Sentences!

Ornate: When I saw my sister's wedding dress, I was in awe! The dress was so ornate and beautiful. It was clear that the designer gave each little bead on the dress a lot of thought and did his best to make it the most beautifully decorated dress.

Malleable: The clay we worked with in Ceramics class was very malleable when wet. Once it was dry, it was impossible to shape it into something.

Intuition: When I was younger, I thought that I was so special because I somehow figured out a lot of things before they happened. Then, my brother told me it was because the things I figured out were obvious, not because I had some type of intuition. I was so bummed.

Emigrate: Tons of people, like my grandparents, emigrate to a different city, state, or country in order to make a better life for themselves and their family. My grandparents came to the United States with a worker's permit and worked here, legally, so that my father, aunts, and uncles could have a better life.

Genre: Out of all the genre's of music, my favorites would have to be country, acoustic, and soft rock. There are so many different categories of music, that it's difficult to choose just one!

Mural: For our graduation, I wanted to cover up the murals in the gym. I simply thought that those huge paintings on the wall would be a distraction during the ceremony and not very elegant.

Narrative: I have realized that my "excerpts" on this vocabulary blog have become more like narratives of my life. They're stories rather than pieces of stories. Or is my life a narrative and the blogs excerpts since they are pieces of my life?

Parody: The other day I saw a parody of Miley Cyrus' "The 7 Things I Hate About You" music video. It was so hilarious because the person imitating Miley's singing and dancing was being so exaggerated with his movements and made himself look ridiculous with a wig and girl clothes on.

Realism: When I visited the Holocaust Musem in Washington DC, I thought the pictures showed a great realism of how things were back then. Whoever took the pictures really knew how to capture what was going on with great accuracy.

Discredit: My friends and I went out for dinner when I returned from my trip to Spain this summer. They told our waiter that it was my birthday and if they could bring me a slice of cake to celebrate. Their claim was easily discredited when they asked for my ID and saw that it really wasn't my birthday.

Plagarism: Everytime we have an assignment for school, our teachers ask us to site our resources so we won't be blamed of plagarism. By citing the sources, we're acknowledging that the ideas aren't ours and that the information we used came from outside sources.

Austere: I walked into my church a couple of months ago and saw that it looked very austere. The decorations had been taken down and the walls had been painted an almost white blue color. It looked plain and ugly.

Daddy Dearest II. (:

I remember thinking at one point in my childhood that my father was omnipotent. I thought he could do anything and everything! I saw how he would fix things that everyone said were no longer usable. He carried on many reclamation projects that others had completely given up on. He had a profound feeling of responsiblity for his family. He worked and gave us everything we needed. But as time went by, it became rare for him to do these things. It was sort of like an obsolete cassette player that you loved so much but you upgraded when CD players came into existence. Sure you have great memories with the cassette player, but they're rare to find -- almost impossible and you now have to get used to the new "thing." My perception of him changed soon after. I guess it's something every child goes through. When you're young, your parent is a true hero, put as you gain a different perspective throughout the years, you realize that you were wrong as a kid. Everything you thought as a kid becomes completely inconsequential. Those ideas you had as a child are thrown out the window and replaced by new ideas you derived through personal life experiences. Everything I knew as a child became trivial. What I thought of my dad was no longer significant. This new father of mine caused me to have no conception of the man he was before. Those memories faded away. Those enlightening words he told me as a child that made me want to reach for the stars, those medleys he created and sang to me when I was sick, and his facetious manner disappeared little by little.
When I first realized this, I was quite melancholic. I obviously wanted my old daddy back. I couldn't believe that the man that he had become was the same man who was always so cordial to his family and friends. Sure I still loved him, but it seemed as if it was incumbent for me to feel like that simply because I was his daughter and that was my responsibility. I remember looking at him sleeping in his bed as the TV blared and my mother was at work and thinking of the man who would lock himself in his bedroom, the room he used as an asylum, to pray and read the bible. I felt such a sadness to see him just laying there.
But just recently, I realized something. No one remains the same forever. Everyone changes and there's nothing I can do about it. But, I can love my dad for the person he is and not for the person he once was. And, I do. I truly do love my father, bad temper and all.

Daddy Dearest (:

For as long as I can remember, my friends have been under the impression that my dad has a very staid personality. This is, in all honesty, a true misconception of my father's persona. Sure my father seems very serious and unemotional in public, but at home he is a completely different person. Now, my father isn't very aesthetically pleasing (this may be an explanation for why people think he always looks mad). Sure he was handsome as a young person, but the many years he spent as an alcoholic and as a tobacco addict really changed his appearance. My dad is far from contemporary. In fact, he's quite old fashioned. Sure, he's trying to get into today's culture (especially with technology), but he still has the same mindset his parents had. I mean, he is 62 and all, but sometimes I think that he is a little behind of even his own years. I remember that when I was younger, he never allowed my sister or I to wear pants in public because they "weren't modest." The topic of wearing pants in public was completely incontrovertible. He had a set mindset of what he thought was right and what was wrong and arguing with him was completely superfluous. It wasn't until I went into high school that my dad agreed to sanction the usage of pants in public for my sister and I and even then he was very ambivalent to the idea.

My most vivid memory of my father when I was younger was that he was very impartial when it came to dealing with his children. He never picked favorites. He always heard both sides of the story and was fair with everyone. Not. My dad was very biased when it came to his children. Sure, most of that served as an advantage to me, since I received great amounts of gratuitous rewards for doing nothing, but I didn't think this was fair at all. Okay, maybe i'm lying, but still, now I see that that wasn't very nice. I remember that my dad would always surreptitiously bring me a bag of popcorn and M&M's after work every day. He and I planned a clandestine meeting place and as soon as I heard the roar of our Astrovan's motor, I would quitely rush outside to collect my goods. We had an auspicious tradition going, but sadly, my dad's benevolent manner flew away like a hot air balloon and never came back.

my sister (cont.)

After many years of having to deal with her constant jealousy that I was the new princess, (Her jealousy proliferated over the years by the way. She even went so far as to tell me that I was adopted.) we acquired a sort of camaraderie. We are now like best friends. I'm there for her when she needs me and she's there when I need her. Over the years, I realized that the jealousy she had towards me when I was born was inevitable. Any child that gains a sibling after being the center of attention is bound to develop some sort of jealousy. Feelings like those are hard to subdue because they're so strong. You can't hold feelings like those back, especially when you're a young girl like she was. And although her attitude as she was growing up wasn't completely transitory, she learned to control it and is no longer as patronizing as before. Now, she has two adorable babies, one of whom is making her pay for everything she did to my mom and truly making her change her perception of parenthood. She has truly become an affable woman whom cares about others, is friendly to as many people as possible, and as easy-going as can be.

yet another excerpt. (mi hermana, my sister)

Growing up with a sister that was nine years older than I was, was not something easy to endure. My arrival was probably the most spontaneous arrival ever. My mother was 35 and my father, 44. Although my mother always says she always planned on having another child, I find her claim very dubious. Anyways, my sister was always very imperious as we were growing up. She wanted everyone to do what she said to do and thought she should always get her way because she was "better than the rest of us." I mean, I don't blame her. She was the only girl for 9 years and my parents raised her in a way that made her develop a very dictorial behavior. Before I came, she was sort of like one of those despotic rulers who had absolute power with my parents when it came down to what she thought should be done. Well, maybe i'm exaggerating, but she was crazy.

She patronized everyone. She behaved as if she was all grown up and everyone else was but an unexperienced youngster. My mom always tells a story of when my sister was four years old and in pre-k. My mother had to go pick my brothers up from their classrooms and she told my older cousin to keep an eye on her while she went to get them. For one reason or another, my cousin took her eyes off of my sister for a second and when she turned around...POOF! She was gone! Of course, my cousin was scared out of her mind and when my mother admits that when she came back, she felt nothing but disdain towards my cousin. She was so upset that she could lose her precious four year old princess! As my mother desperately searched for my sister, a teacher suggested she go home and see if she was there. My mother thought that that was surely impossible, but she listened anyway. When she arrived home, she saw her intrepid four year old sitting at home with my grandfather. She had walked home all by herself! Now, our home was not in proximity of the school and the route home was amazingly convoluted. Everyone always got lost going there because it was so confusing! Her little coup was a flagrant little plan to show our mother that she was all grown up. My mother says that when she arrived, my grandfather told her that my sister said, "Mi mamá se perdió" (my mom got lost). As if my mother was the child and my sister was the adult! Of course after my grandfather told her this my poor cousin, who was effusive in her apologies for losing my sister, was exculpated and her lament was then truncated. But, even though my sister had done wrong, she wasn't penitent for doing what she did. She didn't think she did anything wrong so she didn't think she had anything she had to be sorry for.