In a complete opposite universe for the Lisbon girls

AOI and such

My AOI is communication and story telling as survival tools. My questions are who survives by communicating and who dies by the lack? why do those who survive do so? How is possible people are completely shut out (lisbons)? How do false stories aid or hinder survival.
This is the story of the boys telling their story. The passage on 182 that starts with "how long could we remain true to the girls?" show how the boys are reflecting in this moment and realizing the story they had been telling is wrong. They say "our talismans ceased to work" (182), showing their loss of communication with the girls whom the boys were unsure about the level of interest of the girls. It helped them function thinking the girls shared similar interests. This fallacy was beneficial to the boys during the time when they originally struggling to figure out the girls and what was going on but once they realized their thinking was skewed, the inaccuracy hurt them because they lost the confidence in their observational skills that they thought they had.

*reads salad section

Area's of Interest (FTB)

 The Myth of american Happiness (AOI)
- Difference between detroit and wealthy suburb
- False Paradise (rotting flowers)
- Lawns
- Flowers
- Day of grieving

Isolation(AOI)
False Protection(AOI)
Blame(AOI)
Story as Tool to Survive(AOI)
Gender(AOI)
Sex and Sexuality(AOI)
Burning/Light(AOI)
Loss of Innocence(AOI)
Narration, Passive/Active(AOI)

Little sauce back to Trip

Not gonna lie I thought Trip was a baller, but when he basically ditched Lux I was like, "Sir!!!"

This doesn't have anything to do with my area of interest but I just thought it was interesting. I was playing squash with a French girl that goes to Trinity the other day and I asked her if she wanted to stay in the United States after college. And she replied "yes I would never want to go back to France. Everyone is so angry all the time. I know people say Americans are really fake but I'd rather work with people who are at least pretending to be happy…it's much more pleasant and it's not like everyone is fake..it's actually quite easy to find genuine people". This related to  when the narrators were talking about Mrs. Karafilis and she said "What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time" (169). It was just a coincidence because I was just talking about it to my squash instructor.

When Asha asks you a question in class

Replacement

For some reason I find it so interesting how the idea if replacement is found so often throughout the book. Like Cecelia replacing herself with the memory of herself and Trip replacing his normal self with almost an addiction to Lux to nothing. Why does this happen? What causes the replacement? Why to the characters replace themselves with such specific objects or ideas?

Trip is no longer the boy!

Trip was so chill and now i hate him. All of the sudden he just decided that he didnt like Lux anymore... the whole reading just made me really mad in general. The fact he still remembers the kiss with bonnie was also weird.

Flowers (not as boring as you think)

My group never got to present on tuesday so I figured I would outline a little of what we talked about here. We focused on pages 104 and 105. The plants were living in a "false paradise" (104). We drew connections between the garden of Eden and the paradise. All that is left is the "aroma of a rotting world" (104). The granddaughter of the women who planted the flowers "volunteer[s] her time in the hope of restoring the flowers" (105), but it is hopeless. Unlike the boys who want to save the girls, but never try, the granddaughter tries to save the flowers, but knows it is hopeless. The girls resemble the flowers in many ways, they are both described as falling apart and disheveled, and Muffie Perry could smell the "odor of the girls' grief "(105).

I also recognized that the false paradise they live in is their own. The parents created a myth for themselves (perfect houses, lawns, and families), but they don't even believe in it. Their whole lives are an illusion which brought me back to the line, "we realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their care taking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns" (52).

ALSOOOO

Another thing i saw…. on page 131...When Uncle Tucker said "It was the kind of music they play when you die" referring to the background music playing from the house, it made me think if it was the death of the Lisbon girls' social life. If it was the last time they were going to leave the house "freely" because of Lux's bad girl attitude and coming home late. I use the word freely, in a loose way because they were never really free because even at the dance Mr. Lisbon was chaperoning them sooooo

wasn't planning on it

Okay, so my original plan was to comment on someone else's blog post because I didn't really want to write one. BUTTT after i say this line on page 128, I just had to. When Therese says "Cecilia was weird, but we're not. We just want to live. If anyone would let us." This go me wondering. Who wasn't letting them. Their parents? for keeping them all locked up and caged like animals. or was it everyone else who keeps comparing them Cecilia and thinking that if Cecilia was weird and suicidal then they must be too. So which on is it? Or is there another "anyone"? I have no idea, but it got me to post on the blog, so props to Jeffrey Eugenides.

First Blog Post!

Throughout my reading of this novel I continue to find sections filled with lots of interesting points and other parts where I feel totally lost and bored. That might just be the nature of the book... Anyways, I finally found a line that actually stood out to me. "Grief is natural....Overcoming it is a matter of choice" (pg. 100). How great is that line!! That basically sums up all that we have been talking about with survival etc... We have all experienced grief and loss in our lives, but it's interesting to think about how we each individually overcome it. Some people mourn for years and fall into a state of depression, and others take a more postive approach and remember the happy times and try to move on. Cleary quickly getting over the loss of someone is not easy, but figuring out how to is even harder. 

Side Note: I totally felt that pages 104-105 were the most useless pages ever, but thats just my opinion! 

I also just wanted to quickly look at the differences between the sisters. On page 106, the author disucusses the various activites each sister joined after the death of Cecilia and I was just wondering if you guys thought that their activities had anything to say for their personailites? 

Therese - Science Club

Mary - Help divorce lady sew costumes for school play

Bonnie - Christian fellowship meeting at house of Mike Firkin

Lux - Tried out for school musical

I don't know what to title this

A section of the reading that i found to be interesting was the lead up to the dance. As the narrators says "Only when the girls reached the bottom did the boys realize they hadn't decided who was taking whom"(117).  Almost the entire football team wee begging Trip to choose them to be dates for the Lisbon's, but none of them really knew who the others were. The idea of just being near the Lisbon's was more intoxicating to the boys then even the sisters themselves were.

"Then like a jerk...

'Its really sad when he dies.' I wasnt even thinking. Grace Hilton elbowed me and i turned purple. It got totally quiet."

On page 99 do you think that bonnie would have made this a big deal had the other girls not made it a big deal? It seems like they're making it difficult for her to be normal by acting this way...why is even the mention of death in a way that has nothing to do with her sister such a big deal...just something i thought about while reading..

Flatness

I have reached an "ah-ha" moment about the idea of flatness.  When we think of flatness we think of lack of uniqueness and individuality. At this point in the story, Cecelia obviously felt like she was not an individual. This is the reason why she did several actions to scream out for the attention she lacked: the wedding dress and even her first suicide attempt. Her need to be different and noticed led to her ultimate death. The one spot she found the was not flat, the fence, is the spot of her death. Once that was taken away, her suicide became less noticed by others and on page 90, most of the town had "forgotten about Cecelia's suicide." Ironically, she was buried in the non-flat cemetary. However, all the sisters need individuality. The lawn represents their need to stand out from the rest of the neighborhood's tidiness as an act of individuality and social recognition. 

When youre trying to be clandestine and bae keeps asking you about it

Mr. Lisbon and co.

I found an interesting idea that we hadn't really talked about yet in the reading. When Trip is ending his conversation with Mr. Lisbon "he could tell how starved Mr. Lisbon was for a son, because he spoke he got up and gave Trip's shoulders three sporting shakes." (109). It makes me think that might be some of reason for his lack of connection with his daughters. He may not necessarily neglect them, but he doesn't see eye to eye with them. He seems clueless when it comes to his daughters and maybe not having any sons probably plays into that. Either way its ostensible that there is something not right about these parents. Id be interested to here other theories about the parents.

Individualization

One thing that stood out to me was a longer quote on page 107, "Other people filed Cecilia's memory away more easily. When they spoke of her, it was to say that they had always expected Cecilia to meet a bad end, and that far from viewing the Lisbon girls as a single species, they had always seen Cecilia as apart, a freak of nature. Mr. Hillyer summed up the majority sentiment at the time: "Those girls have a bright future ahead of them. That other one was just going to en up a kook."
Everyone seems to be individualizing Cecilia as the "weird" sister or the odd one out of their single species. Isn't this what Cecilia wanted? Or is it the fact that she's still the "strange" one in the group, still addressing her as in the group?

When someone makes an awesome comment in class

When the reading makes sense

Mundane (VAP)

I was googling the vap words for their definitions and when I put in mundane I came across this really cool article about how this guy makes really cool sculptures out of mundane objects. Here is a picture of one of his creations:

More Equations

Today during our passage unpacking, it occurred to me that Lux seemed healthier/more radiant after the car episode. while leaving Trip feeling dead. I think this shows the happy medium in relationships, intimate in the minds or just the body, that if one feels more than the other it can drain them while leaving the other feeling pleased with themselves and their "conquest." Lux lacks any type of love, while trip constantly has physical "love", so Trip is trying to fill the lack of real love with Lux, while she does not particularly care what type she gets. Therefore she is the stronger in this situation and walks away feeling good, while trip sits wondering what just happened. It is like a chemical equation with a limiting reagent, one is all used up, while the other still has more left to be used elsewhere. Trip is the limiting reagent, he is spent/all dried up.

When Asha says we are in fact the boys

Lux's behavior

A place in the reading that caught my eye was on page 84, when Dr. Hornicker says that "Lux's promiscuity was a commonplace reaction to emotional need"(84). While the doctor has been portrayed as truly terrible in his practice, how much of his statement is true? On page 82 Trip says that sitting in the Lisbon living room was like "a dead planet"(81). My final question brought on by this quote is that if the doctor is right, how much of this type of behavior are the other girls going to show?

'Trip'ing out the window

Trip says all sorts of important things during the reading, but one that stood out to me is on page 80 where he comments, "You would have killed yourself just to have something to do." The entire passage from Trip's time at the Lisbon home reeks of boredom and "bland entertainment" (80). Furthermore it gives me the impression that the girls live in a soul sucking psychiatric hospital padded room. Their mother doesn't let them do anything, from judging the suitability of the TV shows to poking Lux's toes with a knitting needle when they rest on the table. Perhaps it is this lack of freedom and identity that drives the girls to suicide.

Don't Trip

Trip Fontaine is an interesting character in this book, in some ways he is similar to the boys, but he "never mixed up the Lisbon girls so theres a difference" (75). As a character he is described at first as that smooth guy who did whatever he wanted to. For some reason, (I don't know what it is) "he didn't understand how she had bewitched him, nor having done so she promptly forgot his existence, and in desperate moods he asked his mirror why the only girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him. (76).  Why doesn't Lux like Trip? She doesn't seem like the person who would go for him however given his prior description it seems a little weird that she doesn't want to acknowledge him. Why does she eventually acknowledge him and agree to hang out with him even if the scene is really weird ? It seems almost out of obligation she does so. He is far more vocal than the boys about to Lux but the boys seem to have a deeper interest.

For me, an important quote/moment in the reading was "Sometimes we caught sight of tattered knee socks rounding a corner, or came upon them doubled over, shoving books into a cubbyhole, flicking the hair out of their eyes. But it was always the same: their white faces drifting in slow motion past us, while we pretended we hadn't been looking for them at all, that we didn't know they existed." I find this quote disturbing because of the obsession that the boys have with these girls. It makes me wonder if this sort of obsession with them played some part in the suicides that we know come later.

The Fence

On page 50, Mr. Frank describes Cecilia's death as "an accident waiting to happen" and then Mrs. Zaretti goes on to say "'our kids could jump on it, too'". Everyone seems to be blaming the fence or refusing to see Cecilia's death as a suicide. Later, on page 51, the narrator says "the murdering fence came loose" as if it were the fence that decided to kill Cecilia. I found these three lines really bothered me. They made me wonder why everyone is coming up with reasons why Cecilia's death wasn't technically a suicide and why it "was listed in the church records as an 'accident'" (34).

A key line

This line really stuck out to me/spoke to me, it reminded me of so many different books I have read, but also something I have realized growing up. The narrators write, "We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their care taking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns" (52). This idea/line really resonated with me.

This whole freaky religious thing.

On page 4, when Cecilia first tried to kill herself, Eugenides describes the scene in a freaky and religious way. He identifies the EMTs as "the two slaves offering the victim to the altar (lifting the stretcher into the truck)" and he describes Cecilia as "the drugged virgin rising up on her elbows". My question is, why does everything have to be so religious. This was kind of creepy religious too. By that I mean, why did Eugenides feel the need to even compare the EMTs as "slaves offering the victim to the altar"? I get that the whole book is based off of religious things like the whole virgin mary thing, and the Lisbon family being all conservative and religious. But I don't understand why at that moment he wanted to describe the EMTs as "slaves offering the victim to the altar". What altar? Who were they offering it to? Why are the EMTs slaves? I think this is a key line because it shows the creepiness and religious aspect of the book even though I may not understand the reasoning behind it completely.

Nobility

While reading, one line really stuck out to me. On page 53, it says "For a moment our century was noble again." This rose many questions, what made it not noble? When was it lost? What causes people to be noble? Personally, I've witnessed nobleness generally after a sad event.  Due to sorrow and sympathy for the subject of the sad event, people tend to work to much to seem noble to them. The neighborhood being noble is just their act of sympathy more than them being noble. Because of the lack of nobility, this can be the cause of the death and sorrow.

I find the way the book portrays all the sisters as being the same to be very interesting. My key line (or paragraph as the case may be) is on page 39, "Instead, Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity. It's often difficult to identify which sister she's talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader's mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads..." I wonder whether Cecilia intended to do this, or if the boys are imagining it to a degree based on their past beliefs of the sisters.

Who is Cecilia

I started writing this as a response to Sophia's post, but started to go off on a tangent and decided to write my own instead. I think the point Sophia makes about Cecilia being compared to an animal is really interesting. Both of the lines she mentioned also stuck out to me, especially the puppy reference. Something about a puppy is that they are cute and innocent, which is what I think Cecilia struggles with. She wears a stained wedding dress (which is really contradictory in a way) and is referred to as a "mature woman" (1). Cecilia always seems to be stuck between two roles. It's almost as if her personality is in a quandary. I also think its interesting that the narrators say that "a few of [them] had fallen in love with her, but had kept it to [themselves], knowing that she was the weird sister."

Random side note, I was really annoyed that her mother threw away her wedding dress after she died.

The boys

Something I noticed about narrators is that they were really affected by what happened to these girls. They much like the girls became kind of a mystery, they said "no one ever understood what got into us that year why we hated so intensely the crust of dead bugs over our live. Suddenly however we couldn't bear the fish flies carpeting our swimming pools"(53). They need to find out what actually happened years later in order to deal with the tragedy that has plagued their lives for years.

while reading i realized that both the parents and the boys refer to cecilia as more of creature than an actual human being. On page 32 when the narrator was describing the few deaths in their town they say, "and then that summer, a creature who in dog years was still a puppy-Cecilia Lisbon". On page 42 when it was re describing the night of Cecilia's death, the narrator says, "The rattling of her bracelets comforted her parents because it allowed them to keep track of her movements like an animal with a bell on its collar". In both of these quotes Cecilia is being compared to an animal, but if they view her as that why are they so infatuated with her life?

When one of ur bros (classmates) makes a good point during class

When you support your idea with text from the book

After reading Tavi's view of the novel, i realized like Talia earlier that there was some sense of romance in the novel. The narrators all seem to be enamored with these girls that they truly know nothing about, and even decades later can recall memories of them with perfect precision. Tavi's made me realize that these boys must of truly been obsessed with these girls in order to remember everything that clearly.

In the book so far it seems as though there is a lack of things to keep the "we" or the boys occupied. This is why I feel that they are so obsessed with what is going on in the Lisbon house. When they go to their house for the party I think that it might have been some sort of wake up call that these girls were just like them in that they were real people with real desires, and not something that is otherworldly or above them. However, i do believe there is some sort of mystery to the girls which I am looking forward to learning about. In Tavi's article she talks about how there is no debunking of high school stereotypes, I think that what she is trying to say is that there isn't going to be anything thats just given to us and we will have to really look into the text in order to figure out what "category" the girls fall in.

Tavi touches upon the lack of communication within The Virgin Suicides because everything that circles around the town is mainly rumors. I think what makes the Lisbon girls so intriguing is the lack of knowledge we really have about them, because it leaves everything in a mystery. This lack of the truth really relates to teenage years because people are always making things up to make their life more exciting.

Tavi's review etc.

Tavi says that the "The Virgin Suicides is [her] favorite teen romance of all time, either in spite or because of the fact that the characters never really talk to one another." Reading the last chapter I hadn't even begun to consider that romance existed in the book (besides the Dominic Palazzolo scene). I was curious as to why the narrators were so infatuated with the Libson girls, but never considered the fact that they might have a "crush" on them. The narrators seem to perceive the daughters as perfect and are unable to find much of any fault in any of them. Tavi really opened my eyes to seeing the story in a different light.  

Also side note unrelated to what I wrote above, but I find it really interesting that everyone seems to have extremely different perceptions of the girls and different scenes in the book. 

Books and such

In the Tavi Gevinson article I like the quote "there are no breakfast clubesque debunking of high school stereo types." Its true this book doesn't seem like its going to have that nice simple message to it. Clearly the poetic morbidness leads to a variety of different observations. I also like how talks about adolescence as "disconnect". Cecelia was clearly disconnected from the rest of the world and she did want to die even though no one would except it. It shows what instability can turn if its left untouched.

Tavi Gevinson's Book Review

I agree with Tavi when she says the memories were "recalled in almost creepy detail". There are a lot of random details thrown into the stories being told by the narrators. For example, when the narrator is telling the story of when Cecilia came home from the hospital he recalls that "it was Tuesday and [Joe's mother] smelled of furniture polish"(14). Another time this happens is when the narrator is talking about the picture the real estate agent took of the Lisbon house and recalls that "it was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies" (3). These details seem to just be thrown into the stories or explanations as random thoughts the narrator is remembering, but what makes these details so important? I don't know what would make me remember the temperature it was when a certain even happened. It just doesn't seem to be very important to the story. Are these details just added to make the book creepier?

Tavi Gevinson's Article

I totally get what Tavi is saying in the article when she says "But that disconnect, that yearning, just waiting itself." She says the girls had their own expectations of sex and love all bottled up inside and never shared it because their mother was trying to shelter them from this urge. Maybe they wanted to experience these things but never got to as a teenager because their family was so sheltered. This still shows no explanation to why Cecilia killed herself, but it gives us an idea that maybe she was tired of her conventional, conservative lifestyle. But Tavi thinks that maybe adolescence isn't "making out with Trip Fontaine under the bleachers or losing your virginity at the school dance or jumping out a bedroom window after dramatically proclaiming love to an almost perfect stranger", but it is "that disconnect, that yearning, just waiting itself". The girls never experienced the free lifestyle, but Tavi is saying that maybe that yearning is what is really means to be a teenager. The girls just don't know that, and that's why a possible theory of why they killed themselves is because they were very sheltered and were tired of their lifestyle. 

Virgin Suicides

After reading the NPR article on line, I feel as if the book is almost fantasy.  Though I do not know what being a teenage girl is like, and will never, I feel as if it is what most people think of it as. Minus the suicide of course.  The romance and conflict between the girls and boys reflect expectations that people expect adolescents to act like. We all know in most cases this isn't true.  Reading a girl's perspective of this book just verifies that only certain individuals act this way, like Cecelia. 

My face when all the boys are obsessed with menstrual cycles

When Lux walks in on Paul in the bathroom while hes creepin around

Reading Virgin Suicides

Boys

This has absolutely zero relevance to anything, I just find batman playing hockey very entertaining

When u read the part where Cecilia dies

Pls dnt hate on my vlog postes hatters

What I end up doing when I try to read 31 pages

Chuckin up the one

I came across an interesting quote recently: "Whats success without the stuggle." It got me thinking that one has to constantly keep pushing through the tough times to finally be succesful or content to where they are in life. Though, one should always be pushing to get better and better. Hopefully you'll be able to chuck up the one like so...

When you walk into class and see bae

When you walk into class and see bae

When Asha isn't looking

When sauce in a beauty of a comment during the class discussion

When u sauce a nice post on the blog ftb

Writing this essay like...

When we realize me and Bryant are the only ones posting on the blog

When u walk into class & see the boys

When u correctly line up u papers to staple them

When the boys are broken up in class

My face when I cant edit my boy's paper in class

When you can't find the page your quote is on

When someone posts the pic u were gonna use on the blog

When I'm writing on the blog & my mom walks in

When u write ur essay and u realize that it's super bomb

When my mom tells me to do my other homework and stop posting on this blog

connecting your essay back to your current Netflix series

When I finish my draft and realize I was on Mt. Text the whole time

real life

True

when u realize u fell off mt text

The other day in art history we were talking about "what is art?" and my class came up that it can be a communication of a belief or idea and it made me think of the passion of the drum kit. Artists create art in order to portray their passion for something, hoping to connect to the viewer to find their passion.

when you're typing your assertion

Me before writing on the blog

when the squad links up during class

A talisman (of sorts)