Unessay

As we grow, our idea of home grows with us. It is the day to day experiences in our lives which change the way we view the world. They are what shape us, our ideas, and our actions. Going to college is a big life event for most people. It is a chance to get out from under your parents control and grow up, become more responsible, and to explore the kind of person you want to be. In the memoirs The Glass Castle and Fun Home, the ideas of home and growing up are explored. My project is to take the Facebook platform, through the site fakebook, and use it to explore growing up and experiencing responsibility in a modern digital way while also connecting back to the idea of what is home and how personal growth is achieved.

This is my version of a modern memoir for the digital viewers. It is like other memoirs only in its ability to explain personal events in my life for the public to view. It differs from the memoirs of Jeanette Walls and Alison Bechdel only in the ways of its digital nature, and the fact that I am not speaking directly to the reader like theirs. Otherwise it is my account of events that have happened in my first term of college.

https://www.classtools.net/FB/1544-qYNvR8

In this project I hoped to explore growing up in a more modern and digital way. I wanted the fakebook profile to come of as more modern and what we, as the first “digital” generation would post online in order to catilogue events in our lives becuase most people rely on sites like facebook and instagram to catilogue their lives rather than analogue keepsakes like journals and scrapbooks. I tried to keep the posts as authentic and “unscholarly” as possible in order to bring some authenticity to the project becuase most people do not go on facebook and type out a whole paragraph about their life for the whole world to see. I did however make these posts longer than I usually would because this is a class project. Looking back, I do believe this project could have been better represented by a blog/wordpress as it is more of an online journal.

Fresh Milk on Trains

Today I found myself on a train. I have never been on a train before and I really do not plan on too many more trips on one after my ride. There was so many people all rushing to board and to find the best seats. It was like watching organized chaos unfold in the most mundane way possible.

While I was on this trip, I noticed myself looking out the window, watching what passed by the view of my seat’s window on the way home. I started to wonder what it would be like for the Wall’s family (throw back I know) always moving from place to place with no set home. As the train passed through the farm land with the small houses of the people who own the farms I began to wonder who lives there and about their lives.

Were they like Alison Bechdel and her father, with people struggling with the concept of masculinity, or were they like Jeanette Walls and her family, struggling to make ends meet in a world that doesn’t value the life of an eccentric nomad with no means to pay for goods?

It was a long ride full of deep thoughts for me. I imagined one house had a small family where the parents spent the day tending the cows that surrounded their small home, making milk products to sell at the local farmers market not unlike Rosemary Walls with her art, with two small children, leaving to go to school every morning and returning to the house late afternoon to do their homework at the dining room table while their father cooks dinner only made complete by the milk from the cows fresh from earlier in the day.

While this imaginary life for the people who lived in this small house may be the furthest thing from the truth, I do believe there is some beauty in imagining the lives of those around you.

Pride in an Older Home

The pride someone can take in the outward appearance of their home is one that I know too well. I come from a family of builders. My mother, my grandfather, and my uncle all work together to build homes.

I joined the business the summer of my freshman year. By the time I got involved, however; the market had changed and it had become much less of a home building business and more of a house flipping one. I watched people take apart homes and then rebuild them from the inside out. New walls, new rooms and even the occasional ceiling scraping had these homes looking like new in the matter of a few months, and each time the look of achievement on my family’s face was the same.

While I was never allowed to do anything major like knock down a wall or install cabinets and flooring, I was allowed to paint, clean, and stage the home before the real-estate agents came in with their clients to view the home.

In this regard I can relate to Alison Bechdel, as much like how she watched her father restore their home from a run down house into a beautiful mansion, I got to see my family take older homes and turn them into modern paradises for a generous profit. The little joys her father had like finding original bargeboard could be mirrored by the excitement of my grandfather when he pulled up plastic linoleum to find old scratched wood flooring underneath. The prospect of restoring something old and adding character much more interesting to him than adding something new to make the house a perfect cookie-cutter replica of something you would find in the hardware store showroom.

While this job was unlike the restoration of the Bechdel home, with the sole purpose to update rather than preserve the original bones of the house. It is still weird to read this book and realize my uncle did the same thing with the paint colors that Alison’s father did with the wallpaper going in her bedroom.

Coins Turn Up in Odd Places

When I was little, my parents owned a minivan. There was nothing particularly great about this van, it was just an old Pontiac Montana with forest green sides and gold trim, however; inside that van, attached to the drivers side sun visor was something of a rather strange origin.

I was told it was a gift to my father from my grandfather, though I cannot say for sure as I was young and I had never met the man who gifted it. It was a rather large safety pin with two coins and some red string attaching them. The coins themselves were gold and silver, both with a square hole in the center. 

My grandfather had been a coin collector, and his time in the army had allowed him to amass quite the collection, he had jars upon jars in a closet that my grandmother refused to touch upon his passing. I remember when I was little going through the jars, looking for the shiniest coins (this coincidentally is how I ended up with so many Canadian coins in my piggy bank as a child).

It makes sense that my grandfather would have chosen to give my father the two Chinese coins. He was an engineer who made it his job to travel and get to know other cultures, and upon looking around the home that he and my grandmother shared, they had a special appreciation for the Chinese. Their house was filled with artwork and old carved furniture and statues from China, and outside there was a direct influence to zen gardens in the layout of their lawn.

Only yesterday did I learn some of the significance behind the coins I spent my childhood looking at. While they most likely did not come from those who worked on the Stanford Railroad, they are made in the same style and most likely carry some sort of cultural significance, especially if they made their way to the United States, and eventually to our minivan. Sadly, the coins themselves were lost when the car was totaled, though I do remember my father saying they did their job, which was always to bring us luck and safe travels.

A continuation of instability

The continuation of instability in the glass castle has been a sad progression of neglect, hardship and financial struggles for the children of the walls family.

With a lack of food, and funds running low for bills and necessities, it was not uncommon for the children to go without nutritious food for days at a time, eating beans and heads of lettuce to fill their stomachs. With this lack of food readily available for the Walls children to eat, they resorted to dumpster diving and free school lunches just to get by. The lack of food can be attributed to Rex and Rosemary Walls, who for the better part of the memoir were unemployed, spending money on art supplies, or drinking away the small ammounts of money that were to be left over for food. This unstable spending is what created an environment where the Walls children did not know if they were to get a next meal, or what exactly that meal would contain.

Another factor to the unstable lives of the Walls children was the inability of the parents, Rex and Rosemary, to keep a job or steady form of income. Rex worked in mines and doing odd jobs, or at one point in the memoir a casino, attempting to cheat at cards in order to win large amounts of money. These ways of earning money were never stable or around for long periods of time, with Rex frequently losing job opportunities due to his drinking problem. Rosemary was no help to the children either, with a teaching degree she refused to use she was doing more harm than good for the children, especially because she held substantial money in properties and refused to let the children claim welfare in order to eat. This blatant neglect of the children’s needs is part of the reason why later in the book the children begin to turn on the adults who were supposed to provide good lives for them. The instability in the income formed an unstable quality of life and was the basis for the hardships the children later had to face as they matured into young adults and eventually when they became responsible for their own well being.

Medical Care in an Unstable World

The Memoir of Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle, is a riveting tale about a young girl and her unconventional life growing up.

In the first portion of this memoir, Jeannette tells us the stories of her childhood, and how she grew up in an unconventional situation when it came to what she calls home.

Because Jeannette was “mature for her age” she was allowed to cook for herself at what most people would call too young to be unsupervised in the kitchen. Because of this unsupervised time with a stove, which most would call negligent parenting, Jeannette burned herself and had to spend time in the hospital, during which time we learn the truth behind her unstable family dynamics, and how the unstable, nomadic lifestyle she lives is the basis for her constant stability.

 

During her family’s visits we learn several crucial things about her family life. One of the most important things learned during this hospital stay is how there is a major distrust between the adults in the Walls family and medical personnel. This leads to several dangerous and negligent actions to avoid medics, like the usage of witch doctors, home remedies and blatant ignoring of medical staff’s advice. This puts the Walls children in a lot of danger, as they are not the most careful children (within the first few pages it is stated that they have been stung by scorpions, cracked their heads open, and have been severely burned). This form of instability causes these children more harm than good because it endangers their lives because these are life threatening injuries that do need medical care that a parent or witch doctor is not qualified to give. It is a form of reckless endangerment by the parents however, it has become a constant to rely on for these children to be doctored in unusual ways.