Quote from "Obituary" Lois-Ann Yamanaka

"I think about dying every night. Sometimes I want to die at strange moments in the day. Sometimes every day. My mother says its all those books I read about concentration camps. The arsenic in the heart that I tell her about and the gas chambers with the fingernail scratches on the walls and ceilings." from  "Obituary" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka.

    I chose this quote to write about because I can recall a stage in my childhood when I was fascinated with horror stories and real life gorey massacres and the holocaust. I was more interested in these as historical facts. Lovey seemed to take death as just another happenstance of life. Her mom points out her attitude of desensitization possibly coming from her choice of literature. I found that I had a new appreciation and understanding for life, looking at it like a fleeting moment that one should enjoy as much as you can before it disappears.
    The quote was taken out of the part of the story where Lovey is asked to write her obituary as part of an english or journalism project. Most of the story is directed at Lovey's emotions stemming from people teasing her and bullying, as well as, being ashamed of her culture.
    What I enjoyed about this story was that I was looking for some kind of Crux, or axis that hooked everything together and I didn't find it at first, it seemed like a mish-mash od thoughts and stories all crammed in a few pages. When I read it a second time I read it fast, without stopping to analyze every nook and cranny as I usually do. What a difference, I felt like I was in her shoes, in her head and scattering the same emotions and clips of sentences about. It fekt like when I was in Junior high and I felt like the little bit of understanding that I had was able to make sense of the world in brief fragments of my life.
    The quote I chose also kinda set me back abit because with how she was describing herself I wasn't able to picture her reading books about the holocaust, or much of anything actually. This was a good excercise in making assumptions of how we hear different versions of our language and of the characters that speak them.Great story! Try reading it without stopping.