Midterm Reflections on Literature, the Self and Life in this 21st Century

I've always been a self-reflective writer.

I like to inject my own personal experiences and reflections into my literary observances. For my "1 Dead in Attic" Hurricane Katrina post, I realized that the day I started reading was the five-year anniversary mark. For my "Falling Man" 9/11 post, I reflected on that infamous "where were you on 9/11" question and where I was on that day and how I've grown up and moved on from that point in time. For my Abu Ghraib post, the torturous images of POWs got me thinking a lot about my own military history. I have friends, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers who served or are currently enlisted. My father is a retired commander in the Navy and my mother was a Sargent in the Marine Corps. I'm very proud of my family's service and it upsets me to think that people could now have such misguided views about the military at large because of what a couple of idiots did on a night shift with a camera.

I like to pose questions that concern me and evoke memories of my own experiences to use myself as a vehicle for provoking thought.

That is a strength of my posts I think. I don't know if my fellow classmates can always relate to me as they are my experiences and mine alone, but I think that everyone has a 9/11 story, everyone has an impression of the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think it is a great downfall and a great disadvantage in this generation of ours that everyone is so self-involved. Facebook statuses aren't going to change the world. But your self-reflections can change the world as it seems for you. We make sense of this crazy, fast-paced, sometimes disorienting, sometimes liberating new millennium we live in today through ourselves. Fact and frame, right? Everyone has an opinion and a story to tell.

And this blog tells mine.