Writing Project #3

***I would like to first point out that I personally do not enjoy country music very well and had to cringe while uploading these videos to my blog. With that in mind, this project helped me to realize how big of a “hick” any small town kid is, whether they embrace it or not.

Growing up in a small town, my friends and I had to be very creative when coming up with activities to keep ourselves occupied. The following videos display some of the interesting objects we used to create entertainment so we wouldn’t loose our minds in a small town.



The Spill Canvas: All Over You: This Spill Canvas video focuses on a boy spending a lot of his time in a small town park. The park seems to be fairly tiny, only showing a few swings and a little set up containing a slide, monkey bars, and a few benches. This park is very similar to the park in my hometown that my friends and I would spend countless hours sitting in, trying to scheme up our mischief for the day. The park seems to have a fairly green tone to it, suggesting that the season is somewhere around spring or summer. The lack of children on the playground equipment is almost comically similar to my hometown park because they seemed to be more teens who used the park than children. Later in the video, the main characters are found in the back parking lot of a grocery store playing with a shopping cart. The cart is pretty average metal wire with a red handle for pushing, probably rusty and unwanted in the front of the store. The parking lot is pretty deserted with a large number of extra boxes laying outside. In the shopping cart is a girl with a bunch of colored balls around her. As the boy swings the girl around, she throws the balls at her friends. Taking the extra shopping carts from behind the grocery store was a specialty of my friends. The unwanted carts created hours of fun as we rammed into each other and ultimately destroyed the carts



Red Hot Chili Peppers: Can’t Stop: Throughout this video, The Red Hot Chili Peppers are shown playing around with a bunch of random objects. The objects such as plastic one gallon buckets are very ordinary and seem like an everyday object but when the musicians pick them up, they find different uses for them. For example, the simple, yellow, plastic one gallon buckets that anyone else would see for only practical use, automatically become the head, arms, and legs of a character similar to a robot. This same idea represents how many times I would use an object around the house to create a new game. During the breakdown of the song, the guitar player is doused in small, pink, foam packing peanuts. The peanuts fall slowly to the ground almost as if they are lighter than air. This light quality made them ideal for protecting items that are being shipped far distances in boxes. Although these peanuts are very common objects that are usually viewed as more of a nuisance than anything, they create an cool effect as they fall onto the floor. The excess amounts of peanuts that would come in any package that was sent to my house instantly were thrown onto the floor in an intense peanut battle. The same effect seen in the video could be found in my living room as the war waged on.




White Stripes: Icky Thump: Although the whole theme of this video tends to be a little creepy, there was one part that hit close to home. As the singer is shown traveling through different parts of Mexico, he stumbles upon a small carnival where the girl had led him to. In the carnaval, you can see a variety of animals wandering around, sparkalers shining all around him, and different stations set up to play games. The creepiest part about this carnival are the people who are lurking around it. The “carnies” have a very vicious aura around them that seems to make a person shiver. These people, who choose to have a profession traveling around small towns working with carnival rides seem to always be very unhappy with their lives and want to makes others just as unhappy. The whole carnival itself doesn’t look very clean and definitely doesn’t look very safe. But even after all of these negative factors, it also seems to be the place to be! A large group of people are seen around this creepy carnival and they all seem to be enjoying themselves a great deal. This demented carnival reminds me of my town’s once a year county fair. No matter how creepy the carnies were working the rides, it was still the place for all of the little children to go. Farm animals would run around and people saw no problem with it. Although your chances of getting murdered was much smaller than in this video, the creepy factor was still just as high.



Brad Paisley: Mud on the Tires: One of the main focuses for this video is the cars driving around. Many different versions of trucks and Broncos can be seen ripping up fields in flashes of this video. This is called the art of “mudding.” Throughout clips of the video, trucks can be seen flinging up mud many feet in the air as the truck spins wildly out of control. The higher the mud flies, the more successful the run was. This idea of mudding comes about after a large rain when the fields and country roads are pretty much impassable. So the boys with their supped-up trucks and broncos head out to the minimum maintence roads and tear them up. Getting stuck in the mud is only a plus because then you have the adventure of being creative enough to get yourself free from the mud’s sticky grasp. Many times, your truck was seen as a trophy as you drove back into town completely caked in mud and grass. Sometimes you wouldn’t even wash it off, just to let others know that you had a good time last night. Just like clockwork, every day after a big storm, I could expect my friends knocking on my front door with their truck in my driveway. We’d do as much damage to the roads as we could before shipping off to find some other mud to terrorize.




Kasabian: Shoot the Runner: Standing in front of an all black background, the members of Kasabian are seen in different color scheme outlines jamming on their instruments. Each color scheme changes as the music continues until the splashes of new color enter. As the video goes on, the members are constantly being splashed with different colors of paint. The colors of paint are very bright and range from pink, to blue, to green, and so on. As the song continues, the splashes of paint become more and more frequent. Towards the beginning of the video, the colors seem to just trickle on the musicians or maybe like someone was painting the color on them. Later in the video the color becomes much more vicious and violent, almost like someone is throwing it at them or it was splattering out of them. This simulated paint fight is similar to the paint fight that occurred between a bunch of my friends. What started off as a simple painting turned into a full blown, dodge for the sake of your clothes, paint fight. In the video, as the paint fight continues, the splatters become larger and larger until it looks like they too are having a full on war. Each key beat is accented with different styles and sizes of splattering.



The Black Keys: Strange Times: At the beginning of the video, the audience is taken into a laser tag arcade where a girl who doesn’t seem to really enjoy her job is explaining all of the rules and the safety precautions within the arena. She points out all of the exit places in case of emergency and lets the children know how to be safe inside the arena. As the game starts, the children are running around laughing and playing but the quickly changes when the two members of the Black Keys break into the arena and start using real lasers against the children. The children start screaming and running in many different ways trying to escape the actual laser’s blow. As the lasers shoot past the children they blast the walls and create rummage throughout the course. This whole concept of bringing actual lasers into a child’s play-place reminds me of how my friends would take laser tag way too seriously. It seemed as if they believed they were in real war. We even created our own version of laser tag that includes tinfoil and pointer lasers. To save myself from further embarrassment, I’ll refrain from further explanation.



Sum 41: Fat Lip: A main theme of this video seems to be rebelling against the norms of society. One of the major things that these kids are shown doing that fits under that stereotype is skateboarding. The kids who are skating go back and forth on the half-pipe doing tricks. The half-pipe, made of plywood, creates the perfect shape for the skateboarders to roll back and forth and do different tricks and jumps as they reach the top. The name of the half-pipe came from the distinct look of the shape of this object. It seems as if someone took a giant pipe made out of wood and cut it in half in order to create enough angle for the boarders to keep up their speed and also be able to travel over the same area again and again. A large part of my high school career was spent sitting on the top of the half-pipes watching all of my friends skate back and forth on the half-pipe trying to attempt the best tricks they could. The tricks weren’t really that impressive but it was a great way to pass the time and most definitely a social activity.

Final Evaluation

Writing might be one of the most fluid ideas of college. There is no set standard for what is right and what is wrong, unless you professor tells you there is. Over this semester, I feel that I have become a much more mature writer. I am able to create successful works without my instructor telling me exactly what to do and how to do it. I see myself as a very independent writer but I have been so restricted in all of my previous years of school that I am too accustomed to having exact guidelines that when I am set free I tend to just stand there and think to myself, “Well, where do I go now?”

Because of this, my writing has grown. I have been able to view objects is a much different way than I ever could before. I learned how to dig deeper into the ideas and come out with an interesting idea. Our first major essay, focused on an observation, helped teach me to look at others and not focus on myself as much in my writing. On my first draft, I included a large amount of what I did during the observation and how I reacted to everything I saw. As I revised the piece I was able to let the reader know exactly what I saw without making the main focus of the piece be on me.

I also have learned to appreciate my peer’s ideas on my writing a lot more. When I was in high school, I was considered one of the best writers in my class (pathetic class, I know) so I really didn’t pay much attention to what my classmates had to say about my writing because it was usually something to the extent of, “Wow! This is so good. Um…I don’t know. Don’t change anything.” That didn’t do me much good. But now, as I am starting to be surrounded by much more successful writers than my previous chums, I am realizing that the peer reviews are very beneficial and the other writers tend to have some very good input that helps expand my writing. In fact, the reviews that I recieved from my professor and my peers during the peer review really helped turn my second writing project, focusing on rhetorical analysis, into the masterpiece it became.

The definition of good writing is still is very vague. I think that any writing that the author gets across an idea while informing or entertaining the audience. As long as someone has learned something from the writing or finishes the piece and are glad that they spent the time to read it, I believe that that paper can be considered “good writing.”

Post #20 3rd O-O

Thinking back to my high school memories, I can always remember some pretty amazing times with my friends. But when I really start to think about it, a large majority of those memories happened while we were all sitting on my giant, amazing couch. This couch, originally purchased sometime in the seventies, back in the day when so one had style, triumphs me in age by a long shot. The shape of the couch is very original and I have never again seen the same style, although the big couch idea is coming back in style. The shape replicates one half of a stop sign, or an octagon and separates into four different sections that you can arrange in whatever way you desire. Originally, this couch was a light tan color with darker brown stripes traveling through the cushions and pillows. Each of the pillows is outlined in a long brown fray that just screams seventies style. Because of its interesting shape and mammoth size, my couch is easily able to hold eight or nine teenagers at a time with no problem.

Now that description helps you imagine what this couch looked like in its prime. Thirty years later, the couch hasn’t moved from my living room but has altered in appearance. The once light tan color of the couch has now slowly turned to a dark dingy brownish-gray from the dirt accumulating over the years. The fray on the pillows has slowly started to rip away and separate itself. Each side of the couch has many different sets of stitching from different children of the house trying to sow the pieces back together to stop our mother from threatening to just throw it out one day while we are at school. It’s true, this couch has seen better days, but it also has seen an amazing amount of memories as well.

My house was always the place for all of my friends to hang out and whenever we walked through my door, the first place we always headed for was the couch. We could sit on that couch for hours just talking and playing video games until we found something more productive to do. This couch was so famous around my school that my senior class came to my house and picked up the couch just so that we could put it on the senior float for the homecoming parade. Not too surprisingly, the couch held almost 20 kids that day. When another one of my friends came to my house and found that his beloved couch was missing, he created a tape out-line of the couch like a body was found dead there. For the rest of the day that the couch was on the float, that friend of mine was in denial and pretended that the tape outlines were just like the real couch.

There will never be another couch that can replace my couch in my heart. No matter how much my mother rants about how much she hates that couch, she’ll never be able to throw it away because she knows how important that couch was to each of my siblings childhood.

Post #18 2nd O-O Writing

No matter how far away you go, you’re always going to remember where you came from. That saying is no different to me. Even though I have spent many years away from my home and have traveled countless miles around the world and miles away from David City, there is always one object that can sweep my back to my bedroom in that rural Nebraska town with just one smell. That object is my big, pink blanket.

Now, I know that many children grow attached to blankets at small ages and it is customary that they need to become detached from that blanket by the time they enter middle school. I had that blanket and we separated paths in my childhood but it was not the same as my big, pink blanket. My big, pink blanket was more of a comforter than just a throw towel. It’s a very faded and dulled pink color that used to match the sheets of my childhood bed. The edges of the blanket are trimmed in a simple white lace that has threads dangling off of it is many different directions and little holes cut through it in patterns of four to look almost like flowers. If you were to look over it very carefully, you’d find a large darker stain on the corner of one of the blanket’s sides, this came from a spilled pop on a long vacation drive with not very many napkins to wipe it up.

Another very interesting fact about my big, pink blanket is that she has a twin. My older sister who left the house many years before me had kidnapped her blanket from my parents house as well. When we were younger and shared a room, we each had our own twin size bed with our twin sized blanket. After we abandoned the beds, we never could tear ourselves away from our precious blankets. One year, on our way to a family vacation skiing, my sister and I both brought our big, pink blankets to sleep with in the car. At one rest stop, we both threw our blankets onto the car’s floor and ran inside. When we came back, we got into a huge fight over who’s blanket was who’s and which one smelled like ours. Surprisingly, we each believed our big, pink blanket carried a very distinct smell that we wanted back. After that feud was settled we decided that we needed a way to be able to tell our blankets apart. Ever since that day, my big, pink blanket has gained the addition of a very small permanent marker dot on one of her corners.

Every night when I cuddle up to my blanket, I’m always reminded of my sister and her blanket, and the days we used to spend together in our little room. It’s almost like we each have one side of the locket that keeps us connected back to our roots.

Post #17 1st O-O Writing

As long as I can remember, I’ve always grown attached to certain objects. I give many odd materials special meaning and then they seem to almost become a part of me. The most important of these would probably be the piece of jewelry that many have coined as my “hoodie string.” Now, to say that this is object is a piece of jewelry is probably a far stretch because it looks the same as a shoe string, but to me it means so much more. The black lace entered my life about two years ago, when I started dating my present boyfriend. We were on a walk together on a brisk night and he started picking on me, playing around and tickling me. In my defense, I grabbed whatever I could to get him to stop and accidentally pulled the string out of the hood of his favorite hoodie all the way out. I froze and stood down at my hand, knowing how much he loved that sweatshirt and when I looked up at him he was smiling. “Way to go! You ruined it,” he said tauntingly. I smiled back and said, “It’s not ruined. It’s now a…bracelet!” From that day on, I’ve worn that string on my wrist like a religion. Now, two years later, it’s worn down, shorter from pieces breaking off, and dabbed with random dots of paint. It seems to be just another part of me until someone gives me a really weird look as they watch me tie it on my wrist. I had to learn an odd way to tie it on because there is no way that I’m going to ask for help to tie on this string everyday for two years. The knots tied onto the end are to help the string to prevent from fraying even further and to help it from untying as well. There was a chunk of time in those two years where I thought that I had lost my hoodie string for good. I was heartbroken and felt like I had almost let myself down. It’s always amazed me how attached I can get to something that seems so insignificant to others.