Sweating the Small Stuff

Possibly the best assignment/gift I received in my writing class was having a “working draft” due instead of a completed draft. Whether there was actually any difference to my professor, there was definitely a difference to us in class.

For some students, it meant no homework. For others, an assignment they could do not just the night before, but the morning of (thank God for those 12:10 classes.) For me, it meant I could bring in something more like a collage of ideas relating to our prompt, rather than your typical essay. Often times for me, my working drafts came with letters to my readers in the header and footers, and a “conclusion paragraph” consisting of bullet points filled with question marks.

Working drafts often got to evolve during class time as well. In the 100-minute class my essay would start as bullet points and loose ends, and finish with a fully-formed “thesis” (I tread lightly with this word.) Working drafts in my writing class were the perfect way to figure out what the hell you wanted to say.

Something insightful (maybe even too insightful) is that navigating working drafts is a lot like navigating life. Some people want you to come into life with a complete idea of where you want to go, much like a completed draft in most writing classes. Although this draft can change, you normally have some of the big stuff, and some of the small stuff, pretty set in stone. A complete draft isn’t going to work in the real world, however.

Life is a continuous set of working drafts. You can’t expect to make them perfect every time. Working drafts often don’t make complete sense to other people reading them, even though they seem clear as day to you. But working drafts change… for lots of reasons. They can change because of your ideas, or something someone else suggested, or maybe because you changed your mind completely. Despite these changes, it is important to remember that your working draft (if you put time into it and truly care about the end result) is not wrong, it is not going to ruin your final draft, and the amount of changes you make does not mean you’re indecisive, it only means that you’re working hard. 

If you look to the title of my blog, “Sweating the Small Stuff’,” you know that the small things are most important to me. Also, if you’ve noticed “small stuff,” “small things” or some similar phrasing is located somewhere in nearly all of my blog posts. Paying attention to the small things and the details is something I care about in school, at work, and in relationships.

I do indeed, sweat the small stuff.

That being said, I am also really good at letting go. I will worry for a while but I don’t let the small things that bother me sit inside until I cannot handle them anymore.

Sweating the small stuff on a regular basis helps keep me from boiling over. Although it may not be ideal because I do tend to worry about at least one thing every day, it is far better than waiting until the last minute to do something about how I feel. I save waiting to the last minute for my school assignments and group projects.

So, to a certain friend, who is really bad at letting things go (and who will never read this because she said my blog was boring), I hope for my sake, and for your own sake too, that you learn to just start sweating the small stuff and simultaneously learn to just let it go.

Get ready for another Donald Trump themed post, but first let’s back it up a little…

In my writing class we focused a lot on understanding audience. We looked at audience of other pieces of literature, as well as audience of our own work. It is important as a writer to understand your audience. It is important to make critical moves that are specifically effective to the specific people you are writing to. As a reader it is important to understand who the author is speaking to.

In basic terms, a children’s book is most effective to a child, just how a scholarly article is most effective to a scholar.

Now back to Donald Trump…

I am not the only person who has realized that Donald Trump’s Tweets don’t seem to add up… quite frankly, a lot of them don’t make any sense at all. One reason for this is because I may not be his audience. However I think that, primarily, Donald Trump is not understanding his audience. His older tweets don’t have the proper tone or nuance of a presidential candidate, and his tweets now, don’t reach the American people in an effective way. I think his tweets are really tailored for himself, so he can go back and read what he wrote with a smile.

I am not trying to support Donald Trump by what I am about to say, as he could really benefit from a more direct tone and a few more sessions of peer-review, but if he altered how he says what he wants to say, he might receive less hate from the media and reach a large group of the American people. Instead, by talking only to himself and to people who already support him, his ideas aren’t reaching anyone new. If he truly has some good ideas lost somewhere in his twitter feed, he should really think about about the small stuff and how he wants to say his ideas. 

These tweets are what happen when you type “the stupidest Donal Trump tweets” into Google Images. I cannot verify if these are even real (or if they are even fake.)

Dear straight people,

Sorry to group you in a large mass that might not be completely representative of yourself as an individual, but a lot of you really don’t get it.

There is a lot of diversity in this world. Some things you can see. Some things you cannot see. Some diversity is what is inside us. Some diversity is the small stuff. A lot of diversity is things that no one can control. A lot of diversity is never truly realized. You can become diverse suddenly, in a way you never understood. And even to this day, your diversity can separate you from those you love.

For a lot of members of the LGBTQIA+ community, diversity is a challenge. Being straight has not, and never will be, a challenge.

I am not sorry there is no straight pride. I am not sorry you don’t have a flag. I am not sorry you don’t have a month.

SF Pride 2017

Come join us as an ally in our celebration. Come celebrate our love.

The feeling of finishing my freshman year is more overwhelmingly joyous than the feeling of graduating high school. Probably because the amount of time I’ve put into my work, the amount of stress I’ve had to endure, and the significance of this milestone to me, outweigh nay struggle I went through in high school.

Additionally, I think I was somewhat sad to leave high school.  There I was leaving my friends, everything I had built in the four years I was there, and I was leaving the feeling of comfort I had developed at school.

I am not sad to be done with my first year of college.  There are no strong friendships here, there is nothing monumental I am leaving.  Hopefully in two months times, I will find myself in a new school with new friends, focusing on sweating the small stuff, and wandering around a new city.

Right now, my eyes are set on San Francisco.

“Fake News”

A quote, a headline, a new running joke. Unfortunately, there is a good amount of fake news out there. Unlike Donald Trump, however, you shouldn’t go around calling everything you disagree with “fake” and everything you support the truth.

The great news (pardon the repetition) is that there is the internet. Better yet, you can use the internet to do research. Even better than using the internet, you can use online databases, the archives, and real, actual books.

Through my own research this past quarter in my writing class, I have learned that research is power. Research lets you decipher true fact from true fiction and really filter out the “fake news.” The small details come to light. Moreover, giving yourself a foundation for your opinions, something to cite and something to back you up, only makes your statements more powerful. The strength that comes to you from forming your own arguments through research is power.

In my research in sex education this past quarter, I’ve learned the truth – that sex education isn’t working. I am not just a liberal screaming her head off for more left policies… I’ve seen the data, I know the horrific numbers. I know, through my research, that this isn’t just “fake news.” 

Research has provided me with insights to go beyond the surface. Research has given me power.

For the final project in my writing class, we were given the task of transforming our researched argument into a “multimodal” project.  Going into this final project, I was concerned by the word “multimodal.” I didn’t even really know what it meant at first. I was not sure how I was going to turn my project into something that was effective, that fit the guidelines of the project, and that was in the means of the time constraint and my own skill level.

However, I realized that the term multimodal is intentionally ambiguous, and we simply needed to develop a project that was unique to our own assignment. The project needed to take our boring research paper and turn it into a medium that is easily accessible for our audiences.

My argument, that sex education needed to be taught at the university level to address the issue high rates of STDs, STIs, and pregnancy among teens and young adults in the United States, is geared to speak to both university administrators and university students. Inspired by a recent conference I personally attended, and by the frequency that my professors attend conferences in their field, the idea of making a mock sex education conference came to mind.

So that is exactly what I did.  I created a mock conference that would be hosted right here on Santa Clara’s campus.  I created a Facebook Page to market the event, and attached is the daily schedule (imagine it as a trifold brochure) for my conference.

Part of being a good writer is being able to translate your writing to the “language” of your perspective audience. It always makes me laugh when I think that my writing professor was at one point and elementary school teacher, but then I remember that she obviously didn’t speak the same or cover the same topics when she was teaching children more than half of my age. That being said, I am sure she was just as great of a teacher (not trying to kiss ass here) because she was able to translate what she meant into a language that her students can understand.

But, nothing is a direct translation. In languages, for example, there are so many small things that can matter so much to what you’re trying to say, tone of voice, dialect, accent, etc. that when you type something into google translate, or even translate by hand, it just doesn’t come out… quite right. However, you have to make the best of what you’ve got, even if it is a little funky, awkward, or not exactly what you meant.

My most recent assignment in my writing class was to translate my final research paper into a “multimedia” project. After writing about sex education for weeks I decided that my final research paper would be addressing the university’s role in sex education for its students. Long story short… sex education in the United States is almost non-existent and colleges need to do something about it so everyone can stop catching bad stuff and getting pregnant accidentally (and other things as well).

I recently attended a conference here at Santa Clara about looking at the LGBTQ community through Ignatian values, and I thought a similar lens would be the best way to hypothetically get a Jesuit university like Santa Clara University on-board with providing a comprehensive guide to sexual health education (as opposed to abstinence-only education) in hopes of improving student health and well-being. So, for my project I decided on a brochure with a conference schedule just like the one I saw at Ignatian Q, as well as a Facebook page to invite friends, faculty, and students.  Obviously, this all for show, but maybe one day the university would get on board with an idea like mine.

Gail.

This woman has the most patience I’ve ever seen in a white-haired lady. Gail works in the library and specializes in research and is pretty much a walking guide to databases. My writing class has had about 3 classes with her, going over finding sources, creating citations, and how to get the most out of the databases SCU offers.

She clearly loves what she does, because if she didn’t, she definitely wouldn’t be here at SCU teaching research to a bunch of college first-years in a required writing class. Although every time I’ve met with her we’ve done something a little bit different… this past week when my writing class met with her (sans professor) we spent a good portion of our time practicing annotated bibliographies…

right after we turned in our assigned annotated bibliographies.

However, we did touch on how to introduce authors inside a research paper, and how it differs from introducing sources in an annotated bibliography. This will be helpful over the next few days as I compose my final research paper (scary -help me).

That being said, the 11 of us who were there still enjoyed our weekly dose of Gail. And after reviewing annotated bibs with her, I am pretty confident I did my right. So, although I didn’t learn that much new information, I got a pretty stellar confident boost for the rest of the day. 🙂

I can barely recall my sex education in during my primary education. I went to private school from K-3rd grade and then again from 9th-12th, so that luxurious gap in a public middle school is what supposedly gave me the how-to on sex.

I am was probably better off heading into high school straight out of public school sex ed than many of my incoming classmates who had to suffer through sex ed in a private school… with a nun as their teacher. I probably remember LESS from my private high school education than middle school. Although our high school didn’t have a nun who was willing to teach a bunch of 13 year old freshmen, my high school still managed to ignore most of the small stuff (the important stuff) and taught abstinence-only education.

All this taken into account, my research on sexual activity in college has brought me back to my high school and middle school sex education classes. I have realized that looking at research of STDs, STIs, pregnancy, condom use, etc., is all fine and dandy except for the fact that it is missing the fact that everyone learns about this a little differently. Some schools don’t teach it at all – saying no sex is the only sex you’ll get to have until you’re married.

This is a dental dam.

Safe sex may seem like common sense, but I know so many people who don’t do it. Many of my girl friends think birth control is the way to go because then you’ll never have to use a condom – bare is better! Or my friend who is allergic to latex and throws out the idea of condoms all together (latex-free condoms are just too hard to find). Oh… and no one has ever used dental dams except at the dentist. I think the issue, the gap, in my research is that people are stupid.

This is a condom.

But why are people stupid? The answer: because they aren’t educated.