Cover Letter

Dear Reader,

            I came into this English 115 not knowing what to expect to learn from this class. Feeling like I already knew the basics of English, I should already know how to write a strong and successful paper at college level, but I was wrong. There was so much I had not learned about from my previous classes and all the different styles of papers you can write. Me being a third year college student in a freshman class made it very difficult for me in the first couple of weeks. I didn’t think I knew everything there was to writing, but having an older mentality than most of the students in the class I felt I had a slight advantage in taking this English course, man was I wrong. Feeling like I had seniority had kind of held me back in the beginning, but as the course went on, I started to notice that I could learn a lot from this course because there was still a lot of learning about writing that I never touched upon. My writing was average when I began this course, but being naive I felt like it would be advanced for an English 115 class, but I soon found out that it was actually a little below average. This course has inspired me to improve my writing and also how to read and comprehend effectively. I have always wanted to be a stronger writer and in the past classes I have taken, it had all been the same teaching methods so I was hoping that this class would really go into detail by taking me through the process step-by-step of how to truly improve my English fundamentals.

            After I had let my guard down and realized the amount of valuable information I could learn from this class, I started to see a positive change. Whenever I read for my English classes before, I would always read a line then have to go back to certain lines because I would read sometimes and not comprehend any of it at all. I had learned about annotating this semester, which had really helped me read and retain the information I was reading about. Whenever I was confused by what the author was saying or trying to say, I would write a question down and then continue reading to see if the author had answered my question that I was not too sure about before. I had written personal essays in my life time, but none like in this class, the topics we wrote about were a lot more “personal” and wasn’t just another assignment we had to do, but one that we enjoyed writing and had taught me that writing could be fun and a way to express ourselves. On top of writing meaningful personal essays, I learned how to look into things in a lot more detailed perspective. Our second essay had a lot to do with the social media, and I had no clue how in depth you can go into something as small as a movie poster.  Many people just see a movie poster, but there can be so many little things in there that can describe what the movie is about or is there to catch a bystanders eye without them even noticing. I wrote my second essay about the movie, Step Brothers and to most people it is just an immature and funny movie and I even thought so at first before we started talking about movies and media in class. I looked into depth about the movie Step Brothers and saw that behind all the immature jokes and scenes, there was a valuable lesson and moral story behind it, which was to save and to hold on to the spirit of youth no matter how old we become. I would have never looked into something this deep before and write a whole essay on it. The last topic we are going over for our third essay was some what challenging because I have always been a fan of using technology, but being in this course I wanted to challenge myself, so I wrote a paper in a opposing view from how I felt. I had a much harder time writing this essay because it wasn’t feelings or information that I thought was true, but having to do research to try and support my argument of how technology is making us lazy. These three essays had taught me different styles of writing and how to break them down and to construct them successfully. This course has also taught me how to write an effective yet supportive thesis for my paper. I knew what a thesis was before this class, but through this class I had realized how important the thesis is for an essay because it is setting up and allowing the reader know what your whole essay is going to be about. English 115 had improved my writing and had opened my eyes a little more into the world of writing and I can say that my writing has improved immensely from where it was before looking through and editing my own papers throughout the semester.  Not only had my mind of the writing world increased exponentially, but I have learned so many different ways and tips of how to read and comprehend what I was reading and how to set up a strong paper with effective supporting evidence. In the future I will take all these helpful tips whether it be now in college or when I have job because many jobs include writing, whether it is for your job or to network with others. Most jobs also rely on reading, which I will know how to comprehend more efficiently and be able look into closer detail.

            What I have learned from English 115 will not only helps me for future references, but also will help me learn now as a college student. Everywhere we go there is something we have to read or write, it is how our universe communicates and grows from each other. All my classes I have now, I have to read and write in. So why do all colleges stress reading and writing if we are never going to use it in the future? It is because no matter how old we get or where we go in life, we will have to keep learning and growing and we can’t accomplish much without the key component of writing and reading. This English 115 may be a very miniscule thing in my life for the future, but what I have learned from this class has taught me many tips to that I will take with me to help lead me in the right direction and move on to bigger things in life. Sure this class was just another class I took, but in a few years from now it will be like any other class, most of us won’t remember exactly what we did exactly, but the knowledge we gained and tips we learned has helped shaped and lead us one step closer to where we stand today and what we will become tomorrow.

-Tyler Murata  

Step Brother Are Better Than No Brothers

 

            “Wash your dishes.” “Take out the trash.” “Clean up your room.” These were few of the many sentences we all dreaded as kids. When we were younger little tasks such as these made it seem like the hardest work we ever had to do. As we grow older, our parents sculpted us to become hard-working citizens of the United States. Sooner or later we found out that there are much bigger problems out in the world we have to worry about than having to do chores around the house, going to school, doing assignments, and passing classes. Before we know it, we’re at that point in our lives where it is all work and no play. We look back and wishing that the only problems we had to deal with was ‘taking out the trash.” We should all be thankful for the love and support that our parents gave us when we were younger, but in the movie Step Brothers two 40-year-old men are still being taken care of by their parents and they are forced to grow up and become a regular hard-working-citizens. Although the two main characters are older adults, they are portrayed as children and their parents want them to change who they are to meet the minimum requirements of what every parent expects of their child; to become successful. For many young people now, their parents force them to grow up so quickly to prepare for the future, so some kids do not get to experience their childhood and young adolescent years to their full potential. In today's society people are too worried about growing up fast and forget how important it is to be young. Does endeavoring the spirit of youth outweigh the qualities of being serious and reserved all the time?

            In the movie poster for Step Brothers, there are two older looking men at the bottom right corner that seem to be fighting against each other to get into the picture. They both look like the stereotypical "young brothers" in a picture, struggling to get a dominant position in a family picture but smiling in it to make the picture look nice. Also, they’re adults, and not children, which in the background is sort of white and blue mix that gives the poster the effect of looking like the background of an elementary school picture; making these older looking men look somewhat childish. To the side of their heads are the words " they grow up so fast" which is very ironic because they look pretty old, but they have the mind set of a much younger age group. The title of the movies are written in different colors to show that there can be a big difference between being step brothers with someone than being biologically related to them.

            The movie Step Brothers has many scenes in the movie where it shows how forcing people to grow up too quick can be a bad thing. Throughout the movie it shows the transition of two older men who have been living off their parents support and career their whole lives and how they change into your average hard working American citizen within a short time span. One of the earlier scenes in the movie it shows when Dale and Brennan first start to get along with each other. They had been enemies with each other because they were not used to living with each other, but soon find a common enemy who was Derek, Brennan’s younger successful brother. When they decided that they could be friends they decided to share things about themselves and treasuers that they kept secrets from each other. Although most would call these secrets unimportant or not of value, it was the little things that they shared with each other that made them extremely happy and appreciate their life. While they were “playing” the night before their interviews, their mom and dad told them to quiet down and go to sleep because they are too worried about their future. It is the things like that, that people forgot when they get older is to enjoy the little things that keep a person youthful and help them persevere through life. In the eyes of Dale and Brennan they were not focusing on their interview because they were too busy enjoying the small things in life with a friend. From the parent’s perspective they didn’t even notice the fact that their sons were bonding, but were more concerned about the interview. In order for a person to become successful both physically and mentally, we need to find the perfect medium of having fun as well as being productive at the same time. When a person is either too lackadaisical they may never find a future for themselves, where Dale and Brennan were headed at the beginning of the movie. At the same time, if you are too serious all the time and care too much about your future, it can be a bad thing like Brennan’s younger brother Derek as an example.

            In a scene in Step Brothers, Derek is introduced and he seems like he has everything going for him, he is rich and successful and talks about it all the time. When he comes over to meet the new family, he meets Dale for the first time and he gets into an argument with him and starts to harass Dale for being a loser in his eyes. In this scene, Dale says, “What is your problem, man?” Derek then responds, “My problem? I don't know. I don't have a problem, uh, Dale. In fact, I have the opposite of a problem. I made over 550K last year. How much did you make?” Dale then yells back, “It's not about money.” Derek then ends off with, “It's not about money? Well, for me, it's a little about money, and I made *that* much money last year.” Derek has been on a high horse his whole life and since he is so caught up in making money and being successful he lacks many different qualities that makes him a genuine person. He is clueless to his surroundings because he is only focused on himself; his kids are being raised as selfish and stuck up and his wife can’t stand him or her lifestyle, but is only with Derek because he has money. He can’t stop talking about himself and his only mentality is to become more rich and successful. In this way, the movie shows people who grow up too fast and only care about the future, can tend to forget who they are because they get too caught up in their work and stop realizing that there is more to life than just working all the time.

            In the last scene of this movie Dale and Brennan have some what realized what they wanted to do with their lives and have matured since their parents divorce. They end up both working together to host a huge event called “The Catalina Wine Mixer” where Brennan is hosting the event and Dale is catering it. During the event the band playing got kicked out and if there was no music, Brennan would be fired from his brother’s company. “The Catalina Wine Mixer” all depended on a past hobby Dale and Brennan used to do before they had jobs, which was playing music together. They were very hesitant on playing because they had put the past behind them already when they “grew up” and didn’t want to revert back to them old selves. The Father who has been hard on them their whole time about getting careers and growing up spoke to them and told them a story from when he was younger, “When I was a boy, I always wanted to be a dinosaur and I would run around the back yard chasing and growling at the neighborhood cats pretending to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur.  Then my dad yelled at me, Son, you’re 17 years old-grow up!” Dale and Brennan said, “Dad, your a human, you could never be a dinosaur. What’s your point?” He then says, “The point is, Don’t lose your dinosaur…Don’t lose your Dream!” Everyone when they are younger has a dream to become something, and as silly as this quote is, as people grow older they tend to lose their hopes and dreams of becoming something one day because they are not young anymore and start to see things as they are. The best part of being young or having a young spirit it that you are never too old to try and achieve the goals you want to accomplish. 

            Another movie I would like to compare to Step Brothers is another Will Ferrell movie called Elf. Will Ferrell plays a human elf named Buddy, who was accidentally abducted and raised as an elf his whole life. Santa one day lets buddy venture off to New York to find his biological father who was deemed on Santa’s bad list. While finding his father, Will Ferrell finds out that his real dad is a selfish father who puts his job over his wife and son Michael. The father kicks Buddy out of his house because he acts like a child, but then later the father is forced to take care of him and put up with his young and immature behaviors when he finds out that he is actually his son. Michael and Buddy become friends and when Buddy goes missing, so Michael busts into his dad’s meeting and yells at him to put family over his job for once and help him look for Buddy. They find in Central park trying to get Santa’s sleigh to work but would only work if they got enough people to believe in Santa was real. But it was difficult because the father had never believed in him. Every one began to believe in Santa, and thus Christmas was saved. Both Elf and Step Brothers emphasize the idea of how important it is to have a young mentality and to take notice in other things than just working and being serious all the time.

            Many people enjoy watching movies such as Step Brother or Elf because when we see these movies, it ignites a flame from within and makes us feel like we can achieve our long lost goals from when we were younger. When we were all younger, everyone had at least one crazy dream they hoped one day would come true, but as time went on we tell our selves it is unattainable or it will never happen. We stop seeing our dreams from a younger perspective and start to limit ourselves because we think in our society seems more realistic for ourselves in the future. Movies like these can be truly inspiring and should remind us all that having a youthful mind set is not always a bad thing because it opens up endless amounts of hopes and dreams before they can be labeled as unrealistic goals our society or parents have set for us.

            Step Brothers is a very funny and ridiculous movie, but it truly has a meaning and moral behind the story. What saved “ The Catalina Wine Mixer” was a good mix of responsibility as well as having fun every now and then. No matter how old we become physically, we can still remain youthful in the mind to live a healthier and better lives for ourselves. Cherishing the spirit of youth is important to everyone because as we all get older we tend to forget the little things in life that make us happy. Everyone has a dream when they’re younger, but as you start to get older you forget that dream because you think you we will never be able to attain that goal because we have more realistic and serious goals to focus on. That is why I think having a young mentality is so important because no matter how old we get, the spirit of youth can carry us forward and make realize that we still have time to achieve those life-long hopes and dreams we set when we were younger. 

 Works Cited

Judy Rakowsky, et al. "Will Ferrell." People 70.6 (2008): 30. Academic Search Elite. Web. 6 Dec. 2012.

"Step Brothers." Rolling Stone 1058 (2008): 99. Academic Search Elite. Web. 6 Dec. 2012.

Roark, David. "My Top 5 Christmas Movies." Christianity Today 55.12 (2011): 68. Academic Search Elite. Web. 6 Dec. 2012.

Kendal, Sarah, Philip Keeley, and Peter Callery. "Young People's Preferences For Emotional Well-Being Support In High School-A Focus Group Study." Journal Of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 24.4 (2011): 245-253. Academic Search Elite. Web. 6 Dec. 2012.

Mixed Up Me

Imagine being on an island, having everything you possibly need to live a luxurious life, everything you want being catered to you at your command and not having a single worry in life, but then out of nowhere the everything on that island disappears and you are left stranded alone by yourself to survive. That was what the transition from high school to college felt like for me.  During high school, my own luxurious island was living at home with my parents because I never had to worry about a single thing with all the love and support I had received from my parents. But going into college, I felt deserted and had no clue where or who I was anymore. College hit me like a ton of bricks and I was just not ready yet to live on my own because I didn’t know how. I was so content with the life I had that not even for a single second did I stop to think about how different college was going to be then high school. Being a third year student here at Cal State University, Northridge, I have seen many changes in myself, but the most drastic change of them all was my first year as a freshman at CSUN.

            Like many young adolescents on the journey to become adults, I have had many phases and personality changes in my life. In high school, I started off my first years as a very timid and shy person. Then after the occurrence of some dramatic events, I became an angry and aggressive individual because I had not yet how to cope with my feelings. After my phase of “hating everyone in the world” had cleared out of my system, I felt like a new person because I had became a very nice and outgoing person towards my last year. Although I was constantly changing throughout high school, a few characteristics that I held dearly to myself were being a very humble and genuine person. The first two years in high school I was timid and shy because I wasn’t comfortable with my new surroundings of being at a high school. There were so many new faces I had never seen and so much more to explore being in a huge campus compared to my middle school. I spent most of my time veered away from everyone and I kept to myself because I felt overwhelmed. I was like a ghost walking through the hallways my first year, because no one knew me or noticed that I even existed. I tried being nice to everyone, helping them with their homework and doing small, kind, gestures, but clearly it wasn’t enough to catch the attention of anyone. People still had no clue I even went to high school with them.  I grew very tired of not knowing anyone on campus so I started joining more clubs, running for student council and Associated Student Body (ASB), and playing on the basketball team. People slowly started to warm up to me, and I began getting more recognition on campus by being more active at school.  I started to enjoy how thing were going for me and I began to become comfortable with South Torrance High School and myself as an individual. Really throwing myself out there on campus, I had met many new people and had a group of people I could call my friends. Through this process of making new friends, I had even found myself a girlfriend who I really liked and cared about.

My girlfriend and I dated for a year, which is long time for a young high school student and I began to have a lot of strong feelings for her.  We would spend endless amounts of time together and when we weren’t together, we would either be constantly texting or talking to each other. I grew really attached to her, and just when I thought things were going the way I wanted, Janelle and I broke up and everything came spiraling down. After the breakup, I no longer had the desire to be happy and say hello to everyone I knew on campus, I became rather aggressive and short with people. This was a very dark phase in my life, and all I wanted to do was workout and confront anyone who I thought was looking at me in the wrong way. I gave up doing my small kind gestures and started doing little things to make people want to fight me because of all the bottled up anger I had. It took most of my junior year to recover from the break up, but in the end all the hardships I went through made me a better and mature person. I started to look at life on a much larger scale and grew tired of being angry and confrontational; I was tired of making other people angry just because I was angry. That is when I had came to a life-changing realization and decided to turn my life around.                

            My last year in high school I was very outgoing and I tried my best to be nice to everyone I saw. I had finally gotten over the break up and I felt great mentally and physically from all the working out I had done to keep myself busy. I was happy once again, and there was something about me being friendly to people that made me feel good about myself. I finished off high school being very well known, most spirited in the yearbook, and in my eyes one of the friendliest people in my class. Even though it took me until the last year of high school to realize the person that I wanted to become and even though I thought I had finally found my true identity, college came so soon and I was not prepared at all.

It was just like the first year of high school again. Reverting back to my old-ways, I was very shy and not so much timid, but more awkward towards people. I couldn’t hold a single conversation with anyone I met, and since my dorm was so big, I kept myself isolated from everyone. I thought I had already found the person I wanted to become, but college came so quick and was such a totally different lifestyle, that I became confused and very flustered. I was known as the awkward, shy, Asian kid and I was so upset with the person that I had become. I decided to take a really long look at myself and to reevaluate my life and change it.

            I set a couple of goals I wanted to achieve and personality traits that I wanted to strive for to become a better person. I wanted to become would be just like myself in high school, but a lot more mature and responsible. I knew this wasn’t going to be a one-day process, and so I took my transitions at my own pace, step by step. I looked at all the stuff that I used to do in my past that made me happy and started doing them again, such as playing basketball and working out.

Now that I am a junior in college I have seen my progress over the years and my steps seem to be headed in the right direction to who I wanted to become. I have many friends out here at CSUN and feel a lot more responsible when it comes to balancing my life. It is the little things in life that help you become the person you want to become because no one becomes successful in life instantaneously, but by working their way up piece by piece.  Not until this year did I truly feel comfortable at CSUN; I am slowly starting to mold into that very out going and likable person that I want to become again, but there is always more room for improvement. I also want to become a person who is more dedicated to my academics and driven to find a career that I love.

College is the time where anyone can start fresh and you can be whoever you want to be because nobody knows your past. I came into to college like a lost child, and so for the first year and a half I acted like one. Having my life more in order now, I have gotten a better grasp of who I am today and what I want to become. I want to become a very congenial person, with my head on straight at all times, and always striving to better myself and the people surrounding me. The person I want to become is somewhat conflicting, trying to be responsible for any work I have to do and making sure I have time to socialize and keep strong connections with others, but it is manageable with the right time and effort. From past experience, I became the person I didn’t want to become because I held myself back greatly and is the only person there is to blame. For all you knew college students, learn from my past mistakes and be yourselves, going into college at full force because the only person that can stop you from bettering yourself is you!

           

Artifical Minds

--> In this short story Artificial Minds it discusses the possibility of one day programming computers or robots to have artificial minds such as humans. Although we are not close yet, the possibility of computers having artificial minds can become true one day. Human are known for their freedom, creativity, having a soul, moral significance, and being responsible. Computers today can do things us humans can do and are able to do tasks even better such as the computer Deep Blue who defeated Kasparov in a game of Chess. For the people who lose feeling due to brain damage, pain is a very important part of the human body because signals send from the body to the brain that there is stress on the body. Say if we could replace the missing signals in the brain into data that could alert the body there is pain, that part of the brain would be functioning again but artificial now. Although it is one part of the brain it is still a part, and if we could figure out a way to “artificialize” every component of the brain neuron for neuron, thus the artificial brain will be complete. Just because a computer is programmed to do what it is told, doesn’t mean it cannot be creative like a human. In the example of Deep Blue winning in a game of chess against a human, Deep Blue did what it was programmed to do which was to play chess, but in a game of chess in order to win it takes creativity proving that both computers can do what they are programmed but yet still be creativity. Although we are miles away from creating the first artificial brain, reading this short story has shown that one-day, the possibility of making an artificial brain can become true.    

A.I.

  --> In this clip of the movie A.I. or Artificial Intelligence, it starts off explaining where our future world has came to, due to the world’s Green House gases, our ice caps have melted causing a rising in our sea level drowning many of our world’s major cities and wiping out most of our resources and starving many humans. In this new developed world now, over population has become a problem because it was way to big for the scarce amount of supply there is left for the world. The government was forced to regulate and put a license on pregnancy to reduce the human population. Thus, human-like robots called Meccas were created because they were never hungry or did not consume any resources humans needed. A group of humans who are in charge of creating Meccas start discussing about how all these robots look, talk, and carry themselves like real humans, but the models of robots they have made can do everything except love and dream. They now want to make a robot child that can love and dream, and is driven mainly to love their human owner like their own parent. They want to create the perfect child who is always loving, never changing or gets ill, and with all human couples out there who can not get a license this would be the perfect solution. They then to a problem that even if they do create the perfect Mecca child, what responsibilities do these humans have toward the child Mecca and if they will love the child as much as the child loves them. 

 

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

In the short story “ Gin, Television, and Social Surplus,” written by Clay Shirky is about how the amount of television is affecting our society from becoming productive. People today don’t realize how much free time they have and how productive we can be with our free time. Shirky explains that if even the smallest amount of people realized the amount of time they spend watching television and decided to cut back on it we would be so much productive and would make more time for cognitive surplus. The average human in the U.S spends 200 billion hours of a year of human thought watching television and 100 billion hours on ads when we could be using the billions of hours thinking about how to make our country better. The only problem is that people don’t think very much of how much they are thinking of television and the show they are watching when they are watching television and that we need to help people realize this. Clay says biggest concern is how to slowly make people realize how much they are using their cognitive surplus on useless unproductive things, when they can use it and deploy it into other productive things to make it useful.

            Clay Shirky was very optimistic in this short story but only talks about how television affects us as humans where else, Sherry Turkle talks about how multiple technology devices affect a person and our society.

           

Can You Hear Me Now?

-->In the short story, “Can You Hear Me Now,” written by Sherry Turkle is about the struggle between humans and how technology is determining the lives of where humans are headed. She says there are 5 troubles that are affecting humans making our lives more virtual than realistic. The first trouble is that “the virtual” is becoming reality and that with all these games where we can live a second realistic virtual life, where it is so much easier on people because there is no failure or disappointment because we can simply create it. The second failure is that our society is growing up in a world where there is constantly responding to technology such as e-mail, instant messaging, texting, and much more, but with all this kids growing up never learn the value of taking the time for the things that matter in real life. The third trouble is also about kids growing up, learning to be independent and to navigate your way around life used to be a rite of passage but with technology always at your side kids can look up how to get around or call their parents when they don’t know how to deal with something. Our generation has became dependent on technology and would not how to deal with a problem or navigate their way around if we don’t have any sort of technology with us. The fourth trouble is always living our life in the public, such as logging into Facebook or Myspace when in reality it could hurt us because no matter what, when we are on any of the social websites someone is always watching us. The fifth trouble is Split attention, we’ve been raised in a society where we have the opportunity to simply choose whom to give our attention to with the accessibility of talking to someone online then to the person in real life.

            Sherry Turkle was a little less optimistic in her short story about how technology is affecting us but I feel she gets the point across more than Clay Shirky because she states multiple valid reasons behind her reasons and does a very good job on supporting them.