You're Ugly, Too

This story put me in many moods at different parts.  The main character Zoe is sarcastic and has a very potent dry sense of humor that offers a lot of comedic relief throughout the story.  Some of my favorite lines of humor from Zoe are right at the beginning of the story.  She is very honest about herself and her life situation within her own mind, but offers humor to offset the questions and worries of others.  For example, when she is telling her sister that she is too young to get married and her sister counters that Zoe just says this because she is five years older and is not yet married, Zoe replies, "Oh! I forgot to get married!" Her sarcasm is very evident to all of those she speaks too. Her students are another example.  However, they see Zoe in a very different light than she sees herself, made evident by the student evaluations often inserted into the story.  The parts when the story gets serious are primarily when Zoe's humor isn't quite understood by other characters or when she masks other feelings with her sarcasm. For example, Zoe pushes her boyfriend and he slips, scaring him, as they are high up on the roof of a building.  She claims, "I was just kidding!", but the reader knows that Zoe was driven by the anger and rejection she feels when he claims that she is "nothing like her sister." Zoe knows she is not the type of woman that every man dreams of. She has been rejected before and harbors hurt still from that lost relationship.  I think the reason that Zoe is still "alone" and puts up such a rough and offsetting front is to try to avoid any further rejection.

February

This poem seems to be about a person who is very bitter about a lost love. He is very depressed throughout the poem and discusses common steep types of what people do after bad breakup ups, like eating a lot and just laying around all day, feeling bad for oneself, "winter. Time to eat day and watch hockey." The speaker is very bitter about love in general. "But it's love that does us in. Over and over." It's hard to be open to love when, as has apparently happened to this person, it causes you so much pain. I'm not sure the significance of the cat in the poem. I think the speaker does go through a transportation from depression to optimism throughout the poem though, partly helped along by the cat. In the end the speaker says, "Let it be spring". This stands for the end of winter, the period of depression that he has beed experiencing.

Popular Mechanics

This story is messed up and very sad. This is another story of a tragic marriage in this unit. Unfortunately, this marriage ends up really affecting someone else, in this case, a helpless baby. Again, I wonder what could possibly have happened to this couple that they can hardly stand to speak to one another. Why is the husband leaving and how can his wife claim to be happy at this fact? It's touching that they both want to keep their child, but they are also using the baby to get to one another. It's just another thing that they are fighting over. Especially in the end when they are literally physically fighting over a helpless baby. "And in this manner, the issue was decided." I wonder what actually happened, but it seems that the argument was simply never solved.

The Story of an Hour

This story almost made me laugh because it was so bizarre. A woman believes her husband has died and is distraught. Then, she realizes that she is in fact, not distraught, "She breathed a quick prayer that life would be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long." It's really tragic that this woman is extatic at the thought that her husband has died. She feels "free" now to live her own life and live it for herself, but I wonder why she would have ever even married him in the first place. I wonder what could make that marriage so aweful that the death if her husband is he only thing that could make it better. Furthermore, when she realizes that her husband survived the train crash, she is so shocked that she dies "of joy that kills". That's how the story ends. So is she joyful or sad that he survived? I'm not sure.

Delight in Disorder

I'm unsure as to whether I've interpreted this poem correctly, but because this unit is centered around love, I think Robert Herrick's Delight in Disorder is an extended metaphor for a key aspect if love, loving someone's "disorder". If a person truly loves someone, it is said that they love their faults as well as their successes. This can be paralleled to wedding vows, "in sickness and in health". The poem states, "A careless shoestring, in whose tie I see a wild civility; do more bewitch me than when art is too precise in every part." I think those words are beautiful. No person is perfect, so you can't love someone for their perfections, and anyone can admire another's successes. Loveing a person's mistakes and failures is true love. Loving someone despite their downfalls is true love. This is the theme of the poem.

Lonely Hearts

Wendy Cope's Lonely Hearts is very tragic. To me, it is talking about those people searching for love, who feel lonely because they don't have someone they love in their life. The refrains of "Do you live in North London? Is it you?" and "Can someone make my simple wish come true?" show desperation that loneliness brings. The simple wish is to not be alone anymore. Everyone longs for companionship, and most of all, love. The desperation is further shown through the address given at the end of the poem, requesting a letter and photo. The irony of the poem is that the person is requesting a "simple wish" when in reality, love is hard and complicated. Everyone feels the loneliness and complications, an shown by the multiple descriptions of people from all walks of life.

How I Met My Husband

The twist at the end of this story was very unexpectedly romantic, and greatly contributed to my liking of Alice Munro's How I Met My Husband. It's funny that the vast majority of the story and the entire plot involving the pilot had nothing to do with the story's focal idea. A lot of the events that unwound around the pilot's presence seemed odd, but no think that's because of the culture and time period during which this story takes place. Though she was very mean to Edie, whom I like a lot, the pilot's fiancée had every right to be angry. She chases the man all around after waiting through such a long engagement, to find him "being intimate" with another girl. The pilot is obviously not a man I good character or is channelling his emotional harm from the war into harm on other people. "It never crossed my mind for a long time a letter might not come." A naive Edie fell in love with the idea of the man and was heart broken when his promise of a letter was never fulfilled. The pilot broke her heart as well. However, I womd say that Edie got very lucky because as a result of her hope for that letter, she found someone who truly loves her.

Eveline

The ending of this story confused me. Did she go with Frank or did she stay behind? I'm fairly sure she remained behind, because I think James Joyce foreshadowed her lack of commitment to him earlier in Eveline. She mentions how "Frank would give her a life, perhaps love, too." She did not love Frank; she only hoped to love him. She was using him to gain a new life and to "escape" from her current situation. I don't think the want for a new life was strong enough to overcome the love she felt for her family and the responsibility she also felt for them. Eveline recognized her struggles and the lack of joy which her life brang her, but she also recalled the promise she made to her mother to take care of her family. Eveline recognizes the needs of her family before her own.