Sammy's Musings and Insights

I know as a single woman, it is expected to be with a family on Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Well, on Thanksgiving I am covered because friends always invite me somewhere, sometimes but not always.  I decided that regardless of that, I still keep these holidays special to me in my own way and so I made a list of traditions I love and some I think I may incorporate: 1) No After Thanksgiving Black Friday shopping--this is thanks to moving to the Bay Area and seeing how crazed shoppers are here. (This is like Ramadan for me as a recovering shopaholic) 2) Celebrating Advent by going to Mass on Sunday 3) Putting up the tree and decorations 4) Lighting my candles on Winter Solstice 5) Watching A Christmas Carol and Miracle on 34th Street on DVD 6) Go see the Nutcracker 7) Attend Christmas Eve Mass 8) See a movie on Christmas and eat at Denny's (I started this in 2002 with my sister) New ideas for this year: 1) Attend Las Posadas (Spanish-American trad...

Despite my disappointment and frustration I had at the Anne Rice signing, I have to give her credit for this: for the best writing advice I ever got from her.  This advice was is that there are no rules to writing.  I am glad she has said that because there have been times in class where I felt like I was restricted in my writing and my creativity and felt like my writing was being hinged.  This happened to me again last week in my American Women's Literature class.  Our assignment was to write a memoir piece that shaped our identity cultural, spriritually, etc.  It had to reflect on our gender identity and values.  Unfortunately, my first draft of my essay, it was not acceptable because it did not meet her requirements.  So I had to ask myself what experiences shaped me as a woman and my gender identity.  I ended up writing about an experience about being bisexually curious.  I was off and running on this and the ideas were comin...

Can I even call it a meeting?  More like I just had a quick word while she signed my copy of her latest novel "Prince Lestat", on Wed. over at Books Inc.  The only word I can sum up my experience is disappointing. I have been a eager fan of her books for fourteen years, since I was an accounting student over at Solano Community College.  Her Vampire Chronicles began to heal me from a depression I was feeling about myself: a 20 year old college student who was unsure of herself and what she wanted to do with her life.  Especially when I was being encouraged to take up accounting and was not completely sure if this was the career choice for me.  Of course, I still finished the accounting program at the college, but I was still feeling empty.  Then came the days when she became self-proclaimed Catholic again.  My knowledge of religion and faith were foreign to me.  Trying to understand the mystery of faith was something I never could grasp or eve...

Today I just saw an article of a group called 4chan users, who have started a smear campaign against Emma Watson for her speech to the UN on feminism.  Part of this smear campaign is the threat of posting nude pictures of herself to the internet.  How distasteful can people get?  And why threaten someone like Emma, who is peacefully making her voice heard about a subject she cares about: women's equality and feminism?  How far will someone go to make sure a woman's voice is shut down permanently? This corresponds to a topic I was reading in Psychology about conformity.  In society, women are expected to be the weaker sex, the submissive sex, the docile sex.  As the generations passed, women are evolving into strong, proactive, intelligent thinkers, movers and shakers, and as we all know evolution is a process in the change of the world.  Yet there are people out there, like these users, who feel by smearing Emma and her speech, they can make women li...

This week, Emma Watson gave a powerful message about women and equality.  It brought me back to one of my first writing assignments about women and feminism.  Below is the writing assignment I did regarding radical heterosexuality.  Enjoy!!! Naomi Wolf's article, "Radical Heterosexuality", brings up a grey area of how a woman can be feminist woman and yet still be a wife to her husband. She brings up a question in the beginning of the article: "By day, they fight gender injustice, by night they sleep with men. Is this a dual life? A core contradiction? Is sleeping with a man 'sleeping with the enemy'?" (1) In other words, how can a woman be wanting gender freedom and equal rights if she is also affectionate with a man? How can she have the same power and freedom as a man when she is also seeking affection and attention from them and giving them the same? Is it possible to have it both ways. Wolf brings up a point that being a radical femi...

I have seen magical realism prominent in many of Isabel Allende's novels such as House of the Spirits and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's short stories and novels such as In the Time of Cholera . I have also seen it in American novels too, such as Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells and The Sugar Queen . It is a genre I love because it brings the fantastical inside the reality of the novel. Magical realism has the power to grasp the reader into the story or novel and get a dose of reality mixed with fantasy. What exactly is magical realism and how does it fit in with Garcia-Marquez's story? According to Postcolonialstudies.emory.edu, magical realism is a literary device that brings out two perspectives: “ one based on a so-called rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality”. In other words it is the merging of the supernatural with the actual existence in the story. The reader can see this firsthand in the story ...

Another assignment post that I think is relevant to this blog because it focuses on literature and is related to my writings on Latin American writers.  Enjoy!!! What is the definition of a Latina writer? How is it different from being a Latino writer? In my Week Two response of what is a Latino writer, I had concluded that “besides the author that wrote it, it must be a piece that Latin-Americans can relate to, like history or experience.” I still stand by that principle with a Latina writer, like Sandra Cisneros. Why would our publishing want to distinguish Latina writer from Latino writers, just because of the gender? Do they thing this will make it easier to sell a book just because an author like Cisneros is a woman and cannot be in the same category as Junot Diaz and Roberto Bolano? Just because the gender of the author changes does not mean she is less of a writer than a Latino writer. Unlike Bolano and Diaz, who were born outside the United States, Cisnero...