Reflective

Its already winter and the quarter has come to end. Its amazing how fast it went. Looking back on the quarter, this is one that I really enjoyed. At the beginning of the quarter I was nervous due to the fact that this was my first real college class that didn't have anything to do with cars in around two and a half years. My first paper was a very stressful one for me. Even though the topic was so broad, I had no idea what to write about. After some critiquing though I was ready to write. I really began to get into all of the writing assignments, and not hating my homework.

The short stories were interesting and helped me look at writing a little more deeply. They were no longer just entertainment but an interest that deserved to be taken apart and analyzed. The short stories were good, but they didn't compare to what I thought about Hamlet. This class was my first introduction to any Shakespeare because my highschool was lame! With no previous exposure to Shakespeare, Hamlet was completely new and completely interesting to me, once I got used to the very different language. I found myself reading it very slowly and pulling as much meaning out of it as I could. This was a very new concept to me because I was just used to reading as fast as I could and understanding it because it was written in a style that I was familiar with. So in all Hamlet was my favorite part of the class and also the most challenging to dig deep into and find something to write about, not because of the lack of material, more the opposite. It had so much in it that it was difficult to narrow my interesets to.

The blogfolio assignment was also new to me. I had never had a blog, and really never read anyone elses. I am a very quiet person and don't speak my mind to often to people I don't really know. This assignment gave me an outlet to really think about my thoughts and express them how I really wanted to. I do plan on continuing my blog as my college career continues.

To sum it all up this quarter was a good one for me, and gave me a good transitional period to go from the daily grind of work to grinding away at my education. And Jared I will be trying to take more English classes from you.

Open to Shakespeare

Prior to this class watching the new version of Romeo and Juliet was my only exposure to any of Shakespeare's work. I had no idea that he was such a genius. I didn't realize all of the plays on words that he used, all of the dirty jokes that he tosses in there that are sometimes hard to catch. His writing is also very interesting because it makes you think more because of the amazingly colorful use of the language. The structure that he uses in his writing is another thing that really impressed me. I have recently become a fan of Shakespeare and am looking forward to reading more of his work even though at times I do have to read it a couple times to really understand what he is doing with his words. Hamlet has opened me to Shakespeare.

Art in different forms

I particularly liked our last assignment. One of my other classes that I'm taking this quarter is fundamentals of drawing. Im learning a lot about the structure of art and center of interest and what not. I did my paper on William Carlos Williams' The Great Figure and how it went along with Charles Demuth's painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. I was able to use some of what I learned in my art class about the wieght of some objects/ center of interest and apply it to my paper to show how the two worked together. I also had never seen the two different types of art paired together and the idea was very interesting to me. Thanks for the good assignment Jared!

I know this is super late, but I completely spaced it last thuraday. So here is my late blog and I apologize for it taking so long. Last week we read and studied a little of William Carlos Williams work, "This Is Just to Say." We then wrote a parody of the poem. Here is mine:

I have lost
the photos
that were in
the drawer

And which
you were probably
keeping
for memories

Forgive me
they were beautiful
so bright
and so bold

This poem to me actually had meaning. A friend of mine lost her mother to pancreatic cancer 3 years ago when she was only 17. She had lots of pictures saved on her computer of her, almost the only pictures of her mother that she did have. But when her computer got a virus she gave it to her father who is a computer programmer to fix it. In fixing it he was unaware that there was anything of such importance as the pictures of her late mother on the computer. He deleted her entire hard drive. My friend was devestated by her loss.
In my poem I made the narrator her father speaking to her. I changed the computer to a drawer just because i believed a computer would not sound right and I believe making it more genuine sounding is more important than using the actual object. And because her mother was beautiful, bright, and bold she will not have a problem remembering her mother, even without the majority of her pictures.

changing of the seasons

Growing up and living in the northwest has made me a fan of the outdoors and our wonderful array of seasons. I love the fact that we get all four seasons and my favorite times of the year is the changing of these seasons. Each of these seasons has an amazing power to put me in a different mood. Kate Chopin seems to use this power that nature has on our moods in her writing. She’s very talented at putting weather into her stories and letting the weather convey the type of emotional atmosphere that the character in the story is experiencing at the time. I can relate to this because the weather has always been able to affect my mood and whether I want to go out and party, just relax in my back yard with my dog, or maybe go work on one of my project cars.