Poet of the Month

I tried searching for Jim Moore, but the only other poem I saw off Google had like 6 LONG paragraphs. So i skipped that one and moved on to a different poet. I chose Mary Oliver instead. She wrote the Wild Geese poem that we read in class. I loved that poem. I felt like she was really talking to me with the use of the word "you" over and over and over. I chose another poem by her, Breakage, to copy into my moleskine and I like it quite a bit too. Especially the ending line "Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story."

Currently

This week I read "River, Cross my Heart" and part of "Redeeming Love." This makes my etymology total 1164 pages.

Favorite Sentences:
1) "The girls' raucous laughter as not muted by the shrubbery that lined the C&O canal towpath, and the seven pairs of bare feet simply walked westward toward the Three Sisters." This sentence creates a wonderful, relatable picture in my head of me and my friends laughs carrying through the neighborhood while our bare feet leave footprints in the dirt. Sounds like such a fun night.

2) "The heart-shaped head ducked beneath the surface and boiling water closed over it. " I feel like this one needs some explaining. Johnnie Mae is cooking on the stove and she sees her sister inside of it, with her hands outstretched, trying to get Johnnie Mae to save her. I feel like this could come right out of a scary movie! Love it.

3) "Johnnie Mae knew she had at least a split second to leap onto the coat and burrow her face down into it. " I can clearly see a little girl sticking her face into this enormous fur coat just to be able to feel the warmth and comfort of it around her face.

Parallels

After reading the Help, I got into a sort of book depression. Nothing else matched up to the greatness of it, and I didn't know what to do. At this point, I was reading My Antonia for novels class, which was an extremely boring book, and was just bummed out. Then I chose to read "River, Cross My Heart." It is a book written during the same time as the Help, but from a much different circumstance. In this one, a little girl dies in a river under her older sister's watch. The story tells about how the older sister, mother, and rest of the town are struck by her sudden death. The older sister, her name is Johnnie Mae, falls into a deep depression where she doesn't even want to move. She is so overcome with nightmares and dreams that her neighbor gets the town herbal remedy provider to make her a "concoction" to help her get sleep.

I can't imagine having my brother die when I was supposed to be watching him. I don't often have to take him along when I go and hang out with my friends. But that is what Johnnie Mae has to do all day, everyday. Johnnie Mae sees her sister drowning in the river and tries to dive over and over and over to find her sister's body and pull her to the surface, but she cannot find it. This river is said to be haunted in a way. The town refers to it as the Three Sisters because 3 sisters, nuns, were said to have drowned in the river and now take prisoners by their ankles whenever someone goes swimming. Most know not to swim in the river, and so does Clara, the youngest sister. However, when standing on a log over the river, the log breaks and she falls in. This seems to always happen in movies! Someone walks a little too close to a steep edge hanging over a 500 foot drop, and suddenly the rocks break beneath them. Or maybe a person is walking backwards and doesn't see the drop-off behind them and falls to their death. Who knows. I just know that it happens a lot and its very predictable.

Speaking of predictability, I was sitting watching Parenthood the other night on NBC, AMAZING show for any of you who don't watch it. Well one daughter on the show is around 17 and she is dating a guy who is about 22, but is a recovering alcoholic. Sweet, sweet guy. He has totally turned his life around. Anyways, Hattie, the 17 year old, wants to go to this high school party and she wants her boyfriend to come along, but her little brother suggests that Alex shouldn't go because if there is going to be alcohol there, that would be bad for him. The little brother's name is Max and he has Aspergers and is crazy intelligent and lacks a filter to tell him what is appropriate to say to others. Ok, the application is coming, I promise! So Alex decides that he isn't going to go, but he will pick Hattie up at the party and they can hang out afterwards. OF COURSE the rest of the story line is predictable. Hattie gets totally wasted, Alex comes in to get her, and has to punch a drunk guy who won't let Hattie leave. You just know that if something is telling you that something is bad, bad, bad, that someway, somehow, someone is going to get tangled up in that mess.

Anyways, its just interesting to see how different story lines overlap, but go in completely different directs with the rest of the story line, but also how one incident can connect to so many others in other types of entertainment.

Currently

For this 100 pages only, I am reading Joker One. Makes my total 906 pages.

1) "My job description was twofold: 1) Save lives and 2) Take lives. Not necessarily in that order." I can't imagine being in a job where my performance, which was measured by the men i killed, affected the lives of so many others.

2,3) "You can't think of home, you can't miss your wife, and you can't wonder how it would feel to take a round through your neck. You can only pretend that you're already dead and thus free yourself up to focus on three things: 1) finding and killing the enemy, 2) communicating the situation and resulting actions to adjacent units and higher headquarters, and 3) triaging and treating your wounded. If you love your men, you naturally think about number three first, but if you do, you're wrong. The grim logic of combat dictates that numbers one and two take precedence." I just can't see myself ever getting into that mindset. Ever. I couldn't imagine getting shot, but if I was in war, thats all I would think about. 24-7. 365.

BLAH!

This week I started reading Joker One. I'm not really a nonfiction type person; I eat up all the romance novels and comedies and such so a book on the military is really not my favorite. I really can't stand it so far and since I've read my 100 pages, I think I am just going to stop! The story line really isnt that bad. Its the accounts of a Marine as he becomes a platoon leader and about the struggles and memories he has of his men in battle. I thought it sounded good, but I don't understand about 75% of what he is talking about, which makes it a REALLY REALLY slow read... At the beginning, I was hopeful. The Marine gave a short reason why he wanted to write this book and he felt that his men had a story that deserved to be told. He kept saying how proud he was of them, and that he knows there are other Marines out there worthy of a story, but this book is about his men.

One interesting part, but also kind of cruel and gruesome, was one of the exercises they had to do in training. There are two platoons involved per round and one platoon goes and lies in a trench at the bottom of the hill. The other platoon has to manage to get over this double sided razor wire to get to the hill so they can climb it and have a mock attack on the "enemy." Being as smart as he is, the platoon leader decides to have his men go around through the nearby forest and stage a side attack on the unsuspecting trench waiters. They throw fake grenades that don't actually detonate to show the explosions that would go on. However, the main corporal in charge of all the platoons, nicknamed Ox, decides that this was not the route the men should have taken and makes them do it over again, this time going through the barbed wire. To cross the wire, 3 men have to sacrifice themselves as "flying squirrels" and lay across the wire so that the other men can walk on their backs! They get real gashes and awful wounds from being the sacrifice, but they have to do it anyways. And the corporal enjoys watching it!

How terrible. I would never do such a thing for guys that I barely know. Especially just in training. Anyways, the guy's home life stinks. He's been married for a year and his wife works all the time to keep her mind off the fact that her husband is never home. So they are both workaholics. Good thing they don't have kids yet or they would be growing up without either parent!

On that topic. I really feel bad for kids who are raised by nannies and babysitting or stay at daycare all day everyday. The point of having kids is to be able to enjoy them and spend time with them! When two workaholics have kids, no one but the child suffers! Sure they make big bucks to buy the kid whatever he wants, but what he wants most, he can't have. Before I have a family, I am going to make sure I can actually support them while being able to take time off and enjoy their young ages! They are only young once! Or if I can't, make sure that my husband is home often. My children will not be raised by a nanny. What's the point of even having kids if you aren't the one that raises them? Are they just supposed to cooperate when you feel like being with them? And all the times you don't, the times you choose work instead, they are supposed to be OK with that too?

Currently

This week I began and finished the Help. With a whopping total of 530 pages, I loved every second of it. That makes my etymology reading total 806 pages. This book has much more meaningful sentences than last week and here are my top three:

1) "Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, we are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as i'd thought."
I love this quote because this is exactly what i got out of the book. I knew that there was no difference between races, but for the white women in this book to begin realizing these facts, it was an enormous breakthrough.

2) "The date is Friday, January 17, 1964. I have on a black A-line dress. My fingernails are all bitten off. I will remember every detail of this day." This is the day Miss Skeeter finally hears back from the publishing company with the wonderful news that they will publish her book. What a huge moment!

3) "Taking care of white babies, thats what I do, along with all the cooking and cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime." While Aibileen never gets any thanks for the work she does with the white women's babies, she takes pride of the job she does in her heart.

Helpless in Mississippi

Yeah, I heard about the civil rights movement in U.S. History last year and it made me feel awful about how African Americans used to be treated. All the violence towards them and they really didn't have to do anything to provoke white people, except exist. As I have been reading "The Help" I have found a better understanding of what really went on in Mississippi. These women, the hired help, basically raised white women's children for them but received none of the credit. White women wanted their baby to show off at first, but at the first stinky diaper, heck, they couldn't run away fast enough. They would punish the children not only physically, but emotionally as well. One dad would whip his 6 year old with a garden hose and they it was the job of the help to bandage, and ice his wounds only so the father could do it yet again. They were helpless to stop any of the cruelty. I love the humor that the African American women use. Although they were treated worse than anything I have ever witnessed, they still found ways to have jokes with the other help. One servant, Minny, has the attitude of a typical rich white woman trapped inside an African American body. At one point, a white man discovers that she is in his house after his wife had hired her to do the chores without telling him, she stands at the door and yells at him. He just happens to be holding an axe and she is convinced he is going to chop her into pieces. In other part, one white woman, who starts to become friends with the help, sabotages her snooty white friend who loudly declares her opinion that the help should have their own bathrooms to use outside of the house so that the whites don't catch diseases from the sharing of toilets. She edits the friends article that is to be published in the newspaper and has everyone bring their old toilets and put them all in the snobby rich white woman's front lawn. At one point, there is a count of 30 toilets just scattered all over. While this book makes you laugh out loud, it also tears at your heart strings when the women get honest about what exactly goes on behind closed doors at their work. One woman took in her grandson Robert because he had nowhere else to go. After he accidentally used a white man's public restroom because it was not displayed which was which, men attacked him and as a result, he lost his sight in both eyes. He was only a teenager. One maid steals a piece of unused jewelry from her employer so that she can pay for both of her twin boys to go to college. She has been saving for years to support them both but realized that she only had the money for one. She couldn't bear the thought of having to tell one of her boys that he is not going to college but his brother is instead. Even when she asks for a loan from her boss, that she promises she will attempt to pay back with each of her week's pay, the woman would not hear of it. In fact, she told her it was even more Christian for her to let the woman suffer than it would be to help her out. Snotty people just bug the heck out of me and its awful to see one human being treat another like the women in this book do. Its definitely one of the best books I have read in my life and I 100% suggest it to anyone that needs something to read.