Amberly McDonald: October 2010

Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Fall of Troy short story

Achilles was well aware that his death was near. A prince from Ethiopia reinforced the Trojans and the Greeks suffered until Achilles killed him. Achilles only weak spot was near the ankles, where his mother had held him when she dipped him into the river Styx. Paris hit him in this spot and he died. Ajax wanted his arms but Odysseus received them. He went into a fit and tried to kill Menelaus and Agamemnon, but instead slayed a group of cattle and eventually killed himself (Athena made him insane).
The Greeks were dismayed because they could still not defeat Troy. A prophet told them that they would need to use the arms of Hercules to defeat the great city. They look for them and Diomedes and Odysseus come back with them. Then they learned that they would have to steal the image of Athena from a temple in the city before it would fall. Odysseus and Diomedes accomplished this task one night. Finally, they realized that they would have to get the army within the city to be victorious. With the help of Athena, Odysseus devised the plan of the wooden horse. He filled it with armed men and left a single Greek behind to convince the Trojans to admit the horse.
When the Greek fleet left, the Trojans came out to find the wooden horse. Some believed it was a trick, and others wanted to take it into the city. The Greek left behind convinced them that the horse was a peace offering. The priest who opposed the horse being brought into the city was killed on his altar by twin snakes. The people took this as an omen that they should bring it into the city.

You will have to be in class to find out the rest of the story. There will be a one minute presentation about this and hopefully it should follow pretty close to everything that you have read about the fall of Troy. Let me know how I do after the presentation. This is only the partial story...

Mythic Clues Within My Life

Have you heard of something called the Oedipus complex? Here's the story:

There was this guy named Oedipus who, at birth, was destined by fate to kill his father (who also happened to be the King of Thebes) and marry his mother. The people in Thebes thought that this was a pretty big deal, so when Oedipus was an infant, he was sent away. As an adult, Oedipus returns to Thebes only to, you guessed it, kill his dad and marry his mom. For Freud over the next few years, as witnessed by the following remarks from The Interpretation of Dreams : "It is as though—to put it bluntly—a sexual preference were making itself felt at an early age: as though boys regarded their fathers and girls their mothers as rivals in love, whose elimination could not fail to be to their advantage" (Freud, 1900a, p. 256), and "it is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laïus and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes" (p. 262).

Pandora's Box - Pandora was the first woman and had good relationship with the gods. The told her not to open the box, but she did anyways. This in return caused, pain, war, illness and all other evils, the only thing left inside the box was hope. Moral of this story is even when you have good intentions, it doesn't always pan out to be something good, can bring something negative. An example of this situation is when I was younger, I wanted to do my dad a favor by washing his truck real good for him. While he was at work I got a bucket, some cold hose water and some bleach. I proceeded to go ahead and scrub down his truck, all of it. He had one of those trucks that had a bed with the hard plastic ripples in it, to keep it from getting rusty and so it was easy to clean. When I was just finishing up, he called and told me that he was on his way. I ended up going inside the house and waiting for him to get home. When he got there, he asked me what happened to his truck. I told him that I cleaned it for him, because it was really dirty. He asked me what I used to clean it with. I simply told him, "Bleach." He freaked out and demanded I rinse it off right away. I did as he asked me to do, but his truck was never the same again. I no longer wash vehicles with bleach, I take them through the car wash. This has been one of my Pandora's Box experiences.

Achilles' Heel - Achilles was born to a goddess mother, Thetis, and a human father, Peleus. Thetis did not like the fact that her son was part mortal, so she was told to dip him into the River Styx to cleanse him of his mortality and render him invincible. She did this, but held him by his heel as she dipped. His heel was left untouched by the water, so it remained the only part of him that was not invincible. Years later, when he was in battle in the Trojan War, Achilles' enemies took advantage of his weak spot and shot a poisonous arrow directly into his heel, and he died. Something that seems as real as this has happened to me. In this day and age a car, or transportation is pretty important. I don't mean a bicycle or just walking, because God gave us legs to walk, but like something that you can transport other people or belongings in. It just so happens that all of my life, since I was 12 I've had something to drive. In the last 6 weeks my car has decided to give me a multitude of problems. I put over $1800 into it, and it was good for about 2 days. I've had to rent a car for almost 3 weeks, which is not cheap. They wanted my blood and that of my firstborn for just a couple of days worth. Anyways ended up paying out the ass for rentals plus the retainer that they keep while you drive it. Plus right when they say ,"Oh, yeah, you get your deposit back (between $150-$300) when you return the car." That is such bullshit. At least this time it was for me. So we found out what was wrong with the car. It was a $3 part. We ordered it, it came in the day I had to bring the rental back, we installed the part, and my car still did not end up working. It sat in the driveway for about 2 more weeks until a neighbor got tired of looking at it and said that one of his mechanic friends would help us fix it. The timing had to be reset and something had to be done with the computer in it. We did not have the tools for that. The mechanic fixed the timing and then checked the motor and said that the valves were gone, and need a new motor. Now the problem is no money. I got laid off my job about 30 days ago and haven't seen a paycheck, so without money coming in, there is no way that I can fix my car. This puts me in a very vulnerable and a constant of "being without" circumstances. I rely completely on others right now to help me, and persay I do something to piss them off, they know that my weakness is that I don't have a ride. They could then just say that they wouldn't give me a ride, which would be cutting my Achilles Heel. It would cut me out of life.

Links used for information

http://www.ehow.com/how-to_4845374_4_basics-greek-mythology.html

http://www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/oedipus-complex

Monday, October 18, 2010

the sky is crying tears of sadness

This weekend was cold and wet. My husband and I have an RV, which we live in with our 2 boys. Since they were gone this weekend, we decided to go ahead and cover the RV for winter. We don't want any cool air coming in through the vents, windows, or the A/C box. We set out to go and cover it, and wouldn't you know that as soon as we were getting coats and boots on to go outside, we heard a little bit of a pitter-patter on the roof. It sounded like a lot of rain was coming down. Of course, we could've done this all of the week before when it was nice and sunny outside, but no, we decided to wait until it was pouring with rain. On our metal roof it sounded like millions of raindrops were coming down, but as soon as we stepped outside, we were met with little balls of what seemed to be like hail. There were so many!
We ended up getting the tarp on in about one hour. It was all tightened down and bungeed tight and squared up so we could have a mud-room. It looked really nice.

Now come today, the landlady looked at it, after approving the project before we even put it up, and said that it looked too tacky, so had to take it down. Had I known this yesterday, I would've told Eric that we would need to come up with a different plan. But all good things come to an end. And now you know the rest of the story.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Book 1 pg. 3 The Creation

A god – and nature, now become benign-ended this strife.

Book 2 pg. 47 Phaeton

The corpses of sea-calves float on their backs.

Book 3 pg. 85 Actaeon

That pack is keen for prey: along the crags and cliffs and rocks so hard to cross, where paths are rouch and where there is no path at all, they rush.

Book 4 pg. 115 Mars, Venus, Vulcan & the Sun