what the fuck is an enthymeme?

Well here we go, Paper #1 for writing 123, my arch-nemesis in the academic world. To be honest, I have no fucking clue what it was supposed to be about, I don't know what the hell an enthymeme is, and I was drinking vodka and cranberry juice for the larger percentage of the endevour.

And I wonder why I can't pass my classes!

_________________

Obesity as a Class Issue

Fresh-cut asparagus: $1.98 per pound. Fat-free, whole grain pasta: $2.99. Jar of all-organic spaghetti sauce: $3.95. Loaf of 12-grain wheat bread: $3.99. Pound of 99% fat-free hamburger: $6.99. Carton of 100% pure cranberry juice: $4.99. Time spent shopping and preparing: 1 hour.
Knowing your family is eating a nutritious meal that is good for them? Priceless.
It may not be an actual commercial, but it could be. Mastercard, with its “Some things money can’t buy” ads epitomizes the attitude of today’s affluence-obsessed culture. You can’t put a price on things like this, they try to convince consumers. The unfortunate reality in America is that everything comes at a price, and some people can’t afford to pay. When faced with a choice of expensive, healthy food that takes a long time to prepare, or cheap and usually unhealthy fast food, working class Americans will more often than not opt for the latter.

Does this mean that America’s obesity problem, now being called an epidemic by many, is a blatant effort by the rich to keep the poor in check for some greedy reason? Quite possibly. It seems as if poor Americans are being targeted by companies like McDonalds and makers of cheap foods, and a large part of the obesity problem can be traced to class differences. Others argue that it is not so much that companies target the poor and try to make and keep them fat (after all, what good is your labor workforce when they’re obese?), it’s that the poor are more likely to make unhealthy choices on a regular basis for the convenience and affordability. Both sides’ arguments are valid.

Obesity is a class issue, related to not only the availability of food but of exercise equipment, or time to prepare proper meals. Rich people work fewer hours than the poor for the same pay, have more access to fitness clubs or safe recreational areas, and have the luxury of choice when it comes to food. Lawrence O. Gostin offers a number of reasons for obesity in his article “Fast and Supersized”:

Health officials can provide information about healthy lifestyles, but if individuals live in poorly designed communities, their health will suffer. Many urban environments lack safe, open, and green spaces to facilitate recreation and physical activity. They also lack easy access to inexpensive, nutritional foods. Convenience stores and fast food outlets may vastly outnumber grocery stores where people can buy whole grains, fresh fruit, and vegetables. At the same time, suburban sprawl facilitates reliance on automobiles and discourages walking or cycling (11).

This is most true in poor neighborhoods, where people are crammed in housing projects and convenience stores line the street. At the same time, companies are targeting the poor, following the basic rules of capitalism: go where the money is, and do and say what you have to in order to get it. The rich aren’t going to shop at 7-11 as much as the poor are, so why build stores in neighborhoods that won’t make money?

Greg Critser describes the opening of a Dunkin Doughnuts in an ethnic neighborhood in California in his article, “Let Them Eat Fat”. He cites a discussion with the manager about why they decided to locate their restaurant in that particular place. The manager replies that they were looking for “all the bigger families”(106). When prodded, he clarifies “bigger in size” (106) with a roll of his eyes.

The Dunkin Doughnuts in Crisner’s article is targeting a certain population, and the question of whether or not it is a malicious decision focused on taking advantage of the poor, in this case Hispanic people, is pressing. An entire class of college students, supposedly developed in their critical thinking skills, missed the potentially deeper meaning of this seemingly innocent exchange (or found it prudent to leave it untouched). Bigger families, as in Mexican families? Or bigger families as in fatter? Is the targeting of the poor so subtle that we often miss it? Do social stigmas on discussing race and class prevent people from addressing these issues? If so, Crisner’s claim that obesity is a direct result of companies’ blatant irresponsibility toward the poor suddenly becomes more valid.

The fact that an entire class would miss something like that shows just how subtle the problem really is. Then again, university students don’t generally hail from the income bracket these companies target.

“Well, they don’t have to eat there,” one boy haughtily declares. Choice for the poor is an interesting thing. After working an 8 hour day, the choice of spending $20 to ride the bus for half an hour, shop for food (assuming you can find childcare for your kids or beat them home), then go home and spend another half an hour cooking it, who isn’t going to opt for convenience that McDonald’s located right by their house offers? It’s cheaper, faster, and tastier.

Of course not all poor people are obese. An entire sub-class of “poor” exists within those below the middle class. Shell Feijo writes a saddening story of a sleepover with a friend in her essay, “There are Holes in My Mandarin Dog Bisquit”:

“We were hungry and there was nothing to eat. I don’t mean that there was only peanut butter and jelly, or milk instead of juice; I don’t mean that there was nothing we liked. I mean that there was nothing there” (99).

Michelle Tea’s compilation is full of stories like this, families without the means to sustain themselves. Are these families the target of companies like fast food chains for their poverty, despite their inability to afford it? In a way. Daisy Hernandez talks about working at a McDonalds in “My Father’s Hands”: “The job was like walking on a tightrope without a net…. You never know why they sent you home but not the others. A wrong word could mean your hours the next week were reduced from forty to thirty-two” (56).

Jobs, and the security of those jobs, are another class-related commodity. This suggests that not only is obesity of rising concern, but the causes of it, like difference in classes,
While fast-food corporations like McDonald’s are often the main focus of the anit-obesity movement, looking at other low-cost foods reveals the same problems. Examining the nutrition facts on a package of Top Ramen, a staple item for many struggling college students, once again reveals that cheap does not equal healthy. A package of the instant noodles contains a low caloric content (280 calories if one consumes the entire two-serving package by himself), but high fat content (22% of fat and 36% of daily recommended saturated fat). Knowing that these packages often sell for ten cents each, does this mean that the Nissen company is intentionally targeting the poor, and ignoring the lack of food value? Is this even their responsibility?

Do corporations like McDonald’s blatantly ignore health issues to make more money? What are the benefits of keeping the poor, poor? The questions about where responsibility lies in the obesity problem continue to grow, and there is no finite answer. The only answer lies in a solution: “The answer, I suggest, is that in almost every public-health arena, the need to address obesity as a class issue—one that transcends the inevitable divisiveness of race and gender—has been blunted by bad logic, vested interests, academic cant, and ideological chauvinism” (Cristner 109). Moving past pointing fingers and instead focusing on a real solution is the only answer to this crisis. A cooporative effort by an entire society, ignoring class, race, and social standing? Priceless.




Works Cited


Critser, Greg. “Let Them Eat Fat.” In The Curious Reader. 104-115.

Feijo, Shell. “There are Holes in My Mandarin Dog Bisquit.” Without a Net: the Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class. Ed. Michelle Tea. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2003. 97-101.

Gostin, Lawrence O. “Fast and Supersized: Is the Answer to Diet by Fiat?” The Hastings Center Report. March 2005: 11 -12.

Hernandez, Daisy. “My Father’s Hands.” Without a Net: the Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class. Ed. Michelle Tea. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2003. 49-57.

word count: 500

Sitting in the desk-crowded, ugly green-tiled, sun-blinding WR123 room that's located on the third floor of Allen Hall today at 3:00 which is when I have my writing class because it's nice to have classes in the afternoon, someone (a girl sitting three desks away with brown hair and too much makeup) asked the teacher who was standing in the front of the classroom wearing a scarf and a sweater if it was acceptable for our reading responses that she had assigned the previous class (not Monday because we had that off for MLK Jr. day--MLK Jr. was a very talented speaker by the way--but Friday) to be less than the required 400-500 words. Although reading responses are only one of the various types of busywork (busywork is all the superfluous stuff that teachers make students do to make sure they're actually reading the materials) assigned for this writing class, they are the most time consuming and annoying and frustrating because we are forced to draw meaningful thoughts and ideas from crap essays (by crap essays I mean poorly written garbage that some pretentious geriatric—Bruce Ballinger—thinks is meaningful in one way or the other but is generally incorrect) with no point and then type them up and turn them in to her. (And she's very picky about the ink, even though I'm running out of black ink in my printer and have to print in red or brown or some retarded color, she doesn't care, she just plain doesn't like weird colors when we turn in papers that she has assigned.) Anyway, her response was no, that we would be graded down a certain amount off the total grade for not having the required amount of words, which was 400-500. Why? Because writing classes at UO require us to write a certain amount for the term. Apparently it doesn't matter if it's poorly written and grammatically incorrect, or even borderline illiterate, just as long as we meet that golden word count. These writing assignments don’t ask that much of us; 400-500 words is a stretch even if you actually care about the assignment. She informed us this policy of meeting word counts or getting graded down would be in effect for our two research papers as well.

"So it's better to keep writing after we've run out of meaningful things to say than to have a paper of substance?" I asked on my way out of the classroom at 4:00 when class was over. I've never been one to pad a paper; when I'm done saying what needs to be said, there's no fucking reason to go back and cram in as much shit as possible to meet some idiotic standard. She nodded her head. "Yep!"

That’s right, instead of writing thoughtful papers and responses, we have to continue spouting nonsense after we've already made our points in order to pass this class. This is quality in education.

I can feel my writing skills improving already!

I'm hungry....

Apparently I’m something of a picky eater. When I say picky, I don’t mean snobby, as I’m quite happy with a hamburger and fries any day. By picky, I mean I won’t eat just any place I come across.

Apparently that’s why I can’t find anything to eat at UO. Well, can’t find anything to eat that isn’t hippie crap or overpriced crap (Subway comes to mind—how much DO vegetables and bread cost to mass produce, anyway?). Even the vending machines with their $1.10 snack size bags of chips are there to partake in the masses of spoiled kids with too much disposable income.

I found myself hungry enough to venture into the EMU for lunch the other day, which was a bad idea not only for the food, but because waiting in line with a bunch of obnoxious, jostling idiots for upwards of 20 mins for ANYTHING is bound to make you dislike it. Since everything had ridiculously long lines and I didn't feel like breaking my hand on someone's face, I decided to try out the Holy Cow Café for a salad, figuring that you can’t possibly fuck up vegetables and dressing.

I guess you can. Chunks of what I thought to be chicken (should have known better on that one) turned out to be fried tofu with the consistency of plastic and a flavor like grilled Playdoh. The vegetables were old and wilted (but organic, hurray! *sarcasm*), the dressing was some terrible healthy version of good old ranch, and to top it off, I paid $4 for the thing.

Contrasting this, I had breakfast today at the bus station, a distasteful prospect to many of my peers. It was cheap, it was horrible for me, it was delicious. And it was served with a smile and courtesy by an older gentleman who was just eccentric enough to be cool and not annoying or scary. The collection of bumper stickers and signs behind the counter and around the register varying from silly sayings to profound statements of advice just added to the charm of the place.

You don’t find that around the school. Any of it. Holy Cow Café with its collection of self-righteous vegetarian and pro-earth comics and articles gives me nothing but a feeling of “I don’t belong here”.

Although that’s probably what they wanted in the first place.

sour grapes make delicious wine

to drown your sorrows in.... Or something like that.

I'd been looking forward to going to Sakura-con, an anime convention, in Seattle for the longest time, at least five years. And every year something would happen that stopped me from going, including no money, boyfriends that didn't give a shit, no money, and no money. This year I vowed to go, being so bold as to send in the $40 preregistration fee to guarantee a spot.

Hotels tend to cost money, as do transportation and food. So I tried to rally some friends into going. For months all I got was meager enthusiasm and no real committment, which of course is not encouraging when you're going to be the one reserving a $120/night, 3-night hotel stay on your bank card.

Besides the vague 'yes' vote on the part of my friends, my car is a piece of crap. I've known this for a while, but when pushing it out of intersections became a daily affair, I decided this car would not be an appropriate choice of vehicle. This left planes, trains, or someone else's automobile, none of which were viable choices. Trains take too long and cost too much (although the cheapest of the options), airplanes suck and cost too much, and nobody I know owns a car that can drive that distance.

But it wasn't any of these things that destroyed my desire to go. It was sitting in Japanese class listening to some spoiled kid ramble on about how she was going to go abroad to China for a term, and then Japan after that, how her Grandpa was paying for all her school, how it was so silly that she didn't get any financial aid because her family did construction (yeah there's no money in that business at all....), and how she couldn't wait to go to the convention with her Chinese teacher. It struck me then that these were the kinds of people that went to anime conventions, brats with disposable income coming out of their asses and nothing better to do with it than buy toys and think they're cute for speaking Japanese and liking anime.

Well, okay, there are the kids that sit around playing D&D (nothing inherantly wrong with D&D, I'd probably play if I'd gotten into it earlier on) and discussing how in episode #47 Naruto's hair is parted the wrong way in scene 24, and how that's some sort of symbolism for his state of mind throughout sidestory brought up in episode #33. (I made that up, I don't have a fucking clue). And then there are the squealing cutesy fan-girls that you want to slap. I've come to realize that these people are going to do nothing but make me hate anime, and that would be a shame. Anime is best enjoyed alone or in the company of a few friends, and there's no need for plastic figurines of characters, running around in an uncomfortable costume for the pleasure of 12-year old perverts and pedophiles, or even the signature of your favorite voice actor.

So yeah. Have fun at Sakura-con, assholes.

sugar, we're goin down

It was the first day of a new term today, and, while it wasn't really punch-the-wall shitty, it had that same old 'why the hell am I here' ring to it.

The more I see of the world, the more I realize that I hate it. At first it was "I hate this town, I want out". Then it wasn't just that town, it was the next one too.
Well, wait, maybe it's this state that sucks.
No, no, this one sucks too.

We all know Americans are self-serving assholes without an ounce of care for the rest of the world or the implications of their actions on the future. The question is, if your ship is sinking, do you bail out or go down with it?

And are other countries any better?

/end pointless rambling.