Revisions for Corbally's essay

Kathy, Lhadze and Luis, here's the essay.

Kathryn Douglas, Lhadze B., Jesse Valdez, Luis Alba

21 September, 2010

Writing One, 6^o

Mrs. Corbally

Pearls Before Swine

            “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matthew 7:6)

            The silence never sounded as loud when Paul held Abbey’s dead body in his hands. He stepped away from Abbey and held the bloody pen in his hand. All his memories of Abbey were playing in his head. Slowly, all of those memories became clear. He knelt beside Abbey, and closed his eyes.

 *                                 *                                         *

            His years of high school were the whole reason why he ended up killing Abbey. Paul and Abbey had been a great couple. Paul loved her; he would do anything for her. He remembered picking her up from her house in his truck and getting out of the car. Abbey came out of her house in her little red dress, nimbly walking over in her heels while putting on a delicate corsage. He was stunned at her amazing grace and beauty. He opened the truck door for her and headed to prom. Paul was nervous and the ride was quiet.

            As they entered the gym where prom was being held, he had a slight feeling someone else was looking for her. Paul and Abbey sat at a table with their friends from high school. They had fun with their friends, but as they left to dance, Abbey and Paul remained silent. As the night went on, Abbey acted strange. She kept glancing around as if she were looking for someone. She suddenly stood up, walked away and never looked back. Paul wondered where she was walking to, but it didn’t take him long to figure out. She was walking towards someone who just came in. As Abbey went over to him, Paul began to notice something strange: he had a pig tattoo on his biceps. Anger boiled inside Paul’s stomach. Abbey, with no sense of pity or regret, kissed the man with the pig tattoo. Paul jumped in his seat and stared at them. Fury exploded within him, but he didn’t want to make a scene. He got up and left, thinking about how Abbey could have just done that to him so easily.

            As Paul drove his truck in anger, his mind was still on Abbey and how he witnessed her cheating on him. He began to think cruel thoughts, all in which included revenge. The tattoo of the pig was on his mind since he had left the prom. He wanted to know who that man that he hated more than anyone else was. He began to swear at the top of his voice, all of them being about Abbey and the man that she was with. While driving, he spotted a pig, and the remaining amount of rage that was inside him was vented out. When he saw the pig, he thought Abbey and the other man and the everlasting pain that they had inflicted on him. Acting on impulse, Paul drove his truck as fast as he possible could, and he rammed into the pig. The truck shook and swerved. When it stooped, Paul left to see if the pig was dead, but when he found nothing, he realized that he had imagined it; the pig was merely a hallucination. He wondered why the car had shook if he did not hit the pig. He noticed a boulder a few feet away from where he was; that had been the cause of his crash. As he realized what had happened, he began to laugh. He was still laughing when he saw two bright lights coming closer and closer. In a matter of seconds, he heard a horn blare, and everything went black.

                                    *                                       *                                              *

            The next thing Paul knew, he was in a room with shiny white walls. He then noticed the numerous amounts of wires attached to him. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was in a hospital. He touched his face and felt his grown facial hair all over. His eyes felt tired and heavy. He looked towards the digital clock. He noticed something strange. The date was 3 years after prom. Everything in between that and now was all just a blank. He was about to gasp in shock, but pain all of sudden shot through his entire mouth. He looked in a mirror next to him and saw that something was clamping him jaw down so much that he couldn’t speak. He thought while in pain, I shouldn’t have tried to run over the pig. I shouldn’t have lost control like that. In half an hour, some surgeons came in to check and fix whatever was clamping down on his jaw. As they were fixing it, he felt jolts of pain that felt like needles being poked into his gums and being twisted. When they were done, one of the surgeons got a mirror and asked him what he thought. There were two thoughts that went through his mind: (1) He was astounded at his reflection; he had hideous scars all over him. His face was unrecognizable. (2) The voice that spoke to him was extremely familiar. Paul was frustrated that he couldn’t figure out whose voice that was.     

            When all the other surgeons left, the one whose voice sounded familiar stayed behind. She cleaned up the rest of the tools and put them on a cart so she could take them back. She took off her surgical mask and then someone else called her. Abbey. She said she would be right there after she put the equipment away. When she turned around to take the cart, Paul caught a glimpse of her face. That glimpse was all he need. Everything that happened after the prom came to him: Abbey cheating on him, driving away in anger, crashing into the boulder, and the most memorable flashback, the man with the pig tattoo. He must have looked like he had a fearful expression on his face, because Abbey told him, “Don’t worry, Sir. You’ll get those scars fixed in no time. Good-bye”.

As she left He saw the man that called that had the clear tattoo of a pig, and an engagement ring brighter than the sun than had engravings on it. Paul shook with fury on his bed when he noticed these two things. If he didn’t have the thing on his jaw, then the entire hospital would have heard his scream. They were the screams of revenge.

                        *                                          *                                               *

            Abbey came in and closed the door. He decided that if he wanted revenge, then there was only one thing he could do. Ignoring every pain in his body, he grabbed Abbey by her collar and took a pen out of her pocket. He looked at Abbey, and his brown eyes, full of rage and hatred, met Abbey’s grey eyes, full of shock and plea. Fighting the pain of his jaw, he said to her, “Abbey.” Paul grabbed her wrist and stabbed it with the pen, cutting it open. She opened her mouth in preparation for a scream, but Paul swiftly covered her mouth. “Be quiet”, he said in a murderous tone. He caressed her face and held the pen up to her neck as she slowly started to lose consciousness. He remembered that horrible heartbreaking day when she cheated on him and caused him to get in a crash. He wanted to make her suffer for what she did to him. The last time he saw her, she was looking at him, deviously giggling. She was different now. Ugly, he thought, that pig man made her ugly, the way she smiled at him, and she never smiled like that at me. She could very well be dead to me. I want her dead; if I can’t have her, neither can that pig man. He then said to Abbey the last words she would ever hear.

“Pearls before swine, Abbey.”

 He took a deep breath, and jammed the pen into Abbey’s soft neck. Her eyes flickered and she was no longer. His hands were soon soaked with Abbey’s crimson blood. He dropped her and wiped his hands on his hospital gown. Paul looked over her dead body on the floor, dropped the pen and limped to the door. It creaked as he opened it slowly. Once he was outside, he looked both ways down the hall and dashed. Running down the white halls, memories of the good times flashed back into his head and he snickered bitterly. He could see the security guards running towards him, they had heard the beginning of her desperate cry. Paul had not covered Abbey’s mouth quick enough. He realized that the guards had him in checkmate. He went with them quietly. He was not only going to prison, but he was going to Hell.

Corbally's Essay

           As Paul drives his tractor in anger, his mind is still on Abbey and how he witnessed her cheating on him. He starts to boil with anger inside. Abbey's pig tatoo was still fresh in his mind. At the same time, he spots a pig, and hatred bursts inside him. When he sees the pig, he immediatly thinks of Abbey, and the pain she caused him. Then, on impulse, he makes his tractor go as fast as it can possibly go. As he gets closer to the pig, with Abbey still in his mind, he can't find the pig any more. He realizes too late, the pig was merely a hallucination. One of the wheels hits a bopulder, and both Paul and the tractor are sent flying in the air.
           When he regains conscienceness, he sees a white-walled room. The next thing he notices is a numerous amount of tubes attached to him. It does not take him very long to realize that he is in a hospital. He's about to gasp, but something stops him. Something clamps his jaw shut so that he can't speak. He thinks to himself that he shouldn't have tried to run over the "pig". He shouldn't have lost con trol like that. In about half an hour, some surgeons come in to fix whatever is clamping down on his jaw. He sees some of them using screws on his teeth. He feels a sudden pain, but it goes away in seconds. One of the surgeons gets a mirror and asks him what he thinks. He sees himself and is shocked. His face is covered in scars. He doesn't even recognize himself. At that moment, the surgeon that showed him the mirror, and Paul realizes that the surgeon is Abbey. Abbey, apparently not recognizing who he is, tells him not to be so scared, and that the scars will go away once he gets plastic surgery by the plastic surgeons. Paul tries to tell her who he is, but he is unable to speak. Abbey doesn't notice that he is struggling to say something, so she leaves without another word. Paul watches her leave, and as he does, he discovers something glistening like the sun om her hand. He shakes with fury on his bed, and the entire hospital would have heard him, if only it weren't for the thing on his jaw. The shiny object on her finger was an engagement ring, with words engraved on it. And Paul knows that it wasn't him that gave it to her.

Response to Colin's iPad post

I decided to respond to Colin's post on the iPad.

 Why choose Ipad? It does the same thing (sometimes less) as many other tablets just for a higher price for the brand name. The blackberry playbook has live video chat, flash payer built in (which the IPAD does not have), youtube, blackberry compatibility, and any more features. I am responding to this because I wanted to show that there are other things you can get that do more than the Ipad but they aren't advertised for as much.

I'm making this response post to say why a lot of people buy the iPad even though other cell phones can do the same thing. People probably expect more from the Apple company because of all the iPhones and iPods and iTouches and how cool they are. Now the Apple company must be running out of ideas for new technology, and therefore they try to get a lot of money and scam people by taking the ideas of some other company's ideas. Then they take, as Colin said, blackberry's video chat and put it in the iPad. They must have not known that the blackberry has a flash player, or they would have put that in as well. Since the economy is bad, they need more money, so they just steal ideas and put it into something. Sooner or later next year, they'll probably have taken more ideas from other companies and put it into something else. This is assuming of course that they don't come up with anything new by themselves. I actually would be surprised if they were experimenting for new technology, but while they were, and in case their ideas didn't work, then they had some back-up blueprints for something else. Therefore, the Apple company must have been trying to get somethig and put it into something else, but failed to accomplish it. Then, they were stating to lose money, so they decided to create their back-up plan, which was the iPad. Since people had high expectations from the company, a lot of people bought iPads in hope of getting something really cool. But there were mostly ideas from other devices, so the Apple company got a lot of money, maybe so they could use the money to experiment more to invent something better. But that remains to be seen.

Unwind Blog Post #1

             During my group's lit circle discussion, we talked about many things that happened in the book Unwind so far. We talked about what we thought of some of the characters, what they would do later in the book, and why they acted the way they did. One of these characters that we talked about was Lev's parents. We pondered if they really wanted to have Lev be unwound, or if they were just getting him unwound because it was their religion. We ended up mostly agreeing that they just gave up Lev to be unwound because their religion had said that they needed to give 10 percent of their possessions to the Church, and they figured that Lev had to be part of that 10 percent. We said that they probably thought that they wouldn't be accepted into heaven if they didn't give up Lev, and that instead they would be sent to Hell. So they convinced Lev that he would be blessed once he was unwound, and that was his purpose: to save lives by giving away his body parts. This made Lev feel slightly better about himself, because he thought it was his purpose. This probably makes the parents feel better, so they keep enforcing this idea.
             After this discussion, our group talked about Lev. We said that he was a jerk for betraying Conner and Risa's trust, and then expecting them to let him tag along with them again. Now that I think about it, I don't even know what the purpose of going to the office to tell them what was going on. All he did was call his friend Pastor Dan, and he could have done that without telling them who he was at all. He told the office person to tell the police not to hurt Conner ans Risa. What did he expect? They were both Unwinds on the run, so if they were caught by anyone, they would be unwound. He deserved to have felt guilty for leaving them and then being alone.

Book Review for Kite Runner

1.         In the one of my posts, I said that I thought the book would be about remorse. Some of it turned out to be that way. However, now that I've read the entire book, I know that there's more to it than just remorse. It gives the reader feelings of hope, loyalty, redemption, and the price of making very wrong decisions. Since I already talked about why this book has remorse, I will explain why and how there is all the other feelings that I stated earlier.
         I said that there was hope in this novel. This is depicted when Amir begins his search for Hassan, then later searching for Hassan's son, Sohrab. Amir assumes that getting him out of Kabul will be easy, but then realizes little by little that he could fail his task. Even after he rescues Sohrab from Kabul, he finds Sohrab lying unconscious, and bleeding to death.

"There is no God but Allah and Muhammad his messenger. I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I always feared they would."(p346)

This is where Amir has a spiritual awakening and prays that if there is a God, then he will keep Sohrab alive, and in return, Amir will be Muslim and pray daily. Since Sohrab is alive, Amir keeps his promise and prays everyday, does namaz, and all the other requirements of a Muslim.
        The part where loyalty comes in is with Hassan. He was forever loyal and shared a strong bond with Amir, even when Amir watched him get raped by Assef. Hassan knew that Amir had done this, yet he still forgave him and considered them to still be great friends with the same bond. Evidence in this is written in a letter that Hassan writes to him.

"If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you."(p218)

Whether it was because Hassan was their servant or because of the friendship that he and Amir had, Hassan was always a great friend to Amir.
          Despite this loyalty however, Amir could never forgive himself for what he did. He thought of himself a sinner, and desperately wanted to be punished for the bad things that he did.

"I wished he would. I wished he would give me the punishment I craved, so maybe I'd finally sleep at night."(p92)

           Shortly after the event took place, Amir and Hassan both went to their favorite tree and stayed there a while. Amir then threw a pomegranite at Hassan, and when Amir told Hassan to punish him, Hassan only took another one and squished it against his head, and made a reply that made Amir feel even worse.

"Are you satisfied? Do you feel better?" (p 93)

         Amir was then haunted by everything he did to Hassan. He became an insomniac, and couldn't bear to even think about Hassan. He finally feels that he gets some punishment that he deserves when he crosses paths with Assef, and he gets beaten up by him. Then he ends up in the hospital.

"The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip."(p297)

         Amir soon starts to think that every bad thing that happens to him is punishment for what he did. When he thinks this, he thinks that now he has a harelip like Hassan did. He thinks that he is going to go through everything that Hassan went through, starting with the harelip. Another example of this is when Amir and Soraya try to have a baby, but they can't.

"Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. It wasn't meant to be, Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be."(p 188)

        After the sins that Amir commited, he feels extremely guilty and fears that his sins will catch up to him and he will lose many things: He fears that he will die in Kabul and fail Hassan, he fears he will lose Sohrab, he fears that Soraya will never be happy because they can't have a baby, and he fears that he won't know what to do when Baba dies.
        All of these feelings that are presented in the book are meant to teach children to make good choices, otherwise they'll either wish almost all the time that they could take it back or they'll be distraught from remorse of something they did. This may have happened to Khaled Hosseni, as I stated in one of my posts on The Kite Runnner.

It is possible that something like this happened to Hosseni. Not all of this word for word, but maybe he did something small that he would never forgive himself for. Then he could have exaggerated greatly the amount of regret he felt and made it into a much bigger problem. Also, he may have based Amir on himself, maybe on the decisions he would have made as a kid: trying anything to please his father, being scared of bullies like Assef, and even making some decisions that may have seemed good at first, but later he realized that was the wrong choice. Then these may have affected his life. He may have even gone a long time in his life haunted by something he did, and every day wishing he could take it back.

       In the end, Amir has to make it up to Sohrab because he broke a promise to Sohrab. He then teaches Sohrab how to be a kite-runner like Hassan. Sohrab still doesn't forgive Amir for the promise that he broke, but he smiles when Amir performs tricks that his father did. It was, as Hosseni put it, the first snowflake melting. So Amir is close to making up for his sins by regaining Sohrab's trust and taking care of him. 
        To summarize it all, the purpose of this book can be viewed from many perspectives: teaching children to stick up for their friends, to teach them to have hope and faith, or even so Hosseni can feel that making the book (and trying to teach children about all the feelings that I talked about) is making up for whatever sins he did and he went through all the guilt that Amir went through.

General Sahib

         In the novel The Kite Runner, General Sahib is Amir's father-in-law. He is also a good friend of Baba's, so there must be some kind of relation between them. It is possible, but not likely, that he may have know how Baba also had Hassan as his son. At the end of the book, the general refers to Sohrab as "the Hazara boy". It is possible that he too, like many others in Kabul, had a certain kind of dislike or discrimination against Hazaras. One piece of evidence that is given on this theory is when he walks in and sees Sohrab.

"'Hello, young man,' was all the general said, leaning with both hands on his cane, looking at Sohrab the way one might stud a bizarre decorative item at someone's house."

       It is obvious here that the general has a kind of racism against Hazaras.That much is clear. But it's what's in between the lines that is interesting. When I said that General Sahib might have known that Baba was Hassan's father, this may also lead to the general somehow knowing that Hassan had Sohrab. It is possible that Rahim Khan had talked to the general many times, and had also talked about Sohrab and how he was hoping to get Amir to take care of him. Therefore, when Amir and Soraya told him that they were going to adopt someone, the general assumed that it would be Sohrab. He then made up excuses for reasons to not adopt, because he didn't want a "Hazara" in his family. So when Amir came back with Sohrab, the general had no idea and assumed that Amir wouldn't adopt him. That is why he asked about Sohrab and why Amir brought him.
         Another part at the end was that the general had been summoned to Afghanistan. However, it could have been just a lie so that he could get away from Sohrab for a while. Or he was too embarrassed to be seen around him. Either way, the "summons" was probably a lie. My last assumption was that General Sahib was a Taliban. He may have hired Assef to kidnap Sohrab and make sure that Amir would not take him to America. He knew, or thought he knew, that Assef would not fail him, so the "summons" was to find Assef, and punish him for his failure.

Response to Meriam's story

    I was looking at Meriam’s post and I saw that she made a post called Story Time. Here’s what she wrote at the end.

Also, the toddler became ill however the step mom believed it was just a regular flu and payed no special attention to him. The brother would escape to the family friend's home trying to escape his own problems. After a month or so the toddlers illness resulted in death and a month later the father had died in war.

       This post I will write is just kudos and some advice. First off, you should probably give names to the people. That would make it easier to understand what’s going on in the story. I understood what happened, but I had to read it 2-3 times to know what was going on. Then you should also make this an actual post and divide it into chapters. Then, if you made at least 15 chapters, you could even make it a book. That could be very nice reading.
    Another thing you could do is just organize it into paragraphs. Some dialogue could be nice too. Also, just as you said in the first paragraph, you should put it through the oldest son’s perspective. And if Corbally ever assigns an essay or something this year or next year, you could use this story for an essay or something. Two birds with one stone.
    All in all, I think that if you really put some time into the story, it would turn out really good. You should consider what I said about making this story into chapters earlier in he post.