Exploration Two: Jared Mills

       My name is Jared Mills.  I'm 18 years old and commute to OSUM from Marysville, where I attended high school.  My fun fact was that I want to be an actuary and I enjoy fishing and playing soccer.  I played soccer my freshman and sophomore year in high school, but stopped after that because I would have had a coach that I didn't like my junior year.  This summer me and a couple friends went up to Michigan to fish.  We met up with a friend and he took us out on a river to fish for pike and rock bass.  It was a fun experience, catching pike for the first time. They're much more fun to fish for compared to the bluegill and bass I fish for in Ohio.

      I chose to research Tim Seibles.  He is 55 years old and was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  I chose him mostly because his poem, "For Brothers Everywhere" referenced basketball, which I thought was interesting.  I had never read a poem about sports before this one.  Something very interesting I found out about Tim is that he loved playing football and aspired to play professionally while writing poetry.  He said that he wanted to, "play pro football and in the offseason write novels."  I thought that was really cool considering you don't see too many guys in the NFL writing poetry or novels.  Reading his work is easy and fun for me to read, which I don't usually find with poetry.
http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Seibles__Tim.html
   
      My favorite poem was, of course, Tim Seibles, "For Brothers Everywhere."  Something that I liked about this poem was that that Tim used a lot of similes.  I feel that similes paint a more vivid picture for the reader, which I feel is essential when writing about a sporting event.  My favorite simile he used was, "...towards rims that hung like piñatas, pinned like thunderclouds to the sky's wide chest."  The similes weren't the only thing I noticed about this poem; I noticed that the language Tim used made it a little easier for me to comprehend compared to the other poems I read.
   
       A recent literacy event that from my life is a letter my friend sent me.  He left for boot camp at the beginning of last summer and was so excited to go.  I had trouble seeing his excitement, thinking that he was just going away to work out every day and get yelled at by drill officers.  What he wrote in the letter actually made me start to consider the option of going in to the armed forces.  He said that it's not all working out, and they didn't get yelled at all.  They worked out for 3 hours a day, an hour at a time, with breaks in between where you could eat, go to classes if you were going into engineering; which he was, or just hang out.