Our family is what my father would like to say as "broken." Each one of us is different in our own ways. We're not broken in a way that a family can be; my parents are still married and all of my brothers and I are pretty healthy. I know we are somewhat different, but why are we "broken?"
My parents were a cute kind of couple; they met at Travis Air Force Base as they were on the same intramural softball team on base. After a few months of dating, they decided to elope because it was much easier than trying to bring my mother's family from Spokane, Washington and my dad's family from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, together. My father is of average height, with his balding hair very short and has dark brown hair with large speckles of gray hair interspersed upon his head. He has a large build and people view him as a bit intimidating, but it depends on the mood--at least with his children anyway. My father can be a bit hot tempered, but has simmered through the years because, I think, we have gotten older and will only show his disappointment. My mother is almost the opposite; she’s very calm and soft spoken with her being around five foot eight or average height with short, light brown hair with streaks of gray if she didn’t dye her hair in a while. Her medium brown eyes are very calming and I get along best with her, personality wise and just in general; she was the one to tell us if we were likely to go to a friends house and to calm us down if our father said things he didn’t mean and so on.
They then had three sons, P.J., Matt, Danny (in order from oldest to youngest) and one daughter, me. People say we are a rich family because we live in beautiful brown house, right next to an alfalfa field with an acre of space surrounding it. Living near cornfields and a few other houses in the town of Greene, where they only have a volunteer fire department, town hall, and a church. The "Big Brown House" (which was what people called it in town because of its distinguishable nature on that country road) that is named as our own, has a dark brown coat on the vinyl siding with beautiful trees that my father put in himself, now very tall maple trees that litter the front yard surrounded by marigolds of oranges, yellows, reds, along with other colorful flowers.
The inside is filled with beautiful coffee colored walls and the wooden banister leading up the stairs to an open kitchen and living room to the left of the stairs. The yellow colored kitchen and dining room area was purposely set up in the house because of its happy color, but seems almost ridiculous now to see. The house throughout the years has been fixed up with different colors, every room, except for my own that still has the light pink wallpaper with a cute little border of light blue houses repetitively along the walls. But with the added touches of several collages of pictures over the years of friends and trips along with several posters of guitar chords, art I made for classes, and a big kitty poster, it adds a nice touch--at least I think so. My father tried taking down the wallpaper border, but gave up because he knew it would be too much trouble for me to go take it all down off the walls. So my room is the only one with its wallpaper still intact. It could be that my father was too tired of re-doing the walls of the house by the time he got to mine, but I think he just didn’t want to upset me and always had a kind of sore spot for me being the only girl of four children.
Everything seemed alright; our family was never really rich, but we never had too many financial problems or anything. Except this one time when I was about eleven, my mother had to take a trip to Puerto Rico to fix a plane over there (she is an electrician for cargo planes like C-70s) and they get some free time. Well, she decided to go to a casino with other co-workers and I remember it was a hot summer afternoon, and my father was on the phone with my mom. He started to get this angry tone that he gets and face got very tense as his brown eyes grow darker with sweat shining his forehead and balding head, he starts yelling and goes to his room down the hall and slams the door. You could hear his voice and he comes back out with our jar of coins and had us starting to roll the coins and kept ranting about how my mother has made us go bankrupt. I remember sitting there trying to roll up pennies, and wondering what’ll happen if we don’t recover from this. I seems to remember a lot of the bad memories just as well as the good ones, which many people may suppress, which is why I’m not surprised that I remember this random memories.
Not much was said after this incident and we kept the handsome house. The family evolved in personality while the Wagner kids started to grow up. Matt became the dedicated student, being on the Dean’s List a few times last year here at Ohio University. Being the shortest of the family, his five foot and eight inches stature is athletic, with wavy, short brown hair with matching eyes that could pick out anything wrong in anyone or anything. When we were younger, we were close in age being the middle children and got along quite well. Today it’s the opposite though; I’m more easy going and take life as it comes while he is the one who worries and prepares for everything. I noticed things weren’t the same between us when he was driving us home an hour-ish after midnight after getting the last book of the seventh year of Harry Potter and we were having a good time. We were driving in the summer night air, with the windows slightly open bringing in the chilly air as we kept driving the half an hour back to our home. I don't remember what really sparked it, but he got upset with me and started yelling at me. "I can't believe you. . . you are so stupid! All you think about is yourself," and a lot of other horrible remarks that I was trying to tune out at the time until he said, "Lisa thinks you're selfish too!" That really hit me hard; Lisa was our foreign exchange student we had my junior year because my father didn't want to have a male foreign exchange student because he was scared by his coworkers that he was "bringing a date for Becca" and that changed his mind immediately (my father felt and still feels a need to protect me, so me being the only girl can have its downfalls too). This led to Matt dating Lisa secretly for a few months and he was still with her during this drive home after what should’ve been a wonderful night getting the last of the Harry Potter books. I was upset because we were such good friends and I thought Lisa thought well of me. And yet, I said nothing to him, which just made him more angry. Agreeing with him makes him angry also (Danny and Matt inherited this anger trait from my father, which would always get them in trouble with others or even each other). Later, I find out that Lisa never said anything of the sort when I asked her on Skype--using a computer and webcam to talk to someone--and Matt denied ever saying it. As flustered as I was, I thought it was just him being angry and he still loved me and we pretended it never happened. I am more social than my brother and liked to help out my friends, which he finds is a fault. Don’t get me wrong, I try to help out my family, but I feel differently towards family and show better interest in helping out my friends if I can. It could be the lack of unconditional love that my friends have for me, them choosing me to be with and accepting me, that I need; all Matt finds in me are faults, which makes me think he doesn’t love me and he definitely doesn’t say or show it, especially as the years progress. You could say Matt is broken because he has had severe ear problems with two ear surgeries and received Ulcertificus Colitis, which means that he had to suffer through an ulcer in the lining of the large intestine during his freshmen year of college (WebMd).
There is Danny, the youngest of the siblings, and is the most social of us. He’s very gifted in sports; it could be baseball, basketball, football and he could play those and more pretty well. That's why I think Danny is the most outgoing, being somewhat close to the "Jock" kind of personality, but being smart also. His hair being straight and wacky from the innumerable amount of cowlicks, he's very tall and skinny, but has a very athletic toned body. Danny goes from sport to sport a lot, so you'll find him sleeping most of the time he's home and not really doing chores that my Dad would end up doing for him. I’m getting along better with Danny as I’ve drifted away from Matt, most likely because of his more fun nature opposed to Matt’s negative and pessimistic views of everything. The thing that makes him “broken” is that he’s smart yet, doesn’t apply himself. Unfortunately, that’s how the eldest of the Wagner children, P.J., ended up being.
P.J. was a very smart guy; getting perfect Math ACT scores, the test consisting of 60 questions “with 14 covering pre-algebra, 10 elementary algebra, 9 intermediate algebra, 14 plane geometry, 9 coordinate geometry, and 4 elementary trigonometry,“ according to Wikipedia (and he also got a perfect Math score on the SAT). My parents were so proud of their brown-haired, hazel eyed, first born son, except when he started not doing homework, that would then lead to him averaging C's and B's instead of acing all of his classes. P.J. managed to join the Navy ROTC at Penn State University. And one winter night, he was
watching "Passion of the Christ" in a local movie theater with friends when he fainted in the men's bathroom from all the blood from the movie. After receiving a concussion from hitting his head on a sink in the Du Bois movie theater, he's never been the same; P.J. eventually dropped out of Penn State to
a local, community branch of Kent State University, and started working at Kraft Maid. After not finishing it at the Trumbull campus of Kent State, he continued working at Kraft Maid until he was laid off and moved in with my Grandmother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania working as a waiter for a Japanese (or sushi) restaurant. I know that P.J. is above such things, but I feel useless because we all know his smarts should not be wasted, and yet they are wasting away . . .
When coming home for the long winter break, I really enjoyed being with my family after living four hours away from them in Southeast of Ohio. We were talking to my father about his knee replacement surgery (he busted his knee years ago doing sports and finally brought up the courage to replace his knee after doctors telling him he needed it) when my father said he had to talk to us about something important. Of course, I got really worried, inheriting the “worry wart” trait from my dad’s side, and he explained to Matt and I how they spent my college loan money. They told us that my mother and himself got into gambling to hopefully help pay for college and ended up using so much money that they took from the Athletic Boosters fund--my dad was treasurer--and eventually paid them back. I was totally stunned; they never mentioned any problems on the phone and acted like life was good. It brought me back to a time where I was away at band camp for two weeks and when I got back, my dad told me that my kitten accidentally ate driveway sealant and the other kitten was all by his lonesome. Except this was my loan money, that I needed to get through college. I was just in disbelief as my father asked me to “forgive” them. I did because they are my family, as I forgave Matt for not helping me study for the Psychology course that my parents thought would be beneficial to me to have my smart, hardworking brother help me.
“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go by any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material” (F. Scott Fitzgerald).
As for me, I know that I’m definitely broken; who isn’t? Within our family, the meaning of “broken” means more to me. I have my faults, as I well know that the rest of my family does, but I’m willing to accept them for who they are. It’s just frustrating when you feel that you are in a room of people that you thought you knew, and now feel detached from. My father says that we’re “broken” in a joking manner, but I think he believes in it. Our family doesn’t feel like a family anymore; throughout the whole break my father explained that we need to show affection towards one another and spend as much time as a family as we possibly could, but we hardly knew any of this. Our family wasn’t affectionate to start out with--we would say “I love you” on the phone, at least if we remembered and helped each other out on occasion--but we really didn’t hug each other, unless the occasion could’ve called for it, but not likely. That could’ve been my parents fault, but we should’ve known better because other families knew better; parents would always go to their child’s events. I remember getting first chair clarinetist in honor bands my senior year, and my parents couldn’t make it to any of the concerts. I had two solos when I attended Akron’s Ohio Band Director’s Conference Honors Band, and Matt and Danny arrived late and missed me tremendous solo in a Bach piece that I can’t remember the name of. I’ve just never really felt that kind of love that Danny would get; my father would go to every one of his basketball games and feel awful when he didn’t and I had to pretend that everything was okay when he couldn’t come to Solo and Ensemble contest for six years, every year having a solo. I’m still bitter about the whole ordeal, even though I know that my parents don’t know much of anything about music, I just thought they could be like other people and their families and go and support their child. I never got the “Great job Becca” that other people would get from parents as I wondered around waiting for my ride to come or just leaving the scene in general. I tried to forgive my parents, but after spending my loan money and now money that my grandmother was going to give me money that could help pay towards doing marching band next year or even towards college, will be used on the family (I’m not sure towards what, but I’m hoping it is used wisely. . . Fingers crossed).
This family could never be the same happy family I once thought it to be. The simple, loving family was gone; it was replaced with bitterness of the cold hard reality that my parents have tried to keep hiding from us for so long. For my family, finance was the final blow that has shattered our delusive perfect picture into an empty frame.
Works Cited
The Quote Garden. 5 January 2008. Guillemets, Terri. 7 March 2009 http://www.quotegarden.com/family.html.
WebMd: Ulcerative Colitis Guide. 3 November 2008. Healthwise Incorporated. 9 March 2009 http://www.webmd.com/ibd-crohns-disease/colitis-guide/ulcerative-colitis-topic-overview.
Wikipedia: ACT (examination). 2 March 2009. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 9 March 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_(examination).
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Revised 1200 memoir
Our family is what my father would like to say as "broken." Each one of us is different in our own ways. We're not broken in a way that a family can be; my parents are still married and all of my brothers and I are pretty healthy. I know we are somewhat the different, but why are we "broken?"
My parents were a cute kind of couple; they met at Travis Air Force Base as they were on the same intramural softball team on base. After a few months of dating, they decided to elope because it was much easier than trying to bring my mother's family from Spokane, Washington and my dad's family from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, together.
They then had three sons, P.J., Matt, Danny (in order from oldest to youngest) and one daughter, me. People say we are a rich family because we live in beautiful brown house, right next to an alfalfa field with an acre of space surrounding it. Living near cornfields and a few other houses in the town of Greene, where they only have a volunteer fire department, town hall, and a church. The "Big Brown House" that is named as our own, has a dark brown coat on the vinyl siding with beautiful trees that my father put in himself, now very tall maple trees that litter the front yard surrounded by marigolds of oranges, yellows, reds, along with other colorful flowers.
The inside is filled with beautiful coffee colored walls and the wooden banister leading up the stairs to an open kitchen and living room to the left of the stairs. The yellow colored kitchen and dining room area livens up the house, but seems almost ridiculous now to see. The house throughout the years has been fixed up with different colors, every room, except for my own that still has the light pink wallpaper with a cute little border of light blue houses repetitively along the walls. But with the added touches of several collages of pictures over the years of friends and trips along with several posters of guitar chords, art I made for classes, and a big kitty poster, it adds a nice touch--at least I think so. My father tried taking down the wallpaper border, but gave up because he knew it would be too much trouble for me to go take it all down off the walls. So my room is the only one with its wallpaper still intact.
Everything seemed alright; our family was never really rich, but we never had too many financial problems or anything. Except this one time when I was about eleven, my mother had to take a trip to Puerto Rico to fix a plane over there (she is an electrician for cargo planes like C-70s) and they get some free time. Well, she decided to go to a casino with other co-workers and I remember it was a hot summer afternoon, and my father was on the phone with my mom. He started to get this angry tone that he gets and face got very tense as his brown eyes grow darker with sweat shining his forehead and balding head, he starts yelling and goes to his room down the hall and slams the door. You could hear his voice and he comes back out with our jar of coins and had us starting to roll the coins and kept ranting about how my mother has made us go bankrupt. I remember sitting there trying to roll up pennies, and wondering what’ll happen if we don’t recover from this.
Not much was said after this incident and we kept the handsome house. The family evolved in personality while the Wagner kids started to grow up. Matt became the dedicated student, being on the Dean’s List a few times last year here at Ohio University. Being the shortest of the family, his five foot and eight inches stature is athletic, with wavy, short brown hair with matching eyes that could pick out anything wrong in anyone or anything. When we were younger, we were close in age being the middle children and got along quite well. Today it’s the opposite though; I’m more easy going and take life as it comes while he is the one who worries and prepares for everything. I am more social than my brother and like to help out my friends, which he finds is a fault. Don’t get me wrong, I try to help out my family, but I feel differently towards family and show better interest in helping out my friends if I can. You could say Matt is broken because he has had severe ear problems with two ear surgeries and received Ulcertificus Colitis, which means that he had to suffer through an ulcer in the lining of the large intestine during his freshmen year of college (WebMd).
There is Danny, the youngest of the siblings, and is the most social of us. He’s very gifted in sports; it could be baseball, basketball, football and he could play those and more pretty well. That's why I think Danny is the most outgoing, being somewhat close to the "Jock" kind of personality, but being smart also. His hair being straight and wacky from the innumerable amount of cowlicks, he's very tall and skinny, but has a very athletic toned body. Danny goes from sport to sport a lot, so you'll find him sleeping most of the time he's home and not really doing chores that my Dad would end up doing for him. The thing that makes him “broken” is that he’s smart yet, doesn’t apply himself. Unfortunately, that’s how the eldest of the Wagner children, P.J., ended up being.
P.J. was a very smart guy; getting perfect Math ACT scores, the test consisting of 60 questions “with 14 covering pre-algebra, 10 elementary algebra, 9 intermediate algebra, 14 plane geometry, 9 coordinate geometry, and 4 elementary trigonometry,“ according to Wikipedia (and he also got a perfect Math score on the SAT). My parents were so proud of their brown-haired, hazel eyed, first born son, except when he started not doing homework, that would then lead to him averaging C's and B's instead of acing all of his classes. P.J. managed to join the Navy ROTC at Penn State University. And one winter night, he was
watching "Passion of the Christ" in a local movie theater with friends when he fainted in the men's bathroom from all the blood from the movie. After receiving a concussion from hitting his head on a sink in the Du Bois movie theater, he's never been the same; P.J. eventually dropped out of Penn State to
a local, community branch of Kent State University, and started working at Kraft Maid. After not finishing it at the Trumbull campus of Kent State, he continued working at Kraft Maid until he was laid off and moved in with my Grandmother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania working as a waiter for a Japanese (or sushi) restaurant.
When coming home for the long winter break, I really enjoyed being with my family after living four hours away from them in Southeast of Ohio. We were talking to my father about his knee replacement surgery (he busted his knee years ago doing sports and finally brought up the courage to replace his knee after doctors telling him he needed it) when my father said he had to talk to us about something important. Of course, I got really worried, inheriting the “worry wart” trait from my dad’s side, and he explained to Matt and I how they spent my college loan money. They told us that my mother and himself got into gambling to hopefully help pay for college and ended up using so much money that they took from the Athletic Boosters fund--my dad was treasurer--and eventually paid them back. I was totally stunned; they never mentioned any problems on the phone and acted like life was good. It brought me back to a time where I was away at band camp for two weeks and when I got back, my dad told me that my kitten accidentally ate driveway sealant and the other kitten was all by his lonesome. Except this was my loan money, that I needed to get through college. I was just in disbelief as my father asked me to “forgive” them. I did because they are my family, as I forgave Matt for not helping me study for the Psychology course that my parents thought would be beneficial to me to have my smart, hardworking brother help me.
“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go by any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material” (F. Scott Fitzgerald).
This family could never be the same happy family I once thought it to be. The simple, loving family was gone; it was replaced with bitterness of the cold hard reality that my parents have tried to keep hiding for so long. Just seeing my parents so weak was a rude awakening for me, that not everyone can handle certain things in life. For my family, finance has shattered our perfect picture into an empty frame.
My parents were a cute kind of couple; they met at Travis Air Force Base as they were on the same intramural softball team on base. After a few months of dating, they decided to elope because it was much easier than trying to bring my mother's family from Spokane, Washington and my dad's family from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, together.
They then had three sons, P.J., Matt, Danny (in order from oldest to youngest) and one daughter, me. People say we are a rich family because we live in beautiful brown house, right next to an alfalfa field with an acre of space surrounding it. Living near cornfields and a few other houses in the town of Greene, where they only have a volunteer fire department, town hall, and a church. The "Big Brown House" that is named as our own, has a dark brown coat on the vinyl siding with beautiful trees that my father put in himself, now very tall maple trees that litter the front yard surrounded by marigolds of oranges, yellows, reds, along with other colorful flowers.
The inside is filled with beautiful coffee colored walls and the wooden banister leading up the stairs to an open kitchen and living room to the left of the stairs. The yellow colored kitchen and dining room area livens up the house, but seems almost ridiculous now to see. The house throughout the years has been fixed up with different colors, every room, except for my own that still has the light pink wallpaper with a cute little border of light blue houses repetitively along the walls. But with the added touches of several collages of pictures over the years of friends and trips along with several posters of guitar chords, art I made for classes, and a big kitty poster, it adds a nice touch--at least I think so. My father tried taking down the wallpaper border, but gave up because he knew it would be too much trouble for me to go take it all down off the walls. So my room is the only one with its wallpaper still intact.
Everything seemed alright; our family was never really rich, but we never had too many financial problems or anything. Except this one time when I was about eleven, my mother had to take a trip to Puerto Rico to fix a plane over there (she is an electrician for cargo planes like C-70s) and they get some free time. Well, she decided to go to a casino with other co-workers and I remember it was a hot summer afternoon, and my father was on the phone with my mom. He started to get this angry tone that he gets and face got very tense as his brown eyes grow darker with sweat shining his forehead and balding head, he starts yelling and goes to his room down the hall and slams the door. You could hear his voice and he comes back out with our jar of coins and had us starting to roll the coins and kept ranting about how my mother has made us go bankrupt. I remember sitting there trying to roll up pennies, and wondering what’ll happen if we don’t recover from this.
Not much was said after this incident and we kept the handsome house. The family evolved in personality while the Wagner kids started to grow up. Matt became the dedicated student, being on the Dean’s List a few times last year here at Ohio University. Being the shortest of the family, his five foot and eight inches stature is athletic, with wavy, short brown hair with matching eyes that could pick out anything wrong in anyone or anything. When we were younger, we were close in age being the middle children and got along quite well. Today it’s the opposite though; I’m more easy going and take life as it comes while he is the one who worries and prepares for everything. I am more social than my brother and like to help out my friends, which he finds is a fault. Don’t get me wrong, I try to help out my family, but I feel differently towards family and show better interest in helping out my friends if I can. You could say Matt is broken because he has had severe ear problems with two ear surgeries and received Ulcertificus Colitis, which means that he had to suffer through an ulcer in the lining of the large intestine during his freshmen year of college (WebMd).
There is Danny, the youngest of the siblings, and is the most social of us. He’s very gifted in sports; it could be baseball, basketball, football and he could play those and more pretty well. That's why I think Danny is the most outgoing, being somewhat close to the "Jock" kind of personality, but being smart also. His hair being straight and wacky from the innumerable amount of cowlicks, he's very tall and skinny, but has a very athletic toned body. Danny goes from sport to sport a lot, so you'll find him sleeping most of the time he's home and not really doing chores that my Dad would end up doing for him. The thing that makes him “broken” is that he’s smart yet, doesn’t apply himself. Unfortunately, that’s how the eldest of the Wagner children, P.J., ended up being.
P.J. was a very smart guy; getting perfect Math ACT scores, the test consisting of 60 questions “with 14 covering pre-algebra, 10 elementary algebra, 9 intermediate algebra, 14 plane geometry, 9 coordinate geometry, and 4 elementary trigonometry,“ according to Wikipedia (and he also got a perfect Math score on the SAT). My parents were so proud of their brown-haired, hazel eyed, first born son, except when he started not doing homework, that would then lead to him averaging C's and B's instead of acing all of his classes. P.J. managed to join the Navy ROTC at Penn State University. And one winter night, he was
watching "Passion of the Christ" in a local movie theater with friends when he fainted in the men's bathroom from all the blood from the movie. After receiving a concussion from hitting his head on a sink in the Du Bois movie theater, he's never been the same; P.J. eventually dropped out of Penn State to
a local, community branch of Kent State University, and started working at Kraft Maid. After not finishing it at the Trumbull campus of Kent State, he continued working at Kraft Maid until he was laid off and moved in with my Grandmother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania working as a waiter for a Japanese (or sushi) restaurant.
When coming home for the long winter break, I really enjoyed being with my family after living four hours away from them in Southeast of Ohio. We were talking to my father about his knee replacement surgery (he busted his knee years ago doing sports and finally brought up the courage to replace his knee after doctors telling him he needed it) when my father said he had to talk to us about something important. Of course, I got really worried, inheriting the “worry wart” trait from my dad’s side, and he explained to Matt and I how they spent my college loan money. They told us that my mother and himself got into gambling to hopefully help pay for college and ended up using so much money that they took from the Athletic Boosters fund--my dad was treasurer--and eventually paid them back. I was totally stunned; they never mentioned any problems on the phone and acted like life was good. It brought me back to a time where I was away at band camp for two weeks and when I got back, my dad told me that my kitten accidentally ate driveway sealant and the other kitten was all by his lonesome. Except this was my loan money, that I needed to get through college. I was just in disbelief as my father asked me to “forgive” them. I did because they are my family, as I forgave Matt for not helping me study for the Psychology course that my parents thought would be beneficial to me to have my smart, hardworking brother help me.
“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go by any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material” (F. Scott Fitzgerald).
This family could never be the same happy family I once thought it to be. The simple, loving family was gone; it was replaced with bitterness of the cold hard reality that my parents have tried to keep hiding for so long. Just seeing my parents so weak was a rude awakening for me, that not everyone can handle certain things in life. For my family, finance has shattered our perfect picture into an empty frame.
Monday, February 23, 2009
1200-ish Memoir post thinger
Our family is what my father would like to say as "broken." Each one of us is different in our own ways. My older brother, P.J., who's the black sheep of the family and amazingly good at math (I think a perfect score on the ACT would prove that). He took all the moving the hardest, because we moved while he was in high school from a huge high school with a state qualifying football team in Poland, Ohio to small, dinky Maplewood, who didn’t even have a football team. So his very large, six foot two inches form, used his large thigh to play baseball instead. My parents were so proud of him, except when he started not doing homework, which is why he would average C’s and B’s instead of acing all of his classes. He managed to join the Navy ROTC at Penn State. Unfortunately, one night my father tells the family that while at Penn State University, P.J. got a concussion from fainting in the bathroom after seeing blood in the movie theater from “Passion of the Christ,” and he’s never been the same since.
Within a year and a half are my other brothers and me. First was Matthew, the quiet, hardworking, straight-A student that got on the Dean’s List a few times at Ohio University. Then me, the artistic one that was kind of outgoing and viewed as an "ok" student. And Danny, the partier and the most outgoing and athletic of the Wagner Family kids.
I remember my dad telling me at dinner one night, "Becky. What'd I tell you are the most important subjects in school?" This question as been droned upon me for years and knows the answer like a pop song, "Math and science?" My parents were always interested in those subjects and thought that you need to be able to survive in the real world; I somewhat believe that, but not to the extent that my parents care about those subjects. My father would just stare at me after he found out that I got a "C" in Trigonometry one quarter in my junior year of high school. You could say that I became the slacker one, but what amazes me more is how Matt would always be praised for his great grades and I find out later that he would copy his homework from someone else in school because he didn't have time to do it beforehand. I felt above him in that aspect, which made me feel a lot better. I was the band nerd who took the course so seriously, doing honor bands and solo and ensemble contest, because I knew that music is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So, you could say I just didn't try too hard in the subjects my parents loved, because I found no interest in them. I remember that very same year, we had the huge "Trig Project" as we all called it, and there were things we hadn't learned yet on it and it was a large portion of our grade that quarter. I had my partner, who happened to be one of my good friends by the name of Andrea, but she was just as bad at math as I was. I'm thinking "I have two brothers who are really good at math, so why don't I ask them? They know this and Matt took it just the year before."
I go to Matt's room, which is across the hall from me and ask for his help. He took the course a year ago and thought he was the best bet. He looks up at me as I ask him and he said "Sure. I'll see what I can do." Matt walks down the narrow hallway into the kitchen to the counter separating the kitchen from the dining room. After scanning the problems, he scribbles with the horribly cramped handwriting he has and kept erasing, jotting numbers and equations down, and erasing again. After only ten minutes, he gets angry and says, "I'm done. I don't remember how to do this." I was shocked; after all the times he said he could help me and my parents telling me that I should get help from him when needed, that it was just useless advice. Going down the stairs into P.J.'s room, was my last resort. His room was very dusty, messy, and cramped as he sat at a computer chair, playing World of Warcraft. I ask him if he could give me a minute and he's the loving brother, I think, and says "Ok. Let me see what you got here." This perfect-math-ACT-getter works so much harder as he looks over all the problems and writes on a notebook paper. P.J. sighed and gave me the project back in about a half an hour and says, "I'm sorry, but I could only get one problem." Honestly, I was glad that he could figure out one of the seventy-odd problems in the homework and thanked him. What I didn't look forward to though, later, is that I didn't get much done after that and asked all my friends for help and failed the "Trig Project"; this then left me with a "D" on my report card for trigonometry so my Dad was peeved. I can still imagine his face and him saying, "I'm very disappointed with you," which is the worst phrase that parents could ever say to you.
But honestly, I really tried to understand the "most important subjects" in school, but it wasn't useful. My brothers think I was babied, being the only girl, and not having to do everything that they had to do. My father didn't force me to take the ACT my sophomore year like he did with Matt and P.J., which upset Matt for some reason. My father understood by then that I was going to study music and didn't really need to worry about my ACT until I needed to apply to colleges. But my brothers thought differently, of course. Secretly though, I wish I could be as smart as P.J. and Matt are; I only got a 22 on my test and felt incredibly dumb compared to them (The second time I took the ACT, a boy threw up onto his test around winter time with the colds going around, and the proctors couldn't clean it up until break, and it happened only a couple chairs away from me. Paper towels do not help you forget it's still there).
About me being outgoing, I'm only outgoing to those I've known for a while, like my family and close friends. Moving around a lot when I was younger was a bit hard for me, and somehow made friends even though I looked like a nerd. My friend from home, Rachel, told me about when I first moved to Maplewood in the middle of fifth grade and how my rose tinted glasses made me look like a hippie, and they found that so humorous, that they started talking to me. I laughed when I heard this story the summer before coming to Ohio U, because we became really good friends somehow. I can say more to my friends than I can do my family, but I don't think of myself as the outgoing, party type that Dan is of the family. Danny will tell you differently because my father would tell him he couldn't go somewhere with his friends and he would reply, "You let Becky go to the movies with her friends, why can't I go?" Danny always wanted to be the one to be more independent than my brothers and I, which would always get him in trouble. My father, Danny, and Matt have the same kind of temper: bad. I am much more calm and can bottle things up like my mother and brother, P.J., which makes them more upset more than anything.
Matt was driving me home around midnight after we got the last book of the seventh year of Harry Potter and we were having a good time. I don't remember what really sparked it, but he got upset with me and started yelling at me. "I can't believe you. . . you are so stupid! All you think about is yourself," and a lot of other horrible remarks that I was trying to tune out at the time until he said, "Lisa thinks you're selfish too!" That really hit me hard; Lisa was our foreign exchange student we had my junior year because my father didn't want to have a male foreign exchange student because he was scared by his coworkers that he was "bringing a date for Becca" and that changed his mind immediately. Also, Matt started dating Lisa secretly for a few months and he was still with her at the time. She really loved the designated "Becky pieces" of pumpkin pie, they were so massive pieces. Anywho, I was upset because we were such good friends and I thought she thought well of me. And yet, I said nothing to him, which just made him more angry. Agreeing with him makes him angry also. Later, I find out that Lisa never said anything of the sort when I asked her on Skype--using a computer and webcam to talk to someone--and Matt denied ever saying it. But I knew. . .
Being calm is something I'm really good at portraying, even with friends. Especially in high school, there is a lot of drama because you see the same people everyday, so life has to be spiced up a little bit. It's odd, because my friends would try to seek advice from me and a lot of the things that I write, as of now anyway, has been philosophical and "deep" as my boyfriend, Reilly, had said. To my family, however, I'm not really viewed as philosophical or anything close to that. I usually find myself hardly saying anything at all when we have group discussions about politics or a related subject at the dinner table because I don't find it as important to me. I think the only "advice" I had ever given to my family was to Danny about a girl problem he was having; it was to see if this girl he was talking to really liked him or not. It didn't really matter because he didn't really accept my advice, but he appreciated that I tried, I suppose.
My family views me as the optimist, which I like to think I am sometimes. I can be a realist, don't get me wrong, but I like to look at the glass half full, as that overused saying goes.
Within a year and a half are my other brothers and me. First was Matthew, the quiet, hardworking, straight-A student that got on the Dean’s List a few times at Ohio University. Then me, the artistic one that was kind of outgoing and viewed as an "ok" student. And Danny, the partier and the most outgoing and athletic of the Wagner Family kids.
I remember my dad telling me at dinner one night, "Becky. What'd I tell you are the most important subjects in school?" This question as been droned upon me for years and knows the answer like a pop song, "Math and science?" My parents were always interested in those subjects and thought that you need to be able to survive in the real world; I somewhat believe that, but not to the extent that my parents care about those subjects. My father would just stare at me after he found out that I got a "C" in Trigonometry one quarter in my junior year of high school. You could say that I became the slacker one, but what amazes me more is how Matt would always be praised for his great grades and I find out later that he would copy his homework from someone else in school because he didn't have time to do it beforehand. I felt above him in that aspect, which made me feel a lot better. I was the band nerd who took the course so seriously, doing honor bands and solo and ensemble contest, because I knew that music is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So, you could say I just didn't try too hard in the subjects my parents loved, because I found no interest in them. I remember that very same year, we had the huge "Trig Project" as we all called it, and there were things we hadn't learned yet on it and it was a large portion of our grade that quarter. I had my partner, who happened to be one of my good friends by the name of Andrea, but she was just as bad at math as I was. I'm thinking "I have two brothers who are really good at math, so why don't I ask them? They know this and Matt took it just the year before."
I go to Matt's room, which is across the hall from me and ask for his help. He took the course a year ago and thought he was the best bet. He looks up at me as I ask him and he said "Sure. I'll see what I can do." Matt walks down the narrow hallway into the kitchen to the counter separating the kitchen from the dining room. After scanning the problems, he scribbles with the horribly cramped handwriting he has and kept erasing, jotting numbers and equations down, and erasing again. After only ten minutes, he gets angry and says, "I'm done. I don't remember how to do this." I was shocked; after all the times he said he could help me and my parents telling me that I should get help from him when needed, that it was just useless advice. Going down the stairs into P.J.'s room, was my last resort. His room was very dusty, messy, and cramped as he sat at a computer chair, playing World of Warcraft. I ask him if he could give me a minute and he's the loving brother, I think, and says "Ok. Let me see what you got here." This perfect-math-ACT-getter works so much harder as he looks over all the problems and writes on a notebook paper. P.J. sighed and gave me the project back in about a half an hour and says, "I'm sorry, but I could only get one problem." Honestly, I was glad that he could figure out one of the seventy-odd problems in the homework and thanked him. What I didn't look forward to though, later, is that I didn't get much done after that and asked all my friends for help and failed the "Trig Project"; this then left me with a "D" on my report card for trigonometry so my Dad was peeved. I can still imagine his face and him saying, "I'm very disappointed with you," which is the worst phrase that parents could ever say to you.
But honestly, I really tried to understand the "most important subjects" in school, but it wasn't useful. My brothers think I was babied, being the only girl, and not having to do everything that they had to do. My father didn't force me to take the ACT my sophomore year like he did with Matt and P.J., which upset Matt for some reason. My father understood by then that I was going to study music and didn't really need to worry about my ACT until I needed to apply to colleges. But my brothers thought differently, of course. Secretly though, I wish I could be as smart as P.J. and Matt are; I only got a 22 on my test and felt incredibly dumb compared to them (The second time I took the ACT, a boy threw up onto his test around winter time with the colds going around, and the proctors couldn't clean it up until break, and it happened only a couple chairs away from me. Paper towels do not help you forget it's still there).
About me being outgoing, I'm only outgoing to those I've known for a while, like my family and close friends. Moving around a lot when I was younger was a bit hard for me, and somehow made friends even though I looked like a nerd. My friend from home, Rachel, told me about when I first moved to Maplewood in the middle of fifth grade and how my rose tinted glasses made me look like a hippie, and they found that so humorous, that they started talking to me. I laughed when I heard this story the summer before coming to Ohio U, because we became really good friends somehow. I can say more to my friends than I can do my family, but I don't think of myself as the outgoing, party type that Dan is of the family. Danny will tell you differently because my father would tell him he couldn't go somewhere with his friends and he would reply, "You let Becky go to the movies with her friends, why can't I go?" Danny always wanted to be the one to be more independent than my brothers and I, which would always get him in trouble. My father, Danny, and Matt have the same kind of temper: bad. I am much more calm and can bottle things up like my mother and brother, P.J., which makes them more upset more than anything.
Matt was driving me home around midnight after we got the last book of the seventh year of Harry Potter and we were having a good time. I don't remember what really sparked it, but he got upset with me and started yelling at me. "I can't believe you. . . you are so stupid! All you think about is yourself," and a lot of other horrible remarks that I was trying to tune out at the time until he said, "Lisa thinks you're selfish too!" That really hit me hard; Lisa was our foreign exchange student we had my junior year because my father didn't want to have a male foreign exchange student because he was scared by his coworkers that he was "bringing a date for Becca" and that changed his mind immediately. Also, Matt started dating Lisa secretly for a few months and he was still with her at the time. She really loved the designated "Becky pieces" of pumpkin pie, they were so massive pieces. Anywho, I was upset because we were such good friends and I thought she thought well of me. And yet, I said nothing to him, which just made him more angry. Agreeing with him makes him angry also. Later, I find out that Lisa never said anything of the sort when I asked her on Skype--using a computer and webcam to talk to someone--and Matt denied ever saying it. But I knew. . .
Being calm is something I'm really good at portraying, even with friends. Especially in high school, there is a lot of drama because you see the same people everyday, so life has to be spiced up a little bit. It's odd, because my friends would try to seek advice from me and a lot of the things that I write, as of now anyway, has been philosophical and "deep" as my boyfriend, Reilly, had said. To my family, however, I'm not really viewed as philosophical or anything close to that. I usually find myself hardly saying anything at all when we have group discussions about politics or a related subject at the dinner table because I don't find it as important to me. I think the only "advice" I had ever given to my family was to Danny about a girl problem he was having; it was to see if this girl he was talking to really liked him or not. It didn't really matter because he didn't really accept my advice, but he appreciated that I tried, I suppose.
My family views me as the optimist, which I like to think I am sometimes. I can be a realist, don't get me wrong, but I like to look at the glass half full, as that overused saying goes.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
RIF Second Reading
In the second reading of Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, there was a chapter that was entertaining to me called "Tongue." This involved the thalagoya, which is an odd, lizard creature that was said to make a child "become brilliantly articulate, will always speak beautifully, and in his speech be able to 'catch' and collect wonderful, humorous information"(73), if you eat the thalagoya's tongue. His Uncle Noel ate only half the tongue and he became "a brilliant lawyer and a great story teller, from eating just part of the tongue" (74). There are other uses, but I found it quite cultural and humorous that people would eat a lizard tongue to be successful.
In "Sweet Like a Crow" chapter, the italicized quote at the beginning was interesting to me:
"The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line, or rhythm" (76).
And the chapter, I'm assuming, is supposed to be a type of poem. Proving the quote by Paul Bowles about being unmusical by not usuing any sort of rhyme scheme and just made up of a series similes. But even with the similes, it all makes sense by the end of the poem with the line "Like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep/and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets" (77). From discussion in class, we've characterized Ondaatje's writing as "lyrical," proving our writer to be contradictory to generations before him.
In "Sweet Like a Crow" chapter, the italicized quote at the beginning was interesting to me:
"The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line, or rhythm" (76).
And the chapter, I'm assuming, is supposed to be a type of poem. Proving the quote by Paul Bowles about being unmusical by not usuing any sort of rhyme scheme and just made up of a series similes. But even with the similes, it all makes sense by the end of the poem with the line "Like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep/and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets" (77). From discussion in class, we've characterized Ondaatje's writing as "lyrical," proving our writer to be contradictory to generations before him.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Running in the Family
Michael Ondaatje's writing so far reminds me of Hosseini's The Kite Runner, by explaining certain cultural words that regular people don't know such as "the kitul tree still leaned against the kitchen--tall, with tiny yellow berries which the polecat used to love" (59). I love how the family always have stories to tell about generations before them and always have something to say when they are all together. Ondaatje uses a lot of allieration that I can't help but notice such as "British and Burgher blood" (41) and "Monsoon Meet in May" (50).
There's a lot of historical references, specifically one chapter dedicated to what was going on in the 1920s in Columbo called "Honeymoon." There also color references that bring out the color red such as "red cement" (17) in the beginning of the memoir; there was the walls that were "rose-red" (24) and Dutch daughter's "red dress" (27) that haunted their house in Jaffna. Red is a bold color and could contribute into describing the family and their storytelling. He also writes giving short sentences to start off a new idea and then he delves into it like, "During the week in Dorset my father behaved impeccably" (32). The story of how much of a pain his father really was all his life goes into greater detail when Michael further explains the engagements he had and so on. But to get his point across, he starts small, than goes into longer sentences just right after the first sentence: "The in-laws planned the wedding, Phyllis was invited to spend the summer with the Roseleaps, and the Ondaatjes (including my father) went back to Ceylon to wait out the four months before the marriage" (32-33). Overrall, it is a different read with more cultural perspectives so far.
There's a lot of historical references, specifically one chapter dedicated to what was going on in the 1920s in Columbo called "Honeymoon." There also color references that bring out the color red such as "red cement" (17) in the beginning of the memoir; there was the walls that were "rose-red" (24) and Dutch daughter's "red dress" (27) that haunted their house in Jaffna. Red is a bold color and could contribute into describing the family and their storytelling. He also writes giving short sentences to start off a new idea and then he delves into it like, "During the week in Dorset my father behaved impeccably" (32). The story of how much of a pain his father really was all his life goes into greater detail when Michael further explains the engagements he had and so on. But to get his point across, he starts small, than goes into longer sentences just right after the first sentence: "The in-laws planned the wedding, Phyllis was invited to spend the summer with the Roseleaps, and the Ondaatjes (including my father) went back to Ceylon to wait out the four months before the marriage" (32-33). Overrall, it is a different read with more cultural perspectives so far.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Father-Son Bondage
In memoirs, we learn about the author’s relationships with people in their family. In Fathers, Sons, & Brothers: The Men in My Family, Bret Lott suggests that the relationship with his father was the most influential in his own life. When becoming a father himself, the unusual bond he had with his father, Bill, helped him through fatherhood.
Bret had always had a view of this amazing father figure; Bill had a good job with Royal Crown Cola as vice president and supplied for the family. One instance that we see a bond begin between Bret and his father is when his father got a job back in California after moving from there to Arizona, and back again. Bill, known as the “father of few words” (7), comes into his room early in the morning and hands him an index card with the words:
“ ‘ God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference’" (8).
The thought that Bret would “appreciate that” (8) made a big impact on Bret to bring up in this essay; he was “stunned” and saw what he thought was “supposed” to be a smile from his father, which reveals how little emotion Bill actually shows to his son (9). This appreciation for his father continues on through the essay “In the Garage,” about organizing his own garage and the small amount of tools he has; “Like father, like son” (10). And he finished it off with a “discard pile outside, a pile so high I know I’ve done my father proud” (10).
What evolved the bond between Lott and his son, Bret, was the Royal Crown; Bill was vice president and had his sons start working for him there. The hero-figure Bill Lott represented was very pronounced when Bret was younger because children always view their parents as perfect superheroes. When Saturday chores were done, the Lott brothers went with their father to different stores to check out the RC pop that was displayed or still needed in the store. “This was our father, an adult, a man; and this was his job: to come into a store and talk of sports” (37). This image represents the further impact Bill had on his sons. Bret started out working on washing the trucks out with his brothers, when working was still fun. He moved up to sweeping out lots the next summer, Bill got to work one-on-one with Bret; he kept coming out day after day, teaching Bret how to sweep a lot by pushing with a push broom (41). It’s not that Bret didn’t know how to push broom, Bret just “dogged”(31) it because of the heat.
A significant turn of events occurs when Bill takes Bret on a stop they have to make because of the broken down shipment truck. Bret noticed a difference with his father but “didn’t recognize this joy in him, only wondered at why he seemed to be smiling when all we had before us was a long trek into the desert” (44). Because of his family growing, Bill had to give up his life of driving trucks to get a higher position to help support his family; this shows how caring Bill is of his family along, including the progression of his sons into the real world. Bret became closer to his father when working for RC Cola because Bill would always wake him up in the morning and they would get breakfast and M&M’s in the afternoon. Ironically, his father showed him later when he returned to RC Cola before going off to college, a donut shop that symbolized the connection between Bret and his father. “There was no waiting room here, no inside place from which to order . . . They had bear claws” (168), with bear claws being what he always got on the way to work with Bill.
For comic relief, the situation where Bret asked his mother where babies came from at the dinner table shows his father’s awkwardness, so to say. “My dad’s instantaneous reaction, enough to make me flinch. . . ‘Hey,’ he said again, ‘don’t talk like that!” (91) was quite astounding and was upset that he shouldn’t ask that during dinner. Years later, Bill had “The Talk” as people would say, but technically not so. It was so humorous to see Bill being so uncomfortable as “his eyes hadn’t yet mine. . . I had him, had him in a way I’d never known before: my dad, powerless, stunned” (94). Bret didn’t really gain any information from his father, but this moment of weakness that shined through made him ever closer with him. The image of his father’s laugh that “was a good laugh, a solid laugh, a kind of laugh I hadn’t heard or seen before: It was a laugh that didn’t take me into account, didn’t pretend to cajole me or to praise me. He wasn’t even looking at me. This was just laughter” (94). This particular part of “The Talk” memory was something new Bret learned about his very shy-like father.
By the essay, “Royal Crown 2,” Bret self focused on his father and how he truly impacted his life, even though he just writes and doesn’t do the kind of manual labor his father taught him as hard work. Because of the guidance Bill gave to Bret; waking him up early and eating “Cornnuts and M&M’s together” was what Bret said knows “only now, were his attempts to guide me and my brothers the only way he knew how” (189). And because of this guidance and the effort he put into his children, Bret understands the great bond between his father and himself.
Bret had always had a view of this amazing father figure; Bill had a good job with Royal Crown Cola as vice president and supplied for the family. One instance that we see a bond begin between Bret and his father is when his father got a job back in California after moving from there to Arizona, and back again. Bill, known as the “father of few words” (7), comes into his room early in the morning and hands him an index card with the words:
“ ‘ God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference’" (8).
The thought that Bret would “appreciate that” (8) made a big impact on Bret to bring up in this essay; he was “stunned” and saw what he thought was “supposed” to be a smile from his father, which reveals how little emotion Bill actually shows to his son (9). This appreciation for his father continues on through the essay “In the Garage,” about organizing his own garage and the small amount of tools he has; “Like father, like son” (10). And he finished it off with a “discard pile outside, a pile so high I know I’ve done my father proud” (10).
What evolved the bond between Lott and his son, Bret, was the Royal Crown; Bill was vice president and had his sons start working for him there. The hero-figure Bill Lott represented was very pronounced when Bret was younger because children always view their parents as perfect superheroes. When Saturday chores were done, the Lott brothers went with their father to different stores to check out the RC pop that was displayed or still needed in the store. “This was our father, an adult, a man; and this was his job: to come into a store and talk of sports” (37). This image represents the further impact Bill had on his sons. Bret started out working on washing the trucks out with his brothers, when working was still fun. He moved up to sweeping out lots the next summer, Bill got to work one-on-one with Bret; he kept coming out day after day, teaching Bret how to sweep a lot by pushing with a push broom (41). It’s not that Bret didn’t know how to push broom, Bret just “dogged”(31) it because of the heat.
A significant turn of events occurs when Bill takes Bret on a stop they have to make because of the broken down shipment truck. Bret noticed a difference with his father but “didn’t recognize this joy in him, only wondered at why he seemed to be smiling when all we had before us was a long trek into the desert” (44). Because of his family growing, Bill had to give up his life of driving trucks to get a higher position to help support his family; this shows how caring Bill is of his family along, including the progression of his sons into the real world. Bret became closer to his father when working for RC Cola because Bill would always wake him up in the morning and they would get breakfast and M&M’s in the afternoon. Ironically, his father showed him later when he returned to RC Cola before going off to college, a donut shop that symbolized the connection between Bret and his father. “There was no waiting room here, no inside place from which to order . . . They had bear claws” (168), with bear claws being what he always got on the way to work with Bill.
For comic relief, the situation where Bret asked his mother where babies came from at the dinner table shows his father’s awkwardness, so to say. “My dad’s instantaneous reaction, enough to make me flinch. . . ‘Hey,’ he said again, ‘don’t talk like that!” (91) was quite astounding and was upset that he shouldn’t ask that during dinner. Years later, Bill had “The Talk” as people would say, but technically not so. It was so humorous to see Bill being so uncomfortable as “his eyes hadn’t yet mine. . . I had him, had him in a way I’d never known before: my dad, powerless, stunned” (94). Bret didn’t really gain any information from his father, but this moment of weakness that shined through made him ever closer with him. The image of his father’s laugh that “was a good laugh, a solid laugh, a kind of laugh I hadn’t heard or seen before: It was a laugh that didn’t take me into account, didn’t pretend to cajole me or to praise me. He wasn’t even looking at me. This was just laughter” (94). This particular part of “The Talk” memory was something new Bret learned about his very shy-like father.
By the essay, “Royal Crown 2,” Bret self focused on his father and how he truly impacted his life, even though he just writes and doesn’t do the kind of manual labor his father taught him as hard work. Because of the guidance Bill gave to Bret; waking him up early and eating “Cornnuts and M&M’s together” was what Bret said knows “only now, were his attempts to guide me and my brothers the only way he knew how” (189). And because of this guidance and the effort he put into his children, Bret understands the great bond between his father and himself.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Prewriting
Our family is what my father would like to say as "broken." Each one of us is different in our own ways. We have my older brother P.J., who's the black sheep of the family and amazingly good at math (I think a perfect score on the ACT would prove that). My other older brother, Matt, is the good straight-A student and is on the Dean's List here at Ohio University. And my little brother, Danny, is the most outgoing of us all and really smart. Me, I am viewed as the outgoing, an "ok" student along with being the "artsy" one of the family.
I remember my Dad telling me at dinner one night, "Becky. What'd I tell you are the most important subjects in school?" This question as been droned upon me for years and knows the answer like a pop song, "Math and science?" He would just stare at me after he found out that I got a "C" in Trigonometry one quarter in my junior year of high school. You could say that I became the slacker one, but what amazes me more is how Matt would always be praised for his great grades and I find out later that he would copy his homework from someone else in school because he didn't have time to do it beforehand. I felt above him in that aspect, which made me feel a lot better. I was the band nerd who took the course so seriously, doing honor bands and solo and ensemble contest, because I knew that music is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So, you could say I just didn't try too hard in the subjects my parents loved, because I found no interest in them. I remember that very same year, we had the huge "Trig Project" as we all called it, and there were things we hadn't learned yet on it and it was a large portion of our grade that quarter. I had my partner, who happened to be one of my good friends by the name of Andrea, but she was just as bad at math as I was. I'm thinking "I have two brothers who are really good at math, so why don't I ask them? They know this and Matt took it just the year before."
I go to Matt's room, which is across the hall from me and ask for his help. He took the course a year ago and thought he was the best bet. He looks up at me as I ask him and he said "Sure. I'll see what I can do." Matt walks down the narrow hallway into the kitchen to the counter separating the kitchen from the dining room. After scanning the problems, he scribbles with the horribly cramped handwriting he has and kept erasing, jotting numbers and equations down, and erasing again. After only ten minutes, he gets angry and says, "I'm done. I don't remember how to do this." I was shocked; after all the times he said he could help me and my parents telling me that I should get help from him when needed, that it was just useless advice. Going down the stairs into P.J.'s room, was my last resort. His room was very dusty, messy, and cramped as he sat at a computer chair, playing World of Warcraft. I ask him if he could give me a minute and he's the loving brother, I think, and says "Ok. Let me see what you got here." This perfect-math-ACT-getter works so much harder as he looks over all the problems and writes on a notebook paper. P.J. sighed and gave me the project back in about a half an hour and says, "I'm sorry, but I could only get one problem." Honestly, I was glad that he could figure out one of the seventy-odd problems in the homework and thanked him. What I didn't look forward to though, later, is that I didn't get much done after that and asked all my friends for help and failed the "Trig Project"; this then left me with a "D" on my report card for trigonometry so my Dad was peeved. I can still imagine his face and him saying, "I'm very disappointed with you," which is the worst phrase that parents could ever say to you.
But honestly, I really tried to understand the "most important subjects" in school, but it wasn't useful. My brothers think I was babied, being the only girl, and not having to do everything that they had to do. My father didn't force me to take the ACT my sophomore year like he did with Matt and P.J., which upset Matt for some reason. My father understood by then that I was going to study music and didn't really need to worry about my ACT until I needed to apply to colleges. But my brothers thought differently, of course. Secretly though, I wish I could be as smart as P.J. and Matt are; I only got a 22 on my test and felt incredibly dumb compared to them (The second time I took the ACT, a boy threw up onto his test around winter time with the colds going around, and the proctors couldn't clean it up until break, and it happened only a couple chairs away from me. Paper towels do not help you forget it's still there).
About me being outgoing, I'm only outgoing to those I've known for a while, like my family and close friends. Moving around a lot when I was younger was a bit hard for me, and somehow made friends even though I looked like a nerd. My friend from home, Rachel, told me about when I first moved to Maplewood in the middle of fifth grade and how my rose tinted glasses made me look like a hippie, and they found that so humorous, that they started talking to me. I laughed when I heard this story the summer before coming to Ohio U, because we became really good friends somewhow. I can say more to my friends than I can do my family, but I don't think of myself as the outgoing, party type that Dan is of the family. Danny will tell you differently because my father would tell him he couldn't go somewhere with his friends and he would reply, "You let Becky go to the movies with her friends, why can't I go?" Danny always wanted to be the one to be more independent than my brothers and I, which would always get him in trouble. My father, Danny, and Matt have the same kind of temper: bad. I am much more calm and can bottle things up, which makes them more upset more than anything.
Matt was driving me home around midnight after we got the last book of the seventh year of Harry Potter and we were having a good time. I don't remember what really sparked it, but he got upset with me and started yelling at me. "I can't believe you. . . you are so stupid! All you think about is yourself," and a lot of other horrible remarks that I was trying to tune out at the time until he said, "Lisa thinks you're selfish too!" That really hit me hard; Lisa was our foreign exchange student we had my junior year because my father didn't want to have a male foreign exchange student because he was scared by his coworkers that he was "bringing a date for Becca" and that changed his mind immediately. Also, Matt started dating Lisa secretly for a few months and he was still with her at the time. She really loved the designated "Becky pieces" of pumpkin pie, they were so massive pieces. Anywho, I was upset because we were such good friends and I thought she thought well of me. And yet, I said nothing to him, which just made him more angry. Agreeing with him makes him angry also. Later, I find out that Lisa never said anything of the sort when I asked her on skype--using a computer and webcam to talk to someone--and Matt denied ever saying it. But I knew. . .
Being calm is something I'm really good at portraying, even with friends. Especially in high school, there is a lot of drama because you see the same people everyday, so life has to be spiced up a little bit. It's odd, because my friends would try to seek advice from me and a lot of the things that I write, as of now anyway, has been philosophical and "deep" as my friend Reilly had said. To my family, however, I'm not really viewed as philosophical or anything close to that. I usually find myself hardly saying anything at all when we have group discussions about politics or a related subject at the dinner table because I don't find it as important to me. I think the only "advice" I had ever given to my family was to Danny about a girl problem he was having; it was to see if this girl he was talking to really liked him or not. It didn't really matter because he didn't really accept my advice, but he appreciated that I tried, I suppose.
My family views me as the optomist, which I like to think I am sometimes. I can be a realist, don't get me wrong, but I like to look at the glass half full, as that overused saying goes.
I remember my Dad telling me at dinner one night, "Becky. What'd I tell you are the most important subjects in school?" This question as been droned upon me for years and knows the answer like a pop song, "Math and science?" He would just stare at me after he found out that I got a "C" in Trigonometry one quarter in my junior year of high school. You could say that I became the slacker one, but what amazes me more is how Matt would always be praised for his great grades and I find out later that he would copy his homework from someone else in school because he didn't have time to do it beforehand. I felt above him in that aspect, which made me feel a lot better. I was the band nerd who took the course so seriously, doing honor bands and solo and ensemble contest, because I knew that music is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So, you could say I just didn't try too hard in the subjects my parents loved, because I found no interest in them. I remember that very same year, we had the huge "Trig Project" as we all called it, and there were things we hadn't learned yet on it and it was a large portion of our grade that quarter. I had my partner, who happened to be one of my good friends by the name of Andrea, but she was just as bad at math as I was. I'm thinking "I have two brothers who are really good at math, so why don't I ask them? They know this and Matt took it just the year before."
I go to Matt's room, which is across the hall from me and ask for his help. He took the course a year ago and thought he was the best bet. He looks up at me as I ask him and he said "Sure. I'll see what I can do." Matt walks down the narrow hallway into the kitchen to the counter separating the kitchen from the dining room. After scanning the problems, he scribbles with the horribly cramped handwriting he has and kept erasing, jotting numbers and equations down, and erasing again. After only ten minutes, he gets angry and says, "I'm done. I don't remember how to do this." I was shocked; after all the times he said he could help me and my parents telling me that I should get help from him when needed, that it was just useless advice. Going down the stairs into P.J.'s room, was my last resort. His room was very dusty, messy, and cramped as he sat at a computer chair, playing World of Warcraft. I ask him if he could give me a minute and he's the loving brother, I think, and says "Ok. Let me see what you got here." This perfect-math-ACT-getter works so much harder as he looks over all the problems and writes on a notebook paper. P.J. sighed and gave me the project back in about a half an hour and says, "I'm sorry, but I could only get one problem." Honestly, I was glad that he could figure out one of the seventy-odd problems in the homework and thanked him. What I didn't look forward to though, later, is that I didn't get much done after that and asked all my friends for help and failed the "Trig Project"; this then left me with a "D" on my report card for trigonometry so my Dad was peeved. I can still imagine his face and him saying, "I'm very disappointed with you," which is the worst phrase that parents could ever say to you.
But honestly, I really tried to understand the "most important subjects" in school, but it wasn't useful. My brothers think I was babied, being the only girl, and not having to do everything that they had to do. My father didn't force me to take the ACT my sophomore year like he did with Matt and P.J., which upset Matt for some reason. My father understood by then that I was going to study music and didn't really need to worry about my ACT until I needed to apply to colleges. But my brothers thought differently, of course. Secretly though, I wish I could be as smart as P.J. and Matt are; I only got a 22 on my test and felt incredibly dumb compared to them (The second time I took the ACT, a boy threw up onto his test around winter time with the colds going around, and the proctors couldn't clean it up until break, and it happened only a couple chairs away from me. Paper towels do not help you forget it's still there).
About me being outgoing, I'm only outgoing to those I've known for a while, like my family and close friends. Moving around a lot when I was younger was a bit hard for me, and somehow made friends even though I looked like a nerd. My friend from home, Rachel, told me about when I first moved to Maplewood in the middle of fifth grade and how my rose tinted glasses made me look like a hippie, and they found that so humorous, that they started talking to me. I laughed when I heard this story the summer before coming to Ohio U, because we became really good friends somewhow. I can say more to my friends than I can do my family, but I don't think of myself as the outgoing, party type that Dan is of the family. Danny will tell you differently because my father would tell him he couldn't go somewhere with his friends and he would reply, "You let Becky go to the movies with her friends, why can't I go?" Danny always wanted to be the one to be more independent than my brothers and I, which would always get him in trouble. My father, Danny, and Matt have the same kind of temper: bad. I am much more calm and can bottle things up, which makes them more upset more than anything.
Matt was driving me home around midnight after we got the last book of the seventh year of Harry Potter and we were having a good time. I don't remember what really sparked it, but he got upset with me and started yelling at me. "I can't believe you. . . you are so stupid! All you think about is yourself," and a lot of other horrible remarks that I was trying to tune out at the time until he said, "Lisa thinks you're selfish too!" That really hit me hard; Lisa was our foreign exchange student we had my junior year because my father didn't want to have a male foreign exchange student because he was scared by his coworkers that he was "bringing a date for Becca" and that changed his mind immediately. Also, Matt started dating Lisa secretly for a few months and he was still with her at the time. She really loved the designated "Becky pieces" of pumpkin pie, they were so massive pieces. Anywho, I was upset because we were such good friends and I thought she thought well of me. And yet, I said nothing to him, which just made him more angry. Agreeing with him makes him angry also. Later, I find out that Lisa never said anything of the sort when I asked her on skype--using a computer and webcam to talk to someone--and Matt denied ever saying it. But I knew. . .
Being calm is something I'm really good at portraying, even with friends. Especially in high school, there is a lot of drama because you see the same people everyday, so life has to be spiced up a little bit. It's odd, because my friends would try to seek advice from me and a lot of the things that I write, as of now anyway, has been philosophical and "deep" as my friend Reilly had said. To my family, however, I'm not really viewed as philosophical or anything close to that. I usually find myself hardly saying anything at all when we have group discussions about politics or a related subject at the dinner table because I don't find it as important to me. I think the only "advice" I had ever given to my family was to Danny about a girl problem he was having; it was to see if this girl he was talking to really liked him or not. It didn't really matter because he didn't really accept my advice, but he appreciated that I tried, I suppose.
My family views me as the optomist, which I like to think I am sometimes. I can be a realist, don't get me wrong, but I like to look at the glass half full, as that overused saying goes.
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