FFW: Just Add Water/Twelfth Night

What is the same about TwN and just add water?

There are a significant number of similarities between the play Twelfth Night and the film just add water. Just one of the many is the similarity between Orsino, the Duke of Illyria, and the citizens of Trona. Orsino wants to be with Olivia, but he's too lazy to try to get her himself. In comparison, the citizens left in Trona are just as lazy about leaving the town. They just wait for rain after it hasn't rained for years. Also, I think Olivia finding out that Viola's not a man is very comparable to Ray finding out that Jonah Hill is not his son. In conclusion, both the film and the play lack a sense of normality, which is the main similarity between the two. In Twelfth Night, you have a woman pretending to be a man that ends up falling in love with a man who's in love with another woman who's in love with the woman that's pretending to be a man. In just add water, you have a town where it hasn't rained in years, where people are just about crazy, where people don't attempt to better their lives, where men hire prostitutes to take an 18-year old's virginity. Bottom line, they're just not normal. They're actually really weird. And there's much more between the two that are similar than one might first think.

Bigfoot

Food miles are “the distance a product travels from the farm to your home” (Specter, 276). Michael Specter’s Bigfoot talks about the global warming problem on our planet and how to fix it. The main suggestion in the article is to create a carbon-neutral community so pollution is greatly reduced. To be exact, this would be equivalent to taking 100,000 cars with all of those toxic gases and fumes off of the street. The food miles are a big deal because, like the example in the article, you can just get food from a local farm, but if it’s not quality, eating the potatoes from the farm could be just like eating French fries from the local McDonalds, which is why food miles are extremely important. It’s better to get your food from farther for maybe a little bit more money than not because the quality is much better, and the carbon footprint is nearly non-existant.
I do not personally feel responsible for global warming. I think that everyone in the world is a little responsible for it because, let’s face it, we did this to ourselves. With all the Hummer H3s riding around and all the extra pollution, it was bound to happen. I might be a little responsible, but I’m certainly not going to put a lot of the blame on myself when there are over 2 billion humans on the planet that had just as big, probably bigger, a part in the cause of global warming as I did.

Just Add Water Questions

1. What's in Ray's tin can?
2. How did Charlene go so long cheating on Ray before he found out?
3. Why have the people in Trona stayed there so long if there's been a drought for years?
4. How is Danny DeVito's character connected to Ray?
5. When will Ray and Nora get together?
6. Why wouldn't Jonah Hill's character not know his own Grandma and not care that she's dying?

Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind

Kenneth Bruffee’s Collaborative Learning and the “Conversation of Mankind” attempts to say that knowledge is gained by working with peers. I’m sure this is a true statement, but when asking the question “does knowing require contact with another intellect?”, I’m not so sure. Sure, contact with a peer can help you gain knowledge, but I don’t think that human contact is required to gain knowledge. There are some types of knowledge that can only be gained via human interaction, but, for the most part, I feel that it is not needed to do so in gaining knowledge for school and other things. Don’t get me wrong, I feel like I work best when in a group, but I don’t think that is the only way to work. In fact, I’m sitting here in my room working on this blog alone. There’s no one around me, and I’d say I’m doing a pretty fine job.
I know people that can just sit in their room and read for 3-4 hours and have gained an insane amount of knowledge in that amount of time just by reading something and studying it. It’s not a far-fetched idea to say this, because so many people do it. You see people studying alone in the library every day, gaining knowledge and applying it to real-life situations. In the article, Bruffee talks about peer tutoring, where, instead of getting tutored by an elder, the student gets tutored by another student. This is a great way to work, and it is a great example of Collaborative Learning at work. By peer tutoring, both the tutor and the person being tutored can gain knowledge; not just the person being tutored. Not only can a tutor help the person being tutored, but the tutor can also learn from what he/she is evaluating and use that to make their own works of writing better.
While personally, I prefer collaborative learning to studying on my own, I don’t think that being alone restricts you from gaining knowledge having to do with education. Street smarts? Maybe. No, scratch that. Definitely. But for education purposes where you only need to know certain subjects? I don’t think it matters in the long run whether or not you’re working alone or with others to expand on the knowledge you have already.

FFW: Just Add Water

What emblem/image/symbol best exemplifies the film "Just Add Water"?

I think that a flower best exemplifies the film. In the movie, Trona had been in a drought for years, and everyone left had developed some sort of mental problem over the years of the drought. Huge chunks of peoples' personalities were just ripped out of their bodies. Much of them began to die, but Ray changed that at the end, and when it began raining at the end of the film, it seemed as if the citizens of Trona were "coming back to life," in a figurative sense. This resembles a flower as a flower needs water, or it begins to droop down and eventually die. The flower represents the citizens of Trona, and when both the flower and the city get watered, it's like a reviving rain. It completely changes the outlook in such a short amount of time, and revives what makes these people: their personalities.

Writing Center

My experience at the writing center was extremely helpful. The writing center instructor gave me a lot of tips on my Twelfth Night Essay. I came into it having done 2 ½ paragraphs and getting myself stuck, but we worked for a little while and I got myself out of the rut that I was in. Joe C, my instructor, tried helping me with the direction I was going with the paper, and we changed a good amount of the first body paragraph, and we completely changed the second one. I feel like it helped my essay greatly, and I think it was a great experience. I definitely feel that the writing center is a huge help, and it'll definitely be the first place I go to revise my next essay, and many essays after.

Reality Tests

In the article “The Reality Tests,” author Joshua Roebke raises an interesting question: “Do we create what we observe through the act of our observations?” The simple answer to this question is yes. Two different people can see one common thing and make two completely different observations. It’s all dependent on one’s perception of what they’re looking at. In the article, Roebke uses many physics examples, but that’s definitely not the only subject in which this statement holds true. For example, for a vegetarian person, Buffalo wings can seem disgusting and horrible while, to a regular meat eater, they look absolutely delectable. Another example is in sports. If a team wins the championship, there are going to be just as many unhappy fans as there are happy ones. Like I said, it all depends on the person’s perception of the subject matter.
Roebke’s thesis is a fantastic one and has a great amount of room to expand on. It’s mind-boggling that so many people can look at one thing and have so many different ideas and perceptions about it. The thesis shows how Roebke chooses to write. Instead of stating the answer to his question and making it obvious, he makes the reader think. He makes us look at the writing piece and realize that we really do create our own observations.

Faustian Economics (Part 2)

"The real names of global warming are waste and greed." Throughout the article "Faustian Economics", author Wendell Berry defends this statement. He calls us "limitless animals," which is a label that I can't say I disagree with. Us human beings want EVERYTHING handed to us. Like Berry said, many people believe that there is a "supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt" (Berry, 2). People think that life will just go on and be okay, which is ignorant. They think we'll be fine for the foreseeable future, but they have no substantial evidence to back it up. The "Unbridled Energy" summit in Louisville, Kentucky talked about converting coal to liquid fuels, but by doing that, the consumption of coal by the country would have to be doubled, and that would last us 100 years. I don't know about anyone else, but 100 years? Sure, we might be dead by then, but what about our kids? What about our grandkids? It's not right to be so present-minded.
This kind of thinking reminds me of the Philadelphia Phillies Major League Baseball team. This past December, after trading for arguably the best pitcher in baseball, Roy Halladay, they traded their top pitcher, Cliff Lee, to Seattle in order to replenish their minor league system so they wouldn't be bad again in two years. Fans were irate because they thought the team would have both pitchers on their staff and that they'd be unstoppable, but it wasn't meant to be. Phillies General Manager Ruben Amaro Jr. explained this in a way that relates to this topic completely. He said that, since talks with Cliff Lee about an extension weren't going anywhere, he had to find a way to get a pitcher of the same caliber for a longer period of time, since this year was the last on Cliff Lee's current contract. So he traded for Halladay and signed him to a 3-year extension. Afterwards, he traded Cliff Lee because he gave up so many prospects for Halladay, that he wanted to make sure there were some more prospects with high potential in his minor league system. Although fans were mad, it was completely understandable, as they would definitely rather have 3+ years of Roy Halladay and a high-end minor league system than 1 year of Halladay & Lee with nothing left afterwards and a huge decline within the next 2-3 years. That's what this is talking about. For many people, the future is now. That's not the right mentality to have, especially when talking about the future of America's economy.
Like Berry says, limitation is needed to make sure our economy is in check, and to make sure that it'll be stable for longer than just the next 100 years. "Our national faith so far has been: 'There's always more'" (Berry, 3). Even though many people believe this, this is not true. There is ALWAYS a limit to EVERYTHING. It's not to say that we'll reach it soon, but, if we keep going the way we are, our economy will reach it's limit unless people in power start thinking far along into the future, rather than just the next 100 years. People might see limitations as extreme and they might see them as unneeded, but these are the same people who think it's ok to look no further than 100 years into the future. These are the same people who, 100 years from now, people will be talking about as the people who destroyed the country's economy. These are the same people that always think about the here and now, and waste their own money on unnecessary items because, like Berry said, "there's always more". Things need to change. Berry's ideas on economics are far-fetched, but they are very plausible and they would definitely help out the country in the long run.

Derrida: Fear of Writing

I interpret Derrida's fear of writing as completely justified. I definitely do understand what he is talking about in his explanations of his controversial writings. Personally, although I have never actually experienced what Derrida is talking about in regards to writing, I do know what he is saying. When one writes, they put their thoughts on paper. At the moment of writing, nothing bad seems to come out of it. But once the writing is published, there's some second guessing as to whether or not the writing should have actually been posted. If there is controversy involved, there will always be that type of fear, but, like Derrida said, when you're writing, that fear is not there. It's asleep. It's only awake when you're asleep. When you're asleep, the subconscious is what controls you. When you're awake, the subconscious is there, but it's overpowered. Just like Derrida said, "when I'm awake and working, this vigilance inside me is actually asleep. It's not the stronger of the two. And so I do what must be done."

What is a writer? Am I a writer?

A writer is a person who thoughtfully and masterfully creates sentences and paragraphs that epitomize the creativity flowing through that person's veins. It is someone who could write about anything, anywhere, anytime and not have a difficult time doing it. It's someone who is natural at the art of writing. Personally, I could see myself as a writer, but not someone who does it extremely often. I believe that I write well, but my goal in life is to become a Sports Broadcaster, not a Sportswriter. I can definitely write about sports and have fun doing it, but I'd much rather be a broadcaster than a writer, which is exactly why I'm not a writer. So many people write and they love what they do. To those people, more power to them. Although I do like to write about topics that interest me, I don't consider myself a true writer because it's not my shtick and it's not something that I consistently enjoy doing.

Faustian Economics

There is a strong amount of excess waste and greed all around us in this world today. There are so many things and so many people that epitomize what Wendell Berry is saying. For example, there are many people that have excess greed. There are celebrities that are all about money, such as Football Player Terrell Owens, people in casinos get extremely greedy after winning a lot of money and they want to continue wining so they keep playing. This greed ends up costing them more than they originally won and it's not good for them to be so careless and impulsive about their money. There is excess waste all around us as well. Many SUVs have an insane amount of pollutants, and they are not at all environmentally safe. The gasoline is not at all good for the environment, which is why people are starting to drive Hybrid Cars more often, such as the Toyota Prius.

The Problem of Describing Trees vs. Hubris at Zunzal

The way that both of these poems make meaning is very obvious. In the poem by Robert Hass, he says that it is very difficult to describe trees. As he goes on describing them, he gets to a point where he doesn't know exactly what to say because he can't completely describe that one aspect of the tree without the reader actual seeing what he was seeing. Although he does his best to make these descriptions, he still falls short. In Rodney Jones' poem, he tells a story of a him being extremely premature on making a decision, spilling his rum into the water. He wants it back, but he can't get it back. Language is a slippery vehicle in the sense that things you say can be taken in many, many different ways. It can be interpreted how you meant for it to be interpreted but it can also be interpreted in a completely different way.