Category: McCoy Fall 2018

12/1/18.

Today marked my last China Night.

China Night is the biggest event for the Chinese Culture Club at Geneseo (CCCG). It is the night where we, as a club, put on a performance to inform the Geneseo community about Chinese culture. I have participated in this event as a backstage manager since my freshman year here at Geneseo. Tonight, this magical part of my life has finally come to an end. As I took my final bow on stage, I realized that my time in Geneseo is almost over. As a senior, I only have a semester left before I graduate. Everything eventually comes to an end, that much is true. To see it happen before my own eyes, though, it feels so surreal. On one hand, I’m ecstatic that I am almost finished with the current school year. On the other hand, I’m scared to say goodbye to the life I have created here in Geneseo. These conflicting feelings continue to grow with each passing day. Whether it’s a coping mechanism or just plain ignorance, I haven’t been able to accept this fact even as I now pack my China Night equipment away.

Continue reading “Reflections After China Night”

Structure is very evident in our daily lives as Katherine Johnson mentions in her blog post Easy as ABC, but structure is only for those that are more fortunate. We can see structure in our ABCs and in the general structure of how our day is going to be, but some may not have their ABCs or live a day with certainty in their lives.  Continue reading “Painful as XVZ”

As this class comes to an end, I look back across the time we shared together and I can’t help but feel saddened by this conclusion. This class has made me realize many things about myself, one of the biggest being the fact that my biggest hindrance in not only class but life is myself. I’m not sure whether it stems from a lack of confidence in my own writing or too much confidence, so much so that I feel that my work needs no editing but I have continuously proven to myself that I am a professional self saboteur. Sadly, although I have been unable to specifically target exactly what is causing me to act this way I can say with absolute certainty that this class has helped my writing immensely.
Although I wasn’t always happy with the final products of work that I submitted for this class in retrospect I can see a world’s difference between my writing from September and my writing currently. One problem that I wasn’t able to tackle this semester was my usual foe, time management. This has always been a frustration of mine because I know that I am a smart young man but, I just can’t seem to be able to properly manage myself; no matter how much time or preparation I put into creating a schedule for myself and getting ahead of my work the tide of life always feels like it’s overwhelming me. This semester I came to the resolution that the only way I will get better is to properly prioritize my life. Although this is a very simple idea it’s surprising how many people honestly don’t implement this within their life regularly (me including). Taking self-responsibility even during the last month and a half of the semester has made me realize how easy life at college can be if it stop worrying about FOMO and learn how to properly draw lines between different parts of my life.

I briefly mentioned how there is a moral line that should never be crossed by satirists and trolls in my other blog post, Satire or trolling?, and that line is very hazy. This line is hazy because morals are all relative and that humor is accepted, by society to a certain degree, to mask meanness and the degree of which can also be relative. Jokes are similar in that they also have this line when they are made at another’s expense, but whether it is a joke, satirical comment, or troll, does not matter when it crosses the line of a member of the audience. It is no longer funny and rather hurtful and mean.  Continue reading “The line of jokes”

Society thrives because of structure. Everything that we experience as humans originates in structure, and functions because of some sort of it. The menus we order from at restaurants. The lines we stand in. The stores that we shop in. The songs that we listen to, the movies we watch. It all has some sort of structure, whether it’s alphabetical, by category, or verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus.

Structure is something that has come up a lot in class, and it is something that is involved in every aspect of life, from poetry to the way class lists are organized, and this course has opened my eyes to that truth. Studying Percival Everett’s collection of poetry, re:f (gesture), gave me exposure to a poet who knew how to toy with the concept of structure in a way that made me really reflect on what structure does to us as humans and the ways it interacts with how we perceive and experience the world.  Continue reading “Easy as ABC”

At the beginning of the course, Professor McCoy relayed to us that the intention of the reflective essay being placed at the end of the semester would be to alleviate some of the stress that we all feel as our other courses began to pick up. As a first year student, I honestly had no idea how important and considerate that would be. Being able to know the structure of a course and the way it would play out over the course of a semester was something I had to get used to.

I found it a little intimidating at first: the entire semester laid out in front of me on a couple of pages. But as I began to receive a syllabus from each of my professors and organize my schedule, I realized how much more control I had over my success. It was certainly different than being walked through the process of the semester by my teachers like I was in high school, but it allowed me to determine much more easily how much time I would need to spend on each assignment, and write it out in my planner right at the start.  Continue reading “What’s concrete mean anyway?”

In Analiese’s post “Lift Yourself” she talks about how she used to underestimate her own skills as a writer, but after taking this course she has become more confident in her abilities. As I was reading her post, I realized I had a similar experience. In the past, I felt blind to the quality of my own writing. I think this can largely be attributed to the fact that I am hard on myself when it comes to my writing. Dr. McCoy always tells us how she has high expectations of us, but I think that the expectations that I have for myself will always be higher.

Continue reading “Blind”