Author Archives: Alexandra Dickerson

Roses!

Megan is a sophomore in my french class. I’ve known her for a year. She’s a sweet, very soft spoken intelligent girl. She loves horseback riding. She’s majoring in creative writing and wants to be a screenwriter for Pixar one day.

 

Megan and I started talking about how she got asked to go to one of campus’ fraternity’s. A boy givers her a rose and invites her to the dinner.

Analysis:

When did this ever become a tradition? Giving dying plants to girls is romantic? Why? Today, it’s a sign of love. When was the first flower given? Why? Is it purely because of how beautiful they are. Monarchs in Europe are known for decorating their  palace quarters and land with gardens from head to toe. It was also a symbol of opulence. Flowers, even though it’s just a plant, like the rest of nature, has demonstrated to mankind its healing and powers of affection. We give and receive flowers when we are sick, weak, in love, obsessed, missing or mourning. Perhaps it’s a way to demonstrate extreme feelings.

Alligators! No, not in Florida…

Sara is a very gossipy, religious, fun girl. Sophomore at USC, she’s in the Helene’s and a sorority. She’s from Anaheim, California. And she has an incredibly interesting memory and past.

Sara once visited New York with a friend of hers in high school. She had never ben before and was excited to explore the big famed city. When she got their her friend kept messing with her about the fact that their were alligators in the sewer. Every time they walked over a Manhattan grate on the sidewalk, or a manhole cover and the pedestrian’s crosswalk, her friend would tell her to “Watch out girl, jeez.” Sara was believing it too. It wasn’t until they went home to her friends mother when she asked “How come no one’s done anything about all the dumb alligators.” Her friends mother gave her a state and that’s when she knew she was punked. Her friend was then shamed and shunned for the next fifteen minutes.

The story of alligators stalking the sewers of in American cities, not just New York, is an urban mystery. Most people have heard the rumors about alligators in the sewers, in large part, because of Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel.

What would happen is, he wrote of the little pet alligators purchased as Florida souvenirs were eventually flushed down toilets. Then they grew and spread throughout all of Manhattan. Moving through the underground system, Pynchon told us, they were big, blind, albino, and fed on rats and sewage. Pynchon envisioned an “Alligator Patrol going into the depths of the sewer system, working in teams of two, with one man holding a flashlight while the other carried a twelve-gauge repeating shotgun.” As no one before him had, Thomas Pynchon wove the rumor of alligators-in-the-sewers through a work of fiction. But is it all fiction?

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Thors Hammer

Treat is a new friend of mine. We shared two classes this semester. He’s a sophomore transferring from Norwich University. He is in the same NROTC unit I’m in here at USC. He’s lived in some very interesting places like Italy and the Netherlands. They move around to such cool places because his father is in the military and that’s where his father got orders to. Treat really likes ghost stories and Mythology. It was not hard interviewing him in the least bit. He had stories I had never heard of or could’ve even imagined.

Treat is also a Pagan. He believes in Norse ‘Mythology’. Oden and Thor and all the other gods of Asgard resemble a huge part of who he is. Treat started practicing in his sophomore year in high school. Below he told me the story of Thors Hammer.

Mjölnir the Norse word associated or given to Thors Hammer. In Translation in means “that which marks and pulverizes to dust”. Treat tells the story of how it came to be: Loki bets with Sindri and his brother Brokkr that they could never succeed in making anything better or more beautiful than Odins spear. Sindri and Brokkr accept the bet and start crafting some magic. The two workers worked until they made thei masterpiece.

Loki in the form of a fly came by and bit them yet they continued to work. Sindri takes out a boars shining bristles (Gullinbursti) and puts it into the forge along with the pig skin. Then they put fold. Loki in the disguise of the fly comes back and bites Brokkrs neck twice. But he stilled worked.

Then Sindri takes out Odins ring – this ring duplicates 8 versions of itself every ninth night. Lastly, Sindri put iron into the forge and they stop. Loki comes in one last time and bites his brother in the eye. He stops working and blood runs down his face. It was a hair too soon. When he took the hammer out it could only be wielded by one hand!

“They still won the bet – it’s Thors Hammer” said Treat. Loki get’s his mouth shut as a means of losing the bet. mjolnir_1

 

Friday The 13th

Treat is a new friend of mine. We shared two classes this semester. He’s a sophomore transferring from Norwich University. He is in the same NROTC unit I’m in here at USC. He’s lived in some very interesting places like Italy and the Netherlands. They move around to such cool places because his father is in the military and that’s where his father got orders to. Treat really likes ghost stories and Mythology. It was not hard interviewing him in the least bit. He had stories I had never heard of or could’ve even imagined.

Treat loves urban legends. I really like movies and documentaries about interesting and maybe even horrifying things. He put two and two together and started to chat about Friday the 13th. A great movie franchise! But where does the suspicion come from? What came first the movie or the bad luck?

Treat talks about an article that looked into what happens concerning accidents on the 13th. The article compared the ratio of traffic volume to the number of automobile accidents on two different dates including Friday the 13th. Over a period of years they mapped “the relation between health, behavior, and superstition surrounding Friday 13th.” Interestingly, they found that while consistently fewer people in the region sampled chose to drive their cars on Friday the 13th, the number of hospital admissions due to accidents was higher than on the other days.

Treat says:

“Friday 13th is unlucky.”

Me: How?

Treat: Because we make it unlucky.

Analysis: Sometimes we fall into our own traps. Things happen because we make them happen. Paraskevidekatriaphobics is the disease of those afflicted with a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th. It’s unwise to take solace in the results of a single scientific study though. Not all culture and society should change their habits because of one sample, especially one as weird as this. Surely these statistics have more to teach us about human physiology than the ill-fatedness of any particular date on the calendar. In the United States today. Some people refuse to go to work on Friday the 13th; some won’t dine in restaurants; many wouldn’t think of setting a wedding on that date. I know I won’t. So, how many Americans at the beginning of the 21st century actually suffer from this condition? You’d be surprised.

Cooties!

Sara is a very gossipy, religious, fun girl. Sophomore at USC, she’s in the Helene’s and a sorority. She’s from Anaheim, California. And she has an incredibly interesting memory and past.

We all know and remember this one from grade school. Boys and girls at their toddler age played with each other like it was nothing. Being a boy or being a girl did not impact the way they played with each other. They may have played with their given toys (dolls versus the fire truck), but overall gender had no role in a child’s fun. Once children get to that age where they start getting curious about what’s different between me and him, it’s time to scheme up some evil plan that will keep them from playing too much with each other. There is an appropriate time in society for boys and girls to start messing around with each other physically or sexually. Society isn’t ready to see their 5 year old girls sexualized. The idea of cooties makes it seem gross and almost wrong to touch the other sex. All in playful fun, it works in a way that doesn’t damage or influence there hormonal nature at about 8th grade.

Informant:

I remember when I was little, my parents freaked out. Me and my brother…[laugh], we were playing house in our little…house kitchen play thing. And at some point, my little brother pretended to get sick. So I played doctor. But my parents didn’t really like how I was trying to heal him.” Out of context that sounds awful. But she goes to explain that she was holding a magnifying glass looking at her siblings buttox. But nothing out of the ordinary. We all get curious to understand why we were made. It’s that time in the child’s life where all they can manage to do is get in their father’s ear and pester them with millions and millions of “why’s”.