Weekly Post 10

So I figure that if my internet keeps doing whatever it's doing, I might not be able to get this done on time again, so I'll do this weeks post while I've got it working for me, somewhat anyway. Well, I hope this cold thing goes away pretty quick because it sucks, it's not like the worst thing in the world but still. I got home from school today, went into my room, and slept until about six thirty. I'm kind of glad that I only work weekends now because working right after school sucks, it's like working a fifteen hour shift and that just gets old. Well, I'm about done with this one, so The End.

Weekly Post 9

Alright so this post is actually for last week, I couldn't get the internet to work for a few days and I finally got it to work today. So the time-frame for it was the 2nd through the 9th I guess. Anyway, Saturday I went and got a tree with the family. Didn't actually cut anymore wood up there because we've already got so much, although I can't see that lasting us all winter, but whatever, less work for me. I caught the cold thing that's going around, it's not too bad but still sucks, especially since I had to work the whole time I was sick. Alright that's about good, or so I'll tell myself, so The End.

Weekly Post 8

Wow, just barely got blogger to start working, this took me like thirty minutes to load this page for some unknown reason. Anyway, this weekend I... worked, big difference right? Ha, I'm to tired right now so if this doesn't make sense I'm sorry haha. Next weekend I'm going to get a Christmas tree; it's December already! Where did all the time go? We cut down around nine or so trees these last couple of days, and I split every piece with an axe, I'm sore and tired of it all, and next week we're going to cut more down... Well I'm to tired to write anymore, so I'm going to call it good.

Blog Post 7

So this week I came down with the stomach flu. It sucked, I spent a whole night throwing up, I literally only got to sleep at five in the morning. I still feel strange and it's Sunday. Other than that it was a pretty uneventful week. I did end up missing one day of work which was pretty nice, other than the puking part. I finally got to see some of the new season of The Walking Dead, I've only got to see season two which was really good; I never thought it'd be a very good show, but then I finally watched it and it was really surprising to me how good of a show it actually was.

Weekly Post 6

Alright time again for the weekly post. This weekend I went to cut wood for the house, we ended up falling, I think it was around six trees. The first tree we tried to cut down got hung up on a couple other trees. When they get hung up like that they tend to roll and the part of the tree that you cut it at jumps back at you, which is freaking scary, but this time it was stubborn and held on until the very last little bit of wood was holding it up. By the time it finally fell it was sitting on a point, it took forever to fall though so we had enough time to get out of the way. All the other trees, though, went pretty well, especially if you compared them to the first. Anyway I spent the rest of the weekend splitting the wood, and that's about it. 

Weekly Post 5

Well this week I finally got my part for my computer and got it fixed so now I'll be able to finally do my posts at the house, on time again. Hopefully, unless something else is wrong, and with my luck, there probably is something else wrong, but oh well I guess. So this last week I did basically nothing, there was Sunday when I got to go for a ride on my dirt bike, but that's about it. I guess I'm pretty close to done now so I'm going to call it good.

Common Theme Essay

Josh Pinneo
Mr. Gowans
Language Arts 12
10/16/12

Common Theme Essay

In this paper I will be covering the common theme of these three stories: Chango, What You Pawn I Will Redeem, Silver Pavements Golden Roofs. In the story Chango, Bony finds a dead monkey head in his parents front yard and decides to keep it. Bony is kind of a drunk, can’t hold a job and still lives with his parents. In the story What You Pawn I Will Redeem, Jackson finds his grandmother’s stolen regalia in a pawn shop and somehow has to come up with nine hundred and ninety nine dollars to buy it back. Unfortunately for him he seems to spend almost every dollar he earns on something (most of the time its alcohol). In the story Silver Pavements Golden Roofs,Jayanti comes to America to live with her aunt and uncle and finds that America is not what she thought it would be. Jayanti finds herself living in a run down apartment and with her drunk of an uncle and her aunt that can’t seem to help herself. In all of these stories you see that there is at least one person using alcohol to solve their problems. In Chango it’s the main character Bony, in What You Pawn I Will Redeem it’s the main character Jackson, and in Silver Pavements Golden Roofs, it’s the uncle to the main character, Bikram.

In the story Chango, there are many instances where this is shown.

“Now Bony made his money installing car stereos on the side. People paid him what they could- twenty or thirty dollars was the usual- but if he knew them, he might let them slide with a case of Corona or Negra Modelo.” (47). He can not hold down a job and will work for beer given the chance.

“‘No’ his father said. ‘All you want to do is drink beer with your new best friend your compadre, instead of going out to make a living.’” (43). His father is saying that he is just wasting his life away, using the monkey’s head and the beer to find comfort, but instead all it is doing for him is making him lazy. He lost his best friend in a car crash and has been a waste since. He drinks everyday, doesn’t work, and now he keeps a dead monkey’s head with him to remind himself of his friend.

In the story What You Pawn I Will Redeem, Jackson is a homeless drunk that finds his way to a pawnshop with his two homeless friends, where he finds his grandmother’s regalia, but they won’t just give him the regalia, he tells him that he needs to come up with nine hundred and ninety nine dollars before the next day and he’ll sell it to him. The pawnshop owner is nice enough to give him twenty dollars to start out with. First thing he does with the money is, he went to the store and bought three bottles of alcohol.

“Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I carried our twenty-dollar bill and our five dollars in loose change over to the 7-Eleven and spent it to buy three bottles of imagination.” (442). He and his friends, given the fortune of twenty dollars and the five dollars they already had, went straight to a store and bought alcohol to help them to think of some way they could come up with the money, instead of putting it towards the regalia like they should have done.

In What You Pawn I Will Redeem, there are many examples that support my thesis but one of the more prominent ones is, the time Jackson goes to the bar with the money he won from the lottery ticket, and buys the entire bar-full of people a few rounds.

“I walked inside Big Heart’s and counted fifteen Indians, eight men and seven women. I didn’t know any of them, but Indians like to belong, so we all pretended to be cousins.

‘How much for whiskey shots?’ I asked the bartender, a fat white guy. ‘You want the bad stuff or the badder stuff?’

‘As bad as you got.’

‘One dollar a shot.’ I laid my eighty dollars on the bar top.” (448). Again he uses his newfound fortune to buy more alcohol. He doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that he is using all his money on alcohol and justifies himself to the cop that finds him on the railroad tracks afterwards, by saying that he’s been killing himself ever since his grandmother died. He uses the alcohol to try to forget about the fact that his grandmother is dead.

In the story Silver Pavements Golden Roofs, Jayanti comes to America to live with her aunt and uncle, what she doesn’t expect is that she would live in a rundown apartment in a bad neighborhood, with her drunk of an uncle.

“He stands in the kitchen doorway, drinking from a can which glints in his fist... Budweiser, I read as he sets the can down, and am shocked to realize he’s drinking beer.” (43). Her uncle drinks beer, which, to her, is something that is unheard of in her family. Just the thought of him drinking brings back memories of the drunks in her Grandfather’s village, the farmhands would lay in the ditches, drunk on palm-toddy.

As you can see in all three stories there is a common occurrence, the act of using alcohol to either solve or try to solve a problem in the characters’ lives. There is a difference in the way they perceive the alcohol will do and what it actually does to their lives. For instance, in What You Pawn I Will Redeem, Jackson uses alcohol to make him feel better for the moment but in time he came to notice that it was only harming him. So in conclusion, there are many ways that the alcohol harmed them in the process but in the moment the characters used it to solve or to try to solve their problems.

Weekly Post 4

Well this post is late because my freaking computer is screwed up. I figured out that it was my hard drive and now I got to wait to get a new one. It sucks because its more money I really don't want to spend. It was either that lightening storm that fried it or just because a part came apart inside the actual drive. So either way its screwed and I can't fix it so I have to wait for the new hard drive to come so I can actually do my posts and stuff.

Weekly Post 3

So this is the third post so far. I'm running out of topics fast with these and the composition notebook writing assignments, so I think I'll just ramble a little bit. That's aloud right? Well I'm going to anyway I guess. So this next week is going to be really crazy. I have to get up at six to go check on an oil site, then go to school, and right after school I have to go to work at Gas N Go. I haven't gotten up that early in a while, I hope I wake up on time or I'm gonna be late for school, because it takes two and a half hours to do what I have to do. Anyway I'm just about done with this, right? Ah well i'm close enough, or at least I hope so haha. THE END

Woman Hollering Creek

In the story "Woman Hollering Creek" Cleofilas (the main character) is faced with many challenges. She married an abusive husband, Juan. The town that she lives has almost nothing to do, adding to her misfortune. She thought her life would be like one of the telenovas that she always watched, it turned out that she was very wrong. In her little piece of hell she meets Felice, who eventually saves her. Felice was a strange women to her "Felice was like no woman she'd ever met." (605). I believe this was a compliment because she is the opposite of Cleofilas, something she needed to be.
Cleofilas was stuck in this relationship that ended up being a terrible one. She was stuck at home until her husband got home and beat her. Felice is the one person that helps her, the one person that would actually do something for her.
Cleofilas was amazed by just about everything Felice was "Everything about this woman, this Felice, amazed Cleofilas. The fact that she drove a pickup." (604). She couldn't understand how this woman could talk the way she did, how she could drive a pickup, or how she pay for the truck herself. I think she was more amazed that she was the one to help her, this lady that was so unlike her.
Felice was an independent person that could hold her own "The pickup was hers. She herself had chosen it. She was paying for it." (604). Cleofilas was so astonished by the fact that she was so independent, that she had no husband, payed her own bills, and had her own truck, a truck, not something that she thought a woman would have.
So in conclusion I believe that when she said that Felice was like no woman she'd ever met, she meant it as a compliment, because she is the opposite of herself and, even though she is strange to her, Cleofilas knows that some of the attributes of Felice is something she needs to learn.

Weekly Post 2

Well this is my second post, I'm not sure if it was supposed to be the third so I just made the title "Weekly Post 2". Well anyway, to the story thing.

Last Friday I was coming home from school. I took Longstreet, like normal. I started my way onto Mainstreet when, all of a sudden, I hear somebody yell my name. It was weird because nobody was in the truck with me, but my windows were down, I looked around to see what was going on when I saw that it was Sydney and Hannah yelling at me from Chow Hound, but in the process I just about hit the car by me then I merged in the other lane and cut the person in that lane off too. I finally got turned around and made my way to Chow Hound, because I thought they needed something, but it turns out they were just yelling my name to see if I'd notice. So I basically just ran two people off the road for nothing. But nonetheless I didn't hurt anybody so all in all it was alright haha. 

Weekly Post 1

So this is the first week we have to post. I'm a little unsure of the topic were supposed to use so I'm going to ramble aimlessly to fill it. Well, anyway this week has been a little hectic and I haven't had the all that much time to finish all the papers and things we were supposed to for this class, so I'm doing them all in one day, ha its been crazy. I hope I can get it all done on time, because I work tomorrow, the next day, and the next day so I don't have all that much time. Well I'm around half way there, right? I'm glad this is the only class I really have homework in though because I probably wouldn't be able to get it all done on time, I mean look I barely got this classes homework turned in on time. Um I'm running out of topics but hey I'm almost done, right? Well I finished all my papers before this, besides the response paper that is. I think I'm going to do my response paper on "Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs" because, well it was the last paper I read ha. And now I think I'm done, so THE END.

Response Paper

This is a response paper to the story "Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs". In the story Jayanti comes to the United States and has a certain expectancy of how life should be and finds herself in a place that she eventually realizes is a cruel and unforgiving environment.
I think the moment that shows the actual transition of what her expectantcies were and her actual impression of her new life was when she got off the luxurious plane and stepped into a life with a drunken mechanic and his wife that can't stand up for herself, not the life she expected for so long.
She expects to come to a home like the ones she saw in the magazines "The apartment is another disappointment, not at all what an American home should be like. I've seen the pictures in Good Housekeeping and Sunset..." (40).
One of the main parts where she realizes that the place she has come to call home is a hostile environment is when she and her aunt go for a walk. They walk for a bit, all the while talking about India, even though she'd rather ask about America. When they finally decide they need to get home her aunt forgets which street its on, because her husband doesn't like it when she leaves. The one street they go to they find some kids on the street that seem harmless enough but they begin to ridicule them, "The boys bend their heads together, consulting, then the tallest one takes a step toward us and says, 'Nigger.'" (50). "
In the end she wishes she would of just listened to her mother and stayed in India. She came to America with the thought that it would great and instead was handed a life in a run-down part of the city where she was ridiculed for just being a different race.

Personal Narrative

Always Wear Boots

If you've ever rode a dirt bike you know that there's a lot of things that can go wrong. That's why they make special gear for you to wear so that you're pretty much safe from a lot of it. One of the most important pieces of gear ( besides your helmet of course) is boots. The boots protect your feet and part of your leg from all the stuff that gets kicked up, hitting the foot-pegs, kickstarting, ect. If you've ever rode a bike without boots you can definitely tell it helps a lot. Well back in the day, I wore every piece of gear I could because I've seen the stuff that has happened to people that don't. Every time I went out though, I'd get a little more used to the bike and a little lazier about putting my stuff on. It started out slow, I'd just not wear my knee_guards or my chest protector, then I got worse about it and only put on my helmet and gloves. I knew at some point I'd probably get hurt from not wearing them but the more used to the bike I got the less I'd wreck or lay it over. After so long I just didn't care because the rare lay-overs and small wrecks never seemed to do any damage. So, being my lazy self, I;d go out and start to do crazier and crazier stuff without all my stuff that I knew I should be wearing. One day I decided to go out, without my boots of course. I knew something was going to happen because when I kickstarted the bike it put a hole all the way through my shoe and cut up my foot. I still decided to go out though, but that feeling that something was going to happen was in the back of my head the whole time I was out and about. While I was out, nothing bad seemed to happen at first, so I went out to my trail I made up the road. I followed it for a while but I decided to take a different way and went down a waterline in the side of a cliff into a wash. I got down into the wash and realized there was absolutely no way back up, but for one reason or another, I went up the wash instead of trying to find a way out. I followed it for a while and found a cool, little jump, so I hit that for a while and found a couple more of them, so I was out for quite a while. When I  finally stopped I realized how long I had been out, it was like three hours, so I figured I better get home. I rode back down the wash forgetting that there was no way out back that way. When I got back to the spot I went into the wash I remembered I couldn't get back out that way and I panicked. I started back up the wash but it splits off into a couple different paths so I wasn't sure if it'd get me back. I got onto the other side of the wash just to try to get up high enough to find a way out, I followed the high spot for a while but every so often it'd cut me off. At this point I was gone for probably four hours and was running out of day light, so I started hurrying and made a lot of mistakes. When I finally started getting out of the main part of the wash I wheelied over, which broke the rear fender and I got scrapped up pretty good, if I would have worn my gear I probably would have been fine, anyway I was out of the main wash now but now there were a bunch of smaller washes I had to get through. All these washes have a sort of cliff on one side and a slopped side on the other, so getting through them is pretty difficult but somehow I managed to get through them all. I was finally getting back into a part that I knew and I knew I was fairly close to the road, but I completely forgot about the big wash between me and the road. I had to follow that for a mile or so until I found a spot that looked fairly easy to get out from, but for some reason somebody poured cement down it, which I couldn't see because it was covered with dirt. So, oblivious to the cement, I started up the hill. It was so soft though that I had to gun the bike, and when I finally saw the cement it was too late. With all the power of the bike I'm amazed it didn't turn out worse, but that back tire hit the cement spinning and sent the front end skyward. I tried as best I could to keep the bike on the ground but my efforts were in vain because it went up and landed straight on my foot with the foot-peg (when a two hundred fifty plus pound bike lands on your foot you know it). I knew at that point that if I would have just put on my boots I would have been fine but no, I had to be lazy that day. After the first initial shock the pain set in. I knew it was broken but I had to get home, so I dragged the bike the rest of the way up the hill. Of course I broke my right foot, the one you use to kickstart with. There was no other way, so I had to try to kickstart it and it was flooded so it took a few tries, which in turn made my foot worse off then it was before. Eventually, though, I got it started and made it back to the house. When I got my foot checked out they told me it was broken for sure and if I would of just put on my boots I would've walked away with maybe a bruise...