Looking to Deep? Is it Possible

In English101 class we do a lot analyzing. We try and figure out of what the artists of songs mean by there music and there videos.  We come up with theories based on what the lyrics say, what the video say, and what the two say combined. In the end we always have at least 4 theories that all make sense. Sometimes 2 of them being polar opposites.

What Does This Mean?

What I've discovered by doing these exercises in class is that lot's of time you can make things say what you want them to say. Yes, there are times when it's clearly black and white what's being said, but other times you can make the artist say whatever you want. 

If I was an artist I'd want to be careful about making anything other than black and white. That is of course if I'm trying to get across a specific message. If I don't care what message I'm delivering is, then it doesn't matter what I do to deliver it.  

I don't think that the script writers of the music videos always have as much put into the videos as people take away. Yes, I'm sure there are some aspects in the videos that are supposed to express what the artist is saying with the song, but not everything. One of the videos we watched in class was "Marilyn Manson - Beautiful People" This video clearly a lot of work went into the visuals. Yet videos like "Miley Cyrus - Wrecking Ball" probably didn't have a lot of thought put into how the visuals connected with the lyrics. I could come up with a ton of meanings though. She could be tearing down the walls put up around women, making it a song about gender. It could be a song about doing whatever you want. Walls can be torn down but it's okay as long as you're being who you want to be. 

There are other meanings for "Wrecking Ball" that you could come up with if you actually put time into thinking about it. It could also just be that someone wrote that song, and to make more money Miley Cyrus needed a music video. So she put herself mostly exposed on a ball swinging back and forth knocking down walls. Two things guys like the most girls and demolition. 

Can we Prevent it?

Is there a way we can prevent overthinking? How do we know if we're just trying to make the song say what we think it should? The best way to prevent this is to keep the lyrics and music video together as one.  Once you separate them there become a lot more possibilities for meanings.  

That goes for anything that you're analyzing. If there are multiple parts, then keep them together. Another way is to look at what the beliefs of the artist or author are. Ten out of ten times they'll be writing towards their beliefs. (Unless it's for a college paper.) I'm sure if you looked hard enough you could find some exceptions, but I'm sure you'd find those exceptions by finding who flip flops what they say they believe.

What to Analyze 

We shouldn't even be spending as much time analyzing things from pop culture as we do. All of pop culture is highly disposable. What's popular today, won't be popular tomorrow.  If we are going to analyze things as deeply as we do, then why not look into Mozart or Beethoven? Look into the writings of Homer, or Aristotle?

We don't gain very much from analyzing all of the pop culture works. It's just people giving their view point of current cultural events to thousands, through songs or writing. To think that they know better than any other one of us would be a logical fallacy of authority. 

Conclusion

We can look to deeply into things. But we often end up looking for a meanings so deep that they don't exist, because of the society we live in. We don't have to though. We can avoid wasting our time by keeping the parts of a work together, and analyzing only things that matter.

Thank you for taking time out of your day to read my blog. Follow me on instagram or twitter @seth_pickel

Instructors Draft For the Autobiographical Narrative

This is my instructors draft for the autobiographical narrative. It's the next step to my first completed college paper. As you can see there are next to no changes from my peer review draft. If you have any changes you think I should make, or any comments, then leave a comment.

Story

1

Seth

Mrs.

English 101

September 1, 2013

Autobiographical Narrative

It was midnight. I woke up. I quickly climbed out of my bed and ran down the stairs. I heard my

Mom screaming at the top of her lungs, “Turn it off!! Turn it off!!” My Dad and siblings were rapidly approaching me from behind. We were all wondering what was going on as we rushed to my Mom. “Turn off the water.” she screamed as we made it to her. My Dad rushed down the stairs into the basement. The water was up past his ankles. There was water dripping from the ceiling onto him just as though it was raining. My Mom was still screaming. My brother, sister and I were trying to figure out what we were going to do. There was so much water this time.

Our house had flooded before because of the washing machine, but never this bad. This time there was water covering the first floor and filling the basement. Once just recently the washing machine had backed up and flooded the basement, but that just required us to replace the floor and some drywall in the basement. This time it was way worse.

My Mom was out of her mind. She could see all of the damage that was done and it was driving her insane. My Dad came up the stairs after he had turned off the water. He began trying to calm her. I got my brother and sister and we started moving stuff upstairs into the garage in order to salvage as much as we could. First came the pictures. Most of the containers had been filled with water. We knew we were going to lose a lot of them and we tried to hide it from my Mom as my Dad continued to calm her. Next came all of the bins of clothing, then the boxes that contained the things my Mom wanted to remember from when we were little. Finally we started bringing out the food and other miscellaneous items. Moving all of this stuff to the garage took what felt like hours and hours of work, but we finished in just over two hours.

For the first hour there was still water dripping from the basement ceiling. It felt like it was raining on us as we trudged through the water and carried everything up to the garage. We were exhausted from carrying everything up the flight of stairs. It was two o'clock in the morning. I had a full day of work starting at eight that morning. We thought we were done, but we had to continue to work. All of the china, the dishes from lower cabinets, and books from my moms office had to be carried up into our bonus room on the second story. About an hour later we had finished all of that. Everyone was extremely tired.

My Mom had been frantically making phone calls trying to find a company to come and start drying everything out. Once all of our belongings were in a safe place we began trying to get the water out of our house. We started using our shop vacuum to suck up all of the water in the basement. Lucky for us after the water had stopped pouring into the basement it started to drain through the sub pump. On the first floor we were using squeegees to push the water out the front and back doors.

At four o'clock a company called Serv-pro showed up. They began moving their equipment into our house. We had all of the standing water out, but now they had to get everything below the floor, in the walls, in the ceilings, and in the carpet dried out.

My Dad and I began looking for what caused all of the destruction. We looked for a leak from the washer. We looked at the face of the washer. We looked where the hose connects to the faucet, and where the hose connects to the washer. We didn't find anything. We were tired and couldn't think of where it could be. We knew it was the washer, but where?

It was five o'clock in the morning. I had to be at work in three hours. I was sent to get a shower and to try and get some sleep. I woke up a few minutes before I had to leave. I got dressed and went to

work.

When I got home that night I had a lot of questions to ask about the house. My parents had a lot of answers, but not all of them. There were a lot of fans and dehumidifiers. The house was hot and loud. When I got home I discovered that we had lost our furnace. There was no way of cooling the house. It was hot outside, and supposed to be hotter the next day. The house was almost 96 degrees upstairs. It was loud everywhere in the house. The sound of the fans echoed throughout.

My Dad figured out during the day that the hose to the washer is what caused the flooding. The pressure through it was to high and had caused it to burst. After 9/11 it became a government mandate to put a compression tank on all water heaters. The point of the compression tank is to prevent people from being able to pump anything into the cities water supply. Our compression tank, which is supposed to be filled with air, was filled with water. There was no way for the system to regulate the pressure and it caused the hose to burst. It was decided that there were about 3600 gallons of water that had spewed from the hose into our house.

We spent that first night in a hotel. We didn't know that we'd be spending the next four weeks in a hotel as we waited for our house to be dried out, and a furnace to be put in. It was almost like moving out of our house. We had to box everything up that was on the first floor and in the basement. We had to load everything into trucks and bring it to a storage unit.

There was a lot of demolition that had to be done. The basement ceiling needed to be torn out and the flooring on the first floor needed to all come out, then we needed to fix what we had demolished. Serv-pro took out the tile on the first floor. We had to remove the basement ceiling, all of the carpet, and all of the hardwood on the first floor.

It was hard to achieve, or make progress on the house during the summer because someone was at a camp almost every week. That meant more work for everyone else. When we were home we couldn't do things with our friends, because we had to work at our house with our free time. Overall it made our summer much worse then we had expected.

The flood happened almost three months ago now. We've been mostly grilling out, or eating out. We have no kitchen, just a refrigerator. We've learned a lot about contracting, construction, and handling money.

While losing so much seems like a bad thing. There are many good things that can be found as well. We have been able to update many things in our house. We were able to rewire things that had bothered my parents since we moved in. Yes it has been a lot of work, but it's been worth it so far.

Life can be very trying for anyone. If you can't find any good, then it will be even more trying. This experience could have been a very bad one for my family. If we just focused on everything we lost, and ignored what we had gained these last months would have been very depressing.

Conclusion 

Thank you for reading my paper. I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to follow me on instagram or twitter @seth_pickel

The College Way of Thinking

In college you will learn how to think. But not really. You'll just learn another way to see things. You'll be told it's the only way to look at things. If you go against the status quo, or form your own opinions you'll be ousted, called names, and made to be an outcast.

What to do? 

So how do you deal with this? Do you just go with the flow, or do you form your own thoughts and opinions? They'll tell you to challenge what people say and to think critically of it. When you do actually go and form your opinion you're told that your thinking to extremly, or that your thoughts don't make sense just because. 

The Point of College

As I was going into college I believed that the point was a higher education. I thought it was

supposed to help me put my education on a platform, not a soapbox, as my English101 teacher would say. 

My first few classes in college involved me being told to think critically of everything, then that being followed by being told how I should see everything. Watching a disqusting music video, and reading lyrics that attacked multiple groups of people, argued for fascism (Anyone remember that guy Hitler?) and used very foul language. All of these items considered good. Does that help me raise the level of my education? Filling my head with foul language, and ideas that fascism is a good thing. 

The teacher asked why the singers target audience was teenagers. One of my fellow classmates raised his hand. The teacher called on him and he said, "Because we're teens you can change our minds the easiest of any groups." The teacher responded, "Exactly! That's why it's good that you're here now!" Does this shock anyone? 

From a glance it seems like telling everyone how to think and what to think is a good thing. Everyone would agree on everything, and everyone would think the right things. But who has the power to choose what the right thing to think is? If I don't believe in homosexual marriages, then that's my right as an American. As long as I'm not harming them why can't I have that opinion? In college though you are taught that to think anything other than gay marriage as being okay is a very bad thing. 

I picked gay marriage because it's a very hot topic right now, but it's the same thing for every other topic. 

Conclusion

Don't go to college to be taught how to think. Go to college to practice your ability to think and reason. Remember though, to be able to practice something you must already possess the skill. College doesn't have to be a waste.

Follow me on twitter and instagram @seth_pickel

My Writing Process at the Beginning

I've just started my first college class. Let me tell you my process for writing a paper.

The Process...

Before I start writing I always come up with some sort of topic. Sometimes that topic is given to me

by a teacher, others times I come up with it on my own.

Once I have the topic for my paper I begin an outline. With the outline I try to shape the structure of the story. Depending on what the paper is on/ for will determine how precise the outline is. Some of my outlines lay out every sentence, others paragraphs, and others just topics of the paper. 

Once I have the outline I begin writing. Normally my first draft is really long, because I write down everything that comes to mind and give as much detail as I can. I write all the way through the paper. (Just being a Freshman in College means that I'm lucky and none of my papers have been very long.) If I do happen to get stuck along the way I'll go over and make some corrections on earlier paragraphs. Once I've taken a little break I'll normally be able to get back into it, but if I can't finish out the paper I'll fill the rest of the time that I've set aside with making the needed to corrections to the rest of the already written paper. The next chance I get to write I'll hammer out the rest of the paper.

Once I have my rough draft I'll go through making spelling and grammar corrections. I'll also cut it down to the desirable length. Once I have a draft that I am happy with I'll normally have a family member, or friend, peer review and give me their thoughts. I'll make some changes according to what they said. I don't normally make all of the suggested changes.

After it's been peer reviewed I'll then bring it into class. At PNC there are three parts to submitting a paper, a Peer review, an Instructor review, then you turn in the final draft.  For the reviews you only make the changes you want to. You are not forced to make all of the changes that your teacher and fellow students say you should. Some of their ideas might give you a new angle and some better ideas, so why use theirs? 

Tips

I find that taking a break of a day or so from your first draft is a great helper in taking an objective view of your paper. Sometimes you'll read it the next day and ask yourself how it was even possible that you wrote what you did. (Now that could be because it's so good, or so bad. Both of those two outcomes will surface in your writing career. However, it'll mostly just be the later)

Another tip would be to copy and paste your paper into google translate, and have google read you your paper. This is a great way to check for spelling and grammar errors, or have someone peer review it if you don't have someone for that job.

I wouldn't try to add big words or good descriptions while writing your first draft, unless it comes naturally. The reason being that you should be thinking about what you're going to say at that point. Not how you're going to say it.  That part comes later. 

First Draft of a College Paper

This is my first draft for a college paper. It is for the class English101 at Purdue North Central.

The Process 

In this writing class we go through a three step process to get our final drafts. First we write a draft
which is turned in for a peer review. After our papers have been reviewed we make necessary changes, then we submit it for an Instructor review. We make the changes that we want to make, then we turn in our final draft.

This particular paper is an autobiographical narrative.

The Story 

Fickel 1

Seth

English 101

September 1, 2013

Autobiographical Narrative

It was midnight. I woke up. I quickly climbed out of my bed and ran down the stairs. I heard my Mom screaming at the top of her lungs, “Turn it off!! Turn it off!!” My Dad and siblings were rapidly approaching me from behind. We were all wondering what was going on as we rushed to my Mom. “Turn off the water.” she screamed as we made it to her. My Dad rushed down the stairs into the basement. The water was up past his ankles. There was water dripping from the ceiling onto him just as though it was raining. My Mom was still screaming. My brother, sister and I were trying to figure out what we were going to do. There was so much water this time.

Our house had flooded before because of the washing machine, but never this bad. This time there was water covering the first floor and filling the basement. Once just recently the washing machine had backed up and flooded the basement, but that just required us to replace the floor and some drywall in the basement. This time it was way worse.

My Mom was out of her mind. She could see all of the damage that was done and it was driving her insane. My Dad came up the stairs after he had turned off the water. He began trying to calm her. I got my brother and sister and we started moving stuff upstairs into the garage in order to salvage as much as we could. First came the pictures. Most of the containers had been filled with water. We knew we were going to lose a lot of them and we tried to hide it from my Mom as my Dad continued to calm her. Next came all of the bins of

clothing, then the boxes that contained the things my Mom wanted to remember from when we were little. Finally we started bringing out the food and other miscellaneous items. Moving all of this stuff to the garage took what felt like hours and hours of work, but we finished in just over two hours.

For the first hour there was still water dripping from the basement ceiling. It felt like it was raining on us as we trudged through the water and carried everything up to the garage. We were exhausted from carrying everything up the flight of stairs. It was two o'clock in the morning. I had a full day of work starting at eight that morning. We thought we were done, but we had to continue to work. All of the china, the dishes from lower cabinets, and books from my moms office had to be carried up into our bonus room on the second story. About an hour later we had finished all of that. Everyone was extremely tired.

My Mom had been frantically making phone calls trying to find a company to come and start drying everything out. Once all of our belongings were in a safe place we began trying to get the water out of our house. We started using our shop vacuum to suck up all of the water in the basement. Lucky for us after the water had stopped pouring into the basement it started to drain through the sub pump. On the first floor we were using squeegees to push the water out the front and back doors.

At four o'clock a company called Serv-pro showed up. They began moving their equipment into our house. We had all of the standing water out, but now they had to get everything below the floor, in the walls, in the ceilings, and in the carpet dried out.

My Dad and I began looking for what caused all of the destruction. We looked for a leak from the washer. We looked at the face of the washer. We looked where the hose connects to the faucet, and where the hose connects to the washer. We didn't find anything. We were tired and couldn't think of where it could be. We knew it was the washer, but where?

It was five o'clock in the morning. I had to be at work in three hours. I was sent to get a shower and to try and get some sleep. I woke up a few minutes before I had to leave. Got dressed and went to

work.

When I got home that night I had a lot of questions to ask about the house. My parents had a lot of answers, but not all of them. There were a lot of fans and dehumidifiers. The house was hot and loud. When I got home I discovered that we had lost our furnace. There was no way of cooling the house. It was hot outside, and supposed to be hotter the next day. The house was almost 96 degrees upstairs. It was loud everywhere in the house. The sound of the fans echoed throughout.

My Dad figured out during the day that the hose to the washer is what caused the flooding. The pressure through it was to high and had caused it to burst. After 9/11 it became a government mandate to put a compression tank on all water heaters. The point of the compression tank is to prevent people from being able to pump anything into the cities water supply. Our compression tank, which is supposed to be filled with air, was filled with water. There was no way for the system to regulate the pressure and it caused the hose to burst. It was decided that there were about 3600 gallons of water that had spewed from the hose into our house.

We spent that first night in a hotel. We didn't know that we'd be spending the next four weeks in a hotel as we waited for our house to be dried out, and a furnace to be put in. It was almost like moving out of our house. We had to box everything up that was on the first floor and in the basement. We had to load everything into trucks and bring it to a storage unit.

There was a lot of demolition that had to be done. The basement ceiling needed to be torn out and the flooring on the first floor needed to all come out, then we needed to fix what we had demolished. Serv-pro took out the tile on the first floor. We had to remove the basement ceiling, all of the carpet, and all of the hardwood on the first floor.

It was hard to achieve, or make progress on the house during the summer because someone was at a camp almost every week. That meant more work for everyone else. When we were home we couldn't do things with our friends, because we had to work at our house with our free time. Overall it made our summer much worse then we had expected.

The flood happened almost three months ago now. We've been mostly grilling out, or eating out. We have no kitchen, just a refrigerator. We've learned a lot about contracting, construction, and handling money.

While losing so much seems like a bad thing. There are many good things that can be found as well. We have been able to update many things in our house. We were able to rewire things that had bothered my parents since we moved in. Yes it has been a lot of work, but it's been worth it so far.

Life can be very trying for anyone. If you can't find any good, then it will be even more trying. This experience could have been a very bad one for my family. If we just focused on everything we lost, and ignored what we had gained these last months would have been very depressing.

Conclusion 

Let me know what you think about the story! If you want to get a better idea of who I am, then follow me on twitter or instagram @seth_pickel

Thank you for taking the time to read my writing.