Introduction

When I entered English class this year, I wasn't sure what exactly I would be learning. I have been telling myself to become a writer, and yet I would struggle to even get the pencil on paper at times (most likely due to my lack of confidence). Now that the semester has ended, I am happy to report that not only did I learn a few thing but also what I need to accomplish in the long run.

I have learn to appreciate the power of the writing process. The invention stage of this process stood out to me the most. Before, I would keep the information within the confines of my mind and keep it there until it was time to put it all on paper. Now learning how to utilize methods such as brainstorming, free writing and looping, I can have a better overall picture on what I am trying to accomplish in my written works. In fact, these practices have lead to new discoveries of ideas and concepts I never thought of before.

Along with this revelation, I have learned of the importance of clarity when writing for an audience. When I had something to say and I tried to put it on paper, it never occurred to me that readers may not be able to understand my writing the way I saw it. Reading different essays and writing them myself though out the span of this class has made this lesson clear to me. This is an significant lesson that will take years to fully understand and learn.

Now that I have talked about what I have learned, it's time to go through my essays to see my progress as a writer.

Sisyphus at Retail

I gaze through a glass window to what was once a bookstore a few months ago. I remember the first time I walked through the entrance doors. I remember the place brimming with the colors of the countless books as they laid in their brown and black shelves. Now, there is only darkness like a black hole. Yet I do not see a difference, as this store took  a year and a half of my life away.

I look closer into the said abyss to spot a chief cause of my suffering. You may know it as simply a pair of restrooms. These were meant for ‘‘customer use only’’ ,mandated by law to be in the store since it also housed a small cafe. Yet everyday, people will walk in, ask for the restroom keys, use the restroom, return the keys (if they were generous enough not to steal them again), and then leave. Some days we will have lines of customers waiting outside the restroom doors.

Because of constant usage by ‘‘customers’’, I learned to dread having to enter our restrooms when needed, in fear on what I may find. Sometimes I would find that someone had changed his clothes in there and left the boxers in the trash can. Some days I could find a faucet clogged with vomit since the toilet was three feet too far. Some days I would enter to see a man washing his hair over the other faucet and simply say, ‘‘What?”. There was even a day when my coworkers and I discovered a man pleasing himself with a couple of magazines. Both the man and the magazines were promptly exiled from the store.

Yet the worst instance occurred outside the restrooms. I was eating in the back room with a coworker one day when I heard her shriek. She pointed at the room entrance to what looked like three ‘‘glomps’’ of mud. However, as I got closer, it was obvious that this wasn’t mud. I opened the back room door just to find where the true damage was. What was once the entrance to the restrooms was now a biohazard wasteland. It was on the floor and walls. It was on the doors and water fountains. It was everywhere, and I had to clean it. 

Yet the most difficult aspect about the task, besides feeling like what I was cleaning up, was the barrage of customers that followed. A woman asked if she could use the ladies room as she stared at the sullied walls. A man asked me how long I was going to take before the restrooms opened for service. One person even managed to walk past me, nearly touching the desecrated restroom door. I would remember more if my memory was not like vision back then: hazy from the tears caused by anger and cleaning chemical fumes.

‘‘It’s because they all have the potential to buy something,’’ was my manager’s response when I asked him about the restroom incident and how anyone could commit such an atrocious act, ‘‘Any enforcement will scare them and their precious 25 cents away”. The customer is always right, remember?’’ The customer is right to read novels and magazines for hours with purchasing any of them. The customer is right to use the science, sports and crafts aisles as makeshift lavatories. The customer is right to bring their outside food from the nearby Popeye’s and McDonalds and eat the food in our cafe, leaving their messes behind. The customers are right to call me an ass**** or threaten to sue me when I ask them not to sit on the floor. The customer is right to steal bibles and leave the plastic wrappings for us to find. The customer is right to open the emergency exit door despite the multiple ‘’Do Not Exit’’ signs in different languages. The customer is right to leave sexuality books in the children’s section. The customer is always right indeed.

It was with this realization that the infamous quote was loaded with what I had to clean before, that I knew my time there was coming to an end. I was forced to watch each of our rule and policy enforcements meet with futility and rebuttal. And as I watched my coworkers leave the store like rats abandoning a ship, I soon followed. Now I stand outside the closed building, now filled with darkness, now just a different shade.

Notes:

This is the first essay and probably my longest one of the bunch. While some writer struggle to have enough material to write about, I had too much. The challenge was selecting what events of the story I would use to describe the message of the essay. After writing this essay, I started to learn about the importance of brevity and how powerful it can be.

Alien in a familiar World

There were multiple books on the floor in my sister’s room. I know this because I was the one who put them there. It would be around now that I would hear my sister asking what the heck I was doing in her room. In shame,I would ask myself the same question, but luckily she was out shopping with my mother. I continued my search through my sibling’s old book collection to the rhythm of the outside rain hitting a nearby window. I scrambled through the multiple works of Doctor Seuss until I found what I was searching for. It was the key to understanding a world that was so familiar yet so alien to me. It may even help me see life in a whole new point of view. It was the children’s guide to learning Spanish.

Finding this book, I recall my most recent venture to the country of El Salvador. It was a venture that I was forced to endure with my family almost every year as a child. And since I was such a young child, not going to visit relatives was not an option for me. I never looked forward to any of these trips. It wasn’t because I had a grudge with the country itself. The area where we stayed was surrounded by the lush green of the jungles that were nearby. The country’s air smelled of papusas being made nearby. I also didn’t hold anything against my relatives there. They always enjoyed our company and are nice people all around. No, I hated these trips for another reason. For as familiar as the land has become to me over the years, part of it was always out of reach.

Despite my parents’ heritage, I do not know Spanish. Probably since I was born in the United States, it was never my parents’ top priority. And every time I left the airport after arriving in El Salvador, I’d pay the price for it. My time there usually goes the same way. I would always stay in the sleeping room because I couldn’t play or talk to the neighborhood kids. I would have to see my aunts and uncles try to speak to me in a dialect I knew nothing about, just to have my father remind them. I would have to stand by my mother at all times, like a clinging mama’s boy, in case anyone tried to talk to me. The two weeks I had to stay for the latest trip couldn’t pass by soon enough.

With that haunting and embarrassing memory still fresh in my mind, I continued to study this colorful scripture of a children’s book. I was on the section that showed the different animals and objects you would find at a farm. Turning my head to ensure no one was watching a boy reading a book he was clearly too old for, I took a deep breath and pronounced the first word I saw: Pollo.

Notes:

I placed the most work on the introduction. I wanted to set up a story that would help illustrate how much Spanish meant to me, and how it was a foreign yet alien concept. I was sure to return to it once I had written the essay's main point, to give a sense of closure.

Drawing with Ourselves

In this day and age, we have more advanced tools for our creative and productive needs than we did years before. Writers, who were strictly tied to tools like the pen and typewriter, now have multiple software programs on many machines to complete their work. Artists, who at one time were limited with physical planes such as paper and canvas, can now weave visual beauty on a computer screen. The physical labor of work drawn and written has never been easier for those whose productive lives revolved around writing and drawing. Yet despite these advances in digital software and tools, most people choose to start their productions with the pencil because, in more ways than one, that tool is an extension of ourselves.

Now when you think of the pencil, it’s most likely that the one that comes to mind is the No.2 model. Still widely used from academics to everyday work, we have all grown up knowing this tool well. The pencil has two primary functions: drawing and writing. The lines we make with these can take forms ranging from letters to objects. Whatever is made with its tip, it did not originate from the pencil. It came from the one using it. The pencil simply acts as an extension of ourselves, allowing us expression and ideas for others to see.

Another reason that the pencil feels natural is because of the simple similarities we, humanity, shares with them. Pencils mostly consist of wood, a product of the planet as are we. They come in multiple sizes and shapes, each better suited for certain tasks, as do we. The pencil has the capacity to create (with the writing tip) and to destroy (erasing), as do we. And like our own lives, the pencil’s uses are not infinite. Each sharpening at the tip after use widdling away its body until it can be sharpened no more.

When a sketch is first made or a rough idea is written, it’s usually crude and unrefined. These come from our thoughts that we have decided to put in physical form. Yet, these drafts are not suited for our advance tools because those are suited for finalizing and finesse. These tools, such as writing softwares, computers and digital programs like Photoshop, are used when the creator is sure on where to go next with the aforementioned ideas. So as it stands, the pencil is better suited for the early stages, for its rough and single colored lines often reflect the state, the mess that is our answers, thoughts, ideas, and dreams. Besides, they are pretty cheap too.

Notes:
I chose to illustrate my point by attempting to compare the pencil to humans. I figured that emphasizing on the similarities to a subject such as ourselves would connect to readers well.

Video Game Tropes and You

Let me start this with a little story. Last year, a pop culture internet critic started a Kickstarter ,a fundraising website used mainly for indie projects, to gather funds from donations. This was to fund a short series of web videos discussing the multiple stereotypes and clichés that are present in video games, from the past to the modern times. While the project was indeed funded, it also met with some ''criticisms.'' The critic was met with multiple threats of violence, death, and rape. Email accounts were hacked and personal information was spread out. A wikipedia page about the critic was defiled with slurs and pornographic imagery. There was even a flash-based game where you punch the critic multiple times in the face, leaving the face black and bruised to your heart's content. Though this did not stop the critic, whose name is Anita Saarkeesian, or the series from being funded (it even surpassed its initial goal), the negative response from these ''male rights activists'' have revealed a dark side of the video game community.

What was going to be a simple web series that could have been simply ignored by those who do not agree with her, became a catalyst of discussion of the acts of sexism that is present in the world of video games. And just as Anita aimed for, I believe the tropes and stereotypes that are present in video games stories should be discussed not just to acknowledge and make these clichés known to the developers and community, but also because this could lead to a creative breakthrough in video games as an artistic medium.

The first reason for the need of discussion is simply to acknowledge that there is indeed a type of gender gap in video games today, on both the industry and the community sides. For example, the director of an upcoming game called Remember Me was rejected by different publishers and backers for having a woman named Nilin as the playable protagonist. The reason for this was, as director Jean-Max Moris was told and states in an interview, ‘’Well, we don’t want to publish it because that’s not going to succeed. You can’t have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that’’(Prell). Whether you believe it is justified or not, cases such as this, along with the Kickstarter debacle stated earlier, shows signs that not all is right. When publishers actively say you cannot have a female lead in a game out of fear that it will not sell, there is something amiss and in need of discussion.

 My second reason for the much needed discussion of the negative stereotypes is for the benefit of creativity. As of this writing, the video game industry is on the verge of a crash, according to many gamers. Due to a struggling economy, expensive games that return low profits, and the staggering amount of contempt consumers are gaining toward the publishers, the industry needs to start changing if it wishes to stay afloat any longer. One of these remedies can be a better catering to female gamers, which percentage of those who play games these days are been on the rise. Also, there is a severe lack of games with female protagonists, while games that have female characters are usually regulated to the side, many times placed within a stereotypical role. The industry can benefit by catering to the other half of the world population a bit better. Discussing and dispelling these cliches (such as the Damsel in distress which limits a woman’s chaacter to being a goal for the protagonist) would not only reduce their uses but also can lead to new and exciting ideas. Games can have better, more well-thought out stories and characters that would stick to our minds long after we have finished the game. Many wish that video games can be respected as the art form . Having a more mature, creative medium definitely will not hurt its chances of achieving this goal. 

 Now some fear that such discussion would paint the developers and the industry as purposely sexist. The point of these discussions isn’t to accuse but to enlighten people about the plot devices and stereotypes that should be known. Gaming won’t become a mature medium any time soon if we continue to use these negative tropes while denying that the gender gap exists in the first place.

Notes:

Much like my first essay, the difficulty was more about choosing what to say then how much I can say about it. Once I chose my focus on a certain opinion, I centered my writing on it. Wanting to tackle this particular topic personally certainly didn't hurt either.

In conclusion

After reading my essay again, I can definitely see my improvement. However, my writing is far from perfect, for I still have a lot to learn. That is probably the most important lesson I gained from this year. Utilizing the writing process, creating a persona, learning to work with the audience and any other tool I was taught about in these classes are just the beginning for me.