Blog Assignment #6 - Responding to a piece of literary journalism

Tara Burns is a career sex worker and her magical ability is stated as the: "willingness to get naked and smile at people."  In her article "That Time I Tried Topless House Cleaning", Tara recounts her entertaining side hustle of her side hustle, "scrubbing while bending over a counter in six-inch heels." The story I expected was one of sorry lament; a guilt ridden event necessitated by a desperate situation - turned out to be refreshingly unabashed. Tara understands her customer, she plays with them and coyly does what only a career hustler can do - the classic bait and switch. 

It's easy, you advertise a juicy morsel - Topless housecleaning and a lap dance $100/hr, seems like a good deal, to the untrained horny eye. But for someone like Tara the $100 was just a warm up, a fee to walk in the door - she scrubbed the dishes and talked her freelance appointment out of $800 in under an hour. I had to admit, I was impressed; really you can't deny the ROI on her fishnets and heels is incredible. Yes, what Tara does is considered taboo but she does something nice in her article, she humanized herself. She didn't bother to justify her actions, she didn't bother caring whether you approved of her or not, she told a story of a day where she was able to make the $3 in her pocket to $800.

What piqued my interest in Tara was a telling line that I thought was so good, "Sex work is my trust fund." Never before had I heard it told that way, and while I am opposed to the objectification and over-sexualization of women in general, it gave me a strange feeling of pride to see a woman turn a taboo around and have it serve her purposes, as Tara. 

I enjoyed this piece, it was honest and forthright. Tara told her story and opened her life to those that would laugh with her and to those that will judge her. She does not apologize for her work in fact at the end of the topless cleaning hour, holding eight one-hundred dollar bills her partner agreed, "Holy Shit, he says, I do believe I wish I had a vagina too!" Tara may have just found a loop hole, no pun intended. 

Blog Assignment #5 - Planning an Interview

During the Thanksgiving Holiday I find myself looking at faces I haven't seen in a while and in turn looking at faces trying really hard to remember the names attached to them. If some of these transients make their way to my mother's house there are a few that I would love to interview. One being a childhood friend - let's call him Friend 1; he has been with our family for a long time. I've known Friend 1 for as long as I remember, we have been through a lot of life together but he always seems to float away and back, sometimes I don't see him for a few holidays but he always shows up at the strangest times during our holiday celebrations. One Thanksgiving my brother told him that the meal would be at 6pm (Hispanics cannot understand having an early meal, it seems almost sacrilegious in my family to have such an important meal mid-afternoon) after complaining at how early the dinner was slated for he arrived at 8 pm with his parents who had to get laundry done before arriving. It was strange.
Anyhow, if Friend 1 comes by he would be who I interview. I cannot say he is particularly interesting - he is usually quiet but after a few drinks he can sling a joke or two really well. Actually he only knows about two or three jokes because I have heard the same ones over and over again, although to be fair he is really funny when he tells them.
Ok- so some of my questions would probably revolve around his interests because even though I have known him my whole life I know NOTHING about his interests. Wait, no, I have seen him play the guitar so I know that but aside from that and maybe the Mets I know nothing about him.
Question 1 would probably go like: So, Friend 1, what is the most interesting thing you have seen in Astoria?
I would ask this because he is not one for detail and I'd have to ask a creatively worded question to tease out some sort of real response.
Question 2: If you had all the time/resources available to you what would you do, where would you go?
I LOVE this question, to be honest I usually ask this question to anyone I'm trying to get to know....it tells me a lot about a person.
Question 3: What do you love?
This question I'd wait until last because this is for me what would be the meat of my profile of Friend 1, he has been so elusive during my life, it would really blow my mind if he had a crazy cool answer for this!

Blog Assignment #3 - Writing on a Photo

"Sweetheart, could you help me with these bags to my apartment?"
The old lady in 4E hobbled toward me, her rickety shopping cart could hardly hold up the pint of milk and carton of eggs inside of it.
In her apartment everything was meticulously clean and well placed. A beautiful mahogany table held up what looked like a vintage Tiffany lamp.
"Mrs. Wright you have such beautiful antiques."
"Oh, Sweetheart - those weren't antiques to me."
She touched the lamp and smiled.
"You know, there was a time when I had nothing. Let me get you some milk, I made cookies!"
I sat on her pink velour couch, the crinkly pillow itched my arms, you could tell when her last foray into decorating happened somewhere between the years Twiggy was famous and Diana Ross sang in a group.
Rounding the corner  carefully holding a very large glass of milk,  Mrs. Wright shaky hand reached out and located a pretty crocheted coaster.
"Make sure you use that coaster, OK, Sweetheart?"
She sat next to me and pulled up her afghan over knee highs.
"Mrs. Wright, have you always lived here?"
I sipped a little bit of milk, Mrs. Wright forgot the cookies.
"No. As a little girl I lived in Astoria."
"Really! I go to school in Astoria - right on Broadway."
"Yes, well, I lived somewhere near Steinway."
Oh, Sweetheart, did you want cookies with that milk?"
I begged her to please not get up, she looked so comfortable with her afghan. She continued to tell me about her life in Astoria. How she lived through the bread lines and her father pleading for work on the street. I couldn't help but look at her in disbelief as she detailed "Depression Recipes" and sugar rations.
"One day my little brother, Ronnie, got sick with the fever - very badly. My momma begged the butcher for a beef bone so she could make him a soup but he refused. My poppa went to the butcher the next day and offered to clean his floors for a beef bone but he refused again -  my brother died a week later."
Mrs. Wright at this point was so visibly shaken I got up and offered to make her some tea, she liked peppermint she mentioned. She drank her tea in silence and I watched her eyes go back in time, her pruned lips shook a bit and the edges of her eyes were moist. After about three minutes she looked at me, "Thank you sweetheart for helping me, please come by and visit me again."
I started college that year and was swept up in the hectic nature of freshman year, every now and then catching up with Mrs. Wright on the street promising her I'd visit her as soon as I could.
It was a spring day, finals week actually, and on my way back home there was a pretty middle aged woman I had never seen before leaving with the same Tiffany lamp I had recognized from Mrs. Wright apartment. Running to her apartment I immediately knew that Mrs. Wright had passed.
"Hello, are you related to Mrs. Wright?"
"Yes. We, were, Nana died on Monday - are you Carolina?"
The pangs of regret filled my stomach, I wish I had visited her one more time.
Trying not to cry, I asked when the wake was, I knew where it would be; everyone from the neighborhood had it at the same place.
"I asked if you were Carolina because she wanted you to have this."
Looking down through my tears, the pretty older woman handed me a worn pink leather purse and in it was the picture of a grocery store you see above.
The lady looked over my shoulder at the picture.
"Such a random photo, I have no idea what that could be!"
I looked at the lady and teared a little.
"I do."

Blog Assignment #2 - Reading Annie Dillard's Description

Annie Dillard saw an eclipse and it broke her mind. Before reading this piece I could have described to you the mechanics of an eclipse, it would have been science based and void of any possible neurosis inducing language. If I had not read this piece in its entirety,  I would have accused Annie Dillard of melodrama and would have missed the rich inner worlds of a momentary mental breakdown. I would have never understood that as, "A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky."(pg.286) so was the eclipsing of the world she knew, the world that flew away from her as fast as the eclipse hit.

Dillard takes us with her, she sets the scene and tone of what we were going to get slammed with poetically, "This was the Yakima valley...It extended south into the horizon, a distant dream of a valley, a Shangri-la."(pg.286) I can almost feel the cold wind whipping around, her writing directing me to this almost mythical gathering, "It looked as though we were scattered on hilltops at dawn to sacrifice virgins, make rain, set stone stelae in rings. There was no place out of the wind. The straw grasses banged our legs."(pg.286) Her view of this setting is intimate and internal, she feels her position on the mountain - the wind and the silent reverence. It left me with an slight eeriness - something otherworldly was about to take place.

"From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching...It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk...The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed."(pg. 288) My body physically reacted to this part of the story, I could feel her dread. Watching this event recalled a primitive memory, a past life watching an extraordinary event with no sense of science; only the realization that you are small watching a very big thing happen - a black disk moving over the sun. The lid of her rational, perceiving mind closed at the inability to connect this real event, it looked like nothing any of us could have ever read. It amazed me how she was able to place me so tangibly close to the terror of this natural occurrence with just a few words, "The hatch in the brain slammed."

With all of this, Annie Dillard, saved the wallop, for a later paragraph but allowed herself the moment to take in the unnatural sight of a world without the light of the sun; it was as simple as the sentence, "We got the light wrong."(pg. 288) You at once understood what it was like to stand in a world in where something as simple as lighting was wrong, it messed up the natural order of coloring our minds need to resemble order and rightness-silver, she described, the world was colored like
dead silver like a , "...photographer's platinum print."(pg. 287) But her mind could not reconcile or leave alone the ghastly world in which the eclipse left them in, she looks at her partner, "The sight of him, familiar and wrong, was something I was remembering from centuries hence, from the other side of death: yes, that is the was he used to look, when we were living." (pg.288) and here is the best sentence, "When it was our generation's turn to be alive." This for me was chilling, in all of its prophetic foresight - maybe this is the shadow world we will all turn into after death. Absolutely devastating. I am with her shadow among shadows walking in another dimension of existence where color and light are non-existent. In the light of our eclipsed non-existent life.

This next piece is what convinced me of Annie Dillard's existential mind brake, "What I saw, what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world. We had all died in our boots on the hilltops of Yakima, and we were alone in eternity."(pg. 290) Walloped, I stared at that sentence and was convinced Annie Dillard opened the curtain and chilled me with the stark truth of what lurked on the other side. The cold inevitability of lifelessness.

Her genius in this story is how she crystallizes the moment between the extraordinary and ordinary, disclosing to us a very human trait - our brains map towards its most simplest route - the obvious. "When the sun appeared as a blinding bead on the ring's side, the eclipse was over...We were born and bored at a stroke." (pg. 293) A perfect way to end a crazy ride, it ended and we went home.

Hello World.

It's August, I am sitting at the LAGCC admissions office the lady officiating my direct admit application looks at me like I'm crazy, "So you already have your degree and your looking to come to LaGuardia?" Sitting in her office is where I first composed the introduction that I have had to tell countless of times in the past two months because for some reason, here in LAGCC, everyone thinks I'm crazy. 

Hello, my name is Crystal. I went to Hunter College, I got my degree in Psychology - no one in the real world cares. Naturally, I am trying to get my Masters in something, don't want to do it in Psychology - can't stand hearing peoples problems, got enough of my own. I work in Accounting, I like numbers and I like to organize data, data is wysiwyg, no surprises. 

Ok - there is a MS program that I want to do but I have absolutely no programming experience, need more math classes and need to get to know some new professors, all the professors at Hunter forgot about me already. Could do all of this at a senior college but a) classes are cheaper here and b) my mom lives like ten minutes from campus and she watches my son. Bringing me, in a weird backdoor kind of way, to LAGCC. 

The room is silent for a minute, same lady is looking at me - her eyes dart around the room, then lands on my application. 

"OK, Ms. Aya, do you have the money order to complete the application?"

Her naturally bulging eyes blink a few times, I reach into my purse and wondered why I even tried to convince her otherwise.

So here I am, in this class, because my academic adviser advised me that while all my liberal arts from my first degree transferred, none fulfilled the "creative expressions" core. You can only believe the laugh I gave him but I when I saw this class I said why not? I like to write and I'd love an opportunity to get my writing some well deserved tuning up. 

Hi.