How To: Get Excited About Yourself (MetaPost 2.0)

        My favorite blogpost this quarter is "How To: Read the Fine Print", because writing that post really proved to me that I have become a more skeptical receptor of medias over the course of this year. In the post, I discuss a seemingly harmless two page photograph printed at the beginning of February's edition of  National Geographic. Because the magazine is circulated monthly, and because I am quite the fan of it, I probably read it three or four times cover to cover. It wasn't until I came back to this edition in April seeking inspiration for a blogpost that I finally noticed the caption, printed in small, nearly invisible letters on the bottom left hand side of the page.
        Instantly I was intrigued merely because I had not noticed the caption any of the times I flipped past the photograph before, but my excitement heightened after discovering (at least what I thought to be) the secret message lying beneath the romanticized photo of a shepard in Afghanistan.
        National Geographic probably receives upwards of one thousand photo submissions each day, yet the editors chose to include a relatively uninteresting photo of a man leading sheep through a mud wall  "who is (not coincidentally) in Afghanistan, a country the United States currently has soldiers fighting a war in."
        The reason I found this blogpost so exciting is simply because I noticed some type of modern anti-war propaganda on my own; I'm sure it's not as cool as I think it is. But isn't that the point?

How To: Move Backwards via Progression

       I don't have much to say about this video other than to urge you to watch it (in it's entirety). I know what my opinion on this style of living is, but I'm really curious as to what everyone else's is. What do you think about the philosophy of the people living these lives? Would you ever consider doing this yourself?

How To: Replace Old Victims With New Ones

        Unfortunately for Americans, each new generation will be the target of significant advertising from tobacco companies, because new smokers have to replace the old smokers who have either quit or been killed off by the habit, who are likely to have belonged to the lower class. Unless strict government bans and regulations on the sales and distribution of tobacco products are put into place, in addition to the ones currently in effect, smoking will forever continue to be the number one cause of preventable death in the United States. Today, the main argument keeping tobacco products from 100% illegality is that smokers should have the freedom to purchase and use tobacco products as much as they please, despite the irrefutable evidence that cigarettes will kill each user slowly and without mercy. Is the war against tobacco worth compromising our civil liberties?

How To: Procure Diseases Your Insurance Won't Cover

        Smoking cigarettes is an expensive habit, yet impoverished Americans who struggle to afford food purchase and smoke more cigarettes every day than the upper-class will in three. One of the main reasons this demographics’ smoking rates are so high is that America’s working class is much less educated than their hierarchical superiors. Over 728,000 Americans have GED certifications, and 45.2% of them smoke. Destitute high schoolers, if they graduate and are able to attend college, go to affordable institutions where they train for their future jobs and accumulate debt. The intention of this process is to acquire a job that will help pay rent, not to absorb knowledge and become a professor. These trade schools do not spend time discussing the harmful effects of smoking with their students, so the last anti-smoking appeal pitched at them would have been in high school or elementary school, along with the rest of their education that is no longer of much practical use.
        These members of the lower class are now “likely to report that smoking is allowed inside their workplace,”. This drastically increases the amount of time per day they are breathing in secondhand smoke, which “causes heart disease and lung cancer in nonsmoking adults,”. Then there’s thirdhand smoke, defined as “residual tobacco smoke pollutants that adhere to the clothing and hair of smokers and to surfaces,” which are carcinogenic and evidently more dangerous to nonsmokers than secondhand smoke, because they stick to surfaces for indefinite amounts of time. All these risks simply apply to nonsmokers who are often in the presence of smokers.
        The likelihood of these Americans dying from a tobacco related death skyrockets if they choose to take up smoking themselves, if they haven’t already. Americans living below the poverty line use cigarettes for decades longer than a smoker with a high socioeconomic status, start smoking at earlier ages, and are 55% more likely to take up smoking again three months after a quitting attempt. Smoking while living under the poverty line, like 28.9% of the currently impoverished (compared to 6.3% of Americans with graduate degrees), is a downward spiral towards lung cancer, as well as a multitude of other possible dangers directly caused by smoking.

How To: Kill Yourself Slowly

The boy who smokes cigarettes need not be anxious about his future, he has none.

-David Starr Jordan, 1915

        “More deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by all deaths from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined.” The dangers of smoking are no secret, yet 443,000 people in the U.S. will die prematurely this year from smoking or from exposure to secondhand smoke. That’s over 1,200 deaths per day, and given the huge efforts to curb public smoking by the government and by tobacco companies themselves, these numbers should be much lower. Despite the uniform availability of tobacco products to all Americans, smoking does not affect everyone equally. Americans living in poverty smoke at three times the rate of those with household incomes over $50,000. This subset of the U.S.’s population makes up a majority of the working class, who, along with adolescents, are America’s most likely to succumb to smoking cigarettes. “Nearly one in four high school seniors and one in three young adults under the age of 26 smoke." Why are the smoking rates among America’s youth and the impoverished so high? Americans with lower socioeconomic statuses are less educated, more likely to begin smoking at an early age, less likely to quit, and more exposed to smoking daily. The same repeated exposure to cigarette smoking is a leading cause of teen smoking in the form of peer pressure, as are tobacco advertisements and backfiring anti-smoking campaigns.

How To: Fix What's Not Broken

“The world has shrunk to those mean dimensions known to county clerks,” said Aldo Leopold in his book, A Sand County Almanac (44). In other words, Leopold is pointing out that people’s appreciation of land and the world they see has been reduced to what can be expressed on paper, such as acreage and square-footage. This mindset is the result of England’s system of equating land ownership with political power, because this motivated colonial settlers to claim land as far as the eye could see when they first began establishing families and governments on the east coast. Leopold is trying to express how this system of acquiring power has resulted in people regarding land as “a commodity belonging to us,” (vii) rather than a community we are members of along with all other living and nonliving things. Unfortunately for this community, more and more people came to America and ‘purchased’ land for themselves, and over time, as land became less available for purchasing, America has been reduced to the metropolis we know today. Some might think that the driving out of all the good (the wilderness) and replacing it with the bad and the ugly (industry and urbanization) has been an improvement, but the reality is that this process has caused America to regress as a whole.

How To: Ingest Pure Cancer

        I scanned this page from my copy of TIME Magazine's April 16 edition. Right away when I saw this, I thought I had hit the jackpot. Never before in my life could I recall coming across a positive advertisement for cigarettes, and considering how I am in the midst of writing a research paper about cigarettes and impact on American culture, finding this ad, especially in such a reputable magazine, was like gold.
        As a receptor for advertising campaigns, how do you feel about these types of ads running in some of the worlds most reputable magazines? 

How To: Fall Short

        This piece was created by Adam Simpson, the same artist who created the piece I discussed in my earlier blogpost: "How To: Make Million-Dollar Movies". I particularly like his work, because he is commenting on the aspects of our society that we pride ourselves on. In this image, the "ALL IS FAIR" idea relates to the fundamentals of the democratic society that we set up for ourselves and the liberty for all that was supposed to come with it. 

        But instead, as this image points out, sometimes that democracy and liberty get twisted, and our government has arrived in a sticking point in which in order to get laws passed, exhaustive compromises must be made in order to get everyone needed on-board, sometimes defeating the purpose of the laws in the first place. 

        This piece reminds me of the hypothetical little girl who grows up wanting to the the President of the United States, and when she finally becomes a state senator years later realizes that in order to get ahead politically in America, you either sell out or bust. It's no longer a matter of whether or not this is true, but it is a matter of how much longer we (the voters, citizens, and Americans) are going to put up with it. 

        At least, that's what I see when I look at this piece. What do you see?

How To: Read The Fine Print

        This photo, taken by Kevin Frayer, was featured on pages 12-13 of National Geographic's February edition. That's pages 12 and 13 out of 145, the first two page spread in the magazine that month. Without reading the caption, it's hard to grasp what's going on in this picture, or more importantly why National Geographic decided it is such an essential photo that it should be given prime placement in the magazine. The only thing that's clear is that there is a man leading a flock of sheep through a gap in some sort of wall. The caption reads:

 "Afghanistan—On drought-pocked earth near Marjah, in the restive Helmand Province, a lone shepherd leads his sheep through a mud wall's gap. Scenes of pastoral grace persist in this agriculturally intensive country, despite strife, insecurity, and dire food shortages."

        The words "lone," "strife," "insecurity," and "dire" stimulate our natural humanitarian impulses. Whomever authored this caption was shooting to appeal to the readers emotionally, hoping that the caption would arouse some sympathetic feelings towards this poor Shepard who is (not coincidentally) in Afghanistan, a country the United States currently has soldiers fighting a war in.
        I don't think Frayer intended for his photo to become anti-war propaganda, but it is quite plain that National Geographic published it in their magazine with that exact message in mind. What other subliminal anti-war messages are present in the media today?

How To: Change A Story With A Photo

        Both photos above depict the same awesome event: the Central Adirondack Paddlers Society set the new world record for the world's largest raft, with 1,902 kayaks and canoes floating freely for thirty seconds, held together only by holding hands. The photos themselves were taken in September of last year, but the Guinness Book of World Records only just recently confirmed their accomplishment. Also, the CAPS event was in effort to raise breast cancer awareness.

        The top photo was taken by Nancie Battaglia for National Geographic Magazine, and is featured as a two page spread in the magazine. The second photo was posted by Kevin Mansell on his blog. Which picture represents the event better?

        The Battaglia photo works better for the magazine in many ways, that it gets across the mass size of the raft, and that it's simply a kick-ass photo. On the other hand, the Mansell photo does a better job of showing the viewer exactly what was going on, in that you can see the entire raft and it is more straight-forward. 

        Personally, I saw the first photo before the second, and seeing the different perspective of the same event helped to give me a better idea of the actual size of the raft. 

        Which picture tells the viewer the truth about this world record?

How To: Build Your Own Middle-Class

        Entry- and midlevel jobs at companies like IBM, Microsoft, Verison, and Cisco require high school diplomas, but not quite bachelor's. According to TIME Magazine writer Rana Foroohar in These Schools Mean Business, 70% of college students at four-year colleges don't finish their degrees, which leaves big name companies with, "hundreds of unfilled slots for middle-level workers."
        What do these corporations to do solve this problem? They create Pathways in Technology Early College High Schools, or P-Tech schools. One was launched this past September in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where the students, "will graduate with not only a high school diploma but an associate's degree," says Foroohar. Each P-Tech student receives an IBM mentor starting on their first day of this open-admission public school.
        Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to set up five STEM schools, in which the core curriculum focuses on science, technology, engineering, and math, that are to be partnered with the four companies listed above in order to produce a more 'job-ready' graduate population.
        Is this going to help Chicago Public School students graduate and get jobs? According to Yasmin Rammohan of Chicago Tonight in 2011, 40% of CPS students drop out. However, many Crown Heights 9th and 10th graders have already met the City College admission requirements, and are likely to complete the associate's program two years earlier than expected, says Foroohar.
        So yes, P-Tech and STEM schools are likely to give more college graduates midlevel jobs right after graduation. But the only jobs these graduates have available to them is at companies such as IBM, where the companies' intention is to keep them for as long as possible. There is much less room for students at these high schools to be creative and express themselves via the arts and exploring other personal interests.
        I'm curious as to how much the graduates of these schools will enjoy their jobs after ten years at a company like Microsoft, when they've been raised like cattle to be perfect job candidates for companies desperate for middle-class workers and have the training and education for nothing else.

How To: Make Million-Dollar Movies

Racial casting in film - The commission for racial equality

  
        I first glanced at this piece by Adam Simpson as I was looking for a different drawing of his to write a blogpost about. Instead, I found myself being drawn to this piece, because of its direct connection to the TV Tokenism presentations we finally completed in class.
        My first question is: how would this movie have been treated differently if the classic Clark Kent/ Superman icon were portrayed as an African American? In my head, I am envisioning confused viewers of movie trailers not wanting to ask the obvious question: Why did they make Superman black? due to the fear of being perceived as racist or otherwise insensitive.
        The movie would be growing closer and closer to its premiere date as advertising would be getting more and more aggressive. Soon someone might let slip the question, and the next day it would appear in all the daily magazines, criticizing the ignorance and closed-mindedness of whomever might have even thought this ridiculous question. Racial equality activists and the African American community would be in uproar, cast members of SNL and talk-show hosts alike would joke about the tension caused by the casting of this film, and pretty much all hell would break loose, forcing people to face the still ever present but suppressed feelings of racism some still feel towards non-Areans.
        But would that be a bad thing?

How To: Over-Estimate Everyone

"What's a syllable?" 
      This is the question one of my peers asked me amidst a conversation about iambic pentameter during Poetry Club last Wednesday. My initial reaction was to laugh, I couldn't imagine how someone could have made it so far in their academic career at New Trier without knowing what a syllable is.
      Her question, and more-so my emotional response, struck a cord with me. The fact that it did not occur to me that someone could have so little knowledge about a common word like syllable shocked me, because I learned it early on as a player of the game Charades, and a student of literature and poetry.
        This led me to a new question: What is common knowledge? Is it something like: the grass is green, or if you don't feed your fish, it will die? Or might we wrongly assume that something like: the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, providing the energy a cell needs to live.
      Obviously not all people know about the inner-workings of the cell, but I wonder where we can draw the line between what can be considered common knowledge and what can not. What other things so we assume everyone knows?

How To: Criticize Professionals

        George Ouzounian, or Maddox, his online pen name, is the creator of the website iambetterthanyourkids.com, where people submit their children's art to him and he posts their work on his website along with a grade and a comment. Here are a couple of my favorite entries:

On his website, the blurb about himself reads:

"I was standing around in a co-worker's cubicle at my old job one day, and noticed that she had poorly drawn pictures hanging in her cubicle. So I told her they sucked. She took offense and brought to my attention that it was drawn by her 4-year-old nephew. It changed nothing. In fact, it only strengthened my resolve to grade children's artwork, because I don't think kids should get a free pass for being kids. Coddling children ruins them. Mozart wasn't coddled, and look at him: dead and famous. Most people will only ever accomplish being dead in life. Mozart accomplished two things."

 Do you agree or disagree with his justification and rational for grading children's drawings?

(If you like these, check out his YouTube channel.)

How To: Pretend To Forget About Racialism

Portlandia
Starring: Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein
17 Episodes, 2 Seasons
Fridays at 9:00pm on IFC
18-49 Demographic

How To: Be a Good Person

        But maybe you've been meaning to join a service club and haven't gotten around to it all year. Maybe you don't have time after school because of play rehearsals, sports practice, or a part time job.
         The phrase 'community service' has been changing over the years, especially at New Trier. What used to mean doing nice things for your community now has evolved into doing stuff you don't want to do in order to beef up your college applications. (Of course the urban dictionary definition is a little different, but that's to be expected.)

        If you are one of the students at New Trier who has volunteered many a time for causes you don't know much about, you're not alone. New Trier prides itself on its number of social service clubs, and tries to make it as easy as possible for students to spend one day a week after school helping underprivileged kids learn how to play an instrument or sports (and obviously much more).
        If that's you, you have an opportunity to make up for your lack of 'community service', or a chance to relive your guilt about not giving back at all tomorrow! New Trier's Peer Helping club hosts two blood drives every year, one of which was in October, and the other is tomorrow (Friday, February 24). Giving blood is a great way to help your community in a more measurable way, and Peer Helping makes it incredibly convenient.
        I give blood every 56 days, it's something I have been passionate about since I organized and hosted a blood drive via LifeSource at my middle school in 2008. There's no down side, so if you're eligible to donate I urge you to do so.
        If you have any questions about the process, please feel free to ask me, I'd love to help you set up an appointment at a donation center outside of New Trier if donating tomorrow is too short of notice for you.
        Whether you donate blood tomorrow or go to a service club every week, giving back to our community is an important part of becoming an adult. If you don't know what you're interested in, I recommend trying out as many clubs as possible until you find one that suits you, and in the mean time donating blood is perfect for those of us who hope to actually help our communities rather than do community service in order to convince schools you're worth admitting.

How To: Protect Your Home

        While walking my dog this afternoon, I began to notice these kinds of placards on the lawns of every single house for a couple of blocks, but when I crossed a busy street into a separate grouping of houses, none of them had these security systems. When I asked my dad about them, and why our house doesn't have one of these systems, he replied that ten years ago none of the houses around us had them, and they slowly began cropping up one by one.

       My first thought was that people were buying them to make their homes more safe. But if that were the case, why would only people on a certain block have them?

        Then I started thinking that people were buying these systems out of paranoia. If a robber looking for a house to pillage, and a couple of your neighbors had these types of security systems, wouldn't that make your home seem more easily accessible to a possible burglar? With that mindset, it's no surprise that one street is ADT protected, and the next is not. 

       The graph shows how the stocks of Tyco, the company that owns ADT, have been gradually increasing over the past ten years. (The drop near the middle is due to the '08 crash.) 

        The ADT website says that their product will allow customers to: 

"Get the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the #1 security company in America is helping protect your family and home,"

Is it possible that their increase in sales is due to the paranoia caused by not having their systems? What other products do we own that are for "peace of mind" rather than functionality?

How To: Be Afraid of Heights

         Some see thrill seeker Dean Potter as crazy, others see him as a hero. No matter what your opinion of him is, you must admit he's got guts.
        Now, I don't know anything about this guy other than what I read about him on his Wikipedia page linked above and what's featured in the video, but I'd have a hard time believing that when he was in high school he knew he wanted to break the world record for the longest base jump ever achieved by man.
        Do you think in 25 years you'll be doing anything like this?

How To: Register for Classes

        Looking to my left now I see my father's bookshelf, which contains hundreds of novels, non-fictions, and guidebooks. But the ones that catch my eye are his old textbooks from college, Intermediate Accounting and The Fundamentals of Marketing for example. Upon request he revealed to me that going into college, his intention was to become a marketer and an accountant, yet his job today could not be more unrelated to both.

        While conducting my oral history interview with the owner of Guitar Works in Evanston at the beginning of the semester, I found that he also ended up on a different path than the collegate system had intended. It's obvious that his years studying geology ended up having no relevance to his career as a small business owner. 

        More examples of college learnings not playing significant roles in the lives of graduates are out there, but I will spare you their stories. I am not suggesting that a college experience cannot enrich people's lives; for the most part it does. 

        What I am suggesting is that all of us registering for senior classes should try to avoid flow-charting our lives. By this I mean consciously disproving the thought that all the classes we take next year will have great effect on us for the rest of our lives. At this point, the most important thing is to enroll in classes that interest us, and gradually get a more specific idea of what we may or may not want to do in the future. The best that we can do as students is hope that we learn about things that we like, and if we're lucky these things will have something do with our occupations later in life.

How To: Categorize Art Incorrectly

       The music video featured above for the song All Your Light by Portugal, the Man is very similar to another music video I blogged about earlier in the year. In case you haven't seen it, here it is:

        A conversation I had with a fellow fan of both bands sparked this blogpost, because she told me that both videos were created by the same artist. This seemed almost obvious after she shared this fact with me; of course they were made by the same person. They're so similar, right?
        Wrong. After doing some more research, I realized that this was not true at all. The Portugal, The Man video was made by Justin Kramer and Lee Hardcastle, whereas the Grizzly Bear video was made by Allison Schulnik ( <-- check out her website, her work is outstanding!).
        But why did it excite me that these two works of art might have been by the same person? Was it because I was simply glad to hear that two of my favorite bands had collaborated with the same artist, or was it because I felt like this new information gave me a deeper insight into the behind the scenes process for the creation of these videos? Maybe.
        How do you think it would change your view of these two works if they were authored by the same person?

How To: Avoid Brainwashing

         This silkscreen, a piece by Jay Ryan, comments on American Studies in regards to the disconnection between the citizens of our nation and the issues we are faced with, and to the stories the media tells us of the world’s events.
        The way that Ryan depicts the cats(?) looking at the painting of the volcano parallels with how many Americans watch as world events unfold before them on the news as if they aren’t connected to them, and will therefore not be affected. When we listened to the RadioLab about memory in class, we learned that whenever you remember an event that occurred to you, you are simply recreating your own memory of what your experience was. This recreation is slightly altered each time, possibly resulting in an entirely different memory after time. For example: I was sitting at my kitchen table eating pancakes while my parents were both huddled around the small TV next to the stove as the second airplane struck the World Trade Center. (This setup was the same on the day that George Harrison died, and I will always associate the two events with the same level of severity, despite my knowledge that this is not the case.) In a way, I was like one of the cats staring up at something I wasn’t quite sure what to make of. It wasn’t until much later that the historical weight of 9/11 took hold for me, and that is because for years after the event, I would always think of pancakes when it was mentioned and not give it much more thought.
         Similar to how the media is inadvertently making world news feel more disconnected to our daily lives as Americans, the media is also relaying the worlds events to us in its own way, perhaps telling a story instead of handing over facts. In the context of Ryan’s piece, the cats see a volcano because Ryan intended for the cats (his audience) to see a volcano. If a majority of the news available to us has been pre-filtered by the media, how can we differentiate between pure facts and the ones being spoon-fed to us? During the Perilous Times: Cold War presentation, we learned that propaganda on the radio and on television resulted in the Red Scare. Today, news companies that support the Republican Party make it seem as if the Democrats are thwarting to ruin our nation, and the same is true for the Democratic news companies. Is the media setting us against ourselves the same way it set Cold War era Americans against people who may have had connections with Communism? We learned during our group work about secret messages that almost everything has a hidden connotation, and as subjects of the media we should be aware of the effect these messages can have on us. In my first blogpost, I wrote, “If secret messages are present in what is supposed to be innocent children's books, it makes sense to assume that they are also common in the media, pop culture, and just about anything else you might come across.” How have these messages already affected the way that we make political decisions?
         Ryan’s piece, although was used simply as a concert poster, warns its audience about the feeling of disconnection we may have from events going on around the world, and about being subject to the media’s sometimes ulterior motives to presenting us with their version of the facts.

How To: Account for the Nonexistent (The MetaPost!)

        It's not news to anyone that teenagers are bad at managing their time, prioritizing, and focusing on their schoolwork.  As the semester began coming to its close a week or two ago, I became increasingly aware of how my procrastination has accumulated over these past few months. Specifically for American Studies, considering the absence of a traditional grading system, the number of blogposts each of my classmates and I have published is the most easily-accessible and concrete way for us to get a feel for where we're at grade-wise in the class.
        (At this point, I would like to clarify that I am not using this meta-post as a means to make excuses for my lack of blogposts. I am simply extending a helpful arm to those of my piers who, like myself, made a sincere attempt at conquering the blogpost assignment, and were wildly unsuccessful.)
        To those in my class like Kathleen and Betsy, who are either New Trier's most disciplined students or are natural born bloggers (or quite possibly both), I commend your dedication to the task at hand. Not to say that those two are the only ones who religiously blogged every week, but I personally found Kathleen and Betsy's writing to be interesting and informative a majority of the time. As both a writer and reader of our class's blogs, I am painfully aware of how difficult that is to pull off.
      As I was blogging, I found the 'Boring Idea' to be a rampant cause of death for the hefty collection of half-finished blogposts that are now reluctantly in my possession. These ideas are typically caused by a shortage of time and inspiration, which left me desperately trying to crank out a post, regardless of its content.
        I have learned that blogposts are products that the writer is attempting to sell to all readers. Beginning with the first word of a post, the writers mission is to convince the reader that they are not wasting their time. If you're Mr. Bolos or Mr. O'Connor, you only blog about things that you're passionate about, and it keeps the reader wanting more.
        Of all the blogposts that I wrote this past semester, the ones I find the most interesting are the ones that I didn't force myself to write. It's no secret that our blogs are a weekly assignment, but I would be more proud of myself if I could write a couple of posts like Interpreting Creativity or Getting To Know Someone than a surplus of the sad excuse for a blogpost that I forced myself to write about a current event I found pretty uninteresting.
         Keep an extra pair of socks on you next semester, because my blogposts might knock them right off. And if they turn out just as boring as they were this past semester, maybe me and blogging aren't meant to be after all. We'll see.