I Wish I Were Knitting

So I just finished reading the mystory essay we read for this week.  Which was, of course, after I finished doing my own mystory.  My initial reaction, after seeing the length and depth and complexity, was “Wow.  Did I do this assignment wrong or what?”

My second reaction was, “I can’t imagine assigning this because getting forty of these back would be maddening.”

Reaction A:  I did take some comfort when Ulmer discussed that the point to the mystory wasn’t necessarily to create meaning or have this nice finished product we are so used to having as our goal in writing.  And that there is no “right” or “wrong” in this.

Thinking about this, and as I was reading this essay, I realized that I think I do a mystory before I write my (creative nonfiction) essays.  I have pages and pages of handwritten notes and pages bookmarked on my computer from researching bits that will go into my work.  Then when I make myself stop researching (and I am one of those who loves researching and could use it as a means of procrastination), I sift through it all to get to the meaning.  This reminds me of the mosaic, or braided, essay, which I happen to employ a lot.

As for Reaction B.  I’m not sure as if I’d every assign a full-blown mystory for a class because Ulmer’s was so maddening and exciting to read at the same time.  T

is my musical hero.  And, as people on my facebook page know, I believe she is “sexy as fuck.”  I own all of her albums except for her first, limited-release “Superpinkymandy” that was only released in Japan.  Last time I saw it on eBay, it sold for over a few hundred dollars.  Maybe some day I’ll have that money.

One of my favorite songs of hers is “Feel to Believe.”  Some of the lyrics:

“You lose it just to find it
And as you walk right by it
You forget how you got there
And why you never meant to stay
And I won’t watch you waste away
And I won’t fake another day
And if one truth leads you to five
I still don’t believe in your reasons why
I just don’t believe in why

…….

If I lose you
Could you find me?
Or would you walk right by me?
The soul and the spirit
Each have got their own limit
And I can’t waste another second
Living in hell like it’s some kind of heaven
And if one truth leads to another
Isn’t there one we can uncover?
There isn’t one I will not discover”

I think that while I was at my worst, this song helped pull me through some rough days.  Although a particular friend was not familiar with this song, he often spoke very similar words to me, that he could not, would not, accept what I was doing to myself, no matter how many “legitimate” reasons I gave him.

This leads me to the personal part of the mystory, which is rather similar to the above paragraph.  When I was in the hospital in 2005, on my third morning there, a doctor came up to me and said, “Want to explain why a 27-year-old has an EKG that looks like this?”  He had picked up on the scarring from the sudden cardiac arrest, a detail of my medical history that, at the time, I tended to not tell anyone, including medical doctors.  And when this doctor came up to me, he was also kind enough to tell me that there really wasn’t anything to do, which turned out to be erroneous.  But that day wasn’t such a good day.  Underweight and not able to think all that clearly and emotional in general, all I could think was, “If I’m already broken, then why the hell should I bother trying to fix myself?”  That’s when my nutritionist took me on an “Ollie-stroll” and told me that I was not an island.  That my actions would affect those around.  My recovery or lack of recovery extended beyond myself.

The third part of my mystory goes to the institution of school in a very general sense and ties in ties in with these lyrics.  “If I lose you, could you find me?” There’s a lot of talk about how students who don’t do well in school often get overlooked.  But I think the opposite is also true.  That sometimes the students who appear to have it all together–the straight-A, all-star athletes who don’t break the rules or buck the system–these students must be okay.  Just look at them.  Sometimes, certainly not always, these students are doing all the right things to hide something else.  No one really wants to look at that, though.

Literature was my fourth quadrant, and I chose The Waves by Virginia Woolf, my absolute favorite novel.  The lives of the characters, even after they finish school and only have two reunions, intertwine and affect one another.  (No man is an island.)  And there’s Rhoda, who within the group, from the time she’s a small child, feels alienated from the others.  In the end, she commits suicide.

Fun fact of my research is that Beth Orton has Crohn’s Diseasewhich is an intestinal auto-immune disease.  It can get nasty.  One of the ways to diagnose it is with a colonoscopy, which I had the pleasure of enduring a year ago.  Also, a common side effect of Crohn’s Disease is depression.  And that word would open up another bag of worms.

I’m wishing I had my reading with the Gilyard and Miller essays, but I have this “must do things in order” problem, and so I began the week with the debate over rhetorical situations.

Other than making my head hurt with the theory I haven’t thought about since I took Teaching of Comp two years ago, I thought of my two freshmen comp classes I have now.  Last week, I introduced the idea that academic writing is part of a discourse, that what they write is in response to something someone else wrote or said, and I am someone who strongly supports the notion of open discourse.  So the Vatz and Bitzer essays fit nicely into my scheme of thinking.

Except that I’ve been trying this new thing out in my life lately–avoiding thinking in black and white terms.  And I can’t help but see Vatz and Bitzer that way.  Two opposite ends of the spectrum.  The situation determines the rhetoric and, therefore, meaning; and the rhetoric determines the situation and, therefore, meaning.  I want the middle ground, where situation and rhetoric bounce off of one another to create meaning.

Last year the death of the Brazilian models from anorexia caused a stir in the fashion world.  While they were not the first models to die from eating disorders, this was the first time that a model’s death helped spur such a strong action as Madrid banning models with a Body Mass Index (BMI) that put them in the “severely underweight” category.  Madrid’s actions then spurred op ed pieces and articles and biographies of models and the question remained whether or not other cities would follow suit.

The debate in the fashion industry spilled over into advertising, sports and, of course, the eating disorder community.  National organizations such as the Eating Disorders Coalition (EDC) and National Eating Disorders Awareness(NEDA) issued press releases.  Pro-anorexia groups rose up in indignation.  Models who may or may not have an eating disorder were outraged.

With each exchange of words, a new situation occured.  But with each situation, more words flowed.  How can you separate one from the other?

____________________

So that was my attempt to struggle with theory by looking at the world around me because, honestly, I had difficulty applying it to the classroom.

Gilyard’s essay was a little easier to grapple with, although the part I highlighted was actually Romy Clark’s comments about how “individual students have to find identities as writers that they feel confident and comfortable with” (266).  I’m attempting to do this in my comp sections with a text that invites a strong response and assignments that ask them to explore their responses to the text.  They pick subjects that interest them (within a given context) and I’m hoping that this will give them a little motivation to begin that process of individuality in writing.