Reading Response Entry 1 (Week 2)

So, today I read "I am 21" by Mary Robinson. I know this is for class on Tuesday, but I wanted to read something other than Abducted by Circumstance. What I wanted to do for this Entry was to go through the piece and use some of the concepts that we had worked on in class:

Showing Not Telling:
"writing clockwise in the left, top and right had margins of page one in my exam booklet." I like this one because it makes me wonder what was so special about the margins? Why didn't they just write in the middle? But I also like the specificity of where they were writing.
"Some guy whose hair I could've ripped out was finished with his exam." I like this because she didn't say "some guy I was annoyed with." It was a hatred you could see.
"The plaster walls were a nothing oatmeal color, which was okay. But not okay was that some earlier renter had gooped orange-unbelievably- paint on the moldings and window frames." I like this showing because of the words she used. You can see oatmeal and you can see gooped.
"This was #2 graphite and gushy-gummy." I like the word gushy-gummy. It really describes the graphite of some pencils.
Specificity:
"probably from overdoing it with diet pills or from the green tea all last night and from reading too much all the time."
"my one picture up wasn't of a Blessed Virgin or a detail from Amiens of the King of Judan holding a rod of the Tree of Jesse. Instead, it was an eight by ten glossy of Rudy and Leslie, my folks." I just think this one is funny because of the specific paintings she picks.
Place:
"But i slapped him my exam booklet and hurried out of Meverett."
"We had to borrow a neighbor's station wagon just to get the thing safely to Dreiser Junior High."
"Willow tree on Route 987"
Background:
"He had asked me out for Cokes, but I had brushed him off. That was maybe stupid because he might've  been in charge of grading exams." I like this because the importance of background is to clarify the relationships and little things about the characters and this definitely shows that the speaker is worried about this test and hopes that every little thing counts.

I wanted to search for these concepts so that I could get a better idea on how to hone these skills in my own writing. The one big question that I had for this piece, that really didn't have anything to do with any concept except for maybe the whole Don't Explain Anything, WHAT REALLY CAUSES THE RINGING?