English, again

Well, this seems to be my official English-class-note-taking place. Honestly, I will be SO glad when this is all over. Really. With the black belt test on Saturday and Mom freaking out more than me about this and giving me a really hard time about it and school and the fact that I have low C's in three classes and whatnot, I'm out of it. To the extreme.
But on the upside, my parents aren't here. But I still have to do homework for the duration of their not being here. :(. They're going to my brother's basketball game/buying stuff for dinner. And I'm here. I would love this time if I didn't have this project and a mom that would hunt me down and kill me if I didn't do my work, because she KNOWS whether I've done the work or not. I'm serious. She always knows. It's really annoying.
Well, today I'm going to continue the note taking from yesterday. Wait, no, scratch that. I'm going to do the plot summary for the book I read. THEN I'm going to do the note taking. I'm going to purposely draw this out so I don't have to note-take. Anyway...
So For Matrimonial Purposes is about this girl called Anju. She was born and raised in India, and the entire book is about her trying to find a good dude to get married to. The story starts out when she's 33, and she's at some relative's wedding (I think it's her cousin), and there's this guy who looks interested in her. Her mom is all psyched about this because most girls are married by the time they're 25, usually younger, so the fact that Anju is 33 and attracting someone is the best thing ever to her mom, because most of the okay guys are already taken. So her mom arranges to meet the guy and his family, so they do, because that's what they do in India. Well, they meet and the guy seems like a total jerk, even though his prospects are great and Anju's mom is happy and very pleased that Anju might FINALLY get married. But Anju does have some say in it and she puts in that she really, really, really, really, REALLY doesn't like him, and she doesn't want to move to Africa with him, either, to which her mom is all like, "oh, but you went to America, why not Africa?" And Anju's like, "HELLO!!! Africa is like eighty bazillion times less developed than America!!!" So anyway, her mom and dad insist that Anju take another week or two off work in America to look for a husband in India. Anju's mom looks everywhere, including the classifieds. They have dating classifieds in India that seem really similar to those in the US, except it's more like, okay, here's my info, here's a picture, call me, and if they get the picture of the candidate and don't like them, then there's no second call. Kind of like in the US. Except without the multiple dates between meeting and marriage proposal. Anyway, Anju gets a picture of a guy who seems all right, and her mom calls, but there's no second call. So that's the end of part one. Part two starts when Anju is in her early or mid twenties, and she tells you all about how all her friends have gotten married and she was the outsider and everything and her mom was really desperate to get Anju married because of Anju's brothers, who were in the prime years of marriage (they were like 21 and 23 or some way early twenties like that), and the can't get engaged until Anju is firmly set to get married. So Anju's mom sees everybody from seers to swamis to everyone. One astrologer says that Anju's luck and star chart would have it that the planets were aligned in a way that would only allow her marriage after the age of 26, which is the equivalent to mid-forties in terms of marriage in India. So eventually Anju gets fed up and asks if she can go to New York and get a second degree at NYU, and after much complaining and denial and whatever else, her parents let her go. There she meets a girl kind of like herself, but the difference is that the friend has a white boyfriend (scandalous for India), and the friendship eventually wanes. Then Anju meets an okay white guy named Jeff, who she likes, but he turned out to be an idiot, ad then he ditched her. Then Anju finishes getting her degree and gets an apartment of her own (she'd been staying with her aunt and uncle), and then she gets a job in fashion advertising and does rather well. After a while, she gets to go all over as a representative from her company agency thing, and her first job with that is in Paris. She manages the Paris show really well, and soon she's going all over the world and having a load of adventures, and freaking out her parents with all this traveling because they think that the outer world is dangerous. So around that time, Part Two ends and Part Three begins. Part one was a lot of setting up Anju's situation, Part Two was Anju figuring out who the heck Anju actually was, and Part Three is Anju finally finding the right guy. And yes, she does, eventually, find the right guy. Part Three zooms forward in time, back to when Anju is 33 and *still* single. She meets an okay guy when she flies over to India *again* for some family or friend's wedding. He lives in London, but after a couple meetings, her dad asks his friend in London to investigate his background, and he learns that the guy has a girlfriend and is living with her and is expecting to pop the question any day now. With the help of an astrologer and her friend in the US, Anju convinces her parents to let her go back to the US. The friend looked up some decent Indian guys in the US, and Anju paid the astrologer to say that Anju wouldn't be able to find the right guy in India, she had to go off into the world to find him and she had to find him on her own. So they let her go. Later on, Anju goes on some Indian dating/marriage websites and finds some decent guys. One guy seems all right, and they email each other and arrange for him to call her. He calls, and they talk, and they seem to be getting on okay until Anju says that she's living ALONE in New York, not with her parents, as he is doing in Texas. After that, he doesn't call back. Then Rohan comes into the picture. Rohan is a friend of a friend, lives in LA, and an hour away from his parents who call him a gazillion times a day, and he overall seems like a nice guy. Anju flies out to LA, partially to meet him and partially because her boss was thinking of opening another branch of their company agency thing in LA. So Anju flies out and meets Rohan, who is extremely awesome. When she flies back to New York, she thinks that she might actually have found the right guy. Rohan doesn't really want their parents to be controlling the relationship, so he asks that she tell her parents as little as possible. So she says that there is a guy, but that's it. So Anju's boss decides that yes, indeed, she WILL open that second branch in LA, and Anju is qualified enough to go lead the operation. So Anju goes, allowing for plenty of evenings to go out with Rohan. Eventually Anju has to go back to India for some other wedding or something. Rohan calls a lot, and all Anju has ever told her parents is that there was a guy and yes, he was Indian. Well, a couple nights into her stay in India, Rohan calls and they talk and then he proposes. Over the phone. She says yes, her parents are happy, her brother gets married two weeks later, she gets married two weeks after that, and all is well. The end.
Well, I succeeded in what I set out to do. I am aware that I included every detail that I could remember about the book, even though we were only supposed to do a plot overview. So the overview is that Anju is an Indian girl living in America and trying to find a decent guy, whether in India or America (but most defiantly Indian), to get married to. She tries and fails many times. But she eventually finds an okay guy. The climax is the Paris fashion show. Or when Raju (the dude who lives in London) is found to already have a girlfriend. I'm not sure which. But probably Raju.
Funny how that works. I spend 45 minutes typing up a summary and then summarize the summary in 2 minutes. Wow. But I did what I set out to do, and now I'm pretty sure this is one of the longest entries that I've ever written. I like writing. But I am not going to post any of my stories because all my stories are really bad and are completely irrelevant to the topic that this blog has come to represent. But I don't care. I'm still not going to post any stories, though. Just because. And also because last year's English teacher still has my journal. Last year's English teacher is really nice. This year's isn't.
Anyway...................
What I have concluded about the topic I am researching is that the main issue that Indians living in America have with love marriages is letting their parents down and not living up to what they seem to need to live up to. That's what I see in this. Well, I'm going to go now. An extra 20 minutes of freedom! Whoop!!