Metafiction

Dear Mom,

First of all, happy birthday! I'm sorry I wasn't able to celebrate in a fancy restaurant. And thank you so much for sending me to such a wonderful place; my experiences in the Philippines were the greatest things that happened to me.

At first when I opened the white wooden door into a hot, steamy, small, but cozy little room, the room was like a hotel; all the furniture was in a right angled order, and nothing was extraordinary about it. The room was utterly clean, without single dust on the floor, and the bed sheets and towels were neatly folded. Apparently in the Philippines, every household owns several housemaids because of the low personnel expenditure.

"Are you saying that I don't have to do my bed or organize my own desk here? Yay! This is amazing!" I cried out loud in joy after listening to my Ajjuma's (the owner of the house I lived in) explanation.

"Sure. In fact, you'll be in trouble if you ever do these tasks yourself. I have to train my maids since some of them are new here."

Except for the fact that it was extremely hot (the temperature reached over 40 degrees Celsius), the place was a paradise for me. There wasn't anyone to scold me or order me to do this or that. Back at home, I had World War Three with you every day, remember? You always tried to find any flaws that I might have made, 24 hours a day. I was delighted to have gotten out of all that.

One day during the six months of my homestay in the Philippines, I caught a really bad cold, as you already know; I couldn't move at all; my body temperature went up to 40 degrees Celsius, but I was still freezing. I skipped school and stayed in my bed all day. At 1 in the afternoon, my roommate came back from school and turned on the air conditioner. I understood her at first, because she was sweating all over, but after a while, I felt even more terrible with extra coughs.

"Hey Sora, could you turn off the air conditioner? I'm freezing here. Please?" I asked just to be polite since I was quite sure that she would gladly turn it off. It was more than obvious that I caught a bad cold and I needed the air conditioner to be turned off, so her answer was totally unexpected.

"You never consider others, do you? You are so selfish, did you know that? I know that you caught a cold, but I live in this room too, and can't you see I'm sweating like crazy? You should really start to learn to consider others too, you know."

I was infuriated with her, but I had no energy to fight, so I just stayed still and fell asleep. Apparently, my cold got worse.

A few days later, I got better. However, this time it was Sora who caught the cold; she must have gotten infected from me. She lay down all day long. Her coughs went on and I felt the strong need to turn off the air conditioner, but I remembered what she had done to me.

Only God knows why Ajjuma had to come into the room at that moment.

"My God, MinSun! Can't you see that Sora caught a terrible cold? And the cold was from you, remember? Now turn off the air conditioner immediately!"

I knew that it was bad, but I didn't want to do it. I knew it was childish, but I felt that it was unfair. I was 13 years old, at the peak of my puberty, so I was rebellious more than ever; I shouted back at her face as loud as I could. She got so mad that she went downstairs and called you. You and Ajjuma talked for quite some time. I tried to eavesdrop your talk from upstairs, but unfortunately, I couldn't catch a thing.

"MinSun, come down and get your mom's call!" shouted Ajjuma.

"Oh, shit," I uttered to myself, assuming that you would shout at me again. "This is my worst day ever."

With an extremely angered face, Ajjuma handed the phone over to me. I took it. I scowled at her for a moment, looked away, and listened to what the telephone had to say. I kept some distance between the phone and my ear since I expected shouting, when I heard a small crying voice from it. I couldn't believe my ear so I pushed the phone against my ear instantly.

"I know. I know you didn't do it on purpose. I know my own daughter, and she couldn't have done it on evil purpose."

"You do?"

"Of course, I know you have a reason to have done that. But MinSun, sometimes, you have to give in to these situations. You're in a foreign country, and in a house that is not your own. You don't have to explain to me what had happened, nor to Ajjuma. She wouldn't try to understand you. I'm on your side, so just go tell Ajjuma that you're sorry and turn off the air conditioner. That's how you can live your life much easier."

You were crying, so was I. It was the first time that I've heard you cry. It was the first time I realized that you were always on my side. My eyes were full of tears, but I didn't want to cry in front of Ajjuma. I put down the phone and ran upstairs into my bathroom. It felt as if someone was poking and opening up my wounded heart. It hurt, so much. I cried until I felt dehydrated, and opened the bathroom door into my room. Sora was sleeping in her bed, buried in multiple sheets. I quietly turned off the air conditioner, pulled out a piece of paper, and began to write this letter for you.

Love, MinSun

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She looked up from the letter, to me. She didn't shout or anything, but I could tell from her eyes that she was quite surprised to see me sitting right beside her while she was reading my letter. She smiled at me, but she didn't say anything. I wished she would break the silence, but she just smiled at me, which started to make me a little uncomfortable. So I spoke out first.

"If you think of me as a daughter who is always rebellious to your thoughts, I am not anymore. After all the years I've been with you, I finally can see the true purpose of all your nagging and scolding. I simply thought you hated me when you scolded me instead of my sister when we had a fight, and I really thought you hated me. In fact, until this moment, I've considered my family useless by the time I grow up and actually get to live on my own. I remember that night when I came home late.

What had really happened that night was I had watched a movie with my friend after lying to you that I would stay and study. It was late, but I didn't answer your calls on purpose because I didn't want to get caught for watching movies and lying to you. You were so worried about me, so you called everyone, including my best friend who was watching the movie with me, the academy that I was supposed to be in, and the police. When the police called me, it was then when I knew I was in big trouble and blamed you for calling the police and making everything so big a deal. I couldn't understand why you would call the police just because I didn't receive my calls for a couple of hours. When I arrived home, you had tears in your red eyes and I remember you saying something about the importance of family and how I should keep in contact especially at night in this dangerous world. I laughed at you inside.

But now, I know. I finally understand what you've been trying to say. It's my first time that I realize that my family is the only one that is going to stand on my side whatever happens to me."

Body Language

Body English. Write a “conversation” in which no words are said.  This exercise is meant to challenge you to work with gesture, body language (or, as a baseball announcer I heard once misspeak it, body English), all the things we convey to each other without words.  We often learn more about characters in stories from the things characters do with their hands than from what they say.  It might be best to have some stranger observe this conversation, rather than showing us the thoughts of one of the people involved in the conversation, because the temptation to tell us what the conversation is about is so great from inside the conversation.  “I was doing the opposite of Freud,” Desmond Morris says, of his famous book The Naked Ape that first studied the ways humans speak with their bodies.  “He listened to people and didn’t watch; I watched people and didn’t listen.”  Because of Morris, according to Cassandra Jardine, “when politicians scratch their noses they are now assumed to be lying—and the sight of the Queen [Elizabeth] crossing her legs at the ankles is known to be a signal that her status is too high for her to need to show sexual interest by crossing them further up.”  Autistic children cannot understand human conversation even when they understand individual words because they cannot read facial expressions, which is clear evidence of how important other forms of language are.  600 words.

The clock pointed exactly eleven o'clock when her mom decided she should exercise outside. Her mom had been making her jump ropes as a doctor told her this would help her grow taller. Nuri was lying flat on her bed as if her stomach was glued to the bed sheets. She was deeply immersed in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," but her mother never accepted any excuse. Perhaps she felt the strong responsibility to help her grow taller since Nuri was the smallest in her class. 
Her mom stared at her disapprovingly out of the corner of her eyes, leaning on the door.
But Nuri did not budge an inch from her position, still holding her Harry Potter book. In fact, she suddenly started to flip through the pages even faster when her mom entered the room to pull her out of the bed. Nuri's eyes were now strictly fixed on the black letters on the white papers in her book. Nuri's mom knew how to handle her better than anyone else; she was standing still on the threshold, staring at Nuri and not moving at all. 
Nuri sighed, her eyes looking down at the floor and closed her book with a loud noise. She put on her coat halfheartedly and walked across the living room hallway, thumping her feet as hard as she could. Grabbing her jump rope, Nuri pushed the door and pressed the elevator button to go down. The automatic lighting turned off itself and there came a complete darkness. In the dark, Nuri's eyes were wavering, and so did her hands toward the light bulb. The light turned on again. Dark again. Now Nuri jumped with her hands high up toward the light. The elevator reached 5th floor, and the door opened. She walked in, pressing the ground floor automatically with her elbow, and looked into the mirror. Her face was the only part she could see. She stepped up onto a green box at the edge. Now her shoulders were shown in the mirror.
When the elevator reached the ground floor, the door opened and Nuri came out of the elevator. The freezing wind pierced through her thick parka, and Nuri stopped in front of the door that divided the warmer part of the apartment, and outside, the colder part. Her neck and chin were already buried deep in her coat, and her hands in both her coat pockets, with her jump rope carried under her arm. She gazed outside through the glass door with gloomy eyes. Her eyes panned around the parking lot in front of the apartment, and suddenly, her eyes were fixed on a white Avante, because the car had its yellow lights turned on inside. Under the yellow lights, a young woman was sitting next to the driver's seat.

Nuri's eyes suddenly got bigger, and she carefully opened the glass door when icy cold wind invaded her; she shut her eyes tight. She stepped outside with her eyes still fixed on the young woman. The woman was sitting straight, staring at a tree right in front of the car. Her eyes weren't moving at all, nor was any part of her body. Shivering, Nuri slowly walked toward the car tiptoeing on frozen snow. Then, the woman suddenly turned her head where Nuri was walking. Screaming like a dying little pig, Nuri slipped on icy ground, but quickly got up and ran into the apartment. She pressed the elevator button to go up. She fumbled around the neck area and sighed. For the second time, Nuri walked toward the car, and for the second time, the woman turned to face Nuri. Startled at her movement, Nuri picked up her muffler. Right then, the woman tapped on the driver's seat next to her, looking into Nuri's shaking eyes. Nuri's heart began to beat faster, but her hand reached out and opened the car door. Moving as if she were hypnotized by something, Nuri kept staring at her own feet, occasionally peeking at the woman. Nuri suddenly stopped glancing and watched the woman intently. In the woman's eyes, Nuri saw her own face magnified by the woman's tears. 

All of a sudden, Nuri held the woman's hand, which was two times bigger than hers, and Nuri looked deeply into the woman's eyes. Both of them stared at each other holding hands for several minutes. Then, Nuri grasped her hands with greater strength and smiled. 

The next day, Nuri hears a story; the explanation of the woman sitting there.

Obama's victory

Election Results Prezi on Prezi

TED; Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are

I'm posting this TED video to relate to my assignment; fiction-body language

Isn't life

"Isn't life," she stammered, "isn't life-"

But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood.

"Isn't it, darling?" said Laurie.

From "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield

Fiction-Assignment

Body English. Write a “conversation” in which no words are said.  This exercise is meant to challenge you to work with gesture, body language (or, as a baseball announcer I heard once misspeak it, body English), all the things we convey to each other without words.  We often learn more about characters in stories from the things characters do with their hands than from what they say.  It might be best to have some stranger observe this conversation, rather than showing us the thoughts of one of the people involved in the conversation, because the temptation to tell us what the conversation is about is so great from inside the conversation.  “I was doing the opposite of Freud,” Desmond Morris says, of his famous book The Naked Ape that first studied the ways humans speak with their bodies.  “He listened to people and didn’t watch; I watched people and didn’t listen.”  Because of Morris, according to Cassandra Jardine, “when politicians scratch their noses they are now assumed to be lying—and the sight of the Queen [Elizabeth] crossing her legs at the ankles is known to be a signal that her status is too high for her to need to show sexual interest by crossing them further up.”  Autistic children cannot understand human conversation even when they understand individual words because they cannot read facial expressions, which is clear evidence of how important other forms of language are.  600 words.

I'm totally in the same place with this prompt that body language is sometimes even more important than actual words when communicating, especially with emotions. 
I'm planning to write a story based on my experience when I was 9 years old. I have an experience of witnessing a ghost inside a car around 11 in front of my apartment. It was so shocking that I still remember exactly how I felt then. 
I'm going to change the point of view from me to "a girl." In that way, I could be able to illustrate my emotion through gestures.