Blog Post #3

I'm not sure what I'm going to do for this assignment. I have never been able to keep up a journal because I don't feel comfortable talking about myself (even if no one else was reading it), but this assignment requires that I choose something and my mind immediately goes blank. 

After thinking it over for a week I've got some ideas that do come to mind but I'm not too sure what I want to write about. 

- I played tennis for about 7 years and had to stop due to an injury to my shoulder. I plan on including flashbacks to when I played and then insert instances in which my injury got in the way (for example, the time my shoulder got so bad that it caused  muscle spasms in my back and I could not move because of the excruciating pain). The problem with this one is that I'm not too sure what my point would be.

- Just last week I was seconds away from being involved in a pretty bad car accident and I remember that when I was a child going on vacation with my family one of our planes wings caught fire and I could see the smoke from the window. What stands out to me is that fact that even though I was not in a car accident I was very aware of my mortality, my small car would have been whipped around by the large Jeep that sped down the highway. However, as a kid on that plane I thought it was an adventure, a story to tell, that there was no way we would die (despite the fact that the plane was on fire and we were in the middle of the ocean). If i juxtaposed the two situations and reflected on the difference with which I analyzed the real danger of the situation. Here my problem would be the fact that my memory of the plane being on fire is, for lack of a better word, blurry. I know it happened, I can remember being told to put my head between my legs, I know there were nuns and a boys soccer team on board and somehow everyone thought that was reassuring because of course a plane with so many innocent children and a bunch of nuns won't go down in flames. But then I remember tragic stories of innocent people dying in horrific accidents and how there really was no guarantee that we wouldn't become one of those stories you hear on the news. 

Well I guess I fleshed out that second idea more that I had initially anticipated. I still have my doubts as to how I will write my story without falling into the realms of fiction and without being too preachy or letting the reflection take over the story.