A Very Lucky Girl

"There was nothing wrong with her face that a pleasant expression wouldn't help."--Good Country People The above quote was written by Flannery O'Conner. I've been submerged in her twisted stories throughout the course of my Critical Reading and Writing class.  It stuck out so much to me that I felt a compulsory need to jot it down. Ms. O'Conner writes a lot about social status and dispositions. So her comment was not out of character, but it has a complete knell of truth. Smiling makes everyone pretty. Smiling creates an illusion of happiness, no matter how much a life is falling apart. I've been trying this new thing where I smile at the people I have to dig deep down and grit my teeth to care about. For a few reasons: One, you don't look good without smiling unless you are going for the sultry look and I am not interested in seducing these people. Two, smiling makes people think that your life is on the perfect side of awesome. You could be having ...

I'm currently taking my first major class, Critical Reading and Writing, and we have written one paper so far. English professors are notorious for lag-time on returning graded assignments so I'm still biting my nails over here as I wait for the final verdict on my first piece of prose for Dr. Anderson.  On Tuesday our class had a very interesting and rousing discussion about the general education requirements at OU. So rousing, in fact, that we spent a solid 45 minutes expositing the pros and cons (of course, this was also a clever ruse to delay our inevitable discourse about Flannery O'Connor's tragic tales like Good Country People  and A Good Man is Hard to Find ).  Nevertheless, several of my classmates had good points. OU requires several hours of history and government, two sciences (natural and physical, one with a lab and one without), two semesters of English, and 3 hours of math, regardless of your declared major. Most of us in the CRW class agreed that as...