Intro for Essay #2

 If you are anything like me, you stress over the smallest things. When one thing doesn’t go your way, you feel like your whole life is over and you will never be able to reach your goals. Sometimes it gets so bad that you can't concentrate on a simple, you feel exhausted, or you can't eat anything. We clearly know that nothing horrible is truly going to happen to us, so why does our body prepare us for the worst? It shuts off blood flow to the intestine which makes you feel like you’ve eaten everything in the cafeteria, and it puts all of its energy in preparing your body to run away from a speeding train! Seems logical, right? However, our body know better than we do when it comes to stressful situations, but sometimes, too much of this can be more hurtful than helpful. If we can find safe and effective ways of controlling our body's response to stressful situations, then we can determine when we really need to worry and when we just need to take a deep breath and start over again.

Chunklet with Prickles and Goo

                 While stress may seem like an impossible obstacle to overcome, seeing that we face it in about everything we do, there are ways to sooth the savage beast. One way is to exercise. Yes, it’s as simple as that! Now you may say “oh, I’m too busy to go to the gym” or “I hate working out”, but you don’t really need to do much. Doctors and researchers recommend that getting at least thirty minutes of physical activity a day can greatly decrease you risk of developing depression as well as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Not only does it decrease you stress levels, but as you work out, your body releases endorphins that make you feel happier and more awake. If a more potent solution is required, a doctor can prescribe an antidepressant that can do an array of things such as prevent the reuptake of serotonin, leading to a longer feeling of happiness. However, these drugs do not come without side effects and can sometimes cause the user to become even more depressed. In my experience, I never needed to take medication for my anxiety. I wanted to find a safer and healthier alternative to alleviating my stress that wouldn’t interfere with school. My therapist recommended that I worked out more. Nothing too crazy, just going for a run or a walk around campus or swimming some laps. At first, I didn’t feel any different. I still felt like I was on pins and needles everywhere I went. However, as I began to become a little more active, in the gym and on campus, I started to feel like a new person. The little things that use to drive me crazy like test and new assignments started to feel like a normal task. I didn’t feel like I would explode if I didn’t tend to them immediately. I didn’t feel like I was about to have a mental breakdown. As well as feeling better on the inside, I started to eat healthier and the zits that I would get from stress started to disappear. I was a whole new person.

Social Media Solving Social Division Analysis

Danah Boyd, the author of “Inequality: Can Social Media Resolve Social Divisions?” explores how widespread and domestic racism has truly become in America. To demonstrate how bad it has become, she interviews students in a part of Los Angeles where segregation has reappeared in the school. Parts of the school occupied by white students are called “Disneyland” while parts occupied by black students is called “Six Flags” and races never truly mix. She finds it surprising how the students have become to accept this as a way of life and finds it ironic the people thought that all of this racial bias would stop after the election of President Barack Obama. While doing this, she also analysis how social media actually plays in these elections and how it actually tends to reinforce these social divisions instead of solving them.

              To further back up her arguments, she not only uses personal experience and interviews, but she also events that sparked a lot of controversy, not for what happened, but for how people responded to it. She explains how during the 2009 BET awards, people notice names on twitter that were trending, such as Neyo and Beyoncé, who are black musicians. As soon as people saw this, some started to make racist remarks saying that they didn’t understand why so many black people were on TV and that they would give up twitter for this. This strengthens her point that social media for the most part will do more bad for divisions in society than good.

              In this article, you see many indications that there is a lot of fieldwork included that supports what she has heard about for many years. She asks students at other “diverse” schools why they are separated by race. These students answer that it is because what class they take or what sports they play, not realizing that they have been already be segregated by society like they were sixty years before. She also notes that social media can be an indication of how bad racism and segregation has gotten on this country, based on online friend groups and comments on topics. If Boyd did not include this fieldwork in this essay, the article would be in a way one sided, with no opinion or personal experience. Because she puts this in there, the article is much more “easy to swallow” and relatable to the reader

Fieldwork essay topic

In my fieldwork essay, I have chosen to explore stress and how it affects my life every day. I have chosen this because this is something that has physically and mentally taken a toll on me since I was young. I would physically feel tired and sick at times when I was really stress. At times, I would be stressed over small things like if I would make my flight or not. I seemed to be stresses, one way or another, every single day. Not only would I feel horrible, but I would not be able to concentrate on simple tasks like doing some homework or cleaning my room.  Finding a way to escape this constant battle was crucial if I wanted to function as a normal human being. In this essay, I would like to explore what causes stress not only in me, but in others as well as the physical and mental affects that it has on the human body. I have heard many things from people on how too much stress can causes you to age more quickly and could dramatically shorten your life. In hearing this, it would stress me out even more. However, I would like to research this to see if this is factual or not. Finding out how much stress the body can take will either calm me down or freak me out even more. I expect there to be many negative side effects associated with stress, but I also expect there to be a large number of people, especially in this country, to be affected by stress. I would also like to research ways of coping with or avoiding stress and the problems that are associated with it. This will mostly likely range from taking a calm walk to doing intense exercises. In doing so, I might look for information on medical website backed by research from experts and doctors. This will ensure accuracy and should make a well written, credible essay.

Consider the Lobster Analysis

In “Consider the Lobster” by David Foster, he writes about a valued tradition in New England of eating lobster. Lobsters are so popular there that they have large festivals celebrating them and feasting on them. However, in this article he writes mostly about how these festivals effect the lobster biologically and physically. Certain groups like PETA seem to have a problem in which the way lobsters are killed and have protest the festival many times to encourage others to stop eating them. People who do eat them seem to be ignorant as to how sensitive lobsters really are to pain. As he writes this, he is using Huxley’s second direction of writing towards the objective, historical facts, which is concrete. For example, when he is speaking about pain receptors in lobsters, he says “Lobsters do not, on the other hand, appear to have the equipment for making or absorbing natural opioids like endorphins and enkephalins, which are what more advanced nervous systems use to try to handle intense pain.” There is nothing that can really be debated about this and exhibits logos as his argument is based on facts.

              When he chooses lobsters at his topic, he is picking something that people tend not to care about or notice. While these people at the lobster festival are enjoying their lobster rolls, they tend to forget that thousands of lobsters are being boiled alive. Although people know that this happens, they like to make themselves feel better and think that the lobsters are not evolved enough to feel pain. Although the author is not against the killing of lobsters for food, he just wants to bring up the problems associated with it and at least inform his readers of these issues before they eat a lobster again. This may not change whether they eat lobsters or not, but at least they will be educated on how a lobster functions and where their meal came from.  In doing so, his article was well formulated and entertaining to read. However, if there were some pictures to show the way that the lobsters were killed or where lobsters tend to live, this would be even better for the article.

"The Overly Documented Life" Analysis

                  A.J. Jacobs, the author of “The Overly Documented Life” writes about what daily life is like for a middle class person in Americas society today. Specifically, what every waking second is like. He speaks about how our memory tends to be short lived with all of the other things that we have to do and remember. To try to document his memories, he attaches a small camera to the side of his head to record everything he sees throughout his day, including him using the bathroom and staring at other women. In doing so, he is more carefully and self-conscious about what he looks at as he doesn’t want to look back on what he did and saw that day and be embarrassed. In this project, he also states the benefits of lifelogging such as finding the taxi that his left his belongings in and rewinding the tape to see if he had taken an Advil for his headache. In doing so, he is following one of Huxley’s three directions which is towards the personal, autobiographical, and inner experience. He shares specific details about what he did each day and how it made him feel. In doing so, he lets the reader know how he directly feels and the reader will then feel a deeper connection to the writer. He also writes this article is a very comical sense which is beneficial towards his cause of bringing awareness to how much we really tend to forget or ignore things in our everyday life. If it was written in a very dry way, the article would lose speed very quickly and the reader would most likely stop reading after a few paragraphs. He is also very relatable with his experiences that he states in the article like losing his wallet. Most people understand frantically looking for their wallet, wishing that they had a device that would basically remind them where they put it. Altogether, the article was very entertaining and brings up a valid point that we need to be more aware of how much that we really do and what we say in our everyday life.

Catfishing Comments

Out of all of the essays, I like this one the most. It is informative, well written, and straight to the point. The hook for the essay was perfect and is bound to pull the reader right in immediately. She made me feel like this was a real problem in society when I didn’t really think it was before. However, there are some things that she could fix to make it even better. First, the introduction is a bit lengthy. Some of that information could be put into later paragraphs when more information is needed. Also, there should be more sources cited so that the argument is not so one sided. From what I read, much of the information that was obtained was from MTV which is the production company that produces and airs the show. This could be seen as a bias. Lastly, there should be more to compare in the main body of the essay. Instead of comparing and contrasting, there is just a lot of what the articles are about. This would give the essay more length and would clarify each article even more. Overall, this essay was great and really changed my outlook on the issue.