The Three-Day Blow

I really enjoyed “The Three-Day Blow.”  I think Hemingway was writing about a stage that every teenager goes through.  Nick is at an age in the story where he is going through changes in his life and his personality.  He is trying to find out what he wants out of life, when he wants it, and what direction he should take to get there. 

                I believe that Nick decides to drink in an attempt to flood his emotions away.  He responds to Bill with simple answers and multiple times he says nothing at all.  I think Hemingway does this to show how deep in contemplation Nick is about everything.  He is sitting, thinking, and drinking, hoping to find an answer to his question of whether he did the right thing by pushing Marjorie away. 

                When Nick starts to believe that he has a chance to change things and that nothing is permanent, a weight lifts off of his shoulders and he has hope for the future.  This is an experience I can relate to in my own life.  I know that sometimes I wonder whether I made the right decision for my life but knowing that everything is never over just because of one decision, is always reassuring.  We all have the ability to change our lives and steer ourselves in a new direction from the one we are heading in now.

                This short story showed me a new side of Nick.  I now see Nick as a teenager in transition, who cannot decide between being a free man like Bill and becoming a family man with Marjorie.  In my view, he likes the freedom but he needs a woman.  He wants what his father doesn’t have, and by the end of the story, he realizes that it is all still attainable.

                The story is set in a time in history where there is a massive change going on in America that is even larger than Nick’s own changes.  The world around Nick is evolving into a modern age, and this transformation contributes to Nick’s confusion.  He has to find his place in this new world, and he has options that are conflicting. 

This story is relevant to teenagers growing up in the world today, also.  There are many changes occurring, that in my opinion, can either be good or bad.  We rely so much on technology that our personal relationships may suffer in the future.  Our communication is through the internet and smart phones, and the world feels smaller than ever before.  This is good for business and economic growth, but it can be debilitating when it comes to our human need to feel connected to other people on an intimate level.  “The Three-Day Blow” got me thinking about the changes in my own life, and I think it’s a story that still holds true today and will forever.

2nd Meeting with Hana Jang

Today, I met with Hana again after her class, but this time she brought a friend from class with her.  Her friend’s name is Oliver, and she is also from South Korea.  Oliver lives in Keller, Texas at the time, and she has 2 daughters, one 14 and one 12.  It was interesting to me that she was willing to come all the way to Texas to learn English, especially having two children.  I guess that shows how dedicated she is to learning a new language that will help her achieve her goal of becoming a teacher. 

We all ate together at Union Grounds.  They got sushi, and I got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  They were surprised at my sandwich and said they had never had one before.  That was shocking to me, since most American kids live on them at one point or another.  They were also shocked that I didn’t like sushi or fish.  They looked at each other and laughed when I told them I didn’t like it.  They were in disbelief and kept trying to get me to try some of it.

I asked Oliver about how school is in Korea, and she told me that in college the normal weekly hours are 18-21.  I thought that was interesting because we only see 12 hours as being full time, with most people taking 15 hours on average.  It made me think that our cultural differences might not be just language or food.  I think that as Americans we take education seriously but not as seriously as many other countries around the world.

Another cultural difference I realized is that we address people differently in American culture than they do in Korea.  Hana told me that since Oliver is an older woman, she greets her with a bowing of the head instead of a simple “hey.”  I never noticed that we don’t really have different ways of addressing one another according to age, unless we are writing a letter with either Miss or Mrs.  It never would have occurred to me that they would have specific ways to greet each other according to their age. 

I feel like I’m learning a lot of things from Hana, and it was good to meet with her friend Oliver and get another perspective.  Overall, they are just like any other college student.  Both of them told me that they hate to wake up early, and they like to hang out with friends and go out on the weekends just like everyone else.  I’m realizing that we have some strong similarities, but we also have some really cool differences that are fun to find out about.

VOGUE

I found an issue of Vogue from August 1, 1936.  It was in a collection of other issues of Vogue from around the same period.  I wasn’t expecting it to be so different from our modern magazines, but I found that it was unique in a lot of ways.  First of all, almost all of the depictions of clothing and shoes were drawn out by an artist, which makes the magazine feel more personal.  I would like to see more hand-drawn pictures in our modern magazines.  I feel like if you create something with a computer application, you can make a more colorful and detailed picture, but you miss out on the hand-drawn and creative feel.

The article that drew my attention was one on page 72 titled “Adventures in Education.”  In the article, College of Bennington was profiled.  Bennington is a women’s college located in rural Vermont.  The way the author of the article described the college was different from how we see writing in women’s magazines today.  There was a great deal of figurative language and the college is described as having “shed a lot that we thought belonged to colleges, as the modern maiden has shed grandmother’s stays and petticoats.”  The author was showing through this statement that what we think belongs is always evolving, and we have the ability to change what is perceived as normal.

Within the article, there were photographs of women who attended the college, participating in activities like sculpting and painting.  It reminded me of a summer camp that I went to when I was younger.  If I had seen these pictures without the article, I would not immediately think of an academic college.  Instead, I would think about an art school or club.  Bennington College got many of its plans and ideas from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.  Sarah Lawrence did not have a set curriculum and “in an economics course, students find themselves reading proletarian novels along with statistics.”  The courses changed from year to year, and the classes were never quite what you would expect.

After reading through the article and other sections of the magazine, I got a strong sense that women at the time were searching for a change.  Most of the articles made use of the word “modern” many times throughout, signifying that women did not want to be associated with the old-fashioned views of the mothers and grandmothers.  Women were seeking education, expression through fashion, and a sense of individuality.

 In my view, the 1930’s was an incredibly important time to the transformation of our society.  Women wanted a voice and they passed on that attitude down to their children.  The fact that I am now in college studying the same curriculum as men my age would have been looked upon favorably to many of the women at that time.  Without modernist views from women in the past, women’s rights and other progressions in our society may not have been possible.