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I wrote my paper over the NSA and I was able to thoroughly enjoy my topic because as an American citizens myself it matters dearly to me. My greatest strength was my personal opinion and prior knowledge I had on the subject.  I could have done better with my preparedness and getting work done early. Im just really bad at procrastinating and I’ve been sorta in a mental and emotional block which has been hurting my productivity and creativeness My process got kind of put behind because I wasn’t using any sources from a database, just online webpages so I had to delete a lot.  The Article I got to write about was useful to me because it helped me put the national attention of the subject into perspective. It’s not just me worrying about the rights in this country, but other people caring and fighting for everyone is encouraging.

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Promise of Poverty.

What does the term “Big Business” mean nowadays? From Visa and MasterCard to Kraft and Budweiser, capitalism seems to be at the peak of its conglomerate Mountain. Not to mention that the government gets a pretty penny from taxes and the occasional bribe from a company’s political lobbyist, or five. So, how do companies stay on the top and how does the government let that happen? This connection is digested in “How the poor are made to pay for their poverty” by Barbara Ehrenreich, “Major credit companies…have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.” Just a single example of the ways the “cycle of the poor” can continue to spin. Trying to help the poor by offering food stamps or any form of government assistance is only a short term solution, the first step is to stop intentionally siphoning off of the livelihood of the people struggling to live.

#America #Alliknow #LandoftheFree?

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3/10/17

Have you ever been so angry that you wrote a letter? While it may seem like an incredibly formal method of communication to those of us living in the 21st century, before electricity was discovered (not invented) it was the common practice to use a physical mail system. In “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift, this Irishman decides to give the Pope a piece of his mind disguised as a piece of advice, sent with a letter. My girlfriend coined the term “hopefully sarcastic” when I told her that Mr. Swift economic solution to burden of poor people in Ireland was to eat their babies. He wrote “I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts… I have been assured that a young healthy Child well Nursed is at a year Old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food, whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boyled[sic]”.(par. 8-9) Even though he then pens through a six potentially positive points and making relatively accurate suggestions on the economic benefits, hes talking about different methods of farming and murdering babies the entire time. It is all Kind of  @%$^&* up, but it goes to show how the obsession of money can turn humanity against itself, and personally I would call it pure evil, no joke.

#0.o

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3/3/17

Plato’s discusses Socrates explanation to the inability of human beings to rely on their senses for information regarding the true reality of life. In “Allegory of the cave”, there are prisoners in a cave restrained from moving with chains unable to turn their heads from some form of entrapment. Behind them a great fire, the only light source casts shadows on the wall of figures walking by on a walkway. Some that carry things on their head made of wood stone or even animals, some with nothing. After Socrates describes the scene, put into words much like J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings trilogy”, he begins to question the ability of a the prisoner’s judgement, saying if you have never seen the real objects and not just their shadow’s then there is no way of determining if that’s what is truly real. He then supposes a prisoner escapes from the cave, in fashion of Neo inside the Matrix, discovers everything they have ever known to be fake. Later after learning the reason for life and the beauty of living, the ex-inmate returns to the cave to free his fellow prisoners, but when he tries to inoculate them with knowledge of their world they refuse to believe him and threaten to kill him. In relation to the media news of the 21st century where every day new scandals arise and there is fresh intelligence to be had, I believe stories like this are imperative to understand to help accept the new knowledge of political corruption.

#Knowledgebomb

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Smoke Signal’5

1.      The Fourth of July party abruptly leads to an uncontrollable house fire and a baby getting tossed out the window of the second story. Arnold Joseph (Viktor’s dad) catches the baby Thomas with a leaping catch similar to an MLB highlight reel. Thomas’ mother and father both were trapped inside the house and burned down with it. Arnold is complimented shortly after for his heroic actions saving Thomas and he replies, “I didn’t think about it, I didn’t mean to”, rather shamefully which didn’t seem to match up with the scene beforehand. Ever since Viktor and Thomas were basically infants their half-sided relationship was born.

2.      Years later Arnold left his family when Viktor instigated a fight between his parents by throwing glass beer bottles at part of their trailer, obviously upset at their excessive drinking. Arnold leaves after fighting with Viktors mother about still wanting to drink he hits her and leaves the house hustling to his truck and drives off and never returns. Like 10 years later Arnold dies in Phoenix, Arizona and Viktor must travel to collect his belongings of choice but he only has  insufficient funds of 40$. He runs into Thomas after cashing his mother’s check, who instantly confronts him about his lack of money situation, offering his help with a melon sized glass jar turned piggy bank. Thomas stipulates that he only wants to travel with him, and Viktor denies at first, but after a quick talk with his mother, goes to Thomas and agrees to go to Phoenix and back with him.

3.      One Indian trait is described during one of Thomas and Viktors conversations about Arnold. Thomas says “When Indians leave they’re gone forever, Last Mohicans, Last Winnebago…” This fear of leaving and never returning was mirrored in my personal culture whenever I left for college my parents were scared I wouldn’t ever come back and visit.

Arnold in his passing also represents an inheritance trait when Viktor travels to his camper and takes his pocket knife. This is similar to my personal experience because my father gave me my Grandfather’s knife after I came to college.

 Another trait I observed was a form of tradition, maybe even religious, was when Thomas sat down to eat dinner with his Grandmother before they touch their plate they place their heads down in a quick 3-5 second moment of silence, or potentially prayer. Every day during dinnertime when I lived with my parents we would have a quick prayer before eating which also lasted only like 5 -6 seconds, except for holidays he would elaborate.

 4.      Later on in the movie the scene flashes back to the infamous Fourth of July celebration. It starts with Arnold drunkenly stumbling around the front door and out onto the front porch screaming and hollering for people to wake up and continue partying. It also shows him holding a roman candle firework shooting into the air trying to get peoples attention, and after a few pops he stumbles over near an open window of Thomas’ parents house and accidentaly shoots one of the shots of the firework into the drapes and curtains. Almost instantly the house catches on fire but Arnold doesn’t notice anything right away.

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#4

I love to people watch, and admit it, you do too. Watching someone walk by at your college, or fly away at an airport your stopping at just shows people have very active lives all around us. But, can you truly ever understand someone just by looking at them for a passing moment and making silent judgements about who they are, where they are from, what they are doing. It seems to only scrape the surface. In “Mrs. Sen’s” by Jumpha Lahiri, in this story Elliot spends his time at Mrs. Sen’s afterschool until his single mother gets off work. The personal perspectives from Elliot fills the pages with judgments made from just watching her, for instance, “He especially enjoyed watching Mrs. Sen as she chopped things, seated on newspapers on the living room floor."(pg. 114). Even though it is a surface judgement there is more information to be found in just a simple task. Who sits on the living room floor and chops things on newspapers? Sometimes my grandmother will recruit her grandchildren and fill the entire living room to make pasta noodles which is kind of similar to how Mrs. Sen is preparing dinner for her family too.

#watching you

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#3

To live a day in the life of someone else’s shoes has always piqued my interest. The idea of swapping lives with someone you just met, don’t know, or have maybe even known for years. What if they don’t even speak the same language as your used to? Anything could change from your past-life, in this new world of possibilities solely based off the skin color that you are now occupying. From “InshAllah”, Haroon Moghul intimately describes the details of growing up within a Muslim American culture and to my naive surprise, social and religious customs that I didn't think were in place within America. In an excerpt over high school prom from the book, Moghul discloses that his parents customs share a resemblance to extreme christian parent culture, ‘’We didn't drink. They did. We didn't dance. They did. We didn't date. They did. We did not "like" girls, never mind "need" them. Somehow, it was assumed but unspoken...” (par. 2) even though he decided to drink and dance, guilt wasn’t the worst of his problems. He just wanted to live his life a little bit, explore the worlds options. Personally, I’ve always felt the same way about breaking expectations and boundaries that people attempt to establish in your life when your not even sure what life means to you yet.

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#2

Video games are my favorite pass time and don’t mistake me for a simple console nerd. I play PC games, so my computer is a piece of who I am. I customized the hardware inside it to my exact requirements and even got my full name laser-printed on the bottom. Ever since I started playing games in 5th grade my Mother has always told me I waste too much time. Much to my mothers avail, the mental benefits of video games have been getting some serious study and research. In the essay, “Your Brain on Video Games”, Steven Johnson references a professor of learning sciences from the University of Wisconsin James Gee, “Gee and other researchers...are now beginning to recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience.”(par. 4) It is no surprise to me that like strategic board games, video games aren’t only raising peoples experience  bars in-game but in real-life as well.

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“Omw to the Hospital”, is not the easiest text to receive. Its 8pm Tuesday night, the second week of my 3rd year of college. We stood completely still, time stopped as our eyes locked frozen in a mix of fear and confusion. She called her mother over and over. No answer. We said good-bye to our friends and left in a hustle. The relationship a single mother shares with her daughter is difficult to categorize, but, similar to the connection Sarah Vowell shares with her father in Shooting Dad, “The older I get, the more I’m interested in becoming a better daughter”, my girlfriend didn’t always connect with her mother either. But, situations change. Relationships change. The relationship with my mother isn’t the same as it used to be. I don’t really have any desire to try and change it anymore. It makes wonder if I’m just not old enough yet? Or maybe my 60 year old parents are too old for this generation and time I was born in.

#old alone excepther