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'The Birthday Girl' is a story within a story. The narrator, whom we know nothing of except that she is having this conversation, tells us what the other woman tells her about her 20th birthday. Btw, the other woman is over 30, has two children - a boy and a girl, drives an Audi, is married to a CPA 3 years older than herself, they have an Irish settler, and she plays tennis with her girlfriends twice a week. She used to wait tables every Friday at one of the better-known Italian restaurants in the Roppongi district of Tokyo in her student days, which is where her story is set. O.W. (other woman) had to work on her birthday, Friday, November 17, because her waitress friend who offered to fill in for her became sick. O.W. didn't mind; work would take her mind off of what she had a sinking feeling was a break-up, with her boyfriend since high school. Her story is quite straightforward - she had to deliver dinner to the owner of the restaurant, because the manage, who did...

Diti Golder's post It was the aim of our syllabus committee to include marginalized voices, such as Linda Hogan's. She is not mainstream because (a) she is of Native American ethnicity and (b) her themes are somewhat metaphysical: life, death, rebirth, the circle of life, oneness with nature's people etc. This  essay  on the Native American perspective w.r.t. Linda Hogan is a lifesaver. Let us examine the many, many themes in this essay. Firstly, work:  -according to  Elana here , working shapes the way people live, from individuals to communities, to the globe. When I think about it, “work” means to me to exert physical or mental effort in order to do, make or accomplish something, or the function of completing a process or carrying out a task. -Hogan carries the words "Our work is our altar" throughout her life, the words having deeply resounded with her on account of just having been healed and nursed by the woman who uttered them.  -She s...