Coddling of the American Mind

In recent years, college students have been becoming more aware of the word choices and actions of the people around them, especially other students and professors. Students are typically set off by the use of microaggressions, small actions or word choices that have no malicious intent but are misconstrued as a kind of verbal violence. In some cases these microaggressions could be considered racist, sexist, or prejudiced. Some students even opt out of readings or classes due to the microaggressions certain topics or readings discuss. Personally, I try to avoid using microaggressions because of the conflict that often arises after using the phrases. I also know they do tend to be racist, sexist, prejudiced, and I considered myself educated enough to know that stupid questions are indeed stupid and hurtful. 

That being said, the fact that some teachers have to change the curriculum for the class because of the oversensitivity of students is absurd. You go to college to learn and be more educated, not shield yourself from necessary information for your field of study. If a person is triggered by microaggressions taught in a class, they should have the ability to excuse themselves, but the overall mental, emotional, and psychological well-being should remain in tact. If a student plans to pursue a career in law, they cannot avoid learning about certain taboo subjects. Although microaggressions do have the ability to harm the well-being of a student, that should be taken into consideration when choosing a field of study. 

However, if a student is using microaggressions during class discussion, they should be educated on the hurtful manner of their words. Teachers should be able to teach their classes to the best of their abilities, but students should not chime in, when unrequired. 

Millennials Video

The video Millennials in the Workplace is a satirical video about the issues with Millennials at office jobs. The video makes fun of millennials by exaggerating their behaviors. The author of the video has to believe at least part of the portrayal of the millennials in the video are accurate, because in order to make a satirical video, it has to be based off of some truth. Some of these assumptions include: millennials needing constant praise and promotion, millennials are always late, millennials need coffee, millennials will make up any excuse to miss responsibilities, and more. The assumptions about non-millennials, to even further exaggerate behaviors of millennials are: that they don't understand millennials, its hard to work around them, and its easier to comply then to work with them. The fact that millennials all show up 40 minutes late with their iced coffee really bugged me, because although some people are tardy, if coffee is really important to a person, the time for it will be budgeted into a morning routine. Another issue that bugged me, was that millennials need constant praise, because that is a mindset that our parents instilled in us. The author is correct that some millennials need constant praise, but it is due to our parents.

The central stance of the video Millennials: We Suck and We’re Sorry is a sarcastic view about how the older generations view the Millennials. Everything the millennials are apologizing for are things the older generations caused to happen. For instance the millennials apologize for being lazy and not working, even though 90% of the new jobs created are part time. Also they apologize for all going to college and having averages of $30,000 in debt, because the older generations increased college tuition by 600%. The video is very accurate depiction of how the older generations think of the millennials. If someone didn't know the video was sarcastic, they'd probably be confused as to why the millennials are apologizing for so many things they think are wrong with them. The discussion of the college tuition rate being jacked up was very close to home, because its an issue very personal to me. Also the mention of the recession the baby boomers caused in the 90's and how the economy was wrecked after, was very grabbing. Many older generations criticize millennials for moving back in with their parents after college, but its very difficult to pay off the abundance of student loans and pay for rent. I feel as though these issues are portrayed in a very accurate way.
The video Millennials--The Laziest Generation? is a discussion about the Millennials and the stereotypes and how true they are. The first woman to speak mentions that the stereotypes are true but we were thrown into a situation where they had to be true. The generations that raised us created an environment that allowed us to feed off of narcissism and technology. Being obsessed with technology isn't too accurate, it is very essential to everyday life because everyone uses it to communicate. Snapchatting everything is just another form of communication, as is tweeting and instagramming. Each member of the panel has a different take even though they're all millennials, which just shows how diverse each millennials perspective of the generation is. The Millennials are the biggest generation ever, so it is unreasonable to lump them into one group that all acts the same way.

Me Me Me Generation

Generations of people do not shape themselves, the past generations raise the future ones with their idealistic mindsets, forming them into however they deem best to live a good life. The Me Generation of the past (the baby boomers), installed a sense of entitlement into their children. Awards at every corner and congratulations at every bend, made the Me Me Me Generation. Older generations complain that this sense of entitlement and narcissism is problematic. But we're no different from the older generations, we just have more platforms with easier accessibility to promote ourselves. If twitter, instagram, and facebook had been invented a hundred years earlier, the older generations would have behaved exactly as we do. We are self-sufficient. No longer do we rely on the corporate America to satisfy needs. Internet is easily accessible to the masses. The rich-kid specialties have spread across the world, allowing everyone to behave with snobbery and entitlement. Instead America is starting to shape itself around what millennials deem important. For a millennials, we are multi-taskers. You can't just get by doing one task at a time anymore, to be ahead, you have to be able to consolidate tasks so you can move on quickly. Millennials are also connected, networking has never been easier. With technologies, its easier to get in touch with a person that knows a person that knows their secretary that can get you the information you need. Millennials also balance well. Its not just about having a career, but also having a social life, and friends, and family, and hobbies. Millennials budget their time to fit in activities and people that make their lives worth living. Although, many older generations think these can be bad qualities because work should be the main focus and never half-assed, its also important to find a happy medium and live a good life.

Millennial Generation

It's hard to describe a 'typical' Millennial, due to the diversity of the people. Some key aspects that separate millennials from the older generations, are the non-destructive habits, financial cautiousness, and skeptical view of politics. Millennials tend to live in cities in cheap apartments (depending on location), so as to work on paying off the vast amount of student debt most have. In a television show, a male and female millennial would probably have a weekly or monthly budget, possibly a job depending on their college education. They wouldn't eat out too often because of the budget, and they probably don't sleep very much because they might be working multiple jobs.  

Millennials face many challenges.  Many white millennials are ignorant to the inherent racial discriminations in their every day lives. Politically, many millennials are more aware of politics, but not involved with political careers. Personally, I'm most concerned about the issues regarding higher education. It is too expensive to go to college, but without college you can't get a job or start a career. So many students take out thousands of dollars in loans, and can barely get by while paying them off years after graduation. College shouldn't be completely unaffordable, as it is now. It's also quite difficult to get a job after college, so college might not even be the best option for some individuals. The older generations left us with an unstable economy and a heavy burden. 

Everyone's an author

By developing habits of mind, such as listening and searching for understanding before deciding what you actually think of a subject and then try to persuade others to listen, is considered thinking rhetorically. This is especially important because there are two known methods of persuasion: violence and language. As writers, it is of the utmost importance to execute thinking rhetorically, because the audience is vast and sponge-like. Readers tend to believe most things they read, so the information being written must be able to communicate their points successfully. Research is necessary for successful rhetorical thinking and writing, because you have to have as much information to communicate well. After research has been done, or "doing your homework", it must be analyzed and synthesized. When choosing a place to further my education, I did days worth of research on: the best colleges for my specific major, schools I could reasonably be accepted by, schools on the east coast, affordability, location, weather, people, and days and days of more research. My analysis of the information brought me to the schools I applied to, and the synthesis of the information helped me choose my college.
When Watson and Crick were discovering DNA, they had to be aware of their audience of other scientists. Instead of stating their facts and findings in a way that was matter of fact, it eased the readers (mostly scientists) into the new idea of DNA. The vocabulary used shows the amount of rhetorical thinking, knowing that scientists might not be open to accepting this new information.
To successfully use rhetorical thinking in a situation, the audience must be considered first. As mentioned before, rhetorical thinking must be precise to have the desired affect on an audience. A clear stance must be developed without forcing the purpose. For example, if you wanted to ask someone out but weren't sure they were interested, asking them to do something low-key, like study, is showing that you know they exist but not giving away your stance. Then throughout the study session, you throw out different vibes, maybe revealing the true purpose. It's like slowly submerging yourself in a pool, not creating a wake, or a stir in the audience reading the piece.

Vanishing Act - Final

I vaguely remember the sirens wailing the background, or the hours spent in the tiniest room in the house. Eventually, I must have fallen asleep, because by the time they got home my eyes had fresh sand in the corners and my mouth tasted bitter.

I was 5, maybe 6 years old, when my brother and I decided to play a rousing game of Hide and Go Seek, a personal favorite. After game after game of being found almost instantly, probably due to my brother peeking, I came to the conclusion that I was going to win.

I grew up in a neighborhood in Montgomery County, Maryland,  with sprawling lawns and numerous woods. The houses were spread far enough for privacy and quick walks, supervised from the window by mom. My house and yard had more privacy than any other in the neighborhood, due to the fact that when we built the house when I was three, we also planted 100 evergreen trees surrounding the property. All of the other kids in the neighborhood were years older than me, leaving me to adventure by myself in the quiet woods.

Nothing bad had ever happened in my neighborhood, the most scandalous news was when my neighbor dozed off while driving back to her house and ran into a small tree.  (even to this day...) The younger tree that replaced it, always reminds me of how boring my neighborhood really is.

My mother never had to reveal her overprotective-self, because I was always visible from the abundance of windows in the house. There were no parks to walk to, no stores to get a snack from, nothing that I would need permission to go out and do. And that goes for games too. 

My brother rarely wanted to play outside with me, he's two years older than me, and way too mature to play kiddy games. But we both had a mutual love for Hide and Go Seek.

Whether it was late in the summer or already Fall, the season didn't matter. The evergreens that surrounded the lawn showed no sign of seasonal change, so the images in my mind don't match to a specific time of year. 

As my brother began to count down from twenty, my eye was focused on the evergreens. As I ran away from my brother and towards the trees, I remember thinking "There's no way he'll ever find me." And boy was I right.

The only house that is directly adjacent to my house, is never locked. Ever since I can remember, either the garage or front door was open, even if no one was home. I guess I knew in the back of my mind as I ran away from my house, I would be able to hide in another. What I didn't expect, was for it to be so easy.

One of their cars was parked in the driveway underneath their basketball hoop, so as I snuck through their garage to the inside door, I expected to have to negotiate my way in. Something along the lines of "I need to win at Hide and Go Seek, and my brother would never look for me here," would suffice. But I didn't need it, because after waiting about 15 seconds at an unanswered door, I tried the handle. It opened and I was in. No need to explain why I was there, I could just hang out for a little while in their house, no big deal. Except what if my brother was smart enough to come looking at the neighbor's house, then he'd find me. No, I had to hide in their house, I couldn't just be sitting at the door waiting to be found.

Even now, in our neighborhood people rarely visit each others' houses. We don't have barbecue block parties, nor do we have a tight knit community. The only time my neighbors come over is when their dogs have run into our lawn.

So there I was, walking through the house, looking for a perfect spot to hide, as if my brother was counting in the other room and not the other backyard.

The first room in the house when entering from the garage, is the kitchen. I originally passed over it, thinking it didn't have any place large enough to hide in. But then, I heard my stomach rumble, and my brain switched momentarily, from hiding, to snacking.

My mother is the most crunchy granola person I know, she even makes her own granola just to reinforce the point. Every day she either goes for a 6 mile run, or does one of her hundreds of work out videos. Her healthy life-style doesn't end with her workouts, she has been a vegan for the past 25 years. My father, on the other hand, was raised on red-meat. Every year our freezer is refilled with the meat of a cow we got at auction. My parents are total opposites. But one thing they agree on, is that we can never have junk food in the house. The closest thing I ever got to junk food was the organic version of goldfish kept in the back of the pantry. We have never had white bread in the house, or anything processed or chemically enhanced. Basically, a child's nightmare.

But I must have known that I would find the equivalent of "Wonderland" inside my neighbor's pantry. It left me feeling like Alice. Chocolate, chips, real goldfish, gummy bears, nutella, cheetos, gushers, you name it, the pantry had it. All of the foods my parents forbid in our house, were beckoning me. I didn't even stop to think that my brother hadn't ventured over to the neighbor's house to find me.

Hours later, footsteps nearby woke me. Since the pantry door was closed, I had drifted asleep in the darkness. My neighbors were shocked, but relieved to find me curled in their petite pantry. I didn't understand why until they walked me back over to my yard.

Police were swarming around my house, trailing out into the woods. Search and rescue helicopters were hovering above the vast woods behind my house. My parents were speaking with the authorities when my neighbor tapped them on the shoulder and gestured below to me. Apparently I had chocolate covering my face, but my neighbor reassured my health-nut mother that when she found me, surrounded by wrappers galore, there was a banana peel too.

According to journalist, Hanna Rosin, author of the Atlantic article "The Overprotected Kid," parents have become more and more involved in their children's lives. Rosin states that "parents these days have little tolerance for children’s wandering on their own," and this rings true for my parents especially.

Years later, on spring break in New York City with my family, I got separated again. I had been on the subway and my navigational brother had mentioned that we were on the wrong subway. Being the youngest, I was used to always being last. So as the doors to the subway were closing, I jumped through them to the other side. My parents screamed and banged on the doors begging them to be reopened.

Obviously, it was a bit more serious than when I went missing when I was little. But I had always been overprotected, shielded from most of the dangers in the world. As I sat on the subway platform, crying, I remember thinking how mad my parents would be that I had disobeyed them. Rosin observes that most children "take it for granted that they are always being watched." Without my parents watching over me in a swarming subway station, I migrated towards the nearest police officer. She noticed the tears streaming from my eyes immediately, and held my hand for almost two hours until my parents returned from the other side of Hudson river.

Without my family, I didn't know what to do in a public space. My parents installed a sense of protected-ness from a young age. Like Rosin said, I took it for granted that I was always being watched. After the "Hide and Go Seek" game gone wrong, I had never ventured too far from the yard.

Now that I'm older, I think about how different my parents would have raised me if I hadn't disappeared that day. My brother was granted more freedoms than I ever had, I wasn't allowed a facebook until I was 17, whereas my brother made one when he was 13. My parents seemed to treat me as if I was always going to vanish, keeping me home and out of danger. According to Rosin, my over-protective parents hindered my development and I missed out on many experiences. Sometimes it feels like that, but I know may parents weren't being over-protective on purpose.

My parents use my disappearance story as an introduction for me now a days. It's an embarrassment tactic, but I sometimes I can't help but think what would have happened if I had vanished. Would my brother have been raised like I was afterwards? Thankfully, I was found, but my mother never lets me forget about my binging on junk food. And after the story is done, I reassure her, I ate a banana too.




photo from google images*

Shitty First Drafts

When writing a first draft, such as this because I will not be revising it, inner voices play a key part in the development of the piece. For me, as an aspiring journalist, I tend to let my inner voice flow through my fingers, editing a lot and hoping I don't sound too dumb. For other writers such as Lamott, she doesn't tend to have inner voice that flows through. Instead its like "pulling teeth" with an eventual good second or third draft. The inner voice can be trusted to certain extent. More or less, the voice in your head telling you the words that should belong on the page, can be shitty. You have to trust the years of education, that you've developed a good editor in your head alongside your inner voice. If you sometimes feel like words don't make sense or seem correct, the editor has to reevaluate the piece and fix it. The first draft is more about the process, the product doesn't matter as much because its going to be revised, reinvented, and bettered. If all writers stuck with their first drafts, they wouldn't be terrible, but they wouldn't be polished. It'd be like reading what someone is saying. I agree with this statement because I've written a lot and rewritten more. There are rare circumstances when the first draft is almost uneditable because of the effort and thought, but almost always its the third draft that is the final.

How to get inspired as a writer

Writing is hard. As an aspiring journalist, I have written and rewritten (and rerewritten) countless articles that will never see the light of day. And that's okay with me. It's practice. A misconception about writing, especially for published authors, is that writing is easy for professional writers. That every single person that has gone into a profession heavily reliant on writing, can whip up a story without even batting an eye. This isn't even close to true. How could it be? Writing takes practice, research, googling, etc. And since writing does not always flow so easily out of the tips of a writers' fingers, there is a lot of trudging involved. For me, its procrastination. I know that once I boot up my laptop and oven Chrome, my homework is not even on my mind. Netflix is almost imbedded into my fingers, like the first key that they naturally drift to is the 'N'. Eventually I'll almost fall asleep and realize my homework should probably be acknowledged. Some writers don't even like writing. Sure, they might be good at it, have a natural knack for stringing words together to flow so that readers want to devour them, but some hate the actual physical act of transferring thoughts into concrete written 'squiggles'.
My senior year of highschool, half of the year was devoted to writing a senior thesis research paper. I  had to write a 15 page paper developed through months of research, analysis, tears, etc. And at the end of the process, was an oral defense waiting, where I had to defend my paper and its argument to my professors. And of course, I was the first person in my class to complete the paper, and have the oral defense. Suffice to say, I nailed it, but I completely doubted myself along the way. Again, procrastination got the best of me. My paper was due during my spring break, and 12 pages of the paper, somehow, got written the day before it was due. C'est la vie. Writing is different when its for pleasure, or on your own terms. When you don't have a strict set of guide lines to follow, or a list longer than your forearm of sources to cite. Writing sometimes just flows out, but that writing isn't what teachers are looking for. When writing about academic topics, motivation find its way to curl up in the nooks of your brain and never reappear. Outlines restrict the cogs from working. In order to get your brain up and running again, you have to share your work. Outside readers are ideal because they have nothing to gain or lose from just giving their honest opinions.
To write, is to elicit a response from readers, to evoke the parts of readers they didn't even know they cared about. Personally, that is a great reason to write, but I also write to clear my head. Thoughts that bounce around, not knowing what to do with them, a solution was found in typing them and seeing them appear on a screen as the voice speaks them in my head. Its the coolest feeling