Some Hoops

Some Hoops

            If you know me then you would know that I use to not have a lot of self-confidence, overtime it has gotten a lot better just because of my friends and certain situations that I have been put in. This story is one of the situations that my good friend Robert helped me build up my confidence and gave me some great advice.

One night my friends decided they wanted to go and play basketball at the church gym so they sent me a text message and asked if I wanted to go. At first I was a little hesitant to go but my friends finally talked me into going. I finally got there and they had already started playing, I knew them already so I knew that they were a whole lot better than me at basketball. I was talking to my buddy Robert and I was telling that I didn't really want to play because I wasn't that good. He told me that if I tried my hardest no one could complain. So we all started playing and at first I was doing terrible but as we kept playing I started to get better and better. My team did not win the first game but we did end up winning the next one, which made me feel pretty good. He came up to me after the game with this look of I told you so on his face and all he said was, “are you glad you came now?”, I was so tired and out of breath that all I could do was give him a little smirk and a small chuckle.

This memory sticks out to me because for many reasons. The first reason is because my friend taught one of the most valuable lessons that I now know today, that no matter what it is you’re doing whether its school, a job or something as small as playing basketball, that as long as you try your hardest at what you’re doing that you cannot really be ashamed of yourself for that. I know it was a weird lesson to get out of that whole situation but now I have a lot more self-confidence.  The second was that I actually one a game of basketball which didn't hurt at all.

This did not happen that long ago but I have remembered it ever since and will remember it for a long time.

Stitches and The Psyche

My original paper about Stitches: A Memoir was about the relationships between David, the main character, and his family. My research paper is going to be focused more on the psychological impact of the types of relationships the family had with each other.  What I’m hoping to get out of this paper is that there is a psychological reason behind the relationship of David and his mother. Hopefully answering questions like why she was so distant towards David and why she hated him. And to see if maybe the pattern of abuse from his mother comes from her past with her mother and her family or if it could have come from something else. Hopefully the more I research the more I can find about where these tendencies come from and if they can be traced back to a past relationship.

 My research is mainly coming from sources from the library database esources including the Gale database and other sites. One of the sources that I have found talks about how domestic violence can affect a young child’s emotional state. It also talks about how domestic violence comes shows on the child in many things like drawings. The children’s drawings would show either their parents abusing them or how it made them feel. 

Another source that I have found starts off with some theories behind domestic violence and the impact it has on the children.  It also talks about the different types of feeling that the children have that are going through domestic violence including anxiety, fear and dread. And also explaining the fear that the children have that they might not ever escape the violence in the home and how that fear can affect the relationships the children have later on in their lives.

So the research paper is going to mainly be about the relationship between David and his mother. Whether or not that relationship had a major effect on the rest of his life.

Bad Terms

                When a relationship ends one of the strongest emotions that could possibly come out of it is hatred toward the other party.  The two poems “What I Want” and “Hate Poem” describe some of the hatred that could come out of a relationship. Both of the poems describe their hatred in their own way one being a little subtle and the other not so much.

                In “What I Want” by George Bilgere, the narrator of the poem has a lot of built up rage and hatred toward his ex-wife, which if you read this poem you can tell is a little bit of an understatement. “What I Want” begins with the narrator saying some of the things that he wants things like sleep, ride a motorcycle watch clouds and then the narrator kind of slips in that he want his ex-wife to “get leprosy, Her beauty falling away in little chunks. At first it seems as if “What I Want” is going to be a nice little poem about what the narrator wishes he could have then you get to see this sudden anger come out and his hatred toward his ex-wife, a little bit later in the same sentence he goes on to say that “she exercises her gift for doing absolutely nothing” basically saying that his ex-wife was good for nothing. The narrator goes on to say he wants world peace, to be lectured by a woman from his work on the history of lingerie, a nice dinner with live music and then subtle puts his wife getting struck by lighting and caught on fire in front of her friends who happen to be sick of her stories. The narrator has so much hatred toward his ex-wife that he wants her to suffer from a lighting strike and caught on fire, which is still not the worst thing he wishes of her. The narrator continues on with what he wants, just to talk with some old friends, have lunch with his aunt, what he wants in a woman and how he want to read in the newspaper how his wife was given a lethal injection because of some “program to aimed at improving the civic pride of Cleveland” and it going wrong and she becomes a vegetable. The narrator clearly has some issues with his ex-wife, we can only assume, with the knowledge we have, that their relationship did not end on very good terms and the narrator is extremely angry about it and has a lot of unresolved

                Now in “Hate Poem” by Julie Sheehan, the narrator flat out says that she hates, assuming you take it as she is talking to her significant other, her partner. The narrator explains how everything not just herself shows her hatred towards her partner. Her wrist hates him, the way she holds a pencil, “each corpuscle singing in its capillary” even hates him. Everything hates the narrator’s significant other, she even goes as far as saying that the history of key chains hates the partner, even a closed window is clearly a sign of her hatred toward him. Everything is a reminder of hatred toward her partner even if it has absolutely nothing to with the situation or the actual person.

                As you can tell by these two poems bad relationships can cause a lot of hatred toward people if not settled correctly. These two poems “What I Want” and “Hate Poem” both show a hatred that could come out of a bad relationship while describing it in their own intense, kind of scary way.

Not A Clue About Poetry

Reading 180 more extraordinary poems for every day there are a few poems that I have to take a second look at to understand the full grasp of the poem. One of the poems I had to take a second look at was “The Russian Greatcoat” by Theodore Deppen. After reading the poem for the first time I was a little confused as to what Deppen was trying to explain to the readers. The poem starts off with the narrator swimming with his family having a great time and all of a sudden he starts to remember an old memory. The memory is about an unknown friend and the narrator’s Russian greatcoat standing on the Covington Bridge. A questions that comes to mind is who is this friend that he is with and what does this friend mean to the narrator. The friend is a great mystery to the reader something that also adds to the mystery is the fact that when the narrator’s wife asks about what he is thinking he lies to her to hide what he was thinking. It is almost as if the mention of the friend to the narrator’s wife would be almost an act of treason. The only thing I can think is that the friend was a past lover of the narrator and they had to keep it a secret from the narrator’s wife and that’s why he feels that his thoughts alone are an act of betrayal.

Non-verbal Communication

            People often say that 93% of communication is nonverbal, which means that most of the communications comes from body language. Author David Small takes advantage of this when he writes his graphic novel Stitches: A Memoir, David Small uses his images in this graphic novel to describe situations that words simply cannot and he also uses the body language of the characters to show their real feelings.

            Even from the beginning of the book David Small tells the reader that his family had their own language that involved no words Small would even write out the sounds that their “language” would make, things like his mom slammed doors making “Whap” noises, his dad hit a punching bag making a “pocketa”, and his brother banged on drums with the sound “bum”. This “language” is repeated thought the graphic novel, when his family did this they were trying to communicate something, being angry, sad, anything that they did not want to talk about verbally with each other. Or when David Small is recovering from his surgery later on in the graphic novel, his mother tells him to stop messing with his stitches and he looks at her with a look that said “why do you even care” but he can’t actually say anything because of the surgery.  He also uses his images to show what his metaphors mean to him, for example when David Small explains how his mother’s silent anger was “like a black tidal wave” he then draws a picture of a tidal wave swallowing him and his brother whole.

            Another thing that David Small does in Stitches: A Memoir is that he uses his drawings when no words can be used to describe what his emotions are toward a specific situation. When David, the young David, went out and played as Alice and was chased back to his house he draws a sequence showing David and he almost looks defeated and he then goes to his drawing pad and he becomes lost in his own drawings and it takes the pain of it away. Another example is when David and his mother go and visit his grandmother David is left with his grandmother and she punishes him and drags him around pulls him up the stairs by his wrist and burns his hands. Throughout this sequence while David’s grandmother pulls him, the images of David Small’s face shows that he was genuinely afraid and in pain from what his grandmother was doing to him. Later on in the novel when Small starts to see a psychiatrist the discuss how David’s mother does not love him and when David and his psychiatrist are coming to an end of the conversation, David just breaks down and starts to cry and it shows that he is going through pure sadness.  He shows all of this without words and uses the images to show so much more emotions coming from David Small most of these things you could not get from only words on a page you have to actually be able to see it.

             David Small in Stitches: A Memoir does an amazing job of going past the only verbal form of communication, using only words to describe things and using images to show the pure emotion that could only be seen not told. 

The Great Escape

            When I was younger my imagination was my escape from just about anything. Whether the day was good or bad my imagination took me to places that where almost unbelievable. My imagination taught me how to get out of my own head for a little bit.

            I couldn't actually go anywhere because I was too young to actually travel by myself so my backyard became my sandbox turning into whatever I wanted it to be whether it be a jungle a desert or maybe even outer space. Because my imagination was what constructed my sandbox, there was no such thing as a limit to what I could come up with.

            As soon as I would step through the screen door into my backyard the yard turned into a jungle so I did what any other kid would do naturally in that situation, I started running around like a mad man. While I was running around my mom would let out our little dachshund out in the yard with me. Because my imagination was already let loose that dachshund immediately turn into a massive tiger chasing me down, unfortunately that tiger was extremely quick and caught me, took me down and attacked me with many licks. Sometimes our dog would turn into an alien from outer space and we were on their planet, and I would start walking around the yard as if I were in zero gravity. But my imagination, even though it was like I was getting deeper into my mind it was also allowing me to get out of my mind to forget everything that has happened.

            A few years passed and I was able to actually walk the neighborhood by myself, I still had an extremely overactive imagination so when I had an off day I would take a page out of the old book and I would go outside and run around the neighborhood imagining most of the time that I was on a secret mission that I had to get from my house to the other end of the neighborhood as fast as I could. I would pretend like it was a plot from a spy movie with bad guys chasing me and all. It allowed me to forget about what was going while I was out there no matter how bad it was.  When I ran it felt like I was running away from my problems just for a little bit just long enough for me to figure out what I had to do about what ever situation I had gotten myself into.

            All of this taught me a very valuable lesson that I still carry with me today, all of those things taught me how to get out of my head to think about certain situations. I don’t have the imagination that I had when I was younger but I can still take myself out of the world just long enough for me to solve whatever my problem might be, even though it’s not the jungle or a secret mission it still got the job done.

A Life Lesson

Back in the day when I was about eight years old I was a little dare devil, I would do just about anything that I was dared to, let’s just say that I did not make very good decisions when I was younger. But that all changed after one accident that occurred so many years ago that caused me to be very cautious of the decisions I make.

            It started off as a typical summer day, waking up, making break feast, which usually consisted of just cereal, watching some T.V. for a little bit and then going outside to hang out with some friends. But this time it was different while all of us where outside playing around my friend Tyler comes out with a new bicycle ramp, this thing looked insane there where only a few kids that where willing to jump it and of course I was one of them. So I pulled my bike out of the garage and started ridding the bike around to start warming up. I was looking at this ramp and all I could think was this ramp was massive there is no way I could do this but everyone else was doing it so I felt obligated to do so as well.

            So there I was looking at this ramp dead on lined up with the center of the ramp, the thought “I can do this” kept repeating in my head over and over again. I took off as fast as I could, handle bars in front of me, wind blowing in my face, adrenaline pumping, and it felt amazing. Finally I hit the ramp for a few seconds I’m up in the air, it felt like I was flying, then all of a sudden I was coming back down to earth but instead of the handle bars in front of me they were behind me and I was headed face first toward the ground.

            When I finally hit the ground I hit the ground hard luckily I was able to put my arms down before my face dragged across the ground. But my arms were completely messed up I had blood dripping down arms and it was pretty painful. I picked myself up regretting the fact that I had just done that and thinking my mom was going to kill me. I went and found my bike, the bike actually went a whole lot further than I did, and headed back home to clean myself up. When I got home my mother freaked out on me and forced me to put up the bike for a little while. When I finally cleaned up I had two huge gashes all the way down my arms and also down one of my legs, it took a while but they eventually healed up and left minimal scaring.

            When I look back on that day I realized that I learned one of the most important lessons of my life, never to just go and do something without thinking about the consequences that could come from my actions. Ever since then I always think about the possible outcomes of my actions good and bad.