Before class on Wednesday, post your written response to Project 1, Part 1: Thinking in Writing in a comment to this blog post. Details from the assignment sheet are included below.
Choose a full day to carry your notebook (or notepad) with you. At least once every thirty minutes (at the top of the hour and at the bottom of the hour), spent a few minutes writing down what you have been or currently are thinking about. Include meta-information that provides context, such as where you are, what you were doing, what time you had that thought, whom you were with, etc. At the end of the day, you should have several pages of notes recorded. Some of your thoughts will be mundane, others might be insightful, and others might be daydreams about the past, present, or future. Try to capture as many of your thoughts as possible—those about surface matters and those of deeper importance.
Look for patterns in your thoughts. What do you see think about more often? What do you give little attention to? On reflection, what should you give more time and energy to thinking about? Write a 250-500 word comment to the appropriate blog post on our OpenLab site that addresses these questions. Discuss those patterns that you identified and include some of your thoughts in your short essay in quotation marks, and give each of those quoted thoughts some explanation using your contextual meta-data that you scribbled into your notes. Also, discuss what thoughts you think should receive more or less attention from you.
In the excerpt of Michael O’shea’s “The Brain” he focuses on the basics of the brain. With a personal approach in the text, O’shea writes how humans learn to read and how words are associated with images and further thoughts in our mind. What I found really interesting was the fact that humans can understand full paragraphs of jumbled text, as long as the first and last letter in the words are in correct order. To add on to that, the brain is so smart that we don’t even have to read every word in a sentence to understand its meaning. We simply have to take a glance at the sentence and will understand it in most cases. Although we normally look at the brain as only the operator of our thoughts, O’shea points out that the brain is just one part of a large system operating our whole body. Our brain sends signals to our blood to transfer, it tells us when to breathe all while we may not believe that we are consciously making that decision for ourselves.
Looking at my list of thoughts I find that I think a lot about being on time and managing my time from the morning to afternoon and less frequently in the afternoon. My first priority is waking up on time even if I’m tired; in order to get to a bus and train on time to be in my classes in the morning with extra time to possibly get breakfast and coffee. From the time I wake up to the time I exit the train at Jay Street a common thought is sleep and coffee. From there I find myself making a “to do” list on my iPad or phone so that I can prioritize the rest of my day or next couple of days. Lastly after my classes are done I rush to work in order to clock in on time. Another common thought that stood out was managing my school work for the night because I’m a tad bit of a procrastinator when I have a heavy workload and long work day. Besides those main patterns my mind focuses on taking in information at school and making ways to remember it.
If I had the option of focusing on something more is would definitely be schoolwork. When I’m in class I no doubt take on full attention to my work but once I leave my mind rushes off to the next part of the day which most in most cases is my job. I think if I started to focus on school more often then I wouldn’t be so stressed before class due dates.
More often, I think about far away looking at myself changing. Progressing, growing up or moving forward to life. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing or who I am with, I would see myself in the future. However, family problems take my attempts holding me to the past. Sometimes, this is what stop me of seeing myself in the future. Sometimes, It erase or change the image in my mind. Here is when I blame destiny until the day I hear ” we create our own destiny”. As an immigrant, I know that I have a lot of opportunities. As time passes, passion and vision becomes one. Meanwhile, for me success is the result of the amount of time I spend pursuing my ambition. “Does that mean that doing what I have to do because I have to is my destiny or if I stop receiving what life is giving me and choose my own path is also my destiny”. In other words, for this thought I was thinking that destiny and future might be the same. I give little attention to myself. I rather give more attention to other people than me. I choose to satisfy people with my time and I think is because I am to good to say no. However, I got it do the opposite in order to see that change on me. For example, ” why does it feel so wrong to reach for something more, to wanna live a better life and what am I waiting for?”. In my mind, this thought should receive less attention because it will just keep me stuck in a circle with the same answers. Thus, time is the key to a better landscape of myself and my life.
In my daily thoughts, I’ve noticed I have an equal consistency of thinking about food and walking my dog. I think that’s because, I really like food and my dog is very important to me. I like to think that my thoughts are of an average teen, where I wake up brush my teeth, eat, shower and etc. Just an ordinary day for me. Then later at night I start to wonder if my friends are gonna get online or whether or not we’ll destroy or get destroyed. Sometimes when I get a bunch of homework in one day I start to think and think and my head just starts to hurt and i start to get stressed out. When my day comes to end I think how many hours I’ll get of sleep and what am I gonna wear for the next day? My thoughts get really dark sometimes (I don’t wanna sound weird) but when I’m not distracted and just lying down I tend to think of what happens after one dies, is there actually a Heaven and Hell? People sometimes just talk about religious things and then that gets my mind traveling elsewhere. When I’m with friends I usually look at them and then wonder “wow we’ve gotten so old, next think you know we have wife and kids”, when I’m around then I tend to look back at the past and think about all the funny things that had happened between us or if we’ll actually be in contact in 5 years or so, will we look different or just have facial hair. When I’m playing with my dog I sometimes just stop and look at her then I get myself thinking where did she come from and why were dogs put on this Earth, I usually have really dark thoughts or just very idiotic thoughts, and sometimes I just think too much I give myself a headache.
Based on my day of thoughts, I realized how much I dwell on things of little importance. For example, I lost my metro card in the beginning of the day, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for almost the entire day. Also, I woke up feeling bad about not making it to my neice’s show at school and I beat myself over it the whole day. To be honest, a metro card and a show should be the least of my problems. I also came to n otice that I get hungry a whole lot. About 6 times a day I find myself wondering what I’m going to eat next. I feel like my life lacks excitement and I spend way too much time zoning out into random things like television, iPhone apps such as Instagram, Trivia Crack, Facebook, etc., and food. I need to focus my attention more to things like school and homework, and work. Even at work, I’m thinking about how long until I get to go home and eat! I need a hobby. In conclusion, I’ve decided that I will try to make the most of my days with more positive thinking, using my time more productive and efficiently, and get into healthier eating habits!
My thoughts of the day were mostly all about job and my family. I’ve been thinking what I should do with my life, job or focus in school. School was never my thing that’s why I want to look for a job. And thoughts of how can I find something I enjoy doing and in the meantime make money and support my family. Well, there’s one thing I really want to do but my family never supported me. Which is a Professional Sports Player, but different from the normal sports. It is more like an online sport, such as playing games tournament. It might sound silly, but each tournament is two million dollar in USD.
While collecting my day of thoughts, every half hour to an hour, I have noticed that there are things that i think about without noticing. These thoughts that I have read over seemed quite interesting and odd at first and I wondered why I thought of those things, in my natural it’s normal I suppose. I started my day on a early Thursday morning in a rush to attend my morning during that entire time I was nervous due to my professors rigid class rules. The least thought process was during my math class I guess its cause I have to only think about math questions and figure a way to solve them, in a way thats a thought. After a few minutes of that class I was exhausted wanting to sleep and fell asleep enjoying a lustful dream. My thoughts during the day was mainly about my past baseball career and growing up. Also the odd thing I noticed i think about penguins quite often. My thoughts about growing up is different from other people, I do understand that not everyone has the best childhood and the best life growing up, but I’m pretty sure the way I pretty much raised myself wasn’t very positive and productive as it should’ve. Also the most depressing thing that has happen to me is having my dream crushed of having any type of baseball career due to the fact I suffered from multiple hip injuries. Writing my thoughts down made me realize that I should stop thinking of my past so much and start focusing on more of my future.
Today has tough me that the mind is a strange but incredible thing to have with us every day that you wake up, knowing that the first thing that pops into your head is a thought. And the thought can be anything, about a dream you had, a bad night you remember, could just even be thinking about your future and by future I’m saying thinking what your going to do today, the steps your going to make on your way to the train and at school, and also home work you had to do but for got and went crazy trying to find a way to complete it on time, these where just some thoughts that pop into my head this morning from 7am-11am, and i just thought of a name to call those thoughts “my morning thoughts” “a little joke their”. And as the time passes by at my house once i got out class, from 2pm-7pm my “Afternoon thoughts” kick in, and since i was not scheduled to work today, i thought to my self let me hit up my friends to hang out/ Chill, and i as i walk toward my friends home, i was thinking to my self, I’m going to get ode stoned today and knowing that i just recently learned a little bit about ”Neuromyths” And finding out that drugs don’t make a hole in your brain, and realizing its chemical messes around with are brains. I also have learned and notice that drugs like pot can make you more relax and some very attentive to things that catches their interest and of course expands the minds way of thinking, which leads to my “Night time thoughts”. This is where my buzz kicks in and as i sit alone and see something that catches my interest, like the news, and these wars that can happen any minute with North korea, IS and other world problems and all of that just melts in my heads so it fuses with my mind and make me think, why is the world like this? when it can easily be change, Will their ever be change? How can we create/start change? the answer to it is so easy but yet so complicated for people to understand, because greed and ignorance exist in are world so while we still have that their will never be the answer which is peace. Also so when I’m trying to get some sleep probably from 12am-1am in my home i ask my self one deep question a day and yesterday question was “Why are we so focus on creating and starting wars, when we have a world getting smaller and smaller by the years and are human population is increasing? or who know it can even decrease, but at the end, if us as human matter and want to expand are mind and survive for new generation to come, i think to my self if we have been to the moon why aren’t we using it for are own advantage and create away to live in the moon, create some type of oxygen bases “i don’t know” and by the time are world is to crowded we have other homes in space, and step by step we can reach other planet, create live out their. Are mind is limitless and i am 100% that anything that sounds crazy or impossible, is possible. you just need a mind that wont stop imagining or creating random thoughts in your head, and makes you thing of something that can change the world one day. To be honest i think a lot about life and the situation I’m in and how can i change that, a pattern that i notice every time i think, its that i try to think in to the future to much and how it going to be or what i’m going to be doing and even what are we to expect when we die, question that just pop into my head randomly. i also notice i don’t think about my job as as much as i should its like i blank it out and just go to work and come back like i never left but know i went to work , something i should probably pay more attention to. and these are my Day Of Thoughts.
“Day of Thoughts” is a valuable exercise that helps one realize that you couldn’t begin to imagine the amount of thoughts and tasks that you can do within a day without making notes. I honestly believe that this is a wonderful exercise that you can learn so much about yourself. To add icing to the cake, think of this exercise as writing your diary to begin with.
As I was wrapping up my notes on February 8, 2015, on “Day of Thoughts”. I stopped and took roughly 10 minutes to briefly read through 5 pages of what I had written so far. Surprisingly, I was amused by the amount of thoughts and tasks that I was able to carry out within that day. I just couldn’t believe it. Nevertheless, while I was going over my notes, I came across some patterns in my thoughts that were occurring at a regular interval. It appears to be, every time I found myself trying to focus on what I needed to accomplished for that day, I was either interrupted every 30 minutes by either an incoming called or someone wanted my assistance in some way. At the same time I was thinking, “Why every time I find myself trying to focus on my studies or try to get my work done, my phone rings?”, “Why can’t I just win the lottery and moved far way?”, and “I wonder if I’ll will be able to finish doing all I wanted to fulfill today?”
“Why every time I find myself trying to focus on my studies or try to get my work done, my phone rings?” Time is a very important factor in life and yet many people just don’t respect it; at least other people’s time. As an example, I try my best to manage my time wisely so the day won’t slip away. I would normally separate my family time from my school’s work time and my chores time from my relative’s time. Yet, at the end of the day I’m still expected of to do favors at any given time.
The smell of fresh air, the sound of the wind blowing through the top of the tall coconut palms, and the amazing scenery of the beach behind the back yard of my beautiful uniquely design house are all visions I get whenever I asked myself,” Why can’t I just win the lottery and move far away?” Moving somewhere far is a thought that would strike me whenever I’m interrupted unnecessary by relatives and others and I can’t seemed to find enough time to do what I have to do. In addition, I believe that moving far away to somewhere new and not having be bothered by relatives, friends and, others can turned out to be a good thing at times.
“I wonder if I’ll be able to finish doing all I wanted to fulfill today.” Trying to fulfill a day’s work and not being able to do so could be frustrating, especially when there is a deadline. While I was doing my “Day of Thoughts”, I was disturbed on countless occasions; either by my mom, dad, siblings, and two of my friends and the funny thing was that they all needed me to do something for them even though they were fully aware that I was busy getting my project done. For example, my mom was calling me after 10 am that morning to take her shopping and my sister wanted me to braid her hair that same afternoon.
At the end, instead of me asking myself, “why every time I find myself trying to focus on my studies or try to get my work done , my phone rings?” I should have putted my phone on silence or turned it off until I was through studying.
So planning my day of thoughts was the best thing for me because if it wasn’t planned it wouldn’t get done. After reviewing my day of thoughts i’ve noticed that i had normal teenager thoughts. Such as, my future and what i’d be doing in a couple of years, school and why it’s so time consuming and food. However, the only thought that continuously played through my head in the whole day was my future in acting and how soon i will be doing it professionally. I know it’s pretty cliche to have a thought such as this one but this is a thought i have everyday, numerous times a day and at every time of the day. My future is very important to me so it’s only fitting for me to make sure things begin now and as early as possible because i’ve witnessed many people have a passion for something but it became too late to get it and had no other choice but to settle and try to survive. I definitely don’t want that. I had basic normal thoughts about the steps i need to take in order to reach my “success” and be content with my life. Pretty horrible for me to plan my day of thoughts on a school day but for some reason, my school days are the days where the most thoughts come to me and makes the weekends happen for me. Throughout the day i was thinking about if i’ll get to class in time, why is class so long?, why is school is so time consuming? and whether or not homework would get done because of how tired i am. With the idea of writing my thoughts, it made me realize that i need to be more on top of things and keeping everything chronological and “tight”.
Looking at my day of thoughts, I find that I spend a lot of time thinking about school, the future, food and how to manage my time in the best possible way. Im not very good at managing my time, so it actually surprised me how much time I spent thinking about it. When I woke up the morning on my “Day of Thoughts”, I had to rush down to the subway without eating breakfast in order to get to school on time, and I thought to myself that I should have gone to bed earlier that night before, but I find myself so easely cought up in small things and I forget what time it is.
Thoughts about school is popping up in my head all through the day, I usually think about homework I have to do and processing the things I have learned through the day. I tend to spend more time thinking about homework, then I spend on doing it, wich is stupid. I think the reason for this is that, again I’m letting myself get distracted too easy. I keep telling myself “A little break would be nice” and suddenly I find myself watching Netflix or looking at Facebook or Instagram instead. I would rather do it effectivly and be done with it, rather than spend hours of looking back and forth between my book and phone. Food is also something that is constanlty on my mind, when im in class I tend to think about what I want for lunch and dinner today, I start to plan my meals for the whole day. I guess food is important to us humans by instinct, but to me I think it’s more important than most people and it is kind of annoying to think about it all the time.
I have noticed that I spend a lot of time and energy thinking about homework, allthough I always stall doing it untill the last minute. This is something I want to be better on in the future, I think it would help me a lot to put my phone away until im through studying.
After writing about my thoughts I’ve noticed that since I wake until I go to sleep I have different thoughts on my day that sometimes don’t have nothing on common but they have their own reason and objective in my life. Basically, I think about everything, I’m the kind of person that analyzes everything around me.
Its Saturday morning, right now I’m sit on my favorite sofa and all that comes to my mind is the importance to be happy in life because it doesn’t matter the things you have or what you want to have is what you feel and the people that surround you everyday that matters. I’m not trying to consider myself as a philosopher but I think too much about life and why things happen. Also, my days are based on thinking what I need to do every hour of the day, I try to be more organized than I was yesterday so I do my best to keep in mind a “to do list” for the day. Having a moment on your day to do nothing and think about everything is one of the best therapies ever.
Last week my grandmother had a big surgery and my youngest nephew was born in the same day, so these days I’ve thinking a lot about them and what are they doing. I just think that is ironic that some people are very sick and trying not to die while others were born just a second ago with thousands of opportunities to make a difference in this world, trying to adapt and do the things right. Who wouldn’t like to go back in time and do the things better? Well, I do but those things that we’ve been through in life made us what we are now and I don’t want to change who I am and the experience I’ve got.
It’s my first semester in college so at this moment most of my thoughts are about studying, do homework and organize everything for the next day, as many of you I think a lot about school everyday because I want to do my best to be the person I visualize in my mind; someone that enjoy what is doing and also that have good knowledge of what is doing so could have the ability to help the people.
As many of the New Yorkers, most of the times I have to take the public transportation, actually, I hate it but at the same time I Iove it because it’s the only place you can see all kind of people from different countries, religion and personality, so you can indirectly interact with everybody. It’s funny how everybody have their own world and because life is so stressful and busy nowdays we don’t even smile to each other or say hello and bye. Other thing I don’t stop thinking about is my country because I miss a lot my family and friends, I’m homesick and knowing that I’ll see them soon is what gives me strength to keep going and don’t give up.
I could sum up my thoughts in one sentence; “Try to be happy everyday of your life” and what I recommend people to do is that when they go to bed at night analyze everything they like and dislike of their lives and if there’s something they don’t like or is not making them happy, try to change because life’s too short and there’s no second opportunities. That’s what I try to keep as my “everyday goal.
Bryan jimenez
On a average day of mines I wake up thinking about how my day is going to go like. I either start managing the time is gonna take me to get to work or school or start planing what I’m going to do for the day if either I’m off from school or work. I am a fashion designer and the day I choose to make my day of thoughts I was actually working a jacket I designed, so most of my thoughts were about the garment I was making. A lot of Insecurities came to mind as always like “what if it doesn’t fit the model”, “what if it looks ugly”,”what if the people don’t like it”, etc. All this thoughts take over my mind every time I’m creating something, even though this kinds of thoughts make me lose my focus sometimes, but I don’t let them knock me down. I’ve noticed that I think a lot more about what others think about my craft instead of me focusing on who I am as an artist. A lot of times an idea comes to mind and I want to rush it But I’ve made the decision to change that by giving more time and energy into perfecting my craft.
On a average day of mines I wake up thinking on how my day is going to take off. The times when I don’t have school, I usually work on my craft. My craft is fashion design. During my day of thoughts I was making a jacket I designed. My mind was so into the garment I was making that nothing else was on my mind but ideas of how to make my garment better. I am a person who gets bored quite fast so I had to switch up what I was doing. I later grabbed my math homework and started looking through it, another thing about me is that I hate math, so my thought about math are always “who created math”, “why do we need math”, “ugh”, etc. I hate this kind of thoughts. One reason is because it makes me lose my focus on school. I was analyzing how I passed my math remedial class, which I thought was hard even though in reality isn’t, but the secret was that
Even when I thought it was hard I made my mind believe it was easy and that way I learned a lot more than what I was “learning” with my ignorant way of thinking about math. I notice that I also think a lot about my future. At times I zone out thinking if I’ll get to my goals in life and it feels real while I’m there. But I’m sure I’ll not get there if I focused so much on how my life would look in the future and not about the work I have to do right now to get there. After writing this I want to start focusing more on my craft and not get bored with it, I want to have fun with the fabrics, textures, the sewing, the draping, etc. Also with math I want to be able to love it and not hate the moment my break ends and I have to head to my math class.
The day I decided to collect information about my thoughts made me realize what I think about sometimes. Every 30 minutes I had noticed that I have been imagining stuff that I wanted to be. I had started thinking about what I thought i could be in life and yet I am still thinking. It started off when I had begin playing my game I thought about being a soccer player or becoming someone who could make certain type of games so that everyone can be able to have fun and enjoy themselves while they are playing it. Then I had begin thinking about if it would lead me to a difficult road I might have to take to be able to succeed in life then. Afterwards I started thinking of so much things that I can do in life but still not sure if those things I keep thinking is what I want to do or because they seem fun. Now here I am thinking again about this subject because i don’t know if it’s to late to train for a soccer player or is it to late to switch majors or what.
After looking over my thoughts through out the day I was able to point out some of the thoughts that are always floating around me even when I fail to acknowledge them. On my day of my recorded thoughts I attended a auto show in Philadelphia. My first finding was that this was not at all my typical day of thoughts with a exception of a few topics. Something I fail to acknowledge a lot of the time is the fact that I am very concerned for what my future holds. It’s pretty difficult these days to survive and the thought of the possibility of not amounting to anything is very frightening. There are a handful of college graduates in America with degree’s but cannot find a job within there major and some are forced to work at very low paying jobs because of this. I am very concerned about this because it can very easily become a reality even for me and it would absolutely have no reflection on me, it’s just a reflection of the times we are currently living in. Another thought I found myself being consumed by is the thought of not believing that I could be successful in college. By successful I mean meeting my own expectations. It’s very effortless to lose focus on what is your overall goal in life. I tend to briefly forget what steps I am currently taking to complete that goal and by not completing these steps I could forfeit my goal. I also found myself thinking about irrelevant topics to my life. I would even say that this thought sometimes discourages me from doing what I need to do daily.
I would like to start thinking about steps I could take every day to become more self disciplined. My priorities have to be straightened out and I need to be able to acknowledge what is and is not important to consume my concerns with. I will also like to start making it a habit for me to do all things school related first before doing the things I want to do for the day. Lastly, I would like to find a way to look at everything in a more positive way and be able to change my perception of situations because every situation is what we make of it.
A little thing I want to start with.
I never have daily dairy or blog (living in the 21st century). But I always have a daily planner, which helps me to organize my daily routine and be aware of upcoming events. I’d never wrote my thought down and later analyzed them.
So, that was a day, when I woke up with “Napoleon” plans to make my dreams come true and work harder towards getting where I see myself in the future. Analyzing even that sentence, I can tell that for the past couple months the idea of starting new path career wise or just growing professionally coming to my mind almost every day. Maybe because of my age or because I start being around a lot of successful people, make me realize that I need to channel my energy and knowledge towards achieving this goals. I love that i wrote down that phrase: “So now for myself I need to set up priorities, things that I need to stand for and work hard every day.” Its very promising to see that I am trying to motivate myself even I my daily thoughts. I became more organized for the past years and living away from home in such huge megapolis as New York city, gave you a lot of uncertanties and teach you every day to get up and fight, and be faster, aggressive, competitive than yourself yesterday.
I don’t think that I am the kind of person who will have live journal. I am very introverted about my personal thoughts and opinions, but its quiet an interesting to look up for what was on your mind at that moment, why did it bother you, why you were over thinking about this particular situation or thing. Its probably will be very helpful in self-analysis.
Project 1
Writing the brain
Days of thought
This might sound childish but I found myself thinking about an iron man suit and GTA missions more often then anything else. This might be because of the previous day when I spend my whole day playing PlayStation and watching iron man. I could not stop thinking about how he made that suit to be able to fly. I also thought about GTA in which I was trying to pass one mission for days. For example I was in my calculus class and professor was talking about limit but I was wondering how can I make an iron man suit and how to pass that mission. Then I thought this is twenty first century anything can happen technology has reached next level, people are successful to make a robot iron man suit isn’t that far away. The least thing I thought all day was my future which should be my priority. Right now I am living with my parents, my dad gives me money to buy stuff he pays all my bills literally he manages my spending’s but what if I have to do it on my own some day. I also found myself thinking very less about my college and my work. Right now college should be my first priority than an iron man suit. If I can do better in college it will help me to get a better job. Many people are looking for the same job as me therefore I need to develop some quality in me that separate’s me from others, a quality that makes me more suitable for the job. In conclusion, I have decided to focus more on my studies and getting better grades.