Shauna’s Weblog

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Shauna Lewis

Professor: Harrison

English 101

November  9 2008

What Is I

            When I was first asked this question in english class on the first day, I had no idea what  I truly was or even how to define it.This made me think about my life and who I thought I was. I just finished highschool and was moving five hours away from home to start another long journey here in Indiana by myself. All I could think of is how hard it will be adjusting to something so new, making friends and being on my own no mom and dad around.  I had no idea who I was I just knew where I planned on going and that I had four years to do it. Through my earlier years of school I did not know who I was and that was my biggest downfall.If I knew who I was and what I wanted to do than I would not have gotten caught up with the people that I did.Maybe I would have focused on my education and then I would have made  friends that felt the same way.

            All through my twelve years of education  I hung with the wrong crowd that wasn’t gonna get anywhere in life. I never realized that this is not who I am or what I want to do until college. I must have changed over the summer before freshman year because I came in with a whole new mentality and I loved it. However, now that I pulled myself away from those type of

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people, I did not know who I was anymore. This was the perfect time to find out, I had a clean start where no one knew me and I could be whatever I wanted.

            In class we read an article by Kawai about “What Is I”  and for homework we had to blog about what we thought I represented . This question could not have come at any better time then in my freshman year when I was trying to find myself. The only difficulty was that since I came to find who I was I had no idea what to write. I decided that I would take Kawai’s words and ask myself what does his words make me think about I.

After reading this passage I believe that Kawai is saying that I is not just  you or your physical being its much more than that. He is saying that we are made up of more than just body. We are made up of many other things. I think he is saying that we can have a different body or maybe even different body parts and still be a person. The story actually made me think and put myself in the same situation, What would I be if someone came and took all my body parts away and left me with someone else. I think I would be just as confused as the traveler in the story. When I think of What is I,  I would say that I is me, I am I. But even if i didn’t look the same or have the same body in my mind I would still be me. So I guess that’s where Kawai makes sense, when he says that we are made up of much more.  In the dictionary it really doesn’t say to much other than I being the ninth letter of the alphabet. So how do you know what to believe, I’m guessing certain people have there own definitions like Kawai’s in this passage.

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Being who I am today and reading this  I really can see that I had no idea what I was or even who Shauna was. “I” can be very complicated if you don’t even know who you are as a person. I can’t see a person really understanding the meaning of I unless they know themselves. My professor had a very unusual way for us to understand I better using our five senses. This is the last thing you thought you would be doing in a college english class and I could not find one exlpanation as to why he chose this but it makes sense now.

Vision

            This was the first essay that I wrote and I was so nervous, I’m not a writer and I hate writing  but in this case I needed the grade .In this essay we were to use the concept of vision through our writing in a narrative genre. I wrote about my first time meeting my boyfriends parents and how after meeting everyone I saw Archie(my boyfriend) in another way. Observing him around other people who made him happy and loved him almost like I did made me very uncomfortable. I felt as if I did not belong in his world it was already perfect without me.

He looked as if he had no other care in the world, like he didn’t need anything else in the world. This made me feel as if I didn’t make a difference in his life. What could my love do compared to all the other love? As I watched I started to see myself disappear, turn invisible. I saw that his life was perfect and he didn’t need me and I started to feel miserable. I didn’t want to be with someone who didn’t need me. I wanted him to need my love and my affection. While I sat and vanished I started to think how my life would be without him in it

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After writing this essay I became more confident to write until I got my grade. The confidence that I had was soon replaced by doubt, I did not want to write anything else. Professor Harrison must have seen my face, he told us about the revision process and I felt so relieved. In my revision I had to fix my sentence structure, a few grammatical mistakes and work on staying the same verb tense. Although writing using the concept ofvision is hard it has shown me a lot about myself. I realized that seeing is not always believing and its up to you to know the difference.

Taste

            I think my second essay was my favorite one of them all because I wrote about something that really excites me. I wrote about my favorite food which is candy  and how I would like to create an island for all the candy lovers. It’s a secret getaway where everything is very peaceful and relaxing.This essay was inspired by a taste testing we had in class, our professor told us to bring in some of our favorite foods for others to try.  I had been looking forward to this day and I could not wait to see what everyone brought. My partner gave me this revolting combination of  sweet, sour and chewy. It was the worst thing I’ve ever tasted and things that should not have been mixed together. It made my tastebuds scream for help, and I realized how important my sense of taste is to me. If I could not taste the things I eat, candy would not be as important to me. Taste effects me more than any other sense because it satisfies me, it makes me happy when I’m sad, it attracts me from a distant or from memories its amazing in so many ways.

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As I sat it was like I could smell the food and my mouth started to salivate, I wanted to taste it all. Smell contributes grandly to taste. Without smell, wine would still dizzy and lull us, but more captivations would be gone. We often smell something before we taste it, and that’s enough to make us salivate (141). Maybe I was just hungry but I knew by the smell that this food was going to be very delicious. The close relationship of tastes to smell gives the impression that a greater variety of taste exist (“Taste”).

All I wanted was the perfect place where I could have candy all the time and never have to worry about getting cavaties or gaining unessacary weight. A place where people like me could just be ourselves without anyone judging us.

“Thinking about taking a vacation, well you picked one of the best. If you’re a candy lover than this is where you need to be.  It’s a place where all you see is candy, and your job is to taste everything. It’s a very private and peaceful island where everyone is always happy. Come and visit our amazing island, it’s the perfect place for you. As you walk on the colorful sugar sand, you can look up to see pink and blue cotton candy clouds and the bright lemonhead sun shining down on you…. 

            This essay has come along way from my first shitty draft, seeing all the time and effort I put into it needs to be published. I think that candy lovers would love to read something for their enjoyment maybe even dream about visiting a place like this. Writing using the sense of taste was actually very easy for me to do.

   Autoethnography is defined as writing about the personal and its relationship to culture. It is an autobiographical genre of writing and research and is displayed through many layers of consciousness. Autoethnography is a form of ethnography that overlaps art and science. The term has a double sense referring either to the ethnography of one group or to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest(“Toward”). It is writing about yourself from your perspective, situations that you have encountered that has some kind of impact on you.

     It has been around for at least two decades and was used by Anthropologist Karl Hieder in 1975, but David Hayano was credited as the originator of the term. Soon after many others used this genre for writing papers about themselves and what they have been through.At first I thought this writing was just like a narrative or even a autobiography but their are some differences.This type of writing is different because the person writing an autoethnography writes about themselves, their thoughts, their opinions. Some criticize this form of writing as sentimental, unscientific, and the product of the excesses of postmodernism(“Autoethnography”).

   In order to write an autoethnography it has to be about you the writer, your experiences and the outcomes either good or bad. It has to be about your life using your own views of what happened, putting the reader into your shoes. Its basically putting yourself out there for others to read and to judge you on your experiences. It is a great way for you to tell someone about yourself things they never even knew about you.Throughout various autobiographical writings, a sense of self emerges that is thoroughly grounded in experiences and observation(Russell).

                                                                       Work Cited

Ellis, Carolyn and Arthur P. Bochner “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: THE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH (2ND EDITION). Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage, pp. 733-768.2000.

Russell, Catherine.”Autoethnography”. Experimental Ethnography,Duke University Press, 1999

“Toward” http://www.humboldt.edu/kd3/Toward.htm

After listening to Allyssa music it seems as if I have alot in common with her. First song she played for me was a Jay Z song and I actually liked it. I like Jay Z music but he is not one of my favorites but this song sounded nice, I thought it was Ushers song. I think I might put that on my ipod with my slow songs I like. The second song was one of my favorites singers Gavin Degraw about the girl he knows something something(I don’t really know the words). Then I found out we watch the same show and that she actually had the honors of meeting Gavin. She is so lucky and this showed we like some of the same things.

At first I listened to this slow song with Flo Rida rapping and I liked it. I actually think I heard that song before. Well anyway after listening to the first song I assumed that he has a nice sweet side, and the song showed that. It was like a song you listen to when your thinking about a girl or just in the mood for slow song. The second song was very different it was a old rap song with alot of cursing. This showed me he like any other boy he likes that ruff stuff, like hardcore rap that stuff that makes you a little scared.

I have no idae where Iam going with this essay. I have so many iddeas that I can choose from and Idont know where I am going with it. I think I said that twice. I dont know my brain is very cluttered but I am going to try to stay focused. I wanted to persuade my cousin to be grateful for his ears because they are very important and some people dont have the sense of hearing. I want ed to show him how important it was through my essay . When I was blogging a couple of hours ago I realized that was a hard topisc and my thoughts were not coming together like I wanted them to. So after doing this concept map, whatever  you call it, I realized that I have alot of ideas in my head that are way better like maybe How can deaf people hear music? Is that even possible for them to do because it does not make sense to me.

This blog is intended for my cousin to read and hopefully take into consideration, maybe after he reads this he will know how serious deafness can be. I hope to accomplish writing a blog that shows how listening to music at high volume can affect you later. This is a persuassive genre and this writing serves as a wake up call for my cousin.

My cousin recently lost his hearing in his left ear and had surgery to regain his hearing again. The doctor could not tell him the exact reason why one eardrum went out but told him that excessive loud volumes could have helped. Chris listens to everything very loud, music, the television, his game. My grandma always told him that one day he is going to regret it but Chris never listened. Ackerman says in A Natural History of The Sense,” But many teenagers like to listen to music played at such high and distorting level

After a while we started to notice a change in his hearing. His mom would call him and he could barely hear her, then I noticed he plays his music even louder in the car.

MLA

The close relationship of tastes to smell gives the impression that a greater variety of taste exist(“Taste”).

Smell contributes grandly to taste. Without smell, wine would still dizzy and lull us, but more captivation would be gone(141).

Work Cited
Ackerman,Diane.The Natural History of The Sense. New York: Random House,1990.

“Taste”. The Columbia Encyclopedia.Columbia University Press: Sixth Edition Copyright, 2004.

APA

According to Ackerman(1990),” Touch is a sensory system, the influence of which is hard to isolate or eliminate”(p.77).

Field says that “These improvements translated into a savings of $3000 per hospital stay for preemies in the massage therapy group”.

References
Ackerman, D. (1990). “Touch”. A Natural History of The Senses, 77,

Field, T. M. (1998). Massage therapy effects. American Psychologist, 53 (12), 1270-1281.

1. I learned how to do MLA citations and APA citations correctly
2. How to revise my papers a second and third time
3. What blogging is and how you do it
4. How to edit someones paper using a rubric
5. How to make a rubric on Rubistar
6. I learned what to look for in a good paper
7. I learned what a autoethnography is and what it consists of
8. I know that I can write something other than a narrative essay
9. To write in different genres not the traditional five paragraph essay
10. I learned how to write using one of the five senses throughout my essay
11. How to type a paper in a short amount of time because I procrastinate
12. How to set up a blog, design it and put things on it that interest me
13. That I should always write ruff drafts before handing in a final paper
14. Someone should always read my work out loud to me so that I can hear it

In class we discussed what should students should take out of class and is it worth the money we are putting out.  I think that it is worth it because where else am I going to learn the things necessary for my future. We also talked about what should a teacher do for us and I think we all agree that he should not waste our time. Also that he should prepare us for the future and teach us all he know in a way that we can understand it. How can a teacher teach students and make them understand it? Its hard but so far in this class my teacher has made a way for me to understand the info.

It actually very interesting because what I thought it was, it wasn’t. For some reason I thought it had something to do with hearing. Now that I’ve taken this test I guess it deals with your perception of how you view things.

This item that I was not allowed to see was round and it had a stick attached to it. At first I had no idea but as I felt I started to get an idea. I know that this item was a piece to something way bigger. It was almost like a part, an important piece to finish something bigger. As I felt it longer I realized it was a part to a chair the back piece that connects both parts of the chair together.