A Momment with Corina

I have a five year old neighbor named Corina. I have been her buddy since the day she was born. I went right to the hospital the moring she was born and I could see her smiling in her sleep as she lay in her bed. I have changed her, I've bathed her, and I've put her to bed more times than I can count. The other day she came over and we baked cookies. I have done this numerous times and that day we were making chocolate chip cookies. She knew how to scoop the flour and level it off by now. She knew how to crack the eggs and add the sugar. "This girl was going to make a great baker someday." I thought. When we were done, I took the beaters off the mixer and she got one and I got one. We stood there for a few minutes eayting the cookies dough off the beaters and it hit me. I had been taking care of Corina for so long that I hadn't realized how grown up she was. There was a huge difference between that sleeping newborn to the kindergartener that she was today. She could bake! She could carry on conversations with me. She was not just my buddy but a real person who was going to be an adult one day. This was a crazy realization that I didn't want to make because I loved her so much. I think that in the end I treat her more as a "big girl" (not an adult yet) and let her make more desicions than I have in the past.

My Great Grandmother

My great grandmother Johnson is the person who I looked up to most during my lifetime. She and my great grandfather were divorced. Now in their day divorce was something that kings did to get their wifes off the throne. Divorce was unheard of. She pushed for it and was granted her wishes. But there was a catch. In the 1940s divorce wasn't like it was today. The spouse with the most money got the kids. There was no child support or alimony. My grandmother and her sister were with their father most of the time because he owned a factor in Easton and had boat loads of money. Grandma Johnson took care of herself and was a wonderful mother despite the circumstances. Despite everything she was still a lady. She always had her nails painted bright red and her hair was impecable When she was in her fifties she met a many named Jerry Johnson. She fell in love with him and they moved from Connecticut to Florida and we only got to see her once a year in the summer to escape the heat. About seven years ago she moved back to Connecticut when Jerry died. It was great because we got to see her all the time. A few years later she died of a heart attack and my grandmother and mother were crushed (and me as well). She was a pillar of strength and wasn't afraid to be who she was. A year ago we had an aniversary party for my grandmother and grandfather. We told the caterer that we wanted three apetizers and they had brought four. My parents and aunts and uncles didn't want to pay for something extra that they didn't order. The caterer said it was on him. We opened the box and inside be pigs in a blanket. This was my great grandmother's favorite apetizer and we hadn't ordered it. We all knew that she was there is spirt that day.

Favorite Moment in History

This topic is sooooo hard because there are so many great moments in history and I am a huge history buff (it is my double major). I know that my past history professors would kill me for saying what I'm going to say because it is so girly and steriotypical to say. My media studies professors would also be on my case as well. My favorite moment in history is the picture of the sailor kissing a girl on VJ day in times square. I have a poster of it in my room and my sister does as well. I don't like it for it's content but rather what it represents. A man who has been fighting a war for who knows how long is finally back from overseas. He is in one of the most famous cities in the world and he is finally home. A girl who has been waiting for her boyfriend and has been working as "Rosie the Riviter" for the duration of his deployment in Europe. They see each other and in that one moment they see each other and he does the one thing he has been thinking about while battle war and kisses her. The kiss is a symbol. It is saying "We won! We kicked ass! We are American!" It was the end of a war and was topped of with a kiss.

Conflict Central in Adolecents

A conflict that was huge in my school was the presence of marijuana. Our school was known for its involvement in pot and our teachers knew about it too. It was not a drug problem per say but centered mainly on the sale and assumption of that one drug. Everyone knew about it and almost everyone accepted it. The conflict comes in when you got that 1% of students who thought that is was a wrong thing to do and all involved should be punished for their wrong doing. They had a crappy little club that teachers passed around for sponsoring because none of them wanted to deal with the club. So the conflict stood when you entered your sophomore year (my school only had three grade levels in it) would you be for it or against it? Although I've only smoked pot twice my group of friends never got interested in it. At lunch everyone knew who sold the pot and who the "potheads" were. The anti- drug people stood out as well. I had chosen to not take a side. I wasn't against it and I didn't care if someone was lighting up in the bathroom. One of my friends did date one of the dealers but other than seeing him out of school at her home he didn't push anything on me. The school had tried to stop it but they were futile attempts. The school would do drug raids of dealers and they would keep the pot in their backpacks. When the school checked the backpacks the pot would be on the students. There was always a way out. To do drugs or not? They can do whatever they want to their bodies. It's their fault if they can't process anything when they hit thirty.

Fictional Hero

This is going to sound crazy but my hero was Nancy Drew. She was the all round, do it yourself , good girl. She was smart and knew how to reason. I think she was a feminist in her time and I think that is a cool thing to be.
These days I doubt you can find a girl who has read any of the Nancy Drew books. When I was young that were hard to find and you had to buy them in packs of six. I read the first six and a week after getting the books as a Christmas gift. It was hard to hunt down the second pack as well. There are more than twelve books but it is hard to find them. I could probably hunt them down on eBay but I have to be honest: I would get bored reading them today.
As a child I loved reading about Nancy and how she would go camping in a barn and cook her own food on a propane stove top. She was a quest in mansions of her relatives friends as well. The girl had brains, brawn, and class. I went back to read the first book (I still have the first six and have no idea where the other six went) and almost laughed. The books are such an easy read that I could get though it in an hour. I used to stay up late into the night reading these things! It's funny how thin gs change. I could easily if all twelve books into the book I'm reading in my history class. My teacher told my parents that I was reading at the higher end of our grade level so these books had to be advanced to say that they were challenging.
Despite my growth in the reading area I wish that the book sets were still being sold. The whole concept of the book might be dated but Drew is still a good role model. She teaches deduction, survival, and problem solving skills. Hopefully we will be able to get the books on Kindle and I can read them with my daughters some day.

Personal Poetry

This poem is one of my favorites. It was published in an anthology and I got five dollars for it! I wrote it in seventh grade but put out there anyway. Enjoy.

Life

Life is like a birthday present,
No matter how hard you shake it,
It won't give you one single clue as to what it is.
Finally when it comes time to open it,
You slowly take off the bow
And peel back the wrapping paper and you start to see it.
Either your face turns into a smile or you start to frown.
If you are satisfied with your gift and marvel at its color,
And how awesome it looks and you sit and play with it for a while.
Then you put it gently into the box and put it in a safe place.
You are happy with it and that's what matters.
If you don't like it you look at it in disgust.
You think "Gross, what am I going to do with this thing?"
And then you put it in the place where someone will most likely sit in it.
But if you were really smart you would take that nasty present,
And make it into something just as wonderful as the gift that you wanted.

Life as a Writer (4of 4)

When I was in elementary school be did some writting but focused more on reading until fifth grade. Even then it was not a major part of our school day. Despite the lack of a writing stimlus in school I found it at home. From grade four through upper middle school I had a journal and wrote in it almost every night. I would write about what went on that day, what my hopes, and what my wants were. I think that his helped to develop my writing because I did so well in high school with writing. As a writer I used vocabulary that I got from reading books. I sometimes get a "What does that word mean?" I also found that my role as a writer improved with reading (another nightly activity). As I went through high school I did well on writing assignment but when I got to college things changed. Instead of getting As I was getting Bs. To me this was the end of the world. My school told me that they had prepared me for college very well. They were lying. Kids in my school went to Yale,  Harvard, and MIT. This was something my school proudly mentioned. The funny thing is they don't mention the drop outs. I'm sure they are few but it still happens.
Now that I am in college I have had to write numerous papers for a ton of classes. I get help from the writing center but I find that my peers are the best judges. Most of them aren't afraid to critique a fellow student and they are learning the same things that I am. Developing my writing over time has been a long journey but it keeps going, changing as time goes on.

Publishing (3 of 4)

In my mind publishing is the final stop on the road of writing. I start with brainstorming and free writes. Then a outline is made up and a rough draft is formed. The drft goes through three differnt people who are knowledgable about the topic I am writing. Then I do a final proof read and print out a final copy. Just because it is a final copy doesn't mean that it is publishable. So many books and stories are worked over with a fine tooth comb and made to be perfect. Final copy is not good enough.
It used to be that very few people could write let alone a published author. If you wrote a book you were gold. Today the autobiography genre has exploded. Anyone can write a book. Does this mean that these books have some quality? No. Some of the biggest idiots in the world have written books and I have no idea how they were published. "The Girls Next Door" is a great example of how publishing quality material has gone by the wayside. Two of Mr. Heffnef's former girlfriends have written books that have become fairly popular. My view: Who cares? Publishing material one hundred years ago is so much more intellctual than Kendra's Autobiography. True literature had gone bad and is laughable compared to the writers of our pasts. Lets just hope that newly published material exersices or brains a little more.

Peer Editing Process (2 of 4)

When I wrote my informational text for the class I knew that it wasn't my best written work. When I was looking for someone to read over my essay I got people who were in my genre to read my paper. I was extremely happy to see that they were highlighting and writing notations all over my essay. Some people might think that it was a bad thing but that was not the case with me. I knew that my paper was a piece of **** and I should have spent more time on it but the day I was working on it I was called by work and asked to work a shift. Being the poor college stundent that I am took the shift. I know that this sounds bad but after the mark-up copy of my essay came back I more than made up for what I had missed. My paper was changed, altered, and polished. When it came to the narrative I spent more time on the paper. As a result when it came to peer editing I had less red pen and highlighted portions. With their feedback I can see how I have progressed and what I need to focus on. I did this with the first paper and as a result my second was better.

Starting A Memoir (1 of 4)

When starting a memoir you have to think about what you will include and exclude in your story. A memoir is very differnt from a biography or autobiography. It is one event or a series of connecting events that make up a story. With memoirs a person focuses on a small area and it is hard to refine what is being written about. When I was writing my narative and defining things in my informational text I had to wonder: Where do we exactly start? In my informational text I said that students would read memoirs and be able to learn from them where they should start. Now that I have done that paper and have to start on the actual memoir I find it hard to start at one definiate spot. I chose to write about my first day of kindergarten but where would I start? When I woke up? When I got on the bus? Going to may classroom? My story could start at many points in my day. In the end I started my memoir with the time I woke up and ended the day with my mother picking me up for school. Now that I look back they were great times to start and stop my story.

What and why do I read?

This topic is very hard for me. I love to read. I will read almost anything and everything. When I first learned to read in kindergarten/ first grade I would make my mother read with me at night for hours passed my bedtime. When I was in second grade our class had a contest to see who could read the most "Amelia Bedelia" books in a two week period. My teacher only had about seven of the ten books that had been published. After the first week I had already gone through all seven books so I made my father go out and buy the remaining books. Needless to say, I won the contest. Through out my late elementary and middle school education I loved reading homework when others did not. It was my one part of the day where I could go "somewhere else". I hate to admit it but even textbooks that tend to be dry still hold a bit of interest to me.
These days I tend to read textbooks, historical fiction and non-fiction, and autobiographies/memoirs. I read most textbooks because I have to for classes but also for references if I have questions about something that the Internet misses. As for historical books I will read mostly anything. In my Early Republic class I recently finished a great book on George Washington. It gave a great blow-by-blow about his life and how he was not the "great, selfless" man that we usually see him to be, but a calculated player in politics and government. Even though it was assigned reading I still enjoyed it. Historical fiction is a vice of mine. I know that it is loosely related to real events so I have a reason to legitimately say it is productive. I prefer Phillipa Gregory. I have read most of her books (there are many) and have started watching historical fiction TV shows because of it. For some reason I read it because it interests me even thought it's not based on true events.
 Autobiographies and memoirs have been a favorite of mine since I read my first one in third grade by Ekaterina Gordeva. It was called "My Sergi" and was about how the two Russian figure skaters fell in love. Since then I have read many others including "Angela's Ashes", "The Diary of Anne Frank", and "The Unquiet Mind" just to name a few. The reason why I love these books so much is because they give me a window into another time and life. I am a fly on the wall and no longer Christine the college student. I think I feel that way with most books even the emotionless history books that I have to read as my double major. Reading is just another outlet that I take advantage of.