TOW #10 – “The Strange Psychology of Stress and Burnout” by Alina Dizik (Written Text)

            Well-known to virtually everyone, stress is a familiar condition that anyone can relate to, and many tend to find the ability to bond with others, no matter how brief, based on the stress involved in certain activities such as school or work. Alina Dizik, a freelance journalist and writer with stories published in various popular news outlets such as Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and Financial Times, addresses those particularly in the workforce on the effects of stress. She acknowledges how stress can be a good motivator for upping one’s efficiency and focus on a task as many people tend to think, but she also goes on further to explain when stress begins to reach the point of being unhealthy, which many more people take longer to notice until it is too late. She does not go too much into detail on the actual effects of the harmful long-term stress besides noting common issues especially known in the US to be associated with it, but she aims to educate working adults on how to identify when stress is becoming less of a healthy push and more of negative lifestyle.

            The article starts with an anecdote about a neonatal nurse, Jennifer Welker, and her experience with stress as both healthy and unhealthy. Her work with newborn children led to experiencing many deaths in the hospital, but the pressure she endured from it was turned into a force that only made her stronger and more immune to the difficult situations to allow for more efficient work. It got to the point where she believed she “was too good at [her] job” while spending time often in a morgue, but eventually the pressure broke through her carefully constructed exterior, and she crumbled under it. She then had to turn to a jewelry business, at first only part-time, and it soon became her new full-time job when the stress became too much to bear. This personal account was aimed to create a clear idea of when stress is no longer a helpful force and merely a troublesome one, and it also shows that it is important to abandon that unhelpful pressure much like Welker has. It essentially sets up the fine line that Dizik creates by allowing the audience to know exactly what she is talking about in her article.

            This fine line is further drawn with the contrast between the healthy sort of stress with the unhealthy version. Using parallelism, she shows the clear difference in effects coming from both sides, and it appeals to her credibility when these differences hopefully come off as logical and reasonable for a reader to take in. By stating the health problems long-term stress causes while short-term stress tends to only help people become more focused and efficient, the reader is able to see sense in the claim she is making, and is also more willing to learn what she aims to teach them toward the end of the article on how to identify where their tipping point lies with pressure.

            Although Dizik made a good point of showing the clear divide between healthy and unhealthy stress, I personally do not feel as though she actually taught me anything more with the article besides the fact that realizing the harmful sort of stress is harder to diagnose in one’s self. Her offered solutions were ideas that I could come up with on my own without the help of outside influence, so although I have a reinforced fine line between good pressure and bad, I did not otherwise really gain anything from her article.

IRB Intro #2 - "The Color of Water" by James McBride

My Independent Reading Book for the second Marking Period is The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride. This is an autobiography and memoir of James McBride published in 1995 which follows and retraces his mother’s footsteps. His mother, Ruth McBride Jordan, immigrated to America from Poland to be raised in the South, and when she was an adult, she moved to New York where she met and married a black man. The book tells of the many issues with race, religion, and identity she faces as she tries to raise her children, and it reveals how she still triumphed above all of these problems with love, a sheer force of will, and the insistence that only school and church really mattered. This memoir was another recommendation I received as well, and I am eager to learn what it was like growing up as an interracial family in New York.

TOW #9 - "Burning Man" by Alexandr Milov (Visual Text)

          “Burning Man” is a piece created by the Ukrainian sculptor Alexandr Milov. His work consists of two wire frames of adults sitting back to back with children reaching out toward one another trapped inside. This piece implies that, while age and experience has taught us enough to disagree and disconnect with others for so many various reasons, our natural desire from when we were young was to simply connect with everyone and form bonds so that we are not alone. This desire from our childhood has never left us, even if it seems hard to forgive others as we get older, and we still aim to make amends in the end, but we let our own selves get in the way of doing so.

            The children on the inside of the two adults is what really delivers the message. It would have been one thing to have the two adults alone sitting back to back for a reason to be interpreted, but the presence of the younger forms is enough to express disagreement on the outside, but a want to connect on the inside. This helps Milov attempt to tell us that, while we may argue and fail to see eye-to-eye with others on some occasions, we still all want to try to get along in the end, and we should let ourselves find forgiveness more easily on the outside in order to do so. A viewer could even go as far as to say it serves as a comfort for the effects of an argument. Yes, the two parties are upset with one another for reasons we do not know, but they may eventually reach back out and resolve their issues with one another because they still wish to maintain their bonds like their inner child would want them to do.

            The adults themselves, being made of wire while the children are more solid, also shows that while humans grow and learn, they still maintain the qualities of a child at heart, and we do not simply lose them because of the experiences we gain as we grow. This helps to reaffirm the point that we should be able to let ourselves forgive those we are unhappy with, and we should not let what may be our past experiences and thoughts get in the way of allowing relationships to thrive.

            This work let me see my emotions in another light, and as I think about the unconditional acceptance young children tend to have compared to the guarded barriers an adult would put up, Alexandr Milov makes a great point on the interactions of human beings. His choice of materials and composition especially helped with conveying his idea.

TOW #8 - "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls

          Finally facing her fears of being ostracized by the community she has immersed herself in as a regular contributor to MSNBC, Jeannette Walls reveals her past in her memoir, The Glass Castle. The second half of this book takes the reader from her age of ten on to what may be her early twenties, now married to John Taylor in an old farmhouse for one last Walls family reunion during Thanksgiving. Throughout this half of the book, Walls’s issues had only intensified, growing to the point of being unbearable as she struggled to save up a sufficient amount of money only to lose it all again in one fell swoop to her father’s drinking habits. When she finally took a bus to New York to live with Lori, who had moved out as soon as she graduated, things began to improve in the author’s lifestyle, but her parents still insisted on remaining poor, just barely getting by even when they followed their children to the big city. This memoir was shared to inspire its readers, especially the less fortunate facing severe struggles such as poverty, into striving to reach their goals even if their childhood is tough. It also serves to let those who have already succeeded know that, despite whatever their past may have been, they should feel no reason to be ashamed of it.

            One of the things I feel Jeannette Walls did really well in particular is the way she organized the entire book. While it was told in chronological order from her earliest memory to the more recent ones, each sub-chapter within the five chapters of the book were merely snapshots of her life. While many of the details she gave seemed as if they could’ve been easily omitted from the text at the time just to move on in the story, Walls told every occasion with what felt like a sense of purpose. Each of these snapshots, no matter how insignificant they may have seemed to me as a reader having just read a much juicier part a mere few pages preceding it, had some sort of importance to the memoir as a whole. One instance that stood out to me immediately was the use of the word ‘skedaddle’. The word seemed to lose its importance in Walls’s life as I grew immersed in all her other struggles that seemed to come one after the other without pause, but when she said to her father, “Promise you’ll stay here until you get better […] I don’t want you doing the skedaddle” (Walls 261), I was abruptly reminded of her earlier years when she first saw the constant movement and poverty as an adventure.

It was a sort of full circle that tightened the links between the snapshots all the way from her memory as a three-year-old because they all contributed to who she is in that moment with her father in the hospital as well as her success from all the hardships she pushed through since the beginning. It told me as a reader that every moment mattered, led her to success, and now here she was sharing everything without fretting over the criticism she believed she would receive for so long. This openness with both good and bad events also reassures the reader that, even when times are tough, everything builds who they choose to become, and if they succeed and escape from it, they should not be afraid to recount those times to others.

TOW #7 -- "Betrayal" by Mario Sanchez Nevado (Visual Text)

"Betrayal" is a digital art piece uploaded by Mario Sanchez Nevado on 2012. Nevado is a freelance art director, Illustrator, and Photographer born in Barcelona, and he currently lives in Spain where he mainly creates CD album cover art for music bands. This art piece serves as a message towards everyone in regards to global warming and pollution which has become a large issue for today’s society. His work portrays humans as quite literally betraying mother nature by killing her despite all the life she supports including ours, and Nevado created this most likely as an effort to raise more awareness of just how drastic the effects of human activities are becoming for the sake of money.

Looking to the right side of the painting, the hand holding the gun appears to be smoldering hot, causing even the skin above to be damaged by it. This represents how humans are collectively causing the Earth to rise in temperature in the form of global warming while simultaneously damaging themselves, and yet the hand still holds the gun firmly as if to ignore the repercussions of it all. The gun itself, carrying a city upon the frame, is a clear indicator of what the major source of global warming is originating from. This city is all black, giving it an ominous and toxic appearance as it pumps out an equally black smog that begins to invade the light and purity of mother nature. The city’s placement gives off an idea of being directly built on the presence of this threat in order to thrive since, without it, there would be nothing for the city to be built on. All of these little details add up to show humans holding mother nature at gunpoint, expressing how drastic and effect our actions are producing by implying that we are essentially murdering our Earth for the sake of profit and corporations to keep these cities that rest on the gun operating.

On the left side of the picture, we see mother nature in a form quite literally symbolized by a feminine and delicate figure. She shows no resistance to the threat being presented to her as if there is nothing she can do about it except shed tears in response to being killed by her own product of evolution. This concept of being unable to resist translates to the reality that is the Earth’s inability to simply recover or defend itself from what we are doing to it. The pollution and harmful effects of our actions are damaging and killing our Earth, and it has no way of fighting back against it unless we take away the gun ourselves. 

Overall, Nevado has painted a powerful image that grabs our attention and is hopefully causing more people to see the consequences of our choices as a global society. It shows our actions to the true extent of their repercussions and helps viewers bring the large-scale Earth down to perspective.