It will also help to influence younger age groups that look up to us. Since the world will soon be run by people our age and younger it is important we establish the importance of being self reliant and renewable. By growing our own gardens we are helping young members of our community establish an environmental friendly trend that will build unity and boost participation in sharing and preserving the earth.

Works Cited
Nowtopia; Chris Carlsson. AK Press; Oakland 2008

I’ve had countless role models in my life. Most of which have taught me that the more organized and prepared I am the more I will achieve and accomplish in academics, athletics, and relationships. These achievements, they tell me, will lead to a financially comfortable, responsible, happy life. I have to give these role models credit. They taught me a lot. Because of them I’m driven and educated. I’ve become a very competitive athlete and learned to commit completely to everything I do. I’m responsible and what most would call well-rounded. It wasn’t until recently that I met two people who inspired me in a polar opposite way. Contradicting everything I’ve been taught about structure, organization, and accomplishments, Conor Shaw and Karl Cremin taught me to slow down and enjoy what I’m doing, while I’m doing it.

We met three summers ago at Dukes, a small grill a five minute bike ride from my house. My best friend Mckay and I were waiting for our food to come up when two boys with accents sat down at the table next to us. We soon discovered their names were Conor Shaw and Karl Cremin and they were visiting Ventura on holiday from Ireland. We became automatic friends, spending everyday of that first summer together. They decided to return the second summer and rented a small studio apartment down the street from our houses. This past summer they moved into Mckay’s garage, down the street from my house. The four of us became inseparable. We talked about everything and I know more about them then I do about some friends I’ve had for my entire life. Over these three summers the biys have taught me more about the kind of person I wanted to be than I have learned throughout my entire life.

Conor Shaw is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. He’s completely carefree, comfortable with who he is, and convinced living simply is the only way to live. He’s been through so many traumatic experience and he’s remains one of the best people I know. This past January his twelve year old brother Michael passed away in his sleep.  Michael had always experienced random seizures and the doctors couldn’t diagnose his problem. They prescribed him medication that generally kept the seizures under control but, one morning after experiencing an intense seizure, Michael didn’t wake up. Conor also lost his younger brother Rob when Rob was born due to heart failure. Conor, being the oldest of seven children in his family, was the rock. After both losses he kept the rest of his families’ spirit and faith up. Throughout the summer we’ve had countless talks about how these experiences affected him. And it always comes back to the same idea. Conor believes that everything affects you how you let it affect you. If you always look on the bright side, even though sometimes it will seem impossible to do, it makes those awful situations bearable. He also taught me that if you live simply and only stay committed to what is really important to you life will be much happier. David Thoreau had the same idea in his essay “Where I Lived and What I’ve Lived For.” Thoreau wrote, “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself… I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.” This quote explains Conor and Thoreau’s idea that living simply will make you much happier. Thoreau argues that making everyday day tasks, like bathing, one of the most important tasks of your day as well as a “religious exercise”, bigger tasks will seem less stressful. Conor Shaw is a prime example of this way of life. He focuses all of his attention on small everyday tasks and brings out the fun in them. His enthusiasm and optimism is contagious and I’ve seen in spread through everyone we know.  Because of his influence I have grown not only as a person but also as a friend. I’ve learned to look for the best out of every situation and focus on that instead of the negative.

Karl Cremin has taught me a lot over the past three years as well. He’s incredibly intelligent and determined to experience as many different things as possible. He’s convinced me of the importance of traveling and seeing as much of the world as I can. Karl never wants to stay in the same place for too long and is very careful about keeping few commitments so he’s capable of leaving whenever he wants. David Thoreau brought up the same idea in his essay, “Where I’ve Been and Where I’m Going.” Thoreau wrote, “But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.” This quote explains Karl and Thoreau’s dedication to living a simple, carefree life where they can roam and experience everything possible. After countless conversations with Karl about the type of traveling lifestyle he lives I’m convinced he’s right. He’s inspired me to get out of the country and meet as many people and experience as many things as possible why I’m still free enough to do it. By doing this I will become more well-rounded and exposed to different cultures and types of people. He’s also taught me that by keeping my options open by staying committed to as little as possible I can make decisions based on what I want to do instead of what I have to do. Karl taught me that as long as you’re not hurting anyone else it is important to do what I want will make me happy. He says the real trick is when you can make others happy by doing what you really want to do. This is advice I apply to every part of my life. I’ve found jobs that I love doing that make others happy. By only making commitments to things you’re enthusiastic and excited about you will perform at your best because you’ll want to do well for yourself.

Over the past three years the boys have only been in the country accumulatively ten months but they’ve established an entire life here. They have a home , jobs, and a new circle of friends. The second summer they lived in Ventura was the first the trip became for of a lifestyle instead of a holiday.  They got hired at Dargans, a popular Irish pub in downtown Ventura, and worked up to thirty hours a week. Because of this job they made enough money to pay off most of their flights as well as funding different trips. This summer was the first time we made a lot of low budget trips up and down the coast of California. We made it up to San Francisco, cramming nine people into a forty dollar per night hotel. We drove down to San Diego for five days and slept in the car. In every trip we made we got very comfortable where we were staying. Having no commitments and spending the days exploring through a different city with my best friends was the highlight of my summer. We became fimilar with the different cities and made local friends. It got to the point where it felt like we had a bunch of different homes up and down the coast of California. Thoreau explains this idea in his essay, “Where I’ve Lived and What I’ve Lived For.” He writes, “What is a house but a sedes, a seat?” This quote shows that home is where you make it. As long as you have the necessities to survive anywhere you live can be a home. Thoreau believes that the world is your home and you need to live and experience all of it, not stay committed to one place. He also believes that people can’t claim land as theirs, because it belongs to everyone and everything. Conor and Karl taught me this same idea over the past three years. As long as you have the right optimistic attitude and enthusiasm you can make anywhere a home.

These past three summers have been monumental stepping stones that have helped me see who I am and who I want to become. Conor and Karl have inspired me to relax and enjoy my life now, not focus on only succeeding in the future. Due to their constant insistence, I’m leaving Christmas Day to spend three weeks in Ireland to see their other homes. This summer we’re planning on all moving to New Zealand for four months and starting a new home there. These boys have helped me to see that I want to experience everything I can.

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott and The Everyday Writer, by Andrea A. Lunsford are both books designed by the authors to help improve students’ writing skills using helpful techniques’ and tool. In section four of The Everyday Writer, Lunsford helps students learn how to conduct a research paper. According to Lunsford, there are five main steps; preparing for the research project, doing research, evaluating sources and taking notes, integrating sources and avoiding plagiarism, and finally writing the research paper. According to Lunsford there are many different types of research and you should use as many different forms as possible. On page 154 of The Everyday Writer, she says, “ Sources can include data from interviews and surveys, books and articles in print and online, Web sites, film, video, images, and more.” She then goes on to explain the difference of primary and secondary sources in you paper. Lunsford wrote, “Primary sources provide first had knowledge, while secondary sources report on or analyze the research of others (p. 154)”. Lunsford taught me a lot in this section of her book. I learned that you need to find credible information and site it properly so I’m not plagiarizing. I also learned the importance of transitioning between a hypothesis and a thesis in a research paper. I learned the my fist hypothesis isn’t always correct, but I won’t learn its wrong without doing thorough research. Through this research I will learn what it is to make my hypothesis true. Once I’ve learned what I need to change to my hypothesis, I make these changes and it becomes my working thesis. One I have a working thesis my paper is much more organized and constructed so the reader can understand the arguments I include. In the fifth and six chapters of Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird, she provides examples as to how her stories develop.   The first thing she talks about it letting your free writes develops into what you really want to write about. She gave the example of writing everything you can remember about school lunches. Through her writing, her story develops and she starts writing about a boy sitting at a way by himself with no friends at lunch time and how none of the kids wanted to be associated with him. She explains his importance by saying, “ To me, he is the most important thing that came out of this exercise. Tomorrow when I sit down to work on my novel, he will be someone who matters to me, whom I want to work with, get to know, who has something important to say or somewhere only he can take me (page 38)”. This goes back to what Lamott was talking about in her previous chapters. If you let yourself just write you’ll find what you really want to talk about and you can revise it into that. Both authors taught me a lot in these parts of their books. I’m curious as to how their ideas of how a student should write a research paper would differ because they seem to have very different writing styles.

Works Cited

The Everyday Writer:  Lunsford, Andrea A. Bedfors/St.Martin’s; New York. 2009.

Bird by Bird: Lamott, Anne. Anchor Books; New York. 1995.

Blue Whales

Topic: Blue Whales

Purpose: Inform about  Blue Whales

Specific Purpose: Give specific fascinating details about the lives of blue whales

Thesis: The purpose of this speech is to inform students about the life of blue whales

INTRODUCTION
I.   Attention: It’s over eighty feet long. It weighs over 100 tons. And it preys on creatures smaller than this pinky finger nail.
II.  Reveal & relate topic:    Blue Whales are remarkable creatures.
III. Credibility:    We are lucky enough to have to opportunity to expierence them migrate past the Ventura coast to warmer water. I’ve personally seen them migrating with their calves right off the oil peirs in the Ventura harbor.
IV. Preview: Today we’re going to talk about the physical characteristics of these giant creatures. I’m also going to talk about their position on the food chain, meaning what they eat and who eats them. We’re also going to talk about their anual migrations and breeding habits.

Body:
I. physical description
A.  Blue whales are the largest animals in the world. Quite likely they’re the largest animals that ever inhabited the earth. Just to give an idea of their true size here are some comparisons. A blue whales tongue weighs as much as a full grown elephant. It’s heart is as big as a Volkswagen beetle. Blue whales also produce the loudest sound in the world. The create different pitches which leads some scientist to believe they can communicate amoung each other
B.  They are usually blue-gray with white-gray spots. From far distances they appear navy blue-hence the name blue whales. They spend a lot of their time on the bottom of the ocean floor which allows gold-tinted growths on the bottom of their bellies. Their bodies are designed to dive into the deepest part of the ocean. their organs contract which makes them able to handle the pressure in the deepest parts.

(transition) This is what categorizes them as “bottom feeders”

II. What they eat…and what eats them
A.  Ironically, Blue whales feed off krill which are some of the smalles animals in the sea. To feed the whales swim to the bottom of the sea floor, turn on their side, and open their mouth. They use their baleen, thick hair like teeth, to trap the krill then filter out the water and eat them.
B.  Although they’re giants, blue whales are far from high on the food chain. They’re two biggest predators are humans and orcas, more commonly known as killer whales. Orcas attack them in pods. They ate a baby blue here in Ventura two years ago. A group on Island Packers boats saw the attack. Orcas are brutal and easly take down the slow giant blue whales. Humans are also big factors in whale population. According to the NOAA Fisheries report, in 2007 three blue whales were struch and killed by passing ships. Humans have also hunted whales throughout history for their  blubber. New regualtions have aroused that protects blue whales so they can
start to bounce back in population numbers.

(transition) One key factor is the protection of their breeding grounds.

III. Breeding
A. Every winter blue whales cruise down to the warm south tropics to mate and give birth.  At birth the baby can be up to 8.6 meter in length and weigh 7,000 kg. everyday after birth they increase their wieght by 90.7 kg a day. The blue whale, from the time of conception until twelve months old, can claim the most rapid growth rate of any plant or animal species in the world. Do to the simple and shy nature of these creatures they generally stick by themselves. Mothers stay with their calves until they are wiened off milk. Mothers will stay in the shallows with their babies until their supply of blubber runs out and they starve. This forces them to dive down into the deep to find food and their babies follow. this process weens them off their mothers milk.

Migratory and travel thousands of kilometres annually between their winter breeding grounds in warmer, low latitude waters around tropics like Baja. They mate in these warm waters and give birth then move to high latitude waters where they feed for 3-4 months on mass amounts of krill in polar regions. Krill is more plentiful in these areas. They hang out here and feed for fourn months. Then they start the migration back down to the south. While moving they don’t eat for 4 months and live off body reserve.

B. BUST OUT VISUAL. blue whales mate and give birth in southern tropic regions during winter. with the change of seasons they start their treck up to the polar regions during summer. While in polar regions they eat for four months straight to procude blubber. When the water starts to get colder they start their migration south to the tropics during the winter. During their migration they don’t eat for four months, they just live off their blubber supply.

(transition)

Conclusion:
I.   Blue whales are amazing animals.
II.  As we’ve discussed, blue whales have amazing, massive bodies designed to sustain them for months at a time and allows them to travel to almost any part of the ocean. They have pretty ironic eating habits, blue whales being the largest animals in the world and feeding on microscopic organisms. they also have well designed mating and brith migrations
III. Blue whales are massive creatures with gentle lifestyles. They’re the gentle giants of the sea.

The biggest problem with our culture is that the people running our economy and influencing our society don’t act with integrity. The money hungry developers and corporations are producing cookie-cutter establishments and products that take away from the individualism and originality of  simple products produced by individuals. It’s these large businesses and corporations that attract the majority of our society. Corporation and big business is not concerned with promoting integrity and honest hard work; they’re concerned with making a profit. They produce falsehoods that we should do what is best for ourselves and forget about others. Chris Carlsson explains, “Social identities that helped shape society and gave individuals meaningful connections over the past two centuries are steadily weakening (13)”. Over time our society is becoming more concerned with looking and acting like the majority instead of thinking and acting on what is right. We are setting ourselves up to fail. When we act on selfish impulses instead of on moral decisions short term solutions are found. If we don’t change the way our society acts it will soon fall apart.
Integrity is the key to accomplishing any long term goal. Without honest intentions, hard work, dedication, and integrity any solution will fail. Integrity is something that needs to be learned through example. By individuals, like those in Chris Carlsson’s Nowtopia, making decisions based on integrity others will follow. It is important we reestablish integrity into our society so that members will make moral long term decisions that will benefit every resident. Shown by countless examples throughout history, if our society fails to start making decisions based on integrity instead of selfish economic benefits it will soon fail entirely.

In chapter three of Nowtopia, Carlsson argues that Do It Yourself communities bring members closer together, inspire people to be independent from large corporation, and are perfect outlets for curiosity and desire to experiment by learning from each other and stopping the glorification of “professionals”. This sort of mentality promotes a healthier, more productive lifestyle for those who choose it. It also provides it’s members with the opportunity to develop and appreciate their individual talents and use them to help others.

In a Do it Yourself community, members help each other to become self-sufficient and productive. Learning together to do things with their hands instead of relying on a corporation solidifies a strong bond between those who are involved. There is no reason to call in a ‘professional’ when the information is available for people to teach themselves to create and fix things for themselves. Carlsson explains, “The intimate and trusted relationships at the core of these groups depend on egalitarian practices and reliably fulfilled expectations of mutual aid and respect (Carlsson 53)”. This quote describes the unity found in long-term successful communities inspired to do things for themselves. When members of a society can rely and trust other members it becomes much more productive because each member is inspired by pride to carry their own weight.

A Do It Yourself community requires members opposed to the idea of capitalism and a nation run by big corporations. Members have to be curious and inspired to learn, build, and create things for themselves instead of paying someone else to do it for them. Carlsson explains, “ The cultural shift in Do It Yourself allowed businesses to transfer significant operational costs to their customers, who now automatically perform their own service work for free as a matter of course (Carlsson 50).” This shows how people equipped themselves with the tools they need to perform the tasks they need to get done on their own. There is a sense of pride in fixing things with your own hands. It also establishes a hard work ethic and a closer connection within the learning community than you can find in large corporate run businesses.

Members in a Do It Yourself society have to be curious about how things work and inspired to do things on their own. Carlsson describes how Do It Yourself communities are perfect outlets by writing, “First, their human complexity is fully engaged in creative, hands on work. Second, they are producing a material world that exceeds the bounds of capital’s limitations, simultaneously making manifest their individual freedom while proving and old Marxist assertion that the meaning of wealth is no longer labor time but ‘disposable time,’ that time in which we can develop our talents as we choose. Instead of being exploited as surplus labor, the tinkerers are approaching their own time and know-how ends of their own choosing (Carlsson 52).” This quote shows that if people are inspired to do things on their own not only will they do a better job, but it will be accomplished faster providing them with time to do things they truly enjoy. This will provide a happier, well-rounded society in which members are accomplished and well-educated in every part of their lives.

All of these reasons provided show the importance of Do It Yourself communities throughout the world. When people Do It Themselves the level of work and quality goes up because they are self motivated to do their best. People guarantee their best work because they give their word, and in these communities that is trusted. This is not the case in capitalistic corporation. Corporations are motivated by economics, not by curiosity and self-sufficiency. People need to start trusting and teaching themselves instead of putting all their faith into large businesses.

Works Cited

Nowtopia; Chris Carllson. Boston:AK Press, 2008.