optional paper topics

1:  For my first idea I think I am going to write about the Bryan Adams concert that I went to at the New Daisy in downtown Memphis.  It was definitely a crazy experience for me and i loved every minute of it.  It was definitely worth skipping half of cheer practice to go to too. i think one of the most interesting and almost awkward parts of the concert though was that even at the age of 17 or 18 I was still most likely the youngest person at the concert.  But I mean I was practically breed off of his music so I really didn't mind especially since I was one of the few people that probably knew every word to every one of his songs. However, I think my favorite part of the entire concert was towards the very end when I was actually kind of standing up on a rail of sorts and he actually looked over at me so I kind of gave him one of the cutsie finger wave things and he definitely winked at me to the udder suprise of everyone around me.

2: My second idea for this paper would be to write about one of my trips to the high  school cheerleading nationals at disney world.  i am not sure which year i would choose just yet beecause something special happened just about every year but i have many options.  such as how we actually won my freshman year, or how i was traded to our coed team my sophmore year, or just the amazingness of my senior year.  pretty much regardless of what year i choose though i can write about the ridiculous amount of competition and te mental games used to psych out the other teams and all sorts of stuff like that.

3: The third topic that i was considering writing on was my experience at the Memphis is May music fest.   which by the way I also got to see bryan aadams at... plus many other artists like 36mafia and tons of other groups! it really was an amazing experience and i actually got a lot of vip treatments because of the people that we wet with which was ridiculously cool. for example how we got to ride from stage to stage in a golf cart around the crowds and stuff. it was really cool.

"Us and Them" and "Mick Jagger Wants Me"

So I have to say that the beginning of "Us and Them" definitely weirded me out at first simply because when i first moved to the town of Collierville I moved into a house 3 blocks from the school where I would be attending the third grade.  Not to mention that I moved from that house to one about a mile away.  So I can definitely relate to David Sedaris because in case the whole similar houses story wasn't strange enough, I also had a large family right across the street that was extremely sheltered and shut off from the rest of the world even to this day.  However, other than that I had a very difficult time understanding what Sedaris was actually trying to accomplish through his story.  I couldn't really tell if his focus was on selfishness, or perhaps the corruption of modern day society.  Overall though it almost made me want to ban my future children from TV and other similar things so that they would be blind to the same things as the Tomkey children were.  

Now in "Mick Jagger Wants Me", I can't really say that I related to what the author was saying but it was very entertaining.  I especially enjoyed her incredible graphics throughout the entire thing.  But I suppose that in the end i just didnt enjoy it quite as much as the other story because I couldn't put myself into the story quite as much as I could in the other. I really just cannot see myself as the type of person to be obsessed with someone that I know absolutlely nothing about.  However, i guess when you really think about it, the little boy in the first story was actually a stocker as well with the way that he would study the family at night throughout their window at night.  So who knows, maybe I am just more interested in cooky neighbors than celebrities. 

My History with Writing

            Well my experience with writing, like most other people, started in elementary school where I actually learned to write.  But it wasn’t really until high school that I actually started to know what I was doing.  Most of the writing that I have ever done was definitely done within those extremely long four years.  However, I was taught to write in numerous different forms each year.   For instance my sophomore year we were told to focus on all the abstract details of a novel or play and to write about what the author must have wanted his or her readers to think about certain characters and ideas.  But then, in eleventh grade all of the writing techniques I had learned the previous year were practically thrown out the window! Now, instead of focusing on symbols and themes like before, the focus was on the actual style of the writer and how they use rhetoric and strategies to affect the thoughts of their readers.  So, I began to completely rearrange my annotating skills and began looking for logical fallacies instead of symbols and tone instead of theme.  And then, based off of these findings I was required to use different writing styles such as argumentative or synthetic.  Well, that was until my senior year when all of my papers were of course required to be just like they were my sophomore year.  So then I went back to my meaning searches, but remarkably my papers turned out a lot different than those from my sophomore year. And I really owe a lot of thanks to my AP literature teacher for that because was the one who taught me how to come up with themes and organize a paper without following the same old pattern every time.  So I have to say that though my writing experience has really only come from the past four years, I really do feel that I have had the chance to experiment with all different types of writing.