Dear Blogosphere

As the title of the blog says, I'm just a guy doing whatever it takes. To get a passing grade, that is. I have put in the bare minimum effort required to do so. In many ways I feel terrible about it, but time is a precious commodity and I would have had to spend twice the amount of time I have so far in order to improve my grade. Writing for me has always been a matter of passion, and I was unable to find the passion for many of these assignments. Early on in life my goal was to be a writer, but of fantasy and science fiction. I still like to create stories, but now my main career plan is in programming. Scholarly writing like what is taught in this class really doesn't matter to me. This class was a requirement for my degree (a requirement for every degree, I think) so I took it. Because I am a technological person, I chose the online class. Which led me to this point.

Identity. Community. Tradition. Those were the three main themes we covered in this class. Before I only thought of them as words, with definitions attached. Now I think of them as much more, as representations of complex ideas. Not really. I always have thought about the deeper meanings of words and the entities they represent. My own opinions on each had already been developed. Just living and interacting with others causes thought about these themes every day. The difference is that now I had to put them into words. It is difficult to describe how my views have changed, because any changes have been subtle. The general concepts of them haven't changed for me, if anything many of the readings from the text only reaffirmed my beliefs. Emily White in "High School's Secret Life" described my old high school perfectly, and David Brooks put into words my own thoughts on the diverse communities of America in "Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia". Some, like Eric Schlosser's "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good", I had already read in the original source and woven into my views.

As such, much of my work is really just my own view on each of the topics, with evidence from the text taken just to help support said views, not change them in any way. The pieces I chose all follow that same path, some more so than others. I have a very unique writing style, in that I do whatever I want without regard to what is considered "proper". Sometimes this means run-on sentences, fragments, or sudden shifts in direction. It may make me a terrible writer in some respects, but at the very least I hope it can be found entertaining to some. Even if it doesn't meet all the criteria to get me a good grade.