improve your thinking, improve your writing

Pachabel's Cannon

typical, well known piece

What was the tied haired girl's piece?

plays on cliches of commercial

hair tied - hair loose

controlled - free

does this matter?

if you want your hair to look beautiful and free, use pantiene

violin is repaired

meant to plat

who repaired it?

her hair is repaired

lose hair is def and plays violin

she lacks something (...hair, hearing)

given her difficulty how did she learn to play violin?

she is determined

Twelfth Night and Trona

Twelfth Night does have a connection to Trona. How? because they are, indeed, quite different. They have different time periods, different kinds of characters, different humor. But they can be the same. In Twelfth Night, the story starts at a certain normalcy, and then things get twisted and turned so that the normalcy is no longer. At some point, a new normalcy is established and that becomes the sustained normalcy. Ray starts his life, at his form of normalcy. Everyday he sits in his booth reminding each person to "take a mint." He continues his ride home, pays his five dollars to get into his own home, greets his all to strange wife, eats the same food and goes to bed the same way. That's Ray's normalcy. Yet, he one day comes home to find his wife cheating on him. That is when his normalcy changes. He wifes leaves and his son no longer identifies himself as his son. Dirk further abuses the town, his mother dies and he finds himself alone. He decides to unite the town and over run Dirk, which is when their new normalcy is established. There is water in the town, no longer run by Dirk and Ray lives fruitfully with his new wife and child on the way.

small, yet significant lives

Smith mentions multiple times throughout his article, how he has trouble expressing his true love for the small forms of life he can observe for hours. He confesses that his wife becomes annoyed and frustrated with him when he attempts to share his enthusiasm. His nieces and nephews only stayed interested for roughly 30 seconds. He cannot find anyone who shares his intrigue for these tiny creatures and he cannot understand why. He finds them wondrous. They are the smallest forms of life, much closer than planets in space. They are live creatures that all you need is a telescope to see them and a backyard to find them. He finds them amazing and even notes that they have been described by Jennings as having higher life characteristics like showing fear or hunger and that they can even be conditioned. Although it is quite controversial, Smith enjoy's Jennings' notion.

Although Smith feels that he cannot successfully express his passion for the small creatures, he did. He describes them as "tiny angels hovering in the light" (265). That one drop is a "blizzard of life ... swirling and spinning like snowflakes" (259). The one drop is simply a drop to the naked eye, but under a microscope there is an a whole ecosystem of life that never sleeps and constantly moves--life that he can watch for hours on end. When he looks up, he sees the flowers as "ragged" in comparison to the "bright world beneath the lenses" (260). He finds it as a beauty. Cheap entertainment, nature is. The fact that "nature is everywhere, costs nothing, [and] requires minimal equipment" to observe and take pleasure in (262). In fact, he does express his love for the "little subjects" well through his appreciation for their small, yet significant lives.

self-inflicted extinction

Phelan in his piece, "How We Evolve" speaks of the new findings of evolution. Thousands of years ago, we stopped migrating and started agriculture with different food and started living in cities. This caused us to become a large population and allowed our numbers to grow. However, "our DNA is still catching up" (196). This means, that despite the wide spread thought that our evolution has stopped is false, it has nearly begun. In fact research has shown that the "maximum rate of change ... was within the past three thousand years, even though the gene originated eight thousands years ago" (197). As we evolve, we have the ability to create weapons and machinery that will help us with daily activities, in war and in the future. However, he points out that what we create could also harm us. He uses the example of CFCs in refrigerators. They were intended to keep fridges from over heating, but what was released over heated the earth.

Therefore, this evolution has caused what he calls 'self-inflicted extinction.' This can be applied to an array of things, however an urgent topic would be global climate change and pollution. We are quickly extincting ourselves. Our advances in technology and agriculture are leading to our earth's decay. Since we have come from monkeys, we have become more intelligent. We have adapted our environment to our needs instead of adapting ourselves. There is no need for change in our DNA, which is why it seems we are stangent, because anything we need we have the ability to create. This idea, though it is an advance in humanity, will ultimately lead to our downfall.

'Can't just sweep it under the rug,' says Broome.

Climate change is an ethical question, but a simple one at that. Reduce emissions = save the planet. The only problems is, it requires the populations as a whole to sacrifice a little to save a lot. Doing otherwise would simple be unethical because "you should no do something for your own benefit if it harms another person" (Broome 12). When put like this, no one wants to be called unethical, but it's hard to see the future that's centuries away and sacrifice what you have now for them.

If you think about it in a cost benefit standpoint, you would have to lose something now (cost) in order to help generations in the future (benefit). The Stern Review has found the benefits "gained by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases would be far greater than the cost of reducing them" (Broome 13). So why not? Why not cut back now and save later? Well, we are not those kinds of people. But that's the ethical answer. To not cut back now would be victimizing future generations and the only ethical thing to do would to 'compensate' those victims. However for the same reason that we don't think to conserve now, we won't be able to compensate them because the benefits will be "a century or two from now" (Broome 14). The fact that these benefits are "discounted" means that the benefits from now are worth more than they are in the future. When people borrow money and lend money, "they often give less weight to their own future well-being than to their current well-being" (Broome 17). Meaning, in economy, as in our culture, we value more what we get now than what will happen later. But not only is discounting unethical, so is the fact that when climate change is in full throttle, it will be our fault, we won't be around and we would have killed millions of people.

blogging.

I happen to like blogging. There's not worry as to getting to the lab to print out what I have to hand in. I can blog any time. I can even make my blog the colors I like. My WSC 180 class blogs, but we use the Colorado state website. I don't like it much. It's just one long list of blogs that the six of us just enter in. There's no order and we're expected to comment. This layout makes much more sense. Easier for and easier for Lay. I can look at what other people have to say and have them help me with what I'm trying to say... or with what I'm not. So yeah, I happen to like blogging.

"Take a mint"

Observe
Infer

"Take a mint"

Tries to add sweetness to everyday moment

Quarantined by booth

Quarantined in life

Sees nice cars everyday

In his face that he is not successful

Lives in desert

He is deserted

Drives old car

Just gets by with his income

Same routine

Not getting anywhere in life

Neat and organized in chaotic neighborhood

He was forced into this kind of lifestyle

Billboard of jumping fish

Decay

Always looks at the positive

Going to break soon

Shopping at supermarket is excitement for the day

Sexual tension between Ray and Nora

High school football field is used to ride dirt bikes

Education is not of value

Son is nonchalant

Family is not close and family is not a value

Drug deal/crack pipe

methane lab

Authority is drug dealer

Picked up litter

Tries to preserve where he lives

Charlene- half present, does not go outside, inactive, indecisive, smeared lipstick

She was different before marriage and she is promiscuous.

Penny tries to get her conscience enough to give her recipe

Dysfunctional family, financial gain, mother resented daughter and never gave her recipe?

Questions:

1. Why does the wife act so odd?

2. Was the wife different before they got married?

3. What is in the tin box and why are the contents so important to him?

4. What is Nora's situation? Is she married?

5. Did he miss out on opportunities because he married Charlene?

6. Are the son and the prostitute going to start a relationship?

are you a writer? no.

A writer is someone who can translate their ideas and thoughts effectively through ANY non verbal communication. A writer enjoys writing, maybe not enjoys, because some of them agonize over their writing, but they find something in their writing. Something that makes them passionate about their writing, something that drives them to write. I am not an excellent writer and I don't consider myself one. I write when and because I have to. I feel that school has tried so hard to make me a god writer that I actual despise doing it.

creative destruction

"Food miles" is such an appropriate term. The agriculture system causes more pollution than any other system. Food miles refers to the amount of distance a food product travels before it reaches its destination, which is a great amount of time. He reports that food miles in a supermarket are 27 times more than the food miles in a local grocery. The food makes a 15 hundred mile journey before it reaches the consumer. This great amount of distance causes a great amount of greenhouse gases to be released into the environment. It requires the consumption of fossil fuels and at one point required the building of highways so they can be easily transported. Greenhouse gases are linked to causing climate change because they are released into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned. To me, the quote "we are in an era of creative destruction" means that we have changed the way in which we define destruction. When one thinks of destruction, they think that bulldozers are involved or perhaps burning; destructions is a physical element breaking down a material to its elements. However, this creative deconstruction involves the use of technology. Thanks to our advancement in technology, we have developed a use for fossil fuels and inherently developed the deconstruction of the the ozone.
Do I feel personally responsible? We are all responsible. I can't say I have contributed. I use my air conditioner, I have left my lights on, I have thrown plastic bottles out in regular garbage among other things that waste energy. Do I feel personally responsible, you ask again because I never really answered. No, not personally. I feel my carbon foot print is quite smaller than others and therefore, I don't feel personally responsible for the destructions of the earth. However, I also feel that if there is going to be any change that everyone must participate. It is like when you have a group and each person must contribute their card to build the tower. If one person refuses to give their card, then the tower cannot be built.

WC

I really did love my experience at the writing center. When I got there, I sat my assignment paper down and expected the tutor to read it and help me brainstorm. Instead, he pushed the paper back to my direction and asked ME to tell HIM what my paper was on. Important to know my assignment. So I did and it helped me think about what was expected from me on this paper. We brainstormed for a bit and then he left me to start writing. I liked that he gave me my own space to write it and then after 15 minutes he came back to look at what I had written. He said I was headed in the right direction and corrected a couple of things that I warranted my reader would understand. I was in the first stages of writing so I don't think that he could have helped me more than brainstorming ideas and mapping out my paper. The thing that helped me the most was the fact that I had a conversation with someone else about what I wanted to write and the appointment was very helpful for that reason.

who came first?

“Do we create what we observe through the act of our observations?” (230)

I'm not sure how I feel about this article and this question besides the fact that I did not like this article. It is an interesting question to pose. It's like saying when you look at a color, it's really every color except the one you're perceiving which is why we perceive that color. I'm going to have to say no.. simply for the sake of my sanity. Things are there and we perceive them because they are there, not they are there because we perceive them. It is comparable to Brufee's article, which claimed that thoughts are not thoughts until they are externalized to a counterpart. Things are not things will we observe them. It's a never ending argument... who came first? the chicken or the egg?

I think his weakest argument was his progress throughout the discovery of quantum physics. I took physics in high school, but I'm coming into this as a reader who is not very educated in physics. Since this is not a physics textbook, you must understand that some readers do not understand these physics terms. Although the entire article goes through this process of discovering knowledge, it made my head spin and devalued his argument because I was no longer interested. His argument fell apart to the reader who knows little about physics.

It's like...

Excess waste is like a person who eats too much; who eats more than they need to survive and then when that excess is no used it collects as fat. If you continue to eat more than you need the fat in your body collects and collects. Eventually the body cannot handle it anymore and organs will begin to not work properly. Arteries will clog and the desire for physical activity will diminish. Consuming more than you need leads to excess waste. And excess waste is never a good thing.

I have separated excess waste and greed because although they are related, they are two different terms and can infer two different meanings. Greed is a desire for more and more and getting it by any means necessary. Greed is like a weed. It might start as a small desire that grows and grows. It finds it's way to water or sunshine, what ever it needs and it doesn't care about the plants it might kill on the way. It is usually much uglier than the plants it kills. Although there are some weeds that can disguise themselves as flowers. It will even go as far to strangle plants and grown on them and use them for their benefits, despite the fact they could very well kill the exact thing that's helping them survive. in that case, they will move on to the next.

an artist's limits

Berry makes a very good point when he mention the term: limitless. We have believed that we are a higher species and our needs are above all others and therefore we will use things to our benefit with little or no regards to anything else. We have thought that these materials that we do use have been limitless in the sense that we can use it as much as we want and there will always be some of it readily available. But that unfortunately is not the case. And now we realize as we have moved away from coal to oil. But what will happen when we are forced to move away from oil? Where will we go from there? He makes the point to quote words that are supposed to be comforting, that we have "250 billion tons of oil reserves" that will "last us 100 years" (Berry 2). But this fails to recognize the fact that "we have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years" and although it is comforting to hear that it will last us a bit longer, in the context of how long we've been on the earth, it's not enough time at all (Berry 2).
We want solutions that will be the most efficient and the least invasive. Ones that require a certain amount of technology. Yet we still choose to believe that everything is limitless. Berry blatantly calls this "fantasy" because we are "entering a time on inescapable limits" (Berry 4). We can no longer be so stupid to think that we can solve the problem of technology abusing the environment with more technology. Perhaps there is no such thing as "clean technology" that the only true answer to preserving and saving the earth is to start to live with limits. They way we live now it limitless and but using more technology to solve our limitless amount of problems is only aiding us in the continuation of living limitlessly.
Berry suggests that the only way to "recover from our disease of limilessness" is to come to the realization that we are not a species above the rest sent by god. It is sort of this Christian belief that we are above all other creatures because god has created us in that way. We should take the reliance off of science and technology and have a "new look at the arts" (Berry 9). His prior reference to art was that they have limits depending on the size of their canvas and therefore must choose what to depict on their limited frame of art and he again closes with this idea that artists know limits far better than scientists could understand.

derrida's fear

Derrida's fear of writing occurs to him when he is in a half sleep half awake stage. At that point he feels he sees the truth more clearly than ever and the part on his brain he names vigilance tells him that what he is doing is crazy and this "gesture," which I think to be his writing, is crazy and might offend people. But when he is awake, vigilance is asleep and he no longer thinks about if his writing is acceptable, he simply thinks about his writing and says what he wants to say.
I have a similar fear, but not quite exactly what Derrida is describing. I always have a good a idea, but I fear the correct way to articulate my thoughts into comprehensible writing. It goes along with Derrida's fear because if I fail to articulate myself well, then what I'm really trying to say won't be expressed to my reader and then I have failed as a writer.
The motivation of this fear is really the proper way to go about communicating with your reader. Writing is indeed a conversation and if you fail to express your thoughts clearly and understandably, then the reader has no way to accept the ideas you intended to communicate. Derrida feels that his written word is what he wanted to say and therefore will not fail to communicate his point.