We're Really, Really Busy...

Get up early, go to the gym, take a quick shower.  Write two blogs. Finish one book, read a chapter in another, catch up on the reading I've put off in a third.  Study for two exams and write two papers.  Practice for band concert.  Start working on that group project.  Do math problems, study for a quiz, go to office hours.  Talk to advisor and schedule summer classes.  Buy laundry detergent so the laundry can actually be done.  In between all that, squeeze in time with friends, and don't forget to call home!

I always keep a to-do list, and I pride myself on checking off each task that I complete.  Most of my time here at college is spent progressing from one assignment or chore to the next, and when I take a break to go out with friends or watch a movie or take a nap, I've always got my list in the back of my mind.  I often tell people that if I'm not crazy busy, I don't know what to do with myself.

For the rhetorical analysis speeches we've been working on in class, I spent a lot of time the past couple of weeks perusing through a variety of ads online.  Doing this, I started to notice a trend.  So many ads these days appeal to this American ideology that we've got to stay busy, that to have a good life means to be as productive as possible.

Consider this.  Look how much we can accomplish with an iPad!  And all at the same time too!  This ad is for all of us who call ourselves multi-taskers.  I'm definitely in this category, but I've noticed something about multi-tasking since coming to college:  the more I try to accomplish, the less I can accomplish well.  If I divide my brain into four different directions at once as Apple encourages us to do with this ad, I am actually less productive because I cannot give any one task the focus it needs. 

Yesterday, I had a paper due at midnight.  When I got home class in the afternoon, I knew I had to get that paper written, but I really didn't want to work on it.  So in a classic example of multitasking, I opened up Microsoft Word, wrote a few lines, then opened Facebook and Stumbleupon.  I had music playing, I turned the TV on.  I stopped writing every 30 seconds or so to answer a text message or play someone back in Scramble with Friends.  After a while of this with barely a paragraph written, it hit me that I wasn't making any progress and that the quality of my paper was really lacking... Long story short, multi-tasking doesn't work.  Unfortunately, in this busy life we live, sometimes it feels unavoidable.

Here's another one.  This ad inspires us to go fast, appealing to the notion that we must always be doing something, going somewhere, or making progress in some way.

Nike's slogan "Just Do It" really encourages us to keep busy.  In those three words, we are reminded to work hard, to follow our dreams,  and to accomplish big things.  This is a positive, motivational ad, but it still catches our need to finish everything on our lists.  Moreover, it pushes us to get things done now, to stop procrastinating, because "The Future was Yesterday."

Even ads that do not portray people living in "the fast life" still appease our need for busy-ness.  This Royal Caribbean ad uses a different take, displaying peace and relaxation.  It seems to me that many of us work so hard everyday so that we can eventually slow down, kick back, and live in serenity.  Even today, I'm working on blogs and studying all day so that I can breathe easy tonight and watch a movie with my boyfriend.  In this busy world, we are constantly chasing relaxation.

I'm not opposing a busy life.  We live in a highly advanced society, and our commitment to productivity has made great strides in areas of technology, medicine, and communication.  However, I'm not necessarily supporting it either.  Living by a to-do list takes a lot of the pleasure out of doing work, especially if you find it impossible to forget about how long your list is as I sometimes do.  It's important to remember to take a break and relax now and then.

No Offense, But...

I was getting ready to go out for Valentine's Day dinner.  I looked good. I smelled good. Then, a friend from my floor came into my room....

"That's what you're going out in?!  No offense, but you look hideous!"

Granted, I didn't exactly match.  But my skinny jeans and colorful floral top paired with a striped scarf and purple Converse shoes were all part of my statement of expression.... right? Even though I had felt confident two minutes before, I'll admit that my friend's comment made me wonder if I did actually look hideous.  Even though she began her insult with "No offense, but..." her words were no less offensive.  Imagine that.

That wasn't the first time I had heard it.  During a conversation with another friend recently, he admitted that his first impression of me wasn't a good one, saying that, "No offense," but upon first meeting me, he actually thought I was pretty strange.

We've all gotten a "No offense, but..." insult.  Personally, I've never understood this rhetorical tactic.  Urbandictionary.com defines it as "a phrase used to make insults seem socially acceptable," or explicitly, "something you say right before you offend the living shit out of someone."

In class, we've been discussing the role of pathos and ethos, or character and emotion, in effective public speaking.  Now I'll give my friends a little credit. I know their criticisms were meant to be constructive; neither of them would ever set out to hurt my feelings.  However, as rhetors with me as their audience, they destroyed my opinion of their ethos in the conversation.  In saying, "No offense, but..." they were in reality telling me that they were well aware of the offensiveness of their comments but had decided to make them anyway. They also did not consider the fact that injuring an audience's pathos is a very unlikely way to persuade them.  Their words proceeding, "No offense, but..." only caused me to become defensive, and when an audience gets defensive, a rhetor may as well be talking to washing machine.  As soon as I heard, "No offense, but..." I discredited their lines.  If making a comment can only be justified by turning it into a "No offense, but..." phrase, that comment may be better off left unsaid.

We Are......

I remember the first time I heard it.  I was a junior in high school following around an overly energetic tour guide wearing a dark blue polo.  She was showing off buildings, talking about student teacher ratios, and explaining the campus police system as I listened with half an ear.  It wasn't that I didn't care, but with college still two years down the road, it was hard to imagine studying at such an important looking library or reading books on the HUB lawn.  That was when it happened.  One of the many students bustling about stopped for a moment, smiled at our group of prospective students, and screamed...

"WE ARE!"

The passerby's automatically looked up, forgetting their busy schedules for a second as they without hesitation shouted back in unison...

"PENN STATE!"

I giggled, thinking the call was a little dorky.  But even then, I felt the magic.  Maybe that's why I never considered attending another university after that day.  

As a Penn Stater, I like to think that this university is a special place, a college that is one step above every other mundane state school.  I know I'm biased... I know that Ohio and Michigan and Alabama all have their traditions and spirit, but we have something that they lack.  Penn State has four words - four words of freakin' amazing rhetoric.

We are Penn State.

Since I moved to Happy Valley last August, I was pretty sure I knew what these four words meant... that is, until tonight when I really tried to explain it.  How do you describe what it means to say "We are Penn State"? It's that feeling of 107,000 fans roaring the chant together.  It's an identity, a sense of knowing that every student, every faculty member, and every alum is a part of something incredible.  It's sharing a unified goal, a dedication to "success with honor", a commitment to working hard, making changes, and having fun doing it.  It's what we scream at Canyon Pizza at 2am on Friday nights.  It's what we shouted at a candlelight vigil in the face of tragedy, declaring that we are still what we believe.  

To me, saying "We are Penn State" is a lot like saying the Pledge of Allegiance.  The 4 words of our chant, the 29 words of the pledge, they're really just words.  But when you believe them and say them together with others who believe them too, these words become something powerful.  They create intense emotions, uniting us and making us believe we can accomplish anything together.  They become us.

This is our rhetoric.  This is what we are.

Everything is Hard Before it is Easy

http://personal.psu.edu/cab5822/shared/thisibelieve1.mp3

Here's a link to my This I Believe podcast entitled "Everything is Hard Before it is Easy."

Enjoy!

Creative Profanity

Please don't read this if you are offended by profane language.  I mean no disrespect.  I apologize in advance...

My body was all lathered up in soap.  My hair was covered in conditioner.  I was in no hurry to finish my Sunday morning shower when suddenly...

BEEEEEP, BEEEEEP, BEEEEEP, BEEEEEP, BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

The fire alarm.  Knowing that no residence hall coordinator in their right mind would schedule a drill at 10am on a Sunday morning, there was really no option of ignoring the ungodly loud blare.  As I wrenched off the faucet and flung my towel around my sudsy self, words I'm not proud of rolled off my tongue...

Fuck!  Goddammit!  10am!  Motherfucking son of a bitch!

I didn't curse until I got to college.  Growing up, I followed a fairly strict moral code.  I swore for the first time in 10th grade on a dare.  I used to use a variety of substitutions - benign words in the place of dirty ones - to decorate my sentences.  Then I came to Penn State.  I made new friends.  My new friends swore... a lot.  Maybe it makes me a victim of social conformity, but before I knew it I sounded like a sailor myself.  I already told you, I'm not proud of it.  However, sometimes cursing is just necessary.  It signifies many intense emotions - anger, frustration, surprise, happiness...  Our society has come to depend on expletives to convey to others exactly what we are feeling.  Think about it.  When you slam your finger in a car door, it just doesn't cut it to scream, "OUCH! That hurt!"  No, in such situations, it has become customary to string together chains of common profanities and shout them out in quick succession.  Whether it's morally incorrect, un-civilized, not classy, what have you - almost everyone curses.

Being forced to look for "rhetoric" around campus, my attention was drawn to our choices in profanity, and I noticed that everybody uses the same curses.  We stick to three or four swear words - sometimes with variations, sometimes matched together.  I began to wonder why clever, educated people limit their vocabulary so greatly when we have the whole English language at our disposal.  We'll search thesaurus.com for the perfect way to explain the water cycle or describe a Civil War battle, but when we want to express a huge discharge of emotion, we confine ourselves to shit.  Damn.  Bitch, bastard, and asshole.  Why?  The pairing of words is a work of art.  What happened to "Christ on a cracker" or "cooch waffle"?  Why tell somebody to "suck my dick" when you could say "may Poseidon rub his watery balls across your scabrous visage!"? (Thanks to http://shannamann.com/blog/creative-cursing for that one.)

I'm getting really offensive.  I'm sorry, again.

Anyway, the point is, if we're going to waste our breath on inappropriateness, we might as well do a good job of it.  Be forewarned - such rhetoric is unsuitable for churches and elementary school classrooms.  But next time a driver cuts you off or Michigan gets a touchdown, be a little more creative!