Don't Touch Me!

Americans should wash their hands more. Wait, let me rephrase this, people should wash their hands more. I am pretty sure everyone—at least once in their life—have used a public bathroom and have heard the roaring sound of a flushing toilet, but instead of hearing the facet running next—the bathroom door squeaks open and closes with a click.

Thus this left you seating on the toilet wondering, “Why didn’t they wash their hands?”

According to Dr. Philip Tierno, a director of clinical microbiology at the New York University Hospital Center and the author of “The Secret Life of Germs,” the bathroom is the first line of defense to eliminate more than 2 million germs thriving on our hands, in our fingernails, and caked between our wedding ring and ring finger. The Food Standards Agency in London reported that germs hiding under bracelets and watches could have as many germs as there are people in Europe! However, up to half of all men and a quarter of women fail to wash their hands after using the toilet. It's estimated that fewer than 50% of people actually wash their hands after using the bathroom. And for those who do—very few do it correctly—for instance damp hands can spread 1,000 times more germs than dry hands or using clean, dry hands to open the Germtopia door knob. Dr. Tierno also noted that it takes 20 seconds for a proper hand wash—getting in between your fingers, getting on top of your knuckles, getting under your nail beds with plenty of soap, and rinse with water.

For God’s sake people please wash your damn hands! I mean…we do live in the United States where water is not scarce but hospital bills are high. Moreover, we don’t have to hike miles across a desert to fetch water from the nearest watering hole like those poor kids in Africa with the bulging stomachs—which is not filled with water if you are wondering. In fact, their bullies are infected with nematode intestinal parasites, or worms. In a study conducted by Glickman and his colleagues that was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, stool examinations were performed on 286 randomly selected children from 1-18 years old from three rural villages in Guinea, Africa. Their results concluded that 53% were infected with worms and education in simple hygiene, such as hand washing before consuming food, will help reduce the number of future cases. The Centers for Disease Control recommends singing "Happy Birthday" twice through for an effective wash.

On a lighter note, and don’t take me as a hater—but I absolutely despise people who do not wash their hands before handling my food. And after one incident which left me scarred for life…In February of 1991, while visiting Vietnam for the first time, I caught a fever one night like any typical 8-year-old kid visiting a Third World Courtney. Feeling hungry the next morning, I requested for a hot bowl of soup—I quickly engulfed it before getting on a 32-hour train ride from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi to visit my grandmother. After a couple hours on the train, I got my first “got-to-go” signal, then my second, then my third, and by my fourth time I stopped eating and drinking because my toilet paper supply was getting low. By the time I got off the train, I was lifeless, drained, and too weak to budge. The local doctor in my grandma’s village visited me the following day, with a diagnosis that I already knew, diarrhea.

Til this day, I am still convinced it was that suspicious poop soup my cousin bought for me the morning before we departed to grandma’s house. He claimed that he bought it from a clean restaurant next door; I think the opposite, he probably got it from one of those food vendors on the street who hands were tainted with Ecoli bacteria. According to the Hospitality Institute of Technology & Management, each year in the US an average of 76 million cases are caused by foodborne illnesses with 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths—and at least 25 percent of these illnesses are due to improper hand washing. For God’s sake people please wash your damn hands! Our war-fare against germs is controllable and the visit the doctor’s office for food poisoning, even worst bird flu or MRSA, could have been prevented if people wash their damn hands!

I admit it. There were times when I didn’t wash my hands. Not because I didn’t want to but I couldn’t.
(still in progress)

I Don't Give a RIFF about L.O.V.E

I really don’t know what to say about Laura Kipnix, “Against Love,” I can’t quite say that I love it or hate it. I just remember while reading through the first third of the paper and getting stop due to her diction—numerous times when I had to pull a dictionary out—but she managed to lure me back in with her example of a “couple language.” As she guides me through her paper I did notice her usage of white spacing to section her writing. Other strategies that we have learned over the time of the course are hyphens, parentheses, quotes, and possibly italic words were scattered beautifully. She noted her passion for painting and she reflected to her writing as, “dabbing [paint] at it, endless revising,” and as a painter myself, I used this analogy to visual her writing process with my drawings and paints.

One thing that I have to note about her writing was her use of analogies that highly appealed to me because her language and sentences can be dense at times. And this was a way to short down her thinking process for me to catch up from her examples. I enjoyed her example of love in the context of linguistic (it is great when authors reference subject matter you are studying) and how love is a language couples must decode for better communication. My BIGGEST kudo goes to her playful language when she conveys the term, “opening up,” with the reference of the Trojan War in relation to intimacy—I found that to be so witty and clever!

There were areas where she stated a contraction to her comment, backed up her claim in a humorous, yet sarcastically. She said, “You can’t leave the bathroom door open—it’s offensive. You can’t leave the bathroom closed—your partner needs to get in,” which again, I found it to be playful and witty! I admired her usage of repetition of the word “can’t” as a pattern in decoding love. Needless to say, her switch to second-person perspective is like an extra element a painter paints in to give another layer of dimension to pull in the viewer—and yes, she executed it well.

However, I started losing her again on the last paper last paragraph with long sentences that are loaded with questions (or I was too stupid to understand…). But I do think that love is the “vital plasma and everything else just tap water,” and based on these extreme, yet to the point phrases that made Against Love so entertaining to read.

Comparison of Two Authors

Jamaica Kincaid

• Tone: fluid, gentle, smooth, delicate, soft yet sarcastic at places *
• Diction: elegant i.e., special jewel, England, colors, beautiful, bed of sky blue (ocean)
• Metadiscourse: understood then, our sense of reality, meaningful/less, though it looked
• Point of View: First Person, Past Tense
• Metaphor: England—special jewel,
• Narrative Distance: Very distinct almost, feels dreamy and the images are full of life similar to a sweet melody.
• Time: Calling back childhood memories, each paragraph starts with some time…
• Punctuation: dashes, commas, quotation marks,
• Syntax: long and flowy paragraphs, long sentences, a medley of topics associated with England.

David Sedaris

• Tone: playful, subtle, yet clever, jokingly,
• Diction: daring i.e., sink, attack, wild animal, forbidden, pathetic
• Metadiscourse: identified, claimed, instructed, detested, appear less, as though the…
• Point of View: First Person, Past Tense
• Contraction: I’d, I’ve, hadn’t, that’s, they’re,
• Narrative Distance: Very close almost watching as it unfolds
• Time: Paris, France very appropriate for the setting

Where to start...any ideas?

When it comes to writing, especially scientific writing, for my biology classes they could be dry and boring --and sometimes lame. How I usually start them is to isolate a topic that would be easy to write about and a topic that some people would care for to read. I tend to map out a layout of my essay with a bold introduction tab, the "question" to be answered (hopefully), body paragraph, conclusion, and reliable sources in chronological order. Suppose, on the other hand, with creative writing, my thoughts and ideas would jump from one tab to another --not constricted and deprive of creativity.

However writing creatively could be harder than scientific writing something because creativity is one thing but making sense of the mess -yes I said it- for the reader to comprehend is another problem. One tip I learned from Sondra and Mimi's multiple starting strategies is the "cluster" technique, where one word is placed in the center of the page and you have another world that "you" associate with the starter word, and so on. For example, the word [chocolate] could linked to [memories] with a line, then this [valentine], but could also stop at valentine --and restart at chocolate again with another word of association. At the end of the trip you will have a web of words that connect in such a way that could generate a story, essay, or piece of your creativity on paper.

Another tip, which I found to be really helpful is to look at an object and let you mind follow a long train of numerous topics that stem from just looking and a big curiosity. Let's start -- look at the nearest thing to you. I am looking at a dry eraser marker on the metal holder of the white board. What are you looking at? Based on the marker, I am thinking that in my dorm, at Couzens, there are these annoying boys going around people doors and writing stupid things like, "human milk is better" or "drawing pictures with 'other' connotations other than a smiley face." Then this thought branched other of the time I purchased the set of market and white board on Amazon.com; and then to the time I over used my credit card (my mom was mad and way where around it); this road map is an excite way to test the gears before driving forward compared to backwards --and into a ditch.