"The Record that Defined My Summer" Response

        The unnamed narrator experiences a painful break-up with his girlfriend of three years. As he drives home, he flashes back to his memories of their time together, seeking reconciliation of memory and reality.
        There were several things I enjoyed about this story. One was the subtle hints of humor pervading the voice of the narrator. I saw these in passages like: "We went to La Parilla for dinner. It was one of those chain Mexican restaurants that looked like it was really fun from the outside, but all the food was crap, but I took her anyway because that's where she wanted to go." Excluding the problematic double conjunction, I'd like to see more of this humor throughout the story, as I think it could help vary the tone. Another characteristic of this story I enjoyed was the level of detail, which is occasional but fitting to the concept of story as primarily memory. For example, noting that his girlfriend's dress is patterned with penguins is familiar to the hazy and inconsistent quality of memory.
       However, there were several flaws I found with this story. The primary one I found was the inconsistency between past and present tense. Though the story is ostensibly primarily in past tense, with flashbacks to further past, there were many times when present tense was used, which distracted me from the content of the story. This problem was evident from the first sentences, "The sky is so blue that day." "That day" leads me to believe this is memory, but the present tense "is" confuses this. Another issue I found was the sameness in sentence structure. So many sentences, especially in a row, begin with "I," and utilize the same uncomplicated structure. Simplicity isn't a bad thing, but make sure to keep the structure interesting, above all. Lastly, the bulk of this story consists in the speaker simply telling us exactly what was happening (as in "The reason why we were at the lake was because it was some trip for the seniors who were about to graduate. . .") or how he was feeling ("I continued to deny the idea that I would be alone, and feeding the idea that I was this perfect guy. . ."), rather than showing the reader through action and characterization.