Big Ideas Welcome Here

Author: Masha Sukkur

Reading and reflection assignment 1_Masha

If I had read “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” when I was in middle school, I would have enjoyed my English class so much. The pictures and Illustrations of what Greg Heffley drew in his diary to give the readers a sense of what he was writing about seemed interesting to me. Before he starts writing he wrote, “TO MOM, DAD, RE, SCOTT, AND PATRICK” and this shows that he was writing this diary as a letter for those people as he describes that it was his mom’s idea not his. He seemed carefree about what he was writing which is like a new thing I’m visualizing about how my writing would sound if I didn’t put too many thoughts into it.

I like how Greg uses a humorous tone in his writing, it doesn’t make me feel bored while reading his personal diary. His writing style inspires me to make my diaries less emotional and more entertaining for the readers to enjoy it. His diary seems to be his experience during middle school, and he talks about his experiences with girls which were kind of funny and sounded like those experiences you witness in movies. Greg talks about how his brother tricked him to go to school at 3 am in the morning for his first day back to school after summer vacation. I can relate to that because, in the past, my siblings pulled a lot of pranks on me and in the end,  I was the one that got in trouble.

I really enjoyed reading “Diary of a wimpy kid”. It was really entertaining, and it reminded me of some childhood memories. I wished I started writing diaries at an early age so I can express how I really felt during middle school days. This reading really inspired me to put some humor into my writings to make it appealing to the reader.

Diary entry for March 29, 2020

MARCH 29, 2020

4:33 PM

Dear Diary,

I am writing this during the afternoon and I’m about to go eat something since I’m starving. After eating, I continued writing my diary entry. For the past few days, I was not able to record what I was doing throughout the day because I had extremely bad stomach cramps. This has nothing to do with the virus, it was my monthly menstrual cycle.

I didn’t really do much, other than be on my phone, on social media’s and talk to my boyfriend.  I was bored and told my boyfriend to play UNO with me, so we installed UNO on our phone and started playing. We kept losing all of our money but then gained back all of the money. It was like playing poker.

I haven’t worked on any assignments yet. The situation that everyone is facing right now, I really don’t feel like focusing on school. I don’t have enough energy to finish up my work like every minute, I get distracted and use my phone and then after 30 minutes, I start working on my assignments again. I just can’t focus on anything I do. Even when I was writing this diary entry, I kept getting distracted. Other than that, nothing interesting happened recently. The only thing I’m really concerned about is the deceased rate going up and no recovery rate from those who got infected so I’m hoping soon we get to see some improvements because I’m really losing my mind staying home every day. This all I have to say for today.

Diary Excerpt_Week1_Masha

MARCH 25, 2020- FOSTER AVENUE, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK CITY

2:52 PM

Dear Diary,

I am writing this in the afternoon. I did not eat lunch yet since my mom is not done cooking so while I’m waiting for my mom to finish cooking, I thought about writing this diary entry. I took a Snapple from my refrigerator and started drinking and went on YouTube to play Beethoven 9th Symphony – Movement IV – “Ode to Joy”. (I will attach the link of what I’m listening to after writing this) Nothing special happened recently, every day I hear more people deceased due to this virus. I feel very depressed for those people that lost a family member.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a little frustrated with how my online classes are going. I feel like professors are assigning more assignments now than they did in a face to face class. I’m trying my best to not be affected by it and calmly finish up all of my assignments on time. Online classes have been a positive and negative experience for me. It was positive because, for some of my classes, I learned more about a topic than I did in school. However, it was also negative because of the number of assignments that are piling up and a few of my professors are not familiar with online classing so it’s hard for them to teach and for me to understand what they are teaching.

It’s almost 3:45 PM and I’m almost done writing the diary entry for the day. I guess one interesting thing I did today was watching food competition videos on YouTube. It was very funny and entertaining, so I enjoyed watching that a lot and another thing I did today that I regret so much is posting an embarrassing old picture on Instagram. It was a challenge so I had to do it and the rules are if any of your followers post an embarrassing picture of themselves on Instagram with a caption “until tomorrow” and if you liked it, that person challenges you to post an embarrassing picture of yourself. It can be an old or a new picture.

 

Here’s the link of what I was listening to while writing this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdWyYn0E4Ys

Diary entry 2_Masha

I’m on the B11 bus now going home after buying chipotle even though I went out to get starbucks drinks. I got out of my house after 4 days and it feels so good. I feel like I was in prison for a year and got the chance to go out. That’s really how I felt. Even though we are trying to spread less of the virus by not going out, it feels like we are restricted from our freedom. That’s really how this quarantine situation is. I took a very big risk by going out but what can I do? I’m a human being, I have to go out, I have to get some fresh air in order to stay sane because my head hurts so much when I’m in my house only using my phone or doing assignments on my computer.  This is very risky for me because in my family, my dad is the only one who has diabetes and has a lot of health concerns which is also why I didn’t go to work today because my job is an hour away from where I live and traveling back and forth, that’s way more risky than me going out for 20 or 30 mins to get some air or buy something.  Hearing in the news that more than 30 people are deceased from this virus in NYC concerns me a lot. I really hope this virus goes away soon so all of us can go back to living our life the way we did.

Blog #1

Corona virus became the latest news nowadays. Everywhere on social media’s, there are memes, statements or discussions going on about the corona virus. This virus brought a huge stress on everyone, for those who has a business, for those who are employed and for everyone else in general. Corona virus caused a lot of discrimination towards Chinese people, even in school, I started seeing less Asian students in class. People been freaking out and trying to buy the whole grocery store. My history professor always talks about the corona virus in class. She’s 100% sure that by tomorrow, CUNY schools are going to be closed due to this emergency. This is a positive experience for me because people started taking good care of themselves, whether washing their handing as much as they can and just staying clean and healthy and also the MTA stations are looking a lot more cleaner than it did in years.