Silver Lining

In my life, I have never really had a constant object to keep near me as a security blanket - any objects I held in reverence have long since been tossed into the trash by my father without a second glance, along with many other valuable (memories-wise) items belonging to my brother and mom.

However, there is one item that sits, even now, on the topmost shelf of my dresser, that was gifted to me when I was thirteen, probably the worst age of my life. Around the neck of a tye-dyed purple Beanie Baby is a small, tarnished gold cross, it's white and red gems half-missing as it sits quietly surveying the bric-a-brac that clutters my room.

I don't remember exactly when it was given to me - I think it was right before Christmas Eve, immediately before my mom and I recieved our flu shots. That night, both my mother and I became ill, purportedly after-effects the flu shots, though my mother was the only one feeling better the next morning. I quickly became less and less willing to eat, and had little to no energy to move from our couch in the living room. By the time my father's Office Christmas Party rolled around, I was lethargic and could do little more than sleep all day. After a few hours, my mother called home to check on me, and immediately ran home, sensing something was wrong. The next morning, I was hauled out to the hospital, crying with the effort of walking, and was immediately admitted with pnemonia. As they prepared a room for me, I remember pulling the cross from my neck and handing it to my mother for safe-keeping. Somehow it ended back on my neck, where it stayed for the next seemingly endless week as I struggled to breathe and, at one point, completely stopped eating. My mother stayed with me the entire time, refusing to go home to sleep and literally holding me up as I was forced to walk around the halls to help my lungs. By the time I finally regained my appetite, half the gems in the cross were gone, having been worn out and off by my continued tossing and turning as I lay in the hospital.

As soon as I got home, the cross was taken off and disappeared for a long while - it wasn't until I moved back to Lincoln from Illinois with my mother and brother that I found it again, packed in with a going-away Beanie presented to me from one of my only true friends from the hell-hole of a Catholic school I'd attended in Illinois. I carefully wrapped the necklace around the Beanie's neck, and it has stayed there for the last almost six years, a constant reminder that no matter how hopeless and miserable I feel, there is always a way through - everything will be alright in the end, even if I have to endure a period of misery before the 'silver lining'.

Thanks, mom and Mary-Beth.

Only An Elephant

The first time I saw the small, ivory elephant - swaddled safely inside a clear, white film canister stuffed full off cotton balls - I nearly mistakened it for one of my teeth. Clutching the elephant tightly in my eager 5-year-old hands, I held it out to my mother, asking what it was.

As she held it up to the light, I was able to make out the small carvings of an eye, tusks, and trunk embedded in the ivory, the entire figure small enough to sit comfortable on the face of a dime.

When my great-great-grandmother was a young girl, her father took her to the circus, where she was terrified of the giant, powerful elephants parading around the ring. Shortly afterwards, her father came home with the ivory elephant, saying, 'See? Not so scary - it's only an elephant.'

After that day, the ivory elephant became a reminder to my great-great-grandmother to keep everything in perspective - never to let yourself be intimidated by a problem. Eventually, she handed the elephant down to my mother, who carried it faithfully to every one of her law exams to help her keep each situation and problem in perspective.

One day, I was told as the elephant was packed carefully back inside it's canister, I will inherit this small beacon, and until then, whenever I feel worried about some impending deadline or problem in my personal life, all I have to do is think back to that small, ivory carving waiting patiently in the back of my mother's closet and remember - it's only an elephant.

RhetResponse to 'Never Too Late'

The video for 'Never Too Late' by Three Days Grace relies heavily on pathos, compare/contrast and metaphor, while kicking logos completely out the window at times.

Compare/Contrast is used extensively throughout the video, flashing between peaceful scenes from the asylum ward's childhood and her chaotic life in the asylum. In the scenes featuring the inmate as a child, the audience is given a strong dose of pathos from the overly loving, cookie-cutter family she dances with in an ideal child's room, which serves to make the agony-ridden face and frantic efforts of the girl as an asylum ward, being physically torn away from her mother and bound to her bed to keep her from hurting herself or others.

Metaphor is also extremely prevalent in this video - the butterfly, a metaphor for freedom as it lands next to the girl, bound to her bed - the angel, possibly a personification of the mental retreat the girl forced herself into to escape the abusive nature of her father - the black handprints that appear all over the young girl and her bedroom walls, leading back to the father and acting as a physical representation of his abusiveness towards her - and the hands of the father than materialize in stead of the hospital restraints, representing both a physical and mental entrapment of the girl who has gone insane from a childhood of abuse.

This is also where logos gets almost drop-kicked out the window - much of the video's storyline plays out along the lines of Lewis Carrol's 'Alice in Wonderland', with the girl's memories changing to things that can't possibly be real or are highly unlikely, including the angel in the corner of her room, the parents with the band-aid eyes, the black hand-prints all over the girl and her room, and, at the end, when the girl apparently has been lying on a bed parallel to the floor or is walking straight up the wall from her bed.