{"id":657,"date":"2011-11-25T06:00:48","date_gmt":"2011-11-25T14:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=657"},"modified":"2011-11-20T11:19:32","modified_gmt":"2011-11-20T19:19:32","slug":"mark-reads-looking-for-alaska-one-hundred-twenty-seven-days-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2011\/11\/mark-reads-looking-for-alaska-one-hundred-twenty-seven-days-before\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads ‘Looking For Alaska’: one hundred twenty-seven days before"},"content":{"rendered":"

One hundred twenty-seven days before it happens, Miles learns just how brutal the pranks at Culver Creek can be. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read Looking For Alaska<\/em>.<\/p>\n

one hundred twenty-seven days before<\/strong><\/p>\n

Green is still introducing me to a lot of the world of this book, but he doesn’t seem interested in doing so slowly, and I like how quickly one scene moves into the next. I know that I am already comparing this to college when it’s not what this is, but it’s the only thing I have in my life that feels comparable. Miles is uprooted<\/em> by Culver Creek. Sometimes it is negative. Sometimes it’s positive. All of it is wholly unlike his life at home in Florida, and that’s what Green successfully conveys here.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest things I had to adapt to when I went to college was my relationship with food. Green introduces a fairly small detail here at the beginning of this chapter that made me smile with recognition: bufriedo day. My school didn’t have a bufriedo, but I sure ate enough of them growing up. There are few joys in the world quite like eating a fried burriot. What I found so recognizable about this detail is that I distinctly recall being overwhelmed by eating food that wasn’t prepared by my own mother. Even though I’d been living on my own for two years by the time I started my freshman year of college, I’d had enough time under her roof to become accustomed to the style of food she cooked. We were, for the majority of time I was a child, a very poor family, and my parents made-do with what they had. Having to feed three mouths, that meant my mother had to find food that was not only inexpensive, but possessed enough calories to feed two teenagers who ran cross country and track and a younger daughter who was, infuriatingly so, goddamned picky about the food she ate. A lot of what we ate was fatty, fried, high in a million things that were terrible for you, but she managed. You don’t have the luxury to cook whatever you want when you’re on a limited income.<\/p>\n

I actually lost weight the last two years of high school once I was living on my own. Food wasn’t as regular all the time, and having to pay rent, buy my own food, and pay for all the school shit I needed meant that sometimes I rationalized skipping meals. I scavenged a lot at friends’ houses, hoping I could pop in for a meal or two when I needed it. I graduated high school barely reaching 140 pounds on a good day. I had muscular legs from running so much, but I couldn’t seem to keep weight on my frame anywhere else.<\/p>\n

When I got to college, I heard other students who weren’t freshman warning us of the “Freshman Fifteen.” Those who lived in the dorms and had access to “free” food in a buffet style in the cafeteria, combined with a more sedentary lifestyle from studying, generally found themselves gaining weight over the course of the year. This, for me, was a gross understatement. Despite that I still ran cross country and maintained a physical routine to my week, I grew three inches in height and, over the course of a single year, gained fifty<\/em> pounds. Suddenly, the frame I had before that was skinny as a rail, the one that used to have muscle tone simply by the sheer fact that I had nothing to hide what little muscle I did<\/em> have, was plump. And you know what did it?<\/p>\n

Bufriedo Day. We didn’t have one. Instead, we had Taco Tuesdays. Sometimes, on Fridays, there’d be four to five different types of pizza at lunch and <\/em>dinner. I was a fiend for vegetables and always had been and I’d use the giant cereal bowls to craft complex and weighty “salad” constructions, things of abstract art and a swirl of colors, all drowned in whatever new dressing I wanted to have. For the first time in my entire life, I had more food available to me than ever before. I could choose what I wanted, when I wanted, and eat however much I desired. I lost count in the first few months of the number of times I ate myself into some sort of food stupor, unable to do much but shuffle distractedly back to my dorm. It didn’t matter that I was running five-to-ten miles every morning, six days a week. My body suddenly discovered a new source of energy and sustenance, and I exploded upwards and outwards. It took me coming home for Thanksgiving that first year for me to realize that my whole body type had changed, so much so that I told my parents I desperately needed new outfits (plural<\/em>) because I was rapidly growing out of them.<\/p>\n

I know I’m now getting ridiculously off the point of all this, but I couldn’t help but think about how this one small detail just totally gets<\/em> it. I wonder, then, if Miles will experience a large weight gain by the end of the school year after eating so many bufriedos and plates of fried okra. (Okra\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6mmmmmm.)<\/p>\n

The second portion of the one hundred twenty-seventh day before something<\/em> concerns itself with two things: the unpredictability of school life, and pranking gone just a bit too far. I think<\/em>, that is. Miles plans a lot that first night before classes, and I remember doing the same thing. I also remember waking up much earlier than I liked, getting lost (WHY IS YOUR GODDAMN CAMPUS SO GIGANTIC, CAL STATE LONG BEACH), and then sitting in the wrong class for forty-five minutes before realizing it. You just\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6well, you just can’t<\/em> plan all too much in that environment. In Miles’s case, though, something deeply unexpected happens that confused even me<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I woke up completely and instantly, sitting up straight in bed, terrified, and I couldn’t understand the voices for some reason, couldn’t understand why there were any voices at all, and what the hell time was it anyway? And finally my head cleared enough to hear, “C’mon, kid. Don’t make us kick your ass. Just get up,” and then from the top bunk, I heard, “Christ, Pudge. Just get up<\/em>.” So I got up, and saw for the first time three shadowy figures. Two of them grabbed me, one with a hand on each of my upper arms, and walked me out of the room. On the way out, the Colonel mumbled, “Have a good time. Go easy on him, Kevin.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ah, so there’s that name. Kevin. And clearly this was some sort of introductory hazing period, and, as a new student, Miles was subject. I’m personally not a big fan of this at all, but I come from a background of being bullied. What happens to Miles treads far too close to being unbelievably cruel, and I recalled being duck-taped to a pole in the quad at school when I was a freshman in high school. As they duck-taped Miles’s arms and legs together, I thought, “They’ll just leave him on the edge of the water, right?”<\/p>\n
I said, “Please guys, don’t,” just before they taped my mouth shut. Then they picked me up and hurled me into the water.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
um. UH. SO. THAT IS LIKE\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6.wait YOU TAPED HIS ARMS AND LEGS TOGETHER AND THEN THREW HIM IN A BODY OF WATER<\/em>. And if that at all confused me and bewildered me, then I was flat out lost by Miles’s reaction. Thankfully, his body is buoyant–MINE VERY MUCH IS NOT–but he doesn’t seem to panic once. Not at all. I was taken aback by this. Why isn’t he freaking out at what pretty much amounts to those three dudes nearly killing him? Well, to be fair, he was thinking things like this:<\/p>\n
If I tilted my head too much, I felt my whole body start to roll, and on the long list of unpleasant ways to die, “facedown in soaking-wet white boxers” is pretty high up there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Bless this man. These are the thoughts I think as well.<\/p>\n
After he manages to get out of the lake, he makes the mistake of visiting Alaska first, thinking it’ll offset the embarrassment of seeing the Colonel. But she isn’t exactly friendly to him, and she heavily implies that not only did she know about him being thrown into the lake, but that she really could not care less about it. Defeated, he goes back<\/em> to his own room and the Colonel is genuinely surprised it took so long to come back. When he explains why, I suddenly understood why Miles reacted the way he did to being thrown in the lake: he expected it. The Colonel, however, did not. Miles thought this was just how things went. Sure, he’s mystified as to why Kevin and his friends (and Alaska, by that qualification) are so irritated with him, but the hazing? He has already accepted it as a Thing That Will Happen at Culver Creek.<\/p>\n
The Colonel, however, is not so ready to just accept things.<\/p>\n
“Well, maybe I should just go to the Eagle tomorrow and tell him,” I said.<\/p>\n
“Absolutely not,” he answered. He walked over to his crumpled shorts lying on the floor and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He lit two and handed one to me. I smoked the whole goddamned thing. “You’re not,” he continued, “because that’s not how shit gets dealt with here. And besides, you really don’t want to get a reputation for ratting. But we will deal with those bastards, Pudge. I promise you. They will regret messing with one of my friends.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ah, I think I see what’s going on. Is this the start of a prank war? Is this how the “prank” referred to in the opening comes about? An escalation of one devious act after another? I love a good prank war, and I’m intrigued to see what will lead them to that point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One hundred twenty-seven days before it happens, Miles learns just how brutal the pranks at Culver Creek can be. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read Looking For Alaska.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[125,23,123],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-looking-for-alaska","tag-john-green","tag-mark-reads","tag-mark-reads-looking-for-alaska"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}