Lost In Society

May 2-6

I was watching Food Inc in my English class because we were using it to identifying arguments and it seems like a good documentary to show that. We had to look at the situation, purpose, audience, and claim of the movie and analyze it. I have to say I found this movie preferable compared to the two documentaries that I looked at some weeks before independent of college, with my sister. She wanted us to watch Cowspiracy, and she wanted to watch Earthling, but was too afraid to watch it alone. People talked about how much Earthling had changed their perspective of everything and she was afraid that it would do the same to here, but it was too bad I was there to destroy the fun for her.

I didn’t enjoy the first half of Cowspiracy when the person was interviewing all the different companies about the problem with climate change and that no one was aware of the facts that he points out throughout the movie. The movie made it seem like people are being very silent about the agricultural business because they rely on the agricultural business too much that they have an incentive to keep quiet. The problem I have with the interview is how the people who he interviewed were rather shocked and appeared to hear it for the first time that I think it had less to do with the stronghold on environmental companies, but how they do not appear on these companies’ radar. I wish he had taken a different route in the beginning of the movie. The second half is better than the first half, but I fear that there were a lot of people going vegetarian because of the emotional response to seeing a duck get slaughtered for food. I have no problem with them putting the slaughter on, but I feel that the problem with our culture is that we aren’t willing to accept what is needed to make our food.

The problem I have with the duck being slaughtered in Cowspiracy is something I had a problem with Earthling. It was a huge compilation of human abuse in animals and didn’t focus on anything else. I’ll admit there is a lot of bad practices that goes on in our society that involves abuse to animals like pet farms, food animal practices are generally unethical, animals are abused in entertainment, and some are needlessly abused in experimentation. I do understand that we have an issue with how we treat our animals, but in the food animal and entertainment industries that were being shown in Earthling, they focused on our treatment of animal is terrible, but I also saw another story that wasn’t mentioned, but was told in the lens of the camera. The animals weren’t the only one who were mistreated, the humans were being mistreated. I have come to believe that the mistreatment of animals stems from being mistreated. I believe that when people who have been mistreated are not being expected to treat animals well, they won’t. This is what I saw mentioned in Food Inc. This is probably why I like Food inc in comparison to Cowspiracy and Earthling.

Food inc. to me, was far greater than the other two, but it may be because i was not the other documentaries’intended audience. With Food Inc. I felt more of it spoke to me. I do not like Monsanto’s business practices even though I am for GMO. I like how they addressed that animals and people aren’t being treated well in the food industry. That is about as much I’ll go into any conversation about the issue with our food because too many people have a solution to our food problem, but we don’t know the real answer. Those who have solutions are now invested in a lifestyle that suits it because we can’t talk about how a much a diet is theoretically preferable and not participate in the diet, lest we be cognitively dissonant. For that very reason, our diet choices are very polarizing and I want no part in the debate as a whole even if I agree with things on the many sides, I don’t want any part of it for now. As a side note, people were thinking about going vegetarian after watching Food Inc. I find this curious because I think Food Inc. was concerned about transparency in the food industry, not the treatment of animals and was not for or against the consumption of meat. In fact there was that whole section about free-ranged animals as an alternative to conventional food in the documentary. I’ll never understand why people are so fine with eating meat, but are given second thoughts after experiencing the slaughter of animals for meat.

April 25-29

This week was a week where I had a sudden realization that I was lonely. It was a very hard thing to go through because I needed to convince myself that I am not supposed let my imagination run wild when it comes to a solution. One of the supposed solution sounded like the beginning of Romeo and Juliet when Romeo is so stuck in his heartache that when he finds Juliet for the first time, he thinks she answers everything in his life. This leads to extremely irrational moves that he makes throughout the story. I need to convince myself from making irrational ideas that a particular person I enjoy talking to is anything more because I was not in the right state of mind to have anything. This loneliness will become obsessive and I only want to have friend. That is one thing I learned about throughout this situation.I want to be around people and have a good time.

April 18 - 22

This week is a protest week. The people of the college were angry about how the faculties were being treated. This thing was prominent from Wednesday - Friday. People were protesting something about what is called the Q5 (5th Quintile). Q5 is like an F grade for a program at the college. The way they are being graded through something called the PPP (Program Prioritization Process). The faculties need to comply with the PPP and send in a report even though it isn’t in their contract. The college is going through some needed budget cuts after it had spent a lot of money building two new buildings, but their plan to cut on their budget is by cutting programs and grading each program with how many people will be going into the programs. This isn’t popular with either the faculties or the students especially when the faculties aren’t responsible for people not enrolling in the classes, or not applying to the college. Some of the faculties decided not to send a report in, in protest because, like not doing a report for school, they would get an F. The only difference is that they didn’t sign up nor agree on this. We as student agree to be graded when we are given our syllabi and continue the classes. The syllabi are our contracts to the individual faculties.

It is made worse when one of the buildings that had been built is not in use because the program that the building was intended for was cut because the chair of the program got fired. It had something to do with too much power because the staff who oversaw the project was part of the union or something. Essentially, there’s a problem with spending in the college on new buildings and not enough money allowed to continue existing programs. This is a problem with management and that’s why everyone wants the president of the college to be gone.

Other than that, for math, I was expecting my grades to be back by Monday, but he said it’ll be back by Friday. He gave us a paper about a project that we are going to do next week and turn in the following week. Before I forget, he said he’d get the test graded by Friday, but doesn’t give us our tests back because Friday was conveniently a teacher’s walk-out where at 12:00, all faculties walked out and began protesting. We heard about it from other people, but we weren’t given the confirmation by our math teacher and so we came to class when we didn’t need to because he participated in the walk-out.

April 11 - 15

This was a busy week. I had to get as much of a rough draft of a memoir paper for my English class, as well as prepare for the test for physic on Thursday and one for math on Friday. There is a lot of things we had to do, Even though there is a lot to do, I strangely feel like I can handle this kind of stress, which is good.

This is the first time in a long time doing peer review on someone’s English work. I don’t feel like the person who reviewed my work did a great job at reviewing my paper. I feel like he doesn’t quite understand what he’s getting himself into. This doesn’t help that I had a hard time reading his paper. I felt like I didn’t understand where it was going. He had a good amount of details in his writing, but it felt like it wasn’t going anywhere.

For physics, it was getting really simple, I felt like I know what I was doing throughout the time because it was all things I’ve done before. As for math, I was a little worried about getting some of the graph concepts in my mind. Especially finding the derivative of a graph, and guess the general shape of the antiderivative as well. This has been something that one of the student, who was also a fellow student in my math class for the two previous quarters of math with a different professor (the same one in both quarters). He talked about how this professor isn’t doing a good job in teaching, as well as how the person who sits next to me, from China, knows way more than the professor and catches whenever the professor made a mistake.

The first two weeks were with me talking about how amazing the guy who sits next to me is at math. I also enjoy his little gift to me. He gave me a little trinket of what looks to be a carp. This week was with him saying how difficult the classes were because of how long it takes for the professor to get anything across. Basically, he would give us a question that he wants us to answer, and he would not continue until we manage to get the concept. I personally enjoy it because it requires me to come up with a solution, rather than getting fed everything. The problem is that it is taking away from our time to learn.

April 4 - 8

So with the second week gone, I feel like I have my time under control. I noticed that there may be some issues with going to the type of classes I have, but as long as I get enough food, water, and rest, I fell like I can do it. :Anything else would be that there is a general use of problem-solving skill I had to utilize to do my math works.

There were some interesting pieces that I had to read for English class. there was one about a woman’s hair as she goes through leukemia therapy, a man paying attention to a family who he found to be weird, and a woman going through grief after her husband’s heart attack

March 28 - April 1

Back to school, I have to say that I enjoy this week as a beginning week. There were a few complaints that I had about my math class (daily), however. The math professor I have isn't supposed to be our professor, he's a replacement for the other guy who supposedly got fired or quit. Now we have a professor that didn't have a syllabus ready on the first day and had a meeting (but gave us the syllabus) on the second day. I enjoyed my English class (Mon, Tues, Thurs) as well. I also really enjoyed my physic class's (Tues, Thurs) first lesson about the history of science. I distinctly remembered the way many people were sleeping on the first lesson because it is an evening class starting at 6:30-9:30. On the second day, we had a nice lab that gave us an idea of how things scale in real life. There were quite some people on the waitlist who wanted to stay in the class, one being a guy who sat right next to me on the first two days.

March 14-18

This week was busy. I turned in my last assignment for humanities on Monday and turned in extra credit on Wednesday. For math, even though I didn’t have a test until the 17th and the 18th, I spent time with some of the students for a study group for our math finals. It was interesting because, for the first day, there was hardly any studying going on. We spent most of the time socializing. On the second day, there was a bit of studying, but there was still a lot of socializing. On the final day before the math final, it was mostly studying. I was really confident and competent with my preparedness for the final. I was there to make sure I know what I’m doing as well as help the other people with understanding the concepts. This paid off with flying colors because with the 5% extra credit, I ended up getting a !03% on the final. I spent some time getting prepared for my logic final after taking my math final. The test had some extra credit at the end of it and I did them. I ended this quarter better than I started and I did better this quarter than last quarter.

There is also something strange that happened this week. I had a strange urge to wear girl clothing. I’m a boy, but I wanted to wear girl clothing. It was strange because I was with my mom and my sister at some women stores to buy some things for my sister. I was looking around the store because I didn’t have anything else to do, so I looked at some of the clothes and there was a thought lurking at the back of my head. The thought was, “I wonder how it feels to wear this,” and “I think I’d look good in this”. I as struck to find myself thinking these thoughts, but the clothes looked so nice and comfortable.

This is kind of a reminiscence of what happened 3-4 years ago when my mom had to go to great lengths to buy me clothing because I was apathetic to all the men clothes at that time. I found all the men clothing to be bland and boring. My favorite clothes are graphic tees because I love how amazing the graphic designs are. I like them, but I was looking for something that wouldn’t be too casual. The most I found were clothes that I didn’t care for. I searched on the web about men design and found an article that Greta Christina wrote, I felt like it really hit home when she says that we don’t have a wide variety of interesting clothing, As I searched more about men’s fashion, I also learned to pay attention to the textures of the clothing because what it lacks in decoration, it has in complexity.

March 7-11

February 29-March 4

I took upon myself to ask questions every day because of last week’s special situation where I was so confused in math. I wanted to ask every day so that I get used to asking questions so when I get to a situation where I need to ask, I am capable of asking.

February 22-26

I don’t know what’s getting into me lately, I had a review for what I was doing last week, and I tried to do it, but I realize I did not maintain the concepts in my head. I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt this confused in math before in my life. I looked and tried to relearn the concept with some success. I planned on doing a lot more homework and studying this week, but the I was paying attention to the feminist vs MRA politic and trying to make sense of the hostilities. I cannot yet understand the problem MRA has with feminism, and I cannot see the claim that feminists are always judging you. I haven’t ever really seen feminism that is described in the way that people tend to view it. I even looked at some of Feminist Frequency’s work and I didn’t find it as bad as some Youtubers make it out to be. I also was looking around to see where this idea that feminists hate men. I guess there are some, but I’ve looked at a blog that is obviously a joke, but when I look at the comment section, the joke is apparently not so obvious to people that people are actually making arguments against this person’s intentionally flawed logic.

I’ve also looked into Richard Dawkin’s stroke. As an interest, I wanted to know if PZ Myer is just how political he is willing to get. It fills me with joy that he had sympathy for Richard. This confirmed my ideas of PZ Myer. He may have strong beliefs and express it in strong words, but he will not use Richard’s misfortune to advance his own agenda.

February 15-19

I watched Gravity Falls Finale. It was intense. I really like the show a lot, and though it was sad to be over, I prefer it to be over than to go on indefinitely. Sometimes, when a show goes on for another season, I wonder if the writers had ideas for the continuing season while they drafted the original season. Sometimes I think the reason why a continuing season isn’t as great as the previous is because the people who created the work did not intend to continue the work, rather it was supposed to end at the end of the season, so all of the really interesting storylines had been expended for the original story and they have to try to squeeze out any inspiration to continue it. This is why I like Alex Hirsch's decision to not continue Gravity Falls. It ends when ti’s still great and it dies with greatness, rather than fade away slowly. I missed out on watching Deadpool because I had to do my homework for symbolic logic.

February 8-12

What had happened this week was just sad. The guy who was missing a lot of classes was absent on the day of the test. If he does not drop out in any other situation, he’s probably going to drop out for this. Nope, he’s taking this like a trooper. I don’t know what to say. His situation seems to be getting worse every week. I got a 95% on my second test, a huge improvement from my first test. I also got the test result for my symbolic logic test, I got a 94%.

February 1 - 5

That one guy was sleeping in class this week. I didn’t understand him. I think the reason why I pay too much attention to him is because he doesn’t fit my understanding on how people should treat college. It is especially harmful to treat college like that because money is being spent and college isn’t mandatory, kind of.

I remember in high school, everyone wanted to go to college. I’m not saying it’s wrong, because I’m going there now, but it is something that has been instilled in the young people’s mind that you must go to college in order to be successful in life. Not getting a higher education was equated with poverty and anything negative in the mind of young people. I learned outside of school that college isn’t the answer that everyone makes it out to be. The irony is that I don’t trust that source of information anymore. I would have to say, the one good thing it did for me is to not be pressured into college with no idea of what I want to do, nor whether I would make it.

The thing that made me nervous about college is what had happened to my brother. He went to college for a year or 2 with a grant. The grant was free money, unless he quit college, which he did. Now he has to pay it off. I think he’s still paying it off. it’s been about 8 years now. This brought me to question the usefulness of an institution that requires us to spend a lot of money on something that people claims to help make us a lot of money.

So when I finally decided to go to college, I had a goal to achieve. My goal is to pursue computer science and learn as much as I can in my classes. So when I see someone who's missing all the time and sleeps when they're present, I wonder why they are even there, why do they not drop the class? I also don't understand people who go to college and pick classes that don't interest them or they can learn from. I know a guy from last quarter who's always reading the textbook for his ethic class, but he says he didn't learn anything from that class.

So yesterday, apparently there were a lot of groups trying to spread a message. At school, there was a bunch of people walking around barefooted. It had something to do with people who have no shoes and raising awareness for it by walking barefooted. There was also a little something for the lgbtq community. Something about a day of silence. It’s about the silence of people who were harassed and bullied because they were lgbtq.

It reminded me of moving to a new middle school in the 8th grade. The other guys like insulting each other. I guess it’s like when puppies fight without actually fighting. However, I never liked participating in it. One of the insults that they liked doing was call someone gay, as if that’s an insult. I never was gay, and I seem rather heterosexual even today, but I couldn’t defend myself from allegations of me being gay. They would always ask if I’ve ever had a girlfriend. I did not have a girlfriend –I still never have–. That is one of the worst reason to assume someone is gay, but I couldn’t say anything to keep them from calling me gay. There was also a myth that if you call someone gay enough, they’ll actually turn gay. Like a person being denied they were gay, I was being denied that I was straight.

They never accounted for my social anxiety to talk to girls, especially the ones I had a crush on. Back in elementary school, I was told that I “liked” the girls who I called my friends. There were also pressure that they would tell these girls that I liked them. Honestly, I liked being around girls, probably because I had an older sister and that girls accepted me for who I was, but I stopped because I couldn’t take the idea of being rejected by the my friends, so my silence did the work. The event happened in the 3rd grade and I didn’t begin having interest in girls until the 6th grade. I don’t know if I perceived it differently, because I probably would’ve been rejected anyways, because I recently read that girls hit puberty earlier than guys, therefore, they have interests in older guys who’ve already hit puberty. I probably would’ve been rejected on a friend level regardless, so an anxiety to talk to girls seemed futile.

Back in middle school, in the 8th grade, I was also experiencing other problems. I was sitting at a table where they kept calling me gay. It originated from this idea that if you have a group of a certain number of people, you’ll have one gay member of that group. To me, their facial expression were funny. They had an “I saw what you did there face” right before they pointed to me and said “gay”. I heard “hey” because of my hearing impairment and they were speaking as if they had a speech impediment. I also laughed because I was nervous, as they were singling me out for something I couldn't understand. That didn’t go well with one of the guy who, for some reason, didn’t like me (probably because I didn’t stand up for myself, or he actually thought I was gay). The effect of my presence at the table got so bad that they had to come up with a way to get rid of me. First, one of them sat at a different table, everyone else followed after them. When I followed as well, I noticed that he would switch tables again. This happened 2 times before I had enough. There were two people who stayed, but in defeat, I told them “you guys can go if you want. I won’t follow you anymore.” They didn’t move, but it was probably because they didn’t want to move one more time.

I also remember being sexually harassed. I was fat enough to have a little boy boob, and people would flick at it. It made me really uncomfortable, but I didn’t know what was happening and why it was wrong. All I knew was that I felt violated like all the girls were. However, I’m a boy, I shouldn’t have felt violated. Boys don’t get violated, I'm not a girl, but the cold reality is that boys do get violated. And those who were, were considered weak, like a gay man or a girl because a strong boy would never get in a situation where they were indeed, violated. I felt so powerless that I even allowed a girl to be sexually harassed by another person. Again, I wasn’t aware of harassment at the time. I thought it was normal, but it wasn’t. I have been told about harassment all my life at school, but I still wasn’t aware of harassment when it was present.

All of this confusion had made me slightly confrontational. I was conflicted because I was encouraged to be confrontational by other guys, but I didn’t feel right doing it, and when I was confrontational, I was terrible at it. I didn’t get into fights, but there was a lot of verbal insults flying around at the time. When people retaliated I lost frequently. I couldn’t stand up for myself, so people used that to call me gay because being gay was associated with weakness, and I was weak, therefore I was gay, to those people. Having taken a logic class recently in life, I understand that their logic were invalid. If “someone is gay” then “they are weak” is not the same as, if “someone is weak” then “they are gay”. All dogs are mammals, but not all mammals are dogs. Their logic, if somehow, valid were also unsound because being gay is not a sign of weakness.

Although I have been made to feel worse about myself, I felt worse about myself from events before I moved. In the 7th grade, I was not in the receiving end of bullying, but quite the opposite. There was a kid that people would gang up in dissing him. It happened so often that I began joining in, as if it made me part of the “in” group. An example of one of my offenses is that the group were asking how much money would they need to be given in order to kiss another guy? I said that “he would do it for free.” The question was about how much integrity we had to be straight, as if you can buy away your straightness. Integrity > money, and should be, but our level of straightness should not be considered a quality of integrity. Nowadays, I’d probably do it for free just to break that notion that gayness is a loss in integrity. It wasn’t until I was in the receiving end of bullying, did I truly understand what wrong I did to that person. I’ve been told what bullying is all of my life, but I didn’t see it whenever it was present. I hurt a lot of people back then, but that kid was my worse offense.

I was being hurt by life at that time to the point that I disliked who I was. I was smart, others were strong. I was quiet, others were loud. I was reserved, others were social. I was odd, others were normal. Odd people were the ones likely to be gay, likely to shoot up a school, and most likely to have anything that is viewed as socially wrong. It is a fear that has been ingrained in our society. The fear of the other, the fear of Frankenstein, aliens, and the monster in the closet. It is the same fear that fuels other forms of bigotry. I was tired of being the other, so I tried to be normal even when normal was worse than being the other. Frankenstein was a kind-hearted creature.

January 25 - 29

I got the homework for my Humanities class in on time before the deadline at 11:59 pm. I got it within 2 hours. Now I can relax and do what I can do, rather than always worry about not doing something, while consecutively not doing it.

The guy I mentioned about in Week 14 of college is a strange character. I already have problems with him trying to get homework in before he learns the concepts. He also doesn’t do what is necessary to show a good understanding about the concepts he’s supposed to be learning. It also doesn’t help because he is absent all the time.

I got my test results back, and as I expected, it was a terrible day for me to take the test. I guess I should’ve been studying rather than spend time with my family the day before. Bad time management during the test was also my downfall. I got a 67% that is including the 3% boost that I had, when I took a pop quiz. 64%! I can’t remember a time I had a test result that was that bad, besides ear training. Math is supposed to be something I’m good at, it wasn’t the case last week.

To add pressure to the wound, the guy I mentioned, got the same score I did. It didn’t help that I helped him within the last 10 minutes before class. That was the same 10 minutes that I was going to spend looking up and understanding one of the questions that would’ve helped me on the test. I’m way too much of a sucker for helping others. It isn’t to say I didn’t spell my own doom, because I clearly did. He even had the audacity to ask for a correction on his score because the website we used, when asking for a decimal answer, we are able to go beyond the decimal places it asks for. For example, if they ask for 3 decimal places, it doesn’t mark us wrong for adding a 4th decimal place. However, what I notice it that they says at least 3 decimal places, which means he may add more.  When the professor sets up his questions for the test, it doesn’t use the word at least, but says to put it in 3 decimal places, which means no more, no less.

It was brought to my attention by one of the students i enjoy talking to that I spend a little too much time talking about this guy, so I realize that it is a problem. The last thing I want to do is talk all the negative things about a single person that it would lead a negative atmosphere whenever there is people around. This happened when I was at a place to cope and learn how to live with blindness I’’l have one day in the future. I still have a lot of vision left. I just didn’t like how one of the members had so much problems with their roommate that when she talked about her, it was always negative. It primed us to always think negatively about the person, which I couldn’t think about too much. The other problem is whenever the person had talked about something that would be admirable, it was never connected with their listener.

January 18 - 22

Well, I made one guy ruin my whole effort in the week. Well, he’s not to blame for everything, I got a habit to break. So what did I do? On Monday, I played video games nearly all day. There’s this interesting game called Dangerous Dungeon, and I wouldn’t leave it until I finish it. Overestimating my own ability, I spent most of the day playing it. I wasted my chance on doing some major catch-up.

It also didn’t help that on Friday I took a test that I knew I did terribly. There were two problems that had me stumped. I never had much issues with taking tests, but this test had made me stumped at two problems and it costed me more than it should’ve. This is a lesson in time management in tests. It is better to get one question wrong than get 2 wrong because I spent more time one the previous question that I couldn’t put enough time nor effort to answer the next questions. It was a sad moment for me.

The memory of the test questions that stumped me had burned into my mind that it was all I could think about how I screwed myself over 2 test questions. When I got home, the first thing I did was go into my room, write the questions that I had memorized and without the use of external sources (as if I was still taking the test) I worked out how these problems were to be solved. If I had skipped them, I would’ve gotten more points because there were 2 problems that I missed because I didn’t have the time to finish them correctly.