About Juice
       When I first went to read it I hoped that it would not be like the previously assigned reading but would rather have a coherent and understandable theme to follow through what I at the time supposed would be a single story. This is not what I found. I found a hidden theme of obsession and loneliness in four separate stories about four unconnected people.
        On their loneliness; Their loneliness is somewhat self inflicted and is not due to not being surrounded by people, except in Translation, in Proportion Surviving the loneliness is caused by an apple drought which caused the narrator to be unable to obtain their favorite beverage fresh, not like in No Through Street where the narrator lost contact with all they loved through development and wandering, both are a different kind of lonely from the loneliness in First Sleep which is the loneliness of losing someone, just one person, close to you without an understanding of why. All of these latter loneliness's seem insignificant however when compared with the loneliness and abandonment of Translation.
         On their obsessions; the first narrator is obsessed with the mountains, obviously, she will not leave them she sees them as her world and she talks to them near the end of her sanity as she is alone. The second narrator is quite obsessed with apple juice, she writes poems about is, goes on strikes for it, and even gets unreasonably depressed over the lack of it. The third narrator is completely caught up in trains, she spent fifteen years on them, if she is to believed. The forth narrator is obsessed with sleep, it is all she does. She sleeps with short interludes of awareness in which she describes the world around her.

Fiction
        I really liked the fiction writing packets, they are so motivational. I don't know about the rest of the world, but in my sphere of existence most of the kids I know want to write a book that will one day be published, I have written or started to write many stories myself. when you have a story that you working on these packets bring them to mind almost immediately, it makes you want to settle down in the cushioned corner of a warm couch with your computer or notebook and write, using all their fabulous suggestions to reach deeper and make more of a story that could have come out saying less.
       They also make me want to go back and edit the stories that I have already written. There is this one story, I wrote it when I was like 9, it was all over the place. I never noticed that it was all over the place until I started thinking back on it while reading one of the fiction packets assigned the first time. Suddenly I saw that the plot jumped all over, it was unclear why the characters where doing what they were, who the main female lead even was (due to a little editing debacle), and the villain didn't even exist until the last chapter. When I realized how horrible wrong it was I had to wonder how anyone could have let me believe it was good. although now I think about it on of my reviewers merely said she thought it would be good if I went back and edited it in a few years.
         I also read a lot of fiction in my spare time, it is a joke in my family that I'm addicted to fiction (which I know is mostly a joke but sometimes wonder if my family does). Since I do so much fiction reading I could also compare some of what the packets said to how the authors of some of my favorite books write, it is an interesting exercise to think on. one of the authors I have been reading lately makes a point of giving their co-lead a description of them before they meet then making it clear that although the description does fit it is not there is more than one why to interpret their actions or the descriptive words used in that description.

on the longer stories: I guess a paragraph per a story would cover it.
         Internal summary: two different psychiatrist  send interns to observe their "brother" they are placed in room next to one another and told that the brother will be next door. apparently they are both men, because they decide, as their supervises planed no doubt, that the other is their supervises brother. the first intern to arrive drilled holes in the wall so that he could tell which room the brother, who was not to be mistaken for a good or kind type, was in. The second intern upon seeing the holes thought they looked like air holes in the top of a shoe box. Both interns were told to use a different method to discern the character of the brother, the first was to use the Rauchian Theory where the person is broken up into types. The second intern, who is a second year intern according to the first intern who says the second years work under Kagen, is to use the Kagenian analysis, in which the psychiatrist uses the patients posture to judge their mental health, and can fix their mental health by fixing their posture. The first intern is told to make notes of every thing that happened, the second is told the only notes they need is their memory, they are both told not to make contact. I think this is a tell of the facilities internal battle between the two theories.
       A∴I summary: This story seems to be about a person who by all accounts does not like talking, and when she does talk she tells other peoples stories or lies. She enjoys infuriating and confusing others. During this story there is also a side story going on about a girl the narrator was watching, she did not talk to anyone because she was not suppose to talk to strangers, and this caused the narrator to identify with her on some level because she herself did not talk much. In the girls story she had money and wanted to by a scarf, then she got hungry and wanted food, but later found her money gone, after retracing her steps and still not finding her money she decided it was stolen, the wind blew hard at a stall selling scarfs near by and the girl took the opportunity to steal one. I think it is interesting the narrator mentions when she says a it sounds like I when the name of the story is a therefore I.
     People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water summary: there are two families the author talks about, neither of them very endearing neither very eventful, one surviving and almost thriving the other just barely surviving. beside that it is not much of a story as it is a choppily strung together string of events with not much of a plot and not much of an end. The one thing about it that I found interesting was the last implication, that "such desperate things" either do happen today, or the entire tale was a bunch of bologna.

     I found the first short story really sad because the reason the narrator wants to out live his lover is not because he could not bear to watch him die or could not live without him, but rather because he does not want to deal with the side effects of his lovers death. Those side effects being, his parrot, his family, the loneliness, that is cold.
  
      A story I really really liked though was The Red Coats. I have two red coats as it happens, although I have never worn them both to the same place at the same time. having a red coat is really awesome,I think everyone should try it as long as they are not taking someones red coat like whoever did in the story. I would hate to lose my red coat like that especially if it was just missing the red and turned gray, that would suck. I also really liked The List of Famous Hats, even though it only talks about one famous hat. I have never heard of this bathing cap before and I don't think he actually had one like the one in the story but it makes for a great story.
    The last one I wanted to touch on is Wallet, I can see many people I know doing this prank if they had their wallet stolen more then once. There were some really good one liner quotes that would have made the thief feel really stupid if he had the chance to hear them though; like "All oyster, no pearl" and "Life is the same old story told over and over.". Of course the funny part is the irony of the phoney wallet being rescued while the real one was not. The poor thief got tackled over nothing.