Esther's 2018-2019 Playlist

What makes something insignificant? In the question that we answered for the piece The Death of the Moth , it says “Why does Woolf choose to write about something as insignificant as a moth’s death?” The question itself already infers that a moth’s death is labelled as “insignificant”, and all of us students, including me, didn’t even really question the label placed upon the idea because we most likely agree. If you think about it though, that’s actually really hypocritical of us. We always see phrases like life is a gift and you only live once plastered everywhere, all over social media. If we’re told that life is something that we should value, why is it okay for us to say that another living organism’s life is not even less important but simply insignificant? It can’t be justified that it’s because humans are the superior species, or because other organisms are plentiful (it would be considered an understatement to say that humans aren’t plentiful-- 7.7 billion doesn’t really ...

Whenever I think of the word “drive thru”, a variety of fast food places pop into my head, but never in a million years would I have thought that there was such thing as a drive thru wedding. Drive thru’s are great for numerous reasons. First, it’s just convenient. If I’m craving some junk food but I don’t feel like looking presentable in public, I can just roll up to the drive thru and get my food without having to be embarrassed. Second, it’s less intimate. I don’t have to make eye contact with the employee when ordering (I just speak to a machine) and the employee only sees a very limited view of my car.  The list goes on and on, but this is only talking about a drive thru in the context of getting fast food; what if we were talking about this idea and applying it to a wedding? The whole idea shifts. Wedding drive thru's share some similarity in purpose for their convenience, spontaneity, sincerity, etc. As Didion describes it, the “wishing wells”, “stained-glass paper windows”...

In Consider the Lobster , Wallace describes the fundamentals of pain, stating that it’s “a totally subjective mental experience” and that people “do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but [their] own”. If we think about this logically, pain is something that separates people. We cannot completely understand each other’s pain since it’s personal and it can be frustrating to both experience and witness. When we’re in pain, we want to be comforted by others. Dealing with pain by yourself is definitely not easy, and it’s also a matter of understanding. If someone could step inside your shoes and fully understand you, your pain, and your situation, pain wouldn’t be such a complicated topic. We know that this couldn’t happen though. We often find it difficult to reach out to others because pain is indescribable and cannot be simply explained. In this way, pain only seems to have negative effects. However, we can confidently say that pain doesn’t only separate but it als...

In any society, there is always somehow going to be a social ladder where every person is classified under a specific rung. While moving up seems to be encouraged, falling down is frowned upon. In Dumpster Diving and Serving in Florida , Eighner and Ehrenreich willingly chose to live a life of discomfort and misfortune even when having the ability of escaping that lifestyle at any time. It was brave of them to swallow up their pride and join the crowd that most view as hopeless and doomed. As a result, both the authors discovered meaning through their new experiences. Eighner actually came to like “Dumpster diving”. As an educated man, he found value in the scraps of others and learned “of the transience of material being”. Would he have learned about the temporariness of materialistic things if he hadn’t lived as a homeless man? Possibly. But because he did survive off of dumpsters, the idea hit him much more personally and significantly than it would have if he didn’t. Ehrenreich...