Reflection

            Welcome to my reflection letter. My name is Masih Ahmad and I am 20 years old. In about a month I will be 21 years old. I have 2 wonderful brothers and 1 cute sister that I love. I live with my parents and am transferring to WSU in less than 3 months. I was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and have lived in India for 7 years of my life and have been in Everett, WA for the last 10 years of my life. In the years I have been in school I have learned that I really don’t like writing. Although I have enjoyed learning lots of languages and cultures in my journey from the Middle East to the middle of Everett, I have learned that expressing my emotions and thoughts through writing has been one of the things I struggle the most in. Maybe it’s the fact that English is such a hard language with so many contradictions or that English is the last language I learned, I just feel like writing will be one of those things I will be struggling with for the rest of my life.  When I transfer to WSU next semester after this summer I will be studying business and marketing and eventually want to get a job in sales or marketing for either Microsoft, or Apple because I think these companies are the leading force for making life so much easier for the consumer.

          

            Enough about me personally and more about what I thought about the themes in this class. I really struggled with the first one we had about identity. When I first looked at it I just thought about identity in one singular way, which is just how a person looks and how they behave, but as the first couple of days went by into the week of the assignment I learned more about the theme and I understood that identity is something that is the essence of a person and it’s what makes a person who they are and how they are looked at by the people around them.  The passage that helped me the most when it came to understanding identity was the essay written by Queen Latifah called “Who you Calling a Bitch.” In this essay she talked about the struggles she faced when she was a young girl and how these struggles shaped who she was as a person. Prior to reading this passage all I knew about identity is a person’s ethnicity and how they talk, but I learned from this passage that it’s not how a person looks that most defines their identity, it’s how they are perceived in the whole package. I also learned from this essay that identity is a personal thing and its most dependent on how someone looks at themselves and how that person perceives his/her own identity, not how the world looks at them. Ultimately I reached a conclusion that identity is molded and created by one’s environment, just like in the essay when Queen Latifah talks about how she was called a bitch for the first time and her fighting through that hardship and learning from it with the help of her mother, she was able to become strong and grow instead of walking away from it scarred.

            The next theme we explored was the theme of community. This by far was my most favorite theme. Right of the back I understood what community meant and how people find comfort in doing things with other people and how they find normalcy in realizing  that they are not the only ones that are doing a certain activity. The article in the book that was about how Nike makes running a community really helped me the most because it talked about how community can be found anywhere and after that I started thinking about the most general definition of community and I really understood it quite well. At the time that we were doing this unit, I was heavily involved in smoking medical marijuana and I tried to relate that into how it is a community but after thinking about it for a while my opinion on it changed quite a bit. At first my initial conclusion about communities was that it is a gauge of normalcy and I tried to convince myself that if there are people around me that are doing the same thing I am doing, which at that time was smoking lots of weed, then it is a normal thing to do. But I learned quickly that the people I was with were not there for the betterment of the community. They were only there to find comfort in smoking because they would feel like outcasts without it. Looking back at it now, I could say that although I felt like I was in a tight community with a bunch of nice people. That community was based off of just personal need and not the caring and comfort of the people that are in that community. The community really changed how I looked at groups of people and really made me question the intention of the people that are together and in a community.

            The last theme we focused on was tradition.  This was sort of a So-So kind of theme for me. Immediately when I first heard the word I thought of family dinners and doing things with your family every year. I was partly right about the whole concept of the family theme but ingrained in it was the concept of culture and how it makes up tradition in a person’s life. Although this was quite the learning stretch, I actually learned the most out of this theme because I had to look into myself and draw conclusion about how I view my traditions and how my family tries to implement tradition into my life. All and all, these three themes really broadened my view in this diverse society because I started to look at people differently because I understood how each of us are here with the same intent in life and tradition, community, and identity is something we all share no  matter where we come from. It is the essence of what makes us humans; we have come so far in our evolution that survival is one of the least of our worries so every day we tend to evolve 

emotionally instead of physically, unlike other living things in this world.

                         The paper I chose to demonstrate my critical thinking about was titled “So Much for Family meals.” In this paper I analyzed the affects of fast food and processed foods on the tradition of having family meals. I was a fan of Michael Pollan, who wrote one of the decade’s most revolutionary books called omnivores dilemma, in which he exposes the actual truth about big money companies affect our food business to the point at which we have no control on what we can eat. Reading this book prior really gave me a lot to pull from and speak analytically about the affects of fast food restaurants and processed foods. The paper I chose to demonstrate my reseeing and revision skills is my DB post 2 on tradition. When I initially wrote this response I really did not have a sense of direction about what to write even though the prompt clearly asked for an assumption that is either affirmed or challenged by a selected reading about pop culture. I really want to revise this piece because at the time I wrote it I did not have time to give a full response but now that I do I want to show my abilities. The paper I chose to show my awareness of audience and voice was my blog on community called “Green Community” in which I discussed my former smoking habits and how I was involved in that community. The paper I chose to be my most favorite and the paper I was the most proud of was the paper on community titled “Gauge of Normalcy”. In this paper I felt like I was able to understand the topic of the unit the most and even though I got an average score on the paper, I really felt like did my best work when it comes to writing on this paper.  All of these papers have been a work in progress for me because writing is one of my least favorite things to do, but I am not the one to give up on it. I hope my hard work is reflected on the papers I chose to reflect upon.