It's TIME to Survive and Write

Captain's Log: Year 2021 Month 4 Day 4

I continue my pseudo-hibernation in the solitude of my room, hiding away from the cold clutches of the COVID-19. The constant cycles of Zoom calls have numbed humanity, the lines between life and work have blurred and physical touch has become a scarce resource on this planet, only second to common sense. Over a year has passed since this cursed pandemic has confined humans into cages like petty animals scrounging for toilet paper and hand sanitizer. The sound of a cough carries the same terror as the sound of a gunshot. Despite this though, slowly but surely, hope arrives just beyond our computer screens. Hope is rolled up sleeves and small syringes plunged into our arms.

Depicted above is me about to carry one of my dogs, Mei Mei, up the stairs. Although she is capable of going up stairs, she deliberately refuses to climb them herself and makes every human in the house her personal elevator. I could keep playing up my words acting like the charismatic captain of a space ship trying to survive the pandemic, but in actuality I'm a college student sitting in their room trying to survive the pandemic. When classes first transitioned to online, I felt like sympathy and understanding was much more common for students, it was almost like the honeymoon phase. Fast forward over a year later with online classes and I'm pretty sure everyone's begging for the divorce papers now. Some classes translated well to the online format and majority just didn't. As a result, learning feels like a chore and my enthusiasm for anything related to school has fizzled out. But with a combination of weekly therapy sessions, food, water, and questionable periods of rest, I have miraculously managed a few quarters and passed my classes so far. Going above and beyond for grades these days, to me, sounds like a death wish and I've had to gradually change and redefine what success is. Success used to be getting straight A's, but success now is getting out of bed and getting at least one assignment done. Back in high school, I dreaded anything English related. It wasn't until taking WR39B here at UCI did I realize writing could actually be fun. Still, the focuses of 39B and 39C are drastically different, so I'm concerned if I can apply skills from there into this class. I'm not exactly sure how to tangibly judge my own writing. I'm grateful enough to be literate. To be fair though, I can comfortably say my writing is "semi-decent". My little Captain's Log pandemic excerpt above was a fun warmup for myself and hopefully something to entertain whoever reads this. My writing process goes hand in hand with my mindset. The quality of it comes with how much I care about what I'm writing about and the external stakes of course (grades, deadlines, all that good stuff). My pace when it comes to writing is a bit on the slow side mostly due to the fact that I'm just very calculated with how I want to write. I'm not sure if this is an uncommon thing, but a sentence could very well take me more than a few minutes. Close reading skills are just about fine and also just fluctuate with my interest in what needs to be analyzed. I like to think I'm just a "jack of all trades, master of none" kind of writer. I think I have a good basis and understanding but it'll always need some kind of refinement or polish since I don't have a very critical eye for my own writing. I've never really done too much research asides from argumentative writing in high school for debate projects or comparing how different news sources report an event for a past anthropology course.

Now, onto the TIME articles and what I gathered from them. The first topic I want to touch on is the information about hyenas and their matrilineal communities. Despite depictions in media (looking at you Lion King), hyenas place reproductive authority in the females and actually have a hierarchy that contrasts with lions where this authority is granted to the alpha male lion of the pride. Even more, I wanted to take note of this topic for introducing the term "egalitarian" to me, which is how we as humans categorize our society under. The second topic I want to briefly discuss was how and if animals could grasp abstract concepts. The first article showcases Kanzi the bonobo who is capable of doing so. The idea of relations between relations is labeled the basic scaffold of knowledge or implicitly the sole standard that humans can reach and I found it interesting at how language immersion for animals can overcome this threshold.