I haven't done a good job of posting this past week. Although I find myself occasionally encountering topics where I think to myself, Oh I should write about that once I get home today, I never really found the motivation to put blogging over my other activities (whatever they may be at the time) and other times I haven't found the time to sit down and just write. (Poor excuse, I know. But I've had several midterms this past week : / ) Well, now I'm behind on a few of the subjects I wanted to post about. (Actually, some are long overdue.)

But for now, I'll leave a brief update:

I posted up my second expressive paper. This time around, I had a more difficult time thinking about what to write about. There were a lot of interesting subjects that I came across in both A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers) and Maus I (Spiegelman) but I couldn't find a way to incorporate them all together in a clear essay. So, I chose Maus I and developed an essay based on the perspective I got from the book. In comparison to my last essay, this expressive paper actually expresses my own personal views more than it does in regurgitating quotes and the storyline. My past essay, I thought, was well-supported but lacked a degree of personalization. It wasn't my expressive paper. This time around, I'm afraid I don't have as many quotations from Maus to support my views, although I do have a lot of details in replace of concrete quotes. Because my thesis revolved more around the whole structure of Maus, most of the writing in this second essay is more of my voice than it is of Spiegelman.

On another note, I ended up watching "Troy" at the 8:10pm showing last Friday at the Great Mall Century Theatres with my sister. (I wouldn't have had time to watch it at all during the weekend, so I took up the opportunity and I was pretty satisfied.) I read Mr. Lovas' and Qin's response to the movie and mine is similar. I liked Mr. Lovas' term "HoHo" for "Hollywood Homer." : ) It was interesting to sit in the theatre and have English 1C discussions of bird omens and prophecies start up again the back of my mind when a character mentioned the eagle flying over the skies with a serpent in his mouth. I'm not very sure about Greek mythology (aside from what we read in The Odyssey about Troy) but too bad Priam didn't listen to both of his sons. (1)He should have listened to his eldest son, Hector, and shouldn' t have ordered the soldiers of Troy to offensively attack the Greeks (the morning that Achilles was going to depart) because Patroclus wouldn't have been killed -- which in turn, wouldn't have sparked the duel between Achilles and Hector. (2)Even if we let the first one (1) pass, Priam should have listened to Paris and burnt the wooden horse. Tsk. Tsk. Well, what can I do with Greek mythology that has been told for years on end? At least it provided a good 2 and a half hours of violent, bloody war scenes with hints of love-making. Actually, I was pretty sad that Achilles died right after he found someone he fell in love with. Poor guy. Almost shed a tear. Ah, the work of Hollywood. All in all, I enjoyed the movie --whether it was just Brad Pitt or if it was the special effects-- I don't know. But it did put a nice ending to my Friday night before my weekend of midterm studying. (I'm glad you guys enjoyed it too.)