Syd the Sloth

This essay was compelling and easy to read because it had several themes that I thought intertwined nicely. Coming of age, would be the first and probably most obvious one because it was all about how she thought of breasts as a symbol of not only womanhood but also adulthood. I felt like she told a story about how becoming an adult is different from becoming a woman, and she had several markers of womanhood such as menstruating, marriage, intercourse, and of course, her breasts. When those milestones didn't come about as she wanted them to or expected, her whole journey of maturation of womanhood was thrown off, but not necessarily maturation as an adult. All of this maturation and growing up was juxtaposed by a immature seeming competitiveness with her best friend as a kid, but also with her supposed mother in law and people in her life as a grown woman. Her struggle with her personal perception of her body was representative of the struggle many women have against the patriarchy

This essay was quite literally short and sweet. I thought it accurately cultivated a lovely feeling of innocence that probably sat nicely with other girls who are freshly out of high school like myself.  However, because of my current place in life- a college freshman- I am not yet ready to feel nostalgic or sentimental about those high-school experiences, romantic or otherwise. All of those memories of adolescence I feel are too recent to reminisce positively upon, but perhaps in the future I would like this essay more, when more time had passed. I enjoyed the parts where she grounded the essay with points of negativity. Not that I want people to be writing negative essays reflecting on the upsets of youth, but I felt like the bits where she incorporated honest unfortunate reality made this a more believable work than if she had not included them. Along with the romantic and sexual innocence that this story obviously portrayed, I thought it folded in a great deal of social innocence o

I loved this personal essay. I thought it was a well-told story that wove the child's, Ray Carver Junior's, personal experience together with his father's in a concise and almost unbiased manner. Throughout the text I was thinking that it read almost like an article. As a journalism major I know that one needs to write for newspapers and such based in fact and reports, not subjectively, and this resembled very factual work with short sentences and vivid descriptions. Carver wrote this in a way that made me feel like I was a child when he was child, and I was growing up as he was growing up, etc. His narrative grew less and less clueless as he aged and it resulted in a very accurate representation of getting older as I remember it. I liked the story as a depiction of American life in a difficult socioeconomic situation as well, and think it spoke a truth that would resonate emotionally with many people. It reminded of the non-fiction novel "Evicted" by Matthew Desm