Out of Sheer Curiosity...

In One Hundred Years Of Solitude, the main family obviously shares the last name of Buendia. Does it seem to anyone else that the name could represent something? Buen in Spanish is a word meaning good, and dia is the word for day. To me it seems that with each passing generation the Buendias stray further from the "Golden Age" of the lawless utopia that Jose Arcadio Buendia had initially created. Jose Arcadio shames his family by marrying his adopted sister, Aureliano becomes tyrannical, Amaranta's callousness causes the death of Pietro Crespi, her sons ALL have children out of wedlock, and in the midst of it all the country is being terrorized by war. As the bloodline is carried on the novel strays further and further away from the "good days" in early Macondo. Thoughts? Comments?
-Murry-Uh

Filling Space

I haven't posted in an extremely long time, so I'll post my newly finished poem to make It look like I've been remotely productive in the past two months.


Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

Let us go then, with reluctant haste,
When the morning is cinereal and chaste
Like a modest child clad in an ashen gown.
Let us go, through concourses that vilify
My war-paint banded eyes
That watch the girls in their boots of brown suede,
And the boys in masculine masquerade
Through the stark, white confines of cramped corridors,
Trampling the tile floors.
Their sounds reverberate and hang stagnantly.
Oh, do not ask, “ Why such angst?”
When I reject their social ranks

And they roll their eyes for I persist
To be the “unreasonable pessimist.”

The sympathetic adults will say
“There will be time, there will be time,
Everything will be fine, just fine
When you go to college, when you go away,
Foolish Maria, there will be time
To make friends in a four year institution
And you’ll be fine, you’ll be just fine”
But I need an immediate solution.
Time! Time! Yes, Time there will be!
The question is, “What will it solve?”
Will I heal? Flounder? Spiral? Devolve?
How uncertain my promised remedy!

And they roll their eyes for I persist
To be the “unreasonable pessimist.”

And indeed there will be time
To wonder , “Who cares?,” and “Who cares?”
As I sit in disrepair
Sobbing in a guidance chair
Indignantly pulling at my disheveled hair
(They will say “She’s clearly unstable”)
While eyeing me from across the table
As I flee to a makeshift Tower of Babel
(They will say “ Go without pills? She’s clearly unable!)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe
And take all of their
Preconceptions and throw them in reverse?

I’ve known it all too well, too well
I’ve known endless mornings, afternoons , and sunsets on hills
I have measured my life in milligrams and pills.
Psychiatrists said I too could excel
If I “Take one tablet by mouth every day”
But what do they know, anyway?

Shall I give in to their desires? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white jackets if I don’t heed what they preach!
But I’ve learned to dream while they screech

Because their solution is simply not for me.

With you, I see them from atop Salvador’s Elephants
With your chin on my shoulder, arms around my middle
Watching the model world from spindled legs brittle

Our digression doesn’t last,
for, when shaken, their silver trumpets call,
Spindled legs collapse, and we fall.


Murry-uh

my antonia

Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed this book. Enough so that I found a quiet place to sit and read it during lunch. It has all the things I love in a story-- romance, nature, and scandal-- but I didn't feel bad about reading it, as I do with most books containing those things, because it was assigned in an AP class. The first introduction to the book, not the one written by Willa Cather, admits that there really isn't much of a plot to it. The small moments, like descriptions of nature, that would be normally overlooked in a story were mostly all there was to it, so they became more important. There were some tragedies, like Antonia's father's death, but there was little focus on the death itself, more the impact it had on the characters. My Antonia seemed to be more about the setting and the characters than events, making it a welcome change from the surreal, fast-paced plot of Crime and Punishment.
Little Red