Sunday, March 14, 2010

English 1020 Blog 6; What if?

What if time travel was real? I think it would be amazing. It would open up all kinds of possibilities. We could go visit our dead relatives, or go to a famous event and witness it first hand. We could go meet all kinds of famous people and find out if they were really as history remembered them. We could even try to change history for the better.
If I could time travel I would change several events in history. The first would be Hitler. I would kill him at birth. I could save countless lives and probably avoid World War II, at least as we knew it, all together. There would likely be drastic changes to the world as we know it. If World War II was avoided, who knows what life everywhere would be like. The invention of the atomic bombs would likely be delayed several years without the help of the captured German scientists. If Japan was still going super imperial, they would likely have caused a long drawn out war without the atom bombs to stop them.
Aside from changing events, I would go meet several people. First off I would go meet the Founding Fathers of our country. Next I would go meet Einstein and several other famous smart people. I think it would be a really enriching experience to meet all of these people. I could dramatically alter the course of history by giving them some of their ideas earlier that they would have discovered them on their own, or I could even take the ideas back and take credit for myself. I could become super famous by someone else’s work, but I wouldn’t do that because it just isn’t right. Anyways, none of this really matters because time travel is not real.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

English 1020, Blog 5; Maybe

Maybe I will never learn my lesson. Here it is the last legit day of my spring break and I still have a whole lot of work to finish. My part two of my paper for English is at roughly 80%, which I think is pretty good, but I wanted to be finished with it by now. I am slowly realizing how I have shot myself in the foot though.
I don’t have to tell many of you this, but since many people were caught with incorrectly cited or uncited work on their part ones, we were assigned some annotated bibliographies to do over spring break. That was all fine and well until I realized formidable of a task that actually was. Up to this point, I have 23 sources between my part 1 and part 2. This is going to take forever to finish all of these. On top of that, I am following the instructions I was given for them, but I am not sure if I am doing it right or not.
I also realized, today, that the Periodic Table reflection is due on Tuesday also. I thought I had more time than that, from what I gathered in class last Tuesday. I just cannot get into this book. It keeps talking about some family trees, and that stuff bores me to death. I guess I am going to have to do my best and try to get it done.
In addition to all of this, I have not gotten to ANY outside events yet. They all seem to fall on times when I have class. I would have done the hiking one on the weekends, but I have a bad hip (see last blog post for more information). I will get the results of my MRI on Monday. I hope the doctors figured something out.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

English 1020 Blog 4 What if?

What if I had super powers? I do so many amazing things! I don’t even know where to begin. I guess I can describe what I mean by super powers. That is actually a broad category of things. I could talk about this all day. I will now go over some super powers that I wish I could have.
A cool super power to have would be flight! I mean like Superman flight. I would just fly to class faster than a speeding bullet. I could fly all over the world and visit all of the far away places that I will never get to go to in real life. Another power similar to flight would be teleportation. I think if I could pick between the two, I would pick teleportation, because it would be instantaneous. I could wait until the absolute last second to leave, which I do anyways. The difference is I wouldn’t be late!
Another cool super power I would like to have would be invisibility. I could get away with so many awesome things if I could go invisible. It would be like Harry Potter’s cloak, but I could just activate it with my mind. If I have invisibility, I would also like to have intangibility. This would make me almost like a ghost. I could do pretty much anything I wanted if I had these powers.
Another useful super power would be common sense. If I had common sense I could make rational everyday decisions and not look like a complete idiot. I could actually function as a normal human being! How amazing would that be? Out of all of the super powers I have mentioned, I think this is the rarest and most powerful. This last bit is obviously a joke, but I think it gets a message across.

1020 Blog 3- Healthcare

What if the American Healthcare system wasn’t completely screwed up. . .? I always find it easier to write three hundred words on a topic if it is something that I actually feel involved with, or in this case, something that really boils my blood. I have known for a while that the system is broken, but I didn’t really care until it started to impact my family’s lives and my own. The following is a recount of the last few weeks and my encounters with this disgusting, broken-down mess.
The first problem I have encountered with it recently actually involves my mom. She was been and still is having stomach pains to the point that she went to the ER for it. The problem with this is that she doesn’t have health insurance, so all of the cost is on us. . . Anyways, she gets into the ER and they decide that her appendix needs to be removed. So, my mom goes into surgery and gets her appendix removed. After this the doctor tells her that her appendix really didn’t need to be removed, and she will probably still, and does, have the same stomach pains. So now we are stuck with a needless medical bill that bill collectors have already started to harass us over, and my mom is not any better. In my opinion this is a complete failure. . .
The other encounter with this is more personal in a way. I hurt my hip last August. I won’t go into the details of it, but I have been to the doctor twice and the ER once for it now. I have been X-rayed twice and had my hip poked and prodded on numerous times. Through all of this, I have received no relief or valid diagnosis. I am scheduled for a MRI soon, but my point is I have been in pain for about 6 months now, and all anyone wanted to give me was Ibuprofen. If you have ever tried to take a large dose of Ibuprofen, you know not only will it not stop pain from a serious injury, it will tear your stomach up. Until today, Ibuprofen was all I got. I now have some Tramadol, which provides me with some relief, but I won’t even go through the hoops I had to jump through and the bureaucracy that I had to get involved in to get even that.

Monday, January 25, 2010

English 1020, What if?

What would the world be like if the computer had never been invented? I think that things would be completely different in some aspects and places. As a largely technophilic nation, the United States would be nothing like it is today. Students wouldn’t spend all night on Facebook and do bad in class the next day because of it, corporate fat cats couldn’t keep track of all of their investments and companies online, and even our modes of transportation would be different; most methods of transportation use some derivation of a computer to operate. The real question here is, would the positive changes outweigh the negative ones? Many values are corrupted by computers. Loads of crimes take place over the internet. Many people spend all day doing nothing on the computer or playing video games (I have been guilty of these last two myself), when they could be out doing something productive. Despite all of these negative things, computers have many irreplaceable benefits to our lives. So much of our daily lives are ‘powered’ by computers. When you woke up this morning, you took a shower, I hope, and used products that were produced in a factory that was undoubtedly run by a computer. As mentioned before, when you got in your car, you used a computer based product. Even as you read this right now, you are using a computer; even if it was printed, it is still from a computer based product! I really feel like computers are a very good thing. Life would probably be a really sad thing without them. I think everyone would feel the difference to some degree. Unless you are from some obscure culture, I suppose. In conclusion, I will just say that I would not want to live in a world without computers.

Monday, January 18, 2010

English 1020

What if I hadn't waited until right before time to go to bed to write this blog post? I probably would have written something much more interesting. This is probably going to be a boring topic, but I am actually curious as to what I would have written about, if I wasn't so tired. Maybe, I would have written about something exciting that I did over the weekend. Who knows? I could have written about how my roommate and I almost died going down the Highway 51 the other night; some genius was going north in the southbound lane. I could have written about how my crazy roommate decided to, for some reason, follow a fire truck the other day. As exciting as that sounds, it was only going to someone's house; we were hoping to get to see a fire or something cool. Maybe I would have written about how I spent the day watching movies with my mom and brother; Law Abiding Citizen is a pretty awesome movie. Possibly, I could have written about how my car needs repair yet again; it is such a piece of junk. The possibilities are endless. I guess we may never know what could or would have been. I didn't write any of those posts. I instead wrote this one. All comedy, broken cars, and near death experiences aside, I really need to start the spring semester off right and not procrastinate like I always do. I am sure that I could work much more efficiently, if I would give myself more time to think. I bet my grades would improve dramatically if I exercised a better work ethic. I hope I have the right idea with this one. I am really new to this stuff. I guess that is about it. :)