Mid-term Learning Reflection

In advance I apologize for not posting this on time, I guess I am the only person in Richmond that lost power yesterday. Other than this assignment, I have been on time for every assignment this semester. Overall this has been a great first half of an English class. I have been reading and listening to more great writing works over the last seven weeks, than I have my whole life. Every Tuesday I visit the weebly.com website to carefully read about what is due for the upcoming week. For the most I try to do the committee discussion responses first, but it seems like the people in my group will wait until late Monday to post it, which makes it hard to write a response if they are posting to the board late Monday night. So I will generally respond to anyone who post to the committee board before 8 p.m. on Monday. For the second half of the semester I will be responding to people’s posts in greater detail and with comments on their experiences and thoughts. I incorporate my understanding of the class material into my weekly writing assignments, or at least try to. My favorite readings so far have been the latest one, involving Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Both were so important for this country, and I love reading about our Independence from Great Britain. I loved being able to write about having an experience in Nature, for an assignment. It was a great change from reading and assignment and writing a detailed response.  One complaint I do have is that I have no idea how I am doing in this class, unless there is another place to view grades, blackboard doesn’t show any grade. Great reading so far, I hope we stay in the current time period for a little more than we have with other time periods, great readings. Overall great first half to English and I hope to earn an A by the end of it.

Gay Marriage/ Gay Rights

I don’t mean to offend anyone’s beliefs on marriage, or religion for that matter, these are my beliefs and that’s fine if they are not yours. A great majority of people in this country believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. For some reason in this country homosexuals are looked at as second class citizens. Like the slaves that were forced to work our land in the early days of America, or the African Americans during the “Separate but Equal” time in America, homosexuals can’t change who they are. What a joke, Separate but equal, the Jim Crow laws were introduced in 1876 to remind everyone in the United States that everything wasn’t so equal.

Today, some people use gay marriage as a main point of why they will vote or not vote for a person to represent them in government. It seems kind off silly, that you could vote for a representative on one issue, because of all of the other points that a representative believes in, but It is an important issue. I didn’t live through the times in history that I previously mentioned, but for the time that I have been alive, people who are gay seem to have it pretty bad. When you read and see stories about people who are killed, or kill themselves for being gay. Some representatives and priests speak about gay marriage and being gay like there is something wrong with you. People and kids hear this and believe it, then they treat the people around them horribly for being gay. It reminds me of the persecution that the Jews have been going through since the start of time. Hitler tried to get rid of all the Jews and all of the gays, to make one supreme race. I know this does not deal directly with gay marriage, but it all goes together with what people who are gay have to go through, very similar to slaves. There was a story not too long ago, about a Rutgers student that was taped by his roommate while he was having sex, or kissing a guy. Everyone at Rutgers found out about it, because the kid that tapped his roommate showed it to a bunch of his friends, and when his roommate found out about the video, he walked to a bridge and jumped off to his death. When I was in middle school there was a kid, Peter Lurie, I haven’t seen or talked to him since High School, so I hope he is having a better life then he was when I last knew him. Peter was not afraid in what other people thought, he showed this, by the bright colors and the make up that he wore. For his own good, I remember thinking that I wish he would dress like everyone else, but he wasn’t everyone else and one day I can remember screaming coming from behind a wall on the side of my school. Peter was getting the shit kicked out of him and the kid kicking him was yelling, “God doesn’t love you” “faggot”, and other hurtful things like that. Only thing I was thinking as the teacher was pulling Peter off the ground is that something needs to change. Up until a couple of years ago, gay people couldn't even fight and die for their country. I feel like 50 years from now, people are going to say, ''can you believe that people actually used to care about a stupid of an issue as gay marriage, everyone should have the right to be miserable for the rest of their life."

Living a Full Life

What does living a full life mean to me? A full life consists of not only the great times in your life, but also the bad times. In my opinion, family, friends, and money are the most important factors in determining a complete life, but you need all three. Some of the richest people in the world, have no friends or no family that they speak to, and I think if you asked them honestly if they were having a good life, they would say no. My idea of a full life today, could be a different idea tomorrow. Being twenty three years old, my idea of living a full life is, that when I am ready to die, I am staring at the ocean, surrounded by the people who I love the most in the world. Today it would be parents siblings, hopefully wife, children, and grandchildren in the future. Living a full life means that at the end of it, I can say I enjoyed the good and the bad that life has to offer, and I succeeded.  

Living through this recession the last couple of years, has taught me a lot. Making better decisions on how to use my money wisely in the future, is one of them. Another, is to never be comfortable or satisfied. When you get comfortable at a certain job, that’s when they can take it away. It happened to my father, he was with the same company for fifteen years and in 2008 when everyone around him seemed to be getting fired, he did as well. He thought his job was safe, he mentioned loyalty, when I asked why he thought his job was fine. I want to be able to say that when the going got tough, I didn’t back down and I succeeded. I was never really bad with money before, but in the past couple years I have really cut back and began to save for the future. My ideal life would be owning and operating a sports bar near the ocean. Working in restaurant now and for the last five years of my life, and taking business classes at Reynolds to finish my Associates Degree in Business Management, will help point me in the right direction, but a lot of work still needs to be done to make it. After I’m done at Reynolds, furthering my education onto a four year University is in my best interest. Making a business plan and and forming a LLC is definitely a start as well. Location and marketing is huge, you can have one of the best restaurants in the world, but if people don’t know about it, or it’s not located in a good area, you will be closed soon.

I think one of the successes in having a full life is making the lives of the people around you better also.  One day to not have to worry about money, would be amazing, because it would give me the opportunity to do what I’m most passionate about, helping people and animals. I would be volunteering every day at local shelters or food drives. I think the greatest feeling that you could have, is by making someone else feel great. Help building or donating money for parks for kids and dogs would be a dream. Overall a full complete life is being successful in family, friends, wealth, and helping the less fortunate.

Learning Reflection

I have read and listened to more writing in the last 3 weeks, than I have at any point in my life. I am not complaining at, it has been great reading, reflecting, and exploring in nature. I felt most engaged in my writing of my moment of Sublime. Reflecting of all the good memories I had with my friend. The moment I felt most distant, was when I read that we had to set up and write a public blog, never doing one before, but it was easy and I enjoy it. Most helpful is the detailed list at the top of the week assignments page that lists what’s due for the week. I would say that what surprised me the most was the great feedback that everyone in my group is giving each other. Also the language, I knew going into it, that the language was going to be different, but I was still a little surprised. What has helped me, while reading the assignments, is listening and reading along, if that option is available. I will sometimes stop and take notes on what I have read. Overall a great first four weeks, hopefully the rest are just as great.

Week 3

If someone were asked to describe me, somebody that really didn’t know who I was, or what my personality was like, they would describe me as a very quiet and shy person. Like most people I can be shy at first, to people who I am unfamiliar with. Quiet I am not. I am the type of person who loves to make people laugh and keep people entertained. It’s funny, I guess, that through the years of trying to make people laugh and entertain them, it has been the time that I have gotten into the most trouble in my life. Whether I’m in school, in church, on a sports team, or at work, the time when I try to make people laugh seems to be the only time I get in trouble. For instance, when I was at football practice in High School I was the kid running laps after practice, not because I didn’t know what I was doing during practice, it was because I was the one mimicking the coach yelling at us and making everyone laugh. At church I would sing songs with weird voices, and change the words, to what I thought was funny at the time. In school I was a good student, but I was the class clown. In the Fourth Grade, my homeroom class was also my science class at the end of the day. In the morning we would have to watch Chanel 1 news, it is or was a student news organization show that ran nationally. One morning when my fourth grade science teacher, Mrs. Wolf, left to use the bathroom, I taped a fart machine that I got at the fair to the bottom of her chair.  Everyone in the class knew about it, and by lunch it seemed like everyone in the school knew about it. I am surprised that the secret lasted until last period when I made it sound like Mrs. Wolf exploded in her pants.

I also love to argue, I am the type of person who goes down fighting, the type of person who even if he knows he lost the argument, everyone will know his opinion on the subject being discussed. At no point has an argument ever even come close to becoming a physical fight. Emerson states that if you trust yourself, then you can truly be content in whatever you do or wherever you go, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Looking back on the past now, there is always going to be stupid things that you want to take back, but I think they make you who you are today. Am I the person who still likes to make people laugh and entertain them? Yes of course, but am I going to put a fart machine under my managers chair, while he is telling us our goals for the company, hell no. If I did make some people mad with some of my antics as a young man, they knew that there was no malicious intentions in any of my actions.

What Is American?

In reading and interoperating the letter by de Crevecoeur you get a great understanding for what life was like living in the United States, and the rest of the world. For one, writing has changed a lot over the last couple hundred years. I guess I have to get used to it. By reading this letter by de Crevecoeur, it feels like I’m in eighth grade English again, reading Macbeth, or all of the great works by William Shakespeare. In no way am I complaining, I love the old way of writing English, it just takes getting used to reading again. 1782 was a very different time for the United States and the rest of the world. The Revolutionary War was going on, there were only thirteen colonies in the United States, and Great Britain owned pretty much owned the rest of the world. Most important, they claimed to own the United States and we were fighting them for it.

Can you imagine a war being fought on our land? We haven’t fought on our own land in a long time and other than Pearl Harbor and September 11^th, no real war activity has taken place here. To imagine what those people were going through at this time in history, is unbelievable. You have to understand, people either lived on farms, living off their land, lived near the water, living off of it, or some in cities. People came here, like they still come today, for freedom. I guess when you are born here, you can take advantage of what we have here in the United States, a lot of people don’t have it as good as we do. Life in Europe was very hard. People were in social classes, ruled by strict governments, and unhappy. America was a hope at a new life, and also a new beginning. So people left their so called lives all over the world, got onto ships for weeks to months at a time, and shot across the ocean as fast as they could to the “New World”. Here people could own their own land, have their freedom of their own religion, vote on who they wanted to be in place as President and other government officials and also the freedom to be who they want to be with the jobs they want to work. Most people in other countries didn’t have freedom of religion, they had to worship what their government wanted them to. When they came here, they could build churches and communities, to help support their religion.

Live seemed so simple back then, you could live off the land. I guess you could still do that today, but to my understanding, farming is almost going extinct. The government pays some farmers not to farm their land today.  People seemed to have a simple, content life, children worked the farms with their families. Life today is not simple and I’m not to say people aren’t happy today, but we just went through a recession, and there are still people out of work here and around the world.  Although farm work is very tough work, I wouldn’t want to do it everyday, jobs today are more challenging on the mind. 

What is American? It seems like today, that almost nothing is made in America. For instance, most of our American flags that we raise and hang with pride, were made in another country like China or Taiwan, probably by people who still think that the United States is a whole lot better place to live than the place they are currently living.  Other than some of the car manufactures in the United States, like Ford and General Motors, it seems like all of our other industry leaders outsource jobs to other countries. It’s a real shame, because United States companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google, all outsource a lot of jobs to other countries, for their cheap labor. “American made” used to mean something, when we were known as an industry country, like during the Industrial Revolution, now its rare to find goods that are “American Made”, but usually still great quality.

Overall the United States of America has changed since the time that is was discovered, some would say for the better, some would say for the worst. What country doesn’t change over time, the key is changing for the better over time. I think overall the United States has been moving in the right direction since de Crevecoeur wrote this letter back in 1782.