This is it. My final blog for this Eng. composition course. For this blog assignment, I am going to write a reflection of my writing throughout this course. I am writing a blog post, rather than creating a video because I absolutely hate being on camera. As a photographer, I’m always on the unseen side of the camera and I plan to keep it that way.
When this course first began, I had the same basic attitude towards it that I’ve had with all other composition courses. I was annoyed that I had to take this course. Why did I need to take an english composition course for a nursing major? Especially when I score high enough on my SATs to be exempt from any placement testing. I thought I had proven myself competent enough to be done with it forever. Because I know as a nurse, I’m not going to be writing blog posts about my day at the hospital, or memoirs to patients that I meet. I didn’t want to be stuck having to write about whatever a professor told me to write about. That’s not really how I roll. Then we were given our first assignment, to fill out the Proust Questionnaire. In the questionnaire, one of the questions asked, “If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?” I answered that I didn’t like how closed off I can be and it’s something I don’t want my children to learn from me. Answering that question was my first step towards changing it, and I tried to continue to try and change it with my writing this semester. I tried to not abide by my general “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule: If you’re not asking, I’m not telling. That was especially true for my blog post, “Composing an Emotional Scene”, and even more true for my memoir which I really went far out of my comfort zone to write. So far out, that I honestly wouldn’t have been able to read out loud yet. Just hearing someone else reading it was enough to skyrocket my adrenaline, causing me to visibly tremble. But, I had a deal with myself to try and stop being so closed off. If in the future, I take (or have to take) another writing course, I’m going to hold myself to the same expectation that I did this semester to go out of my comfort zone. I’ve got a lot of good shit say, whether it be from personal experience or opinions (like our research project), it’s just a matter of actually sharing it with people. Or even conjuring up the drive to do it. Like right now, my daughter won’t let anyone else hold her without screaming her head off, so I’ve got her in on arm, rocking her, while I type with the other. In previous classes, I wouldn’t have cared enough to do write this with as much effort as I am now. But this class hasn’t left a bad taste in my mouth as bad as the first time I tried celery.
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In this blog post, I am using an "X-ray" process so i can see the "bones" of my research project argument. At this point, my research project is still a work-in-progress, so this post serves as a part of my revision process.
1.) My thesis statement is: Americans need to start acknowledging these detrimental practices of carelessness and begin changing everyday habits and by creating legislation to start protecting our country, planet, and future. 2.) My first supporting point that argues the how or why of my zeitgeist is:
3.) My second supporting point that argues how and why of my zeitgeist is:
5.) My counter argument and rebuttal is (insert the sentence):
6.) My prediction is:
7.) My conclusion revisits the thesis statement and makes (pick the options that apply):
8.) "X-ray" Summary: This weeks blog post is to show my progression with my research project. Since last week, I have decided to research another topic that I was debating to write about originally. So I am posting the questions from last weeks blog post with my new, updated answers.
Welcome to blog post #10, in the blog post we’ll discuss an American zeitgeist of today. What is a zeitgeist? From the German words, “zeit” meaning “time” and “geist” meaning “spirit” or “ghost”- Zeitgeist is the intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era. One current zeitgeist that I am going to research is America’s obsession with nostalgia and its correlation with mental health. Does America’s obsession with nostalgia have any correlation with the decline of mental health? What is nostalgia? Nostalgia is “the sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” Every generation has experienced nostalgia with other people, it’s how we as humans are able to connect without having any prior experiences or connections with one another. Millennials have taken it to a whole new level. Everywhere you look there seems to be some 80s or 90s movie remake or “memories” being shared on almost all social media platforms. I believe that the rise in nostalgia is due to the rise of anxiety and depression experienced by millennials caused by social media’s constant instant gratification release of dopamine. Psychologists once believed that nostalgia was bad for you, but in recent years they have come to learn that feeling nostalgic can comfort some in difficult or stressful times, helping them cope with depression and/or anxiety. I think nostalgia stems from childhood memories, when there wasn’t a worry in the world and most of the feelings we experienced was unconditional love from our parents. I personally love nostalgic shit. Who doesn’t? But I think the excess of it in recent years is too much and it has regressed our own originality and growth as a society. We are continuously trying to emulate a world that does not exist anymore rather than focusing on our ever-changing future. This week, for blog post #9x we were given four texts to read and annotate- To You, I Belong (Becky Thompson), Our Discourse Community Values, What is Literacy? (James Paul Gee), and We Are Many (Pablo Neruda). All of the texts relate to our own discourse community. Discourse community is a group of people that possess a similar set of goals and values who use forms of communication to achieve those goals. I decided to create two found poems, one from To You, I Belong (Becky Thompson) and the other from What is Literacy? (James Paul Gee), which you can find below
This blog post is to assess the “well-being” of my webpages and narrative draft pages and whether each of them are suffering, sustaining, or flourishing, as for stating why each of them are in the state they’re in and what I’ll do to fix it and by when. For my ‘Home’ page, I believe it’s sustaining. It gets the point across but I need a few of my intrinsic goals for this class listed. I will try to figure out just what those goals are and try to get them added to the page before My ‘About’ page I would say is flourishing. I have completed all that was asked for the page and it doesn’t need anything more. ‘Narrative Project” page was sustaining and needed just a few tweaks, that have since been fixed. Other than those, it is flourishing and I think it does not need anything else done to it. ‘Blog’ page is flourishing. I am missing a few tiny details and one blog is missing. Other than adding those, there is nothing else to be done on my ‘Blog’ webpage. As for my ‘Contact’ page, it’s flourishing and has everything that it needs in order to contact me, if someone so desires. For this week’s blog post, I had to examine the scenes of my narrative draft and answer how it allowed me to travel into my brain, heart and how it shows the nerve (high-stakes) it took in writing it.
How does your narrative allow you to travel into your brain (mind) then and now? The narrative travels into my brain by me sharing my thoughts in the present, as well as in the past. How does your narrative allow you to travel into your heart (emotions) then and now? The travels into my heart because I share my emotions that I felt then, as well as ones I feel now. How does your narrative meet the nerve (high-stakes) element of meaningful storytelling? The high-stakes of my narrative is me simply telling it to people that I don’t know for shit. It’s not a story many people know about me. Throughout school, only 3 people in a 2,000+ population knew about this huge part of my life. How does your narrative enable you to re-examine the power (agency) you have in authoring your life-story? What shapes our sense of identity: Life events or the stories we tell ourselves about life events? I think our sense of identity is shaped by the events that happen to us in our lives. The way we tell a story or perceive ourselves in that story can always change because of other life events that we’ve lived through. This week, after reading Hills Like White Elephants, I was supposed to write an emotional moment that I’ve shared with someone in my life. I decided to write about good friends of mine, John and San, and how we all felt when our other friend Brian died in a freak accident.
When I was 16, I got my first job at a restaurant called Pepperoncinis. It was a small corner restaurant with a small staff. Everyone who worked there had the perfect amount and type of crazy where we all connected and were our own little family. Whenever we had a new hire, if they didn’t mix with everyone’s crazy (along with their work ethic), they were sent on their way. About 2 years into working there, we had a new guy named, Brian. He was quiet and kept to himself and everyone had a hard time trying to figure him out. Most of his training and early days took place on Sundays, Tuesdays,and Fridays which were days that I worked too, so out of any other employee, I worked with him the most. I’ve always been very good at reading people and figuring them out just by watching their actions and mannerisms, and listening to everything they'd say. The first thing I noticed about Brian was how colorful and extensive his vocabulary was. Even though he didn’t talk much to us at first, the little bit that he would say to us or when I’d listen to him talking to a table, he would throw in creativity and thought into the words he used that sometimes would make you turn your head in intrigue for his choice of language, even in the simplest of sentences. The second thing I noticed was that we had a similar love of music. Sunday’s at work were the best days to work. My manager, John, and another server, San, were all very close and always looked forward to our Sundays together with just the three of us. Sundays were our days of therapy where’d we tell each other the crazy shit that customers did all week and we’d take over the jukebox and play whatever songs our hearts desired (within reason) and jammed out. During the busier months, there would be a fourth person on and for a while that was Brian. That’s when the three of us got close with him. We were able to break Brian out of his shell and learned a lot about him. He got his degree in theatre, he loved to sing- like would belt the shit out of songs we’d play on the jukebox- and he was just all around an awesome and hilarious guy. Once Brian stopped working on Sundays, he’d come in and have some drinks and hang out with us since he lived less than a block down the street. On the very rare occasion I would take off of work, and I asked Brian to cover me on Sunday, August 31st. The next afternoon, my phone started ringing. It was my boss, Paul, “Hello?” I answered slightly puzzled because Mondays were Paul’s days off. “Hey, Jess, do you have a minute?” “Yeah, what’s up?” “I don’t even know how to say this but Brian was found dead in an alleyway this morning.” About a minute of silence passed while I was trying to figure out if he was fucking with me or not. “What?!” I stuttered. “What the fuck happened?!” “I’m not 100% sure yet, the police called me this morning to ask questions about if he was working last night and when he left. They’re not giving me too much information.” “Have you told John and San yet?” “John knows. You know San, he won’t wake up until 4 the earliest.” We talked for a few more minutes. When I hung up, I just stood still for about 5 minutes trying to figure out if what just happened was real. The next day is when we got the announcement that Brian’s funeral would be September 5th at Our Lady of the Assumption church in Wayne. About seven of us from Peps attended the funeral. After family and friends took turns going up to the podium and speaking about Brian, I looked on either side of me and saw everyone’s tear soaked faces. The last person to speak was the choir teacher Brian had throughout school. When he was finished speaking, he announced that the choir was going to perform the song that Brian had sung at his graduation. A few seconds later, I heard the beginning of “Soulshine” by the Allman Brothers Band start to play. I’m the type of person who doesn’t cry in front of other people, but looked over at San and John, who looked over at me simultaneously and I nearly lost my shit when that song started to play because I knew from all of our “Sunday night jukebox take-overs” is that song was one of Brian’s favorites. In that moment, even though the song is only six minutes long, it felt like time stood still for an hour. Still to this day, whenever I hear that song, I get chills and think of Brian. After the funeral, all of the “Peps peeps” went across the street to a bistro to grab a few drinks in honor of Brian. We all talked about our time with him and discussed what a freak fucking accident it was. A few days after hearing about Brian, we all found out (from another employee sneaking through her cop friend’s emails and forwarding them to herself then us) that while Brian was walking home from work that night, the ground was still wet from the rain earlier and while walking up someone’s cement wall that lined the cut-through stairs, had fallen, then hit his head on the cement wall causing him to go unconscious and bled out. San, John and I mostly just hung our heads. We all had the same thoughts going through our minds. For me it was, “if I hadn’t taken off” or “if I didn’t ask Brian”. For San and John, who ride to and from work together everyday, they wordered “what would have happened if we didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer when we tried to give Brian a ride home. “He would have never been in the alley.” San said. “If someone was with him, he’d be alive.” John sobbed. “There was no possible way to know that he’d slip and hit his head hard enough to bleed out on the less than a block walk home, guys.” I reassured them, hoping it would help them feel less guilty, even in the slightest. But for months, without having to say so, we shared the feeling of what-if we all did one thing different. Another week, another blog post. For this post, I was to read Maya Angelou’s My Name is Margaret then write a moment from my past about a time that I felt intense emotion. I chose to write about when my son was born and the days following.
On November 30, 2017, my 41 weeks of pregnancy and nearly 3 days of labor had come to an end, I was finally able to meet my son, Cosmo. He was the absolute greatest thing I had ever seen in my life and I couldn’t believe that I had created him. On top of being the most beautiful being, he was also the strongest I had ever met. From the moment Cosmo entered this world, I got hit hard with the reality of how terrifying motherhood can truly be and had come face to face every parent’s greatest fear. During labor, after a little over an hour of pushing, my midwife sent for the doctor on call because Cosmo’s heart rate had started to drop. By the time the doctor and 15 other people were in the room, my son had no heartbeat and I was being screamed at by the doctor to push. It took about 2 pushes of super-mom-strength and at 5:07pm, he was here- purple and lifeless. They plopped his tiny, inert body on me while they quickly cut his umbilical cord and unraveled it from around his neck- not once but twice- then swept him away to try to revive him. Once I heard his tiny cry from across the room, I had a wave of relief crash into me, which was short lived. The two neonatal doctors in the delivery room ordered a cooling blanket immediately for full-body hypothermia and took him away to the NICU. On top of the doctors having concern for him having brain damage from going so long without oxygen, he also had a collapsed lung. When I finally saw Cosmo again, around 1am, while I was on my way from LDR to the maternity ward, he had two feeding tubes, oxygen, multiple IVs, a catheter going into his lung, monitors everywhere, and he was on a cooling blanket. I wasn’t allowed to touch his hand with more than two fingers so I wouldn’t warm any part of his body back up from 92°. For 72 hours his body had to be cooled then slowly warmed back up. For 3 days I couldn’t kiss him, hold him, or breastfeed him (he wasn’t allowed any kind of food other than IV fluids). Even though I was exhausted and in a lot of pain, I would walk downstairs and through what felt like the four longest hallways in the world and I spent every moment that I was awake (while still in the hospital myself) next to him in the NICU. I’d watch him breathe and shiver from the cooling and wish I could just hold him in order to make it all better. When I was discharged, I came back every day, for the next week, around 8am and stayed until about 2am. The entire time I would feel helpless for not being able to help my own child in any way, but at the same time I would be consumed with love and be in complete awe while staring at my baby boy. Once the three days of cooling were up, my boyfriend and I woke up around 3am and made our way to the NICU and waited for Cosmo’s warming to be completed so we could finally hold our baby for time first time. When I FINALLY had Cosmo in my embrace, everything was alright, everything that had happened didn’t matter. The fact that no part of my “birthing hopes & dreams” had happened mattered, or that I wanted to breastfeed and feared that I wouldn’t be able to because he couldn’t eat anything for the first 72 hours of life. None of the struggles from the 3 days of labor, the 3 days of waiting to hold my son, somehow summoning up the ability to leave him to go home for a few hours of “sleep,” crying while I was home because I felt cheated for not having the experience everyone else has when their child is born and all I wanted was my baby, or anything else was insignificant other than him being alive, well, and in my arms. It was truly the most blissful moment of my life and it’s a moment I will always cherish. |
Jessica RushWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
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