No days off

            The second week of Sweeney’s English 102 class began on with a day off of school because of MLK Day, which sadly, I spent working my life away at the carnival (Shoe Carnival) like usual.

In class on Wednesday, “The Yellow Wallpaper” was the story that was up for discussion. In this short story, a woman who suffered from a slight depression and some anxiety problems, was taken on a summer vacation by her husband. He wanted their vacation to be almost like a treatment for her, she was especially not supposed to work or write. But as the story began, she was completely intrigued by the huge house, especially one room in particular. The room that she had become so fascinated with became a reason for her to write in her journal because her husband would not listen to her curiosities about the room. She believes that there is a woman trapped in the wallpaper and quickly became extremely bothered by it and decided to lock herself in the room so that she could set the woman free by ripping the wallpaper off. When her husband realized what she was doing he tried to stop her. Apparently when he finally got the door open, he fainted in the doorway. His wife’s last words in the story were “I had to creep over him every time!” which left me with a creepy but curious feeling.

Elephants are my favorite animals but “Hills Like White Elephants” was definitely not one of my favorite stories that we have read so far for class. This story was simple, although I will admit that it annoyed me. It was pretty much just a conversation between two people who I had assumed to be a couple that took place at a train station bar while they waited. What I gathered from this story was that the female character was pregnant and was unsure about whether or not she was going to keep the baby or not. She seemed to be making her decisions based off of what the male character wanted. That’s what mostly annoyed me about this story, even though the two characters were probably a couple I think that the woman should have made her own decision without letting somebody else influence her.