When thinking of how to personally define the American Dream, I keep coming up blank. I keep seeing the idyllic 1950s scene with the suburban houses, flamingo lawn decor, bright poofy dresses, and sunny skies. Back then I would define the dream and having a nice family, house, steady job, with not a worry in the world. On the other hand, the is most definitely not the case anymore. Sure, many aspects to it can be desirable but more pressing issues have shown. When researching other’s definitions, three, in particular, have stood aside from the rest. Webster’s Dictionary defines the American Dream as “a happy way of living that is thought of by many Americans as something that can be achieved by anyone in the U.S. especially by working hard and becoming successful”. This one is, by far, my favorite. This open-ended definition allows everyone to interpret it based on their prior history and goals for the future. In contrast, according to the New York Times, the general ideas of the dream have shifted. Back in the 1930s, the themes were primarily freedom, mutual respect, and equal opportunity. However, when talking with a few politicians in our government today, the themes have turned to “owning a beautiful home and a successful business”. The Times state that the 1930s definition “had more to do with morality than material success”. I find this extremely concerning. If the people who are leading our country have this material mindset, what does that mean for the rest of us? Investopedia’s defines it as “the belief that anyone, regardless of where they were born or what class they were born into, can attain their own version of success in a society where upward mobility is possible for everyone”. This definition is super important. My take is how they suggest that just because someone wasn’t born here, it doesn't mean that they shouldn't have the same opportunities and you and me. All of these definitions have the overall theme of success and just living the life that you want. If I actually had to define my idea “American Dream” it would simply be “a way of living your best life with the resources to do so at your fingertips”. I created this piece to embody some of the themes of my “American Dream”. I had posters show through the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty all in front of the American flag. I used vintage posters showcasing popular states and topics in our country. I placed them in the Statue of Liberty because I appreciate what it stands for. The torch on the statue represents enlightenment and showing the way to freedom. Freedom and equality are topics that I value a lot in life. I muted the flag because I don't necessarily feel strongly about what I associate it with. I feel that while patriotism can be a good thing, but it's just not one of my top priorities. Personally, I don’t like to identify just a single definition of the “American Dream”. However, I believe this piece showcases one of the many takes on the historically known ideals of anyone who lives in the United States.
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Even though women are affected by societal expectations on a day to day basis, they defy those expectations just the same. They do this by simply living their lives. Women can very easily go with society’s expectations. However, we are own people. We make our own decisions.
A great example of this is the short story “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin. In the narrative, the author goes through the hour in which a grieving widow learns of her husband's death. Once the truth is unveiled, she grieves, as someone would expect. After some time she asks for some time to herself. During this time, at first, she thinks this is the end of her life because she doesn’t see the point without her beloved husband. As time goes on, she recalls all of the hard times he caused her. She becomes excited and empowered by her new found freedom. Another example of women defying societal expectations is embodied by Miss Emily from the short story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. Miss Emily defied all expectations on a daily basis. She refused to adhere to simple systematic expectations, such as leaving her house every now and then, paying taxes and murdering people. However, she did not stop there. She then went on and made the townsfolk believe that her suitor (the person that she poisoned) was still alive and well. She then went even farther as to keep the body and in her room. In a nutshell, Miss Emily defied almost every societal expectation in the book. Both these women defied the societal standards that were bestowed upon them. Look around you or take a look at yourself and really think about societies expectations for women. We defy them. Social Expectations affect women in countless ways and it needs to stop. Our society is constantly putting down women or adding yet another standard to which we judge them. Different cultures have different expectations, however, they all that too many.
In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins, the author touches on many of these absurd expectations. The Protagonist is a serious condition and because she is a woman no one is taking it seriously. The two main men in her life, her husband and her bother, are just going along with it but don’t think anything of it. They are both physicians, therefore, they believe they know everything and are the pinnacle of knowledge. The author portrays them to believe that because she is simply a woman she doesn't know if she is sick or not and if by chance she is, they, of course, should lock her in her house and take away everything that keeps her sane. Alleged old beliefs, such as “women can’t possibly handle knowledge” shows a lot within this story. Her brother and husband believe this and unfortunately, there are still people in our society that also feel this way. This has been disproven countless times but still. Nothing. Societal expectations affect woman every day, in all environments. The social standards of woman have been built up throughout the years. This must end. This past summer I had the amazing opportunity to do an internship at Adobe! Every day I would drive the 30 minute trip to the ferry building, ride the hour-long ferry, then ride a bike 3 miles to the Adobe offices in San Francisco. It was quite a trip and all worth it! Although it was only a week, it was one of the best experiences in my life. I had the privilege of working with a small development team. During my time in the city, I learned countless skills that can directly improve my performance and set me up for future experiences associated with my education and career. I researched potential users, similar applications, and what the demand is for the product. I sat in and participated in the team’s meetings and helped orchestrate focus groups. I was interviewed many times and was trained in how to interview others for them. Doing all of these things was extremely beneficial and interesting, however, this was not the highlight of my week. My favorite part of the week was without a doubt being able to test their product. I was able to create new pieces each day and give my feedback directly to the engineers of the product. This incredible experience was absolutely life-changing. Being at Adobe was such a valuable experience and I loved every second of it!
2018 Tech lends a hand was one to remember. To start out, I was able to go to my top choice: Connolly Ranch. As a kid I remember spending all my summers attending the camp to garden, play with animals and make fairy houses around the logs. To help out preparing for that summer camp was very fun! We helped out with weeding, putting down mulch, cleaning out the chicken coop, cleaning out the branches from the duck pond and my favorite, preparing for the summer crafts. This experience was so much fun and it was great to help out to create an amazing experience for others that I once had. WOW! I never knew how much went into the making of a card game even in my last post I thought it was a lot but I had no idea what was yet to come. My team changed our idea about 5 times… each time getting farther and farther away from our original idea. We have gone through all of the steps and have officially finished our game. From my first update I have since redone all of the artwork, change the idea of the game, write action cards, directions, etc. and designed all of the pieces that come along when you purchase the game. This entire process from the introduction to the project to pressing “publish” within the website has taken longer than I could have imagined. There were many obstacles in the duration of this project such as team members losing interest, the artwork not being the right format or size (this took me 6 hours to fix), and more. To be honest, in the end, I am not particularly proud of this game. There are MANY things I wished to fix but just didn't find the time to do so. Some of the aspects of the card game making process were fun but overall I don't think I will be trying to create another anytime soon. This past month in my Game Design Class we have been working on creating card games. We needed to come up with the game mechanics, all of the artwork involved (which is more than you’d think) and, if your game requires it, a storyline or backstory. My team decided to go with a resource management game which we named “Out of the Woods”. Basically, you start out having a paper with an outline of a person on it (see image to the right). You then roll a dice and pick the action card with the corresponding number. The action cards often end up with you drawing a resource card. There is food, water, and various items of clothing shuffled in a resources deck. The objective is to get at least one of all 6 resource cards and draw them on your person. The idea behind our game is that there is this undressed person in the woods (hence the name). They need to collect all of the resources in order to leave the woods and go back to civilization. Our audience for this game is focused on middle schoolers. Why? They need to be taught how to manage resources to get them ready for high school. They also generally have the maturity level to find this game entertaining. This game allows them to show their creative side in drawing the resources on their person. I now have a new understanding and appreciation for game makers. There is so much that goes into making a card game: figuring out game mechanics, concept art, play testing, art critique, revision, finalizing, and in our case, uploading game pieces and selling the game online. We have been working on this project for over a month and only half way done. Keeping in mind this is a group of high schooler making it so it won’t be as nice and professional as usual. Overall, I am actually really enjoying this process. Specifically, I enjoy all the art deliverables needed for it! I am very interested and curious to see how many changed will be made before finalizing and how it will turn out in the end. Our most recent project in World Studies was looking at the industrial revolution and researching, as a team, a modern innovation (my team chose “hive minds”), while reading and comparing them to Frankenstein. While we read the book, we had to look through it thinking about different thematic topics. The topic that stood out the most to me was alienation.
Alienation and being isolated from society can go many ways, it can help to get things done but it can also lead to being lonely and depressed. For example, in Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, the protagonist, Victor makes himself isolated for a large portion of the novel. The downside with him doing this is that he is alone with his thoughts which start to drive him crazy and he ends up getting very sick. He does this to himself because this way he can learn and work without distractions and nobody can get hurt. Victor worked on most of his real scientific innovations while he was alone. This could be because he didn’t want anybody to know about it and so they wouldn’t get hurt but it could also be that this is how he got the work done. You can see this a lot with many scientists in history and today. Often, the best work is done with total concentration and not having any distractions. If you were to ask me “Would alienation be humankind’s tragic flaw?”, I would have a hard time answering this. If you look at it with our innovation, hive minds, where there is absolutely no alienation and everyone had their mind taken over by society, then there is no individuality. Over all, I think people need to be able to isolate themselves every once and a while. With this reasoning, alienation would not be our tragic flaw. On the other end of the spectrum, some people just completely separate themselves from others and this could be very unhealthy and drive them to make questionable choices. Considering this, alienation could influence a tragic flaw. Seeing both sides, I personally can not answer this question. Throughout my years of writing, I believe I have grown in many ways. In World Studies while writing my essay about the Lord of the Flies and the French Revolution, I had a chance to reflect on how my writing skills have grown. I have noticed I am using a more diverse vocabulary. I have more of an understanding of how a difference in phrasing a word or sentence can alter the sound of my writing. I am also able to take feedback from others and apply that to my work. I used this multiple times with this assignment because I asked my peers and teachers to look it over and give me feedback. I received a lot and it helped tremendously! I have learned these and more in my years of writing and was able to showcase them in my essay.
This upcoming year, I want to try to learn more in order to further my growth in my writing. In particular, I want to try to learn how to expand my writing. Currently, I can get a point across in one or two sentences. That is fine for certain situation but not so much in others. To be able to expand smoothly on different aspects of one point would be the goal. In addition, I also would like to further my learning on how to properly cite quotations within my writing. We had to do this a lot in this essay and I attempted to do so. Although I wouldn’t say I did this successfully. In this upcoming semester I will actively work and learn how to improve these two weaknesses. My game design class was recently tasked with creating countdown clocks in the Napa Light Festival. Each clock had to be 20 minutes and incorporate light using the Saber effect in Adobe After Effects. When this was assigned to us, my mind immediately went to an hourglass. During the brainstorming process I played around with some other ideas but my mind was stuck on my original idea. When I started to create the cock, I attempted to use the pen tool in After Effects but it didn’t turn out the way I hoped. I then decided to make the drawing of the hourglass in Adobe Illustrator. From there I put the drawing into After Effects and made the lines into masks. Next, I applied the saber effects and started to animate it. The text was a bit trickier because once I got the numbers to glow (which took 2 layers), I have to make them change every minute. My peers and I then discovered how to change the number within the same layer without making new ones for EVERY SINGLE MINUTE (so 40 layers). I actually really liked this process. At some times it was very tedious but I’m very happy with the outcome. |
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