Photograph

In this photograph there is a picture of my sister, Meagan and I she is picking me up and we have our arms around eachother. I was about five or six and she was about seven or eight. We both have on dance costumes. She has on a red one piece outfit and i have on a cheetah one piece outfit. We use to dress up and put on a dance show for my mother. I remember we use to move the table in my living room and put on one of our cds. Then we use to make up a dance and then have my mother sit down and watch it. This picture was taken in my old house in North Brunswick at our condo. I also see a wooden bench that is right behind us. I remeber this bench being in our house too. I also see about three picture frames behind us. Although there is only a picture in one of the frames and its cut off in the photo but it was a picture of my sister and i when we were three and five. We moved out of the condo when i was about eight. The outfits we were wearing are way gone, i have not actually seen them since we moved, most likely my mother gave them away to family, friends or charity because we grew out of them.

Stories of things from my past

I looked into my one closet where i put a lot of my storage. I found a stuffed animal dog, his name is floppy. I remember my mother giving him to me when i was about eight years old. We went to a toy store and i saw it and fell in love with him. I thought he was so cute and his fur was so soft, i couldn't stop rubbing him on my face.The moment i walked out of the store i slept with that dog everynight, until i felt to old to be sleeping with a stuffed animal. I even brought him on vacations with me, sleepovers, etc.

Another item that i saw is a wooden box i have. In this box i have a necklace and you can slide open the front and there is a picture of my mother. I also have a picture of my parents on their wedding day and the article that was in the newspaper that announced they were getting married. I remember keeping my money in here a lot when i was younger too. I noticed on the inside lid of the box there was some numbers, i believe i use to try and keep count of the money i got on holidays.

narrative on which essay to revise

I am going to revise my first essay about my parents divorce. I thought i wouldn't want to revise it and use it as my final draft because it's personal but i had a change in mind. I am going to revise the essay and take out the things that i feel are to personal. I choose this essay because i have more to write about and i personally like the structure of it better then my second draft. My second draft is about my expectations of highschool, which is very original. I'm sure most peoples expectations of highschool are very similiar. Thus, i would like to revise the essay which is unique. I also like my first draft because there is a couple stories within the story, which makes it intresting. As i read over my second draft to revise it i couldn't add anything to make it more intresting or appealing to the reader i felt like it was very blah. Where as my first draft i had a ton of ideas circling through my head on what to add and take out to revise the draft. I decided to revise my first draft because it has a deeper meaning to me and with that i noticed i can develop a better essay.

draft two

I can vividly remember sitting in my chair the last day of middle school thinking continuously about what to expect going into high school. I had my own expectations, which of course were influenced by others who had already experienced it. I still remember my older sister telling me how she felt going into high school. Although, my sister and I are like day and night so it wasn’t much help to me. She had that I don’t care attitude and I worried about anything and everything that could possibly happen.
When I walked in the first day of orientation, I was so overwhelmed by the size of the building. I remember thinking, “HAA and they say you learn your way around in the first week, yea right.” I was walking through the hallways envisioning myself getting lost the first day. The building seemed so big and confusing, but I did keep in mind so did middle school and that turned out fine. I knew my middle school like the back of my hand, and in time I would know my high school like that right? I guess I hoped that I would and I did. The first day of school I got slightly lost, and I did what I said I wouldn’t, I asked an upperclassmen for directions and you wouldn’t believe it, they gave me legit directions on how to get to my class. I know now that, that was a false accusation I made about the upperclassmen.
The night before the first day of high school I sat up until two in the morning. What was I possibly doing? I was thinking about everything under the sun. Questions came in and out of my head and I remember thinking why do I think so much, on top of the million questions I had about high school. Who were my teachers going to be, male female? Will they be nice, strict, mean, boring? I hope those stories about freshman Friday in the bathroom are not true. The school was enormous on orientation day, will I get lost? How will I find my class if the bell rings and I’m lost? I remember thinking I don’t want to ask another student because they will probably give the wrong directions and humor themselves that they sent me the wrong way. Will teachers get furious that a student walks in late on the first day? Am I going to have people I know in my lunch, gym? What if I have no one I know in my lunch? I remember thinking that will devastate me I have to have at least one person right? Every question that I could think of entered my mind that night before my first day of high school.
One of the things that worried me was the amount of work that would be given and the difficulty I might have completing it. I figured it would be hard completing work for six different classes each day, plus papers, exams, test, quizzes and so fourth. I remember picturing assignments piled up to the ceiling and being up until three in the morning trying to finish. I guess at that time I wasn’t ready for high school yet. Or was it that I didn’t know what to expect so it made me nervous. I remember thinking that high school is probably much harder than middle school. If I would have known then what I know now I wouldn’t of even cared because high school was the best years of my life. My expectations for high school were much higher then they needed to be. Now that I think back I didn’t devote much time to studying and I easily passed all my classes without encountering any problems.
Expectations can really put a toll on a person. I heard the teachers of my high school did not care about teaching or helping their students. I couldn’t believe I heard that I remember thinking, “well why the hell are they teachers then if they don’t want to teach or help their students”. Of course that was another high expectation. It turned out all my teachers throughout the four years of high school were very caring and helpful to me. I realized that the person that told me that was just expecting to get babied in high school. With that I made the assumption that it wasn’t that the teachers didn’t care it was that they did want to treat us like babies. They were trying to prepare us for our future. The only exception to what I said was my biology teacher. I remember sitting in my biology class and I asked my friend Dan a question, who was sitting right next to me. My teacher raised his voice and with that, he said, “Jaimesue Shut up.” I couldn’t believe the words that came out of that man’s mouth. I looked at him and I said, “Do not ever tell me to shut up, if you would like to me be quiet ask nicely, it’s very unprofessional to talk to your students like that.” The teacher had a blank stare and said nothing in return.
Before my first day my friend called me up and said, “Do you hear what they do to freshmen on Friday.” Hesitantly I answered, “No what...” She said, “I heard every time a freshman uses the bathroom on Friday they would get tormented.” For a split second I thought about that foolish rumor wondering it was true. Now that I think back what a baby I was wondering if upperclassmen would pick on me. If I would known then what I know now I would have said, “yeah let someone try to torment me and they’ll be tormented by me!” But I did not have that attitude then so I asked my older sister about the freshman Friday rumor. She laughed and said that would never happen and she never even heard of that. I remember believing her and realizing I was a little to paranoid about the whole high school thing.
I had a lot of different expectations of high school. Unfortunately mostly all of them were negative. Now I am very pleased to say it turned out to be the opposite of what I expected. I’m glad I listened to other people’s opinions about high school but now I know you can’t believe everything you hear. I know that now but at the age of thirteen I was very naive. Although I worried like crazy and couldn’t stop bombarding myself with stupid questions high school turned out great. With all those questions and answers from other people and experiencing high school, I realized sometimes you will never know what to expect until you have experienced it yourself.

ideas for my scond draft

My focus for my second draft is going to be the impact my mother had on me throughout my life. I thought i could bring up a couple stories from my child hood till now and explain within those stories why she had such an impact on me. What she did to comfort me, advice she gave me, things she warned me about, punishments and rules when i was a child, manners she enforced etc. I thought it would be intresting to also bring up that because my mother means so much to me i hate hearing about anything bad that has to do with her. Its kinda weird in the sense that when there is something wrong with her i dont want to hear about it and i tend to ignore it or dont believe it. I thought that was intresting because since i consider her my "rock" i feel as if nothing can happen to her and shes such a strong person because that is what she has shown me. Although as i got older i realized shes human just like me and maybe all that strength was there to help me when i was weak.

In my first essay i liked how descipitive i was in telling the story. I also liked how i switched from three different ages which were six, twelve, and twenty one .I structured my essay in an orderly manner which was effective in telling my story about my parents divorce. For each age i had a different outlook on divorce and then at the age of twelve i was told a story of why my parents got divorced . The opening of my essay was efffective because i explained the definition of divorce and thats what my essay was about. If i had to change anything i would have liked to not have made it so personal where i did not want to post it as a blog. Yet when i wrote it i did not realize how personal it was till i was done writing it. Thus, for the next essay i would like to write about something less personal. I think for my next essay i am going to write a story about my mother. I realized throughout almost all my journal entries my mother comes up at least once. So i figured i could write an essay about her and the impact she had on my life.

Tim O' Brien

"How to Tell a True War Story" by Tim O' Brien is a story about how to tell if someone is telling the truth in a war story. O'Brien states, " A true war story is never moral.It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain the men from doing things they have always done". I thought this line was very important to the story because it sounded truthful and that's what the title is about. He says that a true war story does not suggest models of proper human behavior. I thought that was true because i have never been to war and I'm sure a majority of readers have not been either so we would agree that there is not proper human behavior in war because there is a lot of stuff that they do that we would never do. Thus we cant even pinpoint what they do there we can only assume by what we hear about "fighting in war" or stories that friends or family have told us about their experience in war but then again, O'Brien suggests that half of what is being told isn't true so do we truly know what happens in war. I also thought the example of Lemon was very true when he speaks upon watching a guy die it is very hard because you look away and look back and then look away again and the picture gets jumbled in your mind and you miss a lot of what actually happened. O'Brien states, "...a true war story is never about war...its about love and memory.Its about sorrow.It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen". Thus the truth in the story was about the pain Bob Kiley felt over Lemon's death and the pain he felt that Lemon's sister never wrote back.