Month: November 2024

1. I agree with Bloom’s main argument that Empathy is overrated because people forget the actually meaning of empathy and sort of act as if giving empathy was a trend. People these days feel that if you do something for someone it means that in return that we deserve something back. Acts of empathy isn’t meant to reward you its meant to help other people and lift you guys both up emotionally not by being rewarded for something. However, I do disagree with some of his claims that he brings forth since all cases have exceptions and also when social media is involved there is an advantage over situations being broadcasted versus if they weren’t broadcasted. In addition, some of his examples he gave were more because the people in charge weren’t taking in other possibilities into consideration.
2. Bloom challenged me to really think on how I think on empathy because I know that I use empathy through life to try and help the people around me but just because I know how to use empathy doesn’t mean others do. Bloom brought that to my attention by mentioning the Sandy Hook incident somehow the people that saw it happen on the News thought that sending stuffed animals was a kind gesture to support the families that lost their child. While for some of them it may have come from good intentions but for others it was more a trend the town had asked for less donations, yet people still sent them. If I were to hear about the situation, I wouldn’t have taken such extreme measures like these other people had taken I don’t know the families and the impact this death had on them I would try to show condolence but at the same time give support and help if the families asked for help.
3. One claim Bloom states is that ” empathy is limited as well as it focuses on specific individuals” (2). After this quote he talks about the Sandy Hook incident and how it was treated. He compared it to shootings that happen in Chicago. When reading his I can understand how he says that empathy but these reasons why people felt more empathy for the Sandy Hook children compared to the Chicago shooting is the fact that the Sandy Hook shooting was broadcasted all over America too see it wasn’t limited to just the state of Connecticut to see all the states in America saw while in contrast we can guess that if shootings happened in Chicago it was only televised in the state of Illinois rather than in neighboring states. The spotlight affects that Bloom talks about more comes from the fact that social media is now involved, and people try to televise everything that’s happening.

Peer review at a college level was very different from when I did it in high school. In high school we practically never did peer review and the work was really just on us. During peer review I received feedback about how some of my claims were strong and how it was nice on how I used personal experiences to connect to the readings. I also got feedback on if there wasn’t something that wasn’t making a lot of sense or if the sentence got the reader tripped up. These types of comments helped me a lot because I already acknowledge that even though what I type makes a lot of sense to me when someone else reads it, it doesn’t make sense at all really or its confusing for them to actually get what I am trying to say. Reading a peer’s work allowed me to kind of get a sese of what others’ views for the essay are and they also help realize other connections points that I can make into my own writing. Reading another peer work also helped encourage me a little on my writing I struggle with writing and actually liking what I put down so seeing others messed up parts helps me in turn. The biggest challenge of Peer review was doing the whole time and finding new mistakes or new things to comment on. At a point there’s only so much I can say because I really don’t have that well of sentence level editing and if I already looked at the essay and made comments about certain things it’s because that’s what stood out to me the most. It was a challenge to continue revising when I still feel like I only have so much to offer in advice.

1. Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer who studied at the University of Cambridge. She also is a creative writer professor at New York University for a point in time. We should pay attention to what Smith has to say because of her creative writing background she finds different topics to write about that have a bigger meaning like her essay of “Joy”.
2. Smith distinguishes joy and pleasure as pleasure is an instant feeling of relief at hat is constant for example eating and ice pop for seven minutes for Smith pleasure your able to feel in shorts amount of time and you honestly forget about it once its happen. While Joy is an over heightened feeling that you don’t want to lose. You don’t want to lose it so bad that it can bring forth pain. Smith child for example if able to bring her joy but also pain if she were ever to lose that child. Smith’s interpretations are pretty eye opening to be seeing since I never thought of pleasure as something that I was having instead of Joy.
3. Joy is difficult to manage and live with because of the fact you are scared of losing it. I do agree with Smith that jo is difficult because it aligns with suffering you wouldn’t be able to feel any joy if you weren’t afraid to lose it since who wouldn’t want to be joyful its sort of like a drug once you have you don’t want to lose it. Smith uses her child as an example on how living with joy can be difficult. You have a mixture of terror, pain and delight when having a child (Smith 331). That child is such an innocent vessel that you are able to care for and as a parent compared to taking care of a pet you expect to die before you child however there the ever-looming fear of what’s to happen to your child the dangers of the world.
4. Joy is an underrated emotion that we all believe we hold value and have an understanding of, so we think we don’t need to talk about it a lot and often. However, when we begin to read about joy, we see other people’s interpretations reading about it makes us take in consideration other views on it and we then begin to implant those views ourselves. When we discuss joy with others, we bring in different experiences that cause Joy my joy comes from my family and little brother and little things in life while for others their Joy is found within the sports, they play activities they run or even sitting in the comfort of their room. Joy is a universal emotion that we all experience at one point but never really think about and take time to truly reflect on it. When we think about Joy were actually able to reflect on it and find our true joys in life. It may seem like a small thing to take into account but the smallest things in life have the biggest impact on life.
5. Smith’s essay overlaps with many of our previous reading such as Konnikova’s in relation to the relationships were able to maintain those physical interaction while also bringing forth Joy. Also connects to DFW speech since we also need to hold empathy for the people around us so that we can build connections and friendship if we didn’t we wouldn’t have anything to be joyful for. Joy also comes from the fact that we need to focus on our own happiness coming back to the mindset that we are the center of our own universe like DFW says when we focus on empathy.

1. With Gay suggesting that joy and pain are tangled with one another I fully agree with. My brain is able to wrap around it and realize that to have sorrow you must have felt a type of connection to it that brought about overwhelming emotions such as joy. Otherwise, there would be no real reason to have such an heightened emotion as sorrow. A human connection for example can bring forth joy and sorrow. My cousin Will for example, growing up my cousin Will was my favorite cousin he always was a silly person and always brought a smile to my face he also lived two hours away so when his side of the family came down it was my most favorite time of the year, I remember I would always look forward to seeing him. Background about him he was from my mom’s side of the family and my mom’s side wasn’t always my favorite side to visit but whenever Will’s family my Uncle Mike and Aunt Kathy and Cousin Will and Aj were my favorite. Will was like my older brother I did have an older brother that’s why I can’t say like the one I never had. Will and I also looked like siblings’ little fact about my family I’m actually the only kid in my family that’s black. When I was little, I noticed this, and I would often say I was adopted which is why I thought Will was my brother. In 7th grade February 10th I had just finished my basketball game I think we had won as I left I had seen my coach give my mom and sister a hug as we got into the car my mom gave me the McDonalds that they had left and gotten before they picked me up from basketball. I sat in the back and started to eat my food once we got off the highway my mom angled the dash mirror to look at me. My mom does this alot when she wants to talk with me when I’m in the back but I didn’t know what she wanted to talk about this time she begins talking about how we need to go to my aunts later since it was my cousin Josies birthday. Then she mentions how my Uncle Mike had called I thought this meant they were coming down that I would be seeing them and hopefully Will I hadnt seen him in two years since he was busy with work. This is when my mom tells me that Uncle Mike had called saying Will got into an accident and he died. I felt a drop water started coming from my sisters’ eyes. Then we got to this stop that we had always gone through it was these four ways stop that was on a hill. My sister climbed to the back and gave me a hug.
2. When Gay says we “lay our swords down” I interpret it as we lay our defense down since that’s what swords are for to defend yourself and if putting them down that’s because you don’t feel the need to protect yourself. “Invite sorrow in” If joy and sorrow are entangled then sorrow is joy so your letting joy in as you let sorrow in. I do agree because I read it as you need to let you defenses down and let sorrow in to be able to have joy and also when you have joy in context of relationship you have to let your defense down to be able to form a connection and to let the person in.
3. When I’m skating or longboarding and I finally catch speed that’s controllable and have music in my ear, When I have a really nice poke Bowl, My little brother smiling cause he wants to show me something, When I got a giant duck after doing club Bingo that I was fighting on yik yak for, When there yum yum sauce at the dining hall and I’m able to have fried rice, When I get to meet someone new and it seems like we have a nice conversation, when I got club member of the month as a first year it meant a lot because sometimes they get overlooked, When I accomplish something to help the events I help set up, When I learn my show choir routines and fix steps that I would mess up, When I would be onstage dancing for show choir, when I do little performances for my friends, When I see people I Like ( campus crushes) and friends.
4. My items are kind of little things that don’t seem like much too people but mean a bit for me. Its also a different range of things I like doing different things and will have different attractions at points. I engage with the world over looking at the little things an how each little thing interacts.
5. Gay’s essay interacts with Smith’s by agreeing how sorrow and joy do go in hand its like a supportive argument to Smith’s essay. Gay’s essay helps a freshly graduated high school kid actually understand the world a little more. We young adults do know some stuff and are intelligent however we sometimes forget basic meaning of things and still we don’t always all have a lot of life experiences, so those little things sometimes get overshadow and we forget the true meaning. College is a time to let a lot of joy in, but we need to remember that it will bring us pain are freshman friends might not be friends all the way through and there will be pain from that but it’s a part of life.