At first, my days felt
robotic. Every motion the same as
the one at the exact same moment as yesterday. Each day leaving me as deserted as the last. Even when a bowl of tea, steaming with leaves swimming, dropped
and cracked against the kitchen tile it didn’t even feel authentic. But today...something felt unique.
There is a man that sits on the
crooked corner two blocks from my apartment, I’ve walked past him for a
fortnight, his eyes peering at peculiar trash, while I tap my worn sneakers
against the sidewalk, counting tips frenetically or staring into the
night. Two nights ago for the
first time, I saw him wearing a green tie instead of his usual dark
violet. I wondered where he got
it. I wondered what means it took
him to get it. I admired him as I
looked downward maybe even inward at myself and it suddenly felt different. The doorknob turned cleaner, my bed
warmer, the sun against the black road shined brighter into my eyes, burning
exquisitely as I walked down the street. 
The road feels good and rough; my
strides are strong as I walk home.
There is something about these streets that has gotten into me. Deep in my veins there is something
flowing now, flowing for the addictive energy I’ve found ever since the green
tie. I miss the places I’ve been
and the feelings I’ve felt, but I’m getting used to this feeling. The one I felt when I opened the door
panting, late due to a subway accident on fifth, tributaries flowing from my
watering hole temples, to find a pitcher of the most refreshing Chinese Ginseng
tea I’ve ever tasted laying on the table cloth one of the kid bus boys must
have done for me when he saw I wasn’t there. The same feeling that came when Vincenchi and the four other
people I walked on eggshells with for two months cooked beef stew with all the
food we could scrap together. It
was so good and someone made a joke almost everyone understood.
I
wake to the papaya light peaking through my bedroom and it no longer feels musty
but refreshing. I see tunnels in
my mind, with lights at every end.
I really enjoyed this semester’s blog experience. I definitely enjoy creative writing more than analytical and research writing and I liked how much freedom we had with the blogs even though we had specific requirements we had to fulfill. I am happy with my project because my original goal with the blog was to try to tie the entire thing together and bring the story full circle and it really did work out that day. The final blog entry that I had to last interact with of Desert Living, focused on the streets and their final line was “look differently, think differently,” which fit perfectly with my blog because my last entry was about my character feeling depressed. I enjoyed finding pictures to put in my blog and the photos I saw in others’ blogs also inspired me. The pictures really did give you such a better idea of where the author was coming from because some entries were pretty ambiguous and one of the entire ideas of the blogs was to remain anonymous. I found myself how wondering how vague to keep some of my entries in order to be able to relate them to the other ones I knew I would eventually have to incorporate. It was interesting to attempt having to mentally configure my story so that it could take any turn, not matter how radically different the concept may be. The fact that the entire class incorporated at least three other persons blog into theirs and that the class went full circle with our own blogs makes me appreciate intertextuality, the overall look, and how networking of blogs can really help to increase your blogs views and the amount of readers. I am definitely going to start hyperlinking and incorporated other blog’s pictures and articles into my own in hope that other blogs will do the same for me and that our blogs can all prosper because of our linkage. With the rise of technology and the near limitless options we have to incorporate links, photos, videos, and other medias undoubtedly makes our writing more interesting and more informational. It is imperative to incorporate different medias to have a successful blog and this project expressed that. In Roland Barthes’ essay Image, Music, Text, on page 156 begins the explanation of what a text is. His fourth characteristic, the text is plural, to me, really related and embodied what this networking blog project was about. He says the text is ‘a woven fabric, a tissue,” (159) which is how our blogs were, woven together by links, similar pictures, and story lines. He continues with “the text is not a co-existence of meanings by a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers no to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion” (159). I think what he says here is exactly what our blogs were, answers to an explosion made of text, stories, and media all intertwined by something that can only be seen through the use of intertextuality.
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