Coming Home Again

Coming Home Again
-- Change-rae Lee

I wish I had paid more attention.

                      I feel as though it is easy for people to self reflect back on the things that they could have done better, critiquing and condemning themselves for not doing a better job of it.  Having your mother pass away still at a young age, which I am assuming the son is in his late twenties, is hard.  

                      I was actually just thinking about this the other day.  After finding out that an old friend from my younger educational years had passed away at the ripe age of twenty, I sent my beloved a text message asking, "Is twenty-one the age where we lose the most people?"  Right off the bat I could name five people I were either friends with, graduated with, of knew of enough to know that if we crossed each other in passing, each would say hello.  There is still this one girl, my friend from middle school and onto high school whom I lost touched with.  I knew she had gotten pregnant shortly after graduation, and knew that she was trying to become a better person.  I saw her from behind in the grocery store.  I remember getting nervous and a little bit afraid-- of what I don't know.  But whatever it was boiled up inside me and caused my feet to face the opposite direction.  It was the last time I ever saw her alive.  Thankfully we had reconnected on a social media sight a month before her sudden death.

                       But chatting with pre-made emojis and words that don't do the mood justice will never have been enough.  She got into a car accident, was put in a coma for one week,  had the baby, and then died-- the both of them.  Her boyfriend was the only one survived by them.  I constantly think of all the things I could have done differently that day in summer when I was in no more of a rush than I am now.  (Currently sitting in the cafeteria, staring at my bowl of empty soup.)

                       You beat yourself up.  Curse yourself for not knowing that that was the last visual image your brain will ever recollect for you.  And I put this into play with the Son.  He didn't realize the impact of his Mother's sickness.  His ignorance was due to his age, and the boarding school was something temporary while his parents were a symbol of something infinite.  But nobody is infinite.  And when they pass during an age where death has not become apart of your life yet, how can you know how to handle it?  You can't.  All you can do is quarrel with yourself about the things that could have been said, could have been done, could have been cared differently so that at least they knew, you loved them too.  It is the unforgiveness of yourself that is a battle with.  And I think this story does an amazing job in analyzing this very feeling that so many of us have gone through.  The ending is left open ended.  We don't know for sure if the parents reconnected and were kissing, if they were sleeping, or if they were merely just sitting there, letting tear after tear flow.  We don't see the other side of these things.  And we never will.

Edison, New Jersey

Edison, New Jersey
-- Junot Díaz

The game was part of our mornings, the way our showers and our sex and our breakfasts were.  We stopped playing only when it started to go wrong for us, when I'd wake up and listen to the traffic outside without waking her, when everything was a fight

                  The nameless woman who used to belong to the nameless narrator I feel is a symbolization of the bigger picture Junot Diaz was trying to portray in his short story.  Being with someone you love, care about and value to a point where they have become apart of your life becomes a familiar and comfortable feeling knowing that they know the ins and outs of your personality, family background and experiences which have shaped you into the person you are today.  Couples are together because they have shared beliefs, common goals and destinations in which each aide each other into getting for the benefit of one another.  All trust is put into them and yet, relationships don't always work out.  Everything you new is now unknown, everything familiar is now a strange and distant concept to you, they are no longer your lover, but merely a person you used to know.  That closeness is shattered and you don't know what to think or believe anymore.  

                 I used the quote at the top as a gateway to explain Díaz's bigger picture in his short story.  While doing the pool table jobs with Wayne, the narrator, who is Dominican talks of being judged based on a preconceived idea that he is associated with dishonesty and untrustworthy.  The wealthy customers "linger" in the hallways wondering if they should actually leave or not, "memorizing" everything in their house.  The American culture vs. the Dominican almost seem alien and foreign to one another and so when he meets a Dominican women he immediately assumes he'll have a connection with her.  But much like his girlfriend whom he assumed he knew everything about (where obviously he didn't or they would have still been together) he knew nothing of this women regardless if they shared the same cultural background.  He helps her escape back to this Dominican community where, in just a couple of days she returns back, "choosing" Pruitt over her "own". 

                  The way I tied this into the relationship with the narrator and his ex girlfriend is simply this:  a relationship is about similar wanting, needing and things.  But even with an extended amount of time shared together doesn't mean they'll always pick you at the end of the day.  The days ended for the narrator's girlfriend picking him at the end of their days together.  She choose life without him and thus the Dominican woman chose in a sense, the "American way" over the "Dominican Way".

                   Just because you think you know someone, think you have a connection with them, doesn't mean that you actually do.  Maybe you are blinded by the fact that you share one or two things in common, a few at most.  Blinded by his girlfriend.  Blinded by the Dominican woman.  He thought he knew both because of the Dominican woman's shared culture and his girlfriend because of shared intimacy and experiences.  But clearly he didn't.  Because neither did what he thought they would have done.

The Cariboo Cafe

     The Cariboo Cafe

-- Helena Viramontes

But God is just a man, and His mistakes can be undone

             Viramonte's Cariboo Cafe illustrated a lot of jumping around in her mini chapters throughout her short story. I found myself unable to keep up with what was happening, getting confused by the vague way she would start each new section, seeming as though she were changing speakers on me.  I would often have to go back and re read what I read because I was unsure of where these new characters were introduced.  I felt myself doubting a lot of what was going on because of the jumping around.  And then I stopped for a second to reflect on this.  Was it purposeful?  Was the confusion made as a point in the perspective of the quote above? 

             I feel as though in life itself, when something goes wrong we initially will stop in that moment and retrace our steps as to how we got here trying to figure out why we made the choices we did to end up here.  The quote above, "But God is just a man, and His mistakes can be undone"(Viramontes 76) is an interesting way to explain the unexplained.  I looked at this as a blame for what had happened to the mother and her son Geraldo.  She thinks that someone of higher power is responsible for having things end up the way that they did and thus does what she can to get out of "the path" that He had made for her because she fears that it was a mistake.  But was it?  When we go back and try to retrace our steps, and in this case re reading to better understand, we cannot change anything.  It is what it is.  What has happened already happened.  What is being thought has already be thought.  These people after Geraldo will not magically stop thinking the things that they think or coming after him because their purpose of going after him has deceased.  Whatever is going to happen is bound to happen.  And that is where I tied in the quote, my own confusion in the story of having tried to follow along and the author's (possibly purposeful?) way of jumping around from scene to scene, speaker to speaker.  Because at one point the speaker is the Sister, then the Mom, then the cook and there is no concrete way of knowing that this is them, we kind of get clued in by dropped hints from the author by the way they're talking and the way that they're reacting/doing things.  So, does God make mistakes?  Or are these yours in which you don't want to admit?  And if you do admit that they are yours, why did you state the first comment on God to begin with?  What's been done can't be undone.  I think that is the strange reality behind the purpose of this story.  What will be will be.

Seventeen Syllables

Seventeen Syllables 
-- Hisaye Yamamoto

Rosie fell for the first time entirely victim to a helplessness delectable beyond speech.

               I feel as though when someone falls in love for the first time, as cliché as the saying may go, they tend to fall the hardest.  Love, I used to think, was such a unique type of emotion only meant for that "one special" person.  Having gone through my own personal first love heartache, I can confidently say that my opinion on love has since then changed.  Love is not unique at all, but a mere emotion in which can be learned to be felt and learned to be forgotten.  I have great confidence that I will love many times during the course of my lifetime.  There will never just be that one single man.  (Except for right now, right now is that one single man).  

              In Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables, I get the feeling that Rosie's mother is so religiously obsessed with her contribution to writing Haikus as a way to fill the void of a first lover's heartbreak back when she was a teenager.  Anything in my opinion, can be temporarily cured by distraction.  Distract yourself long enough and you put it off.  Distract yourself even longer than "long enough" and you become in denial.  Burdening a secret that has pained you throughout the course of most of your life is a distressful thing to harbor and keep hidden.  

             I chose the quotation above to illustrate the cycle of first lover's love as the beginning of how all first loves start.  This isn't to say that some don't work out, because they do.  However there is always that chance that it won't.  Being in love requires such vulnerability.  But I feel once you're in it, once you're fully surrounded and grasped into what it all encumbers to be.  I am still unsure however what the title has anything to do with the actual story except for the connection that seventeen syllables make up a Haiku, which is Rosie's mother's distraction, which in return becomes a plea for Rosie's mom to beg her not to commit.  

             All of this is very confusing.  But then again, so is love.

Saboteur

Saboteur
-  Ha Jin

Within a month over eight hundred people contracted acute hepatitis in Muji.  Six died of the disease, including two children.  Nobody knew how the epidemic had started.

          

            That last small paragraph was probably my most favorite to have read throughout the entire story.  Upon reading through the first few pages of Ha Jin's Saboteur, I couldn't help but start to feel a small sense of anger in the pits of my stomach.  The prejudice that ran through the pages had me grow even more mad.  "Stop bluffing us...We have seen a lot of your kind.  We can easily prove you are guilty"  (Jin 275).  "We can easily prove"?  The corruption of the system had me thinking the entire time that the crooked cops were the ones to have been the "saboteurs".  It wasn't until the end of the story where I read the the last paragraph as shown above that I realized the title is in fact about Mr. Chiu.  He couldn't do anything to get the time that was taken from him back, the money he lost for the expired ticket they caused, or an apology for the wrongfulness they had done to him.  Before I had gotten to the end of the story I had asked myself, "What is he going to do?  He can't just leave and live with the lie that they forced him to sign about himself."  And then it was like, but what could he do that wouldn't get him put back in jail and others he cared for in danger too?  His disease.   It was probably one of the most clever things anyone could have ever done without even being noticed.  "If I could only kill those bastards!"  (Jin 280).  Do I think this was the right thing to do?  I'm not sure, it questions everything I believe and goes against my morals.  Would I have done this if this had happened to me?  Absolutely without a doubt.  So was he a criminal at the end?  My question remains unanswered being that the author addressed him "teacher" on page 280 and criminal on page 275.  Would that make me a criminal for indirectly committing something that widely affects people that surround me?  I think the saboteur of the story is not the corrupted police man, but quite possibly Mr. Chiu himself.

Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain
-  Annie Proulx

Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives.  Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held...Let it be, let it be.

          Wow, I don't even know where to begin at this moment in time.  Initially when I was printing this story out a couple of days ago, the name alone was (sadly) a turn off alone in itself due to the movie made some years ago (which I hadn't seen only heard about).  I'm actually really disappointed myself to have worked up a preconceived idea of what I thought this story would be like and how I assumed I would not like it.  

           Turns out, I absolutely loved it.  The quote above that I pulled from page 277 is one of the last things Jack was thinking before he and Ennis split up for what both were aware would be forever.  Love is love.  That's the basis of this story.  Through man and woman, woman and woman or man and man.  No love comes in gender, comes in no form, it is just two souls wanting, attracting and desiring each other in no other possible purified form than in this one.  I nearly cried at the end when I found that that Jack had died.

            This whole time all he wanted to do was be with Ennis, a man who was scared and afraid of what society would do to them if they ever found out about their secret love affair.  And that had me pondering a significant and obvious question:  why do we feel the absolute need to hide what we love?  Who we love?  And how we love?

             Ever since I was young, I've always had this theory in life.  That no matter what you go through or what happens, the basis of life is love.  Love of a friend.  Love of a classmate.  Love of a dog.  Love of a spouse.  Love of your children.  It comes in all forms, but no life should ever go without a form of it.  And then there's this second theory:  Very few people find the meaning of what love means for them as a unique individual.  Some say they've found it and some pretend to have found it.  The truth in my mind is that only a handful of people find it.  Jack and Ennis found it and they didn't know what to do with it.  So was it a waste?  No.

               Not for Jack.  But for Ennis, all the time unspent with Jack was a waste.  And I think this reflects on the irrelevant and unnecessary times in our lives where we bicker at someone we love, pick a fight and then hold a grudge for the rest of the day when the rest of the day could have been good.  It's about the sleepless nights you stay thinking of that special someone, and yet refuse to speak to them because of a lousy point you're trying to make for what?  You love them, and they love you.  So what's the issue?  At any moment at any time any person can be taken away.  Just like that, without a sudden hint or explanation.  It just happens.  And it takes you by surprise because you took for granted their space they occupied in your life.  You took for granted what they fulfilled for you when you were actually happy.  You took for granted the love that you were so lucky to have, and now, you're without any of it. 

Absolutely loved this story.  Loved it.  Can't even explain in words how much I loved it. 

Everything That Rises Must Converge

Everything That Rises Must Converge
-- Flannery O'Connor

She sat forward and looked up and down the bus.  It was half filled.  Everybody was white.  "I see we have the bus to ourselves," she said.  Julian cringed.

                      I remember being enrolled in a particular anthropology class my first transfer semester here at Quinnipiac University.  The course of the class included rich materials from all over the world, having us study cultures I would have never have dreamed existed showing me how narrow minded my, what I thought "open- mind" to have been.  A particular culture was being taught while an issue of slavery was brought up on the side that sparked a spontaneous and interesting point of view.  "Raise your hand if you were born during this time period and you would have owned slaves in this area" My professor had said.  Immediately my arm without initial realizing twitched upward, judgment stopping myself.  Why did I want to stop myself?  Why didn't I just let it continue rising up for the entire class to see?  It was because although I am of this time period and view slavery and any type of racial/discriminatory comment or statement to be unacceptable,  if I were born and raised in a different time period and location that the one I was born into, I am sure that more than likely, such as in the South, if I lived on a plantation I would have owned slaves because it was a "normal societal" thing to do.  

                     Reading O'Connor's story had be reflecting back to that incident in class.  I disliked Julian's mother so much for her racial and discrimination against people of darker skin color.  And how it was "a shame" for kids to have been born half white and half black.  I'm pretty sure even in the outlining of this story I wrote some irrelevant comment around that scene and said, "this woman is so dumb" or something like that.  But at the end of the story, when she is viewed in the light and Julian sees his mother in a state of smallness, in a state beneath the authoritative rank she (thought) she held, a type of sympathy almost and pity washed over not only that of her son, but of myself as the reader.  I felt bad for her.  She wanted to give the kid a nickel.  When I read that I knew something bad was going to black flash.  It was an immediate insult to the black woman and her child.  As though they needed chump change from the bottom of someones' bag.  Do they look homeless or something?  No.  But I can only imagine that that was how they felt.  

                     It wasn't until the end that I fully sympathized with Julian's mother.  She was born in a different time period--circling back to my first paragraph.  She was born into this mindset that the blacks were of lower rank than her and she was of a different rank entirely and when someone is exposed like that from a young age, drilled into their heads as they grow into their teens and still instilled into adulthood, it is very hard to break from a mindset and thought process that has always been.  And that's why I chose the quote at the top of the page.  "She sat forward and looked up and down the bus.  It was half filled.  Everybody was white.  "I see we have the bus to ourselves," she said.  Julian cringed"  (O'Connor 3).  In her mind it will always be the whites and the blacks and we cannot hate her for it.  At least, I cannot hate her for it.  Although her attitude made me not only disappointed but also upset, it is not her fault that her elders brought her up this way.  None of us have any control over what gets instilled into our brains as defining what's "right" and what's "wrong".  It's how she was raised.  And I should think it very difficult to grow out of something that you have been your whole life. 

The Varoom Problem (Short Film)

The Varoom Problem (Short Film)

n  Honlodge Productions

“Sleep badly last night?  Is that your medical opinion?  I’m not a faker, I’m not a lunatic, I’m not a malingerer but a demon.  Am I going to be ex-or-cised?”

     I must admit before I get started that I was shocked by the outcome at the end of the short film.  I didn’t expect an ending that would leave me feeling uneasy especially with only a thirteen-minute film.  I found this film to be humorously sarcastic in relation to those who without evidence deem others whom are different to be lunatics.  The computer crashes and so of course rationally the person in charge of the prison blames this man who he judges as an irrational person to have had something to do with it.  *Note, I’m currently shaking my head.  Whenever we encounter something or someone in which we do not understand, it is as though we automatically associate them with an outside alien form of what we, in our minds, create the “average normal person” to be.  But if we dig a little deeper, then we can ask the question, what is true insanity?  Does it even exist?  Sure we had what the “average” person does in their day-to-day lives; notice the quotes around “average”.  A lot of times without even realizing it first handedly do we do the things we do because of what society has told us is okay to do.  Taking myself as an example, I act very different behind closed doors.  That is why in relationships (I know, I’m jumping around, but stay with me here) advise to “get to know someone first” before committing yourself one hundred percent.  And some may sit there thinking, “Why?  I already know them.”  Ah, but you don’t.  And this short film is the perfect example of that.  We know the idea they believe is socially acceptable to be in front of a crowd.  But how they act naturally in the comfort of their own space and sanctuary may be completely different.  And I think that is what The Varoom Problem was poking fun at.  We assume the worst when encountering a person so different from what we create in our minds as the standard for all people to meet when that isn’t so.  Sometimes people don’t wish to hide their true selves from the world.  Those are the ones who are brave.  And those are the ones in my opinion understand more of what’s surrounding them and others than those who choose to portray an ideal self-image.  Which is why the main character was deemed as “God”.  He didn’t waste time pretending to uphold a status to be accepted.  The interpretation of him as God is equal to a person who strays from what we deem normal.  Besides, what’s cool about being normal anyways?

Complicity

Complicity

By Tim Parrish

            Back outside, a wasp hovered over the hedges lining the sidewalk, then disappeared. Once, I had reached into the bushes to retrieve my football and grabbed a whole nest.  I remembered them boiling toward my fingers.

            The short story, “Complicity” by Tim Parrish I found indeed quite complicated.  I couldn’t figure out why Mr. Parks was the way he was, using physical violence as an active parental discipline technique.  I did not understand how Bob befriended Mr. Parks who helped him get a job as a police officer when his father despised him.  I have outlined the quote above and chose it as one of necessity because I wanted to focus on the placement in which the author put it.  A day after the “in home invasion attack” on Mrs. Parks, we find Mr. Parks sitting outside the house with a shotgun by his side.  Jeb was then reluctantly invited into the garage of a man’s home that doesn’t even like him.  “I had reached into the bushes to retrieve my football and grabbed a whole nest”.  It’s an analogy you see, and a hint from the author of who committed the crime.  Jeb had reached into the bush knowing only that his football was there not expecting to be in the center of danger from the wasps.  This very similar situation can be applied to Jeb walking to the garage of the one who committed the crime against Mrs. Park, which would only lead to Mr. Park.  And I found that to be so interesting for the Parrish to sneak that in there like that.  I had to read the story a couple of times to confirm my belief in it being Mr. Park who beat his wife.  Although obvious in early pages where Jeb was playing basketball outside and heard the ruckus only to see Mr. Park leave in a haste off to work, this little flashback of something totally different and yet, all the more similar confirmed that it was in fact Mr. Park.  And I wonder why now?  Was it because Mrs. Park had walked out when Mr. Park was abusing the children outside?  Making him son hit Jeb and then making them kiss before releasing them?  Was this some sort of point he wanted to make to her and everyone else that this is what he could do if you crossed him?  All of these questions are left unanswered because we know that he did it, and yet if he wanted everyone to know he would have let them be aware of his crime.  But he didn’t.  He acted as though he was going to be the protector; he was going to keep his family safe when the only unsafe person here was him.  

     

There Will Come Soft Rains

August 2026:  There Will Come Soft Rains

-- Ray Bradbury

            Smoke and silence…Dawn showed faintly in the east.  Among the ruins, one wall stood alone.  Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”’

            Humans are living evidence of evolution.  We have grown from nomads to independently living individuals capable of caring for making rational judgments, sustaining life and ourselves with ease.  A day is the same as everyday other day for us.  But to ponder the question of what was going through Bradbury’s mind noting that this piece of writing was published in 1950 leads me to ask, does he think we will one day evolve so much to a point where technological advances will overtake the human race one day?  “And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn/ would scarcely know that we were gone” (qtd. in Bradbury 3).  It’s like no matter how far we go with our new advances, the world will as a whole stay the same.  The sun is still going to rise in the mornings, and set in the evenings.  The moon will still come out as light during darkness, the seasons will continue to pass like ritual clockwork.  The only thing missing would be us.  And it is interesting to note that being in the year 2014, a lot of technology has overtaken us already.  When friends go out in groups for dinner, you can almost always expect the majority of them to be glued to their hand held touch screens, lighting up with whatever was more important in their hand then what was going on in the real world.  To imagine that a man from the 1950s made such a claim that is so relevant today stuns me.  Technology is such a big part of our lives, some people have anxiety without it and it’s hard to believe that not too long ago were we without such luxuries.  To have a house maintain itself on its own, as though in authority of all who lived in it is quite a thought within itself.  I wonder how a man who wrote this so long ago, would have known how on point he was nearing the futuristic time period he labeled in his title. 

 It is like the rain will come to wash us away.  After the decayed, after all is gone.  Growth comes from being watered.  It will begin a new evolution from its purest form.  

           

Second Variety

“Second Variety”

-- Philip R. Dick

            As the Tassos reached for him, a last ironic thought drifted through Hendrick’s mind.  He felt a little better, thinking about it.  The bomb.  Made by the Second Variety to destroy the other varieties…They were already beginning to deign weapons to use against each other

            Never have I ever read before this one, a more powerful ending.  I am almost twenty-one years old and I know my time to walk the surface is not the length of my elders.  Thankfully, I have not endured much sadness universally as those who have been here before me.  But if I were to make a relation between myself and someone twice my age, I think the term, “war” and “fighting” is something that any generation is able to relate to, whether it be personal, regional, nationally, or universally.  Here in Dick’s story, Second Variety different countries are fighting against each other for what?  More power?  Freedom?  Money? People are dying because of disagreement.  To be able to read an outstanding story on machinery, the ideal war tactic tool to be used in defense against the enemy, and how it achieved not only want Hendrick and the others wanted, but also went beyond.  It doesn’t have to necessarily be a breathing soul to end up all the same.  Do we end up all the same?  To watch two sets of people or things in this situation turn against one another speaks so much more than just a fight in beating the enemy.  It makes a statement for merciless, brutality, motivation by rage in terms of wanting more power, wanting superiority, wanting to the ones feared of.  And this whole time, to show through person or machinery, that betray is one of the most effective tactics in getting what you want.  To build that trust, to build that loyalty and defense together and learn to be honest with a stranger you only just met only to find out in the end that they were the enemy makes me laugh cynically.  Because if this were to be the case, who can we trust?  Who can we tell all of our secrets to?  And if you hesitate on any one of those questions, consider this:  can you trust anyone?

The Dangerous Game

“The Dangerous Game”

-- Richard Connell

“…Hunting, remember, had been my life.  I have heard that in America businessmen often go to pieces when they give up the business that has been their life”

           

            I know when I was younger and I used to think how people, for example could be prejudice another, I was naïve in the sense that I didn’t reason with how they came to be like that.  When something is apart of your life for an extensive amount of time, and suddenly it’s gone, it’s like a sudden void has become aware and you will do anything to get it back.  For the people who were prejudice, they continued their beliefs.  For the man hunting animals, he began hunting humans. 

            Why?  Sure, when something I once loved starts to become a bore, I try to reinvent it to where it becomes challenging again in a fun and harmless way.  But how far is too far?  I came to discover my own sense of hunting other beings.  Not just Rainsford and General Zaroff but including all hunters in general lacks a sense of sensibility for their prey.  And I’m not saying we shouldn’t not kill animals.  Many people eat meat on a regular occurrence; I eat meat on a regular occurrence.  But at what part does it become inhumane?  When we start killing and hunting our own race?  Does that make us prejudice toward animals themselves?  It’s interesting to think about this in a light of different perspectives.  Literature has always taught me to try and open myself up and peer into the mind of the author, and to go even further, into the mind of a character, specifically the antagonist in this piece and see things from the way he saw them.  He was beat by his own game in the end.   Does that matter in terms of how things would have turned out if he had let the game of hunting animals continue to bore him to a point where he would no longer have any passion for it?  I look at his continuous hunting cycle as a void he was trying to fill in life.  Who lives on an island by himself with a giant dummy?  And kills for fun?  Must he have had no family, no loved ones, no friends prior to this lifestyle?  Hunting fed his emptiness.  And to feed any kind of emptiness with lesser things other than the core root of what’s causing it is a sad, sad, thing to do.  You can’t win that one in the end.

An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

-- Ambrose Bierce

            He stands at the gate of his own home.  All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine…Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of Owl Creek Bridge.

            Upon reading this story, I was struck by a previous conversation with someone who had lost a loved one and was telling me about the chemical released in the human body just as that person is about to die.  It allows the soon-to-be deceased to gently reflect back on their most happiest times of an event, or occurrence that maybe has not even happened yet and they wish to fulfill mentally before they pass away, or so I’ve been told.  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge reminded me of that in the sense that the entire story of Peyton was the last final minutes of his life reflecting on the last thing he would have wanted to do should he have had the chance to escape, was to see his family.  Peyton never left the spot where he was executed by rope hanging.  “…Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge”, I mean he never even broke away.  He was there the entire time and I think this has made me realize that death itself is not just something tragic, but something beautiful as well.  In a time of guilt, a time in which he wish he had more of to be with his family, in the sense to anyone who wish they had more time as they stood before the grave of their own death, was beautiful.  I say this because the mind of Peyton Farquhar took him to exactly where he wanted to be.  Dying alone and without his family in reality, but given a second chance to be with them in the world beyond, is the most beautifully tragic thing that could have happened to him, especially now.

God of Love

God Of Love

-       Short Films

You can’t control who you love, you can’t control who loves you.  You can’t control how it happens or when it happens or why it happens.  You can’t control any of that stuff.  But I can.  Look, I’m just a guy; I have good aim, that’s it.  You’ve seen me I’m basically an idiot.  I guess that why’s love doesn’t make as much sense as it should because, well, I’m the God of love.

            One of the most common phrases I’ve heard other women say is, “I can’t help that I’m in love with him!  I just am.”  It’s confusing, mind bottling, perhaps frustrating.  Or maybe you’re one of those really obnoxious couples who’s perfect, super sappy and who’s life is content with the world’s hardest conversation ender, “I love you,” and, “No, I love you more,” etc.  But, the point that is open to interpretation is that sometimes, love just doesn’t make sense.  In the short film, God of Love, the audience is able to feel the frustration of Raymond Goodfellow when he does everything possible, including stabbing random love darts into his crush’s hand, Kelly who is actually in love with his best friend.  Though over dramatic, situations like these occur and at the end of the day you sit and wonder, “Out of everyone, why him,” or “why her?”  And so for Ray to remove himself out of the equation of selfishness, he finally allowed his best friend and Kelly to be together as a romantic couple.  And that’s what love is all about.  It’s about being selfless.  Even though Ray didn’t get the girl he wanted, he allowed many other couples to come together, and it’s better to spread love than it is to take it away.   

Happy Endings

Happy Endings

-       Margaret Atwood (1983)

John and Mary meet.  What happens next?  If you want a happy ending, try A.

            It’s funny because upon choosing to read A first not only because it was placed at the top of the page under the title, but also because the author took the time to deliberately point it out should have been enough to sustain me between the couple, John and Mary.  Everyone wants a good beginning, middle and end like the one in A for John and Mary.  Heck, we even want that for ourselves.  But it was too perfect.  It was, “too happy” for me to be anywhere near satisfaction, and so I kept reading.  I read all possible outcomes a few times actually, until I realized what it was that I was doing.  I was deliberately looking for something malicious to happen to them.  I was looking for that resistance between John, and Mary, I was looking for that malevolent part of the story that would sickly spice things up for me.  The affair, the overdose, all of it satisfied my needs much more than the beautiful happy ending in A.

“That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.  Now try How and Why”.  I took that statement to heart in all of its truthfulness.  Everyone as their own individual being has the opportunity of making the “right” choices at a chance to be in forever happiness.  Does that happen all the time?  No.  And the answer is “Why” does that not happen?  And “How” do we let happiness slip away from our fingers like that? 

            My interpretation of this story was that the very answers to both of my questions revolve back around to us.  Because just as I was searching unknowingly for something bad to happen to make this story my definition of a good story, I, along as others in this world, do that within my own life.  Countless amount of times have there been issues that were so small and minuet that shouldn’t have mattered and yet I let it ruin the entire day for me.  And so I pose a question going beyond the reading, are we born imperfect, or do we choose to be it?  That’s what I think the author was trying to indirectly convey.