Extra Credit

Her Ramblings…

Behold the radiance from the mighty sun! Feel the zephyr brushing against your body, and then listen carefully for the message it brings in its whispers. Ho! The waves of Ibiza are approaching your way from a distance, and it sings a song so mellifluous and so lyrical at the same time that you can’t help but heed the words uttered by each splash and thump your feet to follow its rhythm. And it sings: Liiistennn tooo whaaat I haaave tooo saaa– kringgggg, kringggggggggg, KRINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!

Good grief! Now you are telling me that it was all a dream? Reality is such a nightmare, I thought. So I went back to sleep again for some time when I realized that it’s a Monday! Then I quickly got off from my messy bed and brushed my teeth so hastily that I still had a lump of white foam sticking onto my peppermint-scented lips when I jumped into the shower. After grooming myself for what seemed like forever, I munched the last two pieces of bagels on the kitchen shelf and gulped my now half-empty chocolate-flavored soymilk, then hie me to the front door before I miss the 9:00 AM bus.

What a luck, I gasped. My speed proved to be worthless. The moment I caught my last breath was the moment the bus rode off from the bus stop. Sigh, how could I forget that it’s a Monday? Now I have to sacrifice some my points for the next assignment, just for being late! So then I tapped my feet impatiently while thinking I had to waste half an hour of my day just to wait for the next bus. Hold on. On second thought, no, I decided to make effective use of the time to continue reading Totto-chan: the Little Girl at the Window, the best-selling novel by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. That way, I would feel like time was flying.

Soon I was so immersed in Totto-chan’s tale that I didn’t realize the bus was waiting for me to hop in. I closed the book and got into the bus, feeling a little relaxed then after the rush earlier that morning.
“Next stop, Purdue Memorial Union.” I quickly got off the bus and ran towards Hovde Hall, the building where I have my College English Composition class for that semester (Spring 2007). That was my earliest morning class, and also the class that I was late for.

Nevertheless, it’s always better late than never. On that day, my generous instructor, Tom Glass, informed us about the extra credits he was willing to give for the class. Although I realized that I had been doing well so far throughout the semester, I still had the urge to write in every opportunity I could have. And so here I am, sitting in front of my Sony VAIO laptop, typing out my reflections of how I’ve done so far for this class while sipping a cup of hot latte. As I am pondering about the five assignments I had done, I come up with the decision to emphasize on the different and similar attitudes that I had to face these assignments.

The first assignment, Writer’s Autobiography, was basically a review of my life as a writer. I was to narrate the story of my development in writing ever since I got to know the alphabets. At the beginning, I briefly described my pre-teenage years when I used to write my personal problems and contemplations into my first journals. This was actually the underlying significance of my life as a writer. It not only cultivated my interest in writing today, but as I grow older, it also triggered me to stop myself from being narrow-minded and expand my thoughts to those topics that have a larger sphere, such as science and politics. Consequently in the field of art, the more an artist receives critiques and suggestions for their artworks, the more he or she will learn from their mistakes and improve in the future. However, to me, becoming a true artist takes more than manifesting your ideas successfully through visual means. I challenged myself to express my ideas verbally as effectively as I draw. Over the years I write more and more, and my sore hands were soon replaced by my energetic fingers that type like a robot on computers. Since then, I have always taken the advantage of my freedom of speech on the Internet, specifically to blog, up till today.

Just as how the first assignment has given me the opportunity to express a huge part of myself, the following assignments, too, has enabled me to write in my very own unique style, except that this time I had a lot more freedom. The assignments that were given since then until the end of the semester were part of a sequenced writing project, of which I would write about one topic that I’m interested in and would like to find out more about it. Since I was given that much freedom, I, without any hesitation, took the chance to write about what every woman loves: Women’s shopping.

The first part of this project was about my personal experience with shopping, when I spent a total of US$600.00 during the first three months I came to America for college. Then I had to interview my mother to ask for information about organizing a proper financial life, which was relevant, especially after the bad experience I described in the preceding assignment. Although the interview have helped me more than enough in changing my shopaholic habits in the future, I still had to do a literature review, where I did my research about how shopping addiction works and ways to control them. In the process, I think that it was fun to know the differences between shopping habits of men and women, especially when I found out that men buy what they are looking for, and women buy what they are looking at, and then ending up buying too many unnecessary items that they later regret. These three leading assignments turned out to be very helpful later on when I was working with my argumentative essay, of which I stood for the opinion: Shopaholics should record monthly transactions of their expenses in shopping for clothes and accessories. This time, I had to add a paragraph of audience analysis that turned out to help a lot in guiding the tone of my essay.

Just by seeing how distinct each assignment from one to another, there is no doubt that I definitely had more or less different attitudes when facing these assignments. One thing that I have practiced throughout the semester was to insert my personality into each of the assignments. Personally, I enjoyed working on the interview report most, as I was allowed to not only exhibit my own shopping habits, and therefore, my personality in the paper, I could also include a brief story of my family, especially my mother. I feel very excited when I can tell stories about the things I love, which includes shopping. But I became more enthusiastic when I can talk about shopping and also about the people I love together. I figured that when we write about what we love the most, it would give extra meaning (…and extra points too! For your information, I’ve got the highest point for this paper) to the essay, just like a love letter.

However, whenever there’s love there’s always hatred. I didn’t hate doing the literature review assignment, but I dislike the idea of summarizing. Although the assignment was pretty straightforward to me, I think that the result was boring. When summarizing, we were supposed to make a paragraph of the important points from an article, so we had to omit the details. To me, the details given in an essay give the most significance to the writing. Without giving specific examples for the reader, he or she would not fully understand our ideas. This is actually why I have always written papers which are longer than the length assigned, just like the one I am writing now. On the contrary, not many people would like to read a long paper just to get an idea, unless they are willing to find out more about what they are looking for and therefore, are willing to read the details of the essay. From my experience in writing a literature review in this class, I now notice the importance of writing a summary.

Now that I’ve talked about my reflections for this class, the attitudes I had when facing the assignments, and also brief opinions about them, I would probably go wash my tea cup and hope to get an A, and then get ready to sleep. Who knows I can go back to Ibiza island to listen to the whispers of the wind and to hear the songs of the waves, tuning up the hymns from Café Del Mar. Ahhh… paraíso! (and let’s hope I will never be late for class again!)

Sequenced Writing: Interview Report

Mother’s Words of Wisdom in Shopping

“Mom, I need your credit card information to pay for my new contact lenses. Please reply me ASAP.” A few seconds after I select the button “Send Message” on my mobile phone, my home telephone rang. My initial reaction was: Whoa, since she’s the one who made the call, then I won’t have to pay the phone bill for this session! Considering the “free” long-distance phone call, I decided to take advantage of her time and come up with some questions I have to ask her for my interview report assignment in my writing class.

“Are you fine, darling? Have you eaten your dinner? Here’s the information you asked for. By the way, I just bought Louis Vuitton’s latest Damier Canvas handbag! What do you think?” It’s obvious why I chose her as my interviewee just by listening to her first sentences on the phone. Mariaty Ng is a parent whose job is to control all of the financial aspects in her children’s lives. She’s also a woman who has spent 23 years of her married life learning how to resist her shopaholistic temptations upon receiving a monthly paycheck from her husband. Most importantly, she’s also a shopaholic herself who adores fashion, but knows how to manage her financial plans as a shopper, as a parent, and as a housewife. But the question is, how did she learn to balance her expenditures and savings at the same time while upholding both her responsibilities and her personal desires? Since the greatest lessons we learn in life are mostly based on personal experiences that we encounter through time, I asked her to flash a little blast from the past in chronological order: Before marriage, before children, and after children.

Before marrying father, mother was a very timid teenager. She had a very restricted life back then because my grandmother was overprotective. Mom wasn’t very happy with her monochrome life as a teenager – colorless in such a way that she never got the chance to be given what she truly wants versus her needs. During those times, mother resisted her inner desires by confining herself to achieving good grades, eating proper meals, and getting enough rest – basically doing what was needed to be done, only to satisfy her mother. So whenever she went to shop for clothes, the reasons were simply because the old ones were torn or because she gained weight. She listened obediently to her mother when she said “If you don’t need it, don’t buy it”, but grandma never knew that she dreamed of marrying someone soon to escape from her “prison.”

It was after my parents got married that all mother could see was the real world outside of her tiny bubble. The marriage was her dream that came true, because father was the one who went to her rescue from prison, and also happened to be someone who came from a wealthy family. For the first time in her life, she was given the freedom to buy whatever she wants. Although she was finally given the privilege to spend her money in any way she wanted, she never left behind the “don’t need, don’t buy” idea from her mother whenever she went for a shopping spree. The idea left permanent footprints throughout the rest of my mother’s life, and it would largely affect how she manages her money from then on. Whenever she’s shopping, this idea would cross her mind and make her either reconsider buying the item, or, if she liked the item, she would compare the same item with many different stores just to pay for the lowest price possible.

It didn’t take more than a year until my elder brother was born. The thought of my father providing full financial support for starting a family also came to mind, especially when father and mother decided to have only three children, of which, by the way, I was the youngest and also the only daughter. Ever since she became a mother, she has always held the responsibility to prevent herself from blundering parenting needs with her personal happiness. Children’s needs became the first priority ahead of everything else, so there was a decrease in the amount of expenditures on clothes, handbags and shoes as to her year of honeymoon .

As we can see from these experiences mother had been through in the separated timelines of her life, the foundation of her present shopping habit came from grandma’s idea of “don’t need, don’t buy.” The question now is, how does she actually apply all the things she has learned into her shopper’s life today?

What I’ve noticed over the years is that she keeps each of us children a journal containing records about the expensive Chinese herbs and other essential food supplements we’ve consumed each month, since her children’s health is on top of her priority list in parenting. As for our allowance, father is the one responsible for handing 25 USD to each of us every week. Mother also fixed a specific amount of wages for each of our housemaids per week and also a number of 1,000,000,000 Rupiah (approximately 10,990 USD) as the maximum amount of money she can spend for her personal shopping activities within two months. Since that maximum number was pretty huge, she kept another notebook for herself to record every major expense she made, such as Louis Vuitton’s Damier Canvas handbag, which costs up to 1,030 USD. This was done to keep track of her own transactions so that she won’t faint at the end of the year when she reads her annual credit card billing information from the bank. Thankfully, she only buys expensive goods once in every two months, because the larger sum of money was meant to be spent on weekly grocery shopping. Now the question is, what are the things she considers before buying an item?

Let me give you an example of how shopping works for her when deciding whether or not I should buy my contact lenses. Colored toric lenses are specially made according to your doctor’s prescription if you have done an eye checkup recently, which is why they are very expensive. You can no longer find colored toric lenses in Indonesia, as the optical services have stopped ordering for imports of this product. For this reason, my mom suggested me to buy this type of lenses while I am in America, no matter how much it costs. She wouldn’t mind if it was so expensive that she had to sacrifice her personal shopping days. Like I said, her children’s needs are above everything else.

Although to some people toric lenses don't have to be colored, having the color itself is just for the sake of fashion. However, toric lenses that are tailored to the degrees of your eyes are a must to enhance your vision. Besides needing the item, fashion is also in the wish-list. So in this case, mother has no problems at all in handing over a huge sum of money in return for the many advantages. That was how she had suggested colored toric lenses over normal toric lenses for me.

“…So the important thing is for you to think carefully whether something is worth buying or not; are you going to use it often? Is it durable enough for you to use it longer? More importantly: DO YOU LIKE IT?” Of course she doesn’t want to be like grandma who wanted her daughter to find only what she needs, without listening to the deepest desires within her daughter’s heart. She understood how I want to make shopping an activity that I can enjoy as much as possible, and also came up with a system of managing her finance to provide basic family and housing maintenance. Even though she is not responsible for her children’s weekly allowance, as a mother she has to teach us how to shop sensibly and why should we do so. Otherwise, she might really faint at the end of the year and we would have to ask dad for help. Nevertheless, mother’s belief in buying only what I need, but also what I like, is what truly makes shopping not only useful, but also enjoyable.

97/100

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Stacia,

Your paper is not only entertaining and informative, but it also reveals quite a bit about your mother’s life and her values. Great paper! My only question when I finished reading it was this: Do your brothers have the same kind of shopaholic tendencies as you?

Perspectives

These are only sketches for myself to understand the concept of linear perspectives. At first during the lecture in class, I really don't understand how to look at something from one-point or two-point perspectives. How can you ask me to look at something from a three-point perspective? (Bird's and worm's eye views) After making these sketches I finally understand how to spot vanishing points. You know how women just can't think 3-Dimensionally.

Three ISN'T a Crowd

Still-Life of grapes, an apple, and bananas.
See how they look good together?
That's why being a threesome is never too crowdy.

Summer Sky