Blog six

HUMOR, that's a word that is difficult to define with out the use of a  dictionary. It's kind of like beauty, it's in the eyes of the beholder... in this case in the ears of the beholder. Many jokes or stories are categorized under comedy or extremely humorous but it isn't always. Like films for example. How many movies are "comedies" but don't make people laugh.

Humor can be a personality trait. Being funny is something you're born with, something you can't learn. If it was something people could go to school for then how many Dane Cooks would be wandering the world right now?

There are guidelines in writing that define humor. Like Irony for example.
Dramatic irony
Situational irony
irony.... all forms of it.
I vaguely remember learning this in France. There was a type of humor that involves a hero that is like a typical underdog figure. I'm not sure, the French can be weird sometimes. The point is that defining humor in literature is quite boring. I'll explain why. People in the good old years weren't open with their thoughts so when something was out of place it was funny. Which strangely reminds me of another type of humor. Absurd humor. In the 1940-1960's Eugene Ionesco wrote plays that defined absurd comedy. It involved giving out of place characteristics to it's characters and using English words in an all french play. That was funny. That guy had a gift.

Anyway, as i was trying to say. Humor in literature is not really funny like Drew Barrymore films. Humor that is actually funny is the type that uses real thoughts that people wouldn't say in the social norm. In my opinion that is what makes people laugh the most.

STYLE.
Let me quickly tell a funny story of my adventures in Europe. I'm not much of a stylish person. If I could live in my favorite pair of jeans, I would.. wait I already do. Now, the french are very chic. They are so chic so make up for my lack of chic-ness. Anyway, I remember the day I was heading to Pisa. I decided to have style so I had to raid various suitcases of my unsuspecting friends to put together a wonderful outfit which at last minute was ruined because my friend need my cardigan because her style choice was too... visible in the sunlight which we figured out when we took pictures by the leaning tower and realized with the flash you could see her undergarments. Maybe, that really is some awesome style...

Writing style comes from the author. It is also something that cannot be taught. I personally think that a writers style is their personality on paper. People just have to learn how to broadcast a little piece of their soul onto whatever they write. It makes everything more personal or makes the most prominent figure in New York seem human and reachable when something is written like a person wrote it. Style can be humorous or dramatic and depressing. It really depends on the person and how they wish to show themselves.

Blog 5

Never would I have thought that an essay would take me so long to kill. Imagine that I am a cheetah and the essay is a gazelle. I am wandering through the Savannah on the African continent when I spot a tasty gazelle.... instinctively you would think that I would be able to kill that gazelle in no time but I was stuck on my creeping stage. The stage when cheetahs walk really slyly and wait for the perfect moment to attack. I was stuck there for the longest time. I knew the objective: compare and contrast. I just did not know how to pounce on it. The gazelle which is symbolically my essay ran from me many times until I finally was able to conquer it.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I did that gracefully like animal planet depicts. This was a messy fight and I'm looking forward to rewriting this catastrophe.

I liked the prompt for the essay, I just didn't know how to go through with it. This time I honestly did not know how to proceed with less caution. I didn't know how to write it with out it ending up being a confusing piece of paper made up of random facts, citations and the other stuff I fill it with. Think of it as a sloppy Joe. The bad kind. Not the Manwich brand but the kind you get at an elementary school cafeteria. That's what I am talking about.

It was not the reading that were necessarily difficult. It is safe to say that the hardest part was the structure of the essay. People say practice makes perfect. I'm not sure about that but I'm sure the more I do essay that have to be compare and contrast the easier they will become to structure. It was difficult to structure the essay when the readings where kind of similar but not really. It's like a Venn diagram that's really slim in the middle. I need more to work with. That added to the difficult factor.

It wasn't too difficult to get started mainly because while I'm writing the introduction I get more of a feel of where I'm taking the essay. It acts like a mental map in my head. It was hard to get past that stage though. The map i constructed mentally was filled with narrow roads that somehow ended abruptly; A crazy labyrinth if you will.

Overall, I'm glad I'm finally done.