"I was there in the room"

This was a very interesting piece. Upon reading I was at first confused but steadily progressed in my interpretation. whoever told this story was talking about a baby being born and her experience in the room actually witnessing the event. I really liked the metaphors used when she was talking about the vagina as the baby came out; "I was there when her vagina changed from a shy sexual hole to an archeological tunnel, a sacred vessel, a venetian canal, a deep well with a tiny stuck child inside, waiting to be rescued." She also mentions seeing "all the colors of the vagina" and I think that this goes beyond the actual experience, I think she uses the graphical language to dip into the hardships women face and the "secrecy" of the vagina that for some reason we still see today, how everyone gets uncomfortable when the word is used. "saw the bruised broken blue, the blistering tomato red, the gray pink the dark; saw the blood like perspiration" I think she uses this intentionally to make the reader feel uncomfortable to perhaps make the reader feel like the women in labor? Towards the end she related the vagina to the heart, and some of the analogies she brought up to link the two I thought were pretty interesting "The heart is capable of sacrifice so is the vagina the heart is able to forgive and repair so is the vagina" etc. However I'm still not quite sure what shes trying to get it in comparison of the two. Perhaps trying to say if there was no vagina there would be no life which is technically true. I think this story illustrates well the effort Ensler put it to soften people up when the vagina is being talked about particularly at the end when she compares it to the heart.

Moaning Language?

So in this story this women talks about moaning. I'm assuming of course she is a lesbian within the very first line "I love vaginas. I love women." However, I was a bit confused reading in a few more lines when she said "women pay me to dominate them, to excite them, to make them come" so does this mean that she is a prostitute that strictly specializes in women? Or does she do this without sexual contact because further on she mentions how she uses "props" such as chains, whips, handcuffs etc. I'm not sure how to interpret this story because I'm pretty confused. So does this women go from being a lawyer to a prostitute who gets paid by women to make .them "come"? She talks about how she practiced moaning in the mirror and recorded it then played it back to see what she sounded like and said; "but always when I played it back, it sounded fake. It was fake." Maybe this was another reason in which lead her to want to make women moan but really moan not a fake moan. Towards the end of the story she writes about ALL of the different types of moans. You can really see her progress in the story of her understanding of moaning women. It seems to me like a big misinterpretation and I don't know if its because of whats being talked about or if its just me.

"hair" The vagina monologues

Reading "Hair" as well as the beginning of The Vagina Monologues was an entirely new experience for me. I was a little shocked at what i was reading about which i thought was just vagina. Even when i started reading "Hair" i was getting caught off gaurd with lines such as "when he made love to me,my vagina felt the way a beard must feel." and "i could feel his spikey sharpness sticking into me,my naked puffy vagina." it wasn't until the very last line where i started to interpret what in fact this was about. "you have to love the hair in order to love the vagina. You cant pick the parts you want. and besides, my husband never stopped screwing around." I think that shes using the vagina to symbolize love, and the hair to symbolize all the flaws. I wonder if my interpretations are right could she be saying you have to deal with the and look beyond the little flaw and perhaps even not look at it as a flaw rather something good to have love?

"Between the pool and the gardenias"

This story takes place in the Dominican where a women named Marie finds a baby wrapped up in a blanket in the street. I'm assuming that the babies name was Rose because that was embroided on her clothing. What was intriguing about this story is that you don't realize shes speaking of a dead baby until the end, unless you catch her symbolism ahead of time. The first sign was when she wrote "she smelled like the scented powders in Madames cabinet the mixed scent of gardenias and fish" this stood out because upon reading it i was thinking to myself "ok so she smells like fish gross" and i couldn't figure out why until i realized the baby was in fact dead. Marie talks to the baby and refers to it as if it was alive and well telling her about all of her miseries through out life about her cheating husband, her miscarriages, and how she slept with a Dominican pool cleaner. When she finally decided to bury the baby the Dominican calls the police saying that Marie was evil and killed the baby.

Krik? Krak! "Night Women"

"Night Women" is from what I understood a story of a women who is a prostitute. My first speculation of this was when in the beginning when she introduced her son she wrote "For a brief second, I almost mistake him for the ghost of his father, an old lover who disappeared  with the nights shadow a long time ago." This brought line brought about two speculations for me, either she was a prostitute, or her son was concieved due to a one night stand. I later found out that although my speculations of her being a prostitute was right, her son's father however may have infact been a person of importance in her life that may have passed. She goes on to talk about the men that visit her for her services and the excuse she would use if her son had ever woken up during these sessions, or for when he gets old. "I will tell him that his father has come, that an angel brought him back from heaven for a while." SHE BETTER COME UP WITH A BETTER EXCUSE THAN THAT!!! or at least do a better job hiding it maybe taking her activities elsewhere LOL

Krik? Krak? "Children of The Sea"

I am not an avid reader, and it takes something very interesting (to me at least) in a book or any reading to keep my attention. "Children of The Sea" was a very interesting story in its context because it was two people who were in love writing letters to one another in which either persons would never see because the man was in a boat fleeing Haiti. The letters contained all kinds of expressions towards one another including passed conflicts they had "I look up there and i think of you and all those times you resisted. Sometimes i felt like you wanted to but I knew you wanted me to respect you" this is a prime example in  which I think they may be referring to sex The father opposes there love and gave up all of his possessions to protect his daughter. What intrigued me about this tail is the ending because it leave you wondering if they will ever see each other. One question that i asked myself in reading this is what the black butterfly symbolize? Black always symbolizes death and butterflies usually symbolize freedom. So how do the two conjoin? I wonder if he made his escape, or if the boat was him that sank.

"Her Way"

This poem intrigues me the way it was written starting from the title "Her Way." Although the title justifies the poem upon the first few lines I seemed to get caught off gaurd; "What water she poured on the floor/Was more than she needed" this seemed to take my idea away of my idea of the poem being about a women who literally gets "Her Way" because Nye seemed to discredit an act done by her "pouring too much water on the floor". Then the poem seems to twist "Yet her buckets were full/The great buckets of field and orchard/She was dragging them room to room/in a house that already looked clean". The buckets seem to symbolize the women having some sort of a burden upon her, or some duty, and the clean house I think has to symbolize her work load yet already done. In the third stanza Nye talks about soldiars and blood, could she be referring to war? "she was walking with her neck straight/Her eyes placed ahead" I think this poem starts at this point to show a women with an ambition to do good and "her way". I still however don't understand fully the point of this poem. What is this women that cleans necessarily portraying?