“It’s probably not even running by now,” I said as we walked, sandals slapping brick, and turned the corner. “Oh, looks like I was wrong.” Water was gushing from the spout of the Haymarket Tower, filling the basin below, spilling over its cement sides. We sat, Brooke and I, across from the Tower on a dirty metal bench, sipping our coffee and munching our bagels, just looking at it.

Lincoln is a part of me. I was raised here. I was young here. I suppose I still am. Even when things changed, families got uprooted, and I moved to another town, Lincoln was still my city. My “small town” friends didn’t know about Lincoln’s farmer’s market, or the Green Gateau, or about Bright Lights camp, or about anything really. We sat next to each other, doing the same thing, seeing the same thing. But we were so different. As one of my best small town friends and I watched the water splish and splash from the same bench, our minds were miles apart.

How does it happen? How do we become older, mature, ourselves? How do we grow?

Autumn is my favorite season and today was a perfect autumn day; the hot sun shining and brisk wind blowing, couples strolling hand-in-hand and eating their lunches in the restaurant’s outdoor seating. As I kneel to take pictures of the stream spraying and spouting from the tower, the sun and the mist and the wind flood my face at once and I am struck. I become the 6-year-old girl with a bowl-cut and half an egg roll in her mouth, begging her mommy to let her play in the fountain. It happens only in an instant—or perhaps not at all—and then I am me once again. No bowl-cut, no egg roll; just acid-wash skinnies, streaked waves, a chai latte, and a camera.

How does it happen? How does it work?

We stand and throw our trash away. A girl, a pretty girl, is sitting amongst a patch of yellow flowers, getting her senior pictures taken. We walk to the car, sandals slapping brick, wondering just when the hell it was that we grew up.

Post 3: Local Article

Site is virtual graveyard for MySpace's deceased
by Meghan Barr
Tuesday, Sep 11, 2007


Real death is hard enough as it is. Furthermore, the death becomes a whole different experience when the people who pass away are your peers. During high school, I lost one friend, one friend-of-a-friend, and one classmate. Realizing that someone else—who is at the same stage in his or her life as you are—is just as mortal as the next person is downright spooky. Feeling the goose bumps as you pass by their empty desks or glancing their grieving families in the grocery aisle can really mess with your head. But the thing I hate the most about getting over the deaths of peers are the MySpace and Facebook groups or accounts managed in their honors. Its an awkward thing to be invited into an “RIP…” group. I think its pointless, but declining the invitation would be rude. Seeing a profile page left exactly as it was made by the now-deceased user is quite cold and haunting, but seeing a page littered with “RIP”s and “i LuV yOu”s seems disrespectful and almost detrimental to the attempt of preserving the deceased's personality and memory.

Experiencing death on a real level and on a basic technological level is indeed damn hard. Why add to this pain? MyDeathSpace.com is the mind child of an unidentified, morbid, and bored young man. He began searching MySpace for the names of teens he found in the news—those who were being killed, killing themselves, or killing others—and eventually gathered all of the profiles into his aptly named directory. Many problems lie behind the creation of such a site.

Firstly, murderers’ profiles are also listed and linked to from the page; arranged victim and murderer, side by side. While the site is careful to specify accused and convicted criminals, there have been some slip-ups where innocent MySpace users who simply share names with killers become linked up to the site. They begin receiving harassing messages and even death threats from other MySpace users even though may be completely unaware that the murder even occurred or that MyDeathSpace even existed.

Secondly, this archive site creates yet another forum in which members can discuss and perhaps premeditate unhealthy or morbid actions. “Wickedly—curious” writes: “Anyone with any insight tell me if it would be possible for 2 people to shoot each other in the heads at the same time?”

Lastly, these sites, as well as the grieving groups generated on a more local basis are serving to whittle away at the interpersonal experience one has when dealing with a death. Death should be a solemn, humbling time to reflect. You don’t need to leave comments to a person who can’t possibly read them to show that you truly care. You don’t need a join a Facebook group to miss someone who is gone. You certainly don’t have to look at a profile page to remember the lives and stories of those who have passed away.

The neighborhood surrounding Rialto Extra has the ability to make one much more precautious than usual; when I park along the street a few blocks away, I double check that my car is locked. Skinny, grey-green weeds challenge the height and prominence of violated parking meters. Used Clue cards lay spilled across the cracked pavement, providing no help in settling one’s nerves.

But the walk into Rialto is essential. Maybe not if you’re just visiting to score a rockin’ party costume; in that case, receiving accusing stares from the homeless may be detrimental to your overall goal. But when going to observe, admire, and reflect, noticing these surroundings is just as important to the experience as entering the boutique itself.

Opening the heavy, paint-chipped door and stepping from hot cement to slick, mahogany floors is a relief. “It’s like walking into your grandma’s closet” says Ana, the salesperson on duty for the day. She thinks I’m a first timer. I’m not. By now I’m familiar with the musty smell, the beautiful molding on the ceiling, and the wide variety of furs that Rialto displays.

My mom was actually the first person to tell me about the store. How she found out about it I have no idea, but about two years ago me and my foreign-exchange-student friend Maja somehow ended up in that store with her at an open house celebration. When Ana invites me to sit down, take my time, and write, I glance around the room, picturing the way we were back then, wondering how small, how awkward I must have looked, thinking about how beautiful my mother must have been.

Rialto is full of stories, full of ghosts, inside and out. There are women bundled up in ninety-degree weather, staring off into space; men in stocking caps projecting cat calls; kids with Nike tennis shoes and no shirts. There are glamorous young women with dark curls and garnet-stained lips wearing sequined shifts and doing the Charleston; little blue-hairs bundled up in structured coats, prepared to fight the September chill as they take an afternoon stroll; girls with high-tops and 80s-hair leaning against the wall, smoking cigs; and weaving through it all, a dumpy, short, red-head, about age 46.

Vintage is an art, a way of life that extends so much further than the clothes we put on our backs or the hipster-esque label we may apply to ourselves. It’s about memories, about the people that came before us, and about the beauty that came from their lives.

Post I: Discourse Surrounding the Essay.

“In reading an essay, I want to feel that I’m communing with a real person, and a person who cares about what he or she’s writing about. …For me, the ideal essay is not an assignment, to be dispatched efficiently and intelligently, but an exploration, a questioning, an introspection. I want to see a piece of the essayist. I want to see a mind at work, imagining, spinning, struggling to understand. If the essayist has all the answers, then he isn’t struggling to grasp, and I won’t either.”

-Alan Lightman in “The Ideal Essay”

“If kids still write essays in school the way people my age used to, they meet the essay first as pure object. In school, it is (or was) a written paper of a certain length, on an assigned subject, with specified margins and neatness, due on the teacher’s desk at a certain date. From about fourth grade on, I wrote many essays. ‘An essay a week’ was the philosophy lots of grammar school teachers subscribed to back then. Recently I came across an essay of mine I’d saved from the fifth grade. It’s called ‘If I Had Three Wishes.’ My first wish, as I described it, was for lots of fishing equipment, my second was for a canoe in which to go fishing, and my third was for a cabin in the woods somewhere near good fishing. I have more or less gotten those wishes, writing occasional essays about fishing all the while. Even in its present state as childhood artifact, ‘If I Had Three Wishes’ retains its purposeful objectiveness: the three-ring binder paper with regular lines and space at the top for student’s name, teacher’s name, and date; the slow, newly learned script, in blue ballpoint, almost without mistakes; and the circled good grade in the teacher’s hand.”

-Ian Frazier in “The Essay as Object”

Frazier speaks of an essay that most high-school students know all to well, the “standard” essay mentioned earlier in the text. This essay is not the recorded process of finding the answer to a question, as many have been taught to believe, but is simply the answer. It is an “object,” manicured to follow perfectly the classroom’s structured guidelines for an essay. Being so structured, it is often left being flat and unimaginative.

Lightman’s previous quote shows how ridiculous this notion for an essay truly is. The essay should be about the writer’s journey of answering a question; whether the question ever ends up answered or not. Through that journey, things more meaningful than answers can emerge; things such as introspect and self-discovery.

I liked that these two quotations were next to each other in the reading. They seem to be in stark contrast to one another. But, having read and agreed with Lightman’s quotation before reading Frazier’s, their contrast shows a deeper purpose. I believe that Frazier agrees with Lightman on what an essay should be. Of course, his fifth-grade self may not have been capable of writing the type of essay that Lightman describes. But, I think that looking back, Frazier realizes that the good grade that his paper receives is ironic.

How could the grading guidelines Frazier so meticulously followed before be applied to Lightman’s preferred type of essay? They can’t and they shouldn’t be. How could the situation ‘If I Had Three Wishes’ honestly be answered in three paragraphs? It can’t be and it shouldn’t be. Penmanship and margins do not convey passion and articulate thought. The essay that Lightman speaks of is one entirely different than we are used to. It is time to adapt. It is time to weave in and out of arguments, to struggle, to doubt, to accept that sometimes questions will not be answered.

Test Post

First post for ENG 001, Section 07.