tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29871326645851131902024-02-08T04:52:26.920-05:00Narrative Journalism Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-46049433876694991462013-06-10T17:37:00.002-04:002013-06-10T17:38:46.310-04:00Final: College Looms for the Black Sheep of Blessed Sacrament<b id="docs-internal-guid-591c5c26-3005-9f3b-a549-4c546fbadbb3" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tonight, Darien Parlick won’t sing. He says it’s a matter of national security. The last time he sang, the Twin Towers fell. So he plays his favorite Son House song on his hand-me-down guitar without the vocal accompaniment, while he tells his friends about “the revolution” and gets drunk off of five-dollar wine in Dave’s basement. The guy who provided the wine, Mike, isn’t anyone’s friend really. More like friend of a friend of a friend, says Dave. This is the first and last time time he will welcome Mike into his home. </span></b><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-3003-5bb1-8957-4bf081d12a4a" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
<b id="docs-internal-guid-591c5c26-3005-9f3b-a549-4c546fbadbb3" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-591c5c26-3005-9f3b-a549-4c546fbadbb3" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave has a lot of practice confronting situations like this by now. He’s been working as a program coordinator at the Blessed Sacrament Teen Center in McKinley Park since August, so he’s around Darien and kids like him everyday. Some are like Darien, who dropped out of high school because he didn’t have the discipline. Others dropped out because their girlfriends got pregnant and couldn’t afford their time and money to both. Sometimes they come like Mike, and the Center welcomes them with a cautionary eye. </span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-591c5c26-3005-9f3b-a549-4c546fbadbb3" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave will do anything to get Darien out of the neighborhood for even a night, so before acquiescing to Mike’s request to just chill, he tries to find an under-21 club they can all go to. Darien’s face lights up. Earlier in the night, Darien talks about retiring from the wild life at age 20, then complains that his under 21 year-old “bros” are too low key for him sometimes. </span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“These guys aren’t satisfying my rage fever,” he says. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Life is a dance party. Sometimes we just can’t hear the music,” he continues. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Darien’s initial excitement wanes after a few minutes of searching the internet. He wants to dance, loves to dance, but doesn’t want to hang around a bunch of 18 year-olds after all. He likes hanging around Mike and Dave because they’re at least a couple of years older, and Mike has a brown bag in his hand tonight. He makes the executive call. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave is itching to go into the city but agrees to stay knowing Darien will be safe in his home tonight. He lives a few blocks from Darien in a converted convent with seven other recent college graduates participating in a year-long service program in Chicago, so there’s plenty of space for Darien. He prefers staying here at the Amate House because the couches are bigger than the one he sleeps on at home. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave suggests playing board games when the group files into the basement, but after a few rounds of Loaded Questions and a few cups of wine for a near-intoxicated Mike, the friends are restless and want to watch a movie. Dave turns the lights off and puts Darien’s favorite movie, “Pulp Fiction”, into the VHS. Darien moves to the back of the room where Dave can’t see Mike pouring him a cup of wine. With the physique of a malnourished giraffe, Darien is drunk by the time Vincent Vega takes a shot of adrenaline to Mia Wallace’s heart. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Taking advantage of the dark room and his blissful sedation, Darien crawls over to the girl he’s had a crush on for a couple of months now and asks her to get coffee sometime, but his breath smells like cheap red wine and his stained red, overlapping teeth give him a vampiric look, so she teeters on his question. She asks him about the revolution. He tells her he’s building an army of young people to overthrow capitalism and give power back to the people, but it’ll be a nonviolent revolution the way Gandhi intended. They’ll meet in secret locations to discuss their revolutionary ideas. So far only one person has joined the revolution, himself included. He asks if she wants to join. She says yes but reminds him she goes to college a couple of hours away, so she won’t be around for the meetings, and that coffee date might have to wait. A few days later, he tells Dave he’s falling in love.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave is annoyed when he turns the lights back on to find Darien intoxicated on the couch. Dave checks in with his other guests while Darien gets up. In the back of the room, Mike asks Darien to join him outside to smoke. Dave walks over. It’s time for Mike to go. Times like these, he feels more like a parent than a friend to Darien.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s mostly boys who frequent the Teen Center, and Dave’s made good friends out of them. He invites them to his house on the weekends and to get hamburgers at Portillos every Friday night, and they never say no because he offers to pay. It’s a small price to keep them from doing bad stuff, says Dave. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">McKinley Park is a mostly Latino neighborhood that falls along the stretch of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods known for high crime and gang involvement, so most of the kids who take advantage of the Teen Center are Latino and some used to be in gangs. Almost all of them have a story to tell about how gang and intimate partner violence have affected their lives. With the help of Teen Center Director Jim Kozy, they’ve turned their situation around. The Teen Center is home, so even though Dave’s only required to work until five p.m. every day, he keeps it open until the kids are ready to leave. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even with so many teens to watch out for, Dave keeps both eyes on Darien. When Dave began his year of service at the Teen Center, Kozy asked Dave if he could put a little extra time into making sure Darien finishes high school and makes it to college. It didn’t take long for Dave to figure out why. As the only white boy who visits the teen center on a regular basis, Darien’s the black sheep of the group. He wears a black leather jacket, Ray Ban-look alikes, and skinny jeans that accentuate his twiggy legs. He sits on the computer researching philosophy terms that he comes across reading Nietzsche for fun, while the other guys play basketball or pool. Sometimes he plays the guitar even though the sound of dribbling mutes him. He watches documentaries on astrophysics and listens to the Blues. His favorites are Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Son House got me through many a hard times,” he says.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This revolution he speaks of came to be because he needed some sort of intellectual stimulation after he dropped out of school. He’s not against recruiting kids from the neighborhood, but every attempt has failed for some combination of reasons, like they don’t know what capitalism is and therefore don’t know what they’re supposed to be overthrowing, or they don’t understand Darien’s very specific revolutionary vocabulary. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s unclear whether this language he speaks is so futuristic it borders incomprehension, or if it’s something regurgitated from Star Wars movies. In his perfect world, the Star Wars theme song would play for him all day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“First thing. Open my eyes. Imperial March!” he says.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He’s settled for creating his own life soundtrack. He plays the harmonica wherever he goes and brings his ukulele, Goddard, around on special occasions. He starts each day with yoga, which he taught himself with the help of YouTube, and sends off his conversations with a peaceful “namaste.” He carries a pocket notebook at all times in case of profound thoughts, like this one he posted as a Facebook status: </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that we can do, or any kindness that we can show to any fellow creature let us do it now. For we may not pass this way again. Namaste.” He scrolls down his wall to reveal another: </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Kids these days swim in the sex, drugs, rebellion of adolescence and forget to dry off now and then.” Then another: “No one wins in biological warfare.” He scrolls down again: “Those beans were a bad idea for dinner. I’ll be back in a few hours. Ugh. The bathroom calls me.” At the end of the day, he’s retained some innocence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave is only required to work during the week but wakes up as early as eight a.m. on the weekends to take Darien to the nearest community college and enroll him in classes. He has a unique potential he doesn’t seen in the other teens, especially not the ones still in Chicago’s failing public school system. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It sounds like a simple formula. Dave takes Darien to Malcolm X College, enrolls him in classes, helps him pass his GED by the time college classes start in the fall. But even though Darien prefers to spend his time with people like Dave and Oscar--a recent University of Illinois graduate who volunteers at the Teen Center--as opposed to guys like Mike, something pulls him back every time he makes progress. Dave arrives at Darien’s house at seven-thirty a.m. on a saturday so they can take the bus to Malcolm X, and Darien answers the door with his pajamas on and eyes half open. It’s his living environment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Darien hasn’t had a bed for himself in years. Darien was relegated to the couch of his cramped, one-family house once his half-brother, Nick, got his girlfriend, Ashley, pregnant a few years ago. Then there’s Ashley’s mom and sister. Dave lists a host of other people who move in and out of the house like a motel room. Dave is happy to host Darien if it means getting out of that environment for a weekend, but fears Darien will become too dependent on him. His year of service ends on June 16, when he’ll fly back to New York to pursue his masters in social work at the University of Albany in August. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A few days before Dave’s going away party, he calls to say Darien passed his GED with flying colors. In between the astrophysics documentaries and Nietzsche readings, he managed to finish his credits online. A while back, Dave and Darien discussed the possibility of Darien flying to New York to live with Dave and go to college out east. Everyone was on board, including Kozy and Dave’s parents. Then Dave took a good hard look at what the next four years might look like and thought, just maybe, it'll hurt Darien more than it’ll help. They decided it's best that Darien stays in McKinley and goes to school in Chicago, so Dave will rely on regular phone calls to keep him on track.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With two weeks until he leaves, Dave's been walking a lot of laps around the lake by his house. It's a nice place to reflect. He goes alone when he wants to speak to God, but most of the time brings company. He thinks about Darien everyday. He doesn't doubt the difference he made, reminding himself of the story of the young girl who throws starfish into the ocean. A woman approaches the girl and says there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it, so she can't possibly make a difference. The girl pauses, throws another one into the sea and tells the woman it made a difference for that one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is an important reality of Dave’s work at the Teen Center. He touches these kids' lives for a year then leaves without a return ticket. He says he's ready to leave Chicago and return to his home and his girlfriend, but his work here feels incomplete because of Darien. He hopes for the best but understands the challenges Darien is up against, yet he's never met anyone quite like Darien so maybe he'll make it out of McKinley. For now, he waits.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Word Count: 1957</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Intended Publication: Chicago Tribune</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-5605951167132291482013-06-10T16:55:00.000-04:002013-06-10T16:55:27.921-04:00Audio/Visual Slideshow: Kim Russell<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dxgsra0jKdflofUA7OpqJ1P4MxDnPPPFbo2JqMmmo1LGgRP6TqPDdG2pJ4xtFxYTnx2XMEqhPO7f20VjeMTzw' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-63548594369026809682013-06-04T22:51:00.001-04:002013-06-04T22:51:11.936-04:00Process Writing: Darien Parlick ProfileWhat was initially an explanatory piece about young people of color from underserved communities not making it to college, as told through the story of Darien Parlick--a 20 year-old white male living with all of the same obstacles as his Latino neighbors, yet on the road to college--turned into part explanatory and part profile of two different guys, Darien and his friend/mentor, Dave.<br />
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By the end of the piece, I forgot what I was trying to explain because I was so focused on telling Darien's story and what Dave is trying to do for him. I still don't know what this piece is trying to accomplish. It feels like a mix between profile and explanatory journalism.<br />
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I'm not really confident calling this a "profile" because Dave and Darien are both central characters, and the piece speaks to larger issues of race, education and class.<br />
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Right now, though, it doesn't speak much to the implications of Darien's race. What does it mean that he's the only white boy among so many Latinos who frequent the Teen Center and the only one making it to college...and the one that Dave and the director are placing their bets on? He's faced many of the same obstacles as his friends, yet he's more likely to make it out of the neighborhood. What is that attributed to? <br />
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I thought about making this a simple profile about Darien because he's a fascinating kid, as you can read. I really wanted to focus on that questions I just wrote. But halfway through writing this piece, I unintentionally made Dave the (or another) protagonist. Maybe Dave was always the protagonist...I'm not sure.<br />
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Am I trying to do too much here?<br />
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Do you feel that the message is confusing?<br />
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That's a lot of questions. Here's the one to think about for workshop: What is this piece about?Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-58541387473057577222013-06-03T13:05:00.001-04:002013-06-04T22:56:50.989-04:00Darien Parlick Profile<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tonight, Darien Parlick won’t sing. He says it’s a matter of national security. The last time he sang, the Twin Towers fell. So he plays his favorite Son House song on his hand-me-down guitar without the vocal accompaniment, while he tells his friends about “the revolution” and gets drunk off of five-dollar wine in Dave’s basement. The guy who provided the wine, Mike, isn’t anyone’s friend really. More like friend of a friend of a friend, says Dave. This is the first and last time time he will welcome Mike into his home. </span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave will do anything to get Darien out of the neighborhood for even a night, so before acquiescing to Mike’s request to just chill, he tries to find an under-21 club they can all go to. Darien’s face lights up. Earlier in the night, Darien talks about retiring from the wild life at age 20, then complains that his under 21 year-old “bros” are too low key for him sometimes. </span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“These guys aren’t satisfying my rage fever,” he says. </span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Life is a dance party. Sometimes we just can’t hear the music,” he continues. </span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Darien’s initial excitement wanes after a few minutes of searching the internet. He wants to dance, loves to dance, but doesn’t want to hang around a bunch of 18 year-olds after all. He likes hanging around Mike and Dave because they’re at least a couple of years older, and Mike has a brown bag in his hand tonight. He makes the executive call. </span></b><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; vertical-align: baseline;">Dave is itching to go into the city but agrees to stay knowing Darien will be safe in his home tonight. He lives a few blocks from Darien in a converted convent with seven other recent college graduates participating in a year-long service program in Chicago, so there’s plenty of space for Darien. He prefers staying here at the Amate House because the couches are bigger than the one he sleeps on at home. </span></b></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave suggests playing board games when the group files into the basement, but after a few rounds of Loaded Questions and a few cups of wine for a near-intoxicated Mike, the friends are restless and want to watch a movie. Dave turns the lights off and puts Darien’s favorite movie, “Pulp Fiction”, into the VHS. Darien moves to the back of the room where Dave can’t see Mike pouring him a cup of wine. With the physique of a malnourished giraffe, Darien is drunk by the time Vincent Vega takes a shot of adrenaline to Mia Wallace’s heart. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"></b></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; vertical-align: baseline;">Taking advantage of the dark room and his blissful sedation, Darien crawls over to the girl he’s had a crush on for a couple of months now and asks her to get coffee sometime, but his breath smells like cheap red wine and his stained red, overlapping teeth give him a vampiric look, so she teeters on his question. She asks him about the revolution. He tells her he’s building an army of young people to overthrow capitalism and give power back to the people, but it’ll be a nonviolent revolution the way Gandhi intended. They’ll meet in secret locations to discuss their revolutionary ideas. So far only one person has joined the revolution, himself included. He asks if she wants to join. She says yes but reminds him she goes to college a couple of hours away, so she won’t be around for the meetings, and that coffee date might have to wait. A few days later, he tells Dave he’s falling in love.</span></b></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave is annoyed when he turns the lights back on to find Darien intoxicated on the couch. Dave checks in with his other guests while Darien gets up. In the back of the room, Mike asks Darien to join him outside to smoke. Dave walks over. It’s time for Mike to go. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"></b></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; vertical-align: baseline;">Dave has a lot of practice confronting situations like this by now. He’s been working as a program coordinator at the Blessed Sacrament Teen Center in McKinley Park since August, so he’s around Darien and kids like him everyday. Some are like Darien, who dropped out of high school because he didn’t have the discipline. Others dropped out because their girlfriends got pregnant and couldn’t afford their time and money to both. Sometimes they come like Mike, and the Center welcomes them with a cautionary eye. </span></b></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s mostly boys who frequent the Teen Center, and Dave’s made good friends out of them. He invites them to his house on the weekends and to get hamburgers at Portillos every Friday night, and they never say no because he offers to pay. It’s a small price to keep them from doing bad stuff, says Dave. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"></b></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; vertical-align: baseline;">McKinley Park is a mostly Latino neighborhood that falls along the stretch of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods known for high crime and gang involvement, so most of the kids who take advantage of the Teen Center are Latino and some used to be in gangs. Almost all of them have a story to tell about how gang and intimate partner violence have affected their lives. With the help of Teen Center Director Jim Kozy, they’ve turned their situation around. The Teen Center is home, so even though Dave’s only required to work until five p.m. every day, he keeps it open until the kids are ready to leave. </span></b></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even with so many teens to watch out for, Dave keeps both eyes on Darien. When Dave began his year of service at the Teen Center, Kozy asked Dave if he could put a little extra time into making sure Darien finishes high school and makes it to college. It didn’t take long for Dave to figure out why. As the only white boy who visits the teen center on a regular basis, Darien’s the black sheep of the group. He wears a black leather jacket, Ray Ban-look alikes, and skinny jeans that accentuate his twiggy legs. He sits on the computer researching philosophy terms that he comes across reading Nietzsche for fun, while the other guys play basketball or pool. Sometimes he plays the guitar even though the sound of dribbling mutes him. He watches documentaries on astrophysics and listens to the Blues. His favorites are Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; vertical-align: baseline;">“Son House got me through many a hard times,” he says.</span></b></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This revolution he speaks of came to be because he needed some sort of intellectual stimulation after he dropped out of school. He’s not against recruiting kids from the neighborhood, but every attempt has failed for some combination of reasons, like they don’t know what capitalism is and therefore don’t know what they’re supposed to be overthrowing, or they don’t understand Darien’s very specific revolutionary vocabulary. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s unclear whether this language he speaks is so futuristic it borders incomprehension, or if it’s something regurgitated from Star Wars movies. In his perfect world, the Star Wars theme song would play for him all day.</span></b></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He starts each day with yoga, which he taught himself with the help of YouTube, and sends off with a peaceful “namaste.” He carries a pocket notebook at all times in case of profound thoughts, like this one he posted as a Facebook status: </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that we can do, or any kindness that we can show to any fellow creature let us do it now. For we may not pass this way again. Namaste.” He scrolls down his wall to reveal another: </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Kids these days swim in the sex, drugs, rebellion of adolescence and forget to dry off now and then.” Then another: “No one wins in biological warfare.” He scrolls down again: “Those beans were a bad idea for dinner. I’ll be back in a few hours. Ugh. The bathroom calls me.” At the end of the day, he’s retained some innocence. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; vertical-align: baseline;">Dave is only required to work during the week but wakes up as early as eight a.m. on the weekends to take Darien to the nearest community college and enroll him in classes. He has a unique potential he doesn’t seen in the other teens, especially not the ones still in Chicago’s failing public school system. </span></b></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It sounds like a simple formula. Dave takes Darien to Malcolm X College, enrolls him in classes, helps him pass his GED by the time college classes start in the fall. But even though Darien prefers to spend his time with people like Dave and Oscar--a recent University of Illinois graduate who volunteers at the Teen Center--as opposed to guys like Mike, something pulls him back everytime he makes progress. Dave arrives at Darien’s house at seven-thirty a.m. on a saturday so they can take the bus to Malcolm X, and Darien answers the door with his pajamas on and eyes half open. It’s his living environment. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; vertical-align: baseline;">Darien hasn’t had a bed for himself in years. Darien was relegated to the couch of his cramped, one-family house once his half-brother, Nick, got his girlfriend, Ashley, pregnant a few years ago. Then there’s Ashley’s mom and sister. Dave lists a host of other people who move in and out of the house like a motel room. Dave is happy to host Darien if it means getting out of that environment for a weekend, but fears Darien will become too dependent on him. His year of service ends on June 16, when he’ll fly back to New York to pursue his masters in social work at the University of Albany in August. </span></b></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A few days before Dave’s going away party, he calls to say Darien passed his GED with flying colors. In between the astrophysics documentaries and Nietzsche readings, he managed to finish his credits online. A while back, Dave and Darien discussed the possibility of Darien flying to New York to live with Dave and go to college out east. Everyone was on board, including Kozy and Dave’s parents. Then Dave took a good hard look at what the next four years might look like and thought, just maybe, it'll hurt Darien more than it’ll help. They decided it's best that Darien stays in McKinley and goes to school in Chicago, so Dave will rely on regular phone calls to keep him on track.</span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; vertical-align: baseline;">With two weeks until he leaves, Dave's been walking a lot of laps around the lake by his house. It's a nice place to reflect. He goes alone when he wants to speak to God, but most of the time brings company. He thinks about Darien everyday. He doesn't doubt the difference he made, reminding himself of the story of the young girl who throws starfish into the ocean. A woman approaches the girl and says there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it, so she can't possibly make a difference. The girl pauses, throws another one into the sea and tells the woman it made a difference for that one.</span></b></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1a555463-0d70-5d03-18c2-ef031a64ac38" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is an important reality of Dave’s work at the Teen Center. He touches these kids' lives for a year then leaves without a return ticket. He says he's ready to leave Chicago and return to his home and his girlfriend, but his work here feels incomplete because of Darien. He hopes for the best but understands the challenges Darien is up against, yet he's never met anyone quite like Darien so maybe he'll make it out of McKinley. For now, he waits.</span></b></div>
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Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-31213453338488725332013-05-29T17:41:00.002-04:002013-05-29T17:41:59.068-04:00The Burger That Shattered Her LifeI remember reading <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=michael%20moss%20hamburger&st=cse&scp=1">this piece</a> when it ran in the New York Times back in October of 2009. The author, Michael Moss, won the Pulitzer for explanatory reporting the following year. It's not a profile, but since we have the option to do our final piece as explanatory journalism, I thought it would be good to read.<br />
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It tells the story of 22 year-old dance instructor Stephanie Smith, who fell victim to the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to Cargill ground beef (Moss's article was published two years after the outbreak). His piece follows the path of the burger patty that left Smith in a coma for months, eventually paralyzing her and causing her to suffer organ failure, on top of other things, when she came out of the coma. I think her case was considered the most severe anyone had ever seen.<br />
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When I first read it in 2009, I had just gotten to K and hadn't been exposed to food justice issues just yet. The article stuck with me for months because the evils of industrial agriculture were new to me. It was the first time I ever thought about the origins of my food, and I've come a long way since thanks to the food culture on this campus and in Kalamazoo.Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-87769866745667950062013-05-22T17:33:00.002-04:002013-05-22T17:33:56.693-04:00Profile (final): Kim Russell<b id="docs-internal-guid-390b57ae-ce28-c2f8-3fe9-b976456dda71" style="font-weight: normal;"></b>Audience: The Index<br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-390b57ae-ce28-c2f8-3fe9-b976456dda71" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kim wears a different nail polish every week. Lilac puts her in an especially good mood. Her manicured nails are opaque but still shine from a distance. Along with her salon highlights, they add a much-needed glow to an otherwise dull ensemble: A pair of faded blue jeans, off-white sneakers. Like all Facilities Management workers, Kim is given an allowance to purchase clothes from the bookstore to wear while she works. She only buys gray because everything else is too flashy. </span></b></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-390b57ae-ce28-c2f8-3fe9-b976456dda71" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-390b57ae-ce28-c2f8-3fe9-b976456dda71" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She’s happy when she wears lilac. She says she feels pretty. The next week she paints them gray. Maybe it’s just coincidence, or maybe it’s because of the rain, which causes her t-shirt to turn the same color as her nails, but Kim isn’t as cheerful on the days she paints them gray. </span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She doesn’t paint her nails this often because the color wears away from nine-hour days cleaning Hicks. Kim somehow manages to keep them in pristine condition as she begrudgingly cleans Dean Joshua’s office windows. After Dean Joshua filed a complaint with FacMan that her carpet wasn’t vacuumed thoroughly, Kim stopped taking her trash out as often. A few doors down, Kim empties Brian Dietz’s near-empty trash can because he’s nice to her. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At 9am, a voice comes onto the walkie talkie while Kim is cleaning the student leadership suite, which she says is always messy because of “those big girls who order pizza all the time.” The voice belongs to Kathy, another FacMan custodian. She says help is needed over in Severn. Kim divulges that the custodian responsible for the building was caught sleeping on the job, and after going three days without pay, he came back and retired. Kim turns her radio down. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Twenty minutes earlier, Shane’s already grinning behind the security desk when Kim walks in. He teases her with a story and she smiles bashfully. She says be nice, or else she won’t take out their trash. It’s her favorite threat. These guys are the closest thing she has to friends on this campus, so she eggs them on. She heads toward the back of the office and returns a few minutes later with their carpet sweeper. Dave tells her she can’t keep taking it, that she’s racking up the fees. She walks out of the office with it and a grin. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She tells me that not everyone is nice to her around Hicks. She likes cleaning here but misses Hoben since they changed everyone’s placement this year. She misses the kids. She misses driving them to the mall or to the Amtrak station on the weekends or around campus in her red truck. She misses the girls from Texas, now seniors, who don’t stop to say hi to her anymore. During her lunch break, she used to sit in the Hoben lounge and wait for them to come by and gossip with her like high schoolers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These days, she eats lunch in the Richardson Room with the same FacMan employees: Dylan, Stephanie and Mark. Some days she enjoys their company, like the day Mark reached for his phone to show everyone a video of Kim and another custodian playing in the sprinklers behind Hoben on a hot day last spring. It’s Girls Gone Wild, he says. Custodian style. Kim stops him before he gets to his back pocket, laughing. “You get outta here!” she says. Her eyes disappear from smiling so big. She likes when they pick on her. Mark says they target her because she takes it so well. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The next day, before she can finish throwing her trash out, the other three have already made their way down the hall to exit the building. Kim is annoyed because they’re supposed to walk out together, but she doesn’t yell for them to wait up. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“They do that sometimes,” she mumbles, resigned. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ever since her best friend from childhood died 20 years ago, and her husband of seventeen years divorced her “for no reason”, Kim keeps mostly to herself. She says it’s because all of her friends want to party.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Everybody tells me I’m boring.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She prefers to stay at home and let her dog, Magnus, “man handle” her, while she paints or quilts or makes stained glass windows. Kim wants to be an artist. She’d quit her job if she could make a living out of it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When she’s not creating something, she’s watching her favorite tabloid talk show, Maury, popularly known for its agonizing displays of baby mama drama and sexual infidelity. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I wanna watch them idiots fight cause they’re so stupid.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She’s convinced the talk show is a set up. It has to be. There can’t be that many stupid people in the world, she thinks. She likes Maury because it make her feel better.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “I think, maybe I don’t have it so bad after all.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She doesn’t feel like changing when she gets home from work, so she stays in her faded jeans and gray Kalamazoo College tshirt while she watches Maury or quilts or plays with Magnus, until she goes to bed, putting it back on just a few hours later and returns to a sleeping campus at five am. She doesn’t mind the solitude those first few hours, but prefers when everyone is awake. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If she could go anywhere in the world, it would be Jamaica. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I would probably go just ‘cause I know all the Jamaicans here and I probably don’t have to pay to stay anywhere.” She laughs and her eyes disappear again. She wants to go to Jamaica for the beaches, even though she won’t put a bathing suit on because she thinks she’s too fat. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Although, if I was in Jamaica I would never see anybody again so I probably wouldn’t give a shit! Who cares, right?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A fun day for Kim is when she, her sister and her friend Donna go quilt shop hopping for sales. When she tries to do something different, it never works out. Once she wanted to see a baseball game but couldn’t find her way into the parking lot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I got pissed off and went to the mall.” Malls are therapeautic for Kim. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She has no desire to find another husband or boyfriend. She misses her two grown boys but Magnus fills the silences of her home and the empty side of the bed at night. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She says her life was always quite simple. When she was still married, she took care of the pigs and cows on her countryside property in Otsego. She used to kill the animals for their meat, but stopped when she got attached to one of the pigs. Kim named her Precious. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her husband let her keep the house and bought himself another property not too far away, so every once in awhile, she makes him come over to fix things for her. They’re not friends but they’ve learned to tolerate the other’s presence. She doesn’t mind him around. At least it’s company, she says. </span></div>
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</b>Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-65428887706311831162013-05-22T13:42:00.000-04:002013-05-22T13:42:40.691-04:00Reading Response: Events of October<div>
This book was a page-turner for me, which I attribute largely to its organization. I thought it was interesting that she chose to place the murder-suicide in the middle of the novel. This structure allowed her to address at length the effects of murder and suicide on a small college campus, so the book became much more than a narrative about the crime. It is about a community's response to it. After reading the murder-suicide that early on, I was left wondering how she would conclude the novel, but the organization makes sense given her ability to shed light on the bigger picture and larger issues. She zooms in (on the main event and campus response to it) in order to zoom out later on (on the larger implications for society and culture). </div>
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I was also blown away by the magnitude of interviews she conducted, from Maggie Wardle's family and friends to college professors and legal authorities. These people lent a variety of perspectives that give readers access to the murder-suicide's effects on campus from various angles. I put the book down feeling like I had gotten a substantial, holistic view of the events. And as a student on this campus, I felt invested every step of the way, and I could empathize with the feelings of the many students and faculty members that Griffin interviewed. </div>
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Even the second time around reading this, I was particularly interested in the way Griffin writes about Neenef and his friends. I remember the first time, I didn't know what to expect in terms of how she would treat him as a character and his actions, so I was surprised that she treated him and his friends with a lot of sympathy. I liked how she gives his friends a voice in the narrative as well, an outlet to express their grief as well as the grief of Maggie's friends and family. Again, she comes at the aftereffects of the events at many different angles to give readers a well-rounded understanding of something that affected different people in unique ways. This lays the groundwork for her to be able to address greater issues, like masculinity and its tie to culture and domestic violence. It also makes the situation that much more complex, another reason it was a hard book to put down. </div>
Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-21831548213093344062013-05-07T16:41:00.001-04:002013-05-07T16:41:09.147-04:00Process Writing: Profile of Kim RussellI'm not sure there's a story here. My initial idea fell through, which was the interview the collage artists in Kalamazoo, so I needed to find a subject that I felt more secure with. I knew I'd be able to get access to Kim and see her work (she is the custodian in Hicks), which was important. Although I never got the chance to interview Kim at her home in Otsego, where she might have been more comfortable, I still felt like I caught her in her element. I woke up at 7am on various days to shadow her while she cleaned around Hicks.<br />
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I didn't know what the angle of my story would be when I went into it, and that was definitely a problem. There really wasn't a story there, but following Kim around shed a lot of light on her complexities. I think that was the angle I was going into this piece with: here is this woman who, on the most superficial level, seems to be quite simple and lead a simple life. But the more I dug, the more layers I saw. Observing her during her lunch break with other FacMan employees illuminated a lot of those complexities. I wanted to highlight her interactions with these people because that's when I was able to see a different, very vulnerable side of her.<br />
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I was afraid this would turn into one of those profiles we're supposed to avoid--a story about nice people doing nice things--especially after watching those first few interactions with other people, like the Security guards. People really adore her. But like I said, spending more time with her changed this initial impressions.<br />
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But does all of this translate on the page and actually make for a story? I don't know. You tell me!Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-75866250976906289692013-05-06T16:25:00.001-04:002013-05-06T16:25:38.731-04:00Profile: Kim Russell<div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Here’s our wet-n-wild Kim!” teases Mark. We’re sitting in the Richardson Room when he reaches for his phone so he can show me a video of Kim and one other member of the Facilities Management custodial staff playing in the sprinklers behind Hoben on a hot day last spring. It’s Girls Gone Wild, he says. Custodian style. Kim stops him before he gets to his back pocket, laughing. “You get outta here!” she says. Her eyes disappear from smiling so big. She likes when they pick on her. Mark says they target her because she takes it so well. Kim enjoys their company most the time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everyday at 11:30, Kim eats lunch with the same FacMan employees: Dylan, Stephanie and Mark. I meet her at the end of her lunch hour the next day. Before she can finish throwing her trash out, the other three have already made their way down the hall to exit the building. Kim is annoyed because they’re supposed to walk out together, but she doesn’t yell for them to wait up. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“They do that sometimes,” she mumbles, resigned. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kim doesn’t have a lot of friends. Ever since her best friend from childhood died 20 years ago, and her husband of seventeen years divorced her “for no reason”, Kim keeps mostly to herself. She says it’s because all of her friends want to party.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I’m not a partier. I don’t party. I’m not a drinker. I’m not a dope smoker.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She prefers to stay at home and let her dog, Magnus, “man handle” her, while she paints or quilts or makes stained glass windows. Kim wants to be an artist. She’d quit her job if she could make a living out of it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When she’s not creating something, she’s watching Maury. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I wanna watch them idiots fight 'cause they’re so stupid.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She’s convinced the talk show is a set up. It has to be. There can’t be that many stupid people in the world, she thinks. She likes Maury because it make her feel better.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I think, maybe I don’t have it so bad after all.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If she could go anywhere in the world, it would be Jamaica. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I would probably go just ‘cause I know all the Jamaicans here and I probably don’t have to pay to stay anywhere.” She laughs and her eyes disappear again. She wants to go to Jamaica for the beaches, even though she won’t put a bathing suit on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Although, if I was in Jamaica I would never see anybody again so I probably wouldn’t give a shit! Who cares, right?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A voice interrupts her on the walkie talkie. It’s Kathy saying they need help over in Severn. Kim tells me the custodian responsible for Severn was caught sleeping, and after going three days without pay, he came back and retired. She mutters something mean about Kathy while she turns down her radio. She wears an amethyst ring on one of her fingers, drawing attention to her nails which are long and painted lilac, the way professionals do it. Her short auburn hair is combed neatly and shines. If it wasn’t so early in the morning, she might have just come from the salon.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A fun day for Kim is when she, her sister and her friend Donna go quilt shop hopping for sales. When she tries to do something different, it never pans out. Once she wanted to see a baseball game but couldn’t find her way into the parking lot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kim has no desire to find another husband or boyfriend. She misses her two grown boys but Magnus fills the silences of her home and the empty side of the bed at night. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She says her life was always quite simple. When she was still married, she took care of the pigs and cows on her countryside property in Otsego. She used to kill the animals for their meat, but stopped when she got attached to one of the pigs. She named it Precious. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her husband let her keep the house and bought himself another property not too far away, so every once in awhile, she makes him come over to fix things for her. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Around 8:30am, she walks into the Security Office. Shane and Dave grin. They’re expecting her. Shane teases her with a story and she just smiles. They have to be nice to her, or else she won’t take out their trash. She tells me that not everyone is nice to her around Hicks. She likes cleaning here but misses Hoben since they changed everyone’s placement this year. She misses the kids. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She heads toward the back of the office and returns a few minutes later with their carpet sweeper. Dave tells her she can’t keep taking it, that she’s racking up the fees. She walks out of the office with it and a grin anyway. These guys are something like friends to Kim.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Intended publication...The Index?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Word Count: 905</span></span></div>
Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-82884331480032857912013-05-01T15:42:00.002-04:002013-05-01T15:42:53.401-04:00Reading Response: Frank Sinatra Has a ColdI thought that Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra profile engaged with a lot of the different questions and ideas we came up with in our last class--questions about accelerated intimacy, about who all to profile when you profile, about access.<div>
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Talese's profile was incredibly strong because you read it and hear the authority in his words. In this piece, his authority comes from (what I assumed was, and what Talese hints as) months of research. Even though much of the piece is grounded in one or two major events, he traverses an amount of time that isn't necessarily overwhelming to read, but I imagine is overwhelming to sort through and report. Acquiring all of that information--everything from Frank's childhood to his relationships and failed yet amicable marriages, to the bits about Dolly and Nancy Sinatra--requires a time commitment that we don't have in this class. Nevertheless, Talese's profile is a great model not just because of its literary qualities (like his incredible fiction-writing techniques), but because it proves that many interviews, and with people who are not the direct subject, really pay off. It's a good lesson to learn as we dive into our profiles.</div>
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<br />I'm interested to hear what the rest of the class thinks about the ending of the profile, since my attention waned a lot when Talese writes about The Sands. I wanted to stop reading and skip to the end. I was specifically thinking about a section in <i>Telling True Stories </i>where it says that, if you start a piece off really strong, your readers will forgive you almost anything later on in the piece. What do you guys think? How far can we stretch our readers' patience and understanding? </div>
Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-29224716241622117172013-04-29T13:09:00.001-04:002013-05-01T15:44:49.677-04:00What Tita Said: Final Draft(For <i>Modern Love</i>)<br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-2ff13889-58c3-d886-3474-28a09dc166e8" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not even after I flipped him the bird in front of the entire seventh grade class did Hiram understand I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Before I could bat an eyelid at the boy I did like, Ms. Molly Meade gave me my second-ever demerit right then as the whole school shuffled into the gym for the assembly. She yelled my name like I was the first Catholic schoolgirl in Beverly to raise the middle finger to a black boy. For a second her face matched the hot red flames of her hair so that her freckles disappeared and I understood why the boys called her a flaming leprechaun. She was new and twenty-two and still squealed when Catholic schoolboys and girls broke the Golden Rule.</span></b><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-2ff13889-58c3-d886-3474-28a09dc166e8" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She pulled me aside in English class later that day. Because she was also to blame for my</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">first-ever demerit--gifted to me when I dropped all of my textbooks and yelled “shit” in front of her, also in the gym--she required an explanation “This is very unlike you,” she began. With the rest of the seventh-grade class pretending to read </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Giver </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">behind us, I started to cry. My first course of action was to blame it on my new best friend because everyone knew Hannah Pienton was meaner than the meanest class bullies. Even though Hannah wouldn’t do the same for me, I left her out of it and instead told my first lie to my favorite teacher. “Actually, Ms. Meade, I stuck </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> finger at Hiram’s face,” and flipped her my ring finger. </span></b><br />
<b id="docs-internal-guid-2ff13889-58c3-d886-3474-28a09dc166e8" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-2ff13889-58c3-d886-3474-28a09dc166e8" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She asked why I did it. The snot running down the back of my throat and genuine confusion caught my tongue. Why had I done it? For one, Hiram was the most annoying boy I had ever known. He subscribed to the laws of grade school romance that dictated all lovestruck boys drive the girls they like mad by</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> ignoring them at recess and excluding them from their Pokemon Card clique, only to sneak glances at them in class thirty minutes later. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He didn’t speak but screeched and cackled like he was afraid of being ignored, and he flailed his thick arms and legs around like a t-rex so that the floors vibrated to announce his presence. Indigo, the only black girl in his class, was his best and only real friend. She sat with him at lunchtime and during school assemblies, and while she made friends with the other six-grade girls, each afternoon Hiram walked home with only the silence his classmate begged of him during school hours.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-2ff13889-58c3-d886-3474-28a09dc166e8" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The middle school boys called him oreo: black on the outside, white on the inside. As if the color of his skin didn’t draw enough attention to him, he spoke with a faint lisp, played guitar when most other boys played football, and never stopped smiling. One day a few weeks before the assembly, Hiram batted his beautiful brown eyes at me and became one of the first boys to ever flirt with me. I ran away, afraid he’d ask me a question to which I didn’t have the answer he was hoping for. </span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-2ff13889-58c3-d886-3474-28a09dc166e8" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hiram wasn’t the first black boy to admit he liked me. After Mrs. Flood sat Matt Brown and I next to each other four times in a row in fourth grade, Matt came to history class on Valentine’s Day with a red sealed envelope and a card inside that, in beautiful handwriting read, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Emily! I was going to put $40 in here but my mom wouldn’t let me. Love, Matt.” I told him I needed a few days to think about it, hoping he’d rescind the offer once he realized that, in fourth grade, it was really quite simple. You either liked someone or you didn’t. Like the rest of the fourth grade girls, I was saving myself for Pat Kelly, and so I justified the rejection on the grounds that I couldn’t date a boy with better penmanship. </span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That wasn’t the whole story. By the time we graduated, Matt would pursue most of my friends and get rejected by every one of them, and no one would ever mention the color of his skin. In Beverly--where 85% of the population was and is Irish Catholic--and at Christ the King School--where Matt Brown crowned himself the token black boy of the graduating class of 2005--people talked about race as often as our Catholic priests talked about suicide, and skin color was as relevant as God in our religion classes. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was something just as instinctual about my aversion to Hiram three years later, except this time, a memory was at work somewhere in the back of my mind. I was eleven years old sitting in the backseat of a van on my way to Tia Tencha’s house in Monterrey, Mexico. Tito and Tita sat in the front; Mom, Dad and the aunts in the middle; the grandkids in back. Conversations with Mom’s side usually turned to boys and dating because it was the only subject that didn’t bore the aunts. They soaked in stories of Becky’s transient high school relationships with the sports captains and musicians. We knew Tita preferred we marry nice Mexican boys to keep our traditions alive, but she didn’t seem to care that all of Becky’s boyfriends were </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">güeros</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. White boys. My cousins and I were becoming the first generation of Almaguer women who didn’t date and were likely not to marry Latino men because our parents opted out of the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago and into the white ones with the better schools. Becky was the first and wouldn’t be the last to get serious with a white boy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the next hour, the van filled with jokes about white boys and brown boys. Tita kept to herself in the front seat until someone mentioned the blacks. She didn’t engage in conversation because half the time she didn’t know what any of us were saying. Thirty-something years after coming to the U.S. from Mexico, she couldn’t keep up with the way young people talked. So when she did speak, we listened and remembered. So when Tita turned her head to the back row of the van and shouted, “I disown any granddaughter who marries a black man!”, not sure then if it was the truth or her racist humor, I soaked it in alongside the sounds of Elvis Crespo on the radio and carried its weight with me into the assembly that seventh-grade afternoon.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I knew Tita didn’t think warmly of black people, or even dark-skinned Latinos, after Mom told me the story of her boyfriend, Hank, a man darker than the darkest Mexicans in Little Village. Mom would have married him if not for Tita. That’s how it was on Dad’s side, too. When Sonica came out of Auntie Juana looking like a black baby, Tia Chole called Sonica </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pobrecita</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (poor thing) and Aunt Juana never spoke to Tia again. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ms. Meade didn’t hear that side of the story, though. I stuck to the part my whitewashed mind could make sense of.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s how it went in seventh grade. Hiram stomped his dinosaur stomp and looked at me with his dumb cartoon smile. Meanwhile, Hannah made jokes about his big lips and loud mouth while I listened, </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">always knowing there was a not so simple reason why I stuck my middle finger up at him, or why, </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">when I saw him trailing not too far behind when school got out, I walked home a bit faster than usual so he wouldn’t catch up and ask me to be his girlfriend. I never thought to tell him that Mom had a strict “no dating until sixteen” rule because Lauren’s very </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">public eighth-grade relationship with Charlie Rodriguez proved its irrelevance or Mom’s obliviousness, and it didn’t make much of a difference. I would have traded a lifetime of grounding for breaking it had Pat Kelly returned at least one of my infatuated gazes at his clownish smile, let alone asked me to grab burgers at Top Notch or spend a Saturday afternoon skimming magazines at Borders. I wasn’t afraid to break Mom’s rule with Pat because his penguin waddle and unwashed blond mop proved he was harmless and our relationship wouldn’t survive the summer. He was also white. Even if I had liked Hiram, I could never bring him home to the family.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ms. Meade ordered me to write a formal apology after I flipped him the bird. The next day I sat on the steps outside the cafeteria and drafted the letter that was henceforth known as my rite of passage into adolescence. Had she told Mom and Dad that their sweet Emily had a mean streak, they would have grounded me for a week but at least helped me write the letter. But she didn’t, so I was left to it with my God-fearing conscious and sorry seventh-grade eloquence. It went something like this:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Dear Hiram,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m sorry I stuck my middle finger at you in the gym. I did not mean to do it. I hope you can accept my apology.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Emily Guzman”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I gave it to him the next day and he smiled like I had handed him a love letter. He continued to smile at me so big I forgot all about it once springtime came, and all I did think about was the gap in his two front teeth that shined so bright against the blackness of his skin that it occurred to me just how white our world was.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the months following the incident, I said hi to him in the hallway, where I never smiled too warmly, while he still showered me with Valentine’s Day candy and haikus that I hid from friends and tossed in the garbage when I got home. I still watched for him on the sidewalk when school let out and listened to Hannah put him down for things he couldn’t control.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the last day of seventh grade, I dragged behind on the front lawn while everyone else walked home with their friends. I figured the end of the school year meant the end of Hiram’s unrequited romance, until he came up to me from behind, pulled me aside, and out came the question I hoped he never asked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Emily, will you be my girlfriend?”</span><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-2ff13889-58c3-d886-3474-28a09dc166e8" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I shouted at my neighbor Allison to wait up before I hurried some excuses, not thinking to tell him some truths, like Mom didn't let me date until I turned 16, and not wanting to tell him others, like at eleven years old, I sat in the back of a van in Mexico and heard Tita say that no granddaughter of hers will ever date a black boy.</span></b></div>
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</b>Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-39076171822244286702013-04-24T17:19:00.004-04:002013-05-01T15:47:14.756-04:00Reading Response: Writing For StorySomething that I haven't fully appreciated, and didn't appreciate when I took this class last spring, is the importance of the story. He writes, "Seeing stories is like any other marketable skill: It requires effort and practice. If it didn't, people wouldn't pay you for doing it" (74). The more journalism classes I take and Index meetings I go to, I recognize that the idea is often the most important element to a good narrative. But I still think that a good writer can turn even the most uninteresting, mundane thing into a worthwhile read, especially narrative journalists who rely so much on fiction writing techniques. <br />
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Franklin has had a pretty profound impact on my writing over the last year. He reflects on personal rejections, confronts lazy reporting and thinks back on his biases in his earliest works. Everything he writes about craftsmanship, simplicity, polishing, outlining, really stuck. The best part of this book is that he forces you to examine your own writing process, and tells you quite bluntly not to do certain things--like begin your story right where the story begins or use flashbacks because you'll sound like an amateur (which still surprised me)--because they don't work. <br />
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My favorite part of "Writing for Story" is still his chapter on the outline and I still think in terms of that structure when starting the writing process. I'm curious to hear how the rest of the class received Franklin, and this section in particular--and how easily they jumped on his bandwagon (or maybe didn't jump on it....).Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-63590258534440708972013-04-17T17:23:00.000-04:002013-05-01T15:44:12.583-04:00"What Tita Said": Draft 2<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.15; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.15; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Modern Love</span><span id="internal-source-marker_0.2984561554621905"></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not even after I flipped him the bird in front of the entire seventh grade class did Hiram understand I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Before I could bat an eyelid at the boy I did like, Ms. Molly Meade gave me my second-ever demerit right then as the whole school shuffled into the gym for the assembly. She yelled my name like I was the first Catholic schoolgirl in Beverly to raise the middle finger to a black boy. For a second her face matched the hot red flames of her hair so that her freckles disappeared and I understood why the boys called her a flaming leprechaun. She was new and twenty-two and still squealed when good-natured schoolboys and girls broke the Golden Rule.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She pulled me aside in English class later that day. Because she was also to blame for my</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">first-ever demerit--gifted to me when I dropped all of my textbooks and yelled “shit” in front of her, also in the gym--she required an explanation “This is very unlike you,” she began. With the rest of the seventh-grade class now pretending to read </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Giver </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">behind us, I started to cry. My first course of action was to blame it on my new best friend because everyone knew Hannah Pienton was meaner than the meanest bullies in the class. Even though Hannah wouldn’t do the same for me, I left her out of it and instead told my first ever lie to my favorite teacher. “Actually, Ms. Meade, I stuck </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> finger at Hiram’s face,” and flipped her my ring finger.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; white-space: pre-wrap;">She asked why I did it. The snot running down the back of my throat and genuine confusion left me silent for a minute. Why had I done it? Part of it was really quite simple. Hiram was the most annoying boy I had ever known.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He subscribed to the laws of grade school romance that dictated all lovestruck boys drive the girls they like mad by</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> calling them names and ignoring them during recess, only to sneak glances at them in class thirty minutes later. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.35; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He didn’t speak but screeched and cackled like he was afraid of being ignored, and he flailed his thick arms and legs around like a t-rex so that the floors vibrated to announce his presence. Indigo, the only black girl in his class, was his best and only real friend. She sat with him at lunchtime and during school assemblies, and while she made friends with the other six-grade girls, each day Hiram walked home with only the silence his classmate begged of him during school.</span><span id="internal-source-marker_0.2984561554621905"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span><br />
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<span id="internal-source-marker_0.2984561554621905"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The middle school boys called him oreo: black on the outside, white on the inside. As if the color of his skin didn’t draw enough attention to him, he spoke with a faint lisp, played guitar when all other boys played football, and never stopped smiling. One day a few weeks before the assembly, Hiram batted his beautiful brown eyes at me and became one of the first boys to ever flirt with me. I ran away, afraid he’d ask me a question to which I didn’t have the answer he was hoping for.</span></span><span id="internal-source-marker_0.2984561554621905"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.2984561554621905"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hiram wasn’t the first black boy to admit he liked me. After Mrs. Flood sat Matt Brown and I next to each other four times in a row in fourth grade, Matt came to history class on Valentine’s Day with a red sealed envelope and a card inside that, in beautiful handwriting read, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Emily! I was going to put $40 in here but my mom wouldn’t let me. Love, Matt.” I told him I needed a few days to think about it, hoping he’d rescind the offer once he realized that, in fourth grade, it was simple: You either liked someone or you didn’t. Like the rest of the fourth grade girls, I was saving myself for Matt Fahey, and so I justified the rejection on the grounds that I couldn’t date a boy with better penmanship. But that wasn’t the whole story.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the time we graduated, Matt would make his way to most of the girls in the class and get rejected by every one of them, and nobody would ever mention the color of his skin. In Beverly, where 85% of the people were Irish Catholics, and at Christ the King School specifically, where Matt Brown crowned himself the token black boy of the graduating class of 2005, people talked about race as often as the Catholic priests talked about suicide, and skin color was as relevant as God in our religion classes.</span></span><span id="internal-source-marker_0.2984561554621905"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.2984561554621905"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was something just as instinctual about my aversion to Hiram three years later, but this time it came from a memory of a car ride in Mexico with my family when I was eleven years old, when I heard my Tita say she’ll disown any granddaughter who marries a black man.</span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I knew Tita didn’t think warmly of black people, or even dark-skinned Latinos, after Mom told me the story of her boyfriend, Hank, a man darker than the darkest Mexicans in Little Village, who Mom would have married if not for Tita. That’s how it went on Dad’s side, too. When cousin Sonica came out of Auntie Juana looking like a black baby, Tia Chole called Sonica </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pobrecita</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (poor thing) and Aunt Juana never spoke to Tia again.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ms. Meade didn’t hear that side of the story, though. I stuck to the part my whitewashed mind could make sense of.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s how it went in seventh grade. Hiram stomped his dinosaur stomp and looked at me with his dumb cartoon smile. Meanwhile, Hannah made jokes about his big lips and loud mouth while I listened, </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">always knowing there was a not so simple reason why I stuck my middle finger up at him, or why, </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">when I saw him trailing not too far behind when school got out, I walked home a bit faster than usual so he wouldn’t catch up and ask me to be his girlfriend. I never thought to tell him that Mom had a strict “no dating until sixteen” rule because Lauren’s very </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">public eighth-grade relationship with Charlie Rodriguez proved its irrelevance or Mom’s obliviousness, and it didn’t make much of a difference. I would have traded a lifetime of grounding for breaking it had Pat Kelly returned at least one of my infatuated gazes at his clownish smile, let alone asked me to grab burgers at Top Notch or spend a Saturday afternoon skimming magazines at Borders. I wasn’t afraid to break Mom’s rule with Pat because his penguin waddle and unwashed blond mop proved he was harmless and our relationship wouldn’t survive the summer. He was also white. Even if I had liked Hiram, I could never bring him home to the family.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ms. Meade ordered me to write a formal apology after I flipped him the bird. The next day I sat on the steps outside the cafeteria and drafted the letter that was henceforth known as my rite of passage into adolescence. Had she told Mom and Dad that their sweet Emily had a mean streak, they would have grounded me for a week but at least helped me write the letter. But she didn’t, so I was left to it with my God-fearing conscious and sorry seventh-grade eloquence. It went something like this:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Dear Hiram,</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m sorry I stuck my middle finger at you in the gym. I did not mean to do it. I hope you can accept my apology.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Emily Guzman”</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I gave it to him the next day and he smiled like I had handed him a love letter. He continued to smile at me so big I forgot all about it once springtime came, and all I did think about was the gap in his two front teeth that shined so bright against the blackness of his skin that it occurred to me just how white our world was.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the months following the incident, I said hi to him in the hallway, where I never smiled too warmly, while he still showered me with Valentine’s Day candy and haikus that I hid from friends and tossed in the garbage when I got home. I still watched for him on the sidewalk when school let out and listened to Hannah put him down for things he couldn’t control.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the last day of seventh grade, I dragged behind on the front lawn while everyone else walked home with their friends. I figured the end of the school year meant the end of Hiram’s unrequited romance, until he came up to me from behind, pulled me aside, and out came the question I hoped he never asked.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Emily, will you be my girlfriend?”</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I shouted at my neighbor Allison to wait up before I hurried some excuses, not thinking to tell him some truths, like Mom didn't let me date until I turned 16, and not wanting to tell him others, like at eleven years old, I sat in the back of a van in Mexico and heard Tita say that no granddaughter of hers will ever date a black boy.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Word Count: 1537</span><br />
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</span>Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-8202194392264771102013-04-16T15:22:00.001-04:002013-04-16T15:22:15.692-04:00Reading Response: LeBlanc's "Trina and Trina"At one point, LeBlanc relates her positionality in the narrative to that of voyeurism. That's something I kept returning to throughout "Trina and Trina" as LeBlanc is granted (seemingly) unlimited access to Trina's most intimate interactions and behaviors, and all the while, as LeBlanc notes, Trina is largely unaware that she has an audience...or is she?<br />
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The relationship between narrative journalism and voyeurism (or the distinction between narrative journalists and voyeurs) is interesting because it raises questions about curiosity versus invasiveness. Delving into private lives is the nonfiction writer's greatest privilege, according to Gay Talese in "Telling True Stories", but I've always wondered when a reporter goes too far. LeBlanc is very self-aware in this piece, especially in this sense. She acknowledges that she's exceeding the role of reporter, "convinced I am going the limit as a reporter", when she decides to take Trina in. She feeds her, buys her notebooks in which Trina reveals her life, is her chauffeur to and from prison and rehab. </div>
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But LeBlanc seems to be equally passive in the story. "Trina and Trina" opens with LeBlanc just watching Trina go in and out of the buses doing crack. She watches Trina interact with crack dealers and neighborhood friends from the inside of her car. She's able to give the reader so much detail about Trina's appearance, interactions, mannerisms and speech because she watches and listens, like a voyeur. That she allows so many months to pass without seeing or hearing from Trina reads like a balance to those times LeBlanc exceeds her responsibilities as a reporter. </div>
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In the end, she calls Trina her friend. Trina in turn says she loves Adrian. Adrian transforms from voyeur and journalist to normal human being who can't be in this relationship anymore because it's destructive for the both of them. For me, this ending reveals the possibilities of narrative journalism and illuminates the human compassion and connection that is embedded in the genre.</div>
Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-79451622774159940892013-04-10T01:00:00.001-04:002013-05-01T15:46:55.189-04:00What Tita Said: Writing ProcessI wrote my essay before reading the assigned chapters in <i>Telling True Stories,</i> which I wish I had done because a lot of what Phillip Lopate writes about in "The Personal Essay and the First Person Character" resonated with me when I reflected on the writing process.<br />
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It took a lot for me to resist the urge to justify my and my grandma's behavior, and want to analyze my feelings about black men as a result of that conversation in Mexico. Lopate writes that it's these quirks that make for the best characters on the page, so we shouldn't smooth our edges and spare everyone's feelings. Lopate's essay settled some of my fears, but still I walked away from the piece nervous that my jaggedness bordered distaste and the truth would turn some readers off.<br />
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Ultimately, the message I tried to send is that children are malleable, not resilient, and they carry these seemingly minor experiences with them their whole lives. In the end, I had to let the young version of me and the young narrator take over and let the readers come to their own conclusions, no matter my anxieties about its reception.<br />
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A note on genre: my SIP was 80 pages of memoir, so I wasn't surprised when this piece turned into a lot of the pieces I wrote for my SIP. This class is about writing stories, and memoir certainly fits into the realm of narrative journalism and creative nonfiction, but I'm also walking away from this piece wondering if it fits under "personal essay." I hope that in class and in workshop we can talk through questions of genre.Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987132664585113190.post-10215285636373101902013-04-08T13:21:00.003-04:002013-04-17T17:24:32.695-04:00"What Tita Said"<b style="font-weight: normal; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For <i>Modern Love</i></span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b>
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.7774890407454222" style="font-weight: normal; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The backseat of the van smelled like old urine and a fresh dump. Nobody understood why AJ was still crapping his pants at nine years old. The family blamed Auntie Bea. They blamed it on her marrying a white man and moving 1500 miles away from the family to live in Vegas, where she worked for the casino by day and worried about a cheating husband by night. I didn't complain when they sat me next to AJ because, at eleven years old, I was the second youngest and the cousins said I had to pay my dues.</span></b><b style="font-weight: normal; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></b><b style="font-weight: normal; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tito and Tita sat in the front, Mom, Dad and the aunts in the middle, and grandkids in the back.</span></b><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Had she known AJ smelled like a toilet and remembered that the summer forecast in Mexico always called for unbearable heat, Mom wouldn’t have put her foot down to Tia Nora’s suggestion that we rent a pickup truck, on the grounds that the Mexican highways weren’t safe enough. So, for the next hour, we sang Elvis Crespo and stuck our noses out the small cracks in the van windows like canines, hurrying them back inside when lawless drivers cut us off with inches to spare a head-on collision. </span></b></b></b></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Conversations with Mom’s side of the family usually turned to boys and dating because it was the only subject that didn’t bore the aunts. While Mom forbade us to date until we turned 16, they soaked in the stories of Becky’s transient high school relationships with the sports captains and musicians, all of which had one thing in common: they were </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">g</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ü</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">eros</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. White boys. My cousins and I were becoming the first generation of Almaguer women who didn’t date and were likely not to marry Latino men because our parents opted out of the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago and into the Irish ones with the better schools. We knew the family preferred we marry into Mexican families to keep our traditions alive, but dated white boys anyway. Becky was the first and wouldn’t be the last to get serious with a white boy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the next hour on our way to Monterrey, the back seat of the van filled with jokes about white boys and brown boys. Tita kept to herself in the front seat until someone mentioned the blacks. She didn’t engage in conversation because half the time she didn’t know what any of us were saying. Thirty-something years after coming to the U.S. from Mexico, she couldn’t keep up with the way young people talked. So when she did speak, we listened and remembered. I knew Tita didn’t think warmly of black people, or even dark-skinned Latinos, after Mom told me the story of her boyfriend, Hank, a man darker than the darkest Mexicans in Little Village. Mom would have married him if not for Tita. That’s how it went on Dad’s side, too. When Sonica came out of Auntie Juana looking like a black baby, Tia Chole called Sonica </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pobrecita</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (poor thing) and Aunt Juana never spoke to Tia again. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">So when Tita turned her head to the back row of the van and shouted, “I disown any granddaughter who marries a black man!”, not sure then if it was the truth or her racist humor, I soaked it in like my stool-scented t-shirt and carried its weight into the afternoon</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> when the first black boy </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">asked me to be his girlfriend. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not even after I flipped him the bird in front of the entire seventh grade class did Hiram understand I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Before I could bat an eyelid at the boy I did like, the young Ms. Molly Meade gave me my second-ever demerit right then and there as the whole school shuffled into the gym for the assembly. She yelled my name like I was the first Catholic schoolgirl in Beverly to raise the middle finger to a black boy, and since Beverly was 85% Irish Catholic, I might’ve been. For a second her face matched the hot red flames of her hair so that her freckles disappeared and I understood why the boys called her a flaming leprechaun. After a year at Christ the King School, she still squealed when good-natured Catholic schoolboys and girls violated the Golden Rule. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She pulled me aside in English class later that day. Because she was also to blame for my</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">first-ever demerit--gifted to me when I shouted the word “shit” in front of her--she required an explanation “This is very unlike you,” she began. With the rest of the seventh-grade class now pretending to read </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Giver </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">behind us, I started to cry. My first course of action was to blame it on my new best friend because everyone knew Hannah Pienton was meaner than any boy bully in the neighborhood. Even though Hannah wouldn’t do the same for me, I left her out of it and instead told my first ever lie to my favorite teacher. “Actually, Ms. Meade, I stuck </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> finger at Hiram’s face,” and flipped her my ring finger. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was prepared to lie my way out of it until she asked why I did it. Some things I didn't understand and others I didn't want to admit, but the</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> part I could quantify was really quite simple.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Hiram was the most annoying boy I had ever met, and his bug eyes stopped at me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hiram subscribed to the laws of grade school romance that dictated all lovestruck boys drive the girls they like mad by acting like infants. He didn’t speak but screeched and cackled like he was afraid of being ignored, and he flailed his thick arms and legs around like a tyrannosaurus rex so that the floors vibrated to announce his presence. Indigo, the only black girl in his class, was his best and only real friend. She sat with him at lunchtime and during school assemblies, and while she made friends with the other six-grade girls, each day Hiram walked home with only the silence his classmate begged of him during school.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The middle school boys called him oreo: black on the outside, white on the inside. As if the color of his skin didn’t draw enough attention to him, he spoke with a faint lisp, played guitar when all other boys played football, and never stopped smiling. One day a few weeks before the assembly, Hiram batted his beautiful brown eyes at me and became the first boy to ever flirt with me. I ran away, afraid he’d ask me a question to which I didn’t have the answer he was hoping for.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s how it went in seventh grade. Hiram stomped his dinosaur stomp and looked at me with his dumb cartoon smile. Meanwhile, Hannah made jokes about his big lips and loud mouth while I listened, not able to put my finger on why I stuck my middle finger up at him, or why, when I saw him trailing not too far behind when school got out one day, I walked home a bit faster than usual so he wouldn’t catch up and ask me to be his girlfriend.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ms. Meade ordered me to write a formal apology. The next day I sat on the steps outside the cafeteria and drafted the letter that was henceforth known as my rite of passage into adolescence. Had she told Mom and Dad that their sweet Emily had a mean streak, they would have grounded me for a week but at least helped me write the letter. But she didn’t, so I was left to it with my God-fearing conscious and sorry seventh-grade eloquence. It went something like this: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Dear Hiram,</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m sorry I stuck my middle finger at you in the gym. I did not mean to do it. I hope you can accept my apology.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">From, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Emily Guzman”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I gave it to him the next day and he smiled like I had handed him a love letter. He continued to smile at me so big I forgot all about it once springtime came, and I did think about was the gap in his two front teeth that shined so bright against the blackness of his skin that it occurred to me just how white our world was. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the months following the incident, I said hi to him in the hallway, where I never smiled too warmly, while he still showered me with Valentine’s Day candy and haikus that I hid from friends and tossed in the garbage when I got home. I still watched for him on the sidewalk when school let out and listened to Hannah </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">put him down for things he couldn’t control. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the last day of seventh grade, I dragged behind on the front lawn </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">while everyone else walked home with their friends. I figured the end of the school year meant the end of Hiram’s unrequited romance, until he came up to me from behind, pulled me aside, and out came the question I hoped he never asked.</span><br />
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.7774890407454222" style="font-weight: normal; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Emily, will you be my girlfriend?”</span></b><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I shouted at my neighbor Allison to wait up before I hurried some excuses, not thinking to tell him some truths, like Mom didn't let me date until I turned 16, and not wanting to tell him others, like at eleven years old, </span></b><b style="font-weight: normal; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I sat in the back of a stinking van in Mexico and heard Tita say that no granddaughter of hers will ever date a black boy. </span></b></div>
Emily Guzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03397984109318486164noreply@blogger.com8