Prompt A

I thought that Montaigne's essay, "Of Thumbs", was a insightful narration of periods in history when the thumb held a different and unique function of holding and grasping weapons. It was also interesting to see how the rulers and leaders were so protective of their peoples thumbs for the purpose of defending the nation. Alice Meynell's essay on the other hand was very confusing and did not hold much significance to myself. I thought that the essay used a lot of metaphors and imagery that I didnt believe was necessary. I found this no more evident than in the sentence: "To live in constant efforts after an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production, or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to live without either rest or full activity." I think that this sentence is very confusing and has too many thoughts trying to be expressed at one time. Not only does this occur in this sentence but in many others just like it throughout the essay. I fear that others may have a problem understanding this as well. I also fear that my analysis of these two works do not posses the intellectual depth that is so desired among the scholars and students of such things. So I will I try to finish off this blog post with a thought: "Does a work gain power through longevity and thoughtfulness? I say nay, it comes through brevity and instinct."
42 minutes

Weel 1, Prompt B

There are so many interesting people on this Earth. So many different walks of life, so many different stories. A man on his cell phone, arranging a business transaction. A woman pushing a stroller with an innocent child tucked safely inside. A group speaking a foreign language on their way to lunch. A lost girl, searching for her assigned destination. And me, sitting, taking in the sunshine and perfect breeze. I ask myself, what are we all doing here? But then the bells chime and class is about to start. I rush to my seat and prepare to be enlightened.

The screen fills with images and clips of new, exciting adventures ready to unfold. Action heros saving the world. A gorgeous couple finding true love. A soccer team beating all odds. My head spins with all the excitment in these new adventures. So many more stories to learn from, so many characters to become attatched to. But then our adventure begins. And my mind rushes to the present and I watch a lovely tale.

Maybe that is why we are all here. To wait, and then to rush. Human nature causes us to want something more, to want something bigger and better. To get those things, we must wait. We wait for answers to horrible problems. We wait for more money. We wait in the line for food. We wait to do our responsibilities. We wait for oppourtunities. We wait at the stop light. And then we rush. We rush to solve the problems. We rush to spend the money. We rush to eat. We rush to complete tasks. We rush to our oppourtunities. We rush through the light to our final destination. All this waiting and rushing. So, I wait here for something to come along and ignite my imagination. And soon, I will rush to embrace it.

Lilly Pyle

1 hour

Prompt C: Thirst

I will probably never forget the painful running experience I had one summer evening when my running partner and I decided to run at 7 o'clock on a day that exceeded 100 degrees. Neither of us actually thought it was a good idea, but both of us assumed the other had something planned after. The idea of running later when it would be cooler was never even addressed. It was not a good run. We felt like we were going to die of thirst. We were yearning to drink out of the low spraying sprinklers we passed watering various yards. We were only out for a 4 mile run, but it seemed to be 4 miles of pure torture with a thirst we couldn't quench. There was sweat pouring down our maroon faces. Which didn't really help the dehydration problem. Several times during the run I thought about how soothing ice cold water would feel running down my throat. I kept trying to swallow the saliva in my mouth. Usually when I run, I chew a piece of gum to keep my mouth moist, but of course on that fateful day, I was without even that. We ran past a guy watering his yard with a hose and I almost jumped outside my very rigid little comfort zone to ask for a drink of water. My thirst however did not overpower my feelings of self consciousness that keep me from making bizarre requests of strangers. Shortly after the hose, we ran past a church where some sort of young men's activity was just finishing up and some guys were walking around with water bottles. Even more torture. My legs were willing me to stop, but I knew that if I kept running I would get home quicker and drink all I wanted. It was so hard to keep going. Every step felt like it took ten minutes to hit the ground. I will never again run in that kind of heat if I can help it. Or at least without a lot of water fountains close by. I felt like I was dying of thirst.
Of course I wasn't dying. I did get a feeling of nausea and a never ending pounding in my head, but no dying. I recently read a book where the main character has a thirst that far exceeded the thirst I had that day. She has to find a source of water and she wasn't choosing to run in the heat and go without it. She was stranded in an area she didn't know the geography of and forced to survive. The author describes how her lips became chapped and she could literally feel her body drying up. How her body could no longer support her own weight and she eventually collapses and has to crawl to the water source. I have never really experienced an extreme thirst that I had no control over. Any time I am thirsty I have the option of purchasing a water, or going home and getting a drink. I don't even know what it would be like to not be able to obtain water within a short time of when I need it. And if I want it cold, that's an easy fix too. I don't think I want to know what real thirst or dehydration is like.
45 min

Prompt C: "Motherless" by Betty Ruddy (Fourth Genre)

Motherless

She chose to birth me natural. No chemicals would pass through her veins with the chance of entering mine. Received so much pain to get the lumped up and replicated body of mine out of her womb. Relieved when the physical connection between host and, what she considered beautiful parasite was restricted, then cut. Such a mighty task for such a delicate reward. She held me in her arms, looking me over. And I might have known her. Might have loved her. But I'll never remember that. She gave me life. She'd never let me forget that, because she just as easily took it with her.
I could blame her for the way I am. For my too big toes, wispy hair, always careful interactions. For the way I appease and strip down to bones embarrassed, fueled by her need for recognition. And I do. The reflection I see is always hers. Always. No matter the desperate improvements I try: pulling at the corners of our eyes, giving breadth to our too thin nose, making more lifted our seldom used cheekbones. Yet I am so frightened, to the point of immobility, to change what's left of her in me. Is the simple act of brushing the hair we share for the both of us sufficient to say she loved me?

I ran from her bosom when I was old enough to be aware of its wanting me gone. I ran with intentions to make severe blisters to callous over on our already too padded feet. I ran to make shackles of each breeze that would crack against my developing body, because that body was becoming hers. I ran to become both a masochist and sadist simultaneously. And while running, guilt swarmed through me, tinged all of our commonalities and gave them reckoning.
Now I can only find her in myself. I can only speak to her in my mind. And though I try to individualize, I forever come back to her twisted roots. I may claim I'd never hurt my own children, but what control do I have when it is her stubbed fingers I coddle and soothe with, her heart I synchronize to and will pass on, her mistakes I am fated to repeat and suffocate from? Will these things joining her and I be enough to suppress my womanly responsibility and desire? I cannot know. What I do have is, maybe being thus motherless is a blessing. And as I entertain the idea, her laugh escapes through me.

Time: 50 minutes and revision
Word Count: 422

Week 1 Prompt B

This term has just begun. The leaves have yet to golden and fall off their beloved branches. They cling to those branches; their homes and parents. As they age and grow weak, I feel their sudden disconnect as I have left from my own parents. I wake up in a new place with a person I barely know. I walk this unfamiliar campus alone. I now live in a world where I must do everything on my own. I have no one to hold my hand through all that I do or a shoulder to cry on when everything goes wrong. Why is it that we must leave everything we know and love behind when we reach a certain point in our life and must move on?
My envious heart sneers when I see couples so happy together. How can they be so lucky to have someone by their side when they are needed most? Where is my someone?
Trekking across the concrete path to the classes that are so distant, from what is now my home, I find I have too much time to think. So much time it torments the mind and twists one’s thoughts. The clock is ever ticking. Tick tock tick tock. Time never ceases and yet at times it feels as if it stands still. Where am I in this continuous world? Where do I belong? What is my purpose? Questions rattle my brain as they bounce back and forth, never receiving any answer. I find myself forgetting where I am and what I am doing in attempt to answer my many questions. Where are my answers?
I listen to those songs with repetitious phrases. “Sick and tired of being sick and tired.” I wonder who creates these lines and why everyone else has decided they must use them as well. Where has the originality gone? Why is it that everyone must be a cut out of someone else?
Who knows where I am going? Who knows what I will become? I know that I do not, but I do know that can retain my own originality. I will not be another ‘so and so.’ I am my own human being.

Kara Lohberg

45 minutes

Week 1 Prompt C: Homage to a bridge, From Four Genre

There are two acres on the little blackfoot river that are mine. The land has four tall shady cotton woods, six douglas fir, and one broken bridge. One of the first things I did when I bought this land was to take two days and tear out the bridge. The wood was old and rotten, and when I took out one of the beams that crossed the river it crumbled into little pieces and earwigs and mould fell into my waders and the stream. The trout ate them and I swatted them between the rubber and my legs.

After the old bridge was torn out I spent four more days building a new one. The land has four tall shady cotton woods, six douglas fir, and one new bridge. The new bridge has piers built of stones I took from the river and cemented together. They support beams made out of pine that I cut down and varnished and fitted together length wise. This bridge will last a long time. There are little troughs on the beams that water can run through because water will kill wood faster than almost anything.

The heaviest thing it will have to support is myself on my bicycle, and that won’t be for a while now because I am far away and the only thing that crosses the bridge is my thoughts. Sometimes I imagine that I am there walking down the stream and plopping pebbles into the water that passes under my bridge. Others that I am building something new: a house out of brick and stone; a garden with tomatoes and tea; a workshop that smells like pine.

I love that bridge because it is a portal for my imagination. Sometimes I can feel myself “going over the bridge” when I think about the future or read a special novel that paints vivid pictures with words. I hear the deep sound of my feet across the beams and the water running under the bridge. Then I am in the Pelnor Fields, sailing on the Pequod, or passing an abandoned church who’s roof had fallen long ago with an enormous sycamore growing where the sacristy once stood.

Blake Stanger

1 hour

Prompt C: "Exalting the Weird" (and after Kim Dana Kupperman)

One Weird Sister Looks at Another

Wyrd is bird-faced, bird-sharp with a tongue that flaps against time. She dances like a wood nymph in the night. Her long fingers grace the cheeks of those near her, but her pointed nose and icy eyes make her patients step back distressed. Tall for a woman, lithe, enticing, yet cursed, enamored especially by sailors—those with a compass, a map, a direction, a plan. She laughs at human attempts at control. Wyrd dances in a gossamer gown woven of fading flower petals and the blaze of desire. It drapes her body, distracting, until she captures you: captures those who claim she cannot touch them cannot impact them cannot, but she can. She dines on the unspoken fears and dreams of listeners. She writes the lyrics for sirens and baffles men with her ever changing shape. Her voice slides damply across the air leaving a visible trail.

She vacuums every day, suctioning up spider strands and dust that clings to the edge of the wall. Each week, she reorganizes men’s lives like her sock drawer and laughs joyfully. Slithering in her skin, she is fate, destiny inescapable even by us. Wyrd: the one we’re all named for—the oldest absorbs us all.

She dreaded babysitting us when our parents left despite practically raising us; changing diapers, teaching us to speak, enticing us to prank calls, leading us, eventually, beyond the law of time: we became the past and the future, we became active fate by collaborating together. Wyrd taught me the art of walking and waking. My first memory is of her cleaning out my ears with her long un-filed nails as my head lay cushioned in her lap. Every six weeks she ushered us into the bathroom where she trimmed our hair with dull shears. We looked in the mirror after she cleaned the small blades and left the room expecting the worst, but each time—to my relief—my hair still framed my oval face (so different from her heart-shaped one!) coquettishly. She told us how to live. When I disobeyed her, which occurred only once, she threw my handmade porcelain dolls against my bedroom wall. I forgave her to alleviate my own guilt—how could I disappoint her so much? She is a poem in process. She is tears before formulation. I wanted (want) to be her.

She was a little girl who happily introduced herself to strangers, the beautiful young woman strangers sought out, but now the whole world feels like strangers. Ageless, she never claimed childhood, resents her own youth. Wyrd is the mother of all strange phenomena: the sudden wind at night the love of two people, the gallant cause of an everyday coward. She is made of late and sleepless nights, worry for others. She’s compassion overspiced with cayenne pepper. Over-baked. She claims to harbor hate—yet anxiously prepares for neighborhood socials and long conversations. Her hate is a matter of loving too much. She insists on our nightly game of Pinochle. In the lamplight we relax, talk, compare notes, our fingers stained from frozen M&Ms, smearing the cards with artificial color.

Wyrd is the precursor and conclusion: the goddess without a temple, the gentle whisperer who nibbles lotus leaves as chewing gum. Wyrd bottle feeds those who wait upon her; they never know what nourishing poison they drink.

Word Count: 556
Time: 60 minutes plus some revisions

Supplemental Post A: 25 Ways to Avoid Actually Working While Still Bieng Semi-Productive

1. Remember—suddenly—the laundry, dishes, or dirty bathroom that weren’t so urgent before now.
2. Call your favorite aunt who can talk for hours. And needs to. Let her talk.
3. Sweep the stairs outside, under the perpetually molting Chinese elm. Think about how much you hate that tree; then reflect on how much shade it gives your car.
4. Comment on blogs. Justify this by looking at family and friends you usually allow ample living space.
5. Change your clothes four times in preparation for the day. Shower in between cleaning.
6. Take a nap. You need one.
7. Go to the library under the guise of research. Stop to acknowledge everyone you recognize.
8. Make a list of all the things you need to do. Add a few items you can already check off--just because.
9. Choose a few items from that list and be more specific.
10. Ponder your life goals. (Create life goals).
11. Go for a walk to commune with nature.
12. Go for a walk to get out.
13. Think about grocery shopping (or laundry or errands or your long list…)
14. Go grocery shopping (or do the laundry or errands or something from the long list). Check that off your list.
15. Pick up a fascinating article or book you’ve been meaning to get to all month.
16. Be daring. Be bold. Introduce yourself to the neighbors. ("Do I dare? Do I dare / disturb the universe?")
17. Review the direction for what you should be doing. If longer than a page, make notes to yourself in the margin. Call these “ideas.”
18. Notice the clutter of your desk, bedroom, kitchen, pockets—and tidy up.
19. You need music to really accomplish anything worthwhile. Skim through Jim Brickman and Jesse Cook to Bon Jovi and Rush. Be sentimental about Amy Grant and Christmas songs. Reflect on SR-71 and Dashboard Confessional. Skip Mozart today; you’re not feeling that inspired. If you can’t settle on anything, open Pandora.com. Skip the songs that don’t fit your mood (which tends to be most of them).
20. Appreciate the hard labor you demand of your body. Get up and stretch.
21. Check your phone for text messages. Or voicemail. Or anything. Maybe send one.
22. Look again at the requirements of the project you should be doing. Scratch out an outline on the spare newspaper in front of you. Realize that the image on the front page could really supplement your argument or theme. Consider ways to incorporate it and call this “research.”
23. Look at the clock. Panic. Try to gain control of yourself.
24. Decide you have too many other pressing responsibilities.
25. Revel in an activity of your choice. Don’t think about your assignment.

Word Count: 461
Time: 40 minutes

P.S. I don't recommend avoiding your assignments!