Personal Essay

Bartle is a character in a book called “The Things they Carried,” a book that I wouldn’t read for another 6 years. One event in the story was him having to shoot up a car even though he didn’t want to. Not to compare my actions to shooting up a car, or anything else for that matter, but to me, it conflicted my “morals” in a similar way that the event conflicted his.

It is always nice waking up at ten in the morning. I would have been late for school if it wasn’t for winter vacation. I was in the 4th or 5th grade. We were going to New York for Christmas, I couldn’t wait for it. It was originally meant to be a surprise, but I figured it out a few days before. I had been in New York, but never really as a vacation. Everything was already packed, I already knew what I wanted to do when we got there, I was just happy to get away from normal life for awhile. I could have had a nice vacation, but I hated my teachers and they hated me. For my Christmas and going away gift from them to me, they decided it would be best to give me a pink slip. It didn’t mean that I was fired from school, it was there way of basically saying “You should know better, give this to your parents.” I was always a straight A student. I always did my homework and always did the best on tests. I just didn’t like them and they knew it. I don’t know why they would give me a pink slip, they always did it, but I wasn’t sure why.

We left for New York on a train, it took years to get there, but somehow we made it there just before noon. We got off the train, walked up a lot of steps, and then we were in Grand Central Station in New York. It was annoying, everybody was walking like they were late, the unintentional pushing and shoving that they were probably use to. It would have been fun to start kicking people in the shins, but that wouldn’t have helped anyone. We walked outside of the station, it was supposed to be cold, but somehow I felt the warmth of everyone walking by, it was weird. I didn’t know where we were going, nobody really told me, but it was really nice to look at all the tall buildings. We walked around for awhile, then we got to our hotel that we were staying in. It was in Time Square, from our room, we got to see the giant displays from the windows. We weren’t there for long though, we left out later to get dinner. My sister always made things interesting, because of her allergies, we usually had to do some extra searching to make sure that her need were accommodated. It wasn’t a bad thing though, and the search turned into an I-Spy game through the crowd to find a place she could eat at. After we found food for her, we went to Roxy’s. I had a burger (this was back before my vegetarian days) and then an oreo cheesecake. After that we walked some, we went to the Nintendo Store and the M&M store. We got back to our hotel at around 9, we unpacked and then went to sleep.

I never actually went to sleep though, I just stayed up and watched the repeating commercials flashing on the giant screens outside the window. The fact that I had a pink slip was getting to me for some reason. It wasn’t rare for me, they were always stapled into my journal so I couldn’t forget. It’s just that in this instance, I had hid it under my bed, I didn’t really expect anyone would see it in my room, no one was home. This is an event similar to what Bartle went through. A person might say “You didn’t have to hide it.” But I did, it’s not that I wanted to just ignore it or maybe I did, and I had eventually told her after vacation, I just wanted to to leave that back and home for when we came back. I had brought my Nintendo, but I never played it, knowing that I probably shouldn’t. To me, it was interesting how much I was thinking about it, but I normally think a lot. I think that it was more of the feeling of not telling my mom. If I would have told her before or during our vacation, everything would have been different.

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