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New Title: Vaulting the Sea --> To Dive Together or to Love One Another

 In the story Vaulting the Sea , the main character, Taoyu, is faced with a lasting struggle throughout the story. He has to decide whether or not to tell Hai about his feelings towards him, and ruin their diving relationship and probably synchronicity, as well as his own career. At the end of the story, Taoyu decides not to jump, and jeopardizes his own career in hopes of being able to be who he truly wants to be, thus my new reimagined title, To Dive Together or to Love One Another. While Taoyu does not end up with Hai, I still feel the "to Love" part of the title does lead a person who hasn't read it yet to wonder if they do, and by the end of the story they will know that he chose not to dive at all, and Taoyu does not get his happily ever after, in fact going into some sort of hiding. The whole story revolving around synchronized diving also struck me when creating a new title, and that is where the together part comes, as this is such a 2-person affair, as if one pe...
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Sentence Analysis: Eleven

 "What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven. but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today." In Sandra Cisneros' short story, "Eleven," the story of a girl named Rachel on her eleventh birthday is shown, and all boils down to being embarrassed in school on her birthday by one ugly red sweater. I picked the lines highlighted above because they really stuck out to me when reading and are the opening lines to the story itself. The way it is written, it makes you think about how you are every age you've ever been up until that very point, and nothing more. Almost like how if you think about it, there are no photos of right now. Photos taken now have happened second...
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Blog Post 2: What are the apocalyptic fiction stories trying to tell us about our own futures?

Connecting the real world to Bradbury's short story adaptation of the poem There Will Come Soft Rains  and E.M. Forster's story The Machine Stops, I noticed that many of the stories we read were apocalyptic fiction, and seemed to be dealing with issues that our society and world are dealing with now, but these stories were published way before these issues were even present. I started wondering, why? What do these stories know about our own futures that we don't realize?  While Bradbury's story was in fact published in the 1950's, the Cold War was going on in the background of American lives and was prominent for the ever-looming nuclear apocalypse. I don't think Bradbury expected that now, in the 21st century, we would be dealing with a larger threat than just a Cold War level nuclear arsenal, but thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons around the world. It does seem that Bradbury's story was ahead of its time, shown by the fact that even the house was ...
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There Will Come Soft Rains: The Looming Threat of Nuclear Warfare and the Ever Present Reality of a Technological Takeover

     In Ray Bradbury's short story There Will Come Soft Rains , based on the poem of the same name by Sara Teasdale, we see a post-apocalyptic setting, where all that is left in the city we are set in, is one technologically advanced house, maintained by robotic systems, continually running every day, even while the house's inhabitants are long gone. While this short story was published originally in 1950, it details a not so far away future, in the year 2026, where humanity has been wiped out to our knowledge, and all that is left is automated machines. This comes at the start of the Cold War, where the Soviet Union and the United States were both in competition to have the most nuclear weapons stockpiled and use them to intimidate one another. This is truly a testament to the time period it was published in, but the ever-looming presence of nuclear warfare is massively present in our modern society today. To this day even, the United States and Russia are the numbe...
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