9/10/20
7-710pm: Settle in, how are you? What’s new? Have you been writing for YOU?
7:10-7:35pm: Pieces we read… your reactions/SUPPORTED OPINIONS.
7:35-8pm: If you had to characterize or identify Sedaris as anything, what would it be?
For example, “Sedaris is ___________.”
That is a position. That is a thesis, stemming from an opinion.
8-8:20pm: Let’s practice supporting these opinions now….. Please post and share some evidence/quotes from Sedaris’ essays to support your opinions. Please engage each other, ask each other questions, support each other’s arguments!
8:20-8:40pm: OPEN MIC!!!!!!!! What have you been writing for YOU?? Please post and share and react to each other….
ASSIGNMENT: Please have Diabetes With Owls finished by 9/23/20. Start developing an opinion on the book, and Sedaris. This will be the prompt for your first longer essay. Don’t worry about the essay right now… just start developing an opinion. Text me with any questions.
#professormikey 
Hello everyone!
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Hello!!!! How are you??
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ok here in the hospital! No baby yet! Just in pain. How are you doing?
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Whatup y’all!!! I’m here, but am going to let you run the show. Enjoy the conversations and interaction…. SUPPORTED OPINIONS. If you “learn” one thing from me this semester, it’s that. Support your convictions, thoughts… support your ideas. LIGHT IT UP. #madnessisloveanytume
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Hello everyone!
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Good evening everyone.
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Gooooood evening!!!
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Hi everyone
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So most of the writing that I have been doing is notes for a game that I play also for my classes. But when it comes to doing it for myself it is all about the game.
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What kind of game is it?
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I have been really hooked to Civilization 5. It is a nation building turn based game of world domination.
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I am great and I have sort of been writing about myself(my life) when I write my little notes when reading Sedaris.
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Hey everyone!!
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Most of my notes have been brainstorming ideas for making my own version of Risk. Over the break I made my own version of monopoly and it was so fun I was thinking of making my own Risk. Very satisfying to play it with my friends when the game was done.
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YOu sound like my kind of people. I have around 100 board games and I even go to conventions just to play more.
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Me and my friends love playing board games. I like to play the normal version then if I like it find the cool special editions. Currently playing Risk Legacy.
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Hi guys! The way Ive been writing for me is documenting my day in my journal!
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Hello everyone! Hope all of you are doing well. I’m glad to be back after my week vacation to Vegas and LA!
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Hey guys hope everyone is having a great evening.
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Good evening everyone!
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Hey everyone! Hope all of you are doing well. I’m glad to be back after my week vacation to Las Vegas and LA!
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How were your vacations?
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they were really fun my family and i flew down to vegas so that my cousin and his now wife could get married. and then i drove to LA in my step brothers truck to visit my grandparents and give a baby shower gift to my other cousin who is expecting his first born.
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Hi everyone! Something I’ve been up to is getting back into painting more and playing my violin.
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I have always wanted to learn the violin! such a pretty instrument.
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you’ll love it!
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Hi Claudia…what are you painting?
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I love painting nature, so right now I have been working on a landscape of trees!
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Hello everyone!
I’m exhausted today. I stayed up until 3am last night working on last minute homework. Woke up around 6am this morning and have been up ever since.
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Yes! Doing math at that hour is not fun! ha!
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Tell me about it
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Hi everybody I have been writing in two journals – English and Yoga.
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Hey everyone! I have been writing about my thoughts throughout the day and I’ve been writing my notes from reading in the book itself.
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Hey! Good afternoon everyone! Man this smoke has been killer! Headaches have been constant and trying to focus has been kinda hard to be honest. All in all though iv’e been hanging in there. I have not had that much time to write in my journal but will start again asap because it’s therapy for me.
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The smoke is getting worse now then before.
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‘Im sorry to hear there is so much smoke, its pretty bad where I am too. At least I have electricity today
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Yes, totally agree is getting worst! there some many things going on.
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I feel you
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I have been writing a very long report for school, and it really is tiring.
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I’ve been pretty good lately I was able to take some time off for work, I missed the past two classes because of work so it should all be good now. Lately as far as writing, I have been doing a little bit of it for myself. I have also written some music.
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What kind of music do you write about?
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I’ve been having some major blockage lately as far as coming up with something to write on the spot, so I’ve pretty much been depending on writing prompts. I really really like them because there are so many different types of prompts that get your mind going and thinking.
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I’m here y’all… just observing. You run the narrative and vessel-direction tonight. You will accrue added credit for added energy and conversational commitment. If you are silent, that is your choice, and a poor one at that. Someone teach me something about Sedaris, writing, reading, expression, tonight!!!!!!!!!
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These last four essays has had me think about how we all should be supporting of each other and be more understanding of peoples situations.
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YES! This! I have been definitely feeling this way.
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Agreed! It’s important to do that, sometimes we just judge people based on what’s on the outside and forget what someone could be going through.
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For tonight’s page….. You don’t have to dominate a conversation, just be lovingly and generously present and active.
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It couldn’t be better! I am here stuck in the hospital. No baby yet! He playing too many games! I haven’t been able to write a lot or do many things because they just been putting me to sleep all-day but I been writing what I see in the hospital!
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omg! lol crazy, and your still going strong!
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*you’re … lol
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Also for you page, and you can quote me on this and put it on scrape-your-professor-dot-com….. Dismissal of your ability to decide is educational suicide.
And I invite ANYONE to challenge me on that.
The next couple weeks are going to be interesting and challenging, and kindly demanding….. Hope you’re ready. 🙂
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Sedaris is a prophetic blend of yay-sayer and nay-sayer…. Thoughts?
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I definitely agree with him being a blend of both. What I find more interesting is that I feel like he would yay, what most would nay, and vice versa. Not sure if that makes a lot of sense, but Sedaris sees everthing in such a different perspective than most would, including myself and that is for sure what sets him aside from the rest.
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Yes!
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I really enjoyed reading through “Laugh, Kookaburra.” The analogy on page 89-90 was really interesting. Soon after reading it, I pictured a four-burner stove whose burners represented: family, friends, work, and health; and asked myself what two burners was I willing to give to become “really successful.” I didn’t give it much thought then and decided to give up friends, the other three ask just to important
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I caught that as well but it just made me think do I really want to be trully successful if that is what it coasts.
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Right! I thought the same
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yes! this was a great way of basically saying you cant have everything you want in life.
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I was thinking the same thing and I also gave up friends.
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Sedaris teaches us that sometimes you just gotta say f/ck it.
Props to him for the lesson…. ❤
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So I will start by saying that I finally found something funny in Sedaris’ writings. In of all pieces Laugh, Kookaburra. It is where they are having a fancy lunch and he talks about things that are younger cost more. Then a family walks in with a baby and he thinks, “keep it away from the chef”. That one really got me.
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This had me rollin! I couldn’t stop picturing it! LOL
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Personally I thought the “Easy, Tiger” chapter was hilarious. There was a part when he was comparing German to English and the way he said certain things made me laugh. I thought the other chapters or essays were pretty good as well but the first one was my personal favorite.
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The part where he watches T.V. and they are having sex and then he changes the channel. “What could they possibly be doing there that they couldn’t show on the other channel”. That is another good line.
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This qas my favorite too. But I liked how he was so immersed in the language that he was learning.
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Yes it was amusing. The pitfalls of learning languages Pimsleur and his experiences using Herr Thomas to learn German
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Sedaris writing is cathartic. I get a sense of his need to write and explore feelings from the past. Perhaps to reorganize thoughts and look back with eyes now older and more experienced….to understand from a different perspective…and seeing hurtful things with humor in retrospect.
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Examples?
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Yes very true I remember thinking this after reading his essays
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i find myself laughing a lot while reading through Sedaris’s essays. when his mom asks him if he found out what sea turtles ate at the library and he says hamburgers… i couldn’t stop laughing cause that’s the type of response i would give.
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Where were you laughing?
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as in where in the book or where was i physically? i was in my room with my door open and my mom asked what i was laughing at. I told her this book and that she should read it when i was done
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SO what do you all do when you have a thought that you can’t put on paper. I have this feeling in the back of my head that Sedaris is leading us somewhere with these stories but I can’t pin point it, but it is driving me crazy.
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Overthought is death. Stay away from it.
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I hear you, but I feel like his writing is talking to me but I can’t hear it. So I won’t be able to do myself justice in my own writing unless I can uncover the whispers that are David’s work.
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Opinions that are not supported are like things you pass on the freeway, that you don’t know you’re passing… insignificant, ignored, irrelevant.
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Going to keep this in my notes. This is something useful when writing or simply when having a conversation with someone
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I loved “I’m shouting lunch” I am so going to make that apart of my sayings. lol
Also the Costco trip with his brother in law had me rollin! I could just picture me at Costco, and witnessing the big box of condoms in a cart while two men are just casually pushing it along. lol
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HaHa… Thank you for reminding me
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Easy, Tiger had me thinking about how we all struggle on how to communicate with people who speaks different languages.
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Yes! and how we expect them to know english when WE go to a foreign country! I didn’t realize it now.
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Sedaris’ writing is all about connections. One thought or experience connects to a present action or memory, which connects to another thought or idea and it all just keeps flowing. No order. Just flowing.
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And the flow makes it easy to read and follow.
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My favorite chapter was laugh, Kookaburra. Since I traveled to Australia I had a particular fondness for that chapter. In order to see the country you have to see the country side
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I was also very fond of this chapter, Australia sounds beautiful.
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I think the funniest essay to me so far is “just a quick email” because the story just kept getting crazier and crazier. And then in the end when it turns out its her sister I was laughing out loud.
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Omg SAME! I was dying! I was like what the hell is going on in this email and could not stop laughing
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In Standing Still, I felt bad for him because the way he sees himself as nothing through his parents eyes compared to his sisters, which was the opposite.
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This also made me sad for him, but he knows how to deal with it and just keeps it going.
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yes! this chapter made me insecure a little, because everyone in your life has an opinion of you, and you cant really change a first impression
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Yes Cassandra, I felt a sadness. He describes the experience in such a way that it is easy to empathize his language is pretty much everyday language. His sentences do tend to be long but they are separated well by commas. The conversations are short and punchy. Which means you dont get lost in the conversation
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And actually his dad was right. Pg 88, ” I hate to admit it, but my dad was right about the country side”. On a broader level we see, he really doesn’t want to say his father is right about anything. He hates to admit it, yet he feels obliged too anyway
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Did anybody else find it telling of his personality, when he said that he always learns “im sorry” in whichever language he is learning?
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Yes, Because he is the kind of free spirit who does what he wants but when he realizes he is wrong will immediately say sorry.
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when i read this the thing that came to mind was maybe he doesnt really pay attention when he walks and bumps into people often so he has to say im sorry to be polite
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yes ….he is very self-deprecating….he seems used to being the underdog….but he seems also to like the victim role
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My favorite chapter was laugh, Kookaburra. I have been to Australia and everything he said was just so true it made me laugh.
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yes…i have been to Australia too and i miss it…so i liked reading this
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From the few essays I have read from Sedaris, each essay surprises me in how he can have serious components while delivering humor. I enjoy reading how he can openly speak about his life and the problems our society faces today.
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I agree! He even writes about his problems in such a nonchalant way that it starts to make you feel like some of our problems may not be that big of a deal.
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Yeah and the way he goes back and forth between serious things and humorous things so there’s a balance so it doesn’t seem like the problems are too big.
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In “I Break for traditional marriage” Its funny how he talks about marriage like if it was some kind of a game.
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Sedaris is like a mirror reflecting back at me. His essays/ stories are so similar to mine that I’m just I am not only one that has been through this.
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Standing Still was my favorite so far. I feel like he got more emotional in that one. He said how much he actually enjoyed bonding with his dad as they were keeping their eye on his sister Gretchen and looking for the guy who assaulted her.he also mentioned how he liked having her around because the way she looked at him made him feel like everything was okay and that he was doing well in life. Something I feel like many can relate.
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