English Final

    The blogging process has been an interesting experience this year. It was a new way for me to express my feelings over the Internet. I think that while, I like to blog, I will not continue to post as often. I recently found out a new way to track the people that view my blog. That will make it cool to see who views my blog and I will be able to change what I write to cater to who reads it.

    The post that is my favorite and the post that I am most proud of is the vignette post that I modeled after Sandra Cisnero’s book, “The House on Mango Street”. I spent the most time on this post out of any of mine. To more experienced authors, it may not seem like a lot, but to me 1500 words seems like a very high amount. I put the most time and effort by far on this post because I have a much easier time writing about my life instead of something that I don’t necessarily have a strong knowledge about, such as an academic book. I enjoy writing about vivid memories rather than someonelse’s opinion. In the vignettes, I was able to express myself and it did not have to be concrete and it can be a lot subjective.
    To write the vignettes, I started with the ECHO that we did of one of Cisnero’s stories titled “names”. I did some research and asked my parents about why they named me what they did and what it means.

“My names have much significance to me. In Greek, my first name means helper of mankind. To acquire my first name, my parents were traveling in Paris, France when my mom was pregnant with me. They were walking around enjoying the many sights of The City of Lights, when they came across a marble statue of Alexander The Great. They thought that the statue was so magnificent that they wanted to name their son after it.

My middle name was passed down from my grandfather on my mom’s side, his full name was Edwin Martin Quinn. My grandfather was a spy in World War II and he gathered intelligence to help the allies defeat the Germans. He was deceased before I was born, so I was named in his honor. Sometimes people scoff at the name, Edwin, but when I hear this I just smile inside because I know that I was named after a very brave man, brave like a lion.

My last name also has a very interesting story. My great grandfather on my dad’s side was was orphaned by a fire at a young age, at this time his last name, Freund. He was later adopted by his mother parents and he took their last name, Noble.  I like the name Noble because it gives me a goal to live up to, to be noble.”

The next vignette I wrote was about how I raised money for the 8th grade trip to Washington D.C. This was a very personal event to write about because I |earned a lot from the whole experience. While I was writing it, I tried to recall the major theme of the memory. I tried to portray it in a story-like format.

“One of the most interesting can donors was a Vietnam war Veteran with a really bad drinking problem. With the consistency of old faithful, he would call over and request to talk me.

Is Alex available?, he would say in an slightly inebriated voice.

Yes I’m here, I would always reply.

I have some recyclables ready for you to pick up, come on down, he would say, barley slurring his words together.

Ok, I’ll be right over, I retorted.

I would always wonder if he was ok when I heard him on the phone because he seemed to always be impaired due to alcohol.

The first time I ever made the trek over to him house, my nose was assaulted with the thick stench of alcohol that wafted from his house. When I saw the three hefty garbage bags full of recyclables, I figured that he had been saving them up for many, many months because of the sheer volume. I happily collected them and hauled them back to my yard. When I looked to investigate my loot, I found that only 25% of the recyclables were actually available for the California Redemption Value. The other 75% filled up all of my blue bin. The next week at the same time, I received a call and went over to my donor, very surprised that he was ready for me to pick up already. I didn't expect it, but there were three full garbage bags of recyclable again! When I looked through the bag, to my dismay, it was full of blue bin clogging items that I would receive no money for. At first I thought of all the extra work that this would cause me to endure, but then I thought about how badly that all that alcohol was affecting my neighbor.

On the trip that I worked so hard to go to, I saw many sights, including the  Vietnam War memorial. Later, I thought of how my neighbor was negatively affected by the war and was forced by post-traumatic stress disorder to start drinking the pain away.  When I was visiting in DC I sent him a postcard  thanking him for the support. To this day, whenever I walk by he will always call me over and talk to me.”

The next vignette I wrote about was my family’s handwriting. This was directly modeled off of Sandra Cisneros’ vignette in her book, “Hairs”. I tried to describe the different members of my family and how their personality connected to how they wrote.

“Everyone in my family has different handwriting. My Dad’s handwriting looks like quick scratch, where every word seems to blend together, but surprisingly it is still readable. My Dad’s messy handwriting is derived from the thousands of papers my Dad has written due to the fact that he is a lawyer. My handwriting is very messy and it closely resembles Dad’s handwriting because we both are bad at keeping it neat. My sister who is 11, has handwriting similar to mine, but it has something mine is lacking, that little girly touch, that all girls seem to have present in their handwriting. My Mom’s handwriting seems to be infused with bubbles because it is very flowy and big and easy to read, much like her personality. She tries to write neatly because she is a teacher and she wants to set a good example for her students. My sister who is 4 has handwriting that I cant categorize yet because she doesn’t write very often, but from what I have seen she might be destined to the fate that is bad handwriting, well I guess it runs in the family.”

While writing this, I tried to connect my family’s persona’s with how there hand writing appeared to me.

All in all,  my blog was a good experience for me. I learned how to express myself in a safe environment in front of my peers. It was a nice way to reflect on my blog to finish up the end of the year. I liked to go behind the scenes and explain how and why I wrote what I did. It is a relief to finally be done with this school year; this assignment wrapped up this blog and made me feel accomplished after the reflecting on the whole year.