Eyrie 2012

2012

The Eyrie A Literary/Trades Journal

Eastern Maine Community College

Dear Reader ~ This, The Eyrie’s fourth annual issue, brings us the fine efforts of an ever-growing number of accomplished writers from a wider array of disciplines than ever before. Here you’ll find creative fiction and non-fiction, academic research and technical reports, encompassing everything from 17th century feminism to explosion welding of aluminum to steel, from weight loss to Wikipedia. Here you may discover insightful observations of human nature ranging from the pragmatic to the whimsical, read a mystical poem, or see characters from one well-known literary work interact with characters from other works. We even have a long-ish science fiction short story this time. Also, be sure to check out Victoria Hoffses’ description at the end of the journal of the process she used to produce this year’s great cover photo.

If you would like to submit your own work for publication in next year’s issue, please email your Microsoft Word-compatible attachments to dwood@emcc.edu, along with your name, the course name and number for which the work was produced, and a brief description of the relevant assignment.

(Technology-related/technology-specific writing welcomed.)

Thanks to all who contributed.

Enjoy!

Devin Kay Wood Editor

© All works in this journal remain the sole property of their owner and may not be reprinted without permission.

Table of contents From an Ant’s Perspective, to the Cosmic Perspective ...........5 Felicia Graham Contemplation ............................................................................6 Holly Cough Contemplating “Contemplation” ............................................11 Holly Cough Those Who Forget History… ..................................................12 Samantha Cox The Most Brilliant Idea in Human History ............................13 Felicia Graham A Special Place ..........................................................................15 Ruby Ann D’Salva-Bouton Sparrow .....................................................................................16 Steve Gray You Don’t Know What You Have Until It’s Gone ................20 Samantha Cox Children.....................................................................................21 Michael Vilasuso Mr. Goldfine Reads an Essay ..................................................23 Tom Graham Environmental Issue as Externality ........................................26 Eric Flewelling Skiing .........................................................................................28 Dustin Plessner Sector Z29-506 ..........................................................................29 Jared Wezner The Explosion Welding of Aluminum to Steel .......................35 Eric Flewelling My Wall .....................................................................................39 Benjamin Vicnaire The Walker: A Response to “The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas” and “The Lottery” ...........................................40 Heather Walz Working for the Public ............................................................46 Holliann Bergin Seventeenth Century Feminists and the Art of Persuasion ..48 Samantha Cox Looking in That Photo Album ................................................52 Dray Emerson

Running Barefoot ..................................................................... 53 Holliann Bergin Civility: An Oral Reading Report........................................... 58 Kurt Madden Making the Pico ........................................................................ 61 Leisa M. Clement Where They Begin, They Will Be Back .................................. 63 Michael Vilasuso Wikipedia: Can It Be Trusted? ............................................... 64 Alexander Gray The Rider .................................................................................. 72 Alex Snow Object Mini ............................................................................... 74 Elaina Fogler Small and Lonely ...................................................................... 74 Victoria Hoffses

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From an Ant's Perspective, to the Cosmic Perspective Felicia Graham Eng 162-95 Creative Non-fiction Writing Assignment: A small to large essay starting with a grass seed being taken as food by an ant and ending with the sun's eventual demise.

(Written in response to the prompt "To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.” - William Blake) To see a world in a grain of sand.

The ant clutched the helpless seed in its mouth. Up until a few minutes ago, the seed's future had been to become a blade of grass. Now it would be nothing more than a speck in a food storage chamber. On its way back to its hill, the ant happened to pass though the chicken pen. It was a fatal mistake. A hungry rooster scratching in the dirt caught it in its beak, joyfully gave it to a hen to gormandize and then handed her the seed the ant had dropped. *** The rooster was walking along minding his own business when it happened. The new rooster was getting on to a year old and now believed he should be top cock. The old cock tried his best, but the cockerel’s fighting skills were superior to his and he was soon forced into subordination. *** The humans walked down to the chicken coop with a large box. The coop was too full and they needed to remove old hens and extra roosters. Those doomed to the butcher’s block were rounded up with the new top cock amongst them. *** The dictator looked down upon his people. They held up signs, screaming for reform, demanding he step down. Some police came out of the

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background and fired on the crowd. The dictator smiled at the screams.

The rebels and hopefully any future rebellion had been crushed. *** Two tectonic plates were trying to drift in opposite directions, but their jagged edges had snagged on each other. Finally, they came apart and the cities near the fault tumbled to the ground. *** Numerous asteroids are flying around our solar system. Jupiter deflects a good amount of them, but not all of them as the dinosaurs could tell you. *** The sun works away day and night, twenty-four seven, three hundred and sixty-five days a year fusing hydrogen into helium. Everything is fine now, but in 5 billion years, it will run out of fuel, become a giant red star, swallow Mercury and Venus and even if Earth is not swallowed too, it will be too hot for life to survive.

Contemplation Holly Cough Eng112-02 Introduction to Literature Assignment: To write a short story juxtaposing main characters from two works to reflect my understanding of the original works, in this case Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk.”

Reincarnation is real. I know, I know…sounds crazy, like something you’d hear some far-out yoga teacher talking about: “I was a dolphin in my last life.” Whatever…that’s complete and total bullshit. You see, it doesn’t really work like that. Pull up a chair, let me tell ya how it really works.

First, you’re born for the first time. You live your life, you die, and then you enter into what is called, “Contemplation.” This is the period between your first and second lives when you reflect on the details of your life.

You think about what you would do all over again, what you would change, that sorta thing. When God decides what you come back as, he looks at how you lived your first life. Now, there’s no grey area when it comes to Contemplation; you come back as one of two things.

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If you lived a mostly good and honest life you get to spend your Contemplation as a tree. When you’re a tree, you spend your days at peace, basking in the sunshine; you reflect on your days lovingly as a gentle wind blows through your leaves. Each day is just like a day at the spa. I know, because I’m a tree, a tall, strong oak.

If you lived a mostly bad life, you spend your Contemplation as a slug, a nasty, disgusting slug. As a slug, you speak your own language, which is as nasty and disgusting as you are. It’s the most awful sound you ever heard; it sounds like Fran Drescher speaking Pig Latin. There are no dialects and only slugs can understand each other.

That is, until recently. You see, basking in the sun is wonderful…but it does get a little boring sometimes. When I need a break from my deep introspection, I slug-watch. Apparently, I’ve been getting bored a lot lately, because I’ve recently discovered I can understand “Slugish.” I can’t speak it, but I can understand what they’re saying. Ever since I’ve discovered this, I can’t stop eavesdropping. They’re fascinating! In my first life, I was a maid at a Howard Johnson’s and in between toilet scrubbin’s, I’d watch soap operas on television. I’m tellin’ ya, watchin’ these slugs is like watchin’ those soaps…only better! I heard that the networks are canceling a lot of those soaps nowadays; nobody watches ‘em anymore, I guess. But they will soon! I’ve been translating all the slug drama and in my next life, I’m going to pitch my slug soaps to all the major networks. There’s going to be a bidding war. This is T.V. gold, I tell ya!

So, this is what I have so far, but I keep adding to it as the slug drama unfolds. Since I don’t know how to write no script or nothing, I just wrote down what I saw and who said what into my journal and those fancy writers can polish it up for T.V. I did put in plenty of “soap opera stares” (or “sos”). I’ve buried this journal underneath myself, and in my next life, I’m going to dig it up and cash in! And if anyone finds this before I come back for it, you better put it back right where you found it…or else I’ma hitcha with my mop and flush ya down the toilet!

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

As the Slug Turns The Young and the Legless Desperate Slugwives

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Chapter 1

As the Slug Turns

Spunk Slug. So…what are you in for?

Brown Slug. I beg your pardon?

Spunk. You know…what’d you do to end up a slug?

Brown. (hesitates) Why should I tell you? Mind your business.

Spunk. Hey, don’t get all bent outta shape. I’ll go first. I killed someone.

Brown. MURDERER! (sos…that’s soap opera stare, in case you forgot) Spunk. Hey, take it easy, would ya?

Brown. No I will NOT! You’re a killer. Why am I a slug? I didn’t kill anyone!

Spunk. Well, you must have done something, or else you wouldn’t be a slug, now, would ya? C’mon on, tell me…what’d ya do?

Brown. I was a good, Christian man. I repented for my sins. I never did no evil without,..wait…that night…in the woods…(trails off) Spunk. Aha! Now the truth comes out!

Brown. But I turned back…I didn’t go through with my evil deed. It was everyone ELSE…in the woods. It was them…NOT ME! I didn’t murder anyone. YOU’RE the murderer! How could you take someone’s life?!?

Spunk. Listen, it was self-defense!

Brown. That doesn’t matter in the eyes of the Lord…murder is murder.

Spunk. (Getting angry) Look…I couldn’t HELP it. This guy, Joe jumped me from behind with a meat axe. What was I SUPPOSED to do?

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Brown. I don’t know…all I know is you shouldn’t have killed him. It’s a sin.

Spunk. Well….he ended up killing me back, so I guess it’s true, “Eye for an eye.”

Brown. Wait…WHAT? If you killed him, how could he possibly kill you?

Spunk. From beyond the grave (long, dramatic pause and sos).

Brown. So, you’re saying Joe’s spirit came back and killed you?

Spunk. That’s right..pushed me right onto a saw.

Brown. Impossible! God doesn’t work like that.

Spunk. How do YOU know how God acts?

Brown. Because unlike you, I am a good, Christian man and ISpunk. Yeah, yeah…okay, I get it! You’re a man of God. Well, if you and God are so tight, why don’t you ask him who pushed me?

Brown. Well, ISpunk. That’s what I thought! (“Pushes” Brown Slugs’ antennae with his antennae) Man of God…HA! You’re nothing but a fool!

Brown. Take that back! (“Pushes” Spunk back and they lock antennae) I’m NOTHING like you. I’d NEVER kill anyone. And if I did, I’d feel remorse,…guilt! You don’t even seem…(trails off). Wait! That’s it!

That’s how you died!

Spunk. (antennae become unlocked and Spunk “pushes” Brown again, hard) What do you mean?! What the hell are you talking about?!

Brown. (pushes back) GUILT! Joe didn’t push you from beyond the grave, you all but pushed YOURSELF (sos). You were so consumed by guilt you fell on your own saw!

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Spunk. That’s insane…you’re insane! You know, you think you know it all? You think you’re BETTER than me? You’re just like me (pushes Brown so hard that Brown flips over and lays there, squirming upside down for a minute, until he finally flips himself right-side up again) Brown. (long, dramatic sos) I am just like you. I let guilt consume my life, too. That night, in the woods…I felt so guilty for being there in the first place. It was all a dream; it had to have been. It all makes sense to me now! How could I have been so blind? All those years…wasted…I am a murderer. (long, dramatic pause). I murdered myself. And Faith!

My darling, Faith! (starts to cry) Oh, Lord…I take it all back…forgive me! Forgive me! (sobbing) Spunk. Wow, that is just pathetic. Real men don’t cry. If we weren’t both slugs, I’d take your wife in a second, wouldn’t even think twice. I’d take her and I’d(He is interrupted by a large steel-toe boot as it steps on him. As he takes his final slug “breath,” he says one final word) Joe! This next part is gonna sound unreal, I know…but I swear on my acorns it happened! Brown Slug, he just laid there sobbing, crying out to God, asking for forgiveness. I felt bad for the little slug. Then all of a sudden, I see this light wash over him; he started glowing like a firefly. Then, right before my very eyes, that slug turned into a caterpillar. He crawled up my side and spun a cocoon. I had all but forgotten the little guy, until one day when I watched the most beautiful butterfly I had ever seen as it flew off into the distance.

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Contemplating ‘Contemplation’ Holly Cough English 112-02 Introduction to Literature Assignment: A meta-analysis of my comparative short story My short story, “Contemplation,” features the two title characters from “Young Goodman Brown” written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and “Spunk,”

by Zora Neale Hurston. The challenges I faced, the decision to write a short story rather than a compare/contrast essay, and the choices I made all reflect my deep understanding of the original works. Through my story, I was able to show the theme both works shared: the long-lasting effects of wrongdoing on one’s life.

I faced two main challenges in writing my story: setting and dialect. The characters were from completely different parts of the country. Hurston sets her story in the south, which is evident by the thick southern black dialect of the characters, “Spunk was cussin’ a blue streak today ‘cause he ‘lowed dat saw wuz wobblin’-almost got ’im once” (1148). In contrast, the setting of Hawthorne’s story is Salem village; people speak completely different in Massachusetts, “My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done ‘twixt now and sunrise” (81). I faced the challenge of bringing these characters together; I needed to find a way for them to communicate. By making them both slugs who could only understand other slugs, I made communication possible.

The decision to write a short story rather than a compare/contrast essay also reflects my understanding of both stories. “Young Goodman Brown” and “Spunk” both rely on supernatural events that may not even occur.

The plot of “Young Goodman Brown” might actually involve devil worshipping in the forest, or it may have all just been a dream, “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild witch-meeting” (90). Perhaps Joe’s ghost really did push Spunk onto the saw, or perhaps his guilt destroyed him “The machinist come, looked it over an said it wuz alright; Spunk musta been leanin’ t’wards it some” (1148). The authors of both works are intentionally ambiguous in order to make the reader truly contemplate their meaning. In order to write a compare/contrast essay, I would have had to try and prove what each author intentionally left open for the reader to decide.

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Finally, the choices I made in writing my short story also reflect my understanding of the original works. I decided that Young Goodman Brown should turn into a caterpillar and ultimately, a butterfly, to represent a second chance. I gave him a second chance because he knew what he was doing was wrong, “With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making haste on his present evil purpose” (82). It took him a little time, but eventually he did muster up the moral courage.

“Having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came. I have scruples touching the matter thou wot’st of” (82). I chose to not give Spunk a second chance because he never showed empathy for Joe for “taking” his wife, “As Ah wuz sayin’ a minute ago, he tole Joe right to his face that Lena was his, ’Call her and see if she’ll come’” (1146). Nor did he ever express any remorse for killing Joe, “Ah didn’t wanna shoot him but he made me do it. He’s a dirty coward, jumpin’ on a man from behind” (1147).

Through these choices, I was able to show the effect of wrongdoing on each character’s life.

Both “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston bring to life the effect of wrongdoing on one’s life.

My short story, “Contemplating Contemplation,” reflects my knowledge of the original works. It is through the challenges I faced, the decision to write a short story rather than a compare/contrast essay, and the choices I made in writing the story that I was able to accomplish this.

Those Who Forget History…

Samantha Cox Eng 162-95 Creative Non-fiction Writing Assignment: This is a short piece to show the damage that can be done when people forget the past. Written in response to a writing prompt.

She stares at his truck as he drives away, a cloud of exhaust blowing in her face. Numb, she slowly ascends steep stairs into her empty apartment, scared to cry because she knows she’ll never stop once she starts. So many

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things race through her mind as she tries to pretend this isn’t really happening and wonders what is wrong with her. How come it never lasts?

She thought he was perfect, exactly her type. He fit all the requirements; funny and artistic, free-spirited and open, gorgeous blue eyes made bluer by his thick brown hair. Everything about him reminded her of all the things she missed about her first love and soon after they met she was dreaming about their future together. It took longer for the problems to start; for disagreements about his poor time management and broken promises to escalate. For her to realize she loved him more than he loved her.

So she’s sitting on her kitchen floor again and just like the last time, her heart is broken. Reflecting on what went want, she realizes she despises the qualities that made her fall for him in the first place. The familiar feeling is more than she can take and she vows she won’t do it again, promising herself she will find the love she deserves.

Two months later she’s at a party and locks eyes with a man across the room. He’s gorgeous; shaggy brown hair, pale blue eyes and a casual cool about himself. He crosses the room and confidently introduces himself.

“So what do you do?” she curiously asks with a flip of her long hair. He tells her about his passion for the arts, his love for playing the guitar and writing music. At the end of the night she gives him her number as they make loose plans to get together. When she goes to bed, she’s unable to sleep as she thinks about what to wear on their first date.

The Most Brilliant Idea in Human History Felicia Graham ENG-162-95 Creative Non-fiction Writing Assignment: Humorous essay discussing the benefits of changing red tape to pink tape.

There are lots of problems in this world. Wherever you turn, BAM! another problem. There is only one solution to all these problems: have the government regulate every factor of life. Unfortunately, people do not like “red tape.” It makes them very aggravated. Fortunately, I have a solution: change all red tape to pink tape. Red is known to be an aggravating color, while pink is the most calming color. In fact, painting the inside of the jail

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in Brewer pink has calmed inmates so much they do not come back after their first stay. Sure, there are plenty of arguments against my idea, but I can overpower them all, one by one.

Firstly, it goes against tradition. Well, if we stuck to tradition, King George III would still be ruling over us. And what about Frontline, tooth brushes and cell phones? If we had stuck with tradition, dogs would still have fleas, our teeth would still fall out and everyone would still be wasting time and breath saying “cellular� phone. Obviously, sticking to tradition is dumb.

Next, the breast care awareness people would be on top of us for using their color. Well, since when are colors private property? Besides even if it was, the government could take it by eminent domain. In the end, this is really a great opportunity to spread awareness about breast cancer every time a law is passed.

Lastly, there is this one teeny little argument that red tape is only theoretical and calling it pink tape will not change anything because it cannot be seen anyway. Well, why not make it real? Think how many jobs would be created at pink tape factories. This is just what our flattened economy needs to poof it back up again. Sure, environmentalists will argue that putting up pink tape everywhere is massive littering and that animals will get tangled up in it, but who listens to them?

Well, there are all the arguments blasted to smithereens like a pumpkin thrown against a wall. As anyone can now see, changing theoretical red tape to literal pink tape will solve all the world's problems and create none.

However, it will never become the law of the land. Why? Congress has an all male majority. Oh well. At least vetoing it would be a bipartisan effort.

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A Special Place Ruby Ann D'Salva-Bouton Eng 101 95 WE College Composition Assignment: I was to write a graf about a place. Any place, it didn't matter. So I decided to write about a place that takes me away to special memories. It's not a place that most people would call their special place, but this place means a lot to me.

There was a calming aroma of freshly cut grass in the air. Flowers looked as if they were always in bloom. But as I walked closer to them, I realized their stiffer than normal appearance, they were fake. Though, regardless of the feel of fresh flowers, the brightness of the colors would create a beautiful arrangement. I would walk to the headstone and place her lucky charm on the top. Her lucky frog always gave her great fortune, especially at Bingo.

Maybe it would sound strange that I could feel comforted where others would feel emptiness. I have had many important conversations here. Just because I couldn't actually hear the advice or was able to give a hug in appreciation, didn't mean I didn't take it all to heart. Because we have had many laughs here, too! I would pick the overgrown weeds around the fencing, as weed whacking must be prohibited, and then brushed the excess dried grass off the lawn ornaments. It felt like I was doing her house keeping in a weird sort of way.

Holidays, birthdays and just the weekend get-togethers are never the same without her. Those were my most favorite memories. Sometimes if I would close my eyes and just think back, I can almost smell her sweet scent of Pond's cold cream and orchids. May sound stupid, but it was the smell that was embedded in my memory of her. And that scent would bring me back to those happy times. It's always hard to leave, but it would get dark out soon. Not anyone's favorite place after dark. But before I would go, I kiss my fingertips and place it on her name. "I love you Lola and don't worry, I'll be back soon."

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Sparrow Steve Gray Assignment: Article for the school newspaper In the face of becoming winded climbing a few flights of stairs and passing kidney stones on an agonizingly regular basis, I, procrastinator extraordinaire, put my health off as something I would deal with later. I was about to broach 250 pounds which, on a 5'8� frame meant that I had left “overweight� behind 50 pounds ago and was uncomfortably into the realm of obesity. Three years later and 75 pounds lighter, I've completed four half marathons and one full 26.2 mile marathon with several 5k and 10k races in between. What happened to me during the three years between these two extremes has changed my life in many incredible ways.

Whenever I've tried to tell this story, I tend to get hung up on explaining why or how I let myself become so overweight. It's like asking a smoker why they ever started. Even if they do try to offer a reason, it rarely makes much sense and tends to be vague. I've decided that this isn't a part of my journey worth dwelling on, mostly because I still haven't entirely figured it out myself. My vague answer: I was really lazy and a bit uneducated when it came to taking care of myself.

It was an August day in 2008 when the seed was finally planted and roots took hold. I ran into an old friend at a wedding reception who was barely recognizable having lost over 100 pounds. When I asked how he had done it he simply stated that he went for regular walks and ate a lot less. This sounded simple enough. I enjoyed the rest of my night, eating way too much food and drinking too much beer, but confident that I would start my own weight loss journey on Monday.

And, that's precisely what I did. I had measured out a mile on my deadend road that I would walk every day before work. I still remember that first walk. It was late summer and the mornings were still fairly humid. It wasn't all that hot, but by the time I finished 20 minutes later, I was soaked in sweat, breathing fairly heavily, but I was happy to have done it. It felt good, and I carried some extra energy with me to work that day. I repeated this every day that week, and was shocked to see I had already lost 4 pounds.

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As the weeks continued I gradually worked up to walking 2 miles every day. I also made some changes to my diet at this stage. I didn't want to get too restrictive, as I feared that trying to change too much too fast would get frustrating and I was concerned that I would get overwhelmed and give up. So, I made it easy for myself to be successful. Monday through Friday were the business days of the week: no snacks (this eliminated soda, sweets, chips, and any eating between meals) and no seconds. Basically I allowed myself to fill a plate, one plate, with whatever I wanted to eat three times a day. If I felt like beer, the limit was two per day. This allowed me the freedom to eat what I wanted, still enjoy a drink, while keeping me from going too overboard. If I felt like going a little crazy on the weekends, I did.

I continued in this manner for several months and shed about 30 pounds.

Then, seemingly overnight, my progress seemed to come to a grinding halt. People often refer to this as a plateau, which sounds a lot nicer than the brick wall it feels like. I spent a few weeks spinning my wheels, losing a little one week only to gain it back the next, and then decided it was time for a change. The walks were getting too easy. I had to find a way to get my heart rate up a little higher. With some trepidation, I began thinking about running. Since high school (where the only running I did was forced PE laps), I had only made one other attempt at running in my life which ended in a flurry of filthy language and a week's worth of shin splints. I probably hadn't even gone half a mile, and it was over 10 years ago, but this memory made me despise the idea of running anywhere, for any length of time. So, I made a deal with myself: I would run until I reached a respectable weight, maybe around 175, and then I would allow myself the pleasure of never running another step in my life. I figured at that point I could retire from running and maintain my weight through diet and more enjoyable activities like hiking and mountain biking.

The running phase began very slowly. I wanted to ensure that I didn't have a repeat of my prior running experience, so I began by slowly working some jogging into my existing walks. I did this every other day, as it seemed excessive to run every day. Every week I would swap out a few minutes of walking for jogging until I was comfortably able to run continuously for 30 minutes, which came to almost exactly 3 miles. In the meantime, another 15 pounds had come off, but something even more incredible was happening. I was enjoying the time I spent running.

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I spent a few weeks doing 3 mile runs every other day, and then started slowly adding distance. A month later I ran 5 miles. I was so proud of myself. In the car I would constantly (and probably annoyingly) judge distances to places based on my ability to run to them. It is a testament to my wife's patience and support that I never found myself left on the side of the road to prove it. My mood was much more elevated than I remember it ever being. This was the first time in my life I had maintained a regular schedule of physical activity. Physically I felt stronger and healthier, but that was an expected benefit of sustained exercise. I did not expect to be paid the dividends that I received mentally. While running I began entering these almost trance-like states of complete mental relaxation.

Everything would become effortless, and my mind would go blank. I am one of those people who has never been able to mentally relax. My mind always races, but I could make it stop by running. I'm convinced that this is my version of what people refer to as the “runner's high.�

Needless to say, at this point I was hooked. I signed up for my first race, a 15k (9.3 miles) and had my sights set on a half marathon in the Fall of 2009. I continued to run 3-4 days per week, doing one long run on the weekend which built from 5 miles up to 7miles over the winter. I completed the Sugarloaf 15k in May and spent the rest of the summer building up to 10 miles, which was my maximum distance before the half marathon in September. Everything went smoothly and despite the concerns of some friends and family that I was destroying my joints by running so far, I fairly comfortably completed my first 13.1 mile half marathon almost exactly one year after I took that first one mile walk. I had also reached my goal of 175 pounds, which I was extremely happy about, but it was secondary to completing that race.

I took a few weeks off to recover and then was back on the roads. I was already thinking about which race I would run next. As much as I enjoyed running, the goal of a race provided that extra motivation to get in every workout. I thought about a marathon in 2010, but decided to hold off. I settled on another fall half marathon in 2010 and focused on maintaining my fitness.

Around this time I lost my job, and decided to return to school full time. I have no doubt that my running successes provided a lot of the confidence I needed to make this leap. I took the motivation and drive I'd learned how

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to harness in my running and applied it toward furthering my education, something I had been wanting to do for a very long time.

Throughout this time, my diet had remained largely unchanged. I was still keeping portions limited, and avoiding sugary drinks and general junk food. After researching the health benefits of a whole food, vegetarian diet, I decided to give it a shot in April of 2010. This is a point of contention for many people I've told this to, but I can say that the positive effects for me were drastic and immediate. Almost instantly I had more energy and I was running faster and farther without any perceived additional effort. I have since cut dairy almost completely as well, which led to yet another large performance boost. I found that the less animalbased foods I consumed, the harder I could train while at the same reducing the amount of time I needed to recover between workouts.

I completed my second half marathon in October of 2010 and decided to start training for the Vermont City Marathon in Burlington, Vermont on May 29, 2011. I created a plan, wrote out a schedule, and got to work.

Over the winter of 2011 I slowly built up to 18 mile long runs and 40 miles per week. I began reaching points during long runs when I wasn't sure I had anything left, but I was always able to push through and never failed to finish a run. Looking back I know that it was these exact experiences that allowed me to finish the marathon. After running all winter and early spring, I was handed high humidity and temperatures in the 80s on marathon day. I had several moments of near despair along those 26.2 miles, but I made it. Crossing that finish line is an experience that I will never be able to fully describe. It was about so much more than running 26 miles. It was the culmination of 2 ½ years of effort. It was the hardest and most rewarding thing I've ever done. Half bent over, completely spent and gasping for air, I smiled as I pictured the guy in a sweat-soaked XXL t-shirt doing the same thing after his first one mile walk only 30 months prior.

Bio: Steve is a full time student studying computer networking at Eastern Maine Community College. He also works part-time on campus archiving for the school newspaper with the intent to make it available online before he graduates in May. Other than running, he enjoys photography and pond hockey. He is currently training for the New England Tough Mudder (www.toughmudder.com) which takes place in May of 2012.

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You Don’t Know What You Have Until It’s Gone Samantha Cox Eng162-95 Creative Non-fiction Writing Assignment: Response to a prompt designed to learn literary pointillism. explains a complex relationship with food and the regret of caring too much about weight and not loving my body the way it was.

The summer before eighth grade I went on a diet. I counted my calories and portioned out my food. I lived off dill pickles dipped in mustard and dry cereal. I didn’t need the added calories from the milk. For a treat, I allowed myself to have popsicles. They only had sixty calories and I savored the sweetness in my mouth. I was constantly hungry, tired, and irritable. I spent hours keeping a meticulous journal of everything I ate. I weighed myself five times a day and if I gained weight I would go for a run. I wore a size two.

My mother was thin with a dark tan. She was beautiful; her hair was long and curly. To me, she was perfect. Her favorite food was homemade granola with almonds; it was the only thing she ate besides salad. She was constantly complaining about her weight, said she was fat.

One day I heard her talking to my uncle on the phone and the conversation turned to me. He hadn’t seen me in a while, our family wasn’t that close.

My mother didn’t know I was around and she told my uncle I was great, beautiful with blonde hair and long legs, tall. I was short with dark brown hair and muscular legs from gymnastics and cheering. I was nothing like the daughter she described.

We moved after eighth grade and I spent the summer getting ready for cheering tryouts. I was nervous but I made the team. At the first practice my new coach sized us up, trying to figure out who would fly and who would base during stunts. The girls on my team were tiny, smaller than me and I knew I wasn’t going to be a flyer anymore. At a size two, I was assigned the position of a base, something I had never done. At our first competition I ran into my old teammates and they were shocked to find out I wasn’t flying anymore but their surprise didn’t make sense to me. It was obvious I wasn’t thin enough and I spent the next four years at the bottom of the pyramid, a size too large to fly.

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In college, it became harder to maintain my weight. I wasn’t cheering anymore and the food in the cafeteria was so good. Things I never let myself eat before, like fried chicken, pizza, and bread suddenly became a part of my diet and for the first time, I realized how much I loved food. It was fun to eat without thinking about my pants size, though I spent plenty of nights in front of the mirror disgusted by my weight gain. It was a hard transition but I eventually decided I enjoyed food more than I valued the thin, ballerina’s body I strived to have. I was never going to be a Barbie doll with blonde hair and long legs; I wasn’t the girl my mother described and for the first time, I didn’t want to be.

I wear a size six or eight now; I’m not as toned as I used to be and I’ve become an expert at dressing to hide my imperfections. I eat a lot more and don’t waste hours recording every calorie in a book or weighing my food. I’m happy.

When I look at pictures from high school I see a pretty girl with porcelain skin and a thin frame. She forces a smile as she strikes a pose she hopes is flattering because she has no idea how gorgeous she is. I want to slap her for wasting her time worrying about a pound here and there, for never accepting a compliment. I want to scream at her for never once wearing a bikini with pride because that body’s gone; I’ll never have it again and I never got to enjoy it.

Children Michael Vilasuso ENG 162-95 Creative Non-fiction Writing Assignment: The havoc which children can wreak upon parents.

Top ten things that you must be aware of when you have a child: 1.) While You Sleep: You are most vulnerable while you are sleeping.

Never trust a child. They can be so mischievous. Children are never tired and as for adults, sorry, you will be tired. You are not four no more. While you sleep, they have the whole run of the house. Put all snacks away, including chips, candy, and other kinds of junk food. If they are missing in the morning, do not I repeat, do not blame the dog.

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2.) A Moment of Silence: This may not be listed as rule of thumb one but is the number one thing. As a parent you should expect NO silence ever.

If you ever hear absolutely nothing. Run, duck, hide, take cover, and get ready for the worse. Children are never quite so if they become silent you know something is about to go down.

3.) The Bathroom: The bathroom is a battlefield with an endless supply of weapons and ammunition. Anything in the bathroom is fair game for a child. Toilet paper, shampoo, soap, toothpaste, and other items like dental floss. Toilet paper is an especially useful weapon for children. It can be used to plug a toilet or run ribbon through the house.

4.) The Kitty Litter Box: The litter box can have multiple purposes such as a place for a cat to go potty or, worse yet, a child’s sand box.

5.) Keys: We all know keys jingle like little bells. It also has buttons which make your truck or car alarm go off. What child wouldn’t want to rattle those keys around and just plain and simply fuck with you. They seem to always go for the red alarm button. Horn honking and lights flashing and your heart pounding from being scared. Keys can double as a object for children to hide.

6.) Sippy Cups: Sippy cups are a must. Open top cups can often be spilled and will be spilled. Even if they are eight, nine, or ten give them a sippy cup.

7.) Mud Puddles: Puddles are a inviting hole of water and mud. If he/she is dressed in their best outfit for school watch them closer then close. The are and will make it into that puddle on way or another. Carry them if possible.

8.) Bed Time: This can be the toughest time of the day. They never want to go to bed. No matter how tired they are they just wont quit. They will fight you the whole way. Expect them to get up at least one or twice. Be prepared for water or with the toy they previously had. For some reason they will want one or the other.

9.) Toys on the Floor: This can really put a man to his knees.

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Stepping on that sharp edged toy. It hurts like no other and will get a swear out of you whether you swear or not.

10.) Cuddles: Take the cuddles while you can. As they age cuddles will grow to be extinct. Take advantage of any chances of them cuddling or loving you. When they get to old you mine as well forget about it.

Mr. Goldfine Reads an Essay Tom Graham ENG101-10 College Composition Assignment: An effect essay I wrote for Mr. Goldfine’s class on 11-302011. He suggested I submit it.

“I will read you an example essay,” Mr. Goldfine said. “It is about blood, guts, and pus.”

I thought, “Oh no! I’m in trouble.” I have never done well with such grotesque stuff. Blood and such sickens me, and always has. I knew I was in trouble. I hoped that it would be like other essays he had read, which were not as repulsing as their titles suggested. But this essay easily lived up to its name.

“I really dislike blood, but I was thrust into a lot of situations where I saw it.”

The author went on to describe many things that I would have been much better off not hearing. And, anything remotely close to this type of thing usually has bad effects on me, and this one definitely did. And these effects were heat, sickness, and headache.

“They had her severed finger in a jar, and it was floating up and down, tapping on the bottom with its pink painted nail.” By this time, the first effect had set in. This was heat. The classroom had already been a good deal warmer than I liked, as I prefer everything to be very cold anyhow. So I had been sweating it out already, but now, the thought of blood apparently warmed mine, heated mine, until I could feel the heat coursing in waves, heat waves. I love being cold, but when I am hot, such as when I have a fever, I get very hot. When I have been sick, I have reached 105

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degrees on several occasions. Although I did not reach that point during the class, I am still certain that Mr. Goldfine reading this essay raised my temperature probably a good couple of degrees. Heat contributes to many aspects of my not feeling well, including the next one.

"I stood in shock for a moment, then hurried to the motorcyclist where he was lying on the ground. He had no face left, and was torn to ribbons. It was sickening. I threw up several times."

Oh really? This is sickening? I am only experiencing this second hand, yet I am in almost as bad shape as the author was. And if the author disliked blood as much as they claimed at the beginning, then, someone else wrote the introduction, because throughout this essay has been nothing but gruesome scenes described with great relish. I could understand why castiron stomach Mr. Goldfine would like this essay, but still. I figured that I could probably slip out the door quietly with only a short joking comment on it by Mr. Goldfine, but I have a personality that does not give in easily.

In a sports game, if I am injured, I stay in. If I had stayed in through this much, with all of these baseballs of luridness being hurled into my face, then I would stay for the rest. I do get queasy quite easily. When I was younger, in a couple of trips to the dentist in a row, I threw up on the dentist. During this essay, unless I paid too much attention to what he was reading and there was something absolutely tortuously gross, then I would be fine. I just hoped Mr. Goldfine had the janitor nearby just in case.

By the third effect, I was not even hearing anything Mr. Goldfine was saying. The third effect had set in, and that is headaches. Most people would say that when they think too much their head aches, or that occasionally they have a headaches and have to go lay down with the lights out, a wet towel over their head, and Beethoven playing in the background while they sip on Zija and chew on Ibuprofen. I however, have chronic headaches. This means that I have a headache every single day, and just have to work through it. If I have a bad one during a test, then that means I cannot remember any of the material I just studied for it, so of course I do very poorly on the test, and I am not able to remember it or what I had studied afterwards. I actually started and played an entire basketball game once without knowing anything I was doing or remembering it afterwards. Headaches can develop suddenly for me, and get worsened by things like fluorescent light, heat, and such. Since all of

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these collaborated together while Mr. Goldfine was reading the essay, it made a good migraine concert that would have rivaled one of Beethoven's.

I put my head down, and just waited for Mr. Goldfine's voice to cease droning. I always pay attention when a teacher is teaching, and I always look at them too, but when a teacher is reading an awful essay about blood and such, ignoring it is about all I am capable of doing.

Eventually, the essay was finished, and I was able to return to the world, slightly dazed, but otherwise in decent health, except for still being a bit hot and glad that I had no test that day for any class. Another student across the room started talking about the difference between cause and example essays.

"So with an example essay, you're making a claim, and backing it up with examples?" he asked.

Mr. Goldfine thought for a moment. "Yes." "So, my claim is that this was the worst possible essay to read right before lunch."

"But you will get a cause essay going that direction," Mr. Goldfine said.

"No, I will give examples."

"What are your examples for ‘that it was the worst essay to read before lunch?’" "Well, one would be that the gentleman over there," gesturing at me, "Disappeared behind his hat for a while."

And I can say I was quite glad to resurface.

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Environmental Issue as Externality Eric Flewelling Assignment: Critical Thinking Paper Cars. Millions are driven every day. To and from work. To and from school. Pleasure and work. The automobile has become a commonplace in our society. The government has progressively increased fuel economy standards, among other things, in the recent past in order to curb pollution.

Automobile makers in turn came out with hybrid vehicles (and electric vehicles, though that development has been stunted until recently). A great push has been made toward these hybrid vehicles. They claim to be green and good for the environment. Environmentalists claim they reduce greenhouse gasses and undesirable emissions. Those skeptical of global warming like the fuel economy. Win for all, right?

The environmental issue is gasoline consumption. Whether it is cared about because it is a non-renewable resource or because of global warming, nearly all automobile driving Americans care about fuel economy in one way or another. The number of people involved boggles the mind, from oil workers to construction workers, car drivers to gas stations. Everyone has their own part and opinion regarding gasoline consumption.

I’m not sure what property rights are to be disputed in this matter except perhaps who owns the air? One cannot simply own a certain slot of air and do what one wants with it. A company can’t pump whatever it wants into the air. In addition, these messes should not be pawned off on others.

This seems to be the cause of many environmental issues. I believe there ARE externalities involved in this case, things that we simply don’t think about. When you get in the car and drive 40 miles to school (as I do every day) you’re not thinking about how you’re depleting the earth’s oil resources, how you may be destroying the ozone layer (however unlikely) by running your air-conditioning, how you may be contributing to global warming by CO2 emissions. These are not on your mind as you toddle off into oblivion. In addition there are such things as noise pollution, road infrastructure, and congestion. These problems exist because, well, we just haven’t started thinking about them until the last 30 years. That’s really it.

These are all really externalities that we had a delayed realization in. Only

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after the realization of what is going on have we begun to resolve the problem. Of course… how ARE we going to resolve the problem?

Suppose everyone does have the right to pollute their ‘own’ air however they wanted, and this assumption remained constant. One would need to convince the users of automobiles that they really absolutely NEEDED to buy more fuel efficient vehicles in order to accomplish the goal of reducing oil/gasoline dependence. The question is whether or not the government should subsidize the purchase of hybrid cars to promote fuel efficiency and reduce carbon emissions and gasoline usage. This SHOULD be a way to pawn off the costs of achieving higher fuel efficiency by making the government pay while car manufacturers produce more due to the greater demand. In all this SHOULD reduce the amount of gasoline consumed.

Something has been bothering me about this plan though. What about the externalities involved in resolving the newfound externality? What about throwing away used batteries, what about plastic body panels, what about the electrical and chemical costs of building a new car? That couple that gets swayed from buying a 2003 Toyota Corolla to a 2011 Honda Insight Hybrid may actually be doing more total harm to the earth in the long run than if they had bought a car that had already been made.

If the government provided incentives to the manufacturers of the vehicles, I do not believe it would be as efficient as providing incentives to the purchaser of the car. Take a look at the cash for clunkers deal. It was immensely popular! And though I may disagree with it because I’m trying to find a used car right now and many useful cars were disabled, the fact is that many higher fuel efficiency vehicles are on the road as a result. If they wanted to implement a plan to further the purchase of hybrid cars, they would need to analyze the demand curve for hybrids and decide exactly how much the rebate should be before becoming prohibitively expensive.

I believe that should the government put into place such a practice that it will work, though I question the true long term effects of such a policy.

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Skiing Dustin Plessner ENG 162 Creative Non-fiction Writing Assignment: Week 6 - Theme I can feel that frosty air fill my lungs as I step out of the lodge. It’s chilly out, but I’m kept warm by my many layers of clothes and winter jacket.

My heavy ski boots make a deep clunking sound against the wooden deck as I walk toward the snow to put on my skis for the first time of the year. It felt good to be back at the mountain; back home. There’s something about that fresh powder just after a snowfall that gives me a sense of freedom; when I’m on it, all the worries of the world seem to fade away; nothing but that moment matters anymore.

As I prepare to get on the chairlift. I can hear the lift’s age in its weary, rumbling motor. This old lift has been around much longer than I have, but never once has a chair so much as derailed, and I’m far too familiar with it to start worrying about my safety now. As the chair scoops me up and lifts me into the air, the sound of the lift’s engine slowly fades away.

I can hear the approaching music of the terrain park; a strange kind of techno that I’m not familiar with. Every year, they’re always playing the weirdest music in there. I can see teenagers doing all sorts of spins and flips off of the jumps, laughing and yelling to each other all the while. I’ll never understand how they do those crazy things; I’m too afraid of breaking something to try any more than a tiny jump myself.

The music of the terrain park now fades away too, and all that can be heard is the sound of the wire that the chairlift sits on passing through the wheels on the poles that hold it up, growing gradually louder until the chair itself passes over the wheels with a slight shutter. All is calm. The snow-covered trees on either side of me sway gently in the wind, occasionally dropping chunks of powdery snow just outside of the ski trail. The sun glares brightly on my tinted goggles, so I glance down at the trail below. Skiers cross under the chairlift, elegantly swishing from side-to-side, as if performing some kind of dance. Their skis glide across the fresh, powdery snow with that familiar skimming sound; the best sound I’ve ever heard... the sound of freedom.

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My skis hit the ground and I slide smoothly off the chairlift. Immediately I can feel my skiing abilities returning to me; it’s like coming home after a long time away. And it’s great to be back.

Sector Z29-506 Jared Wezner ENG 172-01 Creative Writing Two big metallic doors slam open allowing access to thousands of people fleeing like mice from a flood. People pour though the small opening into the loading bay, pushing, shoving, and screaming. A mother looks for her child on the other side. “Grant!” She screams. Nobody stops to help.

Everyone is frantically searching for one thing, an Arial Escape Vessel, A.E.V for short. Our country’s government started engineering these fiveman emergency space craft, which accelerate zero to one hundred mph in under three hundredths of a second, after Japan sent intelligence of Earth’s imminent destruction. It’s a simple design, a single high output aircraft engine in the rear, and heat resistant plating covering a small rectangular shaped hull. Inside, the seats are arranged in sets of three on either side of a narrow walkway facing each other. People pack in like sardines in a can, eight, sometime nine, some people trying to lie across the laps of fellow humans, all running from an unrelenting fate. The pilot then screams back to a man who has control of the hatch door, “We are at capacity, get the extras out!” Then, flicking a switch igniting the one high output engine, the small craft is gently maneuvered by a mechanical arm into launching position. It’s amazing to think what just under a thousand years of space engineering can bring a civilization on the brink of destruction.

Marci and I are quickly hurried into an A.E.V; I find myself pushing even though we are the first in line for this aircraft. With one jerk of his arm, the pilot shoves us into our seat, and the electric buckle wraps around my chest like an anaconda. “At capacity.” A mother starts yelling while her child claws at the hull door.

“Give me my daughter or let me out, NOW!” The woman says, now tugging at the metallic belt fastening her to the seat. She is still screaming as the heavy hull door slams shut with a slight click as the heavy locks seal

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us in. The captain turns around and with a heavy tone says, “Ma’am, don’t worry, your daughter will be on the A.E.V right behind us. These are built with state-of-the-art guidance systems; we will all be on the same planet in no less than one week”. The Mother nods and gently quiets down, as the pilot flicks a switch and our craft is maneuvered into a take-off position. I feel Marci’s cold hand clench mine and I look into her brown eyes. My gaze now fixated on her pupils, my mind begins to race to a time before chaos and panic. I see as a young man again, sitting in my car watching the brunette strut by looking nonchalant to all the eyebrows being raised.

“What’s going to happen Carter?” The words pulled me away from a time of peaceful serenity. I stare dimly into her brown eyes quietly before replying, “I don’t know Marci, but we had time to plan- we should be okay”. I give her a shallow kiss before the G forces kick everyone into their seats, molding each person into the fabric, like a sheet of dough under a rolling pin.

It was only moments before our escape craft climbed into the outer atmosphere; the extreme change in G forces makes even a steel stomach turn. A dim red glow from the ships guidance system and controls fills the cabin. The captains’ silhouette dances across the hulls metallic door. Part of conversation from the passenger next to me keeps bringing me back to this reality. I hear him say, “The Japs were right! I heard every volcano erupted around every fault line on our planet. Some say it was due to over population-forcing pressure on the tectonic plates, making then sink slowly.” A man across the thin aisle pipes in “Shut up with that! We were all warned, we don’t need to be reminded.”

“Yeah, hopefully we can just learn to be more proactive on this new planet,” says a younger woman next to him. The pilot turns around, “I am going to induce the cryogenic sleep sequence to make our flight pass faster.” A respirator mask snakes down from the hull roof and suctions to my face. Again, I again feel Marci’s hand clench mine, this time her palms are sweating and her look is uneasy. She mouths under her mask the phrase, “I love you,” before a creeping darkness blankets over my consciousness like a sheet. . .

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I envision myself back in my bed as a child scared and frail, searching my room for any signs of life. My eyes slowly open to that dim red glow and gentle shaking. “Good god someone’s finally up” exclaimed the pilot, “Did you wake up during the flight and touch anything?”

“No!” I mutter still in a daze from a full week of almost heart stopping sleep, “What’s wrong?”

“Something with our navigation has failed; we are being pulled into a planets’ gravitational field. Our guidance system should have kept us light years from any other planet.” The shaking starts to turn violent. The mourning mother near the door is the next to awaken with a screech. One by one the passengers awaken, each looking just as confused as the last. I look to Marci, her eyes still shut.

“Marci,” I shake her gently…nothing. Her gaze still gone, the only movement she could make was with our sinking ship.

“Brace for impact!” The captain barks, I grab Marci’s hand still motionless, close my eyes and hang. The aircraft jerks suddenly, BOOM! A loud explosion echoes out the back of the ship. The Pilots words are now repeating in my head, “mayday, mayday, A.E.V craft 1253-02, repeating A.E.V craft 1253-02, with full passenger load is going down over an unknown planet in sector Z29-506, requesting immediate assistance”. Thoughts of a life before mayhem again fill my head. A comforting squeeze on my hand, followed by another loud BANG! Darkness.

A soft glow from the corner dances across room, enveloping all I can see in a soft blue glow. I recognize this place, my old room from 60 State Road in Presque Isle, Maine. Complete security, I gasp a sigh of relief, and listen to the shallow breathing of my pet dog Kuda next to my bed.

My room is cold, as it usually is living though a country winter, but my bed is warm making the perfect contrast for getting back to sleep. The name “Marci” left ringing in my head. “Marci,” a beautiful name I had always thought. “Marci, Marci…wait.”

“Carter!” A brief scream slams me back into reality. I awaken and see nothing but a bright blue sun; I feel immense heat on my face from a

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burning A.E.V craft lying shattered next to me. “Carter we have to move before the fuel in the ship ignites…Carter, MOVE!” No thoughts just reactions, instantaneous fight or flight response. I jump and move my feet as fast as I can. “Wait”, I say. There is a faint whimper coming from inside the hull, Marci’s hand now squeezing mine and jerking me forward.

BANG! A shockwave throws us through the air, sending a searing burning sensation down my back, and encasing my whole body. My skin feels like butter and the shock wave a hot knife. I slam into the coarse sand covering the land, and poof in a cloud of dust. “Marci,” I squeeze her hand still attached to mine. I look next to me and see her and myself both naked, but totally unharmed. I almost feel like cracking a smile, until I remember the final whimper of our fearless pilot, before the explosion of our Arial Escape Vessel, with the flawless guidance system.

Marooned on a blank new rock, Marci and I scour this desolate new planet for any signs of resources, or other survivors who may have been ejected.

The landscape rolls just enough for the sun to reflect across the crests, making the whole land seem flat. Barren and quiet, everything just seemed to surreal. “Carter is that water?” I look to the horizon, squinting from the brightness, at what appears to be a small oasis.

This time I pull Marci’s hand to follow me, and run at a fast pace toward a shallow hope. We run across the flat barren landscape, as the oasis slowly moves further and further away from us. I look at Marci, her expression of excitement fading with mine. Then a slight shimmer of hope, a shine in her eye as she grabs my face spinning it around to see two metallic boxes, debris from our wreck scattered across the landscape. They ae in a linear path from where it looks like our ship skipped across the earth like a stone across water. “My god how have we survived this unscathed?” I thought.

Right in the middle of the trail of destruction lies a body sprawled over the ground in between two crates. I let go of Marci and begin to run again.

As I get closer I see it’s the man who had been sitting across the aisle. I collapse to my knees next to his body, “Sir!” I yell, and shake until his eyes open. The man immediately begins screaming, “My back! It feels like knives are stabbing into my back!” The man also appears to have a gaping wound in his head. He doesn’t seem to notice it at all, dried blood crusted over his head and shirt collar. I gently roll him over to see if there is a wound on his back. Underneath him lies a sharp metal fragment from

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the ship, surrounded by a dried pool of blood. A rip roughly the size of the metal fragment runs parallel with his spine. Dust from the land’s surface coat his clothes and open back. Just then the man gasps a sign of comfort.

I try to dust some off. “That’s not necessary,” he says, and quickly gets up. I look into his eyes to see excitement. “Water!” he yells, “I’m so thirsty,” and he begins taking off to the horizon.

“Wait!” Marci and I say simultaneously. Our words had no effect on the man’s motion; he sprinted off into the distance, slowly getting smaller and smaller. “Carter, I wonder when he’s going to realize there’s no water.”

We began to walk to the two metallic crates along the crash path. The first one labeled “Emergency Food” was filled with cans of fruit and vegetables and MRE type meals, gel packets and other food that would last months, if only we had water. We walked across the barren land to the second, which appeared much smaller than the first crate; the blue colored sun scorched the planet and our faces. The letters on the crate read “E-M-E-R-G-E-NC-Y C-O-M.” “Marci,” I exclaim in a relieved tone, as we got to the crate. I flip the lid open to see a communicator with a button labeled “power.” I start slamming my finger on the button frantically for any sign of progress. Nothing. I flip the small box over to see a small smoldering hole. It looks like it had been destroyed during the crash. Marci and I, tired and distraught, walk back to the first crate and begin to eat the fruit to drink the water they are stored in, hoping somehow to quench our defining thirst. After what seemed like days the sun set to what looked like the South. As darkness approached Marci and I both feared what would come.

A fire red moon slowly crept over the horizon, the sky slowly turning into a beautiful contrast between blue and red, conjoining in the middle of the sky to form a breath taking portrait. The land beneath us started to glow an ominous blue glow. Marci and I stood quickly, as the land beneath our feet began to radiate heat. “Carter,” Marci said, as I clutched her naked body tightly. Dust and grain from the surface began to rise, glowing and covering our bodies and filling our lungs. The planet started to take a new turn; the land now looked like it had been inhabited by a thick omniscient blue fog. I stared into her deep brown eyes one last time before we both fell and passed into a deep sleep. . .

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We both woke to the bright blue sun creeping over the horizon; my joints were stiff and had felt like I had been sleeping for weeks. I looked to Marci still lying next to me; she opened her eyes slowly and smiled at the relief of being okay. She coughed and we started to suck down the canned fruit. What seemed like weeks passed and we both began to develop a persistent cough. I was feeling weaker and weaker. We still had no real source of water; my mind began to wonder about the man who had also survived the crash. I had no idea how we had survived so long, but it was starting to seem like we wouldn’t last much longer. Our food supply began to run out and we were licking the bottom of each can scouring for any remaining bit of food. I began a coughing fit unlike any before; it felt like my lungs were being clawed by a ravage animal every time I coughed.

I took a deep breath and began hacking, my mouth filled with the taste of iron and a slight red mist began to fill the parabola of my hand. “Carter *cough*, Carter” Marci then fell next to me in the same coughing fit.

Through each breath I could hear the sound of an engine coming closer.

Then a strong wind like the exhaust from an engine began to kick dust up around Marci and me. She grabbed my hand and I could feel the presence of someone else there. I heard “Two survivors over here.” My heart skipped and I grabbed the man nearest to me, tearing a slight hole in his hazmat suit.

As we were being carried into the rescuing ship I could hear the doctors calling for blood samples and saying not to remove the respirators attached to the men’s faces. I still couldn’t stop coughing as they wheeled us into an operating room. I looked to my right to see Marci still by my side; I grabbed her cold clammy hand one last time. The pain in my lungs grew so intense and my vision began to darken, I started to feel nothing but a cold sensation enveloping my whole body. I could only hear the doctors saying we had been infected with an Arial pathogen, which was causing a systematic failure of the respiratory system. I squeezed Marci’s limp hand. I began to see myself again lying in my bed on 60 State Road. I could see the blue glow radiating from the corner, only now Marci lay next to me, arms wrapped around my waist as she drifted into sleep whispering “I love you”. A faint echo from a distant doctor shouting, “Were losing them!” More darkness and cold swept over me like a storm. My final consciousness began to slip, my eyes got heavy as I lay my head down in

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my old bed, a faint far off echo ringng in my ears, “Is it contagions…Is it contagious!”

The Explosion Welding of Aluminum to Steel Eric Flewelling WEL-111-01 Metal Technology Explosions are generally avoided at all costs when welding. Even the most trivial practices are required of welders as they go about their duties.

Don’t smoke near the fuel gas cylinders. If you don’t know what it is, don’t weld it. Never weld on a tank or cylinder without taking the proper precautions. Be careful about spontaneous combustion in the oxygen regulator. It is a matter of sheer coincidence then, that the only way to weld together steel and aluminum is by the use of explosives. Since the early 1960’s explosion welding has come into more widespread use as a means of welding dissimilar metals together.

The biggest problem in the connection, or fusion, of dissimilar metals together is galvanic corrosion. Galvanic corrosion by definition is: “An electrochemical process that causes a deterioration of metals by a very slow but persistent action. In this process, part or all of the metal becomes transformed from the metallic state to the iconic state and often forms a chemical compound in the electrolyte.” (Bertone 273) This definition is esoteric and slightly ambiguous. In layman’s terms galvanic corrosion is corrosion that results due to electrons migrating from one metal to another (dissimilar) metal, similar to a battery. Galvanic corrosion will, in effect, significantly increase the rate of corrosion in the dissimilar metals.

Explosion welding was first observed “In the First World War, when shrapnel may have stuck to armament, it wasn’t just stuck but it was actually welded” (Welding). It was again observed in the Second World War, and in the early 1960’s explosion welding was patented. Explosion welding allows even highly dissimilar metals to be welded together, “over 260 metal combinations are possible” (Welding). This process allows the

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advantages of different metals to be exploited in ways that they could not be otherwise.

The description of explosion welding is perhaps put best by Modern Marvels: Welding: “To create an explosion weld, to large pieces of metal are stacked atop one another, then covered with a high powered explosive. When detonated, the downward force of the explosion welds the two pieces together through a combination of intense force and remarkable physics.�

(Welding)

(Joshi) There are three essential variables involved in explosion welding: the standoff gap, the velocity of the explosive, and the height of the bed (or quantity of explosive). The standoff gap is the distance that the two pieces of metal are separated before the explosion occurs. This allows a jet of air to flow from between the metals as the explosion occurs. There are many explosives that are used in explosion welding. The most common are: Explosive RDX (Cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, C3H6N6O6 PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, C5H8N12O4) TNT (Trinitrotoluene, C7H5N3O6)

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Detonation velocity, m/s 8100 8190 6600

Tetryl (Trinitrophenylmethylinitramine, C7H5O8N5) Lead azide (N6Pb) Detasheet Ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3)

7800 5010 7020 2655 (Joshi)

The amount and thickness of the explosive to be used varies depending upon the thickness of the metals to be joined and the type of explosive used. Explosion welding comes in extremely handy with plates, bars, cylinders and other simple shapes. However, it does not lend itself well to unusual shapes.

So why does explosion welding work to join steel and aluminum? What is the application of such a piece? Explosion welding is unique because it can weld (not braze as in cold metal transfer) highly dissimilar metals together. This process can occur because of the curious physics involved in the explosion. The explosion begins at one corner of the metal and expands rapidly across the piece. As this is occurring the clad metal is pushed downward into the base metal at an angle, forming a jet of air that flows through the standoff gap. This jet cleans oxides and any other impurities off of the metals to be joined forming surfaces that are metallurgically pure. The metals are then joined by pressure alone. The weld zone in an explosion weld is called microfusion and is 10-5 inch thick. The lack of heat input and the tiny fusion zone allows both metals to retain all of their properties. The oxide that forms on aluminum forms almost instantaneously. However, because this coating is blasted off immediately before the impact of the aluminum with steel and because the steel also has no impurities on it, a weld is possible between the two. This state of cleanliness is not possible with any other method of welding.

It should be noted, however, that galvanic corrosion is not eliminated by explosion welding. Galvanic corrosion problems are significantly increased when the components are mechanically joined and a crevice is present. Explosion welded couplings cannot eliminate the conditions, but they do eliminate the crevice. Absent the crevice, paint, and other common coatings are effective in controlling galvanic corrosion‌�

(Young/Banker)

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The importance of removing the crevice is that there is no room for an electrolyte such as salt water, which significantly increases the rate of galvanic corrosion. For this reason, explosion welding is far superior to mechanical bonding methods.

The applications of aluminum/steel welds are numerous. It is used in the chemical, cryogenic, and shipbuilding industries.

Shipbuilding in particular has used explosion welded aluminum/steel to great extent. In marine applications it is advantageous because of its increased resistance to galvanic corrosion. For instance, the deck and everything upward on a ship may be made of aluminum while everything below the deck is made of steel. This will likely include many parts like the following:

(Young/Banker)

Aluminum/steel bars make unusual welds possible using conventional methods in welding shops by creating a transition point.

Explosion welding is allowing things to be done that, before 1950, were not even thought possible. It has provided a means of connecting dozens of metals to one another and has dramatically increased the resistance of dissimilar metals to galvanic corrosion. It will be interesting to watch the future development of explosion welding, or what process may replace it.

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Works Cited Bertone, Thomas. Practical Metallurgy and Materials of Industry; Prentice Hall, Columbus, Ohio. 2003, 449 p.

Joshie, Amit. “Introduction to Explosive Welding”, http://www.metalwebnews.com/howto/explosive-welding/explosive-welding.html October, 2000.

Modern Marvels: Welding, History Channel, 2007, video. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldl6fIDGQ5E for the pertinent information.

Young, George A. and Banker, John G. “Explosion Welded, Bi-Metallic Solutions to Dissimilar Metal Joining,” http://www.dynamicmaterials.com/data/brochures/1.%20SNAME%20paper%202 -04.pdf ; February, 2004.

My Wall Benjamin Vicnaire ENG 101 08 College Composition Assignment: A description of what I see when I look at my wall opposed to what others might see.

My wall would confuse people because it’s the most confusing part of my room.

A French flag which some people would refer to as a wimpy or weak flag because of the French history in WW2. However when I see that flag I see my ancestors and the expansive history. The battles, the victories, and the little credit they received for their sacrifice. The soldiers in New France ambushing and killing while Braddock’s men marched, Napoleons old guard making their last stand, the French Army making a breakthrough in the battle of the Somme, the holding out at Verdun, and the ambush at Stonne when a French tank took out 13 German panzers. All other people see is the country surrendering, I see triumph.

An Irish Flag, which people might refer to as a drinking flag and talk about the stereotypical drinking that Ireland does. The Irish flag looks at me and speaks to me this time, “Look at the shit we’ve done and been through,

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look how we still stand.” THAT makes me want to better myself because of the atrocities that happened to the Irish but if you listen to their music it’s cheery. It’s not sad, “oh feel bad for us.” They shrug at the world like nothing happened. What I can see is the 2,000 men marching through Dublin taking it back and making it green. I can see James Conolly moving towards the machine guns instead of away. Michael Collins freeing the majority of counties so that most of the island is now green.

The constant violence that even now happens in the north. The people doing a happy and cheerful jig. How distant they seem but how close they seem to me.

And that old worn drivers cap that you see? I don’t see that at all, I see me as a child being given that by my granddad. I remember him from that, it’s essentially all I have from him. The fact that even when time changed he wore the same stuff, he didn’t change, one of the world’s constants opposed to variables. A man that would do anything for any one of his grandchildren. A man with the last words of “I love you to pieces” to my sister, my sister always said that to him but he never said it back.

The Walker: A Response to “The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas” and “The Lottery” Heather Walz Eng112 Introduction to Literature Assignment: Write a critical essay that compares and contrasts two or more works from our literature textbook. I chose a more creative approach to the assignment (which Professor Gillis told us we could do) and wrote a short story that combined two pieces of fiction that I particularly enjoyed. Some dialogue was taken directly from Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery”. I felt it fit the story most appropriately and was used merely for the purpose of strengthening the message I tried to portray in my work. I take no credit for any dialogue taken from “The Lottery”.

The walker had been walking for a long time. He knew he'd been walking for years; how many, he couldn't be sure. It had been so long, he'd forgotten his own name. He'd been fifteen- or had he been sixteen? maybe fourteen?- when he'd left Omelas. In the middle of the night, he'd crawled over his sleeping siblings, out of bed, out onto the streets and away into the

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night. Now, he was a man and he knew how to survive as a traveler, constantly walking.

The walker taught himself how to find shelter at night. He learned to scavenge for foods, but it took time for him to understand which plants were good to eat. He had come from Omelas, a place where no citizen went hungry... except for one. Many times, he'd eaten berries or roots that had caused the most awful pains in his belly and head; pains he hadn't known were possible for him to ever experience. When curled in a ball, crying like a wounded animal, the walker thought back on the child locked away in Omelas: the reason he'd left in the first place. The walker remembered when the child had screamed for his mother when the walker cried out in pain for his own mother. He imagined that this was the sort of pain that the child had known so well. And when the walker faded off to sleep from the exhaustion from the pain, he learned what it meant to be lonely like that child.

Sometimes, the walker missed home. He missed and longed for his people, his parents and his siblings. Other times, he longed just for company, someone to talk with. When he'd first gone off on his own, the walker had felt such fear and loneliness that he'd considered going back to Omelas.

But he knew, in his heart, that he could never return. Partly because he had since lost his way, and partly because he could not bring himself to stoop to the level of his people. Mostly, though, he was ashamed that he'd left the child behind. The walker vowed, that if ever given the chance to act again, he would. However, he would never keep his promise.

One warm, beautiful day- a summer day, the walker was sure, but he did not know the date (June 27th)- he came to a small village nestled in a valley surrounded by hills of rolling green grasses. He might have missed the village altogether, had he not spotted a few youngsters playing. They were giddy, rowdy and boisterous, and the walker could not help but smile as he watched. He soon realized that they were searching for something: stones. They tossed them in the air to each other, and hollered when they found a large one. Once or twice, one of the boys found an oddly shaped or colored stone, and the children would gather quietly around the discoverer in silent wonder, as children are known to when curious.

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It wasn't long before the children moved on but they did not drop the stones they'd found. They carried great armfuls, stuffed the pockets of their shorts, and one girl even carried a small sack of them back down into their village. For some reason, unknown to him, the walker found himself curious. He wondered what strange games these children might play with the stones they'd gathered. He followed after them a short ways, keeping safety hidden in the grasses of the hills. When they entered the village's main square, the walker did not move closer. He sat, looking down and over the village square and watched.

At first, the children just continued to play and gather stones into piles.

Then, others began to appear: the elderly, middle-aged adults and adolescents alike. They all stood together, talking- a dull roar of many voices talking together rose over the village; the walker could hear a dull roar of many voices. It was apparent that this was a ceremony or ritual of some sort. The walker recalled many ceremonies and festivals of his own people. He remembered how much fun festivals were and decided that maybe, he'd enjoy going to one again.

He walked down the hill carefully, trying not to draw too much attention to himself as he entered the crowd of people. Not sure if he would be welcomed, the walker avoided making eye contact with anyone around him. For a few minutes, this worked; no one seemed to notice the walker, or care that there was a newcomer amongst the crowd. Just as the walker was feeling comfortable in his new surroundings, a woman spoke to him. “Who are you,� she said. Startled, having not heard or spoken to another person in many years, the walker stood there awkwardly, fidgeting with his fingers. The woman was older than he was, by many years; she reminded him of his mother. She was close to the same age his mother would be. Plump, actually pleasantly so, around the middle, but not fat.

Far from pretty, but far from ugly, the woman had a sweet, motherly look to her face, though the walker was sure she was past the age of being a mother.

Despite her kindly look, however, the woman's nose and chin were lifted mightily in the air; it was like she was looking down on the walker, but she was at least a head and half shorter than he. Her eyes squinted at him

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suspiciously. “Didn't you hear me, boy?” she spoke again, her voice now a sharper tone. “Who are you?”

Having left home so many years ago at such a young age, the walker realized that he'd never really learned to talk to an adult, even though he'd since grown into an adult himself. He licked his lips nervously, and seemed to fold into himself. His shoulders hunched inward, and he continued to play nervously with his fingers. The walker was about to turn and run, unsure of what he could say or do, when the woman's expression eased to a softer one: she recognized him. Or at least, she thought she did.

“You're Isaac Zimmerman's boy, aren't you?” she said, nodding her head.

“I'd recognize Isaac's boy anywhere. You look just like him. What's your name again?”

“Uh,” the walker stuttered, and cleared his throat; it felt tight and strange to be speaking after so long. “I'm... Isaac's boy, yeah.”

She chuckled. “What's your name, hm? Isaac had two boys, which are you? Are you Donald or Isaac Junior?”

He shrugged his shoulders, not sure himself which he should say.

“Donald,” he decided, because it reminded him of what his old name used to be. It wasn't the same, but it had the same sound at the beginning; at least he thought it sounded familiar.

She nodded, clicking her tongue. “Yes, yes, should have known. You look so much like your father, the poor soul. How is your mother, Tracie? Last I heard she'd left the village after the Lottery two summers ago when... well, you know what happened, you were there.”

The walker gave a nervous grin and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, she's... uh, she left.”

“Pity,” the woman continued, clucking her tongue louder. “Well, some people just can't handle those sorts of things. But it's fair, you know. You must know that. Your father knew it too; he understood his place when he chose from the box. I mean, we all have to do our part in the lotteries- all must take from the box.”

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As if on cue to the woman speaking to him, the walker noticed to the far right of the crowd, a man coming forth with a black, wooden box under one arm. The crowd seemed to disperse, making as much room for the man and his box as they could as he walked past- like a flock of nervous hens, afraid of the farmer with an ax. It felt as if a dark shadow had fallen over the crowd and although it was still morning and there wasn't a cloud in the bright sky, the walker shivered. Something was very wrong, he could feel it; he was afraid of that black box.

“So, did your brother decide not to come and send you instead?” she asked, turning back to their conversation.

He nodded, playing along with the atmosphere. “Y-yeah, he was too 'fraid of coming.” The walker would have been afraid of coming, too, had he known about that black box, which he guessed the real Donald and real Isaac did.

“Humph,” the woman puffed her cheeks out in annoyance, “Well, it's good to see that Isaac raised one smart child.”

The walker wanted to ask what she had meant, but the crowd had suddenly gone quiet and the man who'd carried the black box out started to speak.

“All ready?” he called. “Now, I'll read the names--- heads of the families first--- and the men come up and take a paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it until everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?”

The eyes of those who stood around the walker seemed glazed over, bored; he guessed that they all had heard these directions before. Then it struck him; this man was going to call names! They would call his name-- or the name he'd stolen-- and he would have to go up, too, wouldn't he? The man at the head of the crowd began calling names, and people in the crowd shuffled about slightly to make room for those heading up to the front of the crowd. As men began to make their way up to the front and taking their pieces of paper, the walker slowly made his way in the opposite direction.

He hid in a small alley between two small buildings, still able to hear and see what was happening, but out of sight of those in the crowd. The walker

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noticed that the woman he'd spoken to pushed a man that was standing with her- her husband, no doubt- up towards the front when the name “Hutchinson” was called. For about twenty minutes, the man continued to call names, and men continued to come forward. Those in standing in the crowd seemed to be standing tightly together; they were all tense and stiff.

When the names had been announced, the man who had called took a paper from the box. “All right fellows,” he said, and all the men unfolded their own papers. There was a soft, breeze-like excitement that rushed through the crowd as people began asking “Who has it?” and the walker found himself leaning forward, also curious to see the “who” and the “it”.

As if some unknown force was controlling what was happening, the same woman he'd spoken to earlier cried out. “You didn't give him time enough to take any paper he wanted!” she called. “ I saw you! It wasn't fair!”.

Obviously, whatever “it” was, her husband, Mr. Hutchinson had gotten it.

“Be a good sport, Tessie,” said another woman. “All of us took the same chance,” called another.

“Shut up,” snarled the woman's, Tessie, husband. Tessie, the woman from earlier, argued a bit with the others around her in the crowd, and the walker only grew more confused. He understood one thing, though. That something very bad was about to happen.

A few minutes later, Tessie, her husband, who's name was Bill, and their three children came to the front of the crowd together. Just as before, the family members took turns taking a piece of paper from the box. One child was so small that someone had to assist him in taking his paper from the box and held it for the small boy. The family opened their papers together.

The children all showed their papers to the audience, all blank, and the there seemed to be a sigh of relief from all those in the crowd.

“It's Tessie,” the announcer man said. “Show us her paper, Bill.” Bill took the paper from his wife, having to pull it with force from her. Tessie's face had drained of all color. There was no arrogance nor motherly kindness left in her expression, just terror.

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“All right folks,” called the man. “Let's finish this quickly.” The crowd moved quickly towards the stones that had been gathered in piles all over the court yard; the walker had forgotten about them until now. The walker felt a sudden awful discomfort in his stomach; he didn't want to see what he knew was about to happen.

The crowd swarmed around Tessie, everyone carrying their own stones.

One woman had to use both hands to carry a huge stone; she could barely manage to hoist it up and walk at the same time. As the walker turned away he heard Tessie cry “It isn't fair, it isn't right.” The walker was now running away from the village square, desperate to get out of ear shot. He made it up the grassy hill just outside of the village, but he did not manage to get far enough. The walker stopped dead in his tracks, and almost turned around to see, as Tessie's screams filled the air. The world was still as her screaming pierced through the walker.

Then the screams became gurgled, filled with agony. And then the screaming stopped altogether. The walker could not help but cry, just as he had years and years before when he walked away Omelas. Again, the walker found himself walking away in tears.

Working for the Public Holliann Bergin Eng 162, Creative Non-Fiction Writing Assignment: This piece is just observations in a grocery store from when I worked there.

She always came into the grocery store and seemed so frazzled. She had a kid on her hip and another in the cart. She wore so much make-up, even though she was naturally pretty enough without it.

Was it judgmental to say that she was a single mom? She never came in with a man. Always just the children.

She bought fairly normal things. You can tell a lot about a person judging by what they buy at the grocery store; this is something you learn after bagging groceries for two and a half years. She would collect her bags and go to leave. She seemed to always be in a hurry and she only muttered a 'have a nice day'.

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It's hard not to wonder what her life must be like. Maybe she has to chase after both of her small sons all day. Maybe she gets sad. Does she sometimes wish she would've waited to have children? People say that having kids at a young age will rob you of your picture. While bringing in the shopping carts, the young mother was cleaning off the face of her little boy and talking to him in baby talk. A bright smile was on her face, and there was a sweet ring in her voice. The ring that, for some unknown reason, only mothers have.

How can so much love rob her of her future? *** Red blotches on his face, wrinkles and balding hair showed that he was far too old to be working on his feet. He breathed in heavy wheezes, and he was a little round around the middle. He didn't have a wedding ring on.

His current customers were two young teenagers wearing jeans that were so tight they would probably lower their sperm count, t-shirts with ignorant sayings on them and big, fat skater shoes.

The man talked to them in a very quiet voice. He kept his eyes low and didn't look them in the face. The Hannaford name tag on his red polo shirt read 'Toby, at your service for 12 years'.

"Wait, is that soda $2.99?" One of the punks asked.

Toby pushed his glasses up his nose and answered softly, "Yes, that is the price of it."

"Seriously?!" The kid said dramatically, "I don't want it anymore.

Take it off."

Toby nodded and cancelled out the item. He continued ringing in their things. It was clear that Toby was older, and he worked at a slower pace.

One of the punks was tapping his stupid foot impatiently.

"Can you hurry it up? We've got places to be." The other punk said without a touch of politeness in his voice.

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Toby started to sweat; you could see it on his shiny forehead. He nodded quickly and started ringing in their items faster.

One of the kids nudged the other and they shared a cruel smile, "Twelve years working in this dump and you still can't ring groceries in fast enough?"

Toby didn't say anything. He just continued to do his job. His eyes were full of an emotion that looked like hurt.

The two punks left. Toby stood motionless as they walked away without saying thank you.

It seems like people in this world assume that every store clerk worker is an idiot without a work ethic. Why does it matter where he works? Maybe he enjoys it. Maybe this is what he likes to do.

Does it matter if he went to college or not? Does it matter if he isn't making triple digits a year?

Why do people go out of their way to be so cruel?

Seventeenth Century Feminists and the Art of Persuasion Samantha Cox English 225-95 Literature by Women Women in the seventeenth century were oppressed, viewed as domestic servants by their husbands and shallow creatures incapable of learning by society. As the unflattering stereotype was perpetuated in satirical writings, women grew increasingly upset by the degrading claims, prompting a few brave women, such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell, to write essays defending their sex. Cavendish's Female Orations is an emotional account of the broad spectrum of problems women face while Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies takes an objective, organized approach to the specific problems of the education of women.

Though their motivation to write about woman's rights grew from the same suffering and degradation, Astell appears more credible in her writing as she lays out a plan to improve the education of women and provides evidence that the improvements would be beneficial to society.

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Meanwhile, Cavendish's dramatic prose grabs the attention of the reader and ignites a strong emotional response in a way Astell does not but her indecisive attitude and her contradictory conclusions do nothing to change the stereotype of women and their differing religious perspectives ultimately set them apart; therefore, Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is a more effective piece of literature than Cavendish's Female Orations because she writes in a factual, dry manner that men can relate to and respect.

Astell is focused throughout A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and immediately offers a solution to the problems in woman’s education, a different approach than Cavendish who evokes emotion in the reader through a broad description of a typical woman's inner-turmoil. Astell strongly advises women to go into a “Religious Retirement” (263) in order to most effectively solve the education suppression of women. She believes education is the medicine woman's souls need in order to thrive, writing “One great end of this institution shall be, to expel that cloud of ignorance which custom has involved us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful knowledge, that the souls of women may no longer be the only unadorned and neglectful things” (Astell 264) as she proposes that women do not lack souls as many men believe, but that their minds are under-stimulated. With the proper education of “a true practical knowledge, such as will convince us of the absolute necessity of holy living as well as of right believing” (Astell 266), Astell believes women will be better human beings and more useful members of society. While Astell makes her objective clear, she doesn't create a feeling of urgency in the reader the way Cavendish's Female Orations does. Cavendish's words vividly illustrate the pain and suffering of women, immediately evoking sympathy in the reader, an emotion that is not betrayed in Astell's dry work. Cavendish writes, “women are restless with labor, easeless with pain, melancholy for want of pleasures, helpless for want of power, and die in oblivion, for want of fame” (162), and the reader cannot help but feel compassion for women who disallow themselves to desire anything for fear of disappointment and are powerless to change their fate. The piece successfully creates a disturbed feeling in the reader, an essential factor in stimulating change, in way Astell's piece fails to do.

Though Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies can’t compete with the emotional poignancy of Cavendish's Female Orations, she is able to

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provide evidence for her argument while Cavendish, whose attempt to describe the inner-turmoil of women by utilizing various “characters” and their opinions, overshadows her point as she brings the reader on an emotional roller-coaster ride but offers little evidence for the need for change. Astell asserts that the education of women would be beneficial to not only women, but to men, saying “Learning is therefore necessary to render them more agreeable and useful in company, and to furnish them with becoming entertainments when alone, that so they may not be driven to those miserable shifts” (265), a smart angle for her to take because men are ultimately the ones who will decide whether or not women can expand their education. By creating an argument with an outcome appealing to men, Astell makes a strong case for her claims and proves women are just as intelligent as men, capable of abandoning emotion and thinking rationally. On the other hand, Cavendish is unable to move past her emotional introduction to produce valid reasons why woman’s suffering should end and she continues to write with zeal and excitement that intrigues the reader. She describes different characters to illustrate the emotional turmoil feminist thoughts create but the creative tactic does nothing more than perpetuate the image of an emotional, irrational women that early feminists wished to change. Her various “solutions” to the problem conflict with each other, making her appear confused and indecisive. For instance, she is torn between loving men for all they do and despising them for her oppression. Cavendish rants, “our words to men are as empty sounds; our sighs, as puffs of winds; and our tears, as fruitless showers; and our power is so inconsiderable, that men laugh at our weakness” (162) and the insignificance she feels is clear. Understandably, she has contrasting feelings towards men, explaining “but we have no reason to speak against men, who are our admirers and lovers; they are our protectors, defenders, and maintainers;” (Cavendish 162) but her conflicting statements would be better kept to herself. Expressing the inner-conflict of women makes her appear emotionally unstable and Cavendish's credibility with men is damaged in a way Astell avoids by remaining factual and on-topic.

Both woman's pieces have a religious component to them and Astell is able to use the word of God to her advantage while Cavendish uses religion to justify the oppression of women, reducing the power of the strong images of suffering she previously employed as a base for change.

Astell states it is against God's will to deny women the right to learn,

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saying “For since God has given women as well as men intelligent souls, why should they be forbidden to improve them? Since he has not denied us the faculty of thinking, why should we not (at least in gratitude to him) employ our thoughts on himself their noblest object, and not unworthily bestow them on trifles and gaieties and secular affairs?” (264) and she makes yet another valid point to support the education of women. Astell's strongest argument questions the possibility of a meaningful afterlife for an uneducated woman as she ponders, “can ignorance be a fit preparative for Heaven? Is't likely that she whose understanding has been busied about nothing but froth and trifles, should be capable of delighting her self in noble and sublime truths?” (265), and she poses an important question in hopes that even man would not deny the word of God. On the contrary, Cavendish doesn't probe the current state of affairs and concedes to the current word of God and man. She says, “Wherefore let me persuade you, since we cannot alter the nature of our persons, not to alter the course of our lives; but to rule so our lives and behaviors that we be acceptable and pleasing to God and men; which is, to be modest, chaste, temperate, humble, patient, and pious; also, be housewifely, cleanly, and of few words” (Cavendish 163) and once again, her message is unclear to the reader and her words seem to accept societal expectations of women.

Though Cavendish's words merely state the conflict of conscience women considering seeking more rights battle with, they damage her argument as she paints picture of a population of women content to follow the words of God. As a result, the reader is left confused by the authors intent and the only thing that is clear is that women feel guilty for flirting with the prospect of change.

Though Margaret Cavendish's Female Orations is a bold piece of work that evokes strong emotions in the reader on behalf of woman's rights, it doesn't demonstrate the desire for change as clearly as Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, whose dry writing style, organized thought process, and detailed solutions are more appealing to the rational minds of men. Both writers are intelligent but Cavendish's confusing rants cloud her message to implement change for women and her seemingly contradictory words cast a cloud on her believability while Astell, who inwardly feels the same dissatisfaction as Cavendish, remains emotionless throughout as she focuses on her education plan, thus enhancing her credibility in the rational eyes of men. In a time when men made decisions, Astell makes a good decision to write her proposal so a male mind would be receptive to

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it, and in doing so, she slightly enhances the power of women because it is clear women can be rational, organized, and intelligent.

References Astell, Mary. “A Serious Proposal to the Ladies.” The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Ed. Lory A. Frenkel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 263- 266.Print.

Cavendish, Margaret. “Female Orations.” The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.

Ed. Lory A. Frenkel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 161164. Print.

Looking in That Photo Album Dray Emerson English 162-95 Creative Non-fiction Writing Assignment: This is a piece I submitted having to do with a short description of pictures that I found in my photo album.

It's a battered old thing. Well I suppose you wouldn't really call it old, maybe ten years give or take one or two, but it certainly looks to bear the marks of age and use; though what has marked it most is its time spent in storage. It's a rare thing now that I pull this old tome out, the once white pages are yellowed with age and water stains. The adhesive that held the pictures in place has lots it's grip on some and precious memories spill onto the ground.

Once I gather up all the fallen pictures I begin the laborious process of placing them back in their proper places and as I do so I take a proverbial trip back in time. I see the faces of people I haven't seen since I was eighteen, smiling pictures of youth at summer camp: Tall skinny Brandi grins back at me from her seat on a picnic table. David falls back laughing from an onslaught by Corey in one of many pillow fights. Meghan and her farther, Pastor Mark smile calmly as they sit on the dinning hall benches, a summer sky as blue as I have ever seen it peeks over grass that is greener than any I have seen in recent memory. I place these pictures back with

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almost exaggerated care and realise that I have forgotten some of the names of these smiling faces, that through the ever constant march of time I have somehow misplaced these dear people.

I set the last picture in place then gently turn the page.

My brother smiles back at me, seated in my mother's lap in our first home, a beat up old rickety trailer we once rented out in Orrington. My mother is younger here, her hair fuller and the only wrinkles I can see are the ones caused by her smile. My brother is laughing, waving his arms in the air at something I can't quite make out and the rocking chair they both sit in surely rocks with the motion of the moment. Bellow is a picture I haven't seen in years, a young boy perched atop a log, elbow propped up on a kneed and his face resting in one hand. I almost mistake the discoloration on the knee for a stain till I remember it was actually grape juice, his blond hair is a tangle and in sharp contrast with the hazy black and white background. To think my hair would turn out as dark as it has.

Again I turn the page.

I see my father peering over his shoulder at me as he cooks in an unfinished kitchen. I can't help but smile at the contrast between the long sleeved tie dye shirt and the grizzled back woods beard he's fond of wearing. Steam rises from the stove top and catches the overhead lights in an almost surreal way and only serves to accent the half finished cabinets to his right and the plywood floor on which he stands.

I close the album and set it aside.

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Running Barefoot Holliann Bergin Creative Non-Fiction Writing 162-95 Assignment: This submission describes two events during my childhood that are about 3 years apart. One event is very innocent, and one is a bit of a coming-of-age incident. They both take place in the town I grew up in and both events stand out in my mind.

"Ouch!" I cried as my barefoot slammed down on a thorn bush. I stopped for a moment and rubbed my foot, but soon enough I was running through the forest as fast as I could.

Perhaps the bare feet were a bad idea, but I didn't really care. I ran through those woods barefoot for years. I've stepped on plenty of thorn bushes, bumble bees, broken glass piles and even a few staples that my feet were as rough as a caveman's. Never once have I encountered poison ivy.

I was hopping over broken trees and stumps as I sprinted even faster. I could hear my mother yelling for me to come to dinner. At this point, I could see the house through the thicket. Finally, I emerged, stepping on a rotten apple that fell from the apple tree. It squished in between my toes and made a down-right gross noise. I shook my foot until the gook flew off.

"HOLLIANNNNN!" I heard my mother yell. I knew that was the last time she'd yell it. Her tone was clearly unimpressed. I walked in the house; the heat from the fire of the wood stove warmed my bones. My legs were raw from the cold autumn air and scratched from the wild I just ran through.

My mother saw me walk in the house, but didn't say anything. She stared at me and I could tell... She was mad.

I did this all too often. I ran off whenever I felt like thinking or singing to myself. Living in the middle of the woods as we did, we had no neighbors.

Privacy was your only choice.

My mother hated that I ran off so much. It bothered her. My father encouraged me to adventure the forest we were surrounded by. But as I looked past my unhappy mother, I saw my father sitting at the kitchen

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table. He was visibly unhappy as well. It was deer hunting season and I had made the mistake of going out with my natural light-bronze colored hair falling all around my shoulders, with no hunter-orange hat in sight.

"Hi, Mom." I said, cutting the tense silence, "Sorry it took me so long to get back to the house."

She didn't say anything right away. She mainly looked at me with disbelief in her eyes. Finally, she sighed, and I knew the lecture had begun.

"Have you ever looked in a mirror, Holliann?" Mom asked me.

I wanted to make a stupid joke but I knew it was too soon. I simply nodded.

"Tell me something... Does your hair look about the color of a deer?

Because I think it looks like the color of a deer. Don't you agree, Don?" She asked, turning to my dad.

"Yes, Anne. I think her hair is almost exactly the color of a deer."

Mom looked back at me and narrowed her eyes, "The next time you decide to run off, if you're not wearing an orange hat, you're grounded. You could get shot! Someone could see you running through the woods and they'll think you're a deer. You understand?"

I nodded slowly and bit the inside of my cheek.

"And why aren't you wearing shoes?" My dad added, "You're going to hurt your feet if you keep doing that."

I exhaled quietly. I got this sort of lecture from my parents all too often.

"I don't like shoes." I replied simply. My father rolled his eyes.

With that, the argument ended, and I sat down at the table. My mother hurried off to call Donny and Cindy to the table.

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Cindy sat down with a mud mask on her face and her hair piled on the top of her head. Donny sat down wearing nothing but his underwear. At 12, Cindy was all about learning how to apply make-up and going through Mom's beauty supplies. Donny was 6 and refused to wear clothes whenever he was at the house. (The fact that Mom got him to wear underwear at all was a big step.) At 10, I was almost never inside. I'd ride bikes with my friends or explore. Our 150 year old farm house sat atop a hill and was surrounded by 96 acres of land that belonged to my parents.

This land was pure untouched, despite a few hunting trails that had been there for years. My home town consisted of less then 150 people and had one general store. I was the gas station, redemption center, post office, liquor store, bate shop, smoke shop, and grocery store all in one. There wasn't even a school in my town.

So most of my childhood was spent running around in the woods, completely barefoot. I have scars scattered on my legs from unfortunate accidents I encountered as a clumsy kid who liked to play in the woods too much.

Dinner that night was surprisingly nice. My parents didn't break out into an argument. My sister talked about boys at school and how she really loved the fifth grade. Donny had just started kindergarten, and he said a few things about how nice his teacher is. I said a few things here and there, but mainly all I could think about was getting back to that forest and running around again. Being surrounded by that enchanting wilderness is possibly the most whole I've ever felt.

I just had to find where I put my hunter-orange hat. /*2005...*/ It was another normal day for me. I was riding my bike to see a few friends at the general store, which is a fairly short bike ride from my house. As I rode down a hill, I stuck my arms out straight. I smiled at how the wind felt. It was March, and the snow was melting quickly and it was warm enough to wear shorts and a t-shirt. Well, it was warm enough for me to wear a t-shirt and shorts. It was about 60 degrees out, which is practically a heat wave after the winter we just endured.

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I turned off the Bingo Road (the road I live on) and turned onto the main road. The store was a short distance from there.

I pulled into the dirt parking lot of the store and parked my bike. I could see my friend Damien waiting for me, sitting on the ground throwing a rock.

"Hey," I said once I saw him.

"Hi." He replied and smiled. He pointed up the road in the opposite direction of my house. I could see Felicia walking down the hill, "She's almost here too." I nodded and sat down to talk.

Felicia, Damien and I were best friends when we were kids. We spent every day doing this; taking bike rides and having long talks. We were inseparable. So much so, in fact, that Felicia and I both had a huge crush on Damien.

And at 13, how could I not? He was the kid in class who always acted up and was always sent to the office. He was tall and had big blue eyes and a killer smile. Of course I had a crush on him. He lived really close to me, and we used to hang out for hours on end.

Once Felicia got there, Damien had a bit of a proposition for us. "Let's play spin the bottle." he said, once the three of us greeted each other.

I didn't say anything. I didn't want to play that! My first kiss was when I was 8 and was attacked by a boy at Felicia's birthday party, but still! I didn't like the idea at all.

"Um, sure." Felicia said, a bit hesitant.

Damien smiled and then looked at me. I shrugged and said, "Why not?"

Before I knew it, the three of us were behind the store playing spin the bottle. It seemed like a really silly game to me. There were only three of us... Why even bother?

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Damien spun the bottle and it landed on Felicia. Since Felicia was much better with guys then me, she simply smiled and leaned in. They kissed, and I felt like the most awkward third wheel on the planet.

Then, it was my turn. I spun it an it landed on Felicia. I quickly spun it again, and it landed on my only other option... Damien.

I didn't want to do this. At all. But, he looked at me and smiled.

Almost involuntarily, I leaned it.

When I went to kiss him, I accidentally wrinkled my nose; a nervous habit I've always had. It was an awkward experience anyways, but the nose wrinkling made it worse.

Once the silly game was over, the three of us went to the old basketball court up the road and sat around and talked. We laid on our backs and watched the clouds float by, talking about everything under the sun, except the game of spin the bottle we just played.

None of us had a curfew; we just had to be back before dark. Once the sun started setting, we all took off on our bikes. Felicia in one direction, Damien and I on the other. He stopped somewhere along to way to say hello to someone, so I waved goodbye and continued on.

The whole way home I thought about what had just happened. Why did they both act like everything was so normal? He had just kissed us both!

That's not something that should be taken lightly.

The air got colder as I turned onto my road. Trees were thick on both sides of me as I winded down the beat-up old Bingo Road to my house. I avoided pot holes and stuck my arms out as I went down hills, all the while still wondering why he wanted to play spin the bottle with both of us.

I passed an old swamp that's on my road and was asking myself why I was thinking about it so much... it was just an innocent game of spin the bottle.

It never occurred to me then, but it really wasn't an innocent game at all.

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Civility: An Oral Reading Report Kurt Madden SPE101 Oral Communication George Washington had it easy. He could quickly reference his copy of “Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation” to address any questions he may have had on the topic. Whether it was trying to explain a felled cherry tree coupled with an inexplicable axe, or when sending a missive to King George flatly stating The Colonies were going to be no pushover, he knew what to do, civilly-speaking, in all situations.

Somewhere between those days and these, the idea of civility in everyday interaction began taking a beating, and from the look of it, that idea has been mugged completely in some quarters.

Having lived for over a half century, I feel qualified to make a few observations on the nature of civility, or the lack thereof, in our society. I certainly do not intend to indict all persons today; the young people of this school often prove good manners are still alive. I must say that as a Culinary student, I’m grateful for polite persons wielding very sharp knives while moving with all due haste.

Please allow me to summarize my chosen op-ed piece for you, give the author’s point of view, and my response.

Let me ask you, how have you felt when being rudely pushed past in the department store by a shopper more concerned with a quick in-and-out purchase than with acknowledging you may have been ahead of them in line? A bit uneasy perhaps?

Kathleen Parker, Opinion Writer for The Washington Post, feels that unease and paints a less than flattering picture of life today in the United States. In her recent article, “Civility is golden,” published February 21st of this year, she asks if civility can be saved. It’s a valid question, and one seemingly growing more outdated by the day with the advent of “distanced” communication, and the apparent growing tendency for many to ignore the consequences of their actions.

Has our Nation ever actually been civil, compared to what we experience today? Parker believes that the answer is no, although due to the

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ubiquitous nature of media it appears so. By the same token she does believe that our manners have deteriorated since the First President’s time, and certainly increasingly so in recent years.

Her contention is that today’s behaviors have declined considerably since her childhood, when even private cursing was rare and it was an extreme rarity to hear the f-bomb, much less on a regular basis like today. She feels we’ve become cruder in the process and desensitized to uncivil action, which fails to place ourselves in the others’ shoes.

Another excellent point she makes is the effect of the overreaching influence of social media, internet access and other methods of anonymous communication in today’s society. Things we may not feel comfortable with expressing in person are easily broadcast far and wide in the modern era. By extension, manners that have faded in interpersonal relations also fail to materialize in the public arena.

Ms. Parker states that to curtail speech involuntarily in some way is not a solution, but that for each person to take responsibility for their behavior and speech is the better answer. She ends her article by stating that the Golden Rule works pretty well. No, not the one that says He or She Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules, but the one that implores us to look within and act as a mature person in a civil society. It boils down quite simply I believe. Treat others well, with consideration and respect.

My own response focuses more on uncivil behavior rather than speech, as I believe that, while offensive at times, crude speech may not be as inherently dangerous as crude, uncaring behavior, particularly when trying to share the road with others.

Imagine you’re out on a nice summer morning, rolling along the highway on your motorcycle at the posted speed, enjoying a ride to school before the day begins. The passing lane merges into your own on this particular stretch of highway and you sense on the periphery that a large speeding object is attempting to occupy the same space as you currently are occupying. Adrenaline floods your bloodstream.

There is no other option other than to quickly formulate a plan for avoiding even the slightest contact. You move as close to the right edge of

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the roadway as practical and downshift frantically in a nerve-racking effort to emerge unscathed and scar-free. The motorist zooms past you in a cloud of dust. They do not appear to acknowledge your existence, much less the chilling fact that you were forced to make way for their mad dash.

That happened to me two years ago and the implications still bother me: a young person driving a luxury car had no intention of allowing me a safe cruising lane. That person’s incivility is still disturbing to me. It could happen to any of us whether on a motorcycle, a bicycle, or while out for a walk.

While an extreme example, it should serve as a reminder that such callousness can lead to disaster, so I believe it imperative to try each day to put ourselves in others’ shoes, to take a moment to stop and take a breath when you’d prefer to charge forward into the daily fray.

To conclude, I’d like to say that a little respect for oneself and others goes a very long way. Offer to let others go first in line. Say a kind word to someone who is struggling. Hold a door open. Smile more often.

Hey, maybe it will catch on, who knows?

Making the Pico Leisa M. Clement English 262, Creative Nonfiction Writing Assignment: A process essay, for which I chose to tell about making my Pico de Gallo.

Cooking, is a lot more than just the ordinary slice and dice that you see at a restaurant. I think that is why I do not like to go out to eat on a regular basis. It is fun once in awhile but it cannot compare to the atmosphere created in your own home while you are cooking dinner for your family.

The kitchen, for me, has always been the heart of my home. It is where I fed my family, teaching my children the alphabet, while eating alphabet soup, of course. It is where I ironed my first husband's uniforms, walked babies around the table while I waited for bottles to heat up, or medicines to go down. This part of the house is where every cherished holiday

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memory started for me and it is, now that I am back in school, where I do the lion's share of my homework at.

I live in a little two bedroom trailer and, of the common area, the kitchen takes up about a third of the space. The makers of my trailer, who have long since passed into obscurity, were ingenious at putting in cupboards and cabinets right where I would need them and yet leave me room to look out the window while I eat, especially since there is only one way the table will fit in here. My trailer has forty year old paneling that showed forty years worth of use and abuse on them. At first there was even some kind of mushroom growing out of the wall down by the floor, and it took me along time to decide what I wanted to do with the kitchen after I removed the mushroom, but eventually I found the wallpaper that made my heart go pitter patter. I bought all the rolls of it that were in the thrift store. Thank God, there was enough for the whole kitchen because that was going on the wall whether there was enough or not. I slapped up a coat or three of paint to trim off the wallpaper with, and just recently found the perfect wall border. The old wooden cupboards I kept the same, some copper accents strategically placed, and I have an old world style kitchen, kind of a rustic European country look.

Everything meshes together perfectly. Feng shui people would be impressed. My point to this blathering ramble is, that when my family comes in the house and sits down to eat, there is a pleasant atmosphere to the place blending the old with the new. Kind of like my family. I have blended my three children with my new husband and his two children. I did not trim them in wallpaper and paint but I did get some things they liked; pillows, towels, their own dishes etc. One of the boys lives with me now and I am incorporating him into the fabric of my family, just like my pico de gallo.

I picked up this recipe somewhere in Texas about 20 years ago and for all family functions, I have made a big heaping bowl full of the stuff. It goes on everything and with everything. My son, when he comes home on leave from the war, is usually at me to make him some to put on his food while he is here. His own bowlful of the stuff, I comply and within a few hours he is happily slathering it on everything he can put his hands on in the kitchen. My son-in-law once made me a bookcase for which I paid with a bowlful of Pico de Gallo. It is the only thing that my daughter will eat

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jalapenos in. I get the freshest ingredients that I can find. I then slice, dice, shred, squirt, and toss it all together to create a new family memory.

Something happens when I make the pico. Everyone comes into the kitchen and sits around the table and they all begin to eat...and tell stories.

It starts innocently enough with the accusations of double-dipping and somehow gets to Jeremy getting dish soap squirted down his throat and ending up throwing up bubbles out his nose. Every time he coughed bubbles came out, which made us laugh, and then he would choke some more. It was the strangest poison control call I ever made, the guy on the other end of the phone was even laughing. It goes from Jeremy right around the table and, before you know it, we are all laughing and having such a good time. The pico in the restaurants might be fancier, made by chefs, maybe even more authentic, but for my family only Mom's pico will do. I try to tell them it is not really the pico but it is the family and the fun and the little bit of love that goes in it, that is what makes the difference I think. I am not sure they buy that explanation though.

Recently I had surgery on my arm and the day of my surgery the children, who were at my house, asked me to make a bowl of the pico for them before I left for the hospital so they could have something to snack on while I was having the surgery done. I of course agreed and set about making a big bowl of it. I still have some left. Casey asked me to save it for him and he would make me an omelet when he got home, he went to his stepfather's house this weekend. Considering how he lost his mom, the thought of another mother in the hospital probably is sending him right up the wall. I have his pico here and have saved out some eggs too. He makes the best omelets and they go so well with the pico.

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Where They Begin, They Will Be Back Michael Vilasuso ENG 162-95, Creative Non-fiction Writing I grew up in a small town. Dedham, Maine exactly. We all are so close.

Family and friends literally next door. Their parents and their parents parent’s are all still living here. Everyone always has dreams of leaving some where different then this small ignorant town. We call them Pipe Dreams. This town is littered with pot heads. They all have these big dreams to do big things and nothing ever changes. Even their grass is long. That shows their simpleness. Their laziness.

Every year or every other year someone that talks about leaving does.

They plan on never coming back. I know they will be home though. We actually bet on when they will return. Or who they will call when they run out of money from partying or wearing their welcome out. Typically the place they go is Florida. Big surprise. Everyone dreams about going there. No one ever takes off for more than 6 months.

I have my money in five months. Cousin after cousin and friend after friend. Move and come back. They come back with horror stories. These people are not regular people. They are drug addict losers. I hate to call them friend. They are more like people I grew up with. I have no choice to like them. I am stuck with them. Neighbors and family members. Here there and everywhere. Some time they will get so fucked up they will just start driving down. Sometimes little or no money in their pockets. They wonder why it never last.

It doesn’t really matter where they begin from. They will be back.

I’m sure it happens in other towns and not just my town. We all have big dreams of getting out of this cold weather. Florida is beautiful. Beautiful beaches, water, weather, and of course women.

What’s not to love about the thought of living there. Especially compared to here.

I have the same dream.

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Wikipedia: Can It Be Trusted?

Alexander Gray ENG 101-05 College Composition The website Wikipedia has made an impact on our generation. In this age when computers are as prevalent as phones, it can almost seem that information is endless - at the tip of our fingers whenever we need it.

Most people would agree that the biggest contributor to the feeling of absolute knowledge is Wikipedia. With over 22,000,000 articles in total, and 3,491,603 of those being in English (Wikipedia), Wikipedia is, by a gargantuan margin, the largest encyclopedia ever compiled. But many people are skeptical of the accuracy of Wikipedia, and there have been many debates about whether the website can be trusted at all. They cite many things to discredit the website, such as the ignorance of the authors, poor grammar skills, and preferences to certain topics over others. So with all of the debate going around, can Wikipedia really be trusted?

When Wikipedia was started, it was really simply a side project of the creator, Jimmy Whales. Whales created a website that he called “Nupedia” in March of 2000 which was not unlike Wikipedia. Whales was inspired to create Nupedia by the Library at Alexandria (Wikipedia) which was said to have had hundreds of thousands of volumes - and by the idea that all of the world’s information could be kept in one place, accessible to all. Nupedia was a peer-reviewed, free encyclopedia, as is Wikipedia, but to start or make edits in an article you had to be a professor of some kind or possess other qualifications that enabled you to have knowledge about the subject matter at hand. But Nupedia quickly ran into trouble trying to find people to edit the articles and in their first year of operation Nupedia only had two completed articles.

Jimmy Whales and coworker Larry Sanger conferred about how they might attract more interest in their site and speed up the editing process.

They had multiple friends suggest that a wiki might help stir up interest. A wiki is any site that allows free posting and editing for the purposes of knowledge, question answering, and information sharing, and Whales thought it would be a great addition to their site. Consequentially, in early January 2001 the first wiki went up on Nupedia’s site. But there was uproar in the Nupedia community about adding a wiki to the site because many feared it would bring down the grade of the articles written. They

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did not feel a wiki belonged on the site. So on January 15, 2001, the wiki was moved to its own domain name and Wikipedia was born.

Wikipedia took off faster than anyone could have imagined, creating a buzz on the internet that hasn’t died yet. By September of Wikipedia’s first year, it already had 8,000 articles - compared to its older brother’s two articles in its first year - and was rocketing on. Although Whales tried to keep Nupedia alive, it had simply been obscured from knowledge with the growth of Wikipedia, and it was eventually shut down in 2003. At the time Nupedia was shut down, it had 24 complete articles and 74 more which were not fully developed. At the same time Wikipedia had passed 100,000 articles in the English language alone.

With the growth of the website came skepticism of the reliability of the entries. Some very notable errors in the past have included the death dates of living people (which, to the delight of the people in question, such as the comedian, Sinbad, were mistakes), and erroneous personal information in biographies. To fight this problem, Wikipedia has had to introduce new techniques for fighting errors and vandals in articles. The methods range from observing the edits that take place, to developing a sort of chain of command in user control (Wikipedia).

But some people were still not happy. Internet users started taking sides on the debate of whether Wikipedia could be trusted or not. One of the biggest roles in the debate has been played by schools, since they have seen an immense increase in the use of the internet for research in its students. Some colleges and high schools feel that Wikipedia is serving a good purpose of educating students about topics they would otherwise have never known about, while others feel the exact opposite and have gone so far as to ban the use of Wikipedia in research and papers. But no matter how many schools ban Wikipedia, the debate is still far from over.

The biggest argument you will hear against Wikipedia is that the information cannot be trusted because it is simply untrue. But this argument can be broken down into lower levels: it can be untrue due to the ignorance of the author about the topic, and it can be untrue due to vandalism by the person who edits it. These are the two main causes for inaccuracy in an article.

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The first level – the ignorance of the author – is the lesser of two evils.

This is the argument you will hear from those people who think Nupedia should have stuck around. Sometimes the writer simply doesn’t know as much as he thought, or is simply mistaken and includes an error in the article. One such instance occurred in the biography of Nightly News anchor, Brian Williams. Williams had been recorded on tape talking about the radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh. During the interview, Williams was asked what he thought about the host. Williams replied, “I really like Rush”. Later on in that week, a radio show host had jokingly taken that quote out of context and implied that Williams was talking about the rock band, Rush, and it appeared in Williams’ biography a short time after that, “One of Williams’ favorite bands is Rush”. There are ample more stories about articles being written by an amateur who accidentally includes a factual error in their writing, and Wikipedia does not deny it. Instead they try their very hardest to fight the errors with added, and better, reviews and more stringent verification processes.

The second level – vandalism – is the one you usually hear about in the news. Wikipedia can be edited by almost anyone, including the kinds of people who just want to make themselves a nuisance. Vandalism is the biggest reason factual errors occur in articles. There have been more times than one can count that a vandal has changed a fact in an article.

Sometimes it’s to make a point, and other times it’s just to make someone mad. Tony Blair has been given different middle names and was stated as idolizing Hitler as a child (The Sunday Times), and numerous celebrities have been “killed”. People even change the bias in articles to give one side of a debate a nicer point of view. They change things like “might be” to “probably is” and such things of that nature. In January 2009 Senator Robert Byrd was attending a presidential luncheon but left early due to “a medical issue” (Pershing). The next day his Wikipedia page stated that he had collapsed on the lunch room floor and died. This of course was untrue and was removed four minutes later. Wikipedia Commented on the story by saying “Allowing anyone to edit Wikipedia means that it is more easily vandalized or susceptible to unchecked information, which requires removal” (Pershing).

But these examples of inaccuracies are really more of the exception – rather than the rule. This is the beauty of peer reviewing. The more people who read the articles, the more chances they have of realizing an

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error. Of all the stories I’ve read regarding the errors and vandals on Wikipedia, there’s one thing I’ve never seen – links to the errors themselves. There were never any links because the errors were discovered by a fellow editor and corrected on the spot. In the case of Sen. Byrd, the vandalism was fixed within four minutes.

PC Pro, a very reputable website based in the UK, conducted a comprehensive study in 2007 on Wikipedia. They tested many things about it such as the writing style, content, depth of knowledge, and accuracy. They designed an experiment to test the error-correcting capabilities of Wikipedia in which they inserted subtle errors into 10 separate articles ranging from the composer Edward Elgar to the GeForce series of computer graphics cards. Every single error was corrected - and 9 of the 10 were corrected within an hour. The only error that stayed longer than an hour was an edit to the atomic number of Xenon. One reviewer had actually traced the IP address of their computer within 20 minutes and flagged four of them at once for vandalism. But PC Pro wasn’t satisfied. They tried again using all different computers and placed ten more, even subtler errors into articles. They changed such things as the launch date of a computer chip and Jesse James’ mother’s first husbands’ name. Out of the ten more subtle errors eight were corrected, all in less than 17 hours. The name change was corrected within a minute and a change to the article of Queen Anne was corrected in two. The only ones to slip through the nets was the change of the launch date of the computer chip and the fact that the Apollo 13 mission flew around the moon twice, instead of once (which they corrected themselves after a few days) (Andrews).

Another study in 2005 by Nature Journal, a British journal of science, was conducted to test the accuracies of Wikipedia compared to the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the test, the participants were given samples of science-related articles from both the Britannica and Wikipedia but were not told which was which. They were instructed to look for errors, misleading statements, and omissions. In the end, when the results had been tallied, the reviewers had found 123 mistakes in the Britannic articles and 162 in Wikipedia articles. This comes out to a rating of 2.4 mistakes per article for the Britannica and 3.2 for Wikipedia – a difference of only .8 mistakes per article. (Wikipedia Survives Research Test) The results of the study helped to prove a point Wikipedia has been trying to make since

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it started – there are strength in numbers. When an individual is given a difficult question, he probably won’t come up with the answer; but if the same question is asked to a crowd, your chances of having the question answered correctly skyrockets.

Sir Francis Galton was an English anthropologist and statistician who lived between 1822 and 1911. He believed that the common people should not be trusted to vote in general elections and decided to test his theory that crowds cannot make a correct decision together. He visited a livestock show with an ox and invited people to guess the correct weight of the ox after it would be cleaned and dressed. Over 800 people guessed the weight that day and he took all the guesses, and the ox, home. After cleaning the ox, the weight was 1,198 pounds, and no one had guessed correctly. But, being a statistician, he wished to prove mathematically that the crowd as a whole was off. But when his work was completed, he found – to his disbelief – that the median guess of the crowd was 1,197 pounds, a mere one pound off (NOVA).

The median and mean principles are how Wikipedia runs. If one person was putting all of the articles together, it would be completely untrustworthy. But as Sir Galton’s experiment unwittingly proved, a group of people acting as a whole can be far more intelligent than any one person alone. The median and mean principles also state that your chance of finding the exact answer grows better as the number of people contributing increases, and this is most certainly true on the internet. The internet is now a place literally billions of people use, and in America, Wikipedia holds steadfast to a position in the top ten most visited websites, along with sites like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook (Most Popular). With so many people contributing, the inaccuracies of articles are snapped up almost immediately, and Wikipedia has become a model for others trying the same.

So with all of the negative news stories and tales of misleading facts, can Wikipedia really be trusted? The answer is yes, as much as any other single source. What people get caught up in is being lazy in their research and only seeing one person’s point of view. A successful paper or study hall has always been reliant on checking one person’s answer to another.

You cannot simply read one article or book and become an expert; you never could, and you never will. But as a source, Wikipedia has been

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proven time and time again that it can overcome its inherent difficulties and stay a reliable and accurate source for researching and general knowledge. Wikipedia has shown us that to gather all of the world’s information in one place is an attainable goal. They have changed a generation from a people who didn’t care, to a people who can look it up.

While Wikipedia is by no means perfect, it can be trusted to give the information you need – and that’s a fact.

Works Cited Andrews, Stuart. "How Quickly Are Errors Corrected?" 12 July 2007. PC Pro. December 2010 <www.pcpro.co.uk/features/119641/how-quickly-are-errorscorrected>.

Ansari, Saif. "Wikipedia Gets a Bad Rap." 17 November 2008. Western Courier.

30 November 2010 <http://media.www.westerncourier.com/media/storage/paper650/news/2008/11/17 /Opinion/Wikipedia.Gets.A.Bad.Rap-3547580.shtml>.

Best Colleges Online. 30 November 2010 <http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/2009/02/10/25-biggest-blunders-inwikipedia-history/>.

"Can You Trust Wikipedia?" 20 July 2010. Sync Blog. 30 November 2010 <http://www.sync-blog.com/sync/2010/07/wikipedia-can-you-trust-theinfo.html>.

Educause. "7 Things You Should Know About Wikipedia." 6 June 2007. www.educause.edu. 29 11 2010 <http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7026.pdf>. eHow. "How to Report Vandalism on Wikipedia." 2010. eHow. 30 November 2010 <http://www.ehow.com/how_2031044_report-vandalism-wikipedia.html>.

Hamilton, Catrina. "The Pros and Cons of Wikipedia." Helium. 2 December 2010 <http://www.helium.com/items/296508-the-pros-and-cons-of-wikipedia>.

History Magazine. Survivor: The History of the Library. November 2001. 29 November 2010 <http://www.history-magazine.com/libraries.html>.

Kahle, Brewster. Universal access to all human knowledge http://www.hotales.org/writings/universal-access-to-all-human-knowledge.html.

2004.

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Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution. New York: Aurum Press, 2010.

NOVA. "Wisdom of the Crowds." www.pbs.org/wbgh/nova/physics/wisdom-crowds.html. PBS, 25 June 2008.

O'Sullivan, Dan. Wikipedia: a community of new practice? . Surey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009.

Pershing, Ben. "Kennedy, Byrd, latest victims of wikipedia errors." 21 January 2009. The Washington Post. 13 December 2010 <voices.washingtonpost.com/capitolbriefing/2009/01/kennedy_the_latest_victim_of_w.html>.

Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, Ben Yates. How Wikipedia Works. Los Angeles: No Starch Press, 2008.

Pink, Daniel. The Book Stops Here. 13 March 2005. 29 November 2010 <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html>.

The Sunday Times. "Comedy of Errors Hits Wikipedia." 12 February 2006. The Sunday Times. 13 December 2010 <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article730025.ece>.

Wikipedia. "About Wikipedia." 2 December 2010. Wikipedia. 2 December 2010 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_Wikipedia>. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;. "History of Wikipedia." 30 November 2010. Wikipedia. 30 November 2010 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia>. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;. "Inaccuracy." 30 November 2010. Wikipedia. 30 November 2010 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Accuracy_dispute>.

"Wikipedia Survives Research Test." 15 Thursday 2005. BBC News. 30 November 2010 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm>.

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The Rider Alex Snow Eng105 College Composition with Lab The Rider is the story of a story. No Name just exists, lost to time. He is trapped, purposeless. He fills himself with pursuits of service odiously trying to find that sense of belonging while he himself battles darkness.

Best put in Dante’s inferno: “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.” The pain put better by the Preacher in Ecclesiastes: “vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” It was not always like this, but he was chosen to choose, but he chose the choice of not death, but not life.

The Rider The story told Of things of old Things that knew That far too bold Yet still so cold That no one knew The rider with No Name Tally forth thru yonder fields of hay & grain Rode forth the rider with No Name Who was cast out of the saint’s domain But not quite the shadows claim Battling the bitter taste of sorrows from the war Lost in time, a sad demise, No Name - a rider scorned The light won’t keep, the dark take not, and death shall do no good To die, so sweet! But life won’t leave so No Name wanders on Serving God and goddesses, demons, the Devil No Name’s purpose: yet be found To wander and please, to serve, to seize The moment those send, the point whom they seek Called again by Lords & Might To do the work of time’s demise That death could find no sweet reside

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In summer tides or harvest time By the rider with No Name But also called by Dark & Hate To work a much more sinister fate To seek the life, to kill & End The rider with No Name At a time of perfect shine Of beaut’ous tone’s that could not buy But cursed to morn of times gone by To long for death, for death to die Yet man, with power out of grasp With will, the fate that claimed Like Pharaoh stood his ground on high The rider with No Name Through light or dark, and heat or hell, yet No Name conquered all But to the end, it was free will, his all-consuming fall Not bigger men nor grander things could yet withstand the squall To that hush that came to crush, the rider with No Name ‘Twas the end that Named The rider that came From end to end From start to fame But no one knew The rider with No Name

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Object Mini Elaina Fogler English 101College Composition It was just a baby blanket… or that was what everyone wanted me to believe. But to me that blanket was my best friend. It went everywhere I went. At the time it was new it was a white blanket and it had baby Minnie, Mickey, Daisy, Donald, Goofy, and of course Pluto. It was the one thing that I had to make sure I had with me when I left my house for a sleepover. Without it I wouldn’t be able to sleep. It was a security thing for me. I knew that if I had that blanket with me that I was safe. It also had a specific smell to it. It was not a bad smell but a comforting smell; it smelled like my house, my mom, dad, dog and even me. So when I was at someone else’s house I would just sniff it and be comforted.

I was eleven years old when I finally got rid of it. I mean got rid of in the sense of I just no longer slept with it anymore. It found a new home; the upper shelf of my closet. By this time the blanket had lost most of it colors. By then it was just a white blanket. In some spots you could just barely see that it used to have baby Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Daisy, Donald and Goofy one it. But it was mostly just a white, pilled, soft as ever baby blanket. Although, to this day I still sleep with a blanket, just it’s not a specific one. As long as it is fuzzy and warm I can sleep. I like to hug it at night; it’s my sleeping buddy. It is my comfort and security. When I am hugging a blanket I feel safe and I’m able to fall asleep at night.

Small and Lonely Victoria Hoffses DGD101 Introduction to Digital Photography Assignment 10: Capture an emotion For this week’s photo assignment, I decided to use yet another previously captured photo. This was originally taken for the first week assignment called Perspective. Instead, I had decided to use the photo of the leaves on the porch. Anyways, I believe this photo captures the viewer’s attention by the simplicity. A small lifeless screw lies patiently on a crisp hardwood floor. I stumbled on the screw as I was passing through our dining room and thought, “How strange for this tiny screw to be here. Where did it

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come from?” Unable to find its original home in the house, I decided that it was lost and quite lonely.

By looking at this photo that was taken months ago, I can still feel the sense of being small and lost. Without any clear definition of any of the surroundings, it is the only object in focus. As the floor fades into darkness, the screw lays motionless in the bright September sun.

Considering this was taken before I had received my Canon DSLR, this image is in JPEG format. Along with that, this image was also captured at a ridiculous combination of aperture and ISO speed. If I were to take this photo again, the F-stop would be decreased to about a 4.0 allowing the ISO to be brought down. Although there is not a lot of noise in the image, I feel that this photo could use a re-take. I am aware that this image is quite old considering all that we have learned but I feel that out of my gallery, this is one that portrays a sense of being lost and alone.

My original thought for this photo assignment was to capture a candle flickering in the wind with a soft Christmas glow. After setting the scene in my living room and capturing over 150 photos, I was still dissatisfied with my captures. I could not feel the emotion that I wanted to capture.

Therefore, considering I had run out of time to capture more photos, I needed to resort to my image gallery. By simply setting my filters to “flagged,” I discovered this image yet again. Although this image is old, I still feel like it makes the viewer in some way feel small and lost.

 Finis

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See your own writing in print.

Contribute to The Eyrie by emailing your work as a Microsoft Wordcompatible attachment to dwood@emcc.edu. Please include: Your name The course name and number in which the work was done A brief description of the assignment that inspired the work

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