I read the essay "HOw to tame a wild tongue". It was interesting, which struck me first, but hard to understand because of all the spanish. I had a friend near by to help me translate, and i understood alot of it. It added depth to my paper, and i do stuff like that in my writing for class. I like to add spanish just cuz that's how i talk to my friends. She related her language to her identity which i thought was really interesting, i never knew how much that ment to people since i grew up in a town where soooo many of my friends were bilingual. i was actually ashamed of not knowing a second language and speaking to my parents in english. Thats why i want to learn another language, to mix it with english and make it my own.
In the essay sexism was also touched apon briefly in the begining in relation to language. English isn't really sexist, well in the same way that spanish is since our nouns don't have genders, but it was still interesting to think about. It always makes me think about how in the bible god is a him, just because they needed to translate god into a gender, which wasn't written there origionally, or so i've heard.
Another idea that i liked was that the chicano's have kept their language thru the centuries, they haven't given it up like so many other people. They aren't allowed to speak spanish at school, but at home they can. When my ancestors came over, they thought it wrong for their children to learn their mother language, trying to make them american, but what really came of that. We all come from somewhere else, and after a while that is forgotten, everyone at some point will have to forge their own identity, it may be more pronounced for someone who is told their identity is wrong as a child, but what of someone who didn't feel they had that identity to start off with.
When i was a kid i struggled with where i come from. I'm jewish, and is that my heritage or my race? It often gets confused, so as a kid i was. What about the people who have lost their language.
Anyways, in the essay there was also a brief conection to music, the music and literature of her people. She was amazed to find literature that mirrored her own language and her own experiences, which is something we would all like to find. In reading we all want to be able to relate to the characters and if we don't have a true sense of identity it would be more difficult to find.
the end.

When i first read the article i got stuck on one of the paragraphs when Kumar was talking about the world trade centers. Certain lines from the essay just got stuck in my head. For instance when a writer was quoted as saying "it looked like a desperate ballet: some seemed to be flying their arms sweeping gracefully as the picked up speed." It was just so graphic with contrasting images of people falling in a really odd way. Its completely the opposite of how i saw the events and i was distracted by the writers unsensitivity to the events taking place. The inclusion of this quote made me wonder about what the author of the essay was trying to get at. Why would Kumar include this passage the sees beauty in the horrific deaths of others?"
When i went back through looking for things that interested me i found a variety of other quotes. I liked the one describing how kumar sees planes through immigrants eyes. He writes "the plane in flight represents the the journey that, when undertaken in the future, will take them to the promised land." I thought about how i see planes, and to me they are an escape from the reality of life instead of being a promised land. Then for some they are a place of work or a way to get to work.
This quote also interested me due to its connections to a quote down the same page. Kumar writes " the suicidcal cts of the hijackers also gave a perverse twist to the old story of the difficult travel to the land of plenty and promise. According to reports that were published in the days following the attacks, it was revealed that the hijackers believed that their deaths promised them entry into the garden of heaven and the ministrations of seventy virgins." They see planes as a way to get themselves into their own personal heaven, however, they also see it as the instrument of death that will carry them there.
Finally, after finishing the paper, i tried to think of what the author's meaning was. What was he trying to say? He comiserates with the immigrants, those that fall out of the planes, but in a way were we only get to know his emotions. He isn't really saying he's like them. I don't believe he has a clear cut meaning, the point of the paper seems to be a comment on the world around him, that he hears these stories and can't get them out of his head until he can pass them along to other people through the medium of the essay. He's only trying to show us a new perspective on them; his.

When i first read the article i got stuck on one of the paragraphs when Kumar was talking about the world trade centers. Certain lines from the essay just got stuck in my head. For instance when a writer was quoted as saying "it looked like a desperate ballet: some seemed to be flying their arms sweeping gracefully as the picked up speed." It was just so graphic with contrasting images of people falling in a really odd way. Its completely the opposite of how i saw the events and i was distracted by the writers unsensitivity to the events taking place. The inclusion of this quote made me wonder about what the author of the essay was trying to get at. Why would Kumar include this passage the sees beauty in the horrific deaths of others?"
When i went back through looking for things that interested me i found a variety of other quotes. I liked the one describing how kumar sees planes through immigrants eyes. He writes "the plane in flight represents the the journey that, when undertaken in the future, will take them to the promised land." I thought about how i see planes, and to me they are an escape from the reality of life rather than a gateway to a promised land. Then for some, planes are just another aspect of life, those that fly them, those that maintain them, those that work on them. Even the people who use them regularly to get from one polace of work to another.

sentance 1: Years ago my family and i used to go to the Reebok tent sale in the springtime to get sneakers for the summer.

sentance 2: The first time my family and i go to the Reebok tent sale in the springtime, i am five years old.

The sentances are similar, but i'm borowing the tense from "if you are what you eat than what am i?". I'm not really showing, i'm still telling but in a different way, i didn't really rewrite that many sentances, i mostly just changed the tense. The most change was in the first paragraph.

Contexts:
her past life: In the essay Foss talks about various stages of her life. There is a small allusion to her life with her family, but a good chunk of the essay refers to how she discovered her literary interest. This interest seemed to begin with her writing of letters to her boyfriend in prison on yellow pads of paper, but never mailing them. This was just a first step, and the letters show up agian later in her life in prison. In my life i write in a journal and have in the past writen many letters to people that have never been mailed. I even had a section in a journal once entitled "letters never to be mailed."
her current life- in her current life she is a writer and a teacher which frames alot of the writing of the essay, she goes back through her story with her commentary in her new voice, the voice of an older, more mature, educated woman. She knows about what she is writing and how she should put it, and makes concious decisions to frame it in the way that she does, and to utilize a variety of voices. Today i am no teacher and no real writer but i like that she doesn't use conventional language, even if i don't agree with the use of the specific words themselves. i like that she isn't afraid to make decisions that others wouldn't make, well maybe for the time, since i don't feel like anything she's written is earthshaking. I think she realizes this also though, when she talks about on the last page how all of the "errors... are becoming part of the stories themselves"
education:the educations of foss is integral to the essay and to the person she becomes. The streets start her education with her legal pads, which is encoraged to grow. She then goes on to attend colleges and get degrees, while teaching herself, as shown in the passage about when she buys a typewriter. The culmination of what teachers try to tell her is right, her own experiences and the changing face of literature educate her and alow her to be her own person, a socially bilingual person as she puts it. I think i can compair a little of my education becuase i've spent years fighting battles with english teachers, trying to stay who i am while still getting the grades. From not capatilizing letters i don't want to capitalize to playing with punctuations i think i've learned more from hating english than from loving it. I look at it as more a thing to change than a thing to learn.
prison: in the context of prison foss learned that she could have something useful. in prison writing bought her time, this factor led her to work harder at it and to continue most of all. Prison straightened her out and set her on the path to her future career. I have yet to find a path and have never been to prison, but i'm sort of the opposite, when i'm required to do something, i hate doing it.
Other peoples views: today other peoples views still affect foss. She thinks in her class about what the parents would think if they knew her whole story. Then in her past she thought herself an outsider because of the views of others, they obviously did not coincide with her thoughts. I try not to let others ideas ruin what i want to write about, an english teacher of mine wanted to stop me from writing in my own way. That jerk. Didn't stop me though.
Growth: this has alot to do with her education, what came out of it, throughout the essay she is growing into the person she will become, she is refining her voice and her language and coming to terms with who she is and what she was. I htink most of the growth in my work just came from my vocab throughout highschool.
Language throughout the essay foss learns more about writing, spelling and vocabulary. This is reflected in the style of the writing, although it seems contrived in the begining. The vocab and style of my writing evolves also as i read more and learn more words.
Boundaries i do believe we killed this topic in class.

On my sixteenth birthday we went to the cemetery, some three hundred years old, across the street from my house. We brought the Ouiji board, some candles and matches, and plopped out little group down past the first hill just out of sight from the street. It was just before dusk and we set up out candles in our little circle and lay the board between up. Unfortunately, the candles proved to be a bit too much for my ever amused friends, and soon they all had to be blown out due to my fear of the sticks, twigs and leaves they kept trying to set on fire. Then we began our task: communication with the dead. Going around the circle we tried to think up questions for the dead. What was the afterlife like? Chocolate or strawberry? Cremation, is it better? Which one of us here should run for president?
None of the questions were answered, I think we had just a few too many people exerting pressure on the game piece. Then the sun really began to dip below the horizon, our candles were long since extinguished, and the shadows were getting long. Although I see this cemetery every day of my life, the night brings it new life. Its no longer the benign place that it is in the light. It ceases to be a place to stroll through, meandering through reading tombstones. In the dark it is a forbidden place, at least to me, filled with ideas of the unknown. For some reason my discomfort amused my friends, who decided to continue with the futile questions.
"C’mon, PLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEeeeeAAAAAAAAASSSSSSe" I whined, but to no avail. This only proved to amuse my friends who like to watch me squirm. The darkness descended further and my discomfort decreased. What could really hurt me there? Why was I so afraid? In the end I got everyone to run out of the cemetery with me, pretty much for no reason, but it made me feel a whole lot better. That cemetery isn’t a scary place, its actually one of my favorite places. No harm done though at my sixteenth birthday party.