Feet of the Duck

I am always willing to try new things. This is particularly different than when I was a young child. Sitting at the kitchen table, all alone, I frequently spent my night staring at the delicious dinners that my mother prepared. I did not want to eat the chicken Parmesan, or spaghetti, or stew. EWW!! GROSS!! I would literally go so long without eating that my parents were afraid I was going to starve myself to death. But when something was placed in front of me that I actually liked, I would eat my body weight in it. Pancakes and shrimp, bread and cereal. My preferences did not follow much rhyme or reason. If it was pink I would eat it. Other than that I pretty much lived off of bread and nothing else. Finally, I matured and my taste buds followed. I would actually try some of the food that was set in front of me, and LOW AND BEHOLD! It tasted good! I soon ventured out and tried many different foods. There are still some foods that I just cannot stand; bananas, onions, peanut butter, but for the most part, I will try anything. And at this point in my life I mean absolutely anything.

Growing up in a particularly ethnically diverse city, my family eats at many different restaurants. We eat everything from the fiery hot peppers of Thai food to the slow cooked Jamaican. We will eat blood soup with the Vietnamese and Curry with the Indians. My favorite place to eat though is Chinese BBQ. There is a big debate among the Chinese (and my family) over which Chinese BBQ restaurant is better. I personally choose First, but some people will refuse to eat anywhere besides King's. After loyalties have been decided, we started frequenting this restaurant many times. It is all family style, so the more friends you bring, the more dishes you get to order. One day after church, we had about 15 people eating at this restaurant, and decided to be very adventurous and order one of the strangest things on the menu (for white people at least). This was during the Beijing Olympics, and the news had done exposes on delicacies over there, one of which was duck's feet.

So, you guessed it, we ordered a plate of duck's feet and passed it around. Only the more adventurous slid the slimy white treat onto their plates to try it. I was among them. I picked up one of them with my chopsticks and tried to bit off just a small chunk. Well it was chewy, and we had no knifes. I had to dive right in; it was all or nothing. I grasped it between the two plastic utensils and ate it. It was disgusting. It was tough, chewy, slimy and so flavorless you couldn't stand it.

I stopped after one bite, but I am glad I tried it. I think it must be one of those things that you have to grow up with. I certainly did not enjoy it. I am glad that I tried it though. I can always win any contest of who has eaten the strangest food. If I don't win with duck's feet, then I go onto tongue, tendon, blood soup, or squirrel. I wasn't kidding when I said that I really would try anything now.

The Lottery

The lottery was a very interesting story to me, perhaps mainly because of the setting. The setting of this story was interesting to me since it was so contemporary. When I first finished the story, I thought that surely it would have to have been set a hundred and fifty years ago, or more. When I found out that it was less than half of that, I was shocked. I couldn't even imagine something like that happening today. Then I took a moment to think, and realized that something like The Lottery could happen today. Perhaps it wouldn't happen here in Fort Worth, but it could happen in a different part of the world. And if you really get down and think about it, we take away people's rights like that right her. Perhaps not to such an extreme extent, but we do take people's rights away purely by the random selection of what they believe in. While I am not going to turn this blog post into a political forum, I do think that no matter who you are, you will agree that somebody in America, right now, is not receiving all of the freedom that they deserve.

This story was a particularly shocking one. As I read the posts of my classmates and listened to the class discussion, I realized that many of them began the story like me. There was not the slightest inkling in my mind that something terrible was going to happen. In the very beginning, I thought that The Lottery would be something to win, something exciting. Perhaps that is linked to my current connotations with the word lottery. When I drive down the highway past the powerball sign, I usually spend the next 15 minutes day dreaming about what I would do with all that money. So while I was reading this story, I started to imagine what the winner of the lottery would win. The buzz of the town got me excited, but soon I realized that this was not necessarily the buzz of winning a few thousand dollars or a big screen tv. Nothing, however, prepared me for the stoning that was going to happen. The screaming and chasing caught me off guard and shocked me.

Like many other stories this semester, this one did not leave me in a happy-go-lucky mood, but rather a deep, almost dark contemplative mood. The type of mood I picture troubled artists have all the time. Perhaps that is the point. 

Hunting adventures

            I grew up in the great state of Texas. This means that every fall, my dad would head out with his buddies for a weekend of hunting. All I ever saw of this was the tasty venison that he brought back. As he got older, he would go on bigger expeditions looking for something more than a Texas white-tail. Well, my father has recently retired, and as a result has a plethora of free time to spend hanging around the house doing who knows what and playing tennis. As far as I can tell, all he ever does is play tennis. I walked up to my father last winter and told him “you are out of excuses Vati (german word for father). It is time that you took me hunting. I don’t have tennis and you don’t have work.” To my great astonishment, he agreed. Well I was so excited. I also made sure to bring it up every few months to make sure that he knew I expected him to keep his word and that he was excited about it.

            This November, we took a trip down to a family friend’s ranch, and yep, you guessed it! I went hunting! I was very excited and nervous to go hunting. I had never killed anything more than a squirrel with a pellet gun before. My dad and I loaded up Frank (see my previous post if you don’t know who Frank is), and drove down to go hunting. We got there Friday night, and I started doing target practice with the gun I was going to use (.243 Winchester, if you were curious). I was a little worried, because my target practice got consistently worse. My dad shrugged it off, and then we went to bed. 

4:30 am the next morning we woke up and went out. I knew that we were going to have to wake up very early. I am NOT a morning person. This is a problem when you are hunting, because coffee is very pungent. Deer have an excellent sense of smell. Well, when it cam time to wake up, I had no problem because I was so excited. I actually was awake before my dad came over to wake me up. We silently crept out to the blind to await our prey. Once we got to the blind, we waited, and waited, and waited. While waiting for the sun to come up, the flies started encroaching into my area. I was a good hunter and did not move much to get them off of me, and instead just let them walk on me. Well one particularly annoying fly was creeping all over my arm. I flex my muscle to try to make it move. It doesn’t work. I do it again. It doesn’t work. I finally look down and try not to scream and ruin everything. There is a giant ugly hairy spider crawling up my arm. Well I flick it off and my dad smashed it with the binoculars. He told me that he was just proud I didn’t knock everything over and make a scene.

A little while later, the does start wandering in front of us. We see a small three point, and then finally an 8 point wanders into my sights. I stead my self, take a deep breath, exhale half way, and BAM! I took down that buck with one shot. He didn’t even take a step. I have never seen my dad more proud of me. I got another buck that weekend, but nothing compared to hearing that first shot ring out and seeing my animal We skinned it, and took it home. Now, thanks to my efforts, I have some delicious venison chili in my fridge. This was a great experience, and one that I am very proud of. I cannot wait until next fall when I can go back and do it again. 

Franklyn

            The day I turned sixteen I expected a fun new car out in the drive way with a giant bow on it. I got no such wonderful surprise when I woke up on that March morning. Unfortunately.  Very Unfortunately. I drove my sisters car around that day. This was the car that we had both learned on, but she put it through a lot more than I ever did. See my sister had a habit of parking this car. Into stationary objects. She and her friends put a lot of wear and tear on that old Toyota Rav 4.

            Now you see a Rav 4 is a perfectly respectable car. It gets good gas mileage, is a nice size, and would suit most people’s needs very well. I, however, am not most people. I am a car person for one. I love cars. I enjoy looking at cars, reading about cars and driving fun cars. I also have very specific options on the different automotives that people drive, and like a stubborn Texan, I am set in my opinions.

            I drove all through my sophomore and junior years of high school in that green mediocre car. Because that is exactly all that it was: mediocre. Driving around town with my mother was, I’m sure, torture for her. Every car that I would even consider driving I would point out to her, and let her know that I really liked it. This mostly consisted of trucks and sports cars. Unfortunately, my mom reverted to her Yankee upbringing and refused to buy me a truck. She also said that if I get a sports car, I would kill myself. I really had no argument on that second one. I did point out one car that she didn’t have much of a problem with. It was not a practical car, but it was a very safe car which was important to her. It was nice and big, and practical. It would have very low maintenance when it got older as I graduated college and started paying for more things on my own. I had picked out an electric blue FJ Cruiser.

            One morning the summer before my senior year, my mom told me that we could go LOOK at cars. She emphasized over and over that we were only going to look. There was no way that we were going to buy a car today. We had several other dealerships to visit. WE WERE NOT BUYING A CAR TODAY! “Okay, okay, we aren’t buying a car. I got it mom.” We walked on to the lot, and of course were ignored. We looked at a lot of the FJs and none of them have what I was looking for. They were new cars, but had thousands of miles on them already. None of them were blue, and all of them were automatic. After looking around the whole lot, we finally spotted one blue one over in the used car lot and decide to meander over and take a gander.

            There it was. That was my car. Sitting in the middle of the used car lot, it was the last of the cars that they had bought from another dealer. The odometer read a whopping 22 miles on it.  It was only left because most of America is too lazy to buy a car with a standard transmission. It had every single thing I wanted, from the racks to the wheels. This was my car. And it was a third of the price of all of the new cars we had looked at.

            Well my mom went back on her word, and we traded in my sisters green mediocre car for Frank. His name is Frank the Tank. In family settings he is Franklyn. 

The Cask of Amontillado

The Cask of Amontillado was the only story in the class that I had read before. This made it interesting because the first time I read this story I was no where close to being a sophisticated reader. I think it was somewhere in junior high when I first read this story, but it went way over my head. I did not understand much of what was going on, and didn't know what to think of the story when it was done. Looking back on my second reading of the story, I realize how much more I absorbed while reading this time around. I understood better what was happening, and why Fortunato was killed. The first time I hardly even realized that he was murdered, never to be found again. I was more focused on the reasoning and the thought processes than the fact that it was all happening while there was a big party going on outside. 

            Montresor is very cunning in his plan, and the reader can tell that the idea is well thought out. The timing is obviously thought out, since Poe tells about it. The carnival distracts people from what is going, people are not reliable and somebody wont be missed immediately on a night like tonight. Montresor knows what to tell people to make them do what he wants. Although this is evident with his manipulation of Fotunato, it is much more evident with the servants at Montresor’s house. He knew that by telling them he wouldn’t be home during a big event, that they would leave. This shows his deep perception about human nature. Poe really understands how people work and what makes them do certain things. This is evident in his stories, and to me, is one of the reasons why they are so highly disturbing.

           

Edgar Allan Poe is an excellent author of short stories in my opinion, but he is a little to dark for my preference. I really like how he understands the psyche and what gets to a person.

Finally, I leave you with Mister Edgar Allen Bro.

Fathers and Sons

            After reading so much Ernest Hemmingway this semester, I think that the one story that best illustrates the Nick Adams stories is Fathers and Sons. This story illustrates the struggles that Nick had growing up. These struggles he had as a child did not leave him when he became an adult. They only changed. His struggles with his father were translated into the struggles that he had with his own son, trying to be a good father.

            Nick does not know what to do to be a good father, but he does try to do a better job than his father. When his son is curious about his grandfather, Nick fibs about what kind of man he was. He wants his son to have a good image of his grandfather, and not the same image that Nick has.

            The reminisce in the middle of the story is a very interesting change. It does not particularly make sense to the rest of the story. Nick is driving through the area where he grew up and is thinking back on it. It is interesting because most of the story is about the role of fatherhood, but the flashback does not touch much on fatherhood, but rather maturation. The flashback pairs well with the story before it however, Cross-Country Snow. The two stories deal with Nick growing up and learning about life. Perhaps Cross-Country Snow is why Hemmingway put that particular memory of Nick’s in Fathers and Sons. Since he linked two stories together often, the similar memories in each story would help to link them.

            Doing what is right by our children is a big part of human nature. People are always struggling with how to raise their own children better than their parents. I think that more often that not, ones parenting skills are no better or worse than that of their own parents. They are only different methods. There is no one perfect way to raise a child, and as Nick is learning in Fathers and Sons, you can only do what you think is best for your own children. 

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wall-Paper was one of the stories this semester that had the biggest impact on me the semester. Much like the public when it was published, this story was shocking. I did not expect it to be so vivid or detailed. This story transports you into the narrators mind. Since it is written in almost a diary format, you feel that you know exactly what the narrator is thinking. If it was told in first person, this would result in an entirely different story than the one that Charlotte Perkins Gilman told.

One of the biggest parts of the story for me is the subsections. This illustrates the worsening of the nervous disorder. As each section is read, you feel for the narrator and feel how she is going insane locked up in the room.

I think the fact that the description of the room is very important to the story. I know that I have seen wallpaper before, that has foil or something else in it, that makes it appear that it moves. This is very disconcerting, particularly when I was a child. Wallpaper is not supposed to move at all. I can understand how the narrator would be very disconcerted with the wallpaper after being locked in the room all day with nothing to do but stare at the wallpaper.

            The story made a big impact on me since it really transports you there and you feel like you are just as bad as the narrator. The shockingness of it plays a very big role in it as well. As a very hyperactive person, I can understand how much worse I would get if a doctor had prescribed me the rest cure. Even if there was nothing wrong with me in the beginning, I feel that after the rest cure, I would have gone crazy as well.