May152012

Kevin's Blog: Sullivan Repost

As a musically involved person, I understand how Kevin feels. In my church choir, I’ve sang songs written by Schubert and Vivaldi, but many times the complexity of these pieces have caused me to not enjoy singing them. Like Kevin, I have found a lot of enjoyment singing simpler songs that don’t take much time to learn, but are far more relaxing than works by composers like Schubert. It is a lot easier for me to want to practice when I have to sing something I enjoy rather than music I think is overly complicated.

kevinevin:

For about 6 years of my life, I’ve loathed playing the piano. Every day after school, I would have to practice the abhorrent instrument for hours and hours. From scales to musical theory, the instrument required perfection, and I am no perfectionist. Eventually, frequent arguments broke out…

May122012
So many times since I followed in the footsteps of my brother and sister and started swimming, I wanted to get out of the pool and quit swimming forever. I wanted to be done with the morning, afternoon, and Saturday practices that made my life miserable. I wanted to do anything but swimming. But I couldn’t; I needed to act like the athletic and well rounded person I was supposed to be. At practice, my coach yelled at me nearly every day, from simple things about my stroke technique to flat out saying things like “your turns are terrible.” This only made swimming that much worse for me. Not only did I hate the thousands of yards I had to swim at each practice, I also began hate my swim coach for constantly yelling at me for my swimming abilities.   And then things changed. I realized that my coach yelled at me not because he disliked me, but instead because he cared about me as a swimmer and he wanted me to get better because he saw potential in me. At swim practice, my habit of swimming simply to survive to the end of practice was replaced by determination to get better. Even the long swim meets, which despised due to my fears of not being able to do a flip-turn or do a half-decent start, we’re starting to get more enjoyable. Videos of swim races, like the 4x100 freestyle relay in which the American team overtook the French for gold at the 2008 Olympics, started to become interesting and exciting, to the point where I would watch them over and over again. Only months before, these races had meant nothing more to me than seeing eight people move back and forth in the same repetitious and boring motion. Watching these videos gave me even more of a desire to get better; they made me want to succeed and become a great swimmer more than anything else.   When I first came to high school, I had planned to only swim for the high school swim season and play high school baseball as well. I believed that I could only do the things that my brother had done when he was in high school before me. However, after my freshman year, I quit playing high school baseball and decided swam year round instead. I realized that I was not my brother and I didn’t have to try to be just like him. Also, I didn’t decide to start swimming year-round because I was force to or because that was what was expected of me, I did it because I want to. I overcame the expectation I placed on myself to be just like my brother and I discovered how much I loved the sport I had once hated. I finally found the strength to be myself. I was no longer trying to do everything my brother did. I was no longer playing the act of an athletic kid by playing baseball and swimming. I was a swimmer.

So many times since I followed in the footsteps of my brother and sister and started swimming, I wanted to get out of the pool and quit swimming forever. I wanted to be done with the morning, afternoon, and Saturday practices that made my life miserable. I wanted to do anything but swimming. But I couldn’t; I needed to act like the athletic and well rounded person I was supposed to be.

At practice, my coach yelled at me nearly every day, from simple things about my stroke technique to flat out saying things like “your turns are terrible.” This only made swimming that much worse for me. Not only did I hate the thousands of yards I had to swim at each practice, I also began hate my swim coach for constantly yelling at me for my swimming abilities.  

And then things changed. I realized that my coach yelled at me not because he disliked me, but instead because he cared about me as a swimmer and he wanted me to get better because he saw potential in me. At swim practice, my habit of swimming simply to survive to the end of practice was replaced by determination to get better. Even the long swim meets, which despised due to my fears of not being able to do a flip-turn or do a half-decent start, we’re starting to get more enjoyable. Videos of swim races, like the 4x100 freestyle relay in which the American team overtook the French for gold at the 2008 Olympics, started to become interesting and exciting, to the point where I would watch them over and over again. Only months before, these races had meant nothing more to me than seeing eight people move back and forth in the same repetitious and boring motion. Watching these videos gave me even more of a desire to get better; they made me want to succeed and become a great swimmer more than anything else.  

When I first came to high school, I had planned to only swim for the high school swim season and play high school baseball as well. I believed that I could only do the things that my brother had done when he was in high school before me. However, after my freshman year, I quit playing high school baseball and decided swam year round instead. I realized that I was not my brother and I didn’t have to try to be just like him. Also, I didn’t decide to start swimming year-round because I was force to or because that was what was expected of me, I did it because I want to. I overcame the expectation I placed on myself to be just like my brother and I discovered how much I loved the sport I had once hated. I finally found the strength to be myself. I was no longer trying to do everything my brother did. I was no longer playing the act of an athletic kid by playing baseball and swimming. I was a swimmer.

aplangthankssarah 

April292012

Voice Inside Me

The voice inside me makes honest judgments on myself, whether I want to believe them or not. Inside, I really don’t know what my purpose in life is. While I really want to believe that I know what my purpose in life is, I really don’t have any idea what it is. Since I’m only a teenager, it’s hard to see what my purpose is at this point in my life. As I further think about this question, the voice inside me is forced to consider the possibility that maybe I really don’t have any purpose at all in grand scheme of life. While I don’t believe that this is the case, the voice inside me, being honest, can’t deny that this is a small possibility. As I grow older, I hope to find something to do that the voice inside me will consider to be meaningful and give me a purpose in life.  

aplangsullivan 

April252012

No Unmarked Woman

In today’s society, I’ve found that it is nearly impossible for women to be unmarked, unlike men. For instance, at formal events, women come in dresses of all sorts of different styles and colors, where as the majority of men wear suits, most of which look very similar. At these events, the women are judged by what they wear while usually little attention is paid to men’s clothes. After events like the Oscars, the media will discuss things like, “the best and worst dressed at the Oscars,” and judge the women based on what they wore. I think that one of the main reasons why women are marked is because the media associates roles with different fashions, and since the media is such a large part of American life, women become marked due to the media’s portrayal of fashions. However, in other cultures with less emphasis on fashion, like those found in many Middle Eastern countries, women are able to go relatively unmarked. In American society, with the huge influence of the media on fashion, women are almost always marked.

aplangtannen2 

April222012

The Roles of Fashion

Fashion creates roles for people by characterizing them in groups that a lot of the time are based on stereotypes. For instance, a man who dresses in a suit might be perceived as smart, important, or wealthy, depending on situation he is in. However, if that same man were to wear a loose fitting shirt and baggy jeans, he might be perceived as unintelligent, “ghetto,” or dangerous simply because that is the role society creates for people who wear those fashions.

Personally, I have rarely felt confined by what I can wear and the roles associated with those clothes. Part of the reason for this is because I have never felt the need to wear different fashions then those that I already do, which might be contributed to the fact that society creates roles for different fashions. Instead of choosing the clothes that I think look good, I choose clothes that fit the roles that I want to represent.

aplangtannen 

April172012

The Alteration of Public Space

Many groups of people are able to alter public space simply because of their race, age, or looks, because many of these alterations are caused by assumptions and stereotypes. This causes many groups of people to be wrongly treated in public places. Obviously, a group of loud and obnoxious teenagers are going to alter public space because they are being disruptive, but it’s when stereotypes and assumptions are made that public space is altered for the wrong reasons. For instance, a group of teenagers might be avoided or treated more harshly in a store because it is assumed that all groups of teenagers are disruptive and cause problems, even though this group of teenagers is doing nothing wrong. Another instance of this is how an African American male might be avoided in public because people assume that he is dangerous because of his skin color, when in reality anyone in a public could be dangerous. Many groups of people alter public space because of assumptions and stereotypes associated with them even though these groups don’t actually fit the assumptions and stereotypes that people view them under.

aplangstaples 

March212012

The Best Idea

Over the last millennium, the best idea was equal education. Equal education allows for people, most of the time minority groups, to have the same opportunities as the majority of people in a society. Before improvements to education, many groups of people were kept inferior because they were denied adequate education. In the U.S., many universities have supported the idea of equal education by practicing affirmative action policies, starting in the 1960s, as a way to support equal education by making sure minority students are accepted into higher education. Although these programs have gone under a lot of debate recently over whether they are just or not, as seen here, the idea of equal education has still had a substantial impact on our society. Due to the idea of equal education, groups that in the past were denied adequate education are now able to have the same opportunities in our society. For instance, people in these groups now have the ability to hold public office and these groups can no longer be held inferior due to educational differences.   

aplangbestidea 

March132012

Why We Fight

During the video, the idea was proposed that we fight because it’s profitable to corporations. This caused me to question a lot of I’ve been told about why America goes to war. The idea that we fight because it’s profitable for corporations makes sense because of how American politics work. If Congress decided to cut defense spending, thousands of people would lose their jobs, and odds are that this loss of jobs would cause politicians to lose votes, and it might end up costing them their jobs as well. The government can then gain support for the war effort by promoting the idea that we are fighting for things like peace and freedom. In reality, the only concrete examples of when we fought for our own freedom was during the founding of our nation, and many of the wars since then have followed the idea that we were fighting because it’s corporations profit from it.  

aplangwar 

4PM
Since its debut at the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens, swimming has become a popular sport throughout the world. Of all the people that swim, few are able to work their way up to swim at the highest level of competition, the Olympics.  Most notably, Michael Phelps, seen here, has dominated in international swimming competitions, especially at the 2008 Beijing Olympics when he won eight gold medals. Art has been around for thousands of years. Many of these examples of art have exceptional amounts of grace and beauty, and they take large amounts of time, effort and skill to perfect, resulting in people placing more value in these art forms and causing the art to be high art. Under this description, despite being rarely recognized by people not tied to the sport, swimming performed at its highest level is high art. The grace and beauty that exists in high performance swimming is exemplified by Michael Phelps’s butterfly, seen here.  The movement of his body when he swims is very elegant as his arms move simultaneously with the exact smooth motion as he takes each stroke. This graceful movement in Phelps’s swimming is comparable to the grace required in performing a similar form of high art, ballet. Also, Olympic swimmers like Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte train for years in order to make to the top level of swim competition. Due to difficulty in achieving that good of swim performance, high level swimming has more value as an art form than lower levels of swimming, as it has the speed that distinguishes it from the lower levels of swimming.  Similarly, it took George Seurat over two years to perfect his renowned painting, “A Sunday Afternoon,” composed of over 3,000,000 tiny dots, and this effort put in to master his skill in painting causes it to be high art. High art is ultimately art that is valued higher than other forms of art and it can generally be characterized by having the qualities of beauty, gracefulness, and the superior skill, time, and effort needed to create the art. All of these qualities are present in swimming performed at the highest level, as seen by swimmers like Michael Phelps at the Olympics. While it may not be recognized by most people as an art form, the fact that it shares similar qualities with other forms of high art like dance and painting suggest that the people who value those art forms should also value swimming as high art.

Since its debut at the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens, swimming has become a popular sport throughout the world. Of all the people that swim, few are able to work their way up to swim at the highest level of competition, the Olympics.  Most notably, Michael Phelps, seen here, has dominated in international swimming competitions, especially at the 2008 Beijing Olympics when he won eight gold medals.

Art has been around for thousands of years. Many of these examples of art have exceptional amounts of grace and beauty, and they take large amounts of time, effort and skill to perfect, resulting in people placing more value in these art forms and causing the art to be high art. Under this description, despite being rarely recognized by people not tied to the sport, swimming performed at its highest level is high art.

The grace and beauty that exists in high performance swimming is exemplified by Michael Phelps’s butterfly, seen here.  The movement of his body when he swims is very elegant as his arms move simultaneously with the exact smooth motion as he takes each stroke. This graceful movement in Phelps’s swimming is comparable to the grace required in performing a similar form of high art, ballet. Also, Olympic swimmers like Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte train for years in order to make to the top level of swim competition. Due to difficulty in achieving that good of swim performance, high level swimming has more value as an art form than lower levels of swimming, as it has the speed that distinguishes it from the lower levels of swimming.  Similarly, it took George Seurat over two years to perfect his renowned painting, “A Sunday Afternoon,” composed of over 3,000,000 tiny dots, and this effort put in to master his skill in painting causes it to be high art.

High art is ultimately art that is valued higher than other forms of art and it can generally be characterized by having the qualities of beauty, gracefulness, and the superior skill, time, and effort needed to create the art. All of these qualities are present in swimming performed at the highest level, as seen by swimmers like Michael Phelps at the Olympics. While it may not be recognized by most people as an art form, the fact that it shares similar qualities with other forms of high art like dance and painting suggest that the people who value those art forms should also value swimming as high art.

aplanghighart 

February282012

High Art Links Explained

I used my first hyperlink of Michael Phelps racing to be illustrative on the topic of swimming.  I specifically chose a video of Phelps because he is considered one of the best swimmers in the world and he exemplifies high art in swimming. Also, I chose that video because it was a close race, making it more interesting to the reader.

The second and third hyperlinks are used to make a comparison of beauty and gracefulness between swimming and ballet. The links provide visual evidence on grace and beauty in ballet and swimming, helping to further back the claims made in the essay.

The forth hyperlink provides the image of the painting stated. It also improves the credibility of the claims stated as the reader can actually see what is described. It also allows the reader to understand what the painting looks like, as it is easier to provide a picture of the painting than to verbally describe it.  

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