#esssays

[themalhambird]

@prettiewittie

William Shakespeare's Regnal Connections: Whose Court Is This Anyway? on JSTOR (cardiff.ac.uk) This article might be of interest to you!

[rainydaynotes]

03/30/2021

I got my copy of Rule of Wolves!!! Yaaayyyy!!! I can't wait to get to read it, though I'll have to wait to power through it until at least after Thursday :(

I have made it to the 8 sources I need for my annotated bibliography!! Finally!!! I switched my topic to focus on sisterhood/sisters in Jane Austen novels for my paper. So now I have all the sources I need for my annotated bib, I just have to annotate them now lmao. Which will take a while, but that's that on that :)

Still have to come up with my American lit topic but that should be easier than the whole annotated bib thing (and I feel like I have more time purely because it's due Friday lol). I also might be getting an extension on my conlangs assignment- apparently my professor is a little backed up with grading right now. So that's one less thing on my plate! :)

[kammartinez]

After My Mother’s Death, I Had to Learn How to Dress

Access here.

[tarantulamolt]

I keep picking up the closest book to me to check information for my politics paper and every time I grab my Norwegian book

[znikolova]

The start of this essay is rather boring. It is simply words piled together. Paragraphs of them. So much of them. 

[whiteshovelcat]

juuust 250 more wooords,

it's a good thing this essay is only worth 15%....

even if I didn't hand it in, I would still pass~

[agibsongirl]

Just Walkin' Down The Street

I used to think that the things I did were things everyone did: turned on their headlights when it was raining, snuck novels to school to read at their desk behind the textbook, memorized song lyrics like they were the ABCs, or knew how to make a cake. Eventually, I realized that the things I find easy, or intrinsic to me, are not things that everyone else finds easy or intrinsic. 

(I can be slow on the uptake sometimes.) 

Of course this also works the other way. My dad, for example, is a math genius. (Well, he does have his undergrad degree in math. And his masters in computer science. So numbers should be his friends.) Doing math homework with him when I was in school was always Battle of the Bulge-like, because: 1) I am in no way, shape, or form a math genius. That whole "Music and math go together" thing? Not in my brain. 2) The way my dad would teach me math, and the way my teachers would teach me math, was vastly different .(until high school, anyway, when I was blessed with The Best Math Teacher on the Planet, Mrs. Carter, who was not only an awesome possum math teacher, but also a knock-your-socks-off piano accompanist, and also very, very nice. She was firm, but nice. And I adored her. I still have the note she wrote me before I graduated from high school, and the "lucky penny" she put in with it.) In the search for Math answers, many math books were damaged, many pencils snapped, and many tears shed.

So, one of the things I've noticed about me, is that I...notice things. I notice what people are wearing, I notice how they wear their hair. I notice the color of women's purses, and their jewelry. I notice carpet patterns, cloud patterns, birds in trees, dogs in windows, and how many kids are on the swing set. I notice, especially, what people are reading! 

This attention to detail is part of what makes me want to write--to catch those details in a permanent manner--but it's also inherited. My brother can do this with movie release dates and sports details (at one point, he knew the weather conditions at kickoff for every Super Bowl. It was an awesome party trick.). My mom remembers dates when people died and of historical battles. I remember birthdays and anniversaries (this freaks out people in my office. Not only will I remember their birthday, but the day they got married, and their spouse's birthday--assuming I knew their spouse. It's weird.). 

Details, to me, are important. They're the color of life. When I'm walking down the street, I notice people's shoes, what they're carrying, how many babies are in a stroller, the trees, the sky, the color of the grass. Passing a cornfield, I can tell how the corn is doing based on its height, the color of the stalks, the weight of them. (Part of this is growing up in a state where Agriculture is still the number 1 industry. And some of it is just me.) This is especially true when I travel. I will take out my journal when I'm in the car (And NOT driving, no worries) and write down what the landscape looks like, signs, animals, houses--what's going on in this place I'm passing through. Writing down the details fills out the outlines of places and makes them real to me. I still remember the eerie hue my Grandma's coral curtains gave her bedroom at midday, when the sun shone through them,   and the clink of the metal Hi-C container being pried open at breakfast time. I remember the way sand feels between my toes at the beach, how sun feels on my skin as I lay out, and the sting of winter wind on my cheeks. I remember every place my family's Christmas tree has been in every house we've had, and how my grandparents' house was decorated for Christmas.  I remember scraping ice of my parents' driveway with our old blue shovel in May, the year I was in sixth grade and we had one of the coldest winters on record. 

A lot of the time I see people walking with their eyes unfocused, iPods blaring: sending the message, 'anywhere but here.' But 'here' can be a beautiful place, if you're paying attention to it.