Note_2, 28 Jan 2021
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One time I decided to go do what things so that’s when you go to another place where you learn to do organic farming all over the world so I did one that was in Columbia it’s kind of strange because the guy who who needed help me a coffee farm and it was in a space for the Sierra Nevada up by Santa Marta near Cartagena Colombia I’ve never been there before but he was just Adam and he I guess when the when the states went through their big their big recession or like economic downturn he lost his house and he said he worked at Hard Rock Cafe music coaxer you had $5,000 the property on the top of this mountain so he said we decide to go there but there’s always these kind of rules that are Carly unspoken there they’re also spoken where you know when you go visit the person and you’re helping them do organic teaching you are doing labour for them but at the same time they’re supposed to feed you so the first part of leg is that the Adam guy said we needed to bring vegetables from Santa Marta so please bring vegetables from Santa Maria carrots potatoes whatever and I was thinking okay he’s supposed to supply us with food but that was the first one so then we had you can have to take mortal tax the mountain it’s like a 3-hour cycle ride on these taxi so you just hold on to the back of somebody in and go up and it’s really a Rocky and so me and my boyfriend at the time had to have each had a grocery bag full of this really heavy root vegetable wrapped around like you know our arms are around the the chests of these guys regeneron mototaxi and then the vegetable like is so Rocky there just thrashing around backward 4 or arms or Flex so hard trying to hold on to these vegetable bags anyway yeah it was a bit of a painful experience but I guess you know it wasn’t a big deal but it was the first red flag second one cul-de-sac casey said that his friend you had another piece of property that he was gone on vacation so that we could stay in his farm house so that Adam guy would stay in one farmhouse in between the other farm house and then threw pretty excited so we brought some kind of like stuff to make music just for our downtime you know and then when we got there it wasn’t the truth we were sleeping on a dirt floor basically sharing a bedroom with him so he had a single blow-up mattress and and there was saloon doors and then his room was a sit-down. Saloon doors he went to bed at 8 p.m. Turn the light to Joint light between our room in his room so he turned off his his light we’re also in the dark at 8 so I mean we couldn’t even really talk about her experiences because he was he was in earshot distance the whole time but anyway we’re just lucky that we bought a mosquito-net because that’s malaria like a malaria area so we just kind of you know each
other on a single mattress and we put the put the mosquito net we hung up from a beam on the ceiling and wrap it under the mattress on the on the dirt floor and in the morning when we would wake up kind of like weird scorpion looking spiders all over the net so I’m so glad that we had that Nets that was the second red flag that he kind of Dino promise one you didn’t fall through with if he had just said that in the beginning and that’s being honest and you know we could have made our decision from then but he promised something totally different the server flag is that you know we would work for 8 hours and then we would kind of like start winding down and then he would start yelling at us and say like you think you’re finished I went through all the areas where there was a coffee beans in there so some some that you guys didn’t see when you are making a passenger Viking coffee beans from from the trees right so basically wants to work 12 hours a day what do you want us to work 12 hours and then you wanted and then we were feeding ourselves essentially and then we couldn’t even really get proper sleep and we couldn’t even have a conversation without him around like spying on us like not not purposely but he was so close to us that there was no way that we could have any free thought free time free anyting so we committed for we had committed to him urgently for 2 months cuz he really wanted to learn how to do organic farming so she organic coffee farming but then because he was being so unreasonable and it was just to get spoiled if next expected then decided to leave so he agreed I I said to him I think that you know this is not really a big screen as we signed up for in all honesty there had been other Clues to like she’s girlfriend who lives in Santa Marta who is helping with this project to to neuter and spay homeless dogs and cats she said that you know he had always had problems with Pikepass woofers for woofers because it didn’t work hard enough and so I should have planted that as a clue that if he has a problem with every single person coming up petition for 2 High anyway he told us in the morning there’s a Chiva like a truck looking to pick up all the farmer if it’s mostly a farmer like an indigenous unity after you take all the farmers. So you can catch it so in the morning we waited at the spot for this truck and that was one of the best experiences of my life I’ll be honest with you you’re something probably never experience again like riding on a truck like that going down it was really scary when they covered the hole the whole thing with a black tarp it’s frightening when you’re in the pitch-dark where’s Donna mountain and you can’t see anything but it was one of the finest experiences of my life even though that guy didn’t really you know he wasn’t a positive experience but I will say that the trip was from what we
learned and what we learned about you know we stepped out of her comfort zone and we learned a lot
Speechnotes 🙂 https://speechnotes.co

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• How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?

This story deviates from the conventions of written English because it has very little punctuation, and capital letters are used sporadically. Because of this, it is difficult to tell where one thought ends at another one begins. This whole story is written as a big block with no organized sections. This makes reading it a bit of an exhausting experience, as your eyes do not get to rest. Because some of the words were misread/misspoken, the sentence structures also do not make sense. I use ‘like’ and ‘you know’ often in this story, which are often frowned upon in written English. Ong argued that “…writing transforms human consciousness by moving language from an aural realm, where it unfolds across time, to a visual realm, where it takes on primarily a spatial quality”(Hass, 2013, p.9) I believe that if the spatial quality of the writing doesn’t emulate my spoken speech, giving us instead, a broken translation.

• What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?

The part that is right in this story, is the order of events. Even though the text is confusing, I still think that the reader can tell what happened at the beginning, middle and end of the story. You can still tell where the story took place, and who the main people are. Although the details become jumbled at times, I think that the main point of the story is not lost. I do feel like the story feels flat, and that a lot of the emotional nuances are lost, because the reader is too busy teasing out details. Many of the single words in the story are wrong. For the story to be fully effective as a psychological tool, or one that can ‘modify others’, the text would have to follow the agreed upon conventions of our culture (Hass, 2013, p.15).

• What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?

The most common mistake in the text is the word substitution. Some examples are words like ‘unity’ instead of community, ‘Donna’ instead of ‘down the’ and ‘Mortal tax’ instead of ‘mototaxi’. I consider them mistakes because they are not the words I intended to use.  This makes me question whether the message communicated by text is to be measured by the intention of the author, or how it is perceived. Schmadt-Besserat & Erard (2009), discuss how “…writing is a technology that restructures the consciousness of individuals who use it and refocuses the energies of societies that utilize it (Ong 1982) (p.20). Because the writing that is displayed is different from the spoken text that I recited, the result is a sort of scattered consciousness that cannot be picked up by others.

• What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?

If I had scripted the story, I probably would have edited it a few times. I would have taken out any ‘inappropriate’ casual sounding language and I would have decided, in a planning phase, which details were important to include. When I decided to use this story for the activity, I actually thought that a majority of the entry would be about the voyage down the mountain. As I started to speak, the focus of my story changed to the ‘red flags’ of the experience. Stories evolve depending on who we are telling them to.

• In what ways does oral storytelling differ  from written storytelling?

Oral storytelling differs from written storytelling in that it evokes more emotion. The qualities of the storyteller, can completely change how a story feels. This can make a story either funny or serve as a cautionary tale. Storytelling also allows a story to evolve over time. When we read a printed story, we gain a similar experience to others who have read it. Our experience would differ while reading a text story, depending on our experiences and prior knowledge. A story shared orally, has the prior knowledge and experience of a community built into it.

Haas, C. (2013). “The Technology Question.” In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy. Routledge. (pp. 3-23).

Schmandt-Besserat, D. & Erard, M.  (2009). “Origins and Forms of Writing.” In Bazerman, C. (Ed.). Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text.  New York, NY: Routledge.