Blog #7 The Power of Hello

                       The Essay "The Power of Hello" by Howard White is about the power of acknowledgement. White talks about how saying hello to someone no matter their rank within a company has the ability to make those people feel appreciated. He also mentions how saying hello to his boss everyday helped build his confidence to ask his boss about his future with the company. White is now the Vice-President of Nike's Jordan Brand.
                      I really liked his essay I felt that he is one of those guys that can genuinely connect with his workers and has a good feel for the people that work for him. I once worked with a gentleman that felt that if you treated people you worked with kindness and respect those people would give you their all. I feel that he was correct and that White is a really good example of how far kindness and respect can get you in life. People tend to react a lot better to kindness then the outright disrespect that some employers express towards their employees. There have been managers that I have worked for that would belittle you in front of other employees to assert their power and expect you to give your best for them. I have also worked for managers that would walk you through things that you do not understand and offer their help when they see you struggling to get the task at hand finished on time. Overall though White seemed like he knows how to balance it all out and get the job done while making his workers feel appreciated and happy.

Blog #6 Facebook in a Crowd

                   Hal Niedzviecki's article"Facebook in a Crowd" brings up a good a point about friends that people have on Facebook. He talks about how he felt that he needed to hangout and meet some of his Facebook friends so he sent out a party invite to all of his friends. Most of them said they would be going and when came to the day of the party only one person showed up. I think it shows how there is a huge difference between friends on Facebook and friends in real life. I know for a fact a good portion of my friends on Facebook are either relatives or high school classmates that I keep in contact with, but there are only a handful of people that I talk in my daily life that I'm friends with on Facebook. I know that if I created a Facebook event I would not have any disillusionment about who would show and not show to the event. I think that the event feature on Facebook is a good one especially for small businesses to use like Black Forest here in town is always having something going on or El Palacio's in my hometown having a special on their drinks for the end of the world. I think that the author was being a little melodramatic at the end of the article when he says that hes all alone drinking beer by himself even though he has seven hundred friends. I feel that anyone with any kind of social skills can find someone to go drinking with at the bar or to hangout with. Finally I just think some of us buy way to much into Facebook and it can be harmful to the social skills of kids today.

Blog #4 Malcolm X

            It is interesting that Malcolm X was self-taught and was a major figure in the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, especially for only having an eighth grade education. Also the fact that he learned a majority of it from copying the dictionary from front to back was amazing. His friend Bimbi was his inspiration for wanting to expand his knowledge and sparked his determination to better himself so his ideas can be heard and expressed through his writings. Malcolm X is pretty inspirational because of his tenacity and tactfulness in the face of adversity. He proves to be pretty resourceful in his ways of learning like his use of phonics and other writing skills that we use now as students is pretty intriguing. The repetition and concentration is definitely outstanding especially how he remembers that aardvark is the first word of the dictionary as well as its description in detail. The writing he learned while in prison gave him a means to fight back against society in his own way and establish himself as an important figure of the 1960’s. He goes on to explain how the prison helped him focus his mind to learn from books and how if he was to attend college instead that he would have been involved more with fraternity pranks then actually studying his homework or in the least bettering himself. In that matter I cannot help but agree with him given that most college students these days spend a majority of their time partying or clubbing instead of learning or taking their homework seriously. It could also be said that people today can find it harder to do what he did due to the fact that most prisons nowadays give prisoners access to Facebook accounts or television as reward for good behavior rather than giving them books. The upside is that most prisons offer education programs that way inmates do not have to go it alone. Malcolm X’s reference to how reading books opened new vistas for him to reflect on while in prison showed how far he had gone in his journey for knowledge is impressive to say the least.  I just think that these excerpts from his autobiography show just how intelligent and dedicated Malcolm X was and that he had the tactfulness to lead and be considered one of the greats right there alongside Martin Luther King Jr. I also don’t think that it was coincidence that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were friends but disagreed greatly on the direction the Civil Rights Movement should take.    

Blog #3 Shitty First Drafts

          I enjoyed reading "Shitty First Drafts" by Anne Lamott and found how she explains that everyone's first drafts are shitty. She also went on to mention that writing horrible first drafts is part of being a writer and that when you write your first draft just write what comes to mind at the time, because what you write at that time may not make any sense then but later will end up making sense. Like before writing this blog I wrote a pretty shitty first draft while riding the forty-three bus from the Eugene station to my home. I find it nice knowing that there is actual writers out there that have to go back re-write their works multiple times. I always had this preconceived idea that they always knew the right way to write their stories and it only took them once or twice to get it the exact way that they wanted it. The way her friend explains what a first, second, and third draft is to them is one of my favorite parts of this article. Finally I just found that this whole article was filled with good advice and interesting facts about writing and can't wait to put some of it to use in our writing 95 class 

Blog #2 The Price of Reading is Eternal Vigilance

                     I find reading " The Price of Reading is Eternal Vigilance" an interesting read and would of never thought much about the authority of books and the effects of books on my reading before.When I  read books I always find myself questioning what the authors reasoning for doing the things they do to characters in their books. I did that recently with a fantasy series that I have been reading for a long time. The author over the years created four protagonist that you really grow to like because of their intricate ties to the main character of the series. He recently decided that the four needed to be killed off over the last set of the most recent series of stories before he started with a new one and i found myself getting very agitated over their deaths. Just as Anatole was getting angry with the authors he was reading. I think that Anatole Broyard makes really good use of analogies in his writings; one my favorite ones from this writing is when Anatole compared most writers to that of beggars that are willing to lie to take advantage of the unsuspecting.

                 

A Little About Me

A map of the Samoan Islands where my dad's family is from.

         My name is Risiti Aina, I was born in Oxnard, California and was raised in Klamath Falls, Oregon which is close to the Oregon/California border.

A picture of a little harbor that is on Klamath Lake across from Moore Park.

My name is Samoan and in English Risiti is Richard; as for my last name Aina means land or family. I love history and I'm planning on trying to major in Archaeology, but have been entertaining the idea of going for a business degree. I moved to Eugene for the first time in 2008 and left to live in Hawaii with my parents until the summer of 2012 when I finally had enough of the high cost of things there. I still can not believe that I was paying $10 for a gallon of milk and $9 for a loaf of bread there. When I was about 4 or 5 years old  I used to do Polynesian dance competitions at my grandparents.  I like watching movies especially comedies and horror movies,

One of my favorites it has a good mix of comedy and horror.

Comics especially graphic novels and I like reading Fantasy and science fiction books. and yeas I like playing video games what self respecting nerd wouldn't haha. my favorite kind of food