Exploration 2: Lorenzo Palma

My name's Lorenzo Palma and I graduated from Olentangy Orange High School. I live in Lewis Center, OH. I'm currently in the Computer Science & Engineering major but I'm thinking of switching majors because I want to become a Video Game Designer/ Programmer when I graduate. My fun fact was that I play club rugby and hate the outdoors. Honestly, it's not so much that I HATE the outdoors but it's just that I'd rather stay inside than outside but I love taking walks, hanging out outside, playing sports, basically normal outdoor stuff with friends but I just hate being outside by myself. Also, I've been playing rugby for three years now, and I think it's safe to say I'm pretty decent at it. I play as a "wing" and a "hooker" for my team, The Columbus Castaways.

Here's a picture of me on graduation day.

I did some research on Tim Siebles and my eye was caught at the fact that he just recently was nominated for an award, The National Book Award, for his recent work, Fast Animal. By recent, I mean it was just two years ago when this all took place. But now he currently teaches English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University and lives in Norfolk, VA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Seibles

My favorite poem was For Brothers Everywhere. I liked it because the way that the voice of the poem changes constantly between two "characters" even though there's only one "narrator." That's my best attempt at explaining it since there's two different choices of diction in this one poem. One is very slang-y and "street" or "ghetto." While the other voice is more intelligible and a expresses a more structured and articulate vocabulary than the other. But both are talking about the same subject: Basketball. I noticed that the actions during the poem are described by the slang-y voice while the articulate describes the scene or setting of the poem. Giving us, easier to understand, very strong, and intense descriptions of the action that's taking place while giving us a vivid, colorful picture of the poem allowing us to truly visualize the situation.

The most significant Literacy Event that has ever occurred to me was when I read a little poem during my freshman english class, I don't remember the name of the author or the name of the poem, but it was a very effective piece on how one treats their mother all throughout their lifetime with all the disrespect we give our mothers, the arguments that happen between us and them, basically everything that we put our moms through and in general we don't give it much thought while growing up and we just keep to our own thoughts and opinions without keeping an open mind to what they could be saying. Either way, after reading that poem I just started realizing that it was what I was exactly doing to my own mother and it just pushed me to start striving for a better relationship with her which to this day I'm still keeping up with. Actually listening to her opinions and thoughts, and instead of arguing if she doesn't agree with me, we discuss. As much as possible we try to establish a compromise where both of us would be happy with any given situation. In the end, it just helped me realize that I wasn't cherishing my time with my mom, my parents, even my whole family as much as I should've been and ever since I read that poem my relationship with them have just been on a positive slope.