"Under the Influence"

The green bottles in Under the Influence are very predominant throughout the essay. Sanders writes of these green bottles like they are more than just alcohol, but more like the demons that take his father away from him and his family. It is often mentioned how they are hidden in tool box drawers, crushed beneath hay in a barn, hurled into the woods and denied when found. He is just a little boy trying to protect and salvage as much of his family as possible. Not only does he write about the green bottles, but there is also another incident involving a bottle. His father threatens to "shut his mother up" by holding a milk bottle up above her face while he has her head yanked back by her hair. Sanders also uses the bible story of the lunatic and the swine, among others, to show his hatred for alcohol and confusion towards its appeal. Even on his 21st birthday, as well as throughout his adult life, he's very hesitant to even sip anything alcoholic. He see's how it affected him, his brother, his sister, and his mother and feels that it's his job as a parent to keep any thing of such nature as far away from his children as possible. He'd rather have his daughter label him a workaholic than an alcoholic. He fears the person he could become because of his father and his abuse of alcohol. Even though his father could go days, weeks, months, or years without a drop, Sanders and his family would still fear the day he would pick up those green bottles, beer cans, or wine and let the awful "dragon" back in that would control and change his father from a Dr. Jekyll to a Mr. Hyde. They all lived in fear, not only for his health, but fear of him leaving and really never coming back, fear of his harsh words and fear of the prospect of being hit. They were all so fearful and silent. The children felt the need to tiptoe around their sleeping father, or the dragon as he was labled in the essay, and they would lay still and quiet in their beds at night fearful of even moving an inch. His mother knew what was going on and did beg him to stop, but because of the angry nature of the beast and the disease as a whole, she never could quite get him to stop completely. It wasn't until doctors warned of how near to death he was that he put the bottle down, only to pick it back up 15 years later. Sanders never wanted to be like his father and that fear reflected upon his choices as an adult. He avoided bars, clubs, and parties where he knew alcohol would be served. He compared compared all the other neighborhood families and their own drunken fathers and husbands. He saw what they were capable of and feared it for his own family. He hated the gas station his father frequented for his booze. He even hated the picture of the brothers pictured on the label of the green bottles. He even wrote about how he would kill them if given the chance. His imagination went to great lengths when it came to thinking of ways to stop his father from having any sip of liquor. His 10 year old thoughts raced trying to come up with a way to change him completely. He wanted so badly to protect him of the nightmare he had become. He often wondered throughout his childhood if maybe he had been the perfect student or the perfect athlete that maybe the outcome would have been different, that maybe it was actually his fault. In all reality, it wasn't his fault or his familys, it was the fault of his father for making the decsions and poor judgements in his own life.

Reader Response to The Rake

The round kitchen table in the essay, The Rake: A Few Scenes from My Childhood by David Mamet, was made of wrought iron and had a glass surface. The author and his sister often associated this table with blood because of their violent and abusive step-father that often shattered the glass due to outrages of anger. The reason the glass and blood were associated with each other is because whenever Mamet’s step-father would break the glass, it seemed that he would also cut some part of himself from the impact and because when he or their mother would pick up the pieces, they would cut their hands on shards of glass thus resulting in it being the fault of the children for the whole incident. It is also mentioned that the glass was shattered by Mamet’s step-father multiple times due to his outbursts and angry nature. Therefore, in the minds of Mamet and his sister, that round, glass kitchen table created many violent scenes and resulted in replacing the top of it several times. Throughout the essay, the author refers back to yet another incident at that table. Not only were there the numerous incidents with his step-father shattering the table, but he points out another particular occasion when his sister was to be the lead in the school play. That night his sister sat down at the table for dinner and for whatever reason, she wasn’t hungry. This resulted in their mother pressing her for reasons as to why she wasn’t hungry and didn’t want to eat. It’s explained as nervousness and excitement from the events of the evening to come. Unfortunately for her, their
mother’s strict demeanor resulted in her calling the drama teacher and telling her that her daughter would not be attending the play that night and that it wasn’t because of illness and that she understood that the teachers and students had worked very hard on the play, but still gave no explanation as to why she wouldn’t be performing that night. All because she was excited about her part in the play and couldn’t contain her excitement which resulted in a lost appetite and a very stubborn mother. Although Mamet wasn’t present during this incident, he was aware of it. The glass table in the nook of the family’s kitchen isn’t considered as a good place for memories and happiness in their home, but rather a place of unfortunate and violent events.

Relation to "Hashish is Marseilles" and "Street Hauntings"

I relate to these two essays in two ways. One being that when I travel, I enjoy time to myself to walk around and do what I want to do. Never has it been in a foreign country because I haven't been fortunate to experience that yet. Second being that I'm intrigued by the unknown. I'm quite a curious person. If I'm not sure of something, I ask. If i don't know how to do something, I figure it out. In the end it all pans out to me being hard-headed and curious all at the same time, two characteristics of mine that rarely go hand-in-hand. Chicago and New York are two places that I've visited more than once and both times I found and discovered new things to love about both. Chicago is cleaner and the cab drivers aren't as neurotic, but New York has the better hot dogs and the cab drivers are just crazy. I suppose that is a generalization, but I find it to be true. I jumped on top of a not moving cab once and the cab driver didn't even blink an eye. He actually drove off, but I'm sure I would have done the same if I were in his position. It was almost like, who is this crazy chick from Memphis jumping on the hood of my cab, and why? The second time I was in New York was during the Presidents Day blizzard. It was awesome. My two friends were bummed that they couldn't go shopping because everything was closed, but I got them to appreciate it because we rarely ever get snow like New York does, actually I don't even remember a time that we've had snow like that. Chicago is the same way. I fell in love with the art school there and I was actually surprised to see how clean their city was. I went with my art class one year and that was one of the best experiences of my life. We were given the opportunity to run around and do what we wanted at least three different times. It's were I actually met and became close to one of my best friends now. I enjoyed both essays in that they were both almost completely opposite, yet had a lot of the same things going on. I like different approaches to writing whether it be a personal experience written about a few days after, or just a written out chronological order of things in a story. I couldn't pick which one I enjoyed most if I wanted to, really. Because they were both the same yet completely different. And I find that I am more and more of an ambiguous person every day.

Personal Response

Around 6:45 a.m. on Monday October 1^st, I received a text from a friend saying there was a shooting on campus. I was immediately freaked out, yet still went back to sleep. When I finally woke up for the day a friend of mine, Jessica, came over and told me it was a student on the football team. I immediately thought about and called my best friend, Mackenzie, because she is a cheerleader for U of M. I also thought about Keenan, the football player that’s in my English class. Before Jessica came over I went to lunch with my mom and that’s all we could talk about. I’ve lost friends through train wrecks and car accidents, but never a shooting. It ties my stomach into knots just thinking about it. Jessica is five months pregnant and we got to thinking and talking about how life is going to be in 17 or 18 years when her daughter is in college. It’s really scary to think of it that way. Later that night I heard about yet ANOTHER shooting at Ole Miss. It all makes me feel so uneasy, anxious and sad. What makes a person fell that they have the right to take someone’s life from them? How could they possibly justify their actions? They can’t. They aren’t God. I don’t know the motives behind either shootings but it certainly is unfortunate and horribly wrong all together. Taylor was only 21 years old, just a year older than me. I feel like my life has just begun and that his had as well. It saddens me that there are such cruel people out there. It would be nice if everyone could just get along but it’s human nature for us to hate. And it’s human nature for us to make bad decisions, and to do the wrong thing. But to take someone’s life? Someone that has a family, friends and a social life? It’s disgusting. I’m not saying that people that don’t have those things don’t matter, I’m just focusing on Taylor here. It’s really disturbing that Memphis is the number one dangerous city in the U.S. And this is just another prime example as to why it is.

The Textual Analysis Essay

In The Fourth of July, by Audre Lorde, the main theme is silence and the idea of not being a child anymore. “The first time I went to Washington, D.C., was on the edge of summer when I was supposed to stop being a child” (Lorde, 567). In the essay, the author identifies with 8th grade graduation as being the end of childhood. She also states how it was high school graduation for her older sister and she wasn’t sure of what she was supposed to “stop being”. Silence as a main theme is apparent in the essay by the author describing her parents as quiet after they are asked to leave an ice cream parlor because they are black. “My parents wouldn’t speak of this injustice, not because they had contributed to it, but because they felt they should have anticipated it and avoided it” (Lorde, 569). The author also states something pertaining to silence about her mother, “As usual, whatever my mother did not like and could not change, she ignored. Perhaps it would go away, deprived of her attention” (Lorde, 568).
Lorde uses many different things throughout the essay to describe and help the reader to really see what’s going on. She uses the descriptions of food at the beginning of the essay as a way to vividly show colors used throughout the paragraph. It also seems like a metaphor to the overall theme of black vs. white. Lorde describes her family as different in the sense that they were all somewhat of a different color. “But something always warned me not to ask my mother why she wasn’t white, and why auntie Lillah and auntie Etta weren’t, even though they were all that same problematic color so different from my father and me, even from my sisters, who were somewhere in between” (Lorde, 568). The whole reason the author and her family are in Washington, D.C. is because her older sister, Phyllis, was the only black person in her graduating class and the nuns at her school gave her back the money she had paid for the trip because she would have had to stay somewhere different and wouldn’t be comfortable. That and when the family went into the ice cream parlor and were told they could only take it to go are both examples of race related prejudice for them during the summer of 1947. The whole idea of not being a child anymore is another thing to be taken into context. The emphasis on the color white throughout the essay could almost be considered as a metaphor for white being a symbol of innocence. Another way the author conveys her ideas is through her description of the Lincoln Memorial. “[…] and I spent the whole next day after Mass squinting up at the Lincoln Memorial where Marian Anderson had sung after the D.A.R. refused to allow her to sing in their auditorium because she was black” (Lorde, 568).
Both the incident in the ice cream parlor and the trip as a whole had made Lorde hate the Fourth of July. “The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D.C., that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all” (Lorde, 570). This quote is an example of why she dislikes the holiday, all because of one bad experience; an experience that was supposed to be a family vacation but really turned into a frustrating and angry experience for her. Another factor that should be kept in mind about why Lorde was bothered so much about her vacation is because of the fact that black people weren’t allowed to eat in railroad dining cars. “I wanted to eat in the dining car because I had read all about them, but my mother had reminded me for the umpteenth time that dining car food always cost too much money and besides, you never could tell whose hands had been playing all over that food, nor where those same hands had been just before. My mother never mentioned that black people were not allowed into railroad dining cars headed south in 1947” (Lorde, 568).
Once again, the main theme’s in this essay is silence, like her parents after the ice cream incident, and not being a child anymore, like her anger toward the racism and actually deciding to write a letter to the President herself, as an almost 9th grader. It’s both disturbing and sad that people were so shallow and ignorant then that they wouldn’t even allow someone with a different skin color in to a dining car or ice cream parlor, to name a few places.

Final.

Having the belief that everything happens for a reason really changes your outlook on life when looking at the big picture. I don't feel the need for an explination when something sudden happens, of course if it's something life threatening or involves losing someone I love and care about, it'd be different. But pertaining to all the little things in life that mean so much to me I don't need reassurance that it's real. Having someone in my life that cares about me just as much as I care about them is absolutely mind blowing. This not only includes Jake and my mom, but my sister, family, and few good friends that I have been blessed with. When I think of myself at 17 and 18, I think of how spontaneous I used to be. I still am, but I've put some rules up for myself now. I feel that happens with everyone at a certain time in their life. I have friends well into their mid-twenties that still scare me sometimes with their decisions and thought making process. Another scary thing to me is if I had ended up living in Chicago after all. Not knowing the people that I know today makes me feel sick almost. I've met a lot of people and lost just as many if not more and all of them have made impacts on my life, whether it was negative or positive. Being raised by a single mom has also influenced me and a variety of ways. I now think “what would my mother think?” before I decide something. This can be very unfortunate at times but in the long run I feel that it’s a good thing, almost like having someone watch over me 24/7. And the thing about that is, is that I know she would if she could. Not in the creepy controlling way, but in the sense that she really truly wants what’s best for my sister and I and she expresses that to us each chance that she gets. I also keep that sort of watchful eye on my sister and it’s all because of my upbringing. Having a family that has each others backs and would literally throw some punches to show how important we all are to each other really has a lot to do with the shape that I’m in today. I feel that I’m determined and stubborn, but also shy and true to my roots. There are so many things that have happened in my life that affect how things have played out up until now. My life has been what I almost see as a chain of events, reactions to one thing leading up to another. Meeting people that introduce me to other people, learning to let people in and really understand how I feel. There is constantly so much going on in my head that it can be overwhelming at times, but in the long wrong I know that it’s all for the best and shaping me into the person that I am today and will be in a few years.

Ideationally.

Things’ happening for a reason is something that I not only believe, but I have a mild fascination for. I’m always trying to tie things together about why this happened, how it happened and so on. If I hadn’t dated that weirdo, I never would have met my good friend, Rachel, who never would have introduced me to Jake. He’s a huge part of my life and I’m thankful for him everyday. If I hadn’t moved out at 18, I wouldn’t have made all my mistakes early on and I also wouldn’t have learned what I know now. If my family had chosen to move to Chicago, I wouldn’t have dated the weirdo, met my friend, met my amazing boyfriend, moved out at 18 (or would I have?), made mistakes, really screwed up, and I would be a totally different person. So much has happened in my life already it’s almost too much for my mind to process sometimes.