Neal chapman blog post 4 9/22/13   

            The lighting crackled in the sky, illuminating the fog. I glace up to see if I could spot a glimpse of the moon, no luck. I couldn’t believe that I was doing this, going into the forest at night. Still my friends were there with me all the time, saying stuff like, “don’t worry, we got your back,” and, “just follow us, it will be alright”. Even with my friends there, my heart was still beating out of my chest, my eyes dilated; I could feel the adrenalin pumping in my veins.

            Let’s start back in the beginning. I was doing what I do most every Friday night, sitting in my room with my friends playing Xbox and watching TV, the usual teenage things. When out of nowhere AJ said we should go on an adventure, Kris glanced at the mediocre south park episode on TV and agreed. “I don’t know guys, it’s really dark outside and I don’t want my parents to get mad at me,” I pleaded with them, “don’t be a women, its fine,” AJ responded. I groaned as I got up, “fine let me just grab my jacket, it looks like it’s going to start storming”.

            Back In the forest my breath was hanging in front my mouth, the chill striking to the bone while I was running trying to catch up to my friends. They had run ahead laughing at me for being nervous. The darkness of the trees was suffocating, the only light coming from my phone screen. “Guys, come on! Stop acting like this and comeback,” I yelled into the darkness. As if it was a movie, lighting crackled when right when I said that. “Guys, seriously stop!” I yelled back out.  I heard whispers come back, “just follow us, it will be alright,” coming from deeper into the forest. I followed the voice as it sounded like Kris. So I went deeper into the dark, cold, scary forest.

I didn’t want to go back and just be made fun of and be called a woman. I already had a hard time making friends, AJ and Kris are the only people who I could get to hang out with me. The only reason that they did hang out with me is because I would offer my house to have parties and they could do any illegal things they wanted. I had met the two of them about a month ago when they sat next to me at lunch. I would usually sit by myself at lunch reading a book. I was surprised when they sat down but my surprise went even higher when Kris asked if I wanted to host a party at my house. I had never hosted a party before and it had sounded like fun. My parents, wanting me to fit in with kids more, had allowed me to hold a party while they turned a blind eye. It was the best night of my life, I was finally a cool kid, I finally fit in and people knew my name.

Back in the forest, I was following the whispers. The whispers seemed to never be getting closer or getting too far away, it seemed to just wander, always changing direction, not following a straight path. After an hour of walking I finally got closer to the whispers. The whispers stopped in a clearing of the woods, but there was nothing there. No AJ, no Kris, but the whispers never stopped. They just keep on saying, “follow us, it will be okay,” the whispers never stopped. I wanted to make the whispers stop but they never would. Where my friends and what are these whispers. I laid down in the clearing with the never stop whispers, “come with us,” “come with us,” “come with us,” “come with us,” “You’ll never leave”.

The women woke up, a knock at her door startling her awake. She stumbled towards the door, opening it just a crack to keep the cold out. “Miss, we need to talk to you about your son, we found him in the forest,” said a policemen “what are you talking about, he’s upstairs in bed,” “I’m sorry but we found him dead, he seemed to have wandered into the woods by himself and just fell asleep, he died of exposure,” she immediately ran upstairs and checked in on her son. The room was empty. The woman fell to her knees crying, “No, no, this can’t be”.

A couple of weeks later the woman was talking to her husband, “I had hoped that after he threw that party by himself he would have more friends, but then every night he would just sit in his room alone and talk to himself,” the man just put his arm around his wife and she put her head on his shoulder and they stayed like that for the next hour.

Neal Chapman
blog post 3
In Bartleby, the scrivener, Bartleby is a scrivener, or better known as a scribe, who is working for a unnamed lawyer who acts as the narrator for the story. He starts out being good at his job, but when asked to review his work her just says "I would prefer not to." After this, Bartleby wont do anymore work, all her reply's with is just, "I would prefer not to." This drives the narrator crazy, making him go as far as to move his entire office, with out telling bartleby.

Something is wrong with Bartleby in a mental sort of way. The way he suddenly refuses to do any work and just repeats the same phrase over and over again leads me to believe he is autistic. Autistic people a lot of the time will focus on one thing and not be able to get it our of their heads. After he tells the lawyer he wont work at all, he still lives in the office. His inability to leave a place where he once called home is again a big sign that he is slightly autistic. i am not saying that he has an inability to work in the normal workforce, I am saying that he has a case of slight autism. there are more signs of him being autistic, such as, the fact that he wont go to the lawyers house, his inability to communicate with the police.

When the narrator sees Bartleby living in the office even though he refuses to do any work, he feels bad for him at first. but, when he starts to lose business because people are disturbed to see a man living in a law office. The narrator went as far as to invite Bartleby to live in his own house. Bartleby gets kicked out of the office but then continues to live in his office building. people have warned the narrator that they will call the police to get bartleby to leave. Bartlebys not wanting to leave indicates an inability to change, and people with autism also have a hard time making changes. They get comfortable in a situation and cant handle changing that, Bartleby also can't leave the office because he has made it his home. the biggest problem people with autism have is trying to communicate with other people. Bartleby can't tell the narrator why he can't work, he just repeats the same phrase over and over again whenever he does not want to do the work. As I have worked with special needs kids, i am comfortable in making my assumption that Bartleby is autistic and just needed someone who understood his condition to help him and to save his life.

Neal Post 2 AP Lit
I am supposed to respond to something that we read or discussed in the class. Considering that we only read one story, I guess I will be talking about the Birthmark. What I found amusing in this story was the gender stereotypes. Both the women and the man did exactly what you thought they would do. The women was weak, unable to convince her husband of anything. The man was a awful, awful person, telling his wife how to make herself perfect. Lets start the with the man.
The man is a terrible husband. He is a controlling mentally abusing person. He physiologically forces his wife to hate herself. His wife starts off being happy with who she was, until this man changes her. He does it upfront by telling her that he could remove it, at first she did not quite understand what he was getting at. then he hits her with the verbal punch of telling her she was so close to being perfect but the birthmark ruined her. This is exactly how a lot men are portrayed, as the stronger, but a lot meaner, person in a relationship. When his disgust at her causes her to faint, he realizes that he has hurt her, then goes through the abusive husband phase of regret, and pampers her. although, when he finds his wife spying on him, he goes back to being abusive and starts to yell at her. this is just like how abusive people will always be abusive and can't change. At the end of the story when the wife dies, the husband is happy that he got rid of the birthmark.Now lets move onto the wife.
The wife is the perfect example of the weak women in a relationship. She just lets her husband push her around mentally. at the begging of the story, when her husband tells her that she is not perfect, she just accepts it as a fact. she is not a strong independent women, but is instead, completely dependent on what her husband thinks. even after she realized that her husband couldn't stand to look at her, she did not leave him, she tried to change her self physically to please him. she wanted to make him happy so hard that she went as far as to risk her life, drinking a potion that she knew could kill her. when she woke up from her nap and knew that she was dying, she was not mad at her husband, but happy because he had cured her of the birthmark.
Altogether the story does a good job of exemplifying the roles of women and men in relationships. the man is abusive, controlling, and strong arms his wife into doing things that at first she did not want to do. The wife is weak, emotionally dependent, and dies to make her man happy. she is who i would tell my daughter (I really hope i don't have a daughter) to not be.