The main reason I chose our classroom as our meeting place was that we needed to meet with another section within the class. Probably somewhere else near Taylor Hall would be nice, but the weather report stated that it would be raining during our class time (though we found out it actually did not).

I did not like having class in Taylor in the beginning of the semeter because the light in the room made my eyes feel uncomfortable. Since the week before, Han Bin took us back to our classroom, I found out that our classroom was not unbearable as I used to think. It actually brought back some different feelings as we were sitting on classroom chairs rather than cozy sofas.

What the Barnes Foundation offered in terms of artwork could be described as sensory overload. Room after room of enrapturing beauty, or death, or solitude, or comfort. I needed to take a break at one point to stop the rushing from room to room, and appreciate the gallery one room, one wall, one painting at a time.

I thought that this book was very interesting. I especially enjoyed the complex relations all the characters had with each other. This was especially so with the relationships between Dill, Billy, and Willa Mae. These relations were even more intriguing because of the pseudo family relationship of father, daughter, and mother that these three had. The love-hate relationship between all of these three created a complicated story with very complicated characters.

I flew through Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body, but as I read, I found myself returning to the novel’s title and the double entendre it presents readers. At first, given the novel’s plot, it seems to be a clear reference to Billy Beede’s journey to recover her mother’s buried body -- and the treasure that was supposedly six feet under along with it. However, as I began reading and discovered that 16-year-old Billy’s story parallels her mother’s. Like Willa Mae, Billy was very poor, young, and unmarried when she got pregnant. In this way, Billy got her mother’s body – that of a young, ringless, pregnant girl.

So far I am really enjoying Park's book, "Getting Mother's Body."  I find it interesting how each chapter is from a different character's perspective.  This gives the reader insight to how each charcater is thinking about the situation and the other characters.  It also gives the reader more of a sense of what is always happening in relation to the main plot.  I wonder why Park decided to lay her book out in this way.

I found the section about accessability and its relation to legislation with the ADA particularly interesting especially because of the upcoming election and its emphasis on disability rights. In the chapter "Opening Doors, Unlocking Hearts", Mairs discusses the shortfalls of the ADA primarily due to the public's distaste for regulations. As a result, employers and businesses tend to carry out the bare minimum the the ADA will allow rather than making workplaces more accomodating to begin with. This leads to vast unemployment in the disabled community with a shocking 82 percent of unemployed Americans with disabilities wanting to work, as Mairs points out.

On Tuesday of my break, I went to go visit some of my old high school teachers including my 11th grade English teacher. He was teaching his students As I Lay Dying, and we started chatting once his students started working on their assignment which was to write an additional chapter for the book from the perspective of a character of their choice. I have never read the novel, but he explained to me that each chapter is narrated by one character. I have read Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury though which has a similar format. During our conversation, a student came up to him to ask if she could write from the perspective of a deceased character. He was wary, concerned that it would be too ghostly and fantastical.

Throughout the book, Mairs points out different people's reactions to disability in the US, but in the last chapter, Into the Wider World, she tells us how it is in other parts of the world. I think it is super interesting how differently people in England treat people with disabilities; not only are services for disabled people expected, but disabled people are generally not pitied the way they would be in the US. It shows how changing the stereotype of people with disabilities is possible, and that services for them are not impossible to provide.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Mairs ties herself and the reader closer and she holds your hand as she guides you through what her life is like. She expresses the same feelings that any other person has and I think that it's important that she says that she never thought about being disabled as a young person, and that she had the same fears and attitudes that society pushes on disabled people before she herself became disabled. She shows that she has been in the shoes of the nondisabled and the disabled, so in a way she is saying she is "one of us" and that this can happen to anyone, it's not just a small marginalized group that has lived with disability all their lives.

after returning to bryn mawr from dc, i had an interesting conversation with rosa about our experiences at the new national museum of african american history and culture. we talked about what pleased us at the museum and what disappointed us. rosa voiced a concern for the politic of the museum. she pointed out that there was almost no text about mass incarceration and presented a linear narrative of progress. she's right. the content at the nmaahc is not particularly radical. it doesn't make a push for the abolishment of prisons or police forces, both things that she and i and many other people see as important to black liberation.