The Myths/Folklore Blog

I decided to delve a bit more into Texas Urban legends this week. The first story deals with the Donkey Lady  who is a fabled woman who lives beneath bridges, deformed after a fire ravaged her body, giving her stumps for arms/legs along with eventually giving her the infamous name Donkey Lady (since her face was unfortunately horribly burned). Now she stays beneath a bridge in San Antonio, looking for late night drivers to get her revenge on. An interesting way that this story could be told would maybe be from the perspective of someone who's related to her, whether it be her family, or someone who was simply a friend of hers. "Donkey Lady" From Weird Texas Another urban legend that I found highly interesting was the Woman Hollering Creek , which describes Hollering Creek as being haunted by a woman who drowned her two children in it - she now lurks around the creek, pulling anyone who gets too close in to their watery doom. This again works with my love for ho...

The best way, like the Try  Feedforward Instead of Feedback  article mentioned to give feedback to others is to do it in a constructive, positive light. If you're focusing on past mistakes, that might not always be the best method to prevent future mistakes - instead, engaging in a dialogue over mistakes you've made with the person you're trying to correct. "Changing the future" is the point of feedback, trying to change their mistakes in order to make them a better writer along with a more well-rounded person. Like the article mentions, showing how someone can be right instead of showing them how they were wrong frames their mistakes in a positive light, making it more likely that they would heed your advice over what you have been telling them about. The other article that I read, Be a Mirror , I loved the last piece of advice that was given over how to correctly foster a growth mindset within their mistakes - it described that we need to avoid using "I...

Walking up to the gleaming Palace of Three, Armistice could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. No one was allowed past the white gate – what his grandfather had told him of his parentage must have been true. Armistice had a normal childhood, at least by mid-world’s standards. Living within the country had taught him the true value of things: justice, vengeance, and power – in this order, specifically, he was told how to rise up in the world, to be a representative of the place where he came from. He didn’t want to disappoint his teachers. That’s why he walked past the gate, why he was told of his relation to one of the three. Armistice didn’t simply want power to control his own fate, he wanted to control the fates of everyone around him – no one could get in his way. He was in front of the large marble door now – he could see the engravings of past revolts, with Vengeance coming down upon the masses with her fiery whip. Next to these revolts was Power, the weak...

Out of the 6 stories that I read today for the Part B readings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pyramus and Thisbe stuck with me the most. Basically, Shakespeare adapted the Roman version to be his Romeo and Juliet. In this version, instead of fake poisoning, Pyramus thinks that Thisbe had been eaten by a lion after discovering her bloodied veil in the place where they were supposed to meet. This is one of the only stories that I read that didn’t include an overt god who meddles with the characters in it. In two of the other stories, the gods are back to their meddling with human lives because of silly reasons. In, “Echo”, Tiresias is made blind by Juno after disagreeing with her viewpoint that men experience more pleasure during lovemaking. A detail that I found fascinating within Pyramus and Thisbe was how their deaths were described, how, “the blood spurted out, like a pipe fracturing at a weak spot in the lead…”. This is much more vivid than the previous stories described death – mak...

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses , quite a lot happens that stuck with me. First off, the way that human life is regarded seems to be from the perspective of an unfeeling god. Deaths are somewhat glossed over, no sure detail is gone into them as seen from the quote, " Overflowing, the rivers rush across the open plains, sweeping away at the same time not just orchards, flocks, houses and human beings, but sacred temples " . Furthermore, when humans are transformed into something else (that I absolutely wouldn’t want to happen) it’s often done because of the god’s vain outlooks on their situations. Tragedy seems to be common with the Roman’s. Io and Callisto are both raped by Jupiter, simply because he wants to. From this pointless and terrible act, both women are punished in severe ways, with Io being transformed into a cow and Callisto (1)  into a bear (and then constellation with her son). These acts are preventable, but told in such ways that they seem not to be a “big” deal with...