1. With Gay suggesting that joy and pain are tangled with one another I fully agree with. My brain is able to wrap around it and realize that to have sorrow you must have felt a type of connection to it that brought about overwhelming emotions such as joy. Otherwise, there would be no real reason to have such an heightened emotion as sorrow. A human connection for example can bring forth joy and sorrow. My cousin Will for example, growing up my cousin Will was my favorite cousin he always was a silly person and always brought a smile to my face he also lived two hours away so when his side of the family came down it was my most favorite time of the year, I remember I would always look forward to seeing him. Background about him he was from my mom’s side of the family and my mom’s side wasn’t always my favorite side to visit but whenever Will’s family my Uncle Mike and Aunt Kathy and Cousin Will and Aj were my favorite. Will was like my older brother I did have an older brother that’s why I can’t say like the one I never had. Will and I also looked like siblings’ little fact about my family I’m actually the only kid in my family that’s black. When I was little, I noticed this, and I would often say I was adopted which is why I thought Will was my brother. In 7th grade February 10th I had just finished my basketball game I think we had won as I left I had seen my coach give my mom and sister a hug as we got into the car my mom gave me the McDonalds that they had left and gotten before they picked me up from basketball. I sat in the back and started to eat my food once we got off the highway my mom angled the dash mirror to look at me. My mom does this alot when she wants to talk with me when I’m in the back but I didn’t know what she wanted to talk about this time she begins talking about how we need to go to my aunts later since it was my cousin Josies birthday. Then she mentions how my Uncle Mike had called I thought this meant they were coming down that I would be seeing them and hopefully Will I hadnt seen him in two years since he was busy with work. This is when my mom tells me that Uncle Mike had called saying Will got into an accident and he died. I felt a drop water started coming from my sisters’ eyes. Then we got to this stop that we had always gone through it was these four ways stop that was on a hill. My sister climbed to the back and gave me a hug.
  2. When Gay says we “lay our swords down” I interpret it as we lay our defense down since that’s what swords are for to defend yourself and if putting them down that’s because you don’t feel the need to protect yourself. “Invite sorrow in” If joy and sorrow are entangled then sorrow is joy so your letting joy in as you let sorrow in. I do agree because I read it as you need to let you defenses down and let sorrow in to be able to have joy and also when you have joy in context of relationship you have to let your defense down to be able to form a connection and to let the person in.
  3. When I’m skating or longboarding and I finally catch speed that’s controllable and have music in my ear, When I have a really nice poke Bowl, My little brother smiling cause he wants to show me something, When I got a giant duck after doing club Bingo that I was fighting on yik yak for, When there yum yum sauce at the dining hall and I’m able to have fried rice, When I get to meet someone new and it seems like we have a nice conversation, when I got club member of the month as a first year it meant a lot because sometimes they get overlooked, When I accomplish something to help the events I help set up, When I learn my show choir routines and fix steps that I would mess up, When I would be onstage dancing for show choir, when I do little performances for my friends, When I see people I Like ( campus crushes) and friends.
  4. My items are kind of little things that don’t seem like much too people but mean a bit for me. Its also a different range of things I like doing different things and will have different attractions at points. I engage with the world over looking at the little things an how each little thing interacts.
  5. Gay’s essay interacts with Smith’s by agreeing how sorrow and joy do go in hand its like a supportive argument to Smith’s essay. Gay’s essay helps a freshly graduated high school kid actually understand the world a little more. We young adults do know some stuff and are intelligent however we sometimes forget basic meaning of things and still we don’t always all have a lot of life experiences, so those little things sometimes get overshadow and we forget the true meaning. College is a time to let a lot of joy in, but we need to remember that it will bring us pain are freshman friends might not be friends all the way through and there will be pain from that but it’s a part of life.