Everything Is Not As It Seems

"Something can be true and untrue at the same time," is a contradictory statement that I agree with. The sentence "Blood clotting is always a good thing" is both true and untrue because it is good to have your blood coagulate to stop bleeding in injuries, but it is harmful when blood clots in your brain which can cause death. With this situation, it is both "true and untrue at the same time."

The sentence, "The real story isn't the official story; the real story is my version (wrong, too, but aware that it's wrong) of the official story," is mind-blowing. I have to read it a several times and contemplate on what the writer is trying to say. If you aren't paying attention, you will have no idea what the author is saying. Grr, it actually makes me have to concentrate...but this sentence is good because it makes me think deeper, and I don't want to. Once you look deeper into the meaning of this sentence it actually makes sense. It is saying that the "real" story for this person is what that person thinks of what really happened even though it may be wrong. Wow, even that sentence kind of hurts my head. It's simply saying that reality is different for all of us. In that case, what is the "official" story if everyone is wrong? Oh my, I'm not going to answer that one.

I like how Shields opens his chapter "Contradiction" with, "This sentence is a lie." I don't understand how that sentence can be a lie when it doesn't lie about anything. I guess it is just that everything is in the eye of the beholder which is exactly what happens with reality. Reality is what each person thinks or believes which can and will be different from others.

Reality is paradoxical because reality is what we think is real when we perceive and think of our situations. However, what is real? Real is different for everybody so reality can't be real, but wait it can. What? Exactly.

Genre Wars

The literary genres of memoir and essay have a few things in common.  A memoir is a personal account on something about or from your life, while an essay is your point of view on a subject. Therefore, they both evoke personal feelings or views through the author's writing. Memoirs have the difficulty of being "under the umbrella of nonfiction" so everything that is written tends to be judged critically as to whether or not everything is hard facts. As humans, we tend to add pathos into what we think in order to get those who are listening to us, to agree or sympathize with us on our point of view. So, in a memoir (which is filled with personal feelings and accounts) you can probably expect some slight exaggerations to get their point across. However, if memoirs could be categorized specifically into essays, their would be no contradictions on whether things were true or not because essays are the author's point of view with infusions of emotions. The article from "The Guardian" is an interesting mixture between these genres.

"The Guardian" is an essay about this guy who writes little "memoirs" on postcards for random people who request it. The author of the article, Kate, got her postcard about her life made and she notes that, "the postcard doesn't sum up my life, but what got me to where I am now. It's a snapshot of a moment." Her postcard is a little mini-memoir for her to reflect back on when she feels the need. Her point of view throughout the essay supports this guy's efforts to bring to life the defining moments in peoples' lives. Hmmm... I wonder what the highlights on my postcard of my life would be?


The Guardian

Reality vs.Illusion

G 215 talks about how writers change their reality to make it be what they want others to see or what they want to remember. This sentence sums this up perfectly by saying, "You do not think of even your own past as quite real...you...censor it, fictionalize it..." This fragment also mentions that "We are all in flight from reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens." I really enjoyed this excerpt because I agree that this is how human nature acts when we interact and write about our lives or experiences. We want everything to seem better than it actually was, or seem more tragic than was necessary. It all depends on the author's objective for what he is writing and it may often include pathos to sway the readers into believing the author's "reality." For me, when I remember past situations that were not pleasant, I either exaggerate the bad parts or what people said, how they said it, etc., or I exaggerate the positives. An example is the common girl rationalization, "Wow, that guy likes me!" when in his reality, he just gave a friendly smile, nothing more.

H 241 compares the body's need of a higher dose of drugs each time to receive the thrill, with the illusion of reality. This "illusion of reality" is "the idea that something really happened-providing us with that thrill right now." We all create our own realities. When we are depressed everything seems to go wrong and even when something that would normally make us happy happens, it may not affect our mood or help us feel any better. It is really quite cruel. I am ashamed to say that unfortunately this is my case some of the time. I just want to wallow in my reality that "nothing is going my way" and "that doesn't make anything better."

I 248 is short and sweet-"We're living in a newsy time." I actually looked up "newsy" and it is a media source that gives up to date news from around the world. This helps to further define this sentence and confirm this statement. We want all the new things, the name brands, the latest styles, the newest songs and videos, this list could seriously go on fffoorrreeevvveeerrr. Anything that is old or out of date just simply won't do in our society. We just want better and more and won't stop until we get it. Well, unfortunately by that time, we will be dead, so good luck with that.

A classmate wrote about fragment H 242 and I agree with almost everything except the part when it says "we can’t experience any event because our life is like a movie that can’t be paused" because if we really tried hard enough, we could slow ourselves down. We have the ability to stop and enjoy the moments in our lives. It doesn't mean we stop and do nothing, just that we appreciate these moments and live them to the fullest. If we are in the right frame of mind, we can experience from our life and pause to analyze it so that we can make ourselves better.

I Thought We Were Done With This Paper...

The comments and critiques were great! I totally understand where you got the whole "discursiveness" feeling from my paper because honestly, I had to come up with a lot of "fillers" to meet the minimum of four pages with this paper. Some of these fillers are what you mentioned like  the random sentence about Star Trek and when I started to bring in Gullah. I did this because I was trying to compare it with Eragon because both evolved from the languages they descended from.

What a talented teacher! Yes, I didn't do an outline...and I should have. It's just that I was going off my thesis and trying to fit in all my randomness so that I could complete the task at hand. I mean there is only so much one can say about the topic I chose. Especially when the Eragon sources were not very helpful. In my paper I was trying to point out the similarities in the languages and the author wasn't informative. He had random words in his languages but hardly any were the same word translated into multiple languages so it was really hard to compare them. I really had to research. And I thought it was going to be easy...little did I know.

My ending was supposed to be drawing the thesis back in. I also had student critiques that involved the "So what?" question and so I tried to address that. Someone commented that I should make the conclusion more final by expanding a little bit. I attempted to try to fit all of these components into the conclusion, so I guess it may have turned out to be a jumble of techniques of endings instead of one precise one. When I first heard of the accursed "Research Paper" I was super depressed, but I actually enjoyed my topic because I chose it and it interested me. Overall, it really wasn't too bad.