Friday, April 29, 2005
Saying good-bye
I’ve never been very good at saying good-bye. I hate it. I guess I always think, what if something happens, and I’ll never see them again, or what if it is a long time before I see that person again. This is something that my mom and grandmother passed down to me. I guess it could be because we’ve had the incident in our family of saying good-bye to someone and then not seeing them again, too often. This happened with the death of my brother and my grandfather. Things happen fast, too fast.
Cafeteria Food
Have you ever notice how the cafeteria seems to get worse as the year goes along? At the beginning of the year the food in the cafeteria is not too bad. When I first went to the dinning hall I wondered why everyone complained about the cafeteria food, because at the beginning of the year the food was not too bad. I thought, at the beginning of the year, that I could definitely last on cafeteria food for the rest of the academic year. Then the months came and went and so did the good food.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Stumbling upon a Crime Scene
My roommate is taking English 101 this semester also, and I liked the idea of one of her assignments, so I decided that I would write one for myself. The title of the assignment was “stumbling upon a murder scene.” Here goes!
On the Origins of “Autopsy”
The etymology of the word autopsy is fascinating. It comes from the Greek “auto” meaning self and “opsy” meaning eye. In making an inference, one can assume that the word means “to see oneself.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the autopsy first meant “seeing with one’s own eyes, eye-witnessing; personal observation or insprection.” The first uses of the word autopsy were with regards to self-reflection and observation. In 1651, Robert Wittie wrote, “or by autopsie, when by our observation, wee get a certaine knowledge of things.” Thomas De Quincey says in “Miracles” that “the defect of autopsy may be compensated by sufficient testimony of a multitude.” In both of these examples, the word autopsy is being referred to as a means of self-examination and critique.
Welcome Spring, My Old Friend
Like a thief in the night, spring comes to Michigan bringing with it warm rain and well-received sunlight. The trees are turning their typical green, a green so pleasing to see after months of grey and white. The sun shows through the clouds and lights up the afternoon like a large lamp that grandpa turns on to read the newspaper. Welcome to Michigan, Spring.
Descriptive Writing: Evan
In the back and forth battle between winter and summer, winter looks to be the victor today. After the warm, muddy spring thaw of yesterday, the snow has a lot of ground to reclaim. In a matter of minutes, the light but constant snow transforms the land from an ungly brown to a pure white. Everything is lightly powdered and frigidly cold.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Lexical moment of “have you ever wondered"_edirin
Have you ever wondered why American’s always ask if you “would like to do something” for them when they really mean to say “do it”? Don’t know what I’m talking about? Let’s look at some examples:
Hey Edirin, do you wanna help mop the floors now?
Edirin, you think you could maybe clean up this mess before I get back?
Edirin, you wanna help carry this boulder to the other side of town while venomous snakes tail you by the ankles?
No! I don’t want to do the FRIGGIN dishes, I don’t want to help you battle a Cyclops, and I don’t want to try on your wife’s pajamas! But maybe if you ask nicely I might consider!
Monday, April 25, 2005
Noticing the lack of noticing
Evan Eilers
ENGL 10l J
Professor Bierma
Journal entry
Noticing the lack of noticing
April 4, 2005
Have you ever noticed how much you don’t notice? Take the information at the top of the page for example. I replaced the last 1 in 101 with a lower case L and I’d bet my favorite kidney that almost nobody who reads this journal would notice it if I hadn’t pointed it out. The fact of the matter is that people tend to ignore most of the world unless it jumps out of a shrubbery and tries to eat them.
Friday, April 22, 2005
A Prayer
O Lord
Why have you smitten, stricken, and afflicted us?
Why are we in the darkness?
Perhaps, O Lord, we are not worthy.
When we look up where are you to be found.
We call and call but only hear our voices.
Bush is Coming to Calvin
Yesterday morning I passed a friend on the pathway on the way to class—a normal occurrence in my morning routine. This friend though, had something to say to me that was certainly not normal. With a huge, ecstatic grin on his face he said to me, “Peter, have you heard the news? Bush is coming to Calvin! Can you believe it? This is awesome!’ Well, my first reaction was unbelief. I thought that this had to be some sort of hoax or something, because I couldn’t think of any logical reason that the president of the United States of America would just show up at little old Calvin College. When I got back to my room though and read my student news, there it was, an e-mail from Shirley Hoogstra stating that the Bush was in fact coming to Calvin to speak at commencement. Now I was no longer in disbelief, but I sure was angry.
running alarm clocks- lauren
The article I am doing my journal entry on is called Snooze-Button Abusers Could be In for a Race Against Time With the ‘Clocky.’ It was written by Roger Vincent from the Los Angeles Times. It talks about a grad student named Gauri Nanda, who decided that he wanted to make an alarm clock that ran away after you hit the snooze button so that you could not keep hitting it over and over. College students, including himself, will sometimes go for hours repeatedly hitting the snooze button so they don’t have to get out of bed. So he ended up making an alarm clock that was soft and had wheels so that when you hit your snooze button, it would fall off the nightstand and roll to a random place so that when the alarm went off for the second time you would have to get up and find it. It was randomly programmed so that it would go to a different place every time. He is hoping that within a year they will be sold in the stores. I think this was a great idea.
Warm Weather
Did you ever notice that whenever the weather gets warm, people always seems happier? Is it because of the weather or is it just because people are no longer hiding in their rooms, or maybe even both? These past couple weeks the warm weather has finally started to set in and it actually feels like spring after a long drawn out winter.
Did you ever notice siblings?
Did you ever notice the way siblings are treated is often worse than are friends? Siblings are the ones that are bound to us by the intangible steel cable of a family, the ones who will be more likely to stick with us through the rough times and through the fun times. Friends move into and then right on through lives, yet they are the ones that we work at to impress. We have hardly any qualms about reaming a brother out for staying too long in a bathroom or for scratching a CD. Should a friend come and spend an exceptional amount of time in the bathroom or should accidentally scratch a CD, most of the time, the first reaction is to say that it doesn’t matter or not to worry about it.
Did you ever notice the way siblings are treated is often worse than that of pets?
Science fuddles Creation
After at least five thousand years, the quest to discover the origins of humankind has made headway but remains a scientific and religious mystery. The Christian scientist, Charles Hummel, makes his attempt to explain away the misconceptions between the traditional Christian belief and the conventional scientific belief of how the Earth, how the human, and how the universe first formed. Hummel discusses in his book, The Galileo Connection, the interpretation of the creation story in Genesis. Many of the problems in Genesis and modern science, Hummel believes, originate out of how the Bible or the Torah is interpreted. Additionally, Hummel assesses the use of the author’s writing style and its purpose for us today. Personally however, it raises the question that if this part of the Bible is only figurative what other areas are only artistic features. In order to come to an open conclusion; information, logic, and discernment must come together as in Hummel’s theories of interpretation, of purpose, and of Christian belief.
Paitence - Jamie
Did you notice how when people are standing in line, they tap one of their feet or start pacing back and fourth. I do not know about for some, but speaking for myself, this drives me nuts! I can understand if it is a long line and it may be a lengthy wait, but otherwise, why not just stand still? Is all of that moving around really going to make the line move faster? In all reality, it is not.