I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE THIS I HATE THIS I HATE IT
I meant to post earlier than this. Sorry about that. Honestly, I'm only posting right now because I really, really need to just...just...christ. Jesus effing christ.
IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE LOOKING FOR THREE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO PAGES OF PURE, UNADULTERATED SADNESS, MISFORTUNE, AND PESSIMISM, I IMPLORE YOU TO READ THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US BY REYNA GRANDE. YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED.
HOWEVER, IF YOU - LIKE ME - JUST NEED TO READ AND ANNOTATE FOR SOPHOMORE HONORS ENGLISH PURPOSES, YOU WILL BE VERY. VERY. DISAPPOINTED.
EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS BOOK IS DISAPPOINTING.
"HOW DO WE ESCAPE THIS LABYRINTH OF SUFFERING?"
IS A QUESTION THIS BOOK SHOULD ASK
INSTEAD OF IMPLYING EVERY CHANCE IT GETS
THAT THERE IS NO ESCAPE
EVER.
I WAS GOING TO FINISH IT TODAY, BUT I JUST...I JUST...CAN'T. TOO MUCH. I THINK I MIGHT CRY.
I NEVER CRY.
I FEEL SO HELPLESS.
I'm at page 275 right now, which is to say, very close to the end. I do not have very many chapters to go. But I just..can't...I mean...why...I HATE THIS.
The bio on the back cover reads:
Reyna Grande vividly brings to life her tumultuous early years in this "compelling . . . unvarnished, resonant" (BookPage) story of a childhood spent torn between two parents and two countries. As her parents make the dangerous trek across the Mexican border to "El Otro Lado" (The Other Side) in pursuit of the American dream, Reyna and her siblings are forced into the already overburdened household of their stern grandmother. When their mother at last returns, Reyna prepares for her own journey to "El Otro Lado" to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for years, her long-absent father.
Funny, heartbreaking, and lyrical, The Distance Between Us poignantly captures the confusion and contradictions of childhood, reminding us that the joys and sorrows we experience are imprinted on the heart forever, calling out to us of those places we first called home.
That is inaccurate. That is not what this book is about. This book is abandoned child after abandoned child. It is "scam artist" boys, who love you long enough for a good makeout session and never look at you again. It's a mother who leaves and leaves and leaves, and a father who is both always and never present. It's about always trying to please those whom you love, but whom refuse to be pleased. It's a constant state of seeing everything you've ever wanted just beyond your fingertips, but the moment you reach out and touch it, it slips completely away. This book is never being able to repair what is broken, but always trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing. This book is dropping out of college to marry the girl of your dreams, only so that eighteen months, two new jobs and a baby boy later, you can get divorced again, completely and irrevocably robbed of your ambitions. This book is constant betrayal, and endless loss. This book is lost hope and broken dreams.
This book is fucking depressing.
I know I should just read it today and get it over with (and maybe finish annotating and start looking for artifacts?) but I recently restarted Homestuck, and I'm close to beating Paper Mario, and my room needs cleaning, and my posters need hanging, and I have movies from the library to watch, and books from my girlfriend to read, and I managed to buy Landline by Rainbow Rowell too, which promises to be much more upbeat than this because she's who wrote Attachments and Eleanor & Park, and fuck it all, I mean, "rainbow" is in her name, isn't it? So I have other things to do.
Let's do those things.
And also, it's raining, so that's good.
-Allie
July 30, 2014
July 9, 2014
Summertime: Fruitless Classes and Extra Books
Hi, all.
Not that there are likely many of you out there, it being July and all. But if there are, then damn, what're you doing here? I haven't posted since May!
I have sort of been doing stuff with my summer, though. For the past two years, I've taken a class at the University of Utah ("the U") called Seize the Story. The first year, it was just amazing. It was a week of really intensive writing projects - but nothing too overwhelming - and local authors came and talked to us, and we got free food at the student union building, and we each made like twelve new writer friends, which was absolutely great. The second year was decidedly less great in comparison, seeing how we had a different instructor and no TA (we'd also had this really cool TA, Kate Coursey). We didn't really learn anything that year, and there was lots of the instructor just rambling about nothing, and no author visited. But we still made a bunch of new writer friends, and still wished that that class could just be what school was like, because sitting around working with this huge group of other dedicated writers is so refreshing that you'll never forget it.
This summer, however, I made a mistake.
I didn't sign up for Seize the Story this year. It had the bad instructor again, and none of my friends would be taking it with me. And there was this other class, "Intensive Creative Writing," which was four weeks long instead of just one, and costed a hundred dollars less. It even offered a 0.5 high school English credit, if I wanted it. It started only a few days after the last day of school, which sort of sucked, but I did it anyway.
And wasted the first month of my summer on it.
If I'd thought the Seize the Story instructor was useless, this instructor may not have even been there. But then she got mad at us when we didn't pay perfect attention. She got sick of us after the first two weeks. (I feel so sorry for those poor Granite School District kids who get her for the whole year.) Even though she got tired, she was still mostly nice, but because the class offered a high school credit, she had to follow the Utah Common Core in what she taught us. For those of you who don't know, the Common Core is basically an outline of what the state of Utah deems necessary for a school to teach us. So this class was wasted on bullshitting our way through everything to simple sentence structure ("what is a noun, everybody?") to essays (she didn't give us an actual type of essay, but I wrote what she called a "humorous argumentative" on why local coffee chains are better than Starbucks - maybe I'll post it someday) to poetry units wasted on soulless "I Am" poems, which she said she hated herself, but saw no problem in assigning to us anyway.
The other shitty thing about this class offering a credit was that nearly all the kids in there were only taking it to get one. The instructor's daughter came in at one point to give us a brief overview on how journalism works, and she asked how many of us wanted to pursue a writing-related career. While at Seize the Story it would have been the entire class of sixteen minus maybe one, here in a class of eighteen, there were only four kids (including me). One was a super-introvert and the other was generally pretty rude, (and the third was my girlfriend - God knows if she'll ever revisit her blog though), so unfortunately, no new writer friends were made.
The one good thing that came of this class was a free-verse poem called Meliorism that I wrote the night before the last day because I knew we'd be having a class-wide poetry reading, and then a party. (Scratch that, there were two good things; at the party, I learned to play poker.) The poem sort of needs to be read aloud though, so I'll post that soon.
Wow. Superlong posts are sort of my forte, aren't they? But I have one more subject to cover before I go.
This blog will only be mostly dormant this summer! That is because of my lovely new reading assignment. Okay, it's not really new; it's been a couple months. But it's new to you! Andbutso, this summer, I'm supposed to be reading and annotating The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande, and I need to collect five "artifacts." Artifacts are basically real-world things I've noticed (news stories, advertisements, all that jazz) that relate to the ideas of the book. I'll need to blog about them here. So, now that you know about my new project, and seeing how I'm already over a third of the way through summer, I'd better get to that. I'll see you guys later.
Thanks,
- Allie H-S
Not that there are likely many of you out there, it being July and all. But if there are, then damn, what're you doing here? I haven't posted since May!
I have sort of been doing stuff with my summer, though. For the past two years, I've taken a class at the University of Utah ("the U") called Seize the Story. The first year, it was just amazing. It was a week of really intensive writing projects - but nothing too overwhelming - and local authors came and talked to us, and we got free food at the student union building, and we each made like twelve new writer friends, which was absolutely great. The second year was decidedly less great in comparison, seeing how we had a different instructor and no TA (we'd also had this really cool TA, Kate Coursey). We didn't really learn anything that year, and there was lots of the instructor just rambling about nothing, and no author visited. But we still made a bunch of new writer friends, and still wished that that class could just be what school was like, because sitting around working with this huge group of other dedicated writers is so refreshing that you'll never forget it.
This summer, however, I made a mistake.
I didn't sign up for Seize the Story this year. It had the bad instructor again, and none of my friends would be taking it with me. And there was this other class, "Intensive Creative Writing," which was four weeks long instead of just one, and costed a hundred dollars less. It even offered a 0.5 high school English credit, if I wanted it. It started only a few days after the last day of school, which sort of sucked, but I did it anyway.
And wasted the first month of my summer on it.
If I'd thought the Seize the Story instructor was useless, this instructor may not have even been there. But then she got mad at us when we didn't pay perfect attention. She got sick of us after the first two weeks. (I feel so sorry for those poor Granite School District kids who get her for the whole year.) Even though she got tired, she was still mostly nice, but because the class offered a high school credit, she had to follow the Utah Common Core in what she taught us. For those of you who don't know, the Common Core is basically an outline of what the state of Utah deems necessary for a school to teach us. So this class was wasted on bullshitting our way through everything to simple sentence structure ("what is a noun, everybody?") to essays (she didn't give us an actual type of essay, but I wrote what she called a "humorous argumentative" on why local coffee chains are better than Starbucks - maybe I'll post it someday) to poetry units wasted on soulless "I Am" poems, which she said she hated herself, but saw no problem in assigning to us anyway.
 |
| This is an "I Am" poem. (courtesy of: docstoc.com) |
The other shitty thing about this class offering a credit was that nearly all the kids in there were only taking it to get one. The instructor's daughter came in at one point to give us a brief overview on how journalism works, and she asked how many of us wanted to pursue a writing-related career. While at Seize the Story it would have been the entire class of sixteen minus maybe one, here in a class of eighteen, there were only four kids (including me). One was a super-introvert and the other was generally pretty rude, (and the third was my girlfriend - God knows if she'll ever revisit her blog though), so unfortunately, no new writer friends were made.
The one good thing that came of this class was a free-verse poem called Meliorism that I wrote the night before the last day because I knew we'd be having a class-wide poetry reading, and then a party. (Scratch that, there were two good things; at the party, I learned to play poker.) The poem sort of needs to be read aloud though, so I'll post that soon.
Wow. Superlong posts are sort of my forte, aren't they? But I have one more subject to cover before I go.
This blog will only be mostly dormant this summer! That is because of my lovely new reading assignment. Okay, it's not really new; it's been a couple months. But it's new to you! Andbutso, this summer, I'm supposed to be reading and annotating The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande, and I need to collect five "artifacts." Artifacts are basically real-world things I've noticed (news stories, advertisements, all that jazz) that relate to the ideas of the book. I'll need to blog about them here. So, now that you know about my new project, and seeing how I'm already over a third of the way through summer, I'd better get to that. I'll see you guys later.
Thanks,
- Allie H-S
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