After discovering class was cancelled, I was on my way into the campus center to get some lunch when I ran into Jane who was quickly trying to finish her meal before the time class would have normally started. I told her the news and we ended up engaging in a small English discussion over lunch about what we listed on our Lists of Five as well as a little bit about the expressive paper that's due next week. For her own category in the Lists of Five she chose her 5 Dreams which she shared with me. Very ambitious, but I know hard-working Jane will do so much more. I told her about my own category, 5 Best Poems I've Read and then we shared our 5 Best Books too. This was good because usually I get book recommendations from my friends around me and this time - for once, I was returning the favor to someone else. Overall, the discussion was nothing short of interesting and I got to know her a lot better. She has such a fresh, lively personality and I can't help but admire how she has that endless crave for knowledge (I've had math class with her the past three quarters. Time has passed so quickly.)

On another note, I was reading Mr. Lovas' weblog entry about the "page 23 meme" and decided to do one myself. I randomly chose a book off of my shelf, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951.) and flipped over to page 23, fifth sentence, which read:

"I was yawning all over the place."

After the discussion with Jane, I've been thinking about possible expressive paper topics (although I don't have many to choose from right now).

-Informal and formal power (Book 7) ~ the power/role of women in The Odyssey
-Odysseus: A question of his own abilities -- help from gods, etc.
-Prophecies
-
...

Those are just several we discussed in class. I definitely need to go back and think of more possibilities. Any ideas for topics? I've heard a lot about the risk papers that 1B students had to write last quarter, and I'm thinking that I should try that out some time this quarter. I've never done papers like that before. Although I have strayed very far from the five-paragraph essay in terms of structure, I feel as if I haven't developed much in my writing in regards to ...creativity. In senior year English AP class we wrote poetry analysis papers, a response to a critic's paper, and papers with topics related to the books we've read. I learned that 5-6 pages sometimes won't do justice (as it did in previous high school English courses) when you're asked to fully analyze a certain aspect of a literary work. It could take more than five paragraphs, it could take 10-13 pages of in-depth writing. Which, many times, it did. Deep analysis, but not much room for creativity. And even though I had more writing experience as news editor with the school paper, The Prospector, I basically stayed within my own section and only occasionally wrote for the features and lifestyles section. Newswriting had strict boundaries. Whether its matching word count or not following the inverted-pyramid structure (structure of the article in which most important facts are listed in the beginning and less important in the end) there's nearly no room for any creative writing.

Anyway, after I decide my topic for the expressive paper, I'll try to come up with ideas to make it different from past essays. I have a feeling I will be thoroughly challenged this quarter in terms of writing-style. It's something I haven't encountered enough to be comfortable doing, but it's definitely an aspect of my writing I would like to improve on.

"Yawning all over the place,"
--aesun

And then slowly, as one day followed another, springtime replaced winter, and autumn summer, it dwindled away bit by bit, crumb by crumb. It went away and disappeared. It went inside, I mean, because you always retain something deep down, a sort of heaviness...

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert.
(Good book, by the way: 4.1/5.0 on my vague, undefined scale).