FINAL PAPERRRRRRRR
REVISIONNNNNNNNNNN
And in the End, it’s Not the Years in your Life that Count. It’s the Life in your Years
“I” is something that can not be expressed in words, thoughts, or even in this essay that I am writing now. But writing this essay will only give a glimpse of who I really am. Expressing my thoughts through writing is going to help myself show the pain and the happiness that I experience through words. This is not a simple task as someone might think. Through the senses that I use most frequently; vision, taste and hearing. Not only will these senses give a perspective of how my writing affects my thinking but most importantly it shows who I really am.
Using all of the information from the previous semester, I have learned a lot about myself. I have learned what I need to improve as a writer and I have learned what aspects of writing I am good at. I loved writing my narrative essay about vision. I have found out that I really love helping people and I love listening to people through all of their stories and all that I have seen while attending the Work Camps with my church. It was an essay that described all the hurt and pain that I had seen when I went to D’Iberville, Mississippi to volunteer with hurricane Katrina victims. I had traveled there with my church youth group and a couple of head people in the church. I had seen so much devastation there that when I went home any time my
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parents asked me how my trip was, there were no words to describe my feelings and all of the important life lessons that I had gained from the experience.
During that week I had stayed with my work crew and we were in charge of cutting down trees that were harmful to the people who lived close to the damaged ones. We also went to a house to help a family move into that they had built after the destruction of the hurricane. My work crew leader was someone who I will never forget. He was in the Marines and he had gone to war multiple times. He had a ‘can do’ attitude that I really liked. He had a set goal and he never swayed from his intentions of helping the victims of the hurricane. He was someone that I look up to even now. He knew how to get the job done and he knew how to make the residents feel safe and secure while we were banging and cutting and scraping all of the bark and timber from the trees. I saw how he talked to the residents and victims of the hurricane with such ease and hopefulness. It made all of the victim’s pains and miseries melt away just like how butter melts on a hot and steamy pancake right off the grill.
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When we were helping the family move their furniture and personal items into the new house, the mother of the family was crying the whole time. She told us to take a break from moving all of the heavy stuff into the other room. She made us take out a photo album that was hidden behind one of the older beds. This particular album looked like it had been through a lot of wear and tear through out the years. But we all realized that the damage was from the hurricane. The outside of the album had been worn on the edges and there was clear evidence of water damage. When we looked inside, all of the pictures were smeared with different colors from the damage of the hurricane. The next excerpt is from my first essay that I had written in Marlen’s class about the owner of the album.
She showed me all of the photo albums that she had made that weren’t destroyed by the hurricane. I saw all of her family members, all of her crazy times in college and mainly most of her life. She had told me that many of her photo albums that had her children in them couldn’t be salvaged from the hurricane. After she told me that, she started to cry. She couldn’t hold in the emotion anymore than any one of us could. I saw the pain and frustration that she had to deal with in those few moments when she changed from confidence to uncertainty and vagueness. It actually scared me to see the look on her face when she was crying. Her whole world had been taken away in a matter of hours from the hurricane. I couldn’t even imagine what I would have done in her situation. I definitely can see her as a hero to me and to the people in my crew.
By writing that strong, descriptive paragraph, I can see that I knew that I wanted to help people in the career that I was going to set up for myself at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. That paragraph also shows how I want to make a difference in the world, even if it only involves spending a week helping people in need. I will be doing that all the time once I earn my teaching license and are able to help people broaden their horizons through the form of language.
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Knowing how I was able to use my helping as a tool for not only my career but also the hurricane victims, it had changed my whole outlook on life. There were so many hurricane victims, who signed up to have our Work Camp come and help their family in any way, but there weren’t enough people and there wasn’t enough time for us to help everyone. It was so sad to see the people on the other sides of the street and the neighbors of the people that we helped not getting any assistance what so ever. Knowing that we were there and that we had the potential to help more but we weren’t allowed to help, didn’t settle with me. I wanted to go so bad and learn more from every victim, to understand their pain, know more about them, and what they were going through. By doing this I would be able to get a glimpse into their lives and I could understand their sufferings better so I could connect with them on a personal level. I realized that in the end that they didn’t want a new table, new paint, new clothes, or anything like that. All that they wanted was someone to listen to their stories and to just be their friend. I wanted to be that person that they sought comfort in and the one that they knew would be there for them.
Once I went back home to Pennsylvania, something about me had changed. Not just because I went to Louisiana for my first time, but something bigger and more meaningful. My parents had just built a deck around my pool and it was finished by the time I came back home from Work Camp. Once I got all of my stuff put away from my suitcase into the washer, I went outside to see the new deck. I was sitting on it when all of a sudden I started thinking about how there is no way that any of the victims could ever even dream of having a pool with a brand new deck around it. I took so many things in my life for granted, even simple things as running water and sewage. I started crying as I saw the new two by fours freshly put in place by screws and nails, how the moonlight hit the water in my pool just right so I could still see the reflection of me crying and as I finally let myself see how people needed to appreciate what they have.
I looked at the wood grain and saw the marks of struggle just like how I saw all of the details of the victims that I had helped in D’Iberville, Mississippi when I looked at them. I saw
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each individual problem, happiness, and confusion in them just like I saw every swirl, and line in the wood grain. Once I saw this I started to cry. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know what came over me, but I liked it. It gave me a sense of humility and a sense of true vision and how I compared the two. I wasn’t grateful enough to get this beautiful work of art that was my deck. I realized there and then that I took a lot of things and a lot of people for granted. I now understood only a sliver of how people were hurting, and I went home to something that none of the victims would ever have like they had before. Going to Work Camp is an experience that I will never forget and I only hope that I have instilled some part of who I am in all of the people that I have touched through my experience at the camp. I am who I am because many of the trials and tribulations that I went through in Work Camp.
Another example of how I can explain who I really am through words is how I react with my family. This is an excerpt from my third blog entry:
My grandfather is the most stubborn person that you will ever meet, ever. When he had his second heart attack I knew he wouldn’t listen to anyone about how he needed to take more pills and how he needed to change his diet, but actually change his diet and not just say he would. I saw how he thought that everything was going to be fine if he refused the treatment, but I knew that the reality was if he didn’t start changing his ways, he wasn’t going to be with us much longer.
All of my family members urged him to just listen to the doctors before he made any decisions, and he flipped out saying that they don’t know what’s best for him. But he needed to understand that taking this medicine and changing his diet will not only save him from the pain that he was being put through now, but ultimately having a lesser chance of having another heart attack that could cost him his life.
When he had his second heart attack, that same night he was suppose to see me in my last musical at Blairsville. He had always came to every one of my musicals, dinner theaters, district chorus, marching band, county band, banquets, and this would be the first thing that he ever missed. I didn’t find out till recently that all
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that he kept saying when he was taken to the hospital was how he couldn’t miss my last musical. I went to the hospital that night and I saw him crying, I have never seen him cry before so my thoughts about a man who was never afraid or upset about anything were totally proved wrong by the reality of the situation that he was put in.
Knowing what I had written in the previous blog, I knew that I really care for my family. I also knew that it’s hard to think about the phrase “seeing is believing”. I saw how my grandfather was in the hospital and I knew that he was not only a stubborn man, but also a strong man. Seeing this beast of a man in such a sad and pathetic hospital made me think about how sometimes seeing actually isn’t believing. Anyone would associate a person in a hospital as someone who is weak and fragile, but were they wrong. My grandfather was such a strong person in every sense of the word. Physically, mentally, and most definitely, caring. I look up to him and seeing him in the hospital made me respect him even more for all of the pain that he was put through during the heart attack. He has shaped me into the person who I am today especially when I think back to him being in that pathetic hospital. What I saw in and after the hospital made me see who I really am and how I love my family dearly.
Now on to the sense of taste. In the essay that I wrote about taste I used the writing genre of a persuasive letter that I had written to the Vice President of the Dairy Queen corporation. I explained that I had found a new, fabulous, flavor of sundae that they should consider using in all of the Dairy Queen stores across the world.
It all happened one day in the summer month of June, when the taste of the air was like taking a breath of meringue and actually felt it slide down the esophagus, the wind hitting the cold, crisp vanilla ice cream of Dairy Queen, when the idea came to me about a peanut butter and jelly sundae. My job as manager of the store
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is to not only know how to deal with cranky customers but most importantly know, understand, and appreciate the ice cream. I made ice cream cakes, cupcakes, dilly bars, buster bars, pecan mudslides, banana splits, blizzards, strawberry short cakes, waffle bowl sundaes, and the list goes on.
Based on that part of my essay it is known that I know a lot about my ice cream. I am a manager at my hometown’s Dairy Queen. I absolutely love ice cream and any one of my friends know that. If I could eat ice cream every day, I definitely would. I love the texture of ice cream and I love the ice cold feeling I get when I eat it. My favorite cold treat at Dairy Queen are their waffle bowl sundaes. The way that it slides down your esophagus and into your stomach is a feeling that I could experience every second of my life. But then I wouldn’t be taking care of my body. The next part of the auto ethnography is how I had given up red meat and why this has happened.
Last March, after my boyfriend broke up with me, I had made the decision to give up red meat for a while. That means no bacon, hamburger, steak, sausage, or even my absolute favorite, beef jerky. I really don’t like breakfast food and so I knew that giving up bacon and sausage would be easy but I knew that giving up hamburgers would be really hard because at the Dairy Queen that I work at they also serve hot food such as hamburgers. I would still be able to eat poultry and sea food.
After reading what I had written down about how I kind of connected my decision to give up red meat after my boyfriend dumped me showed me how I was vulnerable and how that had impacted the way I was acting in school, with my family and ultimately with every encounter I had gone through. I felt that I needed to change my diet and I really wanted to start eating healthy. He hurt me and I didn’t know how to deal with the pain so I turned to exercising and trying to make a change in something that I would be able to control with the foods that I would
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eat. I also wanted to try to loose weight because I thought that no other guy would ever think that I was attractive after he broke up with me.
I know now that my thoughts were stupid but it was a really hard time in my life at the point and I wanted to make myself better. It might seem that I only made that decision because my emotions got the best of me but I really wanted to make a change in my life that would have positive effects. Since last March I have lost a total of 33 pounds and I am so proud of myself. I was also in our school’s version of the Biggest Loser which is a weight loss show on the television. We had programs after school that we were able to participate in and were able to exercise with our friends. I know now that I am healthier and I feel better about myself, not only physically but also mentally. This action that I did last year is definitely something that describes who I am because I still don’t eat red meat today and it also proves that once I put my mind to something that seems hard and troubling, I am able to over come it, even if it even ties in with the sense of taste.
Hearing is also another sense that I am able to use to understand myself. For our class’s hearing work shop Marlen had mentioned if anyone sang in the class. I do sing and I absolutely love it. The way that when I start a scale and the way that I start off a song with the slightest breath is something that makes me who I am today. This is a couple of sentences from my ‘About Me’ page of my blog:
I love singing and acting. I was involved in all my school’s musicals and dinner theaters and participated in band and chorus. I have been selected to be in District Chorus, County Chorus, County Band, and was Monday Music Club Student of the Month. I have also been involved in Music Camp for three years.
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This tells the reader that I have been involved with a lot of activities that involve hearing. When I am on stage acting, I have to be able to hear the other actors say my cue line for when I have to say my line next. I also have to listen to carefully placed lines that mean I should pick up a vase or move to a special place in our blocking of that scene. Hearing is very important not only in plays but also in the musicals that I have participated in. I have been in the musicals: West Side Story, H.M.S. Pinafore, Wizard of Oz, Beauty and the Beast (Wardrobe), Once Upon a Mattress (Lady Larkin), and Grease (Jan). With all of my knowledge of my theatrical techniques taught to be by my chorus teacher, I am able to know when to jump into character and deliver a performance that the audience will never forget.
I have never felt the way I feel when I am on that stage with all of the other cast members on opening night. Literally hearing all of the young cast member’s hearts beating a mile a minute makes me think back to when I looked up to the leads in the cast. How I envied them and their performances and how they were able to actually be someone else in front of an audience. They were always able to pump up the cast with their crazy antics such as making us listen to crazy music and dance to it while we were putting our makeup on and sorting out our costumes. Knowing what I had written above in my blog entry also shows how involved I was with my school and how I really too pride in the activities that I participated in.
Hearing also explains who I am in my fifth and final essay that I wrote about on hearing. Marlen told us to pick a topic that could somehow relate to our major in college. I’m majoring in Spanish Education. So my topic was the history of Latin music. I love Latin music and getting to write an essay about it made me really excited to not only write about something that I will be
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experiencing in the future, but also something that I truly love. The next excerpt is from my fifth essay.
The future of Latin music is something that can be predicted based on the combination of the cultural celebrations that involved music and also the more modern style of music that is being produced today. Recently Mexican rappers were becoming more famous for their songs in that they were being produced in their country, and also in the United States. Who can say what new and improved songs and different types of genres that can be produced through the new tastes that the ear longs to hear. Only time will tell what sensational songs the Latin community will produce. Knowing all the potential that the Latin community has in its music industry shows how they are so passionate for their music and how they are able to hear all of the amazing songs they have to offer to not only their country, but the entire world.
This piece shows how I am interested in the Latin culture and all that it has to offer in the field of music. It also reminds me of when I was in my Spanish IV class in high school; my teacher would always have his Mexican music playing when we entered the class. Being able to experience something new and exciting such as the new music that we were hearing for the first time makes me see how I am open to new possibilities as a person and that I am able to be accepting of other cultures and even intrigued by their different ways of making music.
By writing this paper it has come to my attention that I have a lot more to learn about the world around me that I’m living in today. I need to stop taking things for granted, stop and take a look at the beautiful scenery, taste every opportunity that comes my way and lastly I need to take the time to hear all of the possibilities of life.
And in the End, it’s Not the Years in your Life that Count. It’s the Life in your Years
“I” is something that can not be expressed in words, thoughts, or even in this essay that I am writing now. But writing this essay will only give a glimpse of who I really am. Expressing my thoughts through writing is going to help myself show the pain and the happiness that I experience through words. This is not a simple task as someone might think. Through the senses that I use most frequently; vision, taste and hearing.
Using all of the information from the previous semester, I have learned a lot about myself. I have learned what I need to improve as a writer and I have learned what aspects of writing I am good at. I loved writing my narrative essay about vision. I have found out that I really love helping people and I love listening to people through all of their stories and all that I have seen while I have attended the Work Camps that I have been on with my church. It was an essay that described all the hurt and pain that I had seen when I went to D’Iberville, Mississippi to volunteer with hurricane Katrina victims. I had traveled there with my church youth group and a couple of head people in the church. I had seen so much devastation there that when I went home any time my parents asked me how my trip was, there were no words to describe my feelings and all of the important life lessons that I had
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gained from the experience. During that week I had stayed with my work crew and we were in charge of cutting down trees that were harmful to the people who lived close to the damaged ones. We also went to a house to help a family move into that they had built after the destruction of the hurricane. My work crew leader was someone who I will never forget. He was in the Marines and he had gone to war multiple times. He had a ‘can do’ attitude that I really liked. He had a set goal and he never swayed from his intentions of helping the victims of the hurricane. He was someone that I look up to even now. He knew how to get the job done and he knew how to make the residents feel safe and secure while we were banging and cutting and scraping all of the bark and timber from the trees. I saw how he talked to the residents and victims of the hurricane with such ease and hopefulness. It made all of the victim’s pains and miseries melt away just like how butter melts on a hot and steamy pancake right off the grill.
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When we were helping the family move their furniture and personal items into the new house the mother of the family was crying the whole time. She told us to take a break from moving all of the heavy stuff into the other room. 
She made us take out a photo album that was hidden behind one of the older beds. This particular album looked like it had been through a lot of wear and tear through out the years. But we all realized that the damage was from the hurricane. The outside of the album had been worn on the edges and there was clear evidence of water damage. When we looked inside, all of the pictures were smeared with different colors from the damage of the hurricane. Some of the pictures even had mold on them from just being left in the album. She took her time going through all of her pictures saying who each and every person was, and if they were affected by the hurricane. She named at least 20 people who were in the album that had died in the hurricane. After each person she named who had passed away, I saw how hurt she had gotten as she went on further with each of the affected victims that were in the album. She started crying as she got to the last page because this particular person was her grandmother, who had been caught in the hurricane, had suffered greatly and had soon passed away. I saw her hurt and pain and I realized that I have never felt that way and I knew that I never wanted to either. Her cries were not only representing her pain and suffering, but ultimately it was symbolizing all of the victims of the hurricane and how they are dealing with the devastation in different ways.
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There were so many hurricane victims, who signed up to have our Work Camp come and help their family in any way, but there weren’t enough people and there wasn’t enough time for us to help everyone. It was so sad to see the people on the other sides of the street and the neighbors of the people that we helped not getting any assistance what so ever. Knowing that we were there and that we had the potential to help more but we weren’t allowed to help, didn’t settle with me. I wanted to go so bad and learn more from every victim, to understand their pain, know more about them, and what they were going through. By doing this I would be able to get a glimpse into their lives and I could understand their sufferings better so I could connect with them on a personal level. I realized that in the end that they didn’t want a new table, new paint, new clothes, or anything like that. All that they wanted was someone to listen to their stories and to just be their friend. I wanted to be that person that they sought comfort in and the one that they knew would be there for them.
While I was away at Work Camp, my parents had built a new deck on the pool that we had recently got. When I came back from Work Camp the first thing I saw at my house was my new, beautifully stained, deck. I saw all the details in the wood grain just at a first glance. It showed me the years and the obstacles that the tree had faced when it was going through its growing stage. I looked at the wood grain and saw the marks of struggle just like how I saw all of the details of the victims that I had helped in D’Iberville, Mississippi when I looked at them. I saw each individual problem, happiness, and confusion in them just like I saw every swirl, and line in the wood grain. Once I saw this I started to cry. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know what came over me, but I liked it. It gave me a sense of humility and a sense of true vision and how I
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compared the two. I wasn’t grateful enough to get this beautiful work of art that was my deck. I realized there and then that I took a lot of things and a lot of people for granted. I now understood only a sliver of how people were hurting, and I went home to something that none of the victims would ever have like they had before. Going to Work Camp is an experience that I will never forget and I only hope that I have instilled some part of who I am in all of the people that I have touched through my experience at the camp. I am who I am because many of the trials and tribulations that I went through in Work Camp.
Another example of how I can explain who I really am through words is how I react with my family.
My grandfather is the most stubborn person that you will ever meet, ever. When he had his second heart attack I knew he wouldn’t listen to anyone about how he needed to take more pills and how he needed to change his diet, but actually change his diet and not just say he would. I saw how he thought that everything was going to be fine if he refused the treatment, but I knew that the reality was if he didn’t start changing his ways, he wasn’t going to be with us much longer.
All of my family members urged him to just listen to the doctors before he made any decisions, and he flipped out saying that they don’t know what’s best for him. But he needed to understand that taking this medicine and changing his diet will not only save him from the pain that he was being put through now, but ultimately having a lesser chance of having another heart attack that could cost him his life.
When he had his second heart attack, that same night he was suppose to see me in my last musical at Blairsville. He had always came to every one of my musicals, dinner theaters, district chorus, marching band, county band, banquets, and this would be the first thing that he ever missed. I didn’t find out till recently that all that he kept saying when he was taken to the hospital was how he couldn’t miss my last musical. I went to the hospital that night and I saw him crying, I have never seen him cry before so my thoughts about a man who was never afraid or upset about anything were totally proved wrong by the reality of the situation that he was put in.
Additionally, you will write 2-3 paragraphs explaining how you will expand your paper at this point into a finished product: Which paragraphs need more work? Do you need more outside sources to support your argument? Do your paragraphs need stronger transition sentences? Choose a partner or group of partners and ask them to read and respond to what you have so far.
My first 5 pages were only on the topic of vision. So now I want to start and work on my other forms of senses and how they will explain better who I really am. My two other senses are hearing and taste. I can elaborate on the 3 years I had put in at our local Dairy Queen and how those experiences intertwine with taste and how it will better explain me. I will also go on to hearing part of the paper describing my love for Spanish as a language and also Hispanic music and how it will be used as a vehicle to answer the question what is “I”.
I think that some of my earlier paragraphs need more work than the rest of the others. I think that some of my paragraphs need better transition statements just to get the paragraphs flowing better.
