Man's Search for Meaning blog post

In Man's Search for meaning the author suggests that meaning or purpose in a person's life can help them to overcome challenges that they face. I think that it is a valid thesis and shows its merit in everyday situations. I, myself can think of situations where I have faced challenges and hardships and thinking of something that I wanted to achieve helped me face the challenge head on. I think that a big part of this is the idea of hope and that when people have a meaning or purpose in their life they have hope that certain aspects of their life will work out and certain events will be able to happen. As it is said in Shawshank Redemption, hope is a dangerous thing and I think in the book the author captures how effective hope and meaning can be and how crushing it can be when hope is destroyed.

"Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man—his courage and hope, or lack of them—and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly eʃect. The ultimate cause of my friend’s death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed."

In this section Frankl shows how effective having a purpose or a hope can be. One of the men who was sick was rooted by his purpose of getting out of the concentration camps, which he believed would happen on March 30th. When this salvation didn't happen he died the very next day. This was one of the most powerful parts of the book to me because I thought it showed how powerful the idea of hope was. This man survived greatly because he believed in something he felt he had a chance to live and a purpose to live when he lost that purpose he had no reason to go on and died. This is also evident in other parts of the book where Frankl talks about his dad and how one of his main purposes was to make sure that his dad survived, and while this was diluted for a while he still felt for his father and tried to keep him alive. Overall I completely agree with Frankl's theory, while it applies to his specific and awful situation it can still apply to people today who are going through much smaller challenges.

Digital Downtime Reflection

     My digital downtime started and ended a lot better than I thought it would but it was still a positive experience that showed how much I unnecessarily relied on technology and how much technology I use for stupid purposes every day.
     The first day and the last days were definitely the hardest of the week. Even though I was not to use my phone at school at all I had to take it to school because I had my internship in the afternoon and at work I had to use my cell phone to phone bank and make calls. Resisting the urge to pull out my phone and text someone or even to just check the time when I didn’t know it was really difficult. I kept thinking that maybe there was something that I was missing or someone that wanted to talk to me.  Resisting my phone at school was hard but I was able to get through it, it was at work where I had more problems and also found that I could be so much more productive without distractions. Usually I text in between making phone calls, partly because I am bored but also because I like to stall because phone banking was not my favorite task, but in order to follow my contract I could not text which meant not procrastinating on making calls. I was so much more productive it was crazy. I made probably around double the calls that I made during a usual day, and the productivity didn’t stop there,
      When I got home I went straight to my homework which isn’t usually the case. It was also different because instead of laying in my room doing homework, listening to music like I usually do I decided to sit in our dining room so that I could listen to music on the record player that we have, even though we only had a few records so far. By far my favorite record is the Sam Cooke one which is really old and that my grandmother actually got when she still lived in Korea. While I was listening to the record I realized that it was so different than listening to the same songs on my computer or the phone.
   For one the music seems more alive, the record player gives it more character than just listening to a version on the computer. The music also goes through the whole house so often times my brother would come in and listen to the music with me and we had fun singing and twisting together. Later that day I would also find time to watch television with my parents and would go to bed earlier than usual.
  Throughout digital downtime I also generally felt more relaxed. I think it was partly because I was getting work done quicker and not having to stress about it but also I started to think that my phone in some ways made me more anxious and stressed. With the absence of my phone I wasn’t always waiting for something. For someone to text or call or tag me in a picture. I feel like when you have a phone you always expect for something to be happening and if nothing’s happening than you begin to think that no one cares or wants to talk to you. With a phone and social media there is always the feeling that you should be doing something or talking to someone and without it I definitely felt relaxed.
   I also began to think that having a phone and things that are more instant makes you feel more impatient. When you text someone you expect them to answer right away. I know that when I text someone and they don’t answer after a few minutes I get impatient because I also believe that they are on their phone and just not answering me. Over digital downtime I realized that I like calling someone so much better than texting. In a lot of way texting is in genuine in that a person can carefully construct their response to whatever you say and though it is supposed to be instant it isn’t really. I talked to my friends a lot more over the phone that week mainly my friend who I don’t see during the week, who I usually text a lot and Jasmine as well as some other people. Talking on the house phone also has a much more public feel because anyone could be listening if they choose to pick up on the other line.
     One of the things that happened during digital downtime was that my sister and I took pictures together and when we took them she was saying how she was going to post them on Instagram and Twitter. I had deleted both of my accounts and wanted to share the pictures and started thinking of what people did with their pictures when they didn’t have social media and all the platforms to instantly share and I decided I wanted to start a photo album. Scrapbooking or making photo albums was something that my family used to do a lot when I was younger and I took the time to look through some and though a lot of them were incomplete they were so fun to look at. Seeing how a younger me had decorated a page, what I had chosen to wrote and what my mom added to the page. I began to think about how these photo albums are so much more permanent than anything online, even though they say the internet is forever it’s not like you’re going to be 90 years old, trying to show your grandkids what life was like in your day and say “look me up on my old instagram account.” I really liked the idea of making a photo album so I began to gather up all the pictures I had on my computer and am planning to get them printed so that I can start one. They won’t be as nice as pictures taken on a real camera because most of them have been taken on my phone but it will definitely be better than not having printed copies at all.
      Though I was more productive than I was without technology I did think someday it was hard. I didn’t really miss social media and am not planning on re-downloading them even though so far there have been times when people have referenced things on it and I have been clueless. I did in some ways miss my phone and technology and the ease of it. Sending a text is much easier than making a phone call for example and it also allows you to communicate even when the person isn’t there. I also missed streaming music because even though listening to records and the radio was fun there is a certain ease to just streaming the music that you want to listen to. I also realized that I will always find other ways to procrastinate (Example- One of the days I spent half an hour blowing bubbles in my room which was actually pretty nice). One of the biggest draws I got from this was one of the last days of downtime when I was in Gettysburg with my new teammates. Instead of being on my phone and talking to people I was already friends with I engaged in a lot more conversation and started to form new relationships with my teammates, which was definitely one of the biggest takeaways. The biggest thing I learned through this experience is that while phones and technology is something that can add a lot to our everyday lives and to the ease of our lives we really do miss out on things when we are concentrated on technology whether that be blowing bubbles, hanging out with your brother, or creating connections with new people.

Nonfiction book project

     I enjoyed the nonfiction book project mainly because we got to explore a book of our own choosing. I opted to read the Autobiography of Malcolm X because I had only read excerpts from it before and heard it to be a very influential book. For the project we had identify the arguments made by the author and analyze one of them in an essay. I chose to write my essay on Malcolm X’s argument that blacks would be better served if they were separated from whites and had their own institutions. I ended up defending his argument even though I initially disagreed with it. However, as I read more of the book and was exposed to his examples and rationale I began to recognize the valid case he was making for separation.
     It was hard to write from this perspective because it is not a popular opinion especially now people believe that integration is the only option to make the races equal. Having to write from this unpopular opinion was really interesting and hard because I was challenging my own beliefs and what I had been taught since I a young age. I was taught that blacks and whites should be a part of the same environment because they are equal. However Malcolm X says that though blacks and whites are supposed to be treated equally America is a white man’s society and integrating blacks into this society would make them second class citizens. People of other races also have different cultures which means that there are some basic institutional differences. Looking at the state of race relations today I can see that black people are often treated as second class citizens so what Malcolm predicted would happen with integration largely came true.
     If I were to do this project again I would present my argument with more confidence. I was a little bit unsure of my essay because of how I thought I would be perceived by presenting this perspective. In the essay I tried to push some off some of my own ideas onto Malcolm X and it was often unclear whose idea I was arguing him or my own. Despite the troubles I had with this essay it belongs in my portfolio because it showed me there are so many different perspectives to a single idea, such as racial equality and showed me that if you are able to open your mind up you can find the value in something that is not as widely accepted.

Racism Essay

For me the racism unit was hard. It wasn’t that I couldn’t grasp the information or complete the work, the problem was that in soaking in and listening to what everyone else was saying it was somewhat difficult for me to form my own voice into coherent thoughts. I liked this essay because it gave me the opportunity to really think and reflect on what I wanted to say in a more poetic way. What I love about this essays is that it is probably the most honest thing that I have written in the CAP. I used my own writing voice unlike other essays where I adopt a more scholarly tone. For the essay, which is entitled, Your privilege, and my lack thereof, I chose to focus on on the topic of white privilege which is something that affects me and pretty much every black person in america everyday in small ways that add up. I used a combination of my own personal experiences, current events, and research that we were provided to write a reflection on this topic. In writing this I felt that making it a rant about how white privilege had personally affected me wasn’t enough, as a black person talking about race you often have to substantiate your claims about race (which I also found through my research) so I used multiple sources with different examples of white privilege, and how it affects not only on black people but people of all race.

In some ways I wanted this to be an angry paper but as I was writing it and talking about my personal struggles and those of so many black Americans across the country it became a sad paper. I was consumed by a sense of of despair and to a certain extent, helplessness. The essay asked us what the next step to eradicating racism are. As I was writing the paper the next steps seemed bleak, it seemed like black people were doing so much to try and increase their status in america but that the movement was leading nowhere. Looking back, that’s what I would change, I would try to make the message more hopeful. There are so many fights going on right now that are slowly making changes in the way black people are viewed and treated in this country. In this unit and especially in writing this paper I realized how big of a role white privilege played in my education especially here in CAP. This has led me and some other classmates to begin working on our own cause to help minorities in magnet programs who invariable face white privilege just by being in an environment that is majority white.

The biggest thing I learned through writing this essay, which is largely a documentation of how much race negatively affects me everyday in small but meaningful ways it occurred to me how important it is to be aware of your race and how it can affect your everyday interactions and what being a certain race means in terms of how you will be treated. I also realized that white privilege is something that continually surrounds us and how rooted it is in everybody's lives even if they don't realize it. White privilege seems like such a small inconsequential topic that only would help white people a small amount but in reality it has some huge implications on how blacks will succeed and whether or not we will be able to rise. The biggest lesson I learned in doing research on this topic and reflecting on my own experience with it was that as long as white privilege exists we as blacks are going to have to work that much harder to overcome it.

Short story

The main thing that I enjoyed about this short story was that it really just let me explore my imagination and see what I could come up with. My story was something that I was passionate about and that I really enjoyed working on, when I was writing my story it felt like something that I was doing for fun rather than for school. It was also probably the most efficient I’ve been with school work, because I would always carve out time to work on it way before it was due.  Although the story itself was fun to write, the process of writing the story was much harder.

CAP Hollywood

The Tortured Poet from mrmayo on Vimeo.

Assignment/Activity Title— CAP Hollywood Year— sophomore

Skill— Writing, Media           Portfolio Category— Social Awarness

CAP Hollywood was a really great experience but it was also very stressful and a lot of hard work. The first thing we did when we got put in groups was read Judy’s story and decide how we were going to film it and what parts were important enough to include. Her story was really great and it had a lot of potential to be a great movie but we knew from the beginning that it would take a lot of work to get it to that point because it was somewhat complicated. Writing the script was hard because there was so much in the story and we only had eight minutes to get it all in, so we had to decide where we could cut parts down and what parts were absolutely necessary to our movie. It was also hard because we had to create realistic sounding dialogue which was a lot harder than I thought it would be. After writing the script we began on the storyboard and then started filming which was one of the hardest and most fun parts of the entire process. We filmed in many different locations and it was interesting to see how the shots we had planned out on the storyboard manifested in real life and it was amazing to see them come to life. Filming was such a time consuming process and it actually took a lot of thought and planning to get the shots done well enough to use. Even though it was hard the filming part also created a lot of great memories and funny moments which made the project even better.

            My official role for the movie was editor so I was really involved in all the post-production stuff. Because we were creating a horror movie as the editor I had to make it suspenseful and of course scary. I was able to do this by slowing down and drawing out the shots and well as using different filters in order to make it look dark and ominous. The best part of editing was when I got to edit my own death which is the moment that the audience realizes that something is off and that this isn’t just another cute love story after all. I was able to build suspense using blackout frames and slow motion, I also had a lot of fun with this in the acting stage because we used a lot of fake blood. Another great scene to edit was the end scene because it ended on a cliffhanger and getting that just right was really a challenge.

            Through this project I learned how important it is to pay attention to the small details because those really do make a difference in the quality of your work. There were so many small things that I spent so much time fixing but in the end that is what made our movie better. I also learned how to work effectively as a team because even though we did have many different ideas we were able to combine those ideas and work together to create a really great product. The red carpet event was super fun and it was great to see our movie on the big screen, some people even told us they were scared to that was a compliment to us. The best part was when we received the award for best editing and saw all of our work being recognized. 

For the Love of the game

Assignment/Activity Title— For the love of the game C-SPAN Documentary

Year— Sophomore

Skill— Writing, Media, Research

Portfolio Category— Critical Reasoning

           

            For my C-SPAN documentary I worked with Elizabeth and Ben and we decided to focus on bills that protect student athletes from concussions. We decided to do this project because me and Elizabeth are both athletes and this was a topic that we felt connected to us and a topic in which we felt we could focus on for months and still be interested in.

            Our first step was to do individual research on what bills had to do with concussion safety, we found quite a few so we had to narrow it down to one, which we chose by deciding which was most important to our lives. Next we had to do research and search for interviews. There was a ton of information on concussions and the impact that they have on people, especially following all of the scrutiny that the NFL has been under after a lawsuit from old players regarding the impact concussions have had on their life. Having too much information was often a problem for us because there was so much that we wanted to add to our film, there were so many different perspectives to include.