Conversation Partner – Meeting Two (10/30/12)

My second meeting with Alya was the Thursday after our initial encounter. We decided to meet in the same place but a little later in the day, to make sure our meeting did not conflict with either of our schedules. Towards the end of our first meeting, Alya asked why I was required to meet with an English Second Language, ESL, student, such as herself. I responded that I wasn’t too sure honestly, except that eventually I was going to ask her about Saudi Arabian humor. Besides that aspect, our meetings were mostly a chance for me to help her with her English and to grow as an individual. I told her she didn’t need to worry about preparing anything about her country’s humor; we could talk about it further down the road. However, my words fell on deaf ears. For our second rendezvous, Alya brought her iPad, and we spent the next twenty to thirty minutes laughing and talking about the videos, which she believed represented parts of Saudi Arabian culture and humor well,

            One of the videos she showed me was a YouTube video titled Saudis in Audis. Apparently, the comedian who produced the video makes many videos that are popular with people from the Middle East. Here’s the clip: 

At first, I laughed or chuckled only to make sure the situation wasn’t awkward. I saw the video was almost three minutes long, and I was not about to sit there quietly for that long as the video played. However, as the video progressed, Alya began to laugh quietly to herself. You know what they say… laughter is contagious. I found myself cracking up multiple times. After the video ended, Alya told me that the video perfectly represented a lot of rich Saudi Arabians. They are cocky, wealthy, have mustaches and are obsessed with their cars, which actually happens to be an Audi a lot of the time she said. Alya laughed pretty much continually from 1:24 until the end. She laughed at the “longer than it takes me to do the whites” joke especially. I laughed at this as well because her laughing made me think my stereotype of them always wearing white robes was correct; interestingly, she said it was. She also laughed hard when they said “Spahrite!” (Sprite hahaha) and were dancing. I have an interesting picture of this demographic of people in my head now since she told me the video was so accurate.

            Unfortunately, I had another engagement and had to leave before I wanted to, but we agreed to meet in two days, on Thursday, and pick up where we left off. This meeting was still a little bit awkward, but I’ve felt myself relax a little bit around Alya. I think she has let her guard down a little bit more around me as well. We still have a lot of meetings to have though, so hopefully we get better associated with one another each time.

Hokum 19-36 (10/23/12)

For me, Hokum missed the mark. Key phrase: for me. We were assigned three different short stories from Hokum, an anthology on African-American humor. Of those three stories, two pulled some grins out of me; one didn’t affect me whatsoever. Perhaps, and this is just a shot in the dark but, perhaps, I didn’t find this anthology funny so far because I cannot relate to any of the content hardly. The three stories were written in 1923, 1926, and 1944 respectively, and the setting and contents of each story are from a time when African-Americans and white Americans were still segregated. I found the blatant racism, which was seemingly presented nonchalantly, unfortunate and offensive. Perhaps that is the point though. These authors are making light of a marred and unfortunate history of their ancestors, namely, slavery and segregation.

Specifically, W.E.B. Dubois’ short story, On Being Crazy, was not as funny to me as interesting as an analytical presentation of society and it’s “craziness”. The term “social equality” is thrown around and wrongly used as an African American man encounters racism every way he turns. I simply did not find this funny. The next short story, ‘Possum or Pig, by Zora Neale Hurston, was my least favorite of the three, which is saying quite a bit. I think the point of the story is that John, the slave, outwits his master by claiming he is cooking a possum instead of a pig. Right when it seems he is caught for actually cooking a pig, John denies responsibility if what he pulls out of the put is a pig because he claims to have put a possum into the pot. We don’t get to see the rest of the encounter, but Zora Neale Hurston often writes stories where John, a slave, outwits his master and even wins his freedom, so I believe this story follows suit. I think I understand the humor of this story more than the other. Hurston is mocking an authority figure and uplifting the cunning trickster. I can appreciate this form of comedy but did not find this particular example to be funny.

The last, longest story in the assigned reading is Let Me at the Enemy- an’ George Brown by Chester Himes. Although this story was the longest and had the most undecipherable slang in it, I enjoyed it the most. It’s an interesting story and really came full circle at the end when the main character, High C, gets drafted in the army anyway, and George Brown gets drafted shortly after him. Even with this story, I felt I enjoyed it more as a story than any sort of comedy. I couldn’t help but think… if this is an anthology of African-American humor where do Dave Chappelle and Martin Lawrence fit in?

Conversation Partner – Meeting One (10/18/12)

            Well, it finally happened. After months of hit and miss scheduling and last second cancellations by each party, Alya and I finally met. Alya Almoosa is a 27-year student from Saudi Arabia. She is married and has two children with her husband, who is also with her in the United States. Their daughter is two, and their son is four. We decided to meet at the coffee shop in the first story of the BLUU. I arrived at 2:00 for our 2:30 meeting. As I should have expected from our history so far as conversation partners, we finally met at 3:00 and decided to move to a table in 1873 Café and Sports Grill, where it was less crowded and noisy. After a few minutes of awkward conversation starters, Alya and I began to become more comfortable around each other. She is shy at first, but she became increasingly more amiable as the conversation progressed. She informed me that both her and her husband are in the same ESL classes, English as a Second Language, and that she plans to get her masters in information systems as soon as she passes the TOEFL, a test that measures one’s ability to use and understand English. Her husband plans on getting his MBA.

            They are both currently level four, out of five, in their ESL classes, meaning they are almost complete. It is hard to recall now how our conversation flowed, but it was certainly sporadic. I learned she was one of eight children, she wanted more children, she did not like Oklahoma when she visited her friend, and Texas was not as bad as she expected. When I asked her if she thought we rode horses to school, she replied no. She assumed we did not just like she did not ride a camel to school when she was in Saudi Arabia. Apparently, Texans are not the only group of people who are bombarded with asinine questions, especially as kids. I found Alya informative and very friendly, and I am looking forward to our conversations in the future. I told her I will eventually ask her about Saudi Arabian humor in order to give her time to think a little about it. I do not think I’ll be disappointed. One meeting down, seven to go!

Cat’s Cradle Pt. 1 (10/17/12)

            So far, Cat’s Cradle is an incredible read. My first impression of the novel was that it made no sense and Kurt Vonnegut was insane. How wrong I was… This book is filled with themes, motifs, parallels and general wisdom. One passage that didn’t particularly strike me as noteworthy at first was the scene in Newt’s letter to John when Frank is making bugs fight in his Mason jar. Vonnegut uses this scene to explain and show Bokononism in the works. In Bokononism, people are arranged into teams called karasses, which unknowingly carry out God’s will. John often elaborates on his karasse, and I am excited to see what it is they are unknowingly carrying out. However, in this particular scene Frank represents God. He is spooning bugs into the Mason jar and then shaking the jar to make them fight. This represents God organizing people into teams, or karasses, and then inserting the stimuli into the situation that makes them carry out his will. Perhaps, Frank’s will is more twisted and morbid than God’s, but perhaps, Vonnegut is hinting at a conclusion that it is not. Newt runs out into the garden after his father scares him, stimulus, and observes Frank’s game. At this point, Vonnegut takes the reader to a broader level. Now the children are in the place of the bugs, and just as frank introduced the appropriate stimulus to make the bugs do his will, God implements stimulus into the situation. In the end, Angela slaps Newt, and Frank punches Angela. Maybe I am overanalyzing this short passage, but given the quality of Cat’s Cradle to this point, I have my doubts.

            Another interesting thematic development I noted was the correlation between ice-nine and the atom bomb and mud and people. I didn’t understand this one until class when Mr. Williams brought mud’s literary meaning as a motif to my attention. I’m going out on a limb here, but I think mud represents people. Water represents life. People are made mostly of water. Mud is just a vesicle for water. Human bodies are only a vesicle for life. In a sense, dirt and a dead body are no different technically. They are both just matter. However, if you add life to a body it becomes a human. If you add water to dirt, it becomes mud. Mud symbolizes the human race. Dr. Hoenikker, creates both the atom bomb and ice-nine. The atom bomb destroys life, and ice-nine will eventually destroy water forever as it spread across the globe and changed all water into a solid. I don’t know the full importance of these correlations yet, but it was fun to think about them! Perhaps, the most important correlation Vonnegut is drawing is that the government controlling atom bombs is no different than the Hoenikker children having the ice-nine in their possession. Both the government in the children have fate of humanity in their hands. They can either withhold the force or utilize it and destroy all life. I think Vonnegut it implying that neither party is qualified to possess such power. This book seemed strange at first, but now that I know what to look out for, I am excited to keep on reading!