Eighth, Final Meeting 11/29

Denily and I had our last meeting of the semester the other day. It has been awesome getting to know her just by meeting up and talking for an hour. We hadn’t met for a few weeks due to conflicts and Thanksgiving, of course, so we exchanged stories about the previous weeks. Denily went to Houston for Thanksgiving Break where she has a friend from Venezuela. Like many other people, she had the misfortune of Black Friday shopping. When I asked her why she went, she basically told me she went just for the experience. She didn’t buy anything and she wasn’t looking for anything, but she went to know what it’s like. I would never do that. Over break, I was convinced to go pseudo-shopping with my sister, and I was ready to be done after 20 minutes. I have never understood the pleasure of shopping for hours, but that’s fine with me. I’ll save my time and money!

Denily shared a funny story about towels on Black Friday. She said that she saw a bunch of people rushing for a huge pile of discounted towels. I didn’t think anyone had ever been excited about towels until Denily told me the story. She could not understand why people were grabbing lots of towels. Neither can I!

Denily is already getting excited about her travel over Christmas Break. She is going to Florida with her family for a few weeks and then will return to Venezuela for the remainder of the time. Right now, it looks like she will only be at TCU for one more semester. Her English is advanced enough that I think she could make it wherever she went, at least to communicate well enough. Denily has some pretty ambitious plans for after TCU as well; she wants to go to a university in Houston to get an MBA because her good friend is there, and she wants to be able to stay there instead of Fort Worth. Transferring schools will, of course, require her to take the TOEFL in order to be accepted to the MBA program in addition to the GRE. Without any business experience, I wonder how she will be able to handle this transition. I think she could do it, but I hope the business jargon does not confuse her when she gets to that point.

Denily finishes up her exams next Wednesday, so she’s excited to be done. She had her writing exam just yesterday (Wednesday), so she told me about it. She accidentally answered the question somewhat incorrectly by writing about her favorite vacation spot in Venezuela, whereas the question asked her favorite abroad vacation spot. She said she has become so comfortable with English that she sometimes overlooks things like this. There are some benefits to not knowing a language very well!

Anyway, we had a good last meeting together. It has been a good experience, and I am glad this class requires it. Thank you Dr. Williams!

Free Extra Post!

As part of my patronage toward all of you invisible readers, I have decided to give ONE FREE POST, right here, right now. Hurry, before time runs out! This is a limited time offer! I have already done my 6 required posts, but this one is free! Call now and we’ll throw in a toothbrush cleaner…but wait! There’s more: get a friend to read it and we’ll double your order! That’s right, two posts for the price of one! All of this is yours for the price of $0.00*. This value package is worth over $200, but now, it’s yours, FREE!

            Yeah, I decided I wanted to write another post on Mark Twain. Here are a few I want to talk about:

Literature: (pg. 141)

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Civilization: (pg. 41)

Can we afford Civilization?

            Get it yet? Thinking about it still? Processing…? Okay, now you’ve got it! Oh how these lines can be applied to our class, with a little bit of misinterpretation. At the beginning of the year, we talked about the word civilization and how it has often been used as a means of denigrating other people groups. So when Mark Twain asks, “can we afford Civilization?”, he could possibly have been thinking about this idea that we cannot say what is “civilized” or “uncivilized”. BOOM. As for literature, one thing I have loved about this class is that we don’t typically looks for too much meaning in the books we’ve read. Obviously, books should be interpreted, but I sometimes feel like English classes go too far by requiring the search for meaning. In my opinion, the purpose of books was not for the reader to discover something for him/herself, but for the author to transmit something to the audience. What if every sentence you said was analyzed and interpreted however your audience wanted to interpret it? Would you enjoy that? Absolutely not, I assume.

            Anyway, that was just a thought. I’ll leave you with another applicable piece of wit and wisdom from Twain: “It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them” (103). Go Honors students.

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Tales of Juha 45-92

            As I began the second day of reading from Tales of Juha, I was surprised by how different the jokes were from the ones we read for Monday. The first section is still probably my favorite because I enjoy wit, but these stories and jokes were also humorous. Today, we had to read sections devoted to social satire, cunning and resourcefulness, and naïveté and stupidity.

            On Monday, Dr. Williams asked us if any of the jokes were particularly based on Arab culture, and while there were a few things that referenced Arab culture, most of the humor was fully universal. The readings for today, however, especially the social satire section, seemed supremely situated for study of some society’s social standards. One of my favorites from this section was the one about Juha and his son walking on the road with the donkey, and each time someone passes, they make a comment about how strange it is that they don’t ride the donkey, or that they do ride the donkey, or that one rides the donkey while the other doesn’t (48-49). It all ends with Juha saying, “Let me tell you something, son. You can never please everyone.” This short story made me think of how peer pressure causes people to do things differently than they would in the absence of that pressure. In this way, I could really relate to how Arabs are sensitive to fit to social norms, even if they might do something different when given the freedom.

            I really enjoyed the cunning and resourcefulness section, probably because it is basically wit played out in real terms. I loved the story on page 67-68 about the pots. When Juha returns an extra pot to the neighbor who loaned him the pot in the first place, the neighbor doesn’t mind, and accepts it without complaint. When Juha switches the tables so that his neighbor has no pot, the neighbor suddenly is annoyed. Juha answers him by saying, “The one who reaps the profit has to bear the loss too!” I really enjoyed this one because it has a practical message about investment, but is also humorous because of Juha’s ingenuity.

            Finally, the section of naivete and stupidity was unique because Juha finally is the fool of the joke relatively consistently. In almost every story before this, he has been the one who came out on top in every situation, but this section showed that Juha is not impermeable to being a fool. My favorite of this section was on pages 74-75. We’ve already read several jokes about women giving birth after being married for only three months, but in this one, his wife explains away the birth after 3 months by adding the number of months she had been pregnant, the number of months her husband had been with her during that time, and the number of months the baby has been developing, which adds up to nine! Juha confesses to not counting straight, which I thought was funny. His confession to being wrong puts a whole new light on Juha. He is clever sometimes but dumb at others.

            These stories and jokes were great! Next up, we have jokes where Juha is the butt of the joke. I wonder how this will differ from the stupidity section.

Tales of Juha 1-41

            We have new competition for my favorite book this year! Tales of Juha was great so far. I didn’t know what to expect, but as I read the introductory pages that explained the humor of Juha, I had a feeling it would be something I would enjoy. The first set of jokes was titled “Wit and Wisdom”. I love witticisms and cunning remarks, and so these Juha jokes were great!

            The thing that made these jokes so entertaining was that I was constantly on the edge of my seat waiting for the punch line. Sometimes, I could predict something like what Juha would say, but the entertainment value was not reduced. Since some of the jokes were too long to type up, I’ll stick to the smaller jokes for the most part. One of the jokes I laughed at was on page 25:

A punctilious person asked Juha what was the best position to take in a funeral procession. Was it ahead of the coffin or behind it?

            “As long as you’re not in the coffin,” Juha said, “you can walk wherever you like.”

The sense of sarcasm in this joke made it funny to me. Sarcasm was definitely a theme of Juha stories, but the presence of the donkey was certainly the most common word. I’m not completely sure what a donkey represents in Arabic culture, but it seemed to be present in almost half of the stories. I suspect the donkey represents stubbornness or annoyance, similarly to how we think of donkeys in the U.S.

            I also really enjoyed the jokes when it appeared that a secondary character had fooled Juha (and made him look like an idiot), promptly followed by a quick retort by Juha that makes him a hero. An example of this occurs in the very first story, on pages 11-12. After describing a crazy situation about boiling wheat before planting the seeds, the judge questions the strangeness of his description, but Juha immediately changes the context and uses the argument to win the trial for his “client”.

            Most of these jokes were entertaining and enjoyable, although some of them were difficult to understand based on cultural differences. Overall, I think Tales of Juha will be one of my favorite books this semester.

Seventh Meeting 11/8

Denily and I met for our 7^th time this week (and this time, when I say ‘this week’, that means I am actually writing it relatively shortly after our meeting! Amazing, huh?) in the usual place outside of 1873 at the usual time. ‘Twas a blustery day outside, but thankfully it was warm enough that we didn’t have to go inside.

Naturally, since we met on National Public Transportation Day, we talked about public transportation! The only problem is that I just lied, and it was not actually National Public Transportation Day. In fact, I doubt such a holiday exists, but if you believed that (you non-existent reader, since I know you don’t read this), then you might need to go check your bedroom; I hear gullible is written on the ceiling. But seriously, Denily mentioned how she had experimented with public transportation the previous week and told me that she made it all the way to the airport and back, with the DART as part of the trip. She was trying to make sure she knew how to do it for whenever she flies. This discussion led us into discussion about public transportation in Caracas. Denily said that she almost never takes public transportation back home because it is too dangerous. She says that it is too crowded, and people might try to rob you while you’re on the bus. What was most interesting about her description of public transportation was that she claimed that the danger is a new phenomenon. She said she used to be able to ride without these fears. It just goes to show you what trouble a guy like Hugo Chavez can do in 12 years (I’ve mentioned before she is not very fond of Chavez). She believes her country is very corrupt, and it certainly seems that way based on how she describes everything, and I definitely agree that Chavez isn’t exactly my ideal for a president.

Speaking of presidents, we talked about the election as well. Before coming to TCU for the IEP program, Denily worked in a news station for about 5 years. When she watched our elections, she was very impressed by how we counted votes and how you could see individual counties and states and know the exact number of votes cast for any candidate. She says in Venezuela, they don’t get all of those details. I think they only get to see the final result…and with corruption, who knows how exact those numbers are?

We of course talked about what each other did during the week, and one thing Denily mentioned was her experience with LEAPS. She and 3 other IEP students went to Mission Arlington, where they helped with various projects. What was interesting was that she said she had never done anything community oriented like that while in Venezuela. America seems to be obsessed with community service. There’s nothing wrong with it, obviously, but I often wonder why we care so much about doing community service. Most of the time, we say we do it because we enjoy helping other people and seeing them improve, but isn’t there some ulterior motive? In high school, everyone feels an obligation to be part of some community service so they can put it on their college application. In college, there is still that pressure, especially for those planning on graduate school. Even if we are doing community service because we enjoy the fact that we get to help people and they appreciate us, isn’t that an ulterior motive as well? What if we did community service that wasn’t fun, where the recipient of our goodwill didn’t appreciate us and even became frustrated with us? Would we still do it? I don’t think we would. I think we should have better reasons for doing community service than our personal pleasure, the recipient’s thankfulness, and a pad for our resumes. Just something to think about.

So yeah, after a good meeting, we said goodbye and plan on meeting next week as well. Hope you have a good week, invisible reader! You are awesome, even if you don’t exist!

Sixth Meeting 11/1

           Denily and I met for our 6^th time today. I know many people in our class change things up each week in terms of the meeting place, but Denily and I haven’t met anywhere but the same place, so I’m sorry for the monotony.

            I mentioned a few weeks ago that Denily and all the international students are having to read Life of Pi this half of the semester. I also mentioned that neither Denily or I liked the book very much; however, Denily has now reached the point where the story is actually pretty interesting (it only took about 200 pages before action happened). I hope that she enjoys the rest of it more than she did the first part!

            This week we talked a lot about climate and weather and things like that. For instance, I asked if she had ever been snow skiing. As it turns out, Denily has never even seen snow! Since mountains surround her, I assumed she had experienced snow before, but she has not…so we talked about snow skiing. I shared my only snow-skiing experiences in my life from about 6 or so years ago. We went to Salt Lake City, where we were taught to ski and immediately let loose on all the greens and blues you could ask for. Of course, some of the adults were less capable at skiing than the newly taught 12 year old that I was; when I was going down a very easy green slope, some lady who apparently didn’t know how to slow down or turn ran into me from behind and knocked me down. Thankfully, my landing didn’t hurt…since it was snow.

Later, as I was getting on a lift with three other people, another incident happened. The four of us had advanced to the line where the ski lift picks you up, and all of the sudden, a little bit of time before the chair was to arrive, another lady scoots forward to join us in our chair, pushing herself in between me and another person. I was, of course, on the edge of the concrete platform (about 1.5 feet above the ground), and so I fell off the platform. They had to stop the lift for a second, and I can remember seeing some of my family in the chair ahead of me looking back and wondering why the lift stopped, only to find me on the ground. The best part of the whole experience was that once I had been added on to the same chair with the three four other people, the lady who knocked me off the platform didn’t even apologize. Either way, these were funny stories I had from skiing that I shared with Denily.

Tailing off of that subject, Denily and I talked about mountains. As a resident of Chattanooga, the best city ever basically, I love mountains. We are surrounded by them, and while they are not huge mountains like you would find in Colorado, they make for an awesome addition to an already awesome city. I can go out in the woods for hours and know how to get from place to place by following streams of water. Denily, of course, has some significant mountains surrounding Caracas, her city. She has climbed them several times, but recently, they added a cable car that takes you to the top of the surrounding mountains. She feels that this is cheating and really takes the joy out of climbing the peaks. I completely agree.

While Denily has been to some relatively high elevations, she has not been high enough to experience altitude sickness. I told her about the trip I made to Peru about two years ago and how tired you feel when you run around at high altitude. Naturally, I had to explain the concept of the hematocrit and erithropoetin to show her the adaptations of the human body to higher altitudes…but since I know we all know about that, I won’t worry about explaining it on here…

So yeah, 6 meetings, fun and done! Until I write up the 7^th one in the next few days, I hope you are doing well, dear reader (if you even exist). I know you don’t really exist, or if you do exist, you didn’t make it this far in this terribly long blog post. But either way, thank you invisible reader.

Fifth Meeting 10/25

Denily and I met for our fifth time this week at our usual spot outside of 1873. We talked about a wide variety of topics, as usual, so I’ll just jump right into what we discussed!

For whatever reason, we always tend to talk a lot about language and things related to it. This week, I learned a few important things about Spanish that could save me from some embarrassment…speaking of embarrassment, we actually talked about the Spanish word for being embarrassed! Sometimes, as a non-Spanish speaker, I assume that certain English words can be changed into Spanish by a simple change in the ending or pronunciation. For example, the English word ‘family’ becomes ‘familia’ in Spanish. Unfortunately, this device doesn’t always apply; I had forgotten what the Spanish word for ‘embarrassed’ was (it is avergonzado), and asked Denily to remind me. When I asked though, she had a funny story to tell: there was a girl who she knew who was learning Spanish, and in trying to say she was embarrassed, she accidentally said, “estoy embarasado”….which does not mean, “I am embarrassed”. On the contrary, she quickly became embarrassed! Denily’s friend had accidentally said, “I am pregnant”.

Needless to say, I was glad I didn’t unintentionally claim to be pregnant. Denily also taught me another way to avoid embarrassment. Somehow, the word “Miss” came up, like the same “miss” as Driving Miss Daisy. Apparently, in Venezuela, if you call someone a Miss, it basically means you are hitting on them, or telling them they are beautiful. She said it’s based on the importance of the Miss Venezuela competition in her culture. So make sure you don’t call anyone “Miss _____” when you’re in Venezuela unless you mean it!

Since I am learning Spanish right now, we both exchanged what difficulties we have with each other’s language. Denily says that the hardest thing for her is actually pronunciation and perfecting her accent. I can definitely understand the pronunciation difficulty-we have no consistent rules on pronunciation, unlike Spanish. For me, the hardest thing about Spanish is the prepositions. I forget which preposition goes where, or whether one actually needs to be there. Even though Spanish doesn’t have as many prepositions as English, the smaller number cover the same number of uses, meaning one preposition is used in possibly hundreds of ways (that may be exaggeration).

            So yeah, language was the big topic of the day. We will meet again next week and talk again!

Hokum 301-320 and 429-439

            Today’s Hokum readings were very entertaining to me. In particular, I enjoyed the story “From Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison for the social commentary it gives. Since the story revolves around the inward thoughts of the main character, it is interesting how some of his inward thoughts are universal in their applications. The idea of people being ashamed of something that means a lot to them is unfortunate, to say the least. In this story, the narrator describes the shame someone would feel if his love of certain foods was exposed to the world. He describes the shame as worse than the shame of committing a terrible crime like rape, which was a shocking comparison to me. Obviously, the author is probably using this exaggeration to get his point across, but it still struck me as strange.

            The commentary the author seems to be making is that stereotypes (mostly negative ones) can manipulate people to try to be something that they are not. He implies that the narrator was ashamed of his love for yams, and normally wouldn’t tell anyone about it, but when he bites into the yam, he realizes that he doesn’t care what stereotype it fulfills or what people think about him, saying, “I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper.” The concept of certain thoughts being proper or improper in society is generally a positive thing, but in this story, Ellison shows how social mores can sometimes do harm and cause people to do things that go against what they actually believe. Things that are morally neutral are often discouraged by society simply because of stigmas, which can cause insecurity and shame.

            The story, “Dirty Deceivers” by Chester Himes also contained this theme. The husband, Clefus, and wife, Sadie are both partially black, but are both afraid to tell the other one. They join in with society by being intentionally prejudiced against blacks, even though they know they are partially African American as well. This story was meaningful in that the society around them forced them to disregard part of themselves and join in against their own family.

            These two stories were interesting, although not too funny. The social commentary in them was good and provocative, which made these readings some of my favorites.

Hokum 107-139

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            After another thoroughly enjoyable set of writings from Hokum, I have decided this is my favorite book we’ve used so far this semester. Being from the south, I love the dialect. I was surprised how easily I was able to read it, especially after hearing how difficult it was for some people to understand.

            These stories and jokes were some of my favorites; I laughed out loud at the punch line of the joke on page 114 by Bert Williams, which I will quote in full because it was so good:

Rasmus Bigby used to play with a little white boy about his age. One day the little pale one was crying bitterly and his mother says to Rasmus, ‘What’s the matter with Ronald, Erasmus?’

“He’s cryin’ ‘cause I’m eatin’ my cake an’ won’t gib him none.”

“Is his own cake finished?”

“Yassum. An’ he cried while I’se eatin’ dat too.”

This line fit perfectly with a Spongebob episode I remember. After Patrick and Spongebob “steal” a balloon, they realize they are criminals and leave town, planning on living on their few belongings. For food, Patrick and Spongebob only had one chocolate bar each. Of course, when Patrick eats his own chocolate bar unconsciously, he thinks Spongebob stole his bar: “You took my only food. Now I’m gonna starve!” Here is the link so you can get the full effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMHB-NZY0UQ

            I also have to point out Bert Williams’ first joke in the book because he mentions the first time he went to the big city…which is of course the best city: Chattanooga/Chattanoogy/Chatt-town/Chattavegas/Chattaboogie. Chattanooga is awesome, in case you didn’t know. You should stop by sometime.

            The short story by Rudolph Fisher on King Solomon Gillis and his trip to Harlem was entertaining as well. The foreshadowing given by the insider’s view into Uggam’s conversations was well done; I knew something was going to happen, but the way it happened was a surprise. The story overall was interesting because there was always a tension between corruption going by unnoticed and being caught. These stories are great, and I look forward to more of them. While they are not all humorous, many of them are simply good stories, even if they portray a pretty ugly subject at times—racism.

Fourth Meeting 10/18

            Denily and I had our fourth meeting the other day (actually, it was technically our fifth meeting, but seriously, who’s counting?! Oh wait….). Either way, we had another good conversation about various topics. First, we followed up from the last meeting on the election in Venezuela. Unfortunately (spoiler alert!), as I already said, Chavez was reelected. What a bummer. I asked Denily why he keeps being elected. Chavez definitely has a negative reputation in most of the world, in my evaluation, so I was surprised that he won again. According to Denily, he gets all of his votes from the poorer population, which is very large. Apparently, his presidency hasn’t helped many of them get out of poverty either, because they keep voting for him. Denily was upset, but obviously can’t do anything to change it at this point.

            We haven’t been able to meet for about two weeks because of conflicts in our schedules, so we caught up on what the other had been doing. Denily had gone to Houston to be with some friends there, while I had just stayed here.

            Denily and all the international students had their midterms last week as well, and she said she did very well! Being an ESL student sounds like it would get somewhat repetitive eventually though; Denily says now they will basically do the same thing they did the first half of the semester, but only with different books. In the second half of the semester, they will be reading Life of Pi. I had the misfortune of reading this book years ago, in my freshman year of high school. As I recall, I had to read about 200 pages of boredom before actually getting anywhere. The dislike of the book may have just come from lack of maturity back them, but I still have clear memories of disliking the book. Maybe I would like it better if I read it again; however, Denily so far doesn’t like it either, so maybe I was correct all along.

            So far, it has been cool to hang out with someone from a different country just to talk. Another thing we talked about was Denily’s former exposure to the United States. It was no surprise that before coming to TCU, Denily had only been to Florida, where a large Spanish speaking population makes life easy for south and central Americans. She said she had always wanted to go to other places, but had never been able to do this, since she always travels with her family, none of whom speak English, until now. Denily hopes to someday go to many different parts of the country with her English skills as strong as they are already. She is currently trying to convince her family to make plans for a more exciting family vacation elsewhere in the United States.  

            Our fourth meeting was fun, as always. Denily and her friend Norelly (also from Venezuela; in fact, she is Manoj’s conversation partner) signed up for some kind of gym class at the Rec, so she left to go do that at the end of our meeting. We’ll meet again next week!

Third Meeting 9/15

I know, I am so slow to write these up. But don't worry, I'm slowly catching up...anyway, on to the actual post...

            Denily and I met for our third time this semester over the most delicious Mexican food ever. Hence it was appropriate to talk a lot about food, which is great! I picked up two chicken burritos from Tacos Ernesto ahead of time (look it up; this place is delicious) and brought them back to campus.

            Like I said last time, Venezuelan food lacks almost all spiciness, so I was hoping the slight spiciness would not ruin the food for her. Fortunately, she enjoyed it, although I am not sure how much so. We continued to talk about food. Denily says that food in Venezuela revolves around beef, or at least beef is the most important meat. While the hamburger and ground beef are probably the most common examples of beef in America, Venezuela has a different way to serve it. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name or how exactly it is prepared.

            Denily and I also talked a little bit more about our hometowns. Denily is from the capital of Venezuela, Caracas. While Denily loves her city, she thinks it is unsafe for foreigners due to crime rates. She said that if you walk around looking like a tourist, people are bound to take advantage of you. If you go everywhere with a local or appear to know the city though, you would probably be safe. However, the way she describes her city makes it sound awesome. Temperatures around the year are between 60° and 80° despite the fact that it is only about 10 degrees north of the equator. The beach is only about 5 miles north of the city, but in between is part of a mountain range with peaks in the 2500-meter range. She mentioned that there are even some hotels in the mountains from which you can see both the ocean and the city. It sounds like a perfect vacation setting. I told her some about Chattanooga as well (and this is for you readers to hear as well!). Chattanooga is basically the best city ever. It is large enough to have life, but small enough that traffic isn’t obnoxious. It is the home of many historical events, including battles from the Civil War. It is full of southern hospitality. And one of my favorite things about Chattanooga: the outdoors. Chattanooga is a huge outdoors city, with a river running right through downtown, mountains all around, and trees everywhere. You can go behind my house and just walk deep into the woods (to a point, before it slopes off into a 200 foot drop). Anyway, advertisement for Chattanooga is done (for now).

            Denily also mentioned the upcoming election….but not our election, the election in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez has been the president of Venezuela since 1999. After being the president for only a few years, he made huge changes to the legislature, including an increase in term length of the president from 5 to 6 years, as well as a limit on only 2 terms per president. Of course, Chavez, being the nice guy that he is, decided later in 2009 that the idea of 2 terms per president didn’t make sense, so he changed it back so any president could have an unlimited number of terms. So after already completing 2 terms, he ran for a third. Denily and most of her friends were hoping this election would end differently. But it didn’t. He won again. This post would have been more exciting if I had posted it before the election, but I am so slow that I am posting it after the fact...sorry!

            So that was our third meeting. It was interesting hearing about another country’s politics and culture again. I’ll talk to y’all later!

Hokum 19-36

Today we started reading Hokum, "an anthology of African-American humor". I wasn't sure what to expect from the reading until I jumped right in. We read 3 stories, "On Being Crazy" by WEB Dubois, "'Possum or Pig?" by Zora Neale Hurston, and "Let me at the Enemy--an' George Brown" by Chester Himes.

As I read, one of the common themes I noticed was that these African American writers often wrote things that seemed to ridicule their own culture. The front page of the book is a picture of an eaten slice of watermelon, which seems to correspond with self-ridicule, since there are stereotypes portraying African Americans as loving watermelon. While Dubois didn't make fun of his own culture, Hurston's short story (set in pre-Civil War times) seems to make fun of a situation where a slave has done something against the master's rules and is trying to avoid punishment. The main character (John), a slave, has been stealing piglets for food for a little bit of time, causing his master to be suspicious. When the master investigates, John does everything he can to avoid punishment; he tries to convince his master that he should go to his own house instead of his small cabin; he tells him he is cooking possum instead of pig. But at the last minute, when the master demands to have some of what John is cooking, John comes up with a response that I thought was pretty funny: "Well, ah put dis heah critter in heah a possum,--if it comes out a pig, 'tain't mah fault." Finally realizing there is no way to convince his master to leave, John feigns innocence essentially acknowledges that he may actually cooking a pig, but that it isn't his fault because he did not start off with a pig.

If this story had actually occurred, it is unlikely this humorous excuse would have saved John from punishment (thus showing the futility of his exercise), but his wit makes light of a tense situation and ends before anything bad happens. 

In Himes's story, I really sensed that the main character High C was being ridiculed. First, he believes a man (George Brown) who promises a job that seems suspiciously misrepresented, follows up on the recommendation, and then loses his job, his money, and his woman (Beulah). In the end though, he enters the army, which was his original plan, where he finds he is able to get revenge on George Brown, the man who ruined his life. This humorous twist at the end of the story fills out loose ends in the story and leaves the imagination open to what may have happened between him and George Brown after the story is over.

Overall, I really enjoyed these stories. While they were not laugh-out-loud comedies, they were entertaining stories with a little twist at the end.

Second Meeting 9/8

            In my second meeting with Denily, we talked a lot about sports and her home culture. I had several stereotypes overturned during our conversation; first, I learned that Venezuelan food is very mild, and almost never has anything spicy. This was a little bit of a surprise, since I thought most cultures would have at least one spicy thing in a meal, but Denily assured me that she doesn’t enjoy spicy food at all. I tried to do a little research (Wikipedia!) to see if any region had spicy food, but came up with few results, although the article did mention one spicy food. Maybe she is just in the wrong part of the country for spiciness. Another stereotype that was overturned was that soccer is the most popular sport in Venezuela. I always thought that Central American countries tended toward baseball and that South American countries tended towards soccer. Apparently though, according to Denily, they are both about equally popular, although the internet says baseball is generally more popular. A final misconception I had about Venezuela was that it was a hot country, temperature-wise. Thinking this, I figured the Texas heat was pretty typical to her, but she told me she couldn’t stand the heat. In fact, I compared the temperature data for her city to some of the “perfect weather” cities in California and was surprised to find that the temperature in her city is even more consistent than most of California.

            We met again on Saturday to watch a football game; she and a friend from Venezuela both came to the game against Grambling State (yes, this is being written much too late), where I tried to explain how football is played. As I did this, I realized how complicated football really is to someone who has never really watched it. Even the basics of it were difficult to explain. On certain rules, I actually realized I had no idea why certain things happened. Denily asked why the play clock sometimes counts down from 25 seconds and at other times from 40.

            It was a good second meeting. I’m enjoying learning all about another culture. That’s one of my favorite things about college, the ability to hang out with people from all over the world. More meetings to come soon enough!

Response to The 50 Funniest American Writers

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What in the world did I just read?

Today for class, we read 5 short stories from the book “The 50 Funniest American Writers”. Unfortunately, after reading these stories, I think I could edit the book to “The 46 Funniest American Writers”. We read from the authors James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, Peter de Vries, and best of all, The Onion.

            I enjoyed the first story by James Thurber, but it really was not too funny. The story describes a family where several occurrences cause the wife to think her husband is insane. The first occurrence was perpetrated by Roy, one of the kids, who wakes his dad in the middle of the night, calls him Buck (not his name) and returns to bed before his dad can find out what was going on. While the idea of a prank like this was humorous and enjoyable to think about, the humor from that point on was somewhat stale.

            After enjoying the first story, I was surprised by how much the next three stories disappointed me.  I think the stories may have just been too old for me, but I had trouble even following the E.B. White story. I’m honestly not even sure what happened in it or what the purpose was. From the beginning, there is almost zero context, and everything that happens is confusing from that point on. In retrospect, this story seems like one where such random things happen that it almost needs to be seen on a stage or screen to understand it. Either way, I strongly disliked this story.

            Of course, the highlight of all of the readings was the article by The Onion. I have been a fan of this satirical news source for a long time, and was excited to get to read another article. It did not disappoint. The article talks about the future effort of the U.S. government to deploy thousands of vowels to Bosnia in order to make their names and cities understandable to Americans. The idea was great from the beginning, including fake quotes from people like Grg Hmphrs: “With just a few key letters, I could be George Humphries. That is my dream.” The absolute absurdity of it is humorous to read, but of course, the understanding that the story is not real is necessary to get a laugh out of it. 

John Morreall's Comic Relief

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After trudging through the dense, somewhat unorganized pages of the book “Comic Relief “ by John Morreall, I was glad to have finally finished the reading. The book explores many of the theories of humor through the centuries, and although there were parts that were interesting, I failed to fully enjoy it, unfortunately.

However, there were a few things I did learn from the book:

1)   Humor was, at one point, thought to be a negative contributor to society. This idea was strange to me at first because I cannot imagine a society where humor, or even laughing or smiling would go against social mores. I absolutely love laughing and smiling, so when I read that humor was viewed negatively years ago, I wondered how this could happen. After reading some of the reasoning behind this belief, I understood the logic, at least. It made sense that humor can cause ridicule and emotional pain, but the old ideas of humor did not realize the potential humor has when it is not used for these things.

2)   Humor allows people to do things they are usually not allowed to do. With humor, you can imitate different aspects of life and essentially ridicule different things. In everyday conversation, it is not appropriate to ridicule something, but for a strange reason, ridicule in a humorous fashion is more accepted. Morreall gives several examples of humor that ridiculed a cultural practice, a powerful position in government, and others. This type of humor can be harmful, but some of it can sometimes actually reveal a truth that needed to be heard and accepted.

3)   Cognitive shift is usually the method of humor or laughter. I had not really considered the exact reason I laugh until I read the book. It made me realize that the things I find funny are funny because of what Morreall calls cognitive shift. When I laugh at the short Monty Python “Fish Club” skit, I laugh because the actor (from the official “Board of Irresponsible People”) begins the skit acting normally, but very quickly tells the audience how to feed your goldfish a good meal, including sausage, potatoes, and bread. While he explains this, we see him stuffing the fishbowl with this food, and it catches you off guard, making you laugh. I am much more aware of why we laugh now.

 Watch the Fish Club skit below. It's only 52 seconds!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJlBYvkRiHk

First Meeting 8/30

            I met my conversation partner, Denily, for the first time on Thursday. It was a great experience to just sit down and learn about another person and culture for an hour. Denily is from Venezuela and has worked at a news-station there for about 5 years after college in her hometown. She decided to come to TCU to learn English for job security and to gain another skill for use in her job.

            It was very interesting talking to someone from a completely different culture and hearing some of her reactions to American culture. One of my first impressions was that Denily speaks English very well, practically flawlessly. When I asked her how long she had been in the U.S., she looked at the date and casually said, “almost four months”. I was impressed to say the least. She had little prior training in English before she came to TCU, other than basic knowledge and an English course at one time, and was already speaking smoothly and fluently.

            One part of our conversation that was most interesting to me was our discussion of language. We first talked for a while about idioms. Some idioms translated perfectly from one language to the other, while others did not. In Venezuela, they have the phrase,

“El loro viejo no aprende a hablar,” which translates, “The old parrot cannot learn to speak.” This idiom is very similar to our idiom, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” While the actual words were different, they both communicated the same idea. On the other hand, the Spanish phrase, “hablar por los codos,” does not translate to English well, as it means, “to talk through the elbows,” or to talk a lot. It was interesting exchanging things like this. I also discovered that it is difficult for many Spanish speakers to pronounce words with the ‘th’ or ‘thr’ consonant combination. It was something I didn’t really think of as being difficult, but looking back, I can remember being 5 years old and saying something costs “free dollars” instead of “three”, so I guess I can relate.

            Our first meeting was fun and enlightening. We are planning on meeting again a week from today, so stay tuned!