HW 18

The holiday Thanksgiving has gone form a anti-body practice of giving thanks for what you have and are given to a body–centered practice that is centered around eating till you are to full to move. On this holiday groups of people come together to be with one another and bring large amounts of food that could feed multiple families. This is the modern practice of this holiday. There is no meaning to the holiday now. People look to the holiday as a time to get together and see the people they love. But do they really love the people or the body-centered practice of the holiday.

At my families Thanksgiving we had enormous dishes full of the festive food that could never be finished. But not only the normal the enormous dishes of festive food were there, part of my family who are vegetarians walked in and with more huge dishes to share with everyone. There was double the food this year with the same number of people as every other people.

The after the meal of “thanks” in my family it comes down to the talk. Everyone in my family comes to the family room of where ever we are and sits down to talks. People notice who’s missing at first from the people with spouses not sitting next to them, like my late grandfather Sam Gordon and my late uncle Jim Cotter. People also notice when my grandma is drunk because after my grandfather died she fell in love with gin. My family could be a bunch of bad politicians after the awkwardness. The talk always starts out about the kids in the family and how school is. Then on to the way the D.O.E run and the latest governmental issue till it gets heated and again it gets very awkward. Till my dad who does not talk much in these conversations because its my moms family and he rather not get involved in it crakes a lame joke which they think is funny. I sit there staring in space and texting. I always look at my dad around eight and say lets go because I’m not having fun. No one is my age and no one wants to talk about anything but my school life and collage. It feels like I’m having the same conversation a thousand times. My family follows their cultural practice which is a body centered one. We don’t pray, we don’t say who we give thanks to, we just come and eat talk and leave on the same way we came.

HW 17

Dying has been a thought on my mind since I can really remember. I used to think about it a lot when I was younger. It is my greatest fear.

At the age of eleven I experienced the pain of death for the first time when my uncle, Ira, died of lung and brain cancer. I didn’t really know my uncle because he lived in Arkansas but it was still heart braking. My next encounter with death was when I was fourteen and my oldest and closest grandfather of 97 died peacefully of old age. This showed me that death could be “simple” and clean. This death for me was foreseen still I could not accept it. Then when I was fifteen my other grandfather died of a heart, he was the healthiest person I knew. He exercised every day by swimming and jogging. This event was outstanding to me that someone so healthy could just die with out warning. Nine month ago my grandmother died of old age. I was very close to her because I never knew my grandfather and it really hurts me that I couldn’t ever see or talk to her again. Then two month ago a big tragedy happened in my family, my other uncle died of a sudden stroke. I had seen him not one month before when he was visiting me from San Francisco. This felt unreal to me because it still felt like he was in my living room talking to me. I was very close with him and to here him dying was not acceptable to me. In the same week I had a friend kill her self by hanging. I had never thought I’d have a friend commit suicide. At this point in my life death was vivid and as real as it got but I had not flinched when I heard all this news I always just sit in silence because it all felt unreal. Till I cracked and could not hold the pain of death in anymore because real life had set in.

Death has changed my perspective on live. My family has past away so fast and I have felt the pain that my friend had felt before. I now always try to make life as fun as possible and do as much as I can in the time I have. All these people that have died have there own meaning and story in my life that makes me who I am. I’m scared of dying or wait, am I scared of the unknown. Just as I was afraid of the dark when I was four because I didn’t know what was in the dark. Does dying lead to something else’s? What happens after? That’s what I want to know. Why do we live now if we one day we die and then for all we know don’t know anything, don’t think, see, hear, just nothing. I will never have known I wrote this for Andy my 11th grade sociology teacher. This area is a place of weakness for me. A place I don’t like to enter in my mind because I suppress as much id it as I can because I can’t candle the truth. But what is the truth.

HW 11 - Project Part 1

I have been improving my diet for months before the food unit in order to get in better shape. I started by cutting out junk food, soda, white grains and fast food from my diet. Then I only ate foods with lots of protein and nutrition. This helped me lose wait, have more energy and helped me gain better self-control over my body. I was able to control my bad food urges but the new foods that I was eating were not always the best tasting if I didn’t have time to make it something good. So I cheated my diet by eating very small amounts of fast food to get the tastes I loved so much. Ultimately this disappointed me and when I was given this project I thought what I have been doing has helped me a lot by feeling better about myself and I wanted to help others.

Amhara came up with an idea or a dream, to make a facebook group that would be a protest against fast food for one week. There would be thousands of people invited and joining making it a movement. I liked the concept so I asked to join her group as an admin to work with her but she had already made the group. I became an admin then to just watch and see how people reacted because I did not agree with how she set the group up. People wrote on the wall as if it was a joke and criticized it saying one week is nothing you needed a real change by doing this for a month or for the rest of your life. I agreed because my food life style has changed because I keep up with my diet.

Ultimately the group did not get any buzz and I didn’t think that my original group idea was the right approach anymore. I thought about how people always want to be different and take challenges but not all people want to take the same challenge as everyone else. So I challenged my good friends as they challenged me to not eat fast food for a month and if succeed we would continue for another month but everyone would bring in one person they trusted to be part of this group. We saw each other on a regular basis so there was no reason to meet at certain times. When we meet we would tell stories about how the journey threw our food lives were going. For the first week the fast food world had be easy to leave for all of us but during the weekend it was tuff for some of us. During the weekend my friends were offered free fast food and it was hard but they turned it down. It took more time to make foods that tasted good, we had to do research to find healthy food places to grab fast meals not run by major corporations and it cost more money for this food.

My friends felt that the system of having someone close to you experiencing the same thing you were helped them stay on track because they didn’t want to fail someone they care about. The challenge they said was one of the things that drew them in because you always want to beat your best friend and to lose would be a big defeat. Then I had realized my activist goal had gone off track from making my group so exclusive people would want to join to a group a friends working to help one another be healthy. We did not stand as a number on facebook in the thousands, we had each other to look in the face and make sure we were living up to our challenge. We had to face the people we loved directly and tell the truth. Fast food is a drug you just want more. During the week so far I have felt more awake and full of energy.