"Slice of Life" Russel Baker

This essay is about the process of carving a turkey. The author first starts by explaining the tools that are being needed to carve a turkey. The tools that are needed are the carving knife, wash cloth, soap. After the turkey is being set in the table, the person is ready to carve and cut the turkey. After the turkey is being cut, the process is finished with being carved. A person can enjoy the turkey slice that was carved. I enjoyed this essay because it showed that in life there is always going to be a certain process with what you, regardless with what it is in life.

Suzanne Britt " Neat vs. Sloppy People"

In this story, the author is contrasting the characteristics of how sloppy and neat people are. For example, the author describes the messy people as people that are carrying a heavy vision in their minds and are more friendly than people that are neat. However, this essay gives the negative sides of both people. For neat people, it describes that neat people are less sympathetic and they like to throw away everything after they are done with using it. On the other hand, messy people tend to be more attached to certain things like family letters and cards. Messy people tend to get attached with things in their life and prefer process instead of results, like how neat people like to do. I do think this is true because both messy and neat people have a certain reflection on how they see their lives. By knowing how other people view their reflections in life, then we can understand people better one step at a time.

Virginia Woolf " The Death of the Moth"

This essay is about the life and death of a moth. I liked this essay because it has two morals: everything in life must come to an end and you should never give up in life.She talks about the way in life, everything must start and everything in life must end. She found this moth inside her house. As she found it in her house, she wanted to watch the process of the life of the moth. She describes that the moth looks like a butterfly because it is free, yet doesn't because of how it looks like physically. When she followed the moth, she found out that she hurt the moth and the moth stopped to fly around. After it stopped to fly around, she poked it with a pencil. She started to poke the pencil and she noticed that he was still alive. She was in shock in how a small animal can bring itself back to balance. After the animal stood up, she realized that he was strong and that life has a process of metamorphosis.

Brent Staples " Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space"

In this essay, Brent Staples talks about the difficulties of being an African- American in urban Chicago. He talks about being discriminated by being his race during the 1960s. The person who was looking at the author was a young white woman who was around twenty years old or more of age. As soon as she looked at him, the young woman was in the lookout that he could have been someone bad like a rapist, a mugger or a assasin. As the author got older, he moved to New York and was still careful of the violence that can happen in the streets of New York as well as Chicago. He explains in this essay a mixture of narration and descreptive to explain the image of the violence that happens in the urban ghetto with the difficulties of seeing death in front of his face.

Deborah Tannen " How to Give Orders Like a Man"

In this essay, it is about the process of working at a office. It talks about the process of people communicating in the workforce of the office and talks about the different process of communicating with co -workers. and other people. In order to commnunicate correctly with a person, the communicator must give the message in the correct process, which is the indirect process. For example, if a person receives a phone call asking for a person and the receptionist answers " yes", then that would be indirect style of commnunication process. Another problem in communication is the intercultural commnunication process. By being able to understand the process of other cultures in how their talking straegies are, then we are able to talk better with our communications. When we are talking to others, we should used the indirectness strategy because it gives the listener a better strategy of what the speaker is saying.

Jessica Mitford " Enbalming in The U.S.A."

In Jessica Mitford's story, it is talking about the process of how morticians work in the enbalming business and the comfort ability of Americans and how they are comfortable watching surgery shows in their family living rooms. Unfortunately, the author is in shocked in how Americans feel comfortable with this subject since she is British. In her story, she describes the process that people that work in funerals do. First, the mortician takes the body and it is laid out in the preparation room. The preparation room is a room that is filled with equipments that are used for the "patient". This "patient" is called Mr. Jones. This room is filled with scissors, scalpels and forceps. After the " surgery" is over, the mortician applies special makeup on the "patient" to make the "patient "better physically before he is cremated or buried.After that process is done, Mr. Jone's veins are being drained out and are being replaced by enbalming fluid. After that step is done, Mr. Jones goes through a device called a trocar which is being attached through his stomach. After he is having makeup check on the face, he is going to be located inside a casket. I think this story was very realistic yet graphic.

Holocaust Remeberance Day

On May 21, 2008 our school invited three special guests to talk about the holocaust since they are holocaust survivors. These three men shocked me when I heard their story with all the struggles they had to go in their lives as kids and adults. The first guest, whose name is Gunther had one of the difficult times because all of his family members passed away due to the concentration camps. He also had to move back and forth to different foster homes in different places, which can be very difficult for somebody at a young age. The other two guests, whose name were Peter and Louis, were also save by other families and had to move from foster homes to foster homes. It was very hard for them to live separate from their families. Even though they are not mad at Hitler for what he did, he survived one of the society's most horrible events because of their religion. By talking to survivors, hopefully, we won't able to repeat a tragic moment like this one again.

The Grave of The Fireflies The Movie Blog

Even though this is a movie and not an essay, it has a very sad story. The movie takes plan in Japan in the WW II era. It is about a young man by the name of Seita who lives with his sister, Seistouku and mother in Tokyo. The mother, who has heart problems, is sent to go to the community shelter. Since the mother isn't able to take care of her children, the kids are sent to an aunt's house. The aunt doesn't agree with Seita's ideas, so Seita leaves away with her sister to a shelter. In this shelter, Seistuku knows that her mother was killed by bombs by her aunt. As days go by, Seita and Seistouku get weaker and weaker because they barely have food to survive. The siblings were able to work thru the struggle each day, but sadly, Seistouku is getting sick and very weak due to malnutrition. Sadly, she passes away. So, Seita, being the big brother that he is, cremates his little sister and throws her ashes by the mountain. I think this was a very sad, depressing story that almost made me cry.

" A Chase" Annie Dillard

When I read this story, it reminded me of flashbacks when I was a young girl. The author in the story talks about herself as a seven year girl who plays sports with the boys around her neighborhood. Since the author and the boys weren't able to play sports like football and baseball because of the wintertime, they decided to throw snowballs at the cars around their neighborhood. After several snowballs at cars, the kids hit a black Buick. As the kids were in shock that they dented a car, the kids decided to start running since the man driving the black Buick stepped out of the car and starting chasing the kids. The kids stood there, frozen and shocked that the man was going to chase the kids. To make the chase even more complicated, the kids decided to seperate and ran ten blocks. After running ten blocks, the kids were finally caught by the man driving the Buick. Even though it was a very intense moment for the author and the other kids, she felt happy that she could have ran away from the driver.

N. Scott Momaday " The Way to Rainy Mountain"

I believe this is a very beautiful piece of writing because it is very spiritual towards the illustration on how the author describes the setting of the essay. The author talks in a very beautiful way about his grandmother and his culture, which is Kiowa, a type of Native American group who live in the Arkansas. The author sees his grandmother as someone who wants to keep their culture alive and to pass it on as a tradition for the culture for the next generations. He spoke about his grandmother in a form of respect and love at the same time. After his grandmother died many years afer, he went to Rainy Mountain, where his grandmother used to live. I enojyed reading this story because it was a story written with love and care, yet he talks about his sadness when she passes away.

William F. Buckley, Jr. " Why Don't We Complain?"

After reading this short essay, it made me realize that we as individuals somtimes don't complain with things that are bothering us in our lives. In the essay, the author was describing the annoyance of the temperature inside the train, which was 85 degrees. I understood what the author's feeling was towards the bad service at the train because sometimes I have experienced terrible services at certain places. Sometimes when we don't complain about a terrible service that we have, it makes us more vulnerable to the problem. Like problems that include about having about terrible services, it also includes with other problems such as problems with politics.Wih political differences, such as Democratics and Republicans, it can create problems of people complaining or not complaining.

"Marrying Abusrd" Joan Didion

This story describes the aberration of marrying in Las Vegas, Nevada. It describes the insanity of getting married in a place that are full of casinos and nightclubs. When I read this story, it felt like this is the complete opposite of what it is like to get married. Getting married in a little chapel may seem like a fantasy, but getting married in a little chapel seems like the people who are getting married; who are mostly young people, just want to get married to get indpendence away from their parents and family. It is just an escape from reality that young people create. The author describes how the little chapels work and that they are chapels that are very competitive with one another to see how many people get married in a particular chapel.

Langston Hughes " Salvation"

From all the stories that I have read so far, "Salvation" is my favorite. It describes the pristine of a teenager from believing in Jesus. Even though though the author was not a child and was a teenager, he believed that he was going to be saved and see Jesus while he was at church. When I read this story, I tried to imagine I was the author and if I could have felt the embarrassement that he went through in church. He felt that in order to make his aunt happy, he had to lie to his aunt and tell her that Jesus saved him,when he hasn't. Even though he lied, he felt guilty about lying to his aunt. But now he knows that since he didn't see Jesus, he didnt't believe that Jesus existed to help him.

Borges and I

In the story of Borges and I, it was a short story that I really enjoyed because Borges is comparing himself as a writer and as a person and this makes the story interesting since he is viewing himself in different reflections. For example, when he describes himself in the writer's reflection, he views himself as a person who is very educated and formal. On the other hand, when he views himself as Borges the person who isn't a writer, but as a person who enjoys coffee, and eighteenth century typography and many other things. In the short story, it said that he also he enjoys the same things that he likes also, but in a form that it is in a way of hypocrisy. When he is describing himself as a person who is going to let himself go, and for Borge's lirterature to be alive in the future and for many people to keep on reading his literature for many years. It was very interesting to read because it was confusing at first to see in what parts of the reading he was comparing.