HW 33

Thesis: We're stuck in a culture of celebrity worship, status obsession, and pervasive mediocrity and meaninglessness. Frankly, a truly heroic life and abundant attention from others won't be available to 98% of people - since almost all of us are trapped in meaningless jobs in a meaningless rat race watching meaningless TV shows. Facebook friends, unique tattoos, new apps on your iPhone, clothes from a hip store with semi-nude workers, vacations to exotic places, and a big screen TV provide some relief from what would otherwise be a grey hopeless misery.  (We use these illusions to help distract ourselves from the reality we all face everyday.) 

^ I like the way you wrote this and it sums up my direct take on this unit.  I added the part in parenthesises but I don't know if it is necessary.  

Body Paragraph I: Russell posted this interesting article on Facebook:

 http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/do-you-spend-too-much-time-on-facebook/  After reading it I was so blown away by the truth of the article I decided to deactivate my own Facebook.  Something that struck me to be so bizarre was while I was going through the steps of deactivating it, it seemed as if Facebook was trying to convince me not to.  It showed pictures of me and my Facebook friends and kept repeating the sentence " _______ will miss you".  As if once you are not friends with someone on Facebook you just are not friends in general anymore.  Then I had to click on exactly why I was leaving the Facebook Network and for each option they had an excuse of how to possibly still be a member but not leave.  Essentially though I deactivated it for maybe 3 or 4 days.  I felt so much happier and I felt like I had a lot more time but I didn't know what to do.  I was so used to this routine of constantly staying updated with others and never sitting down and taking the time to care about myself.  Unfortunately I couldn't handle it and I got my Facebook back...Hopefully soon I will be able to quit again but it is so much harder than just pressing delete.  

Body Paragraph II: During this unit I have come to much better terms with my strong disagreement for tattoos, I want to incorporate my HW 32 and HW 31.  Both an interview I had with one of my friends who decided to become part of this way of life and my own ideas on the pointless thing people choose to do to there bodies.  

Body Paragraph III: I want to explore even more our cultures idea of looking up to celebrities hence thinking we need the latest fancy phones, fancy places to travel and the macho TVs.  I am going to try and incorporate the book The Death of Ivan Ilych which I think is a very important book because it makes it extremely clear to people today that this whole idea of trends has been going on for a while.  Which I would like to tie into the idea of death and my own philosophy of the Jenga game.  That maybe our actions are caused by what we believe our outcomes will be based on the people surrounding us.  

Body Paragraph IIII: Lastly for my Body Paragraphs I am going to discuss the very large difference between our own culture and another countries.  How I feel as though the one thing we are looking for: why are we on this planet?  is far more closer to them then it will ever to be us.  Use examples from the Frontline episode: The midriff and the mook. 

Conclusion: Sum up all Body Paragraphs and relate back to thesis.