WRIT 340 dpdoyle

I had an epiphany today in writing class. My professor started the class with a short writing assignment to loosen the muse’s restraints, so to speak. We were required to write nonstop for ten minutes. I looked down at my paper and immediately thought about Gloria Steinem’s My Life on the Road . During the first week of class, I had gone on Amazon and researched the five memoirs from which we could choose to write about. How do I decide which ones to buy? I tend to be interested in everything so I wouldn’t be able to decide based on plot or reputation. I needed a more quantitative measure, something like price ; whistling at my own cunning and congratulating myself, I bought the two cheapest books. As it turns out, many of my classmates picked my first book too. It was fun reading their reviews and getting to see how different people interpret the same book. Now I get what started all those religious wars. However, I didn’t see anyone review My Life on the Road . Oh well, it’s a su...

TO:                  Professor Clark Hansen, CEO, AMDP FROM:            Dennis Doyle, R&D Chief Analyst, AMDP DATE:             September 30, 2020 SUBJECT:      Investment Recommendation Memo My team and I have completed the analyses of the best investment opportunities available to AMDP in 4Q2020. The results indicate that financial support of Oatly, the Swedish oat-beverage manufacturer, is most in accordance with AMDP’s values based on the grading criteria we used. This memo is structured in the following manner: Selection Criteria Concepts Oatly Overview Third-Party Opinions Recommendation Please direct any questions to the R&D team. Selection Criteria Concepts Before I proceed with our analysis, I would like to bri...

  Last Sunday, my flight landed at LAX international at 11:00pm. I was tired, but happy; my flight arrived 28 minutes early and I had zoom school in the morning. My girlfriend and I finished visiting my parents in rural Oregon for the last four months. Cynna, my sister -- whom is pregnant with her second child -- also happened to be visiting my parents with her two-year-old son, Ulysses. Cynna’s old dog, Pepper, a black pitbull-black lab mix, was there too and had “retired” to Roseburg (my hometown) after biting Ulysses a year earlier. My mother called the summer of 2020 “the best summer ever” as her house was full of life again for the first time in years. I’m still trying to decide what to call it. My mind automatically divides the 4-months into two distinct phases: blissful pre-Ulysses and nightmarish post-Ulysses; his arrival at the midway point changed everything. It’s like going from the light side of the moon to the dark. Hopefully, he reads this short random blog post somed...

The question every reader should ask themselves after finishing a new book is what did I get for that investment in time ? Sometimes you get a new point-of-view on the world and you’re fundamentally changed. Those are the rare books that shape destiny, i.e. Confessions by Saint Augustine. Other books are less ambitious and are merely entertaining diversions, like The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. How I Killed Pluto… fits somewhere in between, but where? I need to know. Do Mike Brown (the author) and my desire to classify all things in a logical pecking order comes from a Western upbringing, genetic disposition, or some other unexplored cause? I’m currently taking an American Studies class and we’re asked to judge the merits of using the panethnic label: l atino . Why did people start grouping different and diverse populations -- from the Afro-Caribbean descendants of slavery to the indigenous peoples of the Yucatán -- under one umbrella term? Is it justified? That debate should be he...

Canning for the Next Coronavirus Peace of Mind One Jar at a Time Believe it or not, but the internet trolls were wrong. They were wrong on January 1 st , 2000 when Y2K didn’t crash computers around the world. They were wrong again in 2012; it turns out long-abandoned Mayan cosmology isn’t the best predictive model. Danny Boyle was close in the film  28 Days Later , but all the zombies and flesh-eating distract from the true menace. The world ended on March 11 th , 2020 when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic (Rolling). Of course, this is an (debatable) exaggeration, but one consequence of the current global struggle has been the re-evaluation of certainty  and  control . These illusions have been exposed and average people are coping the best they can. An easy way to reclaim some lost tranquility is food preservation. There is quiet beauty in carefully making and executing a plan, whose end product actually serves some unavoidable future need like hunger. Successful cannin...

In How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming the author, Mike Brown, details how as a scientist working at Caltech, he made the discovery that eventually lead to Pluto’s removal from the registry of planets. While this story is sufficiently interesting to revolve a memoir around, Brown fills the pages with wit, humor, and insight. I’ve only just started this book, but I’d like to share two captions that seem especially relevant. In the first chapter, What is a Planet? , Brown describes his early childhood growing up in Huntsville, AL as the son of an Apollo program engineer. Everyone he knew was associated with NASA and the space program. For a while as a child, I thought that when you grew up you became a rocket engineer if you were a boy and you married a rocket engineer if you were a girl; few other options in the world appeared to exist. This exert shook me. While not 100% white, I know the aegis of white privilege. I’ve heard many black and brown testimonials discussing ...

Navy Leading Petty Officer (LPO) Less than 10% of the U.S. adult population have served in the military and of those people, even fewer have been in the Navy. So, I imagine most readers won’t know what a Leading Petty Officer (LPO) is. Fortunately, it’s your lucky day! I’m going to lift the veil and show you behind the scenes of one of the most gratifying and frustrating jobs in the world! The LPO sits on the lowest rung of the middle management ladder, so everyone in the office looks to you. The junior Sailors direct their concerns and complaints to you, expecting some resolution. The upper leadership expects you to handle the day-to-day running of the department. You sit in the middle of the action and it’s your job to keep everyone happy. To be a successful LPO, you must assume and master several roles at once: Trusted Counselor Production Manager Tireless Student The following three stories are typical for any LPO worth his or her salt.   Trusted Counselor Suicide is ...