Right now it is 12:53 on a Saturday night, and I am doing homework. Sounds pretty lame if you ask me right? Well I am home for the weekend and my boyfriend is busy at work so i decided to get some work out of the way... here goes nothing!

We had two things to read for WRT this week, An Encounter, and Paris to the Moon. I read An Encounter  by Joyce first. Well to begin, we were asked to pay attention to space and how space shapes the story. The line that sticks out for me when I think about space from this short story would be, "...I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must he sought abroad." This story is about boys who spend their whole day seekin adventure. Their whole day is spent seeing social gatherings, meeting new people, and dealing with awkward situations. The story gives the reader a slight glimpse of what Dublin is like. I liked this story, although some parts seemed a little unclear to me. However, that may just be because I am reading these stories so late at night!

Anyway, on to Paris to the Moon by Gopnik. The first part that I liked about this story was the description, I felt like I was there. The scene on the carousel seemed so real to me. I guess I was picturing the carousel that we have on our boardwalk here in town and we have this thing on the edge where children can grab a golden ring as they are going around. I believe if you grab a ring you get a free ride or something. Anyway, next is Deyrolle, which again, is filled with description. The author describes what you see as you walk in and describes how Luke is holding onto him. I love reading stories with a lot of description because it helps me to read the story. I can feel like I am actually present in the scene and I can pretend I am the person in charge. When I cannot picture what is going on i lost interest much easier and the story just seems to drag on and never end. Also, as I stated before, we were supposed to keep an eye out for space. Well this story is all about the different places these people visited. The author describes places they visit to eat, to shop, to spend time, all different places. There are multiple scenes for the reader to view.

The second reading, about all the different places these people went reminds me of a project I am doing called the 365 Project. This is something I am just doing for fun but on Facebook I have an album dedicated to this project. This project is basically just uploading one picture every day for a year. I just started it on January 1st so I have a long way to go, however, each picture is something different. One day I am on the boardwalk and the next I am at home and the next is at a pet store, I try to change the pictures up often so they arent all taken in the same area. Maybe one day I will write a story about all the places I went this year!

So first of all, I opened up these two links and was shocked to see how long they were. I am not a fan of reading long things that do not interest me so at first I was skeptical. However, as the reading went on i realized it wasn't so bad.

The first one I read was The Native Hill by Berry. As I was reading this I kind of felt as though I am at the point in my life where I am beginning to get more aquainted with my surroundings. I am trying to spread my horizon and be accepting to trying new things. This doesnt necessarily have anything to do with the world, but last night I tried Turbo Kick class for the first time, boy was that interesting. Anyway, back to The Native HIll. I realized that the author is trying to talk about how the world is slowly being destroyed and us as humans are no help to keeping it going. The author says how we are arrogant and we need to learn that not everything we do, in fact almost EVERYTHING we so is bad for the world. "We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong." Therefore, we need to get connected to the world and nature and make an effort to change. I feel like that is definitely way easier said than done. I think that over time, something like that can happen where the whole world would eventually figure out what is good and bad for the world but as for now, we are kind of stuck in a dilema.

On to the next reading, The Narrative Life by Pagnucci. This was more to the point, using narrative as a process of learning. It was interesting in the beginning when childhood is discussed. Memories from childhood are discusses and at this point I just began to imagine things from when I was young and I just started to laugh, oh how I wish I could go back in time sometimes. The reading states that living the narrative life is about embracing the stories that make us who we are. The author is saying, well this is what I think, that what we read and have interest in reading shapes our lives. Also, the stories that we tell.  "Living the narrative life means learning who you are is all about the stories that form your life." Okay at this point I am beginning to confuse myself beucase I went back to reread some of the sections to finish this blog up and I noticed the section about writing down our stories to help us remember events that took place in our lives. This is where the author states "living the narrative life means learning that our stories matter and, therefore, wanting to record them. I really liked the reoccuring theme of "living the narrative life means..." There is not one clear cut meaning for it, there are several. I likes how personal this readin was, I felt like i learned so many things about this authors life. It was really interesting.