Pessimistic? No, it's just logic...

Pragmatist
  by Edmund Conti

Apocalypse soon
Coming our way
Ground zero at noon
Halve a nice day

The title of this poem strikes me as oddly funny- it claims to be logical, but there is a distinctly doomed tone to it.  The speaker seems nonchalant on the surface, as if he's commenting on the weather or state of the economy.  All in all he seems bored- total destruction is comingm he claims, but what can you do? It's not as if anyone can prevent it- so 'halve' a nice day, since he most likely took the full enjoyment out of the day.

This Week in Bedford....

I absolutely loved the short story Clothes by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni about a young Indian woman moving to America because of her arranged marriage.  The story started out apprehensivley as Sumita prepared to meet her prospective husband and their marriage.  At first I was extremely frustrated- I didn't want another emotionally draining story about the abusive conditions arranged marriages brought on.  Thankfully, Somesh (her husband) is a loving, hard-working man with big dreams for not only his business, but for Mita as well.  It was refreshing to see a happy story in Bedford, since most of the other stories have either severly depressed me (Soldier's Home) or really ticked me off (Saving Sourdi).Even though the ending of the story is sad, the bittersweet conclusion is full of hope; I liked the idea of a young woman living her entire life surrounded by family and finally getting the chance to live for herself.  I'm the youngest in my family and have watched two siblings succeed through college, and now as my senior year unfolds I connected Mita's yearning for something new and entirely her own.  I guess that's how everyone feels at some point: the need for something completely individual.

Senior year's adventures (continued)

Well, I guess since the whole point of a blog is to share with everyone and their dog (mainly my English class) what my thoughts are about the litereature we've been reading,  I'll start with the massive amount of questions we had to answer about The Poisonwood Bible.  I really liked this book; it was well-writtten, engaging, bittersweet, and unlike any book I have previoulsy read.  While I was reading it, I could feel myself battling out in the back of my mind how I felt about the underlying messages about missionaries, duty, and all-encompassing guilt.  I didn't push the envelope; if a thought became too messy I would leave it alone.  And then we were assigned thirty-three questions about the book. These questions probed deeper than I had been willing to go earlier, and when I tried to make concise, neat anwers to get through the assignmnet, I found that I couldn't.  There were no neat answers in the book, and that frustrated me.  Even simple questions about who the protagonist was were difficult because there were five narrators throughout the book.  Everything depended on my perspective and experiences.  As I became used to figuring out what I believed, I found I could answer the questions easier.  Just my thoughts...