Fall 2009 Commentary

Overview

Starting my second year at UCI, my friends and I auditioned for some dance teams, and only one of my friends got into a team. Running out of money and hoping to take care of some of my parents’ expenses, I quit my old job at the dining commons for a tutoring job that promised more hours. I struggled getting over Trung and I finally decided to switch out of my French major and to not return to Breakthrough for a third summer.

General Comments

A new setting in Fall 2009. And new people too, mainly Alfonso, Kevin, and Sang, who got themselves their own tags. One thing about Summer 2009 that I didn’t like too much was that it was too much about me, so for Fall 2009, I wanted to shine some light on other people too. What I liked about my old blog was that I really developed and gave depth to Peter, Black John, and Miranda. It took a few years to attain that, so I hoped to at least get something started when I wrote about my experiences in the Fall quarter.

Select Entry Commentary

“Around the Kitchen Counter”

After the first two entries of Fall, I realized that there was nothing that really indicated that I was in Irvine (me talking about classes not being enough), so I wrote this entry to establish the setting. The entry also really reaffirms food as a motif on this blog—yes, motif. Think about it and think about where, when, and under what circumstances it appears in entries.

“Empathy” & “Crossfire”

I decided to do something a little different and a little dangerous one day, making “Empathy” my first entry revolving around a completely different person. I’m not exactly too sure what to call the narrative mode I use in both these entries (and later on, “Tháng Tư Đen: Part 1 & 2”) because it’s unconventional. I still refer to myself in the first person, “I,” but my thoughts and the things I don’t do with the main person are just has hidden as any other person’s. The reader only sees from the perspective of Alfonso and Sang in their respective entries. And they’re referred to in the third person. So it’s kinda more like a third person limited narrative. Whatever though, I think it’s a good approach.

I admit that I both conceived of “Empathy” and “Crossfire” for selfish reasons. I mainly wanted to say that I was rejected from CADC, but I didn’t wanna make a big deal out of my rejection, which I really could’ve done due to all of the buildup leading up to it. So, I wrote about Alfonso’s rejection from his point of view, and the attention that my rejection got was limited to one very quick line in a phone conversation. I did write about my rejection in “Stoic,” the following entry, but hopefully “Empathy” weakened whatever emotional impact there might’ve been because you already knew what was coming. And honestly, I wished I saved the events in “Stoic” for a flashback. I first wrote it so that it would transition to “Through the Looking-Glass,” but I think it would’ve worked better as a flashback for later use instead of a transition.

And as for “Crossfire,” even though it’s from Sang’s perspective, it’s a little more obvious how the entry is still centered around me. I wrote the entry from Sang’s perspective to obscure my thoughts, actions, and emotions so that things like the car alarm going off on John and Sang were more of a mystery. But I didlike writing in Sang’s perspective for what it revealed about the kind of interactions we have. It’d be something I’d miss if I wrote in my perspective.

“Those Fucking Persimmons,” “Cơm Gà,” “Happiness,” & “The Key to Happiness”

I had originally intended “Happiness” and “The Key to Happiness” to be a two-parter, but after some rereading, I realized that these four entries could all be a loosely connected four-parter because they flowed into each other pretty well. Also, pay attention to the presence of a food motif in these entries.

Other than that, I don’t actually have much more to say about these entries except that the flashbacks in “Happiness” and “They Key to Happiness” were probably among my favorites to write. Really sentimental, lots of nostalgia.

“No Reason” & “Reciprocals and Rewrites”

“No Reason” is pretty different in that it breaks away from my normal storytelling narrative style and instead opts for a vaguer but more emotionally driven direct address. In other words, it’s kinda like an emo middle school Xanga (or Tumblr) rant, except slightly more mature and I’m not too ashamed to admit it. The thing I always hated about emo rants were the vague references to problems and situations that the reader had no clue about, and that’s pretty much what I did with “No Reason.” But, unlike most emo rants, I do intend to go back and fill in the details about what happened in a flashback, eventually, even if it’s several years later.

“No Reason,” I think, is also a really iconic because, if “Relapse” didn’t do it before, then this entry strongly establishes me as someone who tends to push away and hurt the people closest to me (parents and lovers).

“Transcendence”

Final entry of the season. Honestly, it was kinda lame. I kinda wanted to do something unworldly like I did with Summer 2009’s final entries, which used flashforwards, but all I could come up with was an imaginary conversation. Yeah, but the idea did have its benefits. Instead of communicating how I felt in an angry long rant, I did it by “talking” and responding to a person, and this shows how I’ve reached my conclusions...but, honestly, it was a lame idea. The entry doesn’t really address or clean up any of the issues I brought up throughout the fall. It only added more to the “I’M A SELF-LOATHING GAY” and “I AM CLEARLY NOT HANDLING MY BREAK-UP WITH TRUNG TOO WELL” stories. And, the entry just kinda came out of no where. My penultimate entry was about grades. Big wow.

Although, I did get to refer to gay people as “cocksucking faggots.” Only good thing about this entry.