I knew her when she was just Gaga

It was 11:30am on February 24, 2011, and I was eating lunch at the Tilly. While eating, there were these ladies, behind me, talking about weird dreams they have had in the past. One person dreamt that Lady Gaga was a close friend and once Gaga became famous, she started acting different and they had a fallout. This person kept screaming to her companions about how mad she was at Lady Gaga and kept reiterating how mad she was and how much she hated her throughout the rest of their conversation.

Possible context to the conversation:

Lady Gaga is a mean person, just ask Anna. Anna has lived in California for most of her life and because of where she has lived in California, she became really close friends with many famous celebrities including Justin Timberlake and Rihanna. She also had friends who later became famous, one of whom was Lady Gaga. Anna and Gaga had a special relationship. They did everything together; they shopped, had lunch or dinner together almost everyday, they were inseparable. Once Lady Gaga was famous, she started acting different. She became, what is known as, a diva. Gaga was very demanding to not only her assistants and manager, but also to those close to her, including Anna. Anna was upset. She was losing her best friend and was, in return, getting a high-maintenance star. 

Hoping for the best and for her friend back, Anna stuck by Gaga and did whatever was asked of her. But after a while, she felt that Gaga was taking advantage of her and treated her as another helper and not a friend. She was being treated like dirt and Anna couldn’t take it anymore. Anna was mad. She hated how Gaga, her once best friend, now treated her poorly and called her nasty names just because she became famous. Anna decided to cut ties with Lady Gaga and retreated to Alaska where she could get away for a while. To this day, Anna is sad that she lost her best friend but does not regret the unbearable person she left behind.

The conversation made sense to me because I knew what the ladies were talking about. I knew it was a dream and that everything the person had said was not real. It is very important to know the context of what this person is saying. Without the context, someone might conclude that “Anna” really did know Lady Gaga. They might also assume fictitious notions of Lady Gaga. For example, she treats people poorly and that she is a rude person. We should be concerned with context because without it, we do not know what people are talking about. What we think might be the farthest idea from what they were actually saying. It also gives us fake illusions of things. In this case, it might be the false portrayal of Lady Gaga.

Salvation

In Salvation, Hughes talks about his experience of being “saved” in church.

When Hughes’s aunt told him he would see a light and feel something inside him once he was saved, Hughes believed exactly what she said, word for word. I can understand why. As a kid, I believed everything and took things literally. When people said they were going to explode, I thought that they were going to blow up right in front of me. When they told me a watermelon would grow in my stomach if I ingested a seed, I believed them. As a kid, it was easy to believe things when you don’t know any better. Now, looking back, I laugh at all the things I use to believe, but I can see how I could have believed in those things.

I felt bad for Hughes when he was the last one the bench and everyone was around him screaming and crying, trying to get him saved. That’s a lot of pressure and I could feel how hard Langston was trying to be saved and how anxious I was for him. I do not like being under a lot of pressure nor do I like the feeling of letting people down, so I could somehow relate to how Hughes was feeling, especially when he was the last person.

If I were put into this position, I would have probably done the same thing as Hughes and would have pretended that I was saved to make everyone else happy and to release myself from the pressure and anxiety put upon me. I would have probably lied so I wouldn’t have to feel the uneasy feeling Hughes had gone through. Hughes wasn’t saved the way everyone thought he was. Hughes was saved from the pressure and the feelings he was feeling while sitting alone on the bench.

If I was on the bench and hadn’t seen or felt what I was supposed to be feeling, while thinking that everyone at the altar had, I would have felt betrayed and insecure. I would probably be asking myself why I wasn’t able to see or feel anything. It would feel unfair that all the other people were saved and not me. Why wasn’t I good enough?

The ending was surprising. I knew Hughes wasn’t going to see Jesus and I had predicted that he was going to say he was saved when he really wasn’t. But I did not predict the end. It was sad to read how he cried that night because he wasn’t saved and that he didn’t believe in Jesus anymore. I understand why he didn’t believe, but it was still surprising, yet not, that he no longer believes.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

Me Talk Pretty One Day is about Sedaris’s experience with his French teacher while he attended a school in Paris. He had a very rude teacher who hated her students and who  said mean things about them.

While reading this story, I kept thinking of how mean the teacher was and how I hated her. I didn’t like how she treated her students nor how she spoke ill of them. I don’t like the demeaning things she said about her students that lowered their self-esteem to the point where they “cry alone at night.”

I wouldn’t be able to go through what Sedaris had gone through. If a teacher was constantly humiliating me and saying that she hated me, I would feel less inclined to do work or stay in that class. I would try everything I could to get out of the class. If someone kept telling me that I sucked at French and there was no one to believe that I could excel in it, I would probably believe the teacher. I probably would not have the confidence to speak and eventually give up on the language. As I would have easily given up, Sedaris sticks with it. He stays and puts up with all the belittling comments. He is determined to get learn French and his determination pays off because in the end, he was able to understand every word the teacher was saying.

When everything the teacher said started making sense to Sedaris, it reminded me of the saying “tough love”. The teacher was putting up a mean front to help the students understand the language better. There was a part of me hoping that that this was the case and that in the end, she would turn out to be an awesome, kind teacher and I would start to like her. After reading the whole story, I came to the conclusion that she really was this wicked person who hated her students. Nonetheless, it could still be considered tough love since Sedaris got something out of it.

I like the way Sedaris wrote this piece. While I was reading this, I felt what he was feeling. When he was anxiously waiting for his turn to speak, I was nervous with him. When he was being ostracized by the teacher, I felt dumb too. When he realized he understood the teacher completely, I was shocked and ecstatic as he was. I like how I was able to feel what he was feeling and the emotions the story put me through.

Bone Song

The item I chose at the museum was a painting by Sandy Gillespie entitled Bone Song.
It is located on the upper level in the Rose Berry Alaska Art Gallery portion of the museum. It was painted using acrylic paint on a canvas and was made in 2007.

I was drawn to the painting by the busyness of the words. They were words that overlapped each other and I stood there trying to make them all out, but I couldn’t. Not even a quarter of the words. I wanted to know what the words said. Were they random words? Were they part of the lyrics to the Bone Song? This confusion kept me coming back to the same painting numerous times.

I felt lost trying to read the words. I wanted to understand, but the longer I looked, the more confused I was. That didn’t stop me. I was adamant on trying to read the painting.
I don’t like being confused or lost, especially about life. Then I started relating this painting to our lives and how confusing it can be at times. There are times in our lives that leave us confused or lost. It can be from knowing what’s right and wrong to life itself.

As little kids, we see the world in black and white. It’s so clear. This is right and this is wrong; this is good and this is bad. But as we grow up, the rights and wrongs of the world overlap and mesh together. Most of our blacks and whites come together and become shades of gray. Instead of seeing the world clearly, we are left with confusion and the task to find what is right and wrong for us. We are still able to find some of the blacks and whites but everything else is a mess of the two colors.

Life tends to unexpectedly change from underneath us. When the change is bad, we feel lost. We ask why this has happened to us? It feels like life has taken its paintbrush and scribbled white writings to our perfectly understandable canvas. We don’t understand nor know why this has happened to us, but we don’t stop living. We try to live with it and keep going. We don’t give up.

There are times in our lives when we have felt lost, confused, and didn’t know what to do. We try to understand what is going on and we end up more confused than ever, but that doesn’t stop us. We keep trying until we feel a sense of understanding, even if that means only understanding parts of it.

 

http://www.rasmuson.org/ArtOnDisplay/Popup_DisplayArt/display.php?artwork_id=309&height=725px