Prologue #2

I know we're not suppose to keep going with the whole introduction to ourselves assignment, but I feel like this could be a great opportunity to summarize EVERYTHING that has happened in my life up to now. I'm not doing it for extra credit or for someone's amusement, but for my own desire to organize my memories in chronological order, as if to have an autobiography that I can look back to and laugh at...

     My memory started to develop when I was placed in the education system. Lucky for me, my education career started in a preschool, an english speaking preschool to be exact. I only remembered it as "PPP" but after a bit of research I even found the exact website of the place I went to, right here!: http://www.parentparticipationpreschool.org/  It's suppose to be a kind of daycare place where babies interact with other babies and get better at doing things you're expected to do as a baby. Looking back at it now, my parents probably wanted to make sure I was functional after all those dilemmas I came with. Anyhow, it wasn't the kind of education you normally think of. From what I can remember, we would play with some rip-off lego brand in the morning, have a snack, color some books, take a nap, play hide and seek, eat lunch, and then play some board games while we wait for our parents to pick us up. I'm kinda impressed that I can recall that so vividly.

     There were a couple of friends I made there, some tagged along to elementary school while others disappeared. It was mostly a fun experience. With that said however, there's ONE single traumatic experience that lingers in the back of my head since one of those days. It was in the middle of a "class" period where we were handed printed blank copies of a cartoon hot air balloon.  The instructions were easy, the teacher told us just once: "Okay kids, grab your favorite color and fill in the balloon! Don't forget the basket!". Within 5 minutes everyone was done, they all handed their colored balloons in. To my surprise, when I gave the paper to the teacher, she looked back with a confused expression and said "Andres, you still didn't finish coloring it" while she handed the paper back. I sat at the table while the other kids progressed to the next activity. "I... I didn't finish yet?" Is what ran through my thoughts as I analyzed the drawing while staring hard at that cheap copy paper.

      Something clicked in my brain, I realized that there where little white spots between the crayon strokes in the drawing. Once I get every single inch in that balloon covered in red, I'll be able to have fun with everyone else! It took me a while, but I finally gave it back to the teacher proudly.
"Andres... this still isn't done" is all I got from her when I showed her the balloon for the second time. I was shocked. I ran out of ideas. I sat back in the table clueless as to what I should do now. I grabbed my crayon and kept coloring over the same area while I thought of what to do next. Nothing came. I watched my friends laughing and telling stories across the room while I was isolated trying to think of what I did wrong. Why were they able to color this with such ease? Why am I the only one who can't do it? Is there something wrong with me? I truly felt for the first time what it's like to be abandoned and helpless. Tear drops started to land on the drawing and it quickly became a watercolored piece.

      Next thing I knew, I was crying out loud and the teacher's assistant took me out of the classroom. She escorted me to the water fountain to get hydrated after that waterfall of tears that flowed out of my eye sockets. A month passed by after that horrible event and my parents were handed all the projects that I made while I was at preschool. One of those projects was the air balloon. When I looked at it again with fresh eyes I could see where I went wrong...

I forgot to color the basket.

Somehow I think that part of my childhood subconsciously lead me to becoming an artist or something.

   
     A genre is a category in an art form that is characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter. In this case our art form is literature, the novel "True Grit". This novel can certainly fall in the western genre. It has a revenge plot in which Mattie tracks down her father's killer, Chaney.  It also has showdowns between the good and the bad, just like the movies. I felt as if I was reading a spaghetti western, minus the cheapness of one. What I mean is that it had something more meaningful behind the basic story, a strong meaning instead of pure entertainment. It's almost as if it had a secondary hidden genre behind the western disguise it makes itself out to be. The hidden genre could be a "Coming of Age" story where the protagonist grows from childhood to adulthood. I don't mean literally when we fast-forward to the future of her life, but instead when she matures. At the climax of the novel, when the girl falls into the snake pit; Mattie faces a life or death situation. The problem becomes more of her struggling to survive rather than revenge. She loses two things after that incident: her arm and her innocence.

     After reading Pride and Prejudice, I can understand why they wrote a parody where the setting was replaced in a high school environment. The plot of this book revolves around the drama caused by the love interests between wealthy women and men during the late 1700s. I felt as if I were reading a very old diary of a teenage girl who felt the need to write down all the lovey-dovey gossip that happened to her friends. It's not that I did not find it entertaining, it's just that I didn't feel like I learned anything from it. Usually stories have a message or moral behind it, but this was a collection of love stories and how they worked out at the end after each person settles with what they got.

     With all that said however, I think the character who stood out the most was Elizabeth, she seemed to have been the only smart one in all this mess that they've created themselves. She had every right to think Darcy was a schmuck for not wanting to dance and hearing bad rumors about him. She was the one who cared about her sister's health while Jane's Mr. Bingley was elsewhere. Elizabeth didn't care what anyone had to say about her relationship business because it didn't involve amyone else besides her and Darcy. Once she understood that Darcy wasn't that much of am idiot, she decides to marry him. A smart and patient woman who has her priorities straight.

     Overall, this was an amusing tale that would keep the viewer hooked simply because it had to do with love, there's just something about love that keeps us interested in these characters' actions. I guess there just wasn't anything better to do back then than read books about other people's love lives!

Prologue

"Prologue"

Twenty years ago around 7:00 pm in Puerto Rico a mother gave birth to a baby boy named Andres Guerrero. She was suppose to have twins, but the "twin vanishing syndrome" phenomenon occurred, where one of the embryos died while developing in the womb. An hour after being born, Andres was diagnosed with "Tracheosophageal fistula". This meant that his breathing pipe was connected to his eating pipe. After a week or so of complicated operations, Andres was fixed up successfully. Off to a rough start, a month went by until the doctors found out that his spine was missing half of a bone, causing his hip to be permanently tilted. Trying to avoid a risky operation in the spine that could leave him paralyzed, his parents decided to use a safer method of coping with the problem by purchasing a shoe lift which he wears in the inside of his right shoe to cancel the tilt of his hip and correcting his posture a bit, thus curing back pains. Afterwards the boy would wake up in the middle of the night barely breathing and rushed to the hospital several times. It turned out that he was also allergic to any kind of lactose (milk and cheese products). It would cause his esophagus to close up, making breathing very difficult. Andres was a very lucky kid who probably wouldn't have survived if it wasn't for his parents both being doctors. The mother and father never lost faith and tried their best to keep their first child alive no matter what. After those unfortunate set of events, the child was analyzed from head to toe. Nothing else was wrong with him, he was finally ready to start growing like a normal human being.