HW 18

                   Thanksgiving dinner in the McCarthy house is never a big to-do. The huge feast isn't very huge, and the topics of table conversation are basically the same as any other dinner table conversation. The only thing that made it special was that my brother was visiting from college which sort of gave the homey family feeling. Food pleasure was the same as any other meal, my family finds that the family aspect is far more important than the huge feast. When it comes to family, we're lacking in quantity, my whole outer family lives in Ireland, so we don't have that archetypal huge american family meal on thanksgiving, but we still sit together and feel thankful for one another's presence.
                   Watching football is commonplace in my house, so of course we tuned in on Thursday. I think that counters the argument of anti-body. We are watching big guys knock each other around to win a game. Their bodies have to be big, fast and agile, the players and coaches pay close attention to the human body and how to make it perform at it's best. I think sports are a combination of mind and body and their collaboration. The mind makes the plays and tells you when you need to throw, run, block, or tackle. A great example of the mind factor in football is an audible, in which the quarterback makes a last minute decision to change up the play. By looking to see if the defense is adjust themselves to correctly counter his play, the quarterback will call an audible to use the defense's thought out positioning against them.
                  On the other hand, the physicality of football is clear, but is often times misconceived. People like to think that football is dumb and is just hit for hit stupidity. That raises good questions about our society and their views on physicality, people think that a sport that involves many intricacies, is mindless brute-like fighting. An athlete hones his body to it's peak in order to challenge his opposition who has done the same. For example; a wide receiver needs to have good hands and quick feet,  a cornerback, who covers the receiver, also needs good hands and quick feet, but also needs to be able to tackle, which in turn makes the receiver need to have ability to break a tackle. These are good examples of how we use our bodies to achieve a goal of sorts. You can see this in any sport, I used football because it always goes hand in hand with thanksgiving. On thanksgiving day, before eating, I went to a friend's high school Fordham to watch them play their rivals Xavier in football. Sports are body centered, which can be seen through not only the game itself, but the fans. You will often see fans out of their seats screaming, arms flailing. Many use their bodies as canvasses to promote their team. But people look down on fans, seeing them as animal like creatures, who are idiotic, loud and obnoxious, when really, it is just a deep fervor that is sometimes religious for people.

               We use our bodies a lot, we just like to think that we don't, because we've established some sort of false notion that using our bodies is wrong and that we should refrain from doing so.

But hey, isn't that really what "society" is? A fuckload of false notions.

Jay M.

HW 17

My experience with illness and dying isn't so extensive. I have known people that died, the closest being one of my good friends when I was in fourth grade. Two of my grandparents died two years ago, but I wasn't really close with them. My best friend's brother died almost four years ago. My grandparents' deaths were of illness. The other two were from, respectively; being hit by a car, and electrocution from train tracks.

I haven't been around illness ever really, so I don't know how it goes. Dying, I don't think there are any social norms really. You just die, there's no socially acceptable way to die, because people can die from pretty much anything. Illness, presumably, involves visiting a hospital and having those close to you come to visit and be with you in your last moments.

I think illness and dying are such personal things that no can really set a social norm to them. Each individual person  is going to deal with an illness their own way. If I were terminally ill, I wouldn't want to be hooked up to a bunch of machines that were keeping me "alive". I'd rather be out doing as much of the stuff that I'd always wanted to do that I could fit into whatever time I had.

In what we see to be the regular, I guess, people are supposed to be with their families. But what if someone doesn't have a family? We think that they're are depressed at their death because their is no one with them. How do we know that that's not how they wanted to go? Maybe some people want to be alone in their last moments, but their families want to be there to the end. Do you respect the dying person, or do you stay because you know you will never have them again? It's extremely depressing, and this unit will be hard to stomach, but I'm sure we'll uncover a bunch of stuff that we never knew. To be honest, I don't know what my family does with the whole illness/dying thing. I know that my father went to see his parents when he knew that they were almost clocked out, but other than that, I don't really know.