rar rar rarrr.

what i want out of this paper...

-I want this paper to be fun to write. i dont want this to feel like a chore. i want to have fun doing this and hopefully that will lead to a good project that everyone else will enjoy reading.
-I want to reach back to my roots and learn more about who i am/where i came from and see how it effected who i am today/turned me into who i am today.
-I want to feel like im good enough to be an english ed major and to write something well/important. blahhh.

Brainstorms to start my paper:
grr.
sorrows/griefs. I guess I feel like im not good enough to be in this class. I'm clearly not smart enough. And that's extremely intimidating, grr. I feel like that thought is probably going to make this project hard for me to do. I hate comparing myself to others, and in most situations I don't care if I'm like everyone else, but I can't help but compare myself in this class. ew.

Family sorrows..
hmm, well... I.. dont have any? My brother and sister (twins) are 2 of my best friends (pathetic). I've never fought with them. I dont fight with my parents. My parents dont fight. My brother and sister fight, but rarely. We're not rich, but we're pretty well off. My mom taught at my high school, which was really annoying at first but we loved it by senior year. my daddy and i go on a lunch/movie "date" every saturday. I dont have family grief. I'm the oldest, my brother and sister look up to me and that does put a lot of pressure on me to always appear "perfect" to them and set good exampls.
more personal grief --> I'm weird. and everyone tells me that. Most of the time it doesnt bother me. =) im pretty unique (or at least i'd like to think i am) and it's great a lot of the time.. but other times it's really hard to connect/relate to others... and I think a lot of people are fake, and that really aggravates me. grr. I have trust issues. aldsfalksdfalsjdlasdlad i dont know what to wriiiite. I have phobias/fears of really weird things like meatloaf. and mold. and the color yellow. and bugs (it's much more than just a fear) and that makes a lot of things difficult/it really annoys my parents haha. I'm a hypochondriac and my parents never believe me when i tell them there's something wrong with me! (they refuse to listen to me when i tell them i have a stutter.. or when i tell them i have a breathing problem because sometimes my right lung doesn't fill up all the way.. ok im wayy of track now... excellent..)
something weird/specific that i believe helped shape me into the person i am today is the relationship i have with my family. It's kind of weird to be THAT close with everyone in your family. yikes. And i know that i wouldnt be who i am today without that relationship/connection with my fam. I also think the fact that i've been best friends with the same people since 3rd grade is 1- kind of weird because most people lose touch with their best friends after leaving elementary and going to middle school and 2- has shaped me into the person i am today. I have a hard time opening up to people i just met because i've never really had to open up to new people. I've always had my best friends since.. as long as i can remember..

hometown-->
my hometown is pretty small. Everybody knows everyone else. We all have nice houses.
sometimes its hard to meet new people because you get sucked into your group and stay there because its comfortable and nothing forces you to meet new people. i played soccer since i was 4 and i always played with the same girls. It was nice because i got super close with all of them, but bad at the same time because i never had the opprotunity to play soccer with other people/improve by having new challanges. i even played with teh same girls from club in highshool. the neighborhood i lived in was a normal neighborhood? We had enough trees to make forts =) but not enough to call woods. Everyone had manicured frontyards with pretty flowers and green grass. The houses didn't look the same, and I loved that. Everyone in my neighborhood had dogs that they would all walk together (our neighbors were all friends with each other) and if they didnt have dogs, they had something different/awesome like snakes. My daddy wouldn't let me get a snake =(.

words -->
racism. laughter. playgrounds. immature. grow up. family. diets. best friends. wicked. individual. vacations. lonely. different. rebel without a cause. drama drama drama. self-image. confidence. ughh. (thats not really a word to use. i just cant think of anything else right now)

"... literature works primarily by emotion and experience, and so was admirable well-fitted to carry through the ideological task which religion left off... students of literature occupy the more prized territory of feeling and experiences. Whose experience, and what kinds of feelings, is a different question." (Eagleton, 51)
This passage was usefull to me because if lit works primarily through my emotions and experiences then I can't really be wrong, and that makes me feel a liiiittle bit more confident in my work for this class. No one can really tell me that my feelings/emotions are wrong.

I dont really have anything to write that "just seems appropriate".. but I'm listening to oldies music right now, and i love it... so i'll just write that instead.

"Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students' thinking. The teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinkng that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only is communication. If it is ture that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible." (Freire, 708)

"THe affiermation of an ideal self and an ideal political state through a specific national literature - english literature- is in esssence an affiermation of English identity. But that identitay is split along hte lines of actual and ideals selves." (Viswanathan, 66)