Some believe that the most significant change in their life was when they turned 21 because they could finally legally drink alcoholic drinks. The other, somewhat pathetic and perverted part of society believe that the most significant change in their life is when they turn 18 and can finally buy porn and tobacco, and in the state of North Carolina, where I am from, legally buy a shotgun. But lets be real, most people start drinking way before they ever turn 21 and all of those porn addicted people and bum a cigarette off of anyone they are around and can porn on the computer that you don’t have to verify your age to see. For me, going to college and moving out of my parents’ house wasn’t even the most significant change in my life because ever since I got my license when I was 16 and a car given to me by my parents, I have basically been able to do what ever I want. Getting my license was the most significant change in my life that I have experienced so far. I really love cars. My first car was actually a truck though; it was a Toyota Tacoma. I really loved that truck. I bought it from my sisters best friend. It had a really nice sound system with subs built into the bench seat in the back. Also, it had all the windows tinted and I got a tool box for the back. My sisters friend that I bought the truck from had already put a lifted suspension on the truck and 35 inch mud tires. It was gold and I got it 6 months before I even got my license because it was exactly what I wanted and they gave us a good price. Sadly, I flipped and totaled that truck on a Thursday night after a snow day when I was driving home from a friends house on a dirt road that leads to the back entrance of my neighborhood. But that truck was more than just a truck. It was a new found freedom that I had never had before. Have my license and a car that I could always drive game me as much freedom as I could ever have in a lifetime. When I got my license, I never looked back. Where I live, unless you have friends that are always willing to drive you, if you don’t have your license, you are stuck on the couch. In high school, its not even worth asking your parents for a ride because a car ride with your parents can kill you its so frustrating. All they do is drill you with questions and remind you about stuff that you were either going to already do in the first place or you were hoping that they forgot so you didn’t have to do it anymore.

Intertextuality is a place in a text that references another text in some way. It can reference another text in multiple ways. It can just mention another text by saying the name, or it can be a direct quote from another text. There are some movies that are completely based off of other moves because they are making fun of them. All of the “Not Another Scary Movie” movies are examples of this. They are multiple scenes from a selection of scary movies and basically just mock and make the horror films into a joke. Also, some movies just reference another movie for some reason. An example of this that stands out in my mind is in the movie “Step Brothers.” The scene that I am thinking about is when Dale is having his first counseling session with his therapist. He decides to not take his session seriously and decides to act like he is Will Hunting from the movie “Good Will Hunting”. He says that he is a janitor for a very prestigious college and thinks that he is smarter than everyone that goes to the school. He says that he sometimes goes to the board in the hallways and solves impossible equations that no one else can solve. The therapist says that he is just pretending that he is Will Hunting and is just stating the plot of the movie. But Dale denies this claim and continues on with his pretend life by acting like he is Will Hunting.

I am just going to talk about my break for this blog entry. I drove down to Florida with one of my friends from home who is still in high school. His name is Jared Goldstein and he is not related to me. I am from Durham, North Carolina and our first stop was in Boynton Beach, Florida to visit my grandmother. In Boynton beach, we basically just laid by the pool and played golf and messed around and went out to eat good food. After spending a few days there, we drove to Palm Beach to have lunch with Jared’s grandmother at her club called High Ridge Club. She made sure to tell us that it cost $150,000 just to become a member at this club. She loved to talk about how much everything costs. When we finished lunch she drove us to show us her new condo and then she gave us a driving tour of Palm Beach. The houses we saw were very nice; I got so lucky that I got to see how much bigger one of the many humble abodes of Jay Len is than my house. After the tour we drove down to my girlfriend’s house in Ocean Reef which is in Key Largo. There we spent the rest of our break doing various activities at and around her house. We fished, ate, and laid around doing various activities with the good company of my girlfriend and her friends. The week was highly enjoyed by everyone. But I must say, I am happy to be back in Miami. See you in class tomorrow.

Narrative Sequence

Let The Northern Lights Erase Your name by Vendela Vida portrays the life and the development of a lady names Clarissa. Not only did Clarissa go through a childhood of abandonment, but also went through a childhood of physical and mental abuse. Clarissa’s mother abandoned her when she was fourteen. She hasn’t seen or heard from her mother since then. Along with dealing with growing up without a mother, Clarissa has to also deal with and overcome the physical and sexual abuse. Clarissa is twenty-eight when her father dies. After his death, Clarissa finds out that the man who she thought was her biological father her whole life was not actually her real father. A childhood like Clarissa’s can either change someone in a positive way or a negative way. Unfortunately, Clarissa reacted to her childhood in a way that would affect her and the people that were involved in her life in a negative way. Instead of learning from the mistakes that Clarissa’s mother made while raising Clarissa, Clarissa decides to follow in her mother’s footsteps when making life long decisions.
Clarissa was raised by a man named Richard who she thought was her real father. Richard was always very good to Clarissa and always had good intentions while raising her. Clarissa and Richard were also very close during her childhood since Richard was her only parent figure that she had. Richard chose to keep the truth about Clarissa’s real parents away from Clarissa, which until the truth was discovered, was probably the best thing for Clarissa. The process of dealing with the fact that you mother has abandoned you and that your real father is not the man that you are being raised by would be a very hard process to deal with. As a child, it is better that one does not know that they are actually alone. Richard had good intentions when keeping the truth of Clarissa’s life a secret from her, but the truth is a bit of an overload when it is laid on her. When Richard dies and Clarissa finds out the truth about her father and her childhood, she feels more alone than ever and needs chance in her life. She makes a rash decision to leave everyone and her life behind to set of in search for her mother. This is a very selfish decision because Clarissa is engaged to a man named Pankaj. Clarissa is also pregnant with their child. This is a place in the novel where Clarissa should have learned from the mistake that her mother made by abandoning her. Clarissa knows the negative effects of abandoning the people that love you and that you are supposed to love, but she decides to leave anyways. If Clarissa is not able to learn from her mother’s decision then she is in no shape to be setting off to travel the world on her own. On top of her disheveled mindset, she is pregnant and engaged. Similar to her mother, her priorities are not with her family and her baby; they are with her own happiness.
Clarissa grew up without a mother. Her mother got up on day and just left without warning. It was a complete surprise to everyone in the family and was very devastating. She left with basically nothing, not even any clothes. After Clarissa’s father dies, Clarissa walks in and looks at Pankaj and just decides that she is going to leave him in search of her mother that she does not even know. Her mother obviously does not love her and Pankaj does, so this is a very rash and in a way, ignorant decision. “At seven, I opened the door to my room and stared at Pankaj. I would leave him, I decided” (16). She could have a good future with Pankaj, but instead decides to leave him and take a very big chance by risking the wellbeing of her future along with the future of her child and Pankaj. This is a very similar decision to the one that her mother made. They both just got up one morning and decided to leave everything behind. This is not a decision that a mature adult would make.
After Clarissa leaves Pankaj and sets off on her journey, Clarissa meets another man and makes another bad decision that I responsible adult should not be making. She meets a man named Kari and decides to have a few drinks with him even though Kari is much younger than her. Clarissa is just living in the moment and does not really ever think about the wellbeing of her future. Clarissa drinks Kari under the table since Kari is much younger than she is and cannot handle his booze as well as she can. She gets him to drink so much that he is found face down in the bathroom stall. “A part of me was relieved that what had started had ended” (36). A lot of the decisions that Clarissa makes help distract her from what her life is really like. It seems like she is just trying to forget everything. This desperation drives her to try anything new, but Clarissa’s desperation causes her to not think things through before she acts.
Clarissa later meets another man named Henrik during her travels. The more time that they spend together, the closer they become and Clarissa really starts to forget about ever going back to Pankaj. Henrik accompanies Clarissa in her travels to find her mother.

The end of the book was pretty much what I expected. Clarissa finally found her mother in Lapland. Her and her mother did not get along at all when they were finally together. Clarissa also writes a letter to Pankaj telling him that she is not going to return home to him. She tells him that she is moving on and is going in a different direction with her life. After she decides not to return home, Clarissa decides to travel through out Europe. During her travels she meets another man. This new man is Australian. She talks about how her and her new man are going to get married and raise her daughter with him and not Pankaj. Clarissa decides that she is never going to tell her daughter about her real family and her real father. She is following the footsteps of her mother, which I personally think is a really selfish and immature decision. Since she has so much hate for her mother for what she had done to her, it is really stupid to do the exact same thing with her own daughter. She should have learned from her mother’s mistakes. But this is not the first time that Clarissa made a very immature decision since she did already run away from everyone that loved and knew her. She really is not ready to be having a child of her own if she is going to follow the footsteps of her mother. She is being really selfish and is putting her happiness before her daughter which will probably come back to haunt her later in her life.

This is basically what I am going to write my paper on. I am going to write about the different ways that Clarissa is immature and makes bad decisions. I really think she could use some help or counseling because she needs to learn some life lessons. Most of the decisions that she makes in the book are very rash and she does not put much though behind them. Also, she is very selfish with her decisions and does not care or really think about how terribly her decisions affect the people around her that want to love her. She is also really not fit to raise a child. Hopefully her new man will knock some sense into her. She really cannot raise her daughter on her own and she is really risking the wellbeing of her child by not returning to Pankaj and taking a chance with a man who is really a stranger. For the baby’s sake, I hope everything works out with him.

So far I really like the book. It is really interesting to me because you really never know what is going to happen next. It’s a real page-turner.
In the first chapter of this section that we read we start to see signs that Clarissa’s mom might be crazy. Some of the signs are her mom starts to talk to the cat outside every night. She also starts to write notes in grains of pepper of salt. She writes her notes of things to do this way. In this chapter Clarissa’s mom also escapes for the first time form her husband.
The book then goes back in time and Clarissa talks about how she goes to look for her mother with her friend Virginia. On the 4th anniversary of her mother’s appearance the family holds a funeral for her but they do not even know weather or not their mother is dead.
In the next chapter of this section, Clarissa sets out to find her father in Finland. She goes to a church because she is told that her father is a priest. When she gets there, there is a mass going on and her father is leading the mass. She sees him but she does not actually say anything to him. She cannot decide if she should say something to him at the church or if she should wait and talk to him back at his house. She decides to wait and go to the house. Her father answers the door and one of his first questions is he asks if her mother has died yet.

I am going to start off by saying that I am not a very big fan of reading much of anything. This is mostly because I have a lot of trouble remembering what I read. When I was learning how to read, I was always behind in my progress compared to everyone else in my class. But I did eventually learn how to read and I would say that I am a pretty decent reader now. I still have a lot of trouble remembering what I read though. If it is something that I am very interested in, then I will pay enough attention to it that I will be able to remember it.
In high school, I have to admit that I did not read the majority of the reading. I would always start all of the assigned reading but I could never get through the first chapters because I would just get bored of it and loose interest. I am pretty sure that I survived high school English class just my listening to the discussions in class. I would always have trouble with the pop quizzes but I would do well on the tests and papers just from the discussions so my grade just balanced out. The first time that I started to enjoy English class was my junior year of high school. This was the year when we studied the American Dream and read books on that topic. Some of the books that we read were Easy Rider and Great Gatsby. Those are the first two book that I actually enjoyed reading. I also really liked my teacher that year so I would pay really good attention in class. If it is entertaining to be in class or we are talking about something that really interests me or that I can relate to, I will be able to pay attention in class. But if it is not something that I like, then I probably will get bored of the reading and not read it and just hope that I will be able to pay attention in class.
I am excited about the topic of this class. I am really interested in travel because I have no been many places besides states on the east coast. I have never been out of the country, so I have a lot of interest in foreign travel. I am particularly interested in European countries and South American countries. I feel that everyone should be able to travel around the world during his or her life times. I want to make travel a big part of my life when I get older and can support myself. Since I have such an interest in travel, I think that I will be able to stay interested in the reading that we do in this class since we are focusing on travel this semester. I am actually excited about English class for once. I also like how we can submit our papers over the internet on a blog because I think that we should take advantage of the technology that we have access to. In my first semester English class, every assignment that we had was over the Internet in some way. Our first project was to make a website about ourselves. Also, all of our papers we wrote were submitted online so we never had to bring them to class, which was nice.
Although reading is very important, it is not really a big part of my life. I like to read magazines and there is occasionally a book that I am assigned to read that I actually like and read the whole thing, but I never really pick up a book on my own and read. Reading comprehension has always been a difficult subject for me, but if I am interested in what I am reading, I usually will be able to remember what I have read. I think that I will like the books that we are going to read in this class because they are on a subject that I have a lot of interest in. I am hoping that I will be able to turn around my attitude towards reading so I will be able to pick up a book on my own and actually enjoy it.