Maps To Anywhere Response

    Maps To Anywhere, by Bernard Cooper was a very interesting read. It brought up a lot of views and ideas that I found fun to read and that grabbed me in as a reader, most of which I have experienced in my childhood. Being that Cooper is writing about his childhood, his stories were pretty relatable.
    When the story starts out, Cooper is explaining prank phone calls and the wonders about names. The simplicity of taking us back to the pranking days and then the complexity of the name is quite a mash up. I found that the humor really drew me into the story and then I was more interested in the wonders of the name. I, myself have pondered that wonder many times. "What if I wasn't named Derek?" "What if the people I knew had different names?" I feel like my life would be a whole lot different and I enjoyed that I wasn't the only one who thought like this. There is a lot that goes with a name; who you hang out with, who you talk to, your personality, etc.
    One of my favorite stories was "On the Air" because it talked about the futuristic thoughts we all had as a child. We all thought that there would be flying cars, holograms, all this technology that made our lives virtually pointless, except to be an object in space. While we may have been wrong about most of those things, we weren't too far off. Technology has made our lives extremely easy and, while we may not have flying cars, we do have electric cars and solar powered cars. So, we dreamed big when we used to think of futuristic architecture and life itself; however, things really do change and, maybe, one day we will have flying cars. The dreamers and imaginations of our time will be the ones that make it all possible.

Essay Packet 1

   These essay stories kind of irritated me to read. I keep doing these blogs and, although I may not be completely wrong, I seem to only read the surface of the story. There always seems to be more to read and I never see it. Such as the story, Red: an Invocation, the whole story is about a fox. However, I can't help but to feel like there is more to read.

    The whole story is centered around this fox and the unusual color of it's fur. I don't know if it's meant to be a metaphor for racism in the world or something else, but it seemed peculiar that there was so much thought around the fox. I basically felt the same way with all the other stories in this packet, varying the subject that the story was based on. More, I felt that most of the stories had simple topics or interests, but that there was more to it. After all, that has been the case for most of the semester in this class; there is always more to be read than just the surface.

Fiction Packet #3 Response

    These stories were pretty fun to read. One stood out a lot to me.. basically jumped right off the page and drew me in. The Falling Girl by Dino Buzzati. I have lost two friends to suicide and I got kind of a different perspective in this story. I noticed it was much more than suicide though. Themes like superiority and peer pressure stress came up as well in the story. 

    The different floors of the skyscraper showed the superiority issue in the story and in the world we live in today. Marta was 19 years old and she was at the top of the skyscraper to begin with. My understanding was that she worked her way up to the top, but she was not the best looking one there, especially among the girls. She wore cheaper clothes than the other girls and she didn't feel like she fit in. The pressure of trying to fit in to the higher powered groups was too much. I feel like that is why she jumped. 

    I noticed another issue in this story; the fact that no one really cares until it's too late. It wasn't until Marta jumped that all these groups she was trying to fit into reached out to her, literally. She was already doomed and decided her own fate and that's when all these people tried to get to know her, help her, ask her what was wrong. 

    Once she got to the lower levels though, I felt like they didn't care as much. I think it was because they knew she had worked her way up to the top and once you get to the top, it's fate that your ending will not be pleasant. They seemed to just say, "Yeah, the pretty ones always fall." 

    I think that today's society was well represented in this story. There is too much concern about looks and popularity and it puts people under way too much pressure. That's what I think the deeper meaning of the story was and I found it extremely interesting.