The Ones Who Have Become Adjusted

This past week has been an emotional rollercoaster. I've had so many ups and downs that I wasn't sure which way was up. I had begun to lose myself in a vast sea of the unknown and started to worry more and more about myself; I had let my "natural default setting" get the best of me and it was starting to wear me down. I started to think I wasn't good enough for to be in an AP class; a conversation I had overheard about me not being worthy of the grades I got was always in the back of my mind; I started to doubt that I would ever get anywhere in life because I am black. Luckily for me, five extraordinary people, the Adjusted Ones, came along and helped me. They listened to me while I cried and gave me some great advice that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. These five people I never really talked to and the fact that I opened up to them made me realize they had "adjusted" their settings and for an hour made me the center of their universe.

This experience made me think of David Foster Wallace's speech, "This is Water." In the speech he talks about how some people have adjusted their natural settings and I didn't really understand what Wallace meant until today. To have adjusted settings means not conforming to what society wants you to be. Every single person that I talked to was different from what society what have wanted; they came out of the water. It is through experiences, and life lessons, and selflessness that a fish can achieve this. The Adjusted Ones have achieved "the most important kind of freedom...real freedom." They have learned to "sacrifice" for others by being "aware" of the fact that other people have bigger problems than their own and that they are not the center of the universe. I hope to achieve true freedom someday. It will be my biggest accomplishment.

Puncuation. A constantly changing cycle.

As. Time. Goes. On. punctuationchangeswiththepeople!Ever since the creation of social media the way people write their sentences differently. Many have excluded the use of periods, apostrophes and the Oxford comma. It is believed that social media is creating a decline of literacy when in fact it is helping to improve people's writing styles (Source F.) This is because some social media sites, such as Twitter place character limits (140 characters- on posts so that the author of the post has to be more precise and clear in what they're trying to say but the also have the opportunity to express themselves in a creative way. This “digital communication and social media have produced new opportunities” (Source A) that allow people to not feel oppressed by the rules pf punctuation There shall be no more "dogma of the period" (Source B) Emily Dickinson did just fine without using periods in her poems to or commas to separate her ideas - she used dashes instead- Does this the- 
Overuse of dashes make it-Harder to understand what I am saying?The rules of punctuation are simply "tightening the leash" of an already tight leash. As. Time. Goes. On. punctuationchangeswiththepeople!Thecycleisneverending.

Black Beauty

In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Pecola has a difficulty accepting the fact that she is black. I theorize that, in real life, Pecola would look something like this:

Pecola wants to have blue eyes like white people because she thinks they are beautiful and she is ugly. This reminds me of a speech made by Lupita Nyong'o. If you don't know who Nyong'o is she is a famous actress who played Patsey in 12 Years a Slave. In the following speech she talks about how she had a hard time accepting how dark her skin was.

As I read The Bluest Eye, the more and more I realize that black women have a hard time accepting the way they are. Black women want straight hair, light skin, and light eyes because that is what society deems to be beautiful. In recent years black women have accepted their natural beauty, but at the same time little black girls and teenagers don't think that they are beautiful because of what they see on t.v. from performers like Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj, who have bleached their skin and hair in order to appeal to the public eye and be deemed "beautiful."

It really upsets me that black women don't accept themselves for who they truly are. Beauty isn't something that can be given to you, it is something that comes from within. Ruby Dee, an actress from the 1960s and 1970s said, "The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, and dignity." If any woman holds these three attributes and then some, how can she not be seen as beautiful?

Beauty is based off perspective. So remember as long you think you are beautiful, your beauty will shine through and be seen by others.