The Story of My Existence...

Everyday it seemed, I was happy to be a part of such a loving and close-knit family. To be in a large Mexican family meant every Sunday, cousins, aunts, uncles, and others of the sort would come over to eat Sunday breakfast and get together to make sure everyone was caught up in each other’s lives. To be the daughter to parents who had been together for thirty plus years, only brought more stability and love into my life. I have everything because of my parents. My brothers were so much older than I was that they had left to college before I had even started kindergarten, but having two over-protective brothers wasn’t a bad thing at least till later. So here it goes… The story of my existence through the eyes of my family…

          

He hadn’t expected for him to fall in love so easily. After all, he had only been in Lake Worth, Florida for a short time before getting to know this new woman he called a mystery. She wasn’t like other girls. She fought him on everything and he enjoyed it. She was a challenge and a girl that couldn’t have one pulled over on her. She called him Antonio, which only his family called him. They married mere months after they had had their first dance.

Not long after they were married in a small court ceremony did they conceive a son by the name of Pete. Both Antonio and his wife, Lupe, worked two to three jobs each to provide for their son. Four years later, another son, Mark, was introduced to the family. They were polar opposites. Pete was more serious and tended to blow things out of proportion while Mark was more of a clown and was more prone to crack jokes at his brother’s expense. They both got along really well because they were close in age.

Antonio and Lupe had decided it was time to build a future for their children. Antonio was so devoted to work, he knew he could start a small business and build it from the ground up. His specialty in construction was drywall. His motivation led him to take the examination for the drywall specialty. About nine weeks later, he received the letter in the mail that said he has passed the exam and could now hold a drywall license. Both Antonio and Lupe were ecstatic.

He had asked her, “Would you help me build this company into something we’ve always dreamed about”?

She responded, “Of course, haven’t we survived already”?

 They toiled to find someone who could estimate the cost of the contracts they acquired. Soon, they found a man named Joe. It was with the three of them that the company was able to begin. They had decided to call the company, Boynton Drywall of South Florida, Incorporated. Antonio thought it had a nice ring to it and that he would be able to receive many clients this way. They started off with small jobs here and there and as they became more and more experienced about how to manage a drywall company, they would get bigger jobs that came along such as public schools and big downtown buildings. The company would be fully running within two years and would later become a successful, expanding business for the whole family to join.

It wasn’t long after they had started the company that Lupe had found out she was expecting again. This time she would have a daughter, and they called her Bianca. Her first name was Toni, but as she got older, it was too confusing to have two people who were named the same so she decided to use Bianca. Her mother would put her into dance classes the minute she was able to. She would go off to an arts school for dance and right after she would go to a dance studio for another couple of hours. Dance consumed her life and also consumed everyone else’s. 

Her parents were happy to have something to keep him or her busy and would always go to every recital and competition. They were always strict on her when it came to her grades, which only helped her later in high school when she was accepted to the University of Florida for the fall of 2007. For Bianca, it was a hard pill to swallow leaving home. It meant leaving the beach, leaving her friends from high school, leaving her comfort zone, but more importantly it meant leaving behind her family. She was able to do it because she knew she was to begin the next chapter in her life…

Analysis: I placed my photos in non-sequential order so that it was harder to determine what my story was actually about. I did this because I believe if I had placed them in order, it would maybe have been too easy to decide what it was about. At the beginning of the story, I wrote in first person because the narrative is truly about how I came to be about in my family. Right after the first paragraph, I developed the hermeneutic code because the enigma was finding out the story of my existence or how I came to be. I wanted the readers to question… Who is this person?

            I combined my words and images in a pattern that involves switching every photo from the right to the left and back to the right and so on. I did this while also placing the photos next to either the paragraph that corresponds to it or the paragraph before it corresponds to the photo. I feel that when readers view the photos I have placed at the beginning of the blog, it allows them to get use to the style I have posted in the story. I also believe that when the readers view the photos, they will devise a story that starts from the end of my story and work its way backward. I try to create balance among the photos by placing them on either side of the words while also alternating. The photos themselves allow the readers to devise a meaning with ease. Some photos are more literal such as the map of Lake Worth, Florida or they took more interpretation such as the dancing photo, which could take on several meanings. I wanted the story to flow and not be choppy, which is also why I designed it the way it  is in the story. There are also small events  (proairetic code) that lead up to the development of my enigma. These events can include the forming of my family, the development of the family business and me dancing. These events are not reversible and also add the enigma.