SWA #10, Essay 2 Intro (Imitation of Klosterman’s Appetite for Replication)

This woman is pissed.
She is not peeved or irritated; she is filled with bloodthirsty rage. This is strange considering the fact that she is wearing a lovely wedding dress. One usually assumes a bride on her wedding day is supposed to be transcendently content. And two hours and nineteen minutes later, this woman does appear happy, but right now in Tampa Bay, Florida at 3:11 P.M. on Sunday afternoon, this woman may as well be a Viking approaching a foe with a freshly sharpened axe.
“Are you a complete moron?” inquires the blushing (or rather fuming) bride of her stunned husband to be. “I specifically told you to order the chicken without the peanuts seeing as most of my family is allergic to peanuts including myself. Do you care nothing about this wedding? Should I even be marrying such a thoughtless dick? Our wedding is in a few hours and now we have nothing to feed our guests. This is awful you have ruined this wedding.”
“She doesn’t mean to be so cruel she is just worried,” he says to me as I pat the poor bastard on the back. “The poor girl just takes this wedding business too seriously; she will come to her senses.”
My cousin Ryan (the groom) smiles in spite of the verbal beating he just took. I described his bride as a Viking but in reality he is the giant standing at six foot three and two hundred and twenty pounds. He looks like a giant bouncer you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley (or even a well lit alley for that matter). The man is a gentle giant though who said, “Initially I was against the idea of a big wedding but the more she talked about it the more I realized the wedding is not about what I want. I’m just along for the ride and I happen to be sitting next to this lovely woman who may at any moment embrace me or strike me. At least it won’t be a dull trip.”
I feel as if I am the only person questioning the purpose of this ceremony. As I look around at my family and the people who will soon be part of my family I feel as if I am the only person missing the point about what a wedding is supposed to be . My grandmother is simply amazed at “just how beautiful weddings are” while my uncle exclaims “FREE BAR! Maybe coming to this wedding was not such a horrible idea.” The bride’s grandfather Jonathan sits alone muttering to himself and anyone who will listen (only me) about how the bride and groom will not last long because his granddaughter told him her husband to be saw her in her wedding dress before the wedding day. This is apparently a cardinal sin of weddings. While Jonathan is convinced the marriage won’t last one of the bride’s maids named Jennifer is practically in tears exclaiming, “Ryan and Emily are so happy together I cannot even imagine them not being together.”
What is the purpose of the wedding ceremony? I am not questioning the idea of marriage just the pompous pageantry that is the wedding which seems to be a mandatory part of beginning a marriage. It seems as though the purpose of the wedding is not to express and celebrate love but more to prove to the bride and groom just how serious they are about marriage.

SWA #9

In order to answer the posed question I have to identify the main goal of my job as the editor of the New York Times. I assume my biggest job is to choose the front page story which will sell the most newspapers. Answering this question requires being able to identify which of the stories is the most interesting to Americans. The first story to bite the dust (so to speak) is the story about the Loch Ness monster. Americans as a whole are more interested in domestic issues than foreign ones. Americans are as a majority more interested in domestic issues because these are the issues which affect them directly. The Loch Ness monster was captured in Scotland and therefore is definitely below the story about the Sasquatch. So now the choice is between Sasquatch and the cancerous president. Each story brings to the surface a different feeling when a person reads the headline. The Sasquatch story makes a person feel intense curiosity about the evolutionary history of man. The curiosity is so intense because Sasquatch is supposedly a missing link in the evolutionary history of humans and humans are a race who tends to be self-important. By president I assume Klosterman means the current president at the time the question is asked; in this case this president would be George W. Bush. Bush is one of the most disliked presidents in American history. When people read about this president having cancer some may feel sorrow but I believe more people would feel a sense of righteous justice which justifies their anger. My choice of headline stories comes down to the following; does curiosity or hatred sells better? The answer to this question lies in my judgment of the character of the American people. Do I believe people are optimistic and would prefer to read about a stimulating intellectual curiosity? Or do I believe more papers would sell if the hated president had cancer. I believe hatred is a more emotionally satisfying response so I would put the cancerous president on the front page.