I believe I experienced the ultimate coincidence (or not...because there are no accidents) today. I was reading the "Scorn Not The Sonnet" in Ex Libris and after the poem "Interview with a Soldier" Anne Fadiman mentions Miss Farrar's ninth grade english class at the Marlborough School for Girls. Well...my mom went to the Marlborough School for Girls, so I called her up and asked her if she knew Miss Farrar. She said she did and that she was the toughest english teacher ever! Then I asked her if she knew Anne Fadiman and my mom said that Anne was a year older than her and the most studious person she knew! I couldn't believe it! Then my mom said she'd been wanting to read that book that Anne Fadiman had written but she hadn't gotten around to buying it and low and behold it was sitting in my lap! To end the whole coincidence my mom said to me, "What are the chances of that happening?" and I replied, one in three. 

In class we talked about frame stories and how Arabian Nights is one of the greatest frame story. A frame story by definition (according to Wiki) is a narrative technique whereby a main story is composed, at least in part, for the purpose of organizing a set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story. I find that frame stories work because they draw you in and then stop making you want more and then start again, just like Shahrazad does each daybreak. Now that I think about it there are many novels that are frame stories, The Princess Bride by William Goldman and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley just to name a couple. 

We also discussed that while reading we need to be shifting the point of the story to the experience of the story. I whole heartily agree with this. There's no one point that a story makes, there's probably thousands that start on page one and end on the last page. While you're traveling with a character you experience their faults and their troubles but also you see them learn and change. It's not just the moral of what their doings it's how they live their life (however brief it is in some novels) and as mentioned in class our lives are stories and for some reason I think that there are no specific morals to our lives, just the experience of living. 

We were asked in class to recall our earliest memory of pain. I thought about this for a while and came upon something that I'm not sure if it's pain, but it defiantly hurt. I was in kindergarten, so age five or six, and my parents were in Mexico. My grandma was wait at home for me to hop off the bus and spend the afternoon with her. Well I got on the bus at school and told the bus driver that instead of going to day care like I normally did on that day of the week, I was to go home. She didn't believe me! So we got to the place where I was supposed to change buses to go to day care, but I wouldn't budge, so the bus driver took me off and put me on the other bus. There I told that bus driver that I wasn't suppose to be on today. But it was too late, I was headed to day care. Once we arrived I started sobbing. I sat in the coat room and just cried. I thought that my grandma would forget about me and that I would have to stay at day care, and I was so mad and hurt that the bus drivers didn't listen to me, I mean come on I was a big girl not a baby! Anyways, one of the teachers then came and told me that my grandma called and she was on her way to come and pick me up. I couldn't have been more relieved (if you can be relived at five or six) so I stood in front of the door until she got there. 

p.s. My vocab is at the bottom of my page! :-)