In the story, the husband Stitch Machado is centered around a woman that wears a green ribbon around her neck.  Oftentimes in traditional books where you see this kind of symbolic use of clothing,  it is used to cover up something deeper  or like a secret that the  protagonist is trying to cover up. However what is interesting about this is that Machado  never really reveals the  motif or the  purpose of this symbolic idea of her green ribbon. It’s both literal and symbolic as mentioned earlier and because of this duality with the ribbon it has a whole is very Central and  integral to the plot of the story as a whole. The Ribbon  as a whole is also the epitome of the stories’ overarching themes of A woman’s bodily autonomy,  and  just overall the parts of the body that men are not entitled to see or observe. Thus creating a bigger  emphasis of the importance of the green ribbon because it not only introduces a secrecy element when it comes to this ribbon with  the protagonist but introduces a common element seen throughout all of literature whether it’s a movie, books or in general.  The male gaze or the male infatuation element is another thing that also is being introduced and in a way that kind of rejects that curiosity and gaze. The ribbon overall represents The resistance of being confined as one specific idea or topic when it comes to women.  It represents and shows how all of women’s needs are essentially being forcibly accessed by society whether it’s trauma,  pain and just overall identity as a whole. This is based on what I read. What is the big deal with her green ribbon?.

Here is a meme that relates to my analysis. 

Reflection

The development of this essay is a rather interesting experience in the sense that I’ve never really thought about “my community.” As stated in the essay,  it was pretty hard to try to come up with an idea or concept of a community in which I belong. Overall, it was different. I contemplated back and forth about what similarities all my friendships had in common, or in other words, how I meet or become friends with people.  The two common denominators that were present when meeting and talking to people with either sports or video games,  and I felt the most connection with video games because I was actually spending time together with people longera nd also never really played sports growing up. So the Xbox virtual world was the place where I identified my community and my upbringing.  When it came to the development of this essay, the essay was written in one shot because I wanted an unfiltered, authentic voice of thought when writing the paper.  I wanted to say what I felt about the gaming community and how I thought about people. I wanted to share my experience, and I felt like doing all that in one take and one night was the best situation for me in regard to sharing my experience as a whole.  I love how authentic and unfiltered it is when it comes to sharing my experience in the essay, but because it was written in one shot, there are definitely some revisions that needed to be made from a grammatical and cohesion standpoint. I talked about the Good, the bad, and the ugly when it came to the gaming community,y and I wanted the reader to acknowledge the fact that a community is present and the community is very real and isn’t just people just wasting their time in the virtual Abyss. They would improve the balance between conscious grammatical improvement and entering a flow state of writing, in this case, typing it out. I learned a few things from the peer feedback, not necessarily what led to the development of the essay,y but other people’s stories and experiences, and a very common thing is the feeling of neglect or feeling left out of their communities.  I would say relate to that because I feel like I’ve always kind of been neglected regarding certain communities or friend groups, Etc. What I learned from the peer Group reviews is to really listen to other people’s stories, so that way you’re able to build a better connection with people in the classroom.  especially since I’m going to be there with them throughout this journey for the next three months, we must start practicing what we preach in terms of building a community in our classroom with 20 to 25 people, so we’re able to extrapolate that to our own lives and how we’re able to talk to people on a day-by-day basis.

In chapter 6 of the book Ghostland, Colin Dickey explores Anecdotals Ghost stories in relation through Richmond, Virginia’s traumatic and controversial history of slavery.  The Mecca of this place being Shockoe Bottom, Which features many landmarks that carry that traumatic and haunting legacy of slavery and cruelty, such as the Devils Half Acre.  A notorious slave market, and Jail complex where slaves were stored. This landmark as well as Richmond, Virginia as a whole become a place of many ghost stories and haunting tales as Dicky recounts a multitude of stories of ghosts, for instance, one of them being John May who is a slave turned ghost who haunts because of his tormentors. At the end of the chapter, Dicky says a quote that really interests me a lot; he states that “The dead are watching, whether or not we choose to listen to their stories.” This is in reference to towards the end of the chapter, where he talks about how Richmond Virginia to this day, is trying to in a sense, reclaim their history, and trying to use that history for commerce. But at the end of the day, no matter how well they can spin the story specifically the ghost stories, that was built on slavery and torture of black people as a race will always be there, and as Dicky stated “the dead will be watching.”  The image I chose is a meme, but the reason why I chose this meme, despite not being related to slavery or ghost stories is because It directly relates to the quote that I mentioned earlier, which was how  “The dead are watching, whether or not we choose to listen to their stories.” Their stories will never be forgotten, and despite the attempt to commerce their history, the ghosts of the past was still always be there