What follows is my Twitterive, an assignment that was supposed to cleverly combine tweets posted to TWITTER and narratIVE pieces of writing.  My Writing Research and Technology class has been tasked to pick a place that means something to each one of us and, using multiple genres and modes of communication, we are to write about that place, and post pictures about that place, and use poetry and music and video images to capture what it means to us.  The place does not have to be a physical space like a park or a classroom, but is allowed to extend to all aspects of life.  Love, family, a sense of self, home, a future career.  You name it, it can be included as a Twitterive place.

My place, I have decided, will be the most trying ordeal I've faced in all my life, something that nearly killed me a few times over.  In the end, it helped change the shape of who I am today and made me a stronger, albeit slightly different person than I was seven or eight years ago.  My theme is looking on the bright side of things, something that gets increasingly difficult when you feel like the waking, walking dead.  My repetend, or the repeated motif that will link each piece in a Twitterive that may otherwise seem disconnected with itself, is being able to laugh and roll with the punches through a never-ceasing sense of humor.


Some questions:
1.) Genres.  I need more genres, that much I know, but I'm struggling to come up with some.
2.) How's the tone so far?  I'm aiming to infuse some laughs here and there; do I need more spots to cause the reader to chuckle?  
3.) Since non-super-depressing is my goal, how am I doing so far?  It's heavy material, I know.  Do I need less gloom?  Be honest.
4.) I suck at this, so feel free to offer suggestions not featured in these questions section.  Comment away!  Feel free to be brutally honest - your honesty is probably the best way to shape this thing into a finished product.

For my vows, I made sure to check with my pseudowife before writing anything.  Jen and I briefly discussed what would be fresh, funny, and slightly out of the norm for a couple getting married, and we settled on the conclusion that the entire thing would be more interesting if the wife were to be very chill and blase about the whole thing, but the husband is all gung-ho, "Yay, marriage!" 

At first, I was going to have Tim (my character) get super emotional and cry on the altar, professing his love with profound poetry, sobbing like a baby while Michelle (Jen's character) stands there horrified that Tim is losing it in front of their friends and family.  It was decided, however, in group discussions that the groomsmen will be arriving late to the chapel after one final night of partying.  Despite some objections from his longtime friends,and  combined with a bit of liquid courage from the night before, I figured it would be more in-character to have Tim still kind of drunk, up there just pouring his heart out to his wife.  Instead of getting gooey and emotional like originally planned, and instead of keeping it simple like Tim and Michelle originally planned, I wrote the second vows, the ones he comes up with off the cuff, without a brain/mouth filter.  Tim's going up there speaking his mind and everything on it.

My Writing Research and Technology class is holding a Multi-modal Wedding, and I drew the part of the groom.  His vows will be in two parts: the words that he wrote and intended to say are in the first section.  Michelle and Tim wanted to keep things short and simple, without being overly mushy and embarrassing themselves in front of their family.  

The other set of vows are what Tim actually says on the altar.  It’s important to note that Tim, my character, arrived late to the church from a strip club with his best man and other groomsmen, and is still probably nursing a bit of a buzz. 

Michelle,
I stand before you today ready to become your husband.
I promise to support you through times of laughter and hardship,
to be your partner in all things.
I promise to encourage your passion,
for that is how we met and the reason we fell in love.
I promise to love you above all else for the rest of our natural lives.

Michelle,
I know we promised to keep these simple, 
but I’m up here right now, in front of all these people--
some of whom I don’t even like 
(no offense, Chad.  Other than trying to steal my wife, 
you seem like an all right dude)--
to tell you how much I love you.

I love your beauty because you’re . . . well, you’re beautiful. 
You always know the right thing to do to get me going.
I love you even though my mother sends me letters
telling me to find someone else, someone that's not a hussy. 
She wants me to go out with Susanne, my ex, who she invited here today. 
But I don’t care about any of that, baby.  I only care about you.
About us.

You’re my girl, Michelle, 
and I want you to know that I’ll love and cherish you always.
Even when some of my friends 
tell me to cut my losses and bail the hell out of this relationship.
Know that I think you’re the best,
and know that one lifetime of marriage with you
could never truly be enough to satisfy me.
I love you, you’re so fine.

Out of both stories, Gian Pagnucci's "Living the Narrative Life: Telling Your Own Story" resonated with me slightly more than the other piece.  Despite the message -- a ploy to encourage others to write and foster a deeper meaning behind the act -- the chapter doesn't come off as hokey, nor does Pagnucci speak in platitudes.  In time with his overall message, that paying heed to life's narratives "can teach [us] about [ourselves] . . . how they can sensitive [us] to the stories of others, and how they can focus [our] understand of the world from a personal vantage point" (81), Pagnucci practices what he preaches.  He suffuses life into what could have been a boring essay by including memorable events from his past: his first comic book purchase; that time he and his college-age friends braved a twenty-foot rock wall because it made them feel like superheroes; recovering in the hospital after getting struck by a car and making a friend; buying two young children a box of comics at a garage sale. 

Without these events, the piece would've read like a typical assigned reading.  Not mind-numbingly boring, but something that does not necessarily resonate with the reader.  With the addition of these narrative events, Pagnucci illustrates that he truly believes what he's writing.  With the knowledge that some day soon, the reader might forget one of these formative events in your life, writing them down makes sense.  The internet is littered with blogs, isn't it?  There are cooking blogs and sports blogs and even blogs detailing the building of model robots, so why not begin an online blog detailing the happenings in your typical 9 to 5?

The piece struck a chord with me because, in the spring of 2005 when I was a senior in high school, I was diagnosed with Nasopharyngeal carcinoma and was forced to undergo treatment right away.  I was able to go to prom and walk at graduation, thankfully (radiation had yet to begin at those points, also thankfully), but despite all of the hardships and a period where I thought I was going to die on an hourly basis, I learned and forgot more in that stretch of a year and a half of treatment and recovery than most people learn in a lifetime.  I learned who my true friends were, the people that stuck beside me through thick and thin, as well as how to deal with a feeding tube, the death of close friends (some of which hadn't reached puberty, others that had yet to learn how to walk), and expectations moving forward.  If I'd had a blog, I don't think I would've documented a ton of those things, because most of them have stuck with me.  One doesn't forget seeing a coffin less than four feet long for a two-year-old.  

But I would've been able to document the whacky things that happened throughout the course of my treatment, like the time a crackhead broke into our private Cancer Kid's Wing of the hospital in search of an exit out of the building.  He picked the wrong nurses to trifle with, and ended up getting tackled and held down by two women half his size until security could arrive.  Or that time a group of us cancer kids went to Disney World and P.J. (16 at the time), Devin (10 or 11), Tyree (13), and I (18) hit on a group of N.J. high school girls on their senior class trip.  The next day, guess who helped lotion us up beside the pool?

There are things I know I forgot, like how the word "hemorrhoids" came to be known as "homeboys" around clinic -- being heavily drugged up on a regular basis, my memory of that time is a little fuzzy.  But I do remember discussing with the nurses who would play them in the movie I was supposed to be writing, documenting my experiences at St. Christopher's Children's Hospital.  If I had just taken the ten, maybe fifteen minutes of time to record some of those happenings, I could probably have written and published a book.  More important than that, it'd be impossible for me to forget because all of the memories would be written and recorded.

Note to self: blog more. 

On the surface, it sounds like a simple question.  Is technology distracting?   I'm hard pressed not to start jumping up and down, screaming, "YES, YES, OF COURSE IT IS, WHY WOULD YOU BE SO DAFT AS TO HAVE TO ASK!", but something is holding me back.  On one hand, all to often do I see students file out of classrooms with cellphones in hand, texting this, tweeting that, no doubt updating their facebook status with a metaphorical roll of the eyes at something their instructor did or said in class.  They're like zombies, mindlessly shuffling down the halls, hardly sparing a glance to look up from the glowing, hand-held screens. It irks me, so I'm tempted to agree with anyone that says technology is bad and rotting our brains.

But without technology, could we function?  I'm chained to my laptop on an almost daily basis and, according to Marc Prensky's article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, I don't even consider myself a Digital Native.  I get recipes here, see what my crazy uncle in New York is doing here, find out last night's box score or trade rumors here.  Without my laptop, I don't know what I'd be doing with my free time.  Going out with my friends more often?

I shudder to think.

Then again, the computer on my lap does often draw my attention away from academic pursuits.  Instead of reading up on the merits of rhetorical analysis by Jack Selzer, I'm pouring over information detailing the likely landing destination of Yankees pitcher A.J. Burnett (psst, he went to the Pirates), or reading helpful tidbits about the land of Skyrim, or catching up on TV's Misfits, or adding to my ever-growing, pop-culture heavy wardrobe.  Right now, I'm tempted to head over to twitter and write something snarky about how much I hate blogging. 

What was I talking about again?  Oh, right.  Technology.

Is it distracting?  Not sure, but maybe I'll have the answer after a couple of games of Curveball.  

According to Marc Prensky, I would be qualified as a Digital Immigrant.  For those not in the know, the difference between the two is that one group, the Natives, were born in a word steeped in various technologies: the computer, the cell phone, video games, etc.  Immigrants, meanwhile, have adopted the digital discourse over time, and like immigrants in other aspects, some learn better than others, but they almost always "retain their 'accent' . . . their foot in the past" (2).  

I have maintained my accent by needing to print things out.  People keep telling me to get a Nook or a Kindle, but I'm a book man through-and-through.  In a world full of PDF files that are made to save paper and reach every student in every module of a particular class, I'm that old fuddy dud that stills has to have a hard copy.  I want to read something in my hand, I need to have it to write on if I so choose.  It doesn't help that sometimes teachers post things that are illegibly copied or are rotated 90 degrees in one direction or another.  You're not helping me lose my accent, people! 

Some might find it odd that a 24-year-old doesn't consider himself a Digital Native, but it is important to note that I didn't receive my first computer until the seventh grade.  Even then, I didn't begin using the thing in earnest until high school, when no longer could I hand write my assignments.  For the most part, I always saw the computer as a tool, a means to an end, and never something that would change the way I learned in such a radical direction.  Part of me is glad it did, because my hand writing is absolutely atrocious and I enjoy wasting time on such things as twitter and ESPN.  But to me, deep down and in the back of my mind, I'll forever and always view most technology as time wasters.  Video games are for fun, and are something I do when I don't want to think.  The same goes for pouring over baseball stats and insider information.  How could something that's meant as a reprieve from dealing with society change the way a person learns?