A Letter

Dear Amanda,
Well I can see why one might question why there is a book that is not only written about a pedophile, but furthermore one that is written in such harmless yet great detail.I recently had to kind of defend Lolita very recently in regards to this question of perversion that one might derive from the text, and the only thing I could come up with was that might have been Vladamir's point. By choosing this subject matted on which to write, he aimed for more than just a best seller, he aimed for greatness that was not found in common places. The people who have read Lolita know this to be true because they experience far more than a group of words strung together in order to form sentences and stories that may all have different elements, but when they're stripped down to their core are just replica's of some original somewhere. This is were Nabokov takes a drastic leap away from the conventional type of writing and gives his reader more to take away than a moral lesson. I feel like to most people the rational behind picking up a book like Lolita and actually enjoying it is completely absent, and while that rationale is completely wrong, it is worth it to step away and become irrational. to be quite honest i don't think Nabokov ever wanted the rationale in the first place, for the irrational always seems to make everything more interesting.
Sincerely your classmate,
- Chelsea Diem

A Picture, A Memory, A Loss.

July Fourth, 2007...A group of my friends from various walks of life gathered on my roof top to celebrate Independence day. Our eyes were fixed on the exploding sky as someone began to quietly hum the national anthem...the humming was picked up and before long the entire roof was belting out with pride and enthusiasm. Hands were placed over hearts, hats were removed from heads, the moment was nothing short of intoxicating. The group that was gather on the roof that night was what really made this memory unique...a fair amount of the attend were not even United States citizens, so hearing them sing with all their heart in broken English was quite frankly a wonderful sound to take in. Outside of the international attendees, some of the Americans present were just as diversified...some were patriotic conservative church goers, some were borderline anarchist, while others were politically indifferent...but regardless of standpoints and beliefs we all stood together that night and celebrated the country we live in and the fact that despite all of our differences, we were standing with each other in friendship and oddly enough in song...those friendships have changed a bit over the last two years, being that all of the relationships had begun in a college town it was to be expected...but that night still sticks out in my mind as something beautiful that could not be replicated, for it was naturally wonderful.

Memory

I'm not sure what my first memory was , but when I attempted to dig it up out of the neglected caverns of my memory I kept circling back to not one specific memory, but rather a specific time period...we'll call this the time of "The Yellow House".

My sister and I are lying in our room for what my mother has attempted to create as our designated nap time, I only knew this as the most boring hour of my young life. I'm looking at the shadows of the cherry tree as it waves back and forth against the side of our house, it seems to be mocking my confinement as it revels in its freedom of being outside getting softly kissed by the warm sunlight...Now I'm suddenly taken to the street where my sister and I are in front of the yellow house, we're on our bikes and we are the wind. We maneuver our handle bars from side to side creating imaginary figure eights, there is a feeling of power and limitlessness...Then I'm in the overgrown grass which is littered with lady bugs and morning dew, the towering grass is a powerful force that stretches and climbs up the sides of our plywood fortress that my dad had built for us one blessed summer day...I'm now peering through the spy holes that are scattered randomly about our weather beaten fence which is grasped by green grape vines and remains to be our only protection against the yard next door, which we were convinced belongs to a wretched witch who would stick us in her swamp and keep us as captors as soon as she had an opportunity....This is where I go in search of my childhood memories, I go to the time of "The Yellow House".