Side Note

The more you get to know a person, the more attractive they become to you. Everything beautiful you see on the inside of them, suddenly appears on the outside too.

      This is extremely true. One time when I was hanging out with friends and feeling particularly crappy about my appearance, (Side note about 70% of my friends are guys, I've ALWAYS been one of the guys) my best friend said to me "Lindsey don't worry what you look like. To me once you're my friend, you're in. It doesn't matter what your appearance is, I've already accepted you."
      I don't know, for some reason that stuck with me. Its true for me too, I don't really care what you look like. I understand people have rough days, and sometimes life gest in the way and you can't wake up 2 hours before school to look like a model. I like substance over style and if you look.. Actually LOOK at people, its very easy to see beauty.
      I don't know I think the world is so full of these images of "beautiful" women and it's very easy to get weighed down when you're not that ideal beauty. But I also think it's important to remember that everybody is beautiful in a way, and to me uniqueness is the most important aspect to beauty.
      I know this is a random post but sometimes I think its important to take time to say things that are important to you. How can you truly believe something and live that way if you don't take time out of your day to remind yourself of it?

Personal Addition

Personal Addition

bound like broken birds we all go down together

Personal Addition

THE WIND CRIES MARY- Jimi Hendrix

Intro

So I’ve had this idea that’s been following me around for like.. .. my whole life. It’s about a girl.. I think? I don’t know yet, but I’m a collector. I like to collect words, and images and sounds. I save them but I’ve never had anywhere to put them. I’m a private person about some things and time seems to weigh me down lately. Anyways this is my personal addictions and hopefully the beginning of a new project.

Poem

Into Inevitability

I hung our

sweaters and socks

on the clothes line in the backyard

so that we could smell like sunshine and breeze.

In the front of our house there was a red metal mailbox,

smiling at us with envelop teeth

full of words proving our love.

A white picket fence

separated us from the rest of the world,

and the smell of sweet, apple crumble

wafted out of windows

and into our summer days.

But soon a wind blew in,

and brought with it the winter

and I forgot to bring

our button downs and bed sheets

back inside to protect us

from the thunder and hail.

The metal mailbox slowly began to rust itself shut

and the picket fence turned brown

as its paint ran down with the rain

and turned the green living grass white.

Now the only smell that ever escaped the windows

was the smell of smoke

from forgotten suppers,

as we became preoccupied with our anger

and let it seep into every crevice and corner.

Soon our perfect, pretty house became our prison

and we locked ourselves inside the cage,

making the bars out of love

and molding them together with anger.

Angry that we’d let ourselves become

the same person with the same life,

and the closeness we had once marveled in

became hated.

We pushed each other away to try and become closer,

but we didn’t know if the pushing was

helping or hurting

so we stopped.

And through it all

the clothes on the line became so windblown and tattered

they disintegrated,

and only rags hung in their places.

The mailbox closed itself completely

so that a brown hunk of metal was the only reminder

of the vowels and consonants that had once passed through its lips.

The fence began to crumble

so we cut it into firewood

to feed to the flames that had sparked from our charred, burning food.

As the fire devoured us whole

I looked out the window

and saw millions of other homes

exactly like ours

go up in smoke,

and that was the real tragedy.

-Me

Reading Response 1-5

The Stone Angel is a story about the life of a woman named Hagar. It is written as she approaches death, and is a reflection on her life. Naturally, as person would do in her position, she is reflecting on who she was and the mistakes she has made in her life.

The opening passage to the story is describing the stone angel that sits in the Manawaka cemetery. It is a key passage to the novel because the angel is a metaphor for Hagar, so what is said about the stone angel is really a metaphor for Hagar. Through repetition, imagery, and most importantly diction, Margaret Laurence portrays Hagar and how she was during her life and the mistakes she made through the stone angel’s description.

In the opening paragraph of the key passage Laurence says that the angel was bought “in pride” to mark the grave of her mother who “relinquished her feeble ghost as I gained my stubborn one” (Laurence, 3). Right in that opening paragraph Hagars two major downfalls are revealed; her stubbornness and her pride.

In the key passage it can be seen that the angel is an object of pride because of imagery and diction Laurence uses. The very first sentence of the novel begins with “above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand” (Laurence, 3). This imagery of the angel above the town, standing over everybody else, is a metaphor for how Hagar stood above everybody else, smug in the pride that she was always right and always better.

We can see examples of Hagar’s pride many times in the novel. She thinks she is better than Bram because she is more educated, “This here! That There! Don’t you know anything?” (Laurence,71), and she thinks she is better than No-Name-Lottie because of her birth. Hagar feels superior over Lottie her whole life, even when she finds out Lottie did very well for herself and married a banker.

” “Such a homely boy he used to be”- I did not really want to say a word, but out and out they came- “and none too clever, either. He’s got there more by good luck than good management, if you ask me.” (Laurence, 133).  

And later on when Hagar goes to visit Lottie she continues to judge her, “It was full of ornamental trash as ever. She always put good things side by side with junk and gewgaws” (Laurence 209). Hagar must always judge people and find a way to make herself better than them.

This is shown in the key passage when Hagar compares the stone angel to the other angels in the cemetery. The angel is described as being “pure white marble” and carved from the “cynical descendants of Bernini”. The other angels in the cemetery are described as being “a lesser breed entirely, petty angels, cherubim”. There is so much importance placed on this angel; the imagery of her being pure white marble makes her stick out and seem better than the rest. She has so much importance placed on her, like her father, and you can see from the beginning how his pride was instilled in her.

It is showed how her father has so much pride because there is mentioning of the stone angle being a ``terrible expense`` and it being the ``first, largest, and certainly the costliest (in the cemetery)`` (Laurence, 3). There has to be this mention of it, like without mentioning it would be the end of the world. This relates back to stubbornness that Hagar has. She always has to have her way and she always as to get the last say in things.

When she was younger it was the stubbornness to keep up with Bram which she saw too late, and once John screamed at her ``Can`t you shut up? Can’t you just shut up?” (Laurence,133). Even when she is an old lady she always needs the last say. She mentions the girls black nail polish and why it wasn’t acceptable, and she passes judgement on the people in the nursing home, even though they are just like her.

        The key passage shows how Hagar and her father are alike and possibly it is saying that the first lessons in life are learned from the ones you admire. Hagar did admire her father in his hardworking and determination and perhaps that is why she inherited some of the traits she saw in him.
        After setting up character the key passage moves into repeating the motif of vision. The angel is described as “(having) sightless eyes. She was doubly blind” (Laurence, 3). The repetition of vision catches your attention, and you can see that important realizations in Hagar’s life are followed with references to sight “I could not speak for the salt that filled my throat, and for anger- not at anyone, at God, perhaps, for giving us eyes but almost never sight.” (Laurence, 173). This is when Hagar realizes it was her mistake and comes to terms with blaming herself for marrying Bram.

I believe when Hagar says she was doubly blind, she is referring to her blindness to emotions and blindness to reality.

The key passage shows she is blind to emotions because of how blunt it is. With diction such as bones, eyeballs, carved, and gouging, the atmosphere is set up as very blunt, sometimes to the point of harshness. It can be seen later on that this is how Hagar is with Marvin. There is also the repetition of the word stone. Stone is cold and unfeeling, and Hagar was always unfeeling towards Marvin.

        The second way Hagar was blind was to reality. The key passage says that the angel was also “unendowed with even a pretense of sight. Whoever carved her had left the eyeballs blank”. This imagery shows that the way the angel was made she would never be able to see the truth. The eye balls were blank, it didn’t matter what the angel saw because her opinion would never change. This was true especially when it came to John. She could see the situations but it didn’t matter to her because
        Hagar is doubly blind to emotions and reality, especially when it comes to her sons. She was most blind to reality with John. Hagar could see the truth but to her it didn’t matter. She didn’t confront John when he lied to her about who he hung out with or when he snuck around with girls because to her he could do no wrong. This was because John was hers. When she gave birth to him she was all alone and when she looked down upon him she saw
 “black hair, a regular sheaf of it. Black as my own, I thought…… Sometimes I used to think he’d be certain to die of some sickness, but that had nothing to do with any weakness in him- it was only because I cared so much about him and could never believe he’d be allowed to stay” (Laurence, 122-123).
Hagar is blind to John because he looked like her and later he looked like her father so she was more inclined to like him. Hagar also had legitimate feelings towards John. She could never care much before in her life, she couldn’t pretend to be Dan’s mother or show Marvin praise, but towards John she had real feelings. Because of that John was her favorite child. Later Hagar realized that John was not the perfect child she had always seen his as when she realized he had turned lazy and had been drinking and objectifying women, like Bram.

She didn’t try to hide that fact either and that was a big part of why she was emotionally blind to Marvin. Hagar had always been uncaring towards Marvin. When he was young and tried showing off his chores he received very little praise, there is little mention of him as he is growing up other than to say he helped out on the farm and got along well with Bram but did poorly in school. His childhood is missing from her and then he went off to the war. Even as he left for war Hagar didn’t say “good luck” or “be safe” or “I love you” to him, even though she wanted to. Later Hagar regrets this when she hears Marvin talking to John and realized “Marvin was the unknown soldier, the one whose name you never knew” (Laurence, 182). She regretted not paying better attention to him or showing him affection, but again she didn’t take action to fix this because she thought it was too late and she was never good at showing her emotions anyways.

With Marvin as well as with John Hagar realizes she was wrong too late. She is blinded by her pride and stubbornness and they prevent her from seeing things before it’s too late when it comes to her emotions and reality.  

        As it can be seen Hagar learns about herself through her father, Bram, Marvin and John. You learn about yourself from the people in your life, and it’s interesting to note that all the people in Hagar’s life have been males. Hager never had a female figure to guide her, it was always her against the world which is shown through natural imagery in the key passage when describing the angel. “Her (the stone angel) wings in winter were pitted by the snow and in summer by the blown grit” (Laurence, 3).
        The stone angels whiteness and expense set her apart from the other angels and she had to bear the world alone, much like how Hagar’s self-entitlement and pride set her to face the world alone too.
        Finally the diction of the angel “harking us all to heaven” is important because it shows Hagar’s animosity towards God. She blames god for what happened to John, and she was never able to get over his death. You can see that she blames God for what happened because when she is talking to Mr. Troy she says, “ ‘What’s so merciful about Him, I’d like to know?’… ‘I had a son, and lost him’ “ (Laurence, 121). For the longest time Hagar blamed God and her father and everybody else for her problems, but in the end she realizes she only had herself to blame.
        The key passage is a metaphor for Hagar and her life. The entire character development of Hagar can be shown in this passage, and I think it is interesting that because the book is written at the end of her life, Hagar’s characteristics don’t change much from the beginning of the novel to the end. The big character development of the book is just that Hagar realizes her flaws and learns to take blame, but if you understand the beginning key passage you will understand Hagar and why she was the way she was.

Poem

The First Straw



I used to think love was two people sucking
on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,

but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,
traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.

I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo
in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers

from a phone line, and you promised to always smell
the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal

pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled
all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue


ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.
I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror


over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell
of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted

in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe
in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep's clothing

and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper
of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord

around my ankle and yanked me across the continent.
And now there are three thousand miles between the u

and s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing
at a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels

and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much
I'd jump off the roof of your office building

just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish
we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see

what the other sees. But you're here, I'm there,
and we have only words, a nightly phone call - one chance

to mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver,
hope they don't disassemble in that calculus of wire.

And lately - with this whole war thing - the language machine
supporting it - I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they're


injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,
naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:

Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,
so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,


and it's the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso
looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,

washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin
in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,

like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver
in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,

like I'm the executioner's fingernail trying to reason
with the hand. And I don't know how to speak love

when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,
and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting

into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing
open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself


with the thought that we'll name our first child Jenin,
and her middle name will be Terezin, and we'll teach her

how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,
and to never neglect the first straw; because no one


ever talks about the first straw, it's always the last straw
that gets all the attention, but by then it's way too late.


- Jeffrey McDaniel

Mkay so my first post.. like ever lol. I guess I'll start by saying my name is Lindsey, and I created this blog for my Creative Writing class. I'm pretty excited to be in creative writing, it's the class where I get to read and blog and go on the computer and chill beside Spence for an entire hour every day. Spence is pretty cool, he's one of those people that I've just known my whole life. In grade 4 we were in the same class, Ms. Chuchmuch's class, and we always wrote cool stories together, painted, drew and read.. Man that was an awesome class! I feel like this one is going to be the grade 12 version of it :P. It's kinda funny how life works out like that hey? The people who were with you for some things are with you for others too. I've started to notice things like that lately, trying to open my eyes up to the world a little, you know? There's a lot going on out there, sometimes its nice to take a step back and see it.