Would you mind if your family blogged about you? (I'm 20 ish words over)
I would mind if my parents blogged about me. Not because it’s an invasion of my privacy, which it is by the way, but honestly I don’t think my parents could blog about me. They spend too much time in their own worlds to know enough about mine. My mom is working from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. most days. And as you can imagine, by the end of it all, she’s practically dead. Occasionally she’ll forward me an email about school, but she doesn’t even see that it was already sent to me. My dad is always running around, too. He fills his days somehow, and has never been one to ask to help me with things going on in my life. He asks me in the evenings how school was, but never questions the fact that I reply every day with a simple ”good.”
My melodramatic middle school sister takes up a lot of the energy my parents do have left at the end of the day. She’s outgoing, high energy, and noisy- making her a vacuum for attention since she could cry. It’s not uncommon for the four of us to spend all of dinner talking about something that happened in her world. Nor is it uncommon for her to get in loud fights with my dad. If they wrote a blog about her it would certainly be an exciting read.
My parents’ blog about me would be based on when they see me when they drive me to school in the morning, and for dinner maybe 2 nights during the school week. I feel like they don’t really get to know me during that time, so I don’t know how they could make a blog about me. Part of it is my own doing. There’s so much I feel like they could never understand, so I decide not to tell them. And the older I get the more our personalities clash, so I try to stay farther and farther away.
I’m not home a lot anymore because I’m always off doing other things. I promise I’m not a little sneak of a child- I try to tell my parents where I will be whenever I can. But even though I tell them where I am, they don’t know what I do. For example, I spend almost 12 hours a week with my robotics team. Obviously my parents know I’m on the team, but they don’t know what it is I do there or what the team does. I also sleep over at my friend’s house every other week, and if I don’t I still spend a lot of time with her. But if I lined all of my friends up they wouldn’t be able to pick her out. They still ask about people I haven’t hung out with in two years, but can’t remember the name of the friend who’s house I spend every weekend at. The only blog worthy parts of my life they don’t really know about.
They don’t know my grades in school, they don’t know who my teachers are. They only seem to have time and energy to care about what time I go to sleep each time and what I eat. Their blog would be a fascinating recap of “Tori went to bed at 12:30 again tonight even though we tell her to go to bed at 10” interspersed with “Tori says she will eat lunch at Rachel’s house. I wonder how she if ever eats when we aren’t watching her.” All of the other information in this fantasy blog would be stale and outdated, from back when they could care about what was happening in my life. I would actually be curious to read a blog they wrote about my life. It would be interesting to see what they think is going on based on the bits of information they get. But I’ll never know because they live too much in their worlds to write one.
Tori, this is an extremely engaging essay. You are able to open up to the reader in a real and vulnerable way. In a short period, I feel that I know a great deal more about your family than I did before. You also do a very nice job of mixing humor into your frustration to provide a balance of emotions. I think the only thing that I would maybe suggest is the organization of your essay. It seems like you have two main points: 1) your parents would not blog about you because they are too busy and 2) even if they did, they wouldn't know enough about you to write an actual post. Sorting through the ideas in your paragraphs and organizing them based on which point they serve might help you to reduce your numbers of words because you may find redundant sentences. After sorting through, try to tie the two ideas together with transitions and such. This is really only a suggestion though for your word count, as you have a very unique and flowing writing style that I like!
ReplyDeleteOne of the parts of a good essay is a balanced amount of background. You do an amazing job of giving us the background without explicitly saying "Here is a ton of background info that I'm immediately going to forget". It is very-well spaced and like Carissa said it is also a great mix of emotions, there weren't parts where I was dying from laughter, instead parts where I smiled because I can totally imagine you doing those things. It was very engaging and it describes your problems well.
ReplyDeleteI concur with Carissa, in that this essay very efficiently and effectively shines light on the dynamic of the Aber household. Your colloquial tone and down-to-earth style make the text flow easily, allowing the reader to easily grasp and relate to your situation as well. The imagery of sitting at the table discussing your sister's troubles or triumphs is powerful; it subtly shows the ignorance (if not naivety) of your parents' absorption with your sibling's life, while simultaneously showing a lack of interest in yours. By doing this, you cement your thesis very well, in that they simply don't know enough about you to write a blog worth reading. As Lisa Micele mentioned about our college essays, one should be able to recognize the author from the writing alone, something I think you've achieved here, too.
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