Mikey could hear the distant sounds of his mother's record player in the living room. The serene guitar melodies drifted down the hall and slipped into his bedroom door, which was slightly ajar. The music wrapped itself around his head, flowing in and out of his ears as he blew smoke out of his window, watching it drift a few feet into the air before being dispersed completely by the wind.
"See now, this - this is real music, Michael."
His mother had popped her head inside his door, wearing yellow rubber gloves and holding a bucket in one hand, her face slightly rosy and dewy with sweat. She always put on her old records when she was cleaning the house. Very seldom did she actually sing along, though Mikey knew for certain that she had every last word memorized.
"You know they make stereos now, ma? Machines you can actually just hook your iPod up to and play all the music you want?"
"It sounds better like this," his mother insisted, raising her free hand to wipe the perspiration from her forehead. "And much better than that rap, hip-hop garbage you and your friends like to blast in the car all damn day. You'd realize it if you weren't smoking on that pot all day long, you know."
"Yeah, yeah...." Mikey threw the last of the soggy roach out of his window and reached over to the desk next to his bed for his headphones.
These blog assignments were probably my favorite part of our entire class. They gave us a chance to really express our creativity by allowing us to choose any theme and narrative that we wanted. I have done blog projects for a few classes in the past, but none of them were as interactive as this. I also appreciate how we kept our blogs anonymous, because I feel like that gave us even more license to write about something meaningful. The fact that we had to incorporate someone else's blog post into our own was a bit challenging at first, but it also helped by giving us a theme to go off of for our own blog post. Interacting with our peers' blogs was also interesting because otherwise we probably wouldn't have taken our own time to check out what others in the class were writing for their posts.
ReplyDeleteI began my blog with two characters who reminded me of one of my favorite movies, "Kids." The urban environment of New York City always reminded me so much of downtown Orlando, and everything from the urban dialect to the clothing reminded me of some of the kids I grew up and went to school with. It's been in the back of my mind for awhile now to write a novel about my hometown, with the goal of shattering the "Disney" mentality that I believe the majority of the population has when they think about Orlando, Florida. So, with that narrative in mind, it was fun to play around with different characters in different situations throughout each blog post. It became challenging (but in a good way) when I was forced to incorporate the theme of another blog while still maintaining my own narrative.
I find it interesting that one could make the accusation that because we used themes from different blogs to form our own, our blogs were not entirely original. This reminds me of the issues we discussed after watching "Exit Through the Gift Shop," especially how Mr. Brainwash "borrowed" so many of his artistic ideas from other street artists as well as famous painters. The counterargument could be made, then, that nothing is truly original, and that every piece of work or text has borrowed some elements from previous works.
This blog project was a great way of meshing some creative writing into the course without feeling too serious or confined.