...them being Murphy’s Law; anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. However, I didn’t think twice about this law growing up, and I was a firm believer that I controlled all outcomes for a particular situation. It was with this cocky attitude that I entered an unfortunate, albeit hilarious, series of events that culminated in attaining a coveted role in a Connecticut Christmas play. From the time I was 5, I had earned a role in a play or musical every single year. Never had I experienced a denial or failed audition, and this lead slowly to an abundance of confidence. A Christmas Carol is a famous play, but it holds an even more endearing place in the hearts of Connecticut inhabitants. For a child to earn a role in this play, they had to demonstrate mastery of both acting and singing. Now, keep in mind that I had never run into difficulty with either before this audition, so when it came time to present my skills, I rushed in with almost no preparation. Standing before the three stern scouts, I proceeded to ace my song and monologue without...
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...“Lights, Camera, Action!” The stage lights from above blinded me. The cool draught could be felt between my fingers. At this point, my heartbeat was the loudest thing in the room; louder than a cross-country train zooming past. I could taste all the infinite atoms in my mouth: ‘This is it.’ My mind raced back to the previous weeks where I successfully failed to prioritize. I was well aware that my Grade 5 Guildhall drama exam was coming up. However, my mind was elsewhere. In addition, being a first year International Student in a private single sex boarding school in England, I was determined to fit in socially. I did not want to be known as the strange girl from Ghana. The examiners eyes were burning into my very being. I had my monologue memorized. I was confident about it. I had practiced it about 4 times throughout the preceding night. I had been up all night learning it. ‘Read, remember, and repeat.’ Surely that was enough. It was my destiny to be an actress, it was even written under my profile in the book of life. I was sure of it. For me, growing up in Ghana was far from undesirable. I lived in a decent bungalow in a very pleasant neighbourhood with my family. The last born among 3 kids from my mother; the problem child- that’s what I was known as, dramatic and all over the place. So it did not come as a surprise to my family when my ambitions changed from wanting to be an airhostess to wanting to be on the big screen. My life took a drastic turn when I...
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...theatre, there was a certain structure for every play. The plays were always either tragedies or comedies. In ancient Roman comedies, the characters were always the same. The adulescens was the hero who was generally young, rich, in love, and not very brave. The senex was the father who was always either too soft or too strict, but either one was out of love for his son. The leno runs the brothel. Sometimes the adulescens’ love interest was “owned” by the leno. The miles gloriosus is the soldier who only loves himself and thinks he is smart, but in reality, is not very bright. The parasitus is often begging for meals and never getting them. He lives just for himself. The servi are the slaves and are the half of the cast and have a lot of monologues. The ancilla is a maid or nurse who is a minor character. The virgo is the adulescens’ love interest who rarely gets stage time and is treated like a...
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...Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” focuses on a mother who receives a phone call while ironing, about her eldest child Emily. The call comes from a school guidance counselor asking her to make time to see her so they could discuss helping Emily. While listening, the mother partakes in a mental or interior monologue of her first born child’s life, and how being a single teen mother facing poverty shaped her daughter into who she is to today; a stiff, awkward ,and isolated young woman. Although there are various angles in which to analyze this text, the prominent angle is how society, especially in the 1930’s, view of women and motherhood have affected the narrator in her way of raising Emily. A sociological critique of I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen examines a wide range of social and feminist issues throughout the short story. Theses social ills have left the narrator with a strained psyche and have her questioning her parenting. I “Stand Here Ironing” is a short story in which the reader gets a mental image of the way it was for the narrator to raise her child alone. The narrator was a single mother at the age of nineteen, living during the latter years of the Depression. As a single mother during the depths of the Great Depression it was an especially hard time. The narrator describes the world in which her first child, Emily was born into. “It was the pre-WPA world of the depression” (290). Emily’s mother struggled to find a job to support her child, and eventually she was...
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...apathetic genius. She was a feral cat, never still, powerful arms linking to thin fingers which tapped ceaselessly on her desk. Like a poisonous flower, as beautiful as it is deadly. Monologue It all started when I animated my left sock. Well, that’s not really true. I suppose it began on my sixth birthday, when my grandmother came over and told me a bedtime story. She was a peculiar sort, deep brown skin pocketed with even deeper brown spots and fissures of wrinkles. When she ambled up the stairs, she would take three steps up and then one step down, despite my mother’s nagging about her arthritis. When she recounted the tale, I was tucked in against the winter chill, pine-scented candle flickering mischievously on the edges of my vision. Storytellers paint their art on minds in the same way artists do on canvas, and just so my grandmother wove a story of a young witchling with eyes of amber, gifted with talents to change the world. Every time she said the word magic, her gaze would go wistful, irises shining with a color that mirrored my own. Before she could finish, my mother stormed in with anger and urgency written in her brittle posture. She ushered my grandmother out, and a wink was the last I saw of her. The subsequent years were a whirlwind of wonder and unanswered questions, of my mom scolding that I should never speak that word, of witches in my thoughts and in my dreams. Could magic, of all things, be real? I was hopeful, but I don’t think I ever really believed...
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...------------------------------------------------- Class Notes on The Happiest Refugee Chapter 1 Possibly the most prominent reason why the first chapter of Anh Do’s “The Happiest Refugee” reflects the ideas of an outsider is how war has changed Anh and his families lives. “The year is 1976 and the Vietnam war has just ended”, “When the war ended her two older brothers, high- ranking paratroopers who fought alongside American and Australian soldiers, were put into communist re-education camps” and “My grandfather was in the army, so Grandma was left to look after ten kids on her own in a little hut” explain how the war has torn Anh’s family apart and has deeply effected how his father and mother lived throughout their childhood. When Anh’s Father is forced to almost single-handedly take care of his brothers, it builds and changes his personality and makes him far more responsible. When Anh’s uncles are put into a re-education camp, Anh’s father shows the leadership qualities and courage that he built over his childhood to free them from slavery. Chapter 1. From the start of the chapter, we can see the traits of an outsider, namely being a non-evident sense of belonging. When the communist guards were harassing the young lady; she was an outsider as she was being ostracised and segregated from the rest of the group in a nasty and threatening way. This was evidenced in the text from the quote “ ‘Lift up your trousers’ the guard demands. The girl lifts her black cotton pants to her ankles. ‘Lift them higher...
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...I. Racial and Ethnic Identity The distinction between ethnic group and race are too subtle for clarification; however, Scientists distinguish race on the basis of “physical characteristics” (11), such as a person’s skin tone, texture of hair or facial features. As people continue to migrate into this country, the increase number of interracial children will eventually alter the biological composition of future generations. This evolution of race will impair the variables that scientists use to classify race. Society distinguishes a person’s race based on collective conjecture; while the majority of us accept appearance as the driving force we assign a race or ethnicity. As the races intermingle, societies’ ability to categorize American’s by “social construct,” will be contingent more so on “Social assumptions,” such as language, religion, customs and ethnic group membership to determine race. White like me—Judith Levine I loved reading this! Ms. Levine has step outside herself and realized what the majority of white people in America may never be aware—“whiteness” (48). This became evident to Ms. Levine as she moved from New York’s highly diverse culture, to mainstream white neighborhood in Vermont. She says “Whiteness purports to be both nothing and everything” (48). She explains how whiteness is this invisible power that makes the majority of white people their race is superior bar none. She realized her skin shielded her from the struggles of minorities and...
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...How has Milton’s Paradise Lost shaped modern depictions of Lucifer? John Milton’s Lucifer has become so prominent in modern discussion of hell and sin that it is often confused with the theological account of the devil. Luciferian characteristics or depictions of Lucifer himself can often be linked back to Milton’s Paradise Lost and I will discuss multiple ways that Lucifer has become integrated into modern popular culture. From DC Comics’ Lucifer Morningstar to Walter White in Breaking Bad, I will show how Milton’s Paradise Lost has shaped modern depictions of the devil. Milton’s Lucifer was seemingly created from the influence of the Italian Renaissance devils of Giambattista Marino and Torquato Tasso. Lucifer’s ‘prissy disdain for earth’ and hatred of man in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberta helped form Milton’s depiction of the character. Philip Beitchman suggests that ‘Milton saw Satan’s contempt for man formed from dust’, drawn from such lines as ‘Man, man the vile, born of vile mud’. This hatred is exemplified by Milton in the words ‘Woe to the inhabitants on Earth!’ paraphrasing the New Testament verse of Revelations 12:12. Beitchman suggests that Lucifer’s hatred is fuelled by the purpose of man, claiming that ‘it was standard wisdom that man was created to supply the place of fallen angels’. If man was created to replace him, then we can perhaps understand Lucifer’s disdain towards them in Paradise Lost. We ought to look towards Marino’s La strage degli innocent, in...
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...wings, Steve Tilliss. C ontents Preface ix chapter 1 What’s the Big Deal About Small Talk? 1 chapter 2 Get Over Your Mom’s Good Intentions 12 chapter 3 Take the Plunge: Start a Conversation! 27 chapter 4 Keep the Conversation Going! 37 chapter 5 Let’s Give ’Em Something to Talk About 49 chapter 6 Hearing Aids and Listening Devices 66 viii . contents c hapter 7 Prevent Pregnant Pauses with Preparation 84 chapter 8 Conversational Clout 108 chapter 9 Crimes and Misdemeanors 114 chapter 10 The Graceful Exit 139 chapter 11 The Conversational Ball Is in Your Court! 154 chapter 12 Make the Most of Networking Events! 159 chapter 13 Surviving the Singles Scene 165 chapter 14 Feel-Good Factor 185 chapter 15 Holiday Party Savvy 192 chapter 16 Carpe Diem 195 Acknowledgments 201 Preface W hen I first got into the business of helping people cultivate conversation skills, I ran into a lot of skepticism. Invariably, executives would scoff at the idea of a housewife’s trivial initiative to overcome boredom. Then I would get clandestine calls for assistance from folks with prestigious titles. People would construct elaborate covert operations to seek advice without actually asking for it, because they were embarrassed. I can appreciate that. In a previous life as a nerdy engineer, I was burdened with poor social skills and embarrassed by my own conversational...
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...Chapter 1 Case Study: Harmonix Embrace Your Inner Rock Star Little more than three years ago, you had probably never heard of Harmonix. In 2005, the video game design studio released Guitar Hero, which subsequently became the fastest video game in history to top $1 billion in North American sales. The game concept focuses around a plastic guitar-shaped controller. Players press colored buttons along the guitar neck to match a series of dots that scroll down the TV in time with music from a famous rock tune, such as the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” and Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Players score points based on their accuracy. In November 2007, Harmonix released Rock Band, adding drums, vocals, and bass guitar options to the game. Rock Band has sold over 3.5 million units with a $169 price tag (most video games retail at $50 to $60). In 2006, Harmonix’s founders sold the company to Viacom for $175 million, maintaining their operational autonomy while providing them greater budgets for product development and licensing music for their games. Harmonix’s success, however, did not come overnight. The company was originally founded by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy in 1995, focused around some demo software they had created in grad school and a company vision of providing a way for people without much musical training or talent to experience the joy of playing and creating music. The founders believed that if people had the opportunity to create their own music, they would jump...
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...Chapter 1 Case Study: Harmonix Embrace Your Inner Rock Star Little more than three years ago, you had probably never heard of Harmonix. In 2005, the video game design studio released Guitar Hero, which subsequently became the fastest video game in history to top $1 billion in North American sales. The game concept focuses around a plastic guitar-shaped controller. Players press colored buttons along the guitar neck to match a series of dots that scroll down the TV in time with music from a famous rock tune, such as the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” and Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Players score points based on their accuracy. In November 2007, Harmonix released Rock Band, adding drums, vocals, and bass guitar options to the game. Rock Band has sold over 3.5 million units with a $169 price tag (most video games retail at $50 to $60). In 2006, Harmonix’s founders sold the company to Viacom for $175 million, maintaining their operational autonomy while providing them greater budgets for product development and licensing music for their games. Harmonix’s success, however, did not come overnight. The company was originally founded by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy in 1995, focused around some demo software they had created in grad school and a company vision of providing a way for people without much musical training or talent to experience the joy of playing and creating music. The founders believed that if people had the opportunity to create their own music, they would jump...
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...Social Media Marketing 2 Introduction Social media can be leveraged to create wonderful marketing masterpieces. Big name companies like Skittles and Dell have successfully used social media to increase their sales, brand, and the community around their products. Small companies like Kogi BBQ are using social media to increase their sales and dominate the late night food craze in Los Angeles. No matter your company size, social media can be used to start a conversation with your target market and elevate your brand. SEOP‟s Social Media Consulting Team has successfully worked for clients and built strong campaigns that drive traffic and build community. Through our experience, we have developed the proprietary 5 Pillar Model that teaches our clients how to use social media for business and how to execute the strategies that we develop together. This EBook is your guide to the 5 Pillars of social media marketing, and how you can leverage social media for your company‟s success: Pillar 1: What is Social Media? – We breakdown social media marketing into its core components so that you can understand the fundamentals. building a conversation with your clients and consumers. Pillar2: Common Mistakes Companies Make With Social Media – Though you may understand social media and have a solid foundation to build on top of, it is still possible to fall into the common pitfalls and mistakes that most companies make. Avoid the crucial mistakes and you‟ll be well positioned for social...
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... One “Oh my God, what’s she doing here?” my best friend, Sidney van der Hoff, was asking, as I came up to the corner booth to hand out menus. Sidney wasn’t talking about me. She was glaring at someone at another table. But I couldn’t be bothered to look and see who Sidney was talking about, since my boyfriend, Seth, was sitting next to her, smiling up at me…that smile that’s been making girls’ insides melt since about the fifth grade, when we all started noticing Seth’s even white teeth and highly kissable lips. It still freaks me out that out of all the girls in school, I’m the one he picked to kiss with those lips. “Hey, babe,” Seth said to me, blinking his long, sexy eyelashes—the ones that I overheard my mom telling Sidney’s mom over the phone are totally wasted on a guy. He snaked an arm around my waist and gave me a squeeze. “Hi,” I said, a little breathlessly. Not just because of the squeeze, but because I had a twelve-top (Mrs. Hogarth’s ninety-seventh birthday party) that was running me ragged, refilling their iced tea glasses and such, so I was panting a little anyway. “How was the movie?” “Lame,” Sidney answered for everyone. “You didn’t miss anything. Lindsay should stick with red; blond does nothing for her. Seriously, though. What’s Morgan Castle doing here?” Sidney used the menu I’d just given her to point at a table over in Shaniqua’s section. “I mean, she’s got some nerve.” I started to say Sidney was wrong—no way would Morgan Castle...
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...2 States THE STORY OF MY MARRIAGE Love marriages around the world are simple: Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. They get married. In India, there are a few more steps: Boy loves Girl. Girl loves Boy. Girl's family has to love boy. Boy's family has to love girl. Girl's Family has to love Boy's Family. Boy's family has to love girl's family. Girl and Boy still love each other. They get married. Welcome to 2 States, a story about Krish and Ananya. They are from two different states of India, deeply in love and want to get married. Of course, their parents don’t agree. To convert their love story into a love marriage, the couple have a tough battle in front of them. For it is easy to fight and rebel, but it is much harder to convince. Will they make it? From the author of blockbusters Five Point Someone, One Night @ the Call Center and The 3 Mistakes of My Life, comes another witty tale about inter-community marriages in modern India. This may be the first time in the history of books, but here goes: Dedicated to my in-laws* *which does not mean I am henpecked, under her thumb or not man enough PROLOGUE “Why am I referred here? I don’t have a problem,” I said. She didn’t react. Just gestured that I remove my shoes and take the couch. She had an office like any other doctor’s, minus the smells and cold, dangerous instruments. She waited for me to talk more. I hesitated and spoke again. “I’m sure people come here with big, insurmountable problems. Girlfriends dump...
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...Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Copyright © 2008 by Alloy Entertainment All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Poppy Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017 For more of your favorite series, go towww.pickapoppy.com First eBook Edition: November 2008 The Poppy name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The characters and events in this book are fi ctitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. ISBN: 978-0-316-04286-4 Contents 1: A WAVERLY OWL TAKES HER TUTORING DUTIES SERIOUSLY—REGARDLESS OF HOW SERIOUSLY HER TUTEE DOES. 2: A WAVERLY OWL KNOWS HOW TO TAKE CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM—EVEN WHEN IT HURTS. 3: A WAVERLY OWL ALWAYS ENJOYS A GOOD SURPRISE. 4: A WAVERLY OWL KNOWS HOW TO SHARE. 5: A WAVERLY OWL NEVER ACCEPTS A RIDE FROM A STRANGER. 6: THE WAY TO A WAVERLY BOY'S HEART IS THROUGH HIS… 7: A GOOD WAVERLY OWL IS NEVER ASHAMED OF HER FATHER. 8: A WELL-BRED OWL IS ALWAYS POLITE TO STRANGERS. 9: A WAVERLY OWL HAS FAITH IN HIS ROOMMATE. Page 1 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html 10: A WAVERLY OWL IS ALWAYS READY FOR THE APPEARANCE...
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