Saturday, January 30, 2010

"Fat" Class Entry

This week was so long and not the greatest AP Lang week either. Why do you give us comprehension quizzes? Ugh, I think my mother almost had a heart attack when she looked on parent connect only to see that I have a 63 in AP Lang, I mean it’s no big deal. Not. I’m hoping that I got a really good grade on that quiz that we re-took …if not, I’m screwed. Anyways, despite the horrible quizzes, I did enjoy the readings that we were assigned this week. I thought that the Carver stories and “The Yellow Wallpaper” were both very interesting yet entirely different.

The Carver Stories were pretty interesting but I enjoyed them mostly because they were short and easy to read. “Fat” was a little disturbing because of the very detailed descriptions of the man’s “long, think, creamy fingers” and how he was the fattest man the waitress had ever seen. The story made me feel really bad for the fat man. Like, I really wish that they had had at least made a name for him instead of just labeling him as the extremely fat man. That is so degrading and I really felt as if the waitress was just being polite to the man because she felt bad for him. Her kindness towards him seemed really fake to me because the way she describes him to her friend Rita was in a tone of disgust and horror. But I almost feel bi-polar to this story because at the same time, I definitely understand the waitress’s feeling towards the fat man. I’m not going to lie, it would definitely be hard for me to watch a single man eat 5 baskets of bread and butter and not feel a little bit disgusted and uncomfortable. This story definitely appealed to the audience’s sense of smell, taste, sight, and sound. For me though, the appeal to sound was the most disturbing. The way the author described how the fat man made puffing sounds every so often…umm EW? That really just pushed me over the edge and made me very squeamish for some reason. Even though I was not physically hearing the puffing sounds and the man was obviously a fictional character—I think?—I still was a little creeped out by the whole thing. Is it bad that I feel awkward around fat people? Like, for some reason I feel the need to be particularly nice to them, but if I was that fat I would get so fed up with people just being nice to me because they feel sorry for me. I really hate it when people feel sorry for me. It actually makes me feel even worse when people are overly nice to me when I’m having a bad day. Like, I don’t want your hugs or your sympathy, just leave me alone! That must be the feelings that the fat man has toward the waitress. I mean after all the man is just like any other customer that could walk into her restaurant, why should she be overly nice to him? He isn’t the president of the United States, He’s just fat.

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