the visual cousin of speech, which allowed a select few to jot down concocted bullshit and exert control over other people.  This dichotomy still exists, though at a less staggering level.  I know this because only 83.7% of the world is literate.  87% of the world has a cell phone subscription.  My dog had neither of these abilities and died three-legged and happy and none of her species ever went to war.  She did like to eat shit and piss on things though, which is completely gross. 

After people learned to write and declined to teach others below them, a German man named Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press in 1439.  He was from Mainz, which was founded in the late 1^st century BC by Romans as a military outpost due to its strategic location at the confluence of the Main and Rhine.  Afterward, millions of people died in wars prompted by the Reformation, which was in turn prompted by Martin Luther’s 95 theses, of which 300,000 copies were printed within two years of that fateful nailing to Wittenburg Church’s doors.  Sadly, they were burnt along with the most of the building in 1760 during the Pomeranian War, an extension of the Seven Years’ War, known in America as the French and Indian War.  Newspapers, magazines and novels subsequently appeared, derivations of an oft-misused communication system.  The next step was once again auditory.  Guglielmo Marconi (who looked suspiciously like Geoffrey Rush, of The King’s Speech fame, which won four Oscars at the 83rd Academy Awards) developed radio in the late 19^th century and in 1923 joined the Italian Fascist Party and didn’t mind it when Italy ransacked Ethiopia and ousted Haile Selassie I, regarded as the messiah reincarnated by Rastafarians, of whom Bob Marley was a member.  America heard his song “One Love” on Marconi’s marvelous invention in 1977. People sat in their living rooms and listened to music and fireside chats and commercials until television replaced it.  Sound and sight were finally combined and wholesome shows were beamed into our retinas and burnt into the back of our skulls.  The children who grew up watching these shows became the driving force in the world and created tactless shows which my generation is berated for.

           My family didn’t have television service until I was probably seven or eight, at which point we got “rabbit ears,” which is the colloquial term for a set-top TV dipole antenna, which can be fitted with UHF (Ultra-high frequency, electromagnetic waves from 300 MHz to 3 GHz) receivers.  The only stations that I
ever remember watching were PBS (channel 10) and Saturday morning cartoons (channel 9, the WB).  We only received several other channels, maybe 4 or 5.  Eventually, and I can’t remember when (but it must’ve been before junior high) we got the cheapest available cable, adding to my diverse viewing options two Christian channels, Univisión, a fuzzy BET, a station that seemed to only play B-movies from the eighties and provide weather reports for Chicago called WGN, along with lucky number 13 which let me know what was playing on all the stations I didn’t have.  This was a veritable heaven for an agnostic, white, English-speaking child living east of Cleveland.

            The reason for this sardonic commentary is that television and radio were and are patriarchal media, information filtered through a lens fixed by the preceding generation’s will and commercialism.  They are nothing compared to the anarchic Internet.  My personal history with the Internet is far more influential than any other media. First we had dial-up, and eventually the sounds of the mangled evil-robot in its death throes emanating from the computer tower became a welcome reveille for the beginning of a new knowledge devouring session at a speedy 20kb/s.  I had not yet discovered Wikipedia and internet searching never really went further than video-game walkthroughs and the occasional Google search.  Soon, my brother Glenn found a way to steal internet connection from nearby wireless sources during the advent of DSL connections.  He stuck a wireless receiver in a Folger’s coffee tin and hid it in a rhododendron bush in our front yard, a camouflaged cantenna as he called it.  We used this for a long time until we started another legally-questionable operation: siphoning internet access off of our neighbor’s AT&T line.  We split the bill with our neighbors and used it for years.  We finally bit the bullet and got our own cable internet line and can now search Wikipedia in the range of dozens of Mb/s, thousands of times faster than our original dial-up.  This is why I am an information junkie.

            Students have become used to teachers disallowing Wikipedia as a source, because it can be edited by anyone.  This is precisely why it is incredible.  At its core, it is an encyclopedia, and like any other, the information provided can sometimes be sparse and unspecific.  Yet this is far better than, let’s say, Encyclopedia Britannica.  Britannica has 228,274 entries and 474,675 subentries in English by 4,000 contributors.  Wikipedia has 4.1 million articles in the English edition alone, and 25 million articles in 286 languages by over 100,000 active contributors putting in 100 million man-hours.  Every fact in an article is cited and linked to the primary source at the bottom of the page.  If there is no source, it says “citation needed.”  Britannica is owned by a Swiss billionaire investor and actor named Jacqui Safra who also owns Spring Mountain Vineyard, a large wine-growing estate located in Saint Helena, California.  To have access to all the articles you must buy the print edition, literally dozens of hard-back books.  To have most of them you must become a paying member of the website.  To read some of the articles you can look at their site and have an ad for Netflix pop-up as a new window on your browser.  Wikipedia has no membership, no ads and no owner.  It is free information in the most democratic essence ever experienced.  Anyone in the world can edit it, making ethnic, racial, and cultural bias far less occurring than Encyclopedia Britannica, which has repeatedly been partial to western culture: all of Bhuddism is covered in one article, whereas Christianity has 14 articles.  Wikipedia is at once an encyclopedia and the collective memory of humanity.  The connectivity is staggering: 4.1 million articles, and each one is linked with all the others in countless inter-weaving paths.  There is nothing isolated, neither in reality nor on the internet.      

            What I am trying to say is this:  I look at attractive women, and my God do I enjoy yoga pants and their minimal obscuring of curves.  Yoga pants are typically made from cotton with a flexible knit which graciously allows them to form fit over women’s legs.  Sometimes rayon, also known as viscose, is used in lieu of cotton in the global textile industry.  Viscose rayon was invented by Hilaire de Chardonnet in 1891.  This happened in Échirolles, a town located in the Isère department of France.  The name in Occitan is slightly different, Isèra.  Occitan is a language closely related to French which is slowly dying, having a predicted half-million fluent speakers left.  In the region of France traditionally associated with the language, there is an enormous fortress town called Carcassonne, picturesque in its quaint medieval beauty and deplorable in its history.  It became a stronghold of the Cathars, a peaceful Christian splinter group deemed heretics by Pope Innocent III.  Their philosophy is reminiscent of Manichaeism, a religion derived mainly from ancient Persian teachings and eventually spread as far east as China and as far west as France.  At the behest of the ironically-named pope, French nobility began a land-grabbing campaign under the guise of religiosity in 1209 called the Albigensian Crusade.  Before the crusaders, led by the Abbot of Citeaux Arnaud Amalric, reached Carcassonne, they besieged a city named Béziers and attacked the peaceful inhabitants, Catholic and Cathar.  In the leader’s own words: “Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt.”  The death was perfectly acceptable because, as the Abbot claimed “Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His.”  They looted the entire city and divided the spoils, out of love, for Jesus, or something...  They reached Carcassonne, cut off the water supply and made all the inhabitants evacuate the city stark naked.  As was almost the entire population of Earth, most of the crusaders were illiterate, let alone fluent in Latin, and never read a word of the Bible or Wikipedia.

             The disjointedness is staggering: 4.1 million articles, and each one is linked with all the others in countless inter-weaving paths.  There is nothing isolated, neither in reality nor on the internet.  This is what Wikipedia does.  It jumbles up my mind into a cosmopolitan, manic-depressive web.  I don’t just see a girl’s callipygous figure, I see that and a dead scientist and a dying language and twenty fucking thousand hacked up corpses and a parade of naked refugees.  I get snippets of everything in existence, a montage hell-ride of history, culture, language, music, art, politics, sex, biology, astrophysics, religion and philosophy.  Encyclopedic shallowness thrown at me with no abatement through a backlit LCD screen (liquid crystal display, the ground works for which were laid down in 1888 by Friedrich Reinitzer, born 1857, Prague, liberated by the Red Army 1945).  I am drowning in a kiddie pool filled with tears.  I am becoming a nihilist who will dominate trivia night.

Works Cited

Wikipedia.

            

Sorry for not coming to class today.  Stayed up really late reading everyone's favorite author Diane Ackerman.  

A couple questions for consideration when you critique my essay:

1.  Does my non-inclusion of any characters besides myself subtly bolster my claim of isolation?  Did you notice?

2.  Am I appearing funny or creepy when I talk about girls' butts in yoga pants? 

3.  How can I better incorporate the theme of communication abuse?  I want to flesh it out.  I only touched upon it I think with paragraphs 2 and 3.

Besides these questions, I would greatly appreciate some feedback from you guys!  thank you for bearing with me and my absences.  I will be e-mailing out my critiques of your pop-culture essays and revised essays today.