Author: Ashley Daddona

In honor of finals week and the semester nearly coming to a close, I found myself almost sad that this would be my last ever blog post. It’s crazy to think that I actually feel sad about being done with school work, but these blog posts truly changed me as a student and as a writer. Continue reading “Over and Out”

After reading Dana’s post, I became much more interested in reading the article about DNR tattoos and how it raises concern and uncertainty in terms of consent. The line from Dana’s post that read “…this could potentially lead to a new definition of consent that goes beyond legal written documentation.  The consent that would be associated with tattoos on the body might be difficult to clearly define” really sparked my attention, because this is very true. How do you interpret something like this, that really isn’t a popular or understood concept.

Continue reading “The Uncertainty of DNR Tattoos”

As I am working on my opening-out essay and revisiting my ideas and notes on Zone One, I came across my note about the use of water-related vocabulary, and how I was wondering about the reason behind why Whitehead decided to incorporate these specific words. I failed to look into it while we were reading the book despite my questions about it, although I did talk about his use of complicated vocabulary in a previous post. Therefore, I decided that I would dive into it a little more now that I can take a step back from the complicated vocabulary as a whole, and focus on the specific use of this themed vocabulary.

Continue reading “Mark Spitz’s Ark”

After working on the collective course statement over the course of the last few classes, I have come across a lot of my notes from earlier in the class that I forgot about. Particularly, I came across the sentence “we must be joyfully self-critical, and never have a goal“, capitalized and starred. This was within my notes regarding the discussion with Professor Kennison about medical voluntourism. As we come back to discussing medical voluntourism in terms of our collective course statement, and the solutions we can come up with for the problems with it, I thought that this statement was very important in terms of that, but also in terms of our class in general.

Continue reading “Being Joyfully Self-Critical”

When reading Zone One and discussing the use of the complicated vocabulary during class, my mind went to the familiar phrase of “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. Although it doesn’t exactly follow the meaning of the phrase, I associated this phrase with Zone One because of the dangerous nature of the storyline: it revolves around an apocalyptic world, where people are constantly in danger, yet they are able to use one thing that won’t put them in danger, whether it be in terms of the PASD, or in terms of the blood thirsty zombies inhabiting the city: language. Continue reading “Armor Laced With Letters”

I really enjoyed Taha’s blog post, Rest In Peace, in which he discussed the idea of putting people out of their misery and how in Zone One, Mark Spitz has the mindset of doing just that. He is ultimately finding the humanity within the skells, whether he wants to or not. But because they are blood and flesh thirsty zombies, you would think they don’t have any humanity left at all.   Continue reading “Humanity in Death”

On October 23rd when we first began discussing Clay’s Ark, we briefly discussed the physical appearance and attributes of Eli and the rest of the people in the enclave as opposed to Blake, Rane and Keira. Because of this, I began reflecting on how the appearance of people can give off a certain vibe about someone, causing us to go against the idea of “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Continue reading “Super Heroes vs Super Villains?”

Bringing it back to our conversation regarding race and its origins, we talked about how exactly the idea of race came to be. After a detailed discussion and the viewing of a film in class (in which the name of it I am unsure of), it became clear that the idea of racism is just that- an idea. This idea could not have started with just one person, because if only one person believed in it then it never would have become as prominent in our society as it did. Therefore, racism is a collective idea that is fueled by those who continue to feed into it.  Continue reading “Feeling vs Seeing Race”