Everything else. Twenty-plus years of posts, thoughts, tweets, and internet ephemera. Explore at your own risk.
1. Write a five-sentence summary about the whole paper, and try to make it mimic what your paper will look like when you’re done. The first sentence, like the first…
Since we are very young we are bombarded with images and ideas of romance. It is an important factor in our society that affects and reinforces specific ideas about how…
Racial inequality has plagued our nation so long that even in today’s relatively enlightened culture we find various forms of prejudice and discrimination. In a predominantly white nation, the darker…
It was generally held for a long time that hunting, the act of stalking live prey and then killing it, contributed a great deal to our natural aggressive tendencies. After…
The G-8 was created out of the eight richest countries in the world in order to fight poverty in Africa. Poverty affects more people throughout the world than all of…
There are three pervading hypotheses about the emergence of modern humans. While I was reading the summaries of the three hypotheses, I began to I favor the so-called multiregional hypothesis,…
China has made an unsolicited offer to acquire one of the largest United States-based oil company, which would essentially double its oil and gas output (2). The organization that is…
Evolution is a product of the scientific process. It is often touted by critics as being “only a theory.” The irony is that if they truly understood the word theory…
The recent terrorist attacks in London remind us that people are still willing to use the most extreme measures to make their voices heard. It seems now that more people…
This is an old paper I wrote for a religion class, and I’m only leaving it here for posterity. I may replace it with a more concise version (because this…
Well, finally, the waiting is over. I spent yesterday watching The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, then the Clone Wars series, which ended twenty minutes before I walked into…
Why are people so shitty to each other? Furthermore, when someone is being shitty to someone, why does everyone allow it to happen? Last night I was enjoying a night…
For this assignment, we were supposed to have a three-person dialogue about video games without using quotes or identifying markers. I kind of cheated here by adding color, but I’m sure no one will really care either way.
The purpose of this assignment was to help us construct the smallest story without having to write an introduction, and to concentrate on developing the story and characters in what was implied rather than said. In case you’re wondering, they are <i>not</i> on ecstasy.
This assignment was to write a dialogue between two people without using identifying markers like, “he said,” and “said Kari.” I don’t remember what the content requirements were, but I would guess there weren’t any. My professors are good about that.
The assignment here was to “write the worst, horriblest story” I could. I’m sure it could’ve been worse, but I wanted to be somewhat readable. Though I’m sure I missed a few, I tried to break every rule I could think of, including (but not limited to) grammar, spelling, coherency, decency, and blasphemy. How many can <i>you</i> find?
This is a short story about two men in the middle of the Iraq war from each person's perspective. One is American and the other is Iraqi. I messed up this assignment because it was supposed to have three perspectives, which threw my creative writing class off. They were confused as to who was speaking. To compensate for that problem, I color-coded the text. But it took away from the point of the exercise. And we can’t expect people to print stories in color. That’s called a comic book. Anyway, I decided to keep the two speakers in two different fonts because I wanted it to be <i>immediately</i> obvious that there were two different narrators.
The assignment was to write from the perspective of someone who is wearing two different shoes and suddenly realizes it. They were supposed to think that everyone noticed and (I guess) freak out about it. My only fear with this story (besides how insufferably lame it is) is that someone might completely miss the irony. Dude, I swear I’m not, like, represented in that story. Like, you know, dude?
I originally started writing a story where the author torments the main character by putting him in various weird situations. I set it aside for a long time until I was told to write a metafiction story. I pulled out the sections that did not fit my new story and wrote the rest months later. This was actually enjoyable to do because it allowed me to do something with a piece that I have had a hard time finishing. There are so many things you can do with the seed idea that I just left it alone because it was so open-ended. This, however, is a relatively satisfying way to compress a book into a short story.
This was an assignment where I was supposed to read T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “The Hit Man” and rewrite it using any other profession. It is intended to be a humorous piece about the life of a drug dealer. Special thanks to Boyle for not suing me (yet) for “borrowing” the idea. Try not to take this piece too seriously. There are a lot of half-jokes and wordplay here that is supposed to mimic the original. It actually got a few good laughs when they read it in class. Maybe you'll laugh, too.
