“Unfollow” by Adrian Chen

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SP7eSNz72CppXtFRpjnxrMDdriLNffO968IYyYFpkiI/edit?usp=sharing

” But Phelps-Roper had loved Murphy in “Clueless,” and she felt an unexpected pang—not quite sadness, but something close—over her death. As she continued scrolling through Twitter, she saw that it was full of people mourning Murphy. The contrast between the grief on Twitter and the buoyant mood in the basement unsettled her. She couldn’t bring herself to post a tweet thanking God for Murphy’s death. “I felt like I would be such a jackass to go on and post something like that,” she said. “(Chen 11).

Page 11- The quote talks about the death of an actor from the movie “Clueless” that Megan was a fan of. When Megan found out about the actor’s death, she experienced something close to sadness that she never felt for someone outside of the church before. This was the first time she felt it would be wrong to comment on someone’s death.

This quote struck out to me because it was something less of a turning point for Megan and how she felt for the church. Throughout the reading you hear her story of how she’s grown up in the church and the strict beliefs and guidelines that they follow. You also hear a side of her that is involved with twitter and this new platform that she is exposed to and her developing an understanding for other people’s feelings. In a way, I also believe that I relate to this quote along with a majority of the readers that read the article. As humans we have interests and form connections with people, we idolize in television shows and movies, even though we don’t personally know them. For someone like Megan, who has been told how she should and should feel since birth, it was almost natural for her to feel something towards the death of someone who makes you feel happy. Something she would usually thank God for feeling wrong to do since the person that died was someone that had a positive impact on her. The quote also showed the relationship between the things she was hearing on twitter and the response from members in the church. This is a moment that you are able to see the impact that twitter is finally having on what the church has taught her. While annotating, I wrote a comment about how she was supposed to feel happy about how one of her favorite actresses has died yet she is sad. I was making connections on how she feels and how her feelings have changed and how this is the start to her feeling for other people.

“The Dignity of Disabled Lives” By Andrew Solomon

“Independence is not so brave a value as we often insist, and it is also almost impossible; we live in a collective fabric, all our lives entwined with the lives of others. Human beings are social animals. Disabled people are often dependent on other people, and in our lionization of self-sufficiency, we see that as a weakness. But dependency has its own particular poetry. It is a fundamental aspect of intimacy, a defining quality of love.” (Solomon 7).

Page 7- This quote explains how being independence and dependent are viewed as either negative or positive for most people.

This particular quote in the article had me asking questions and thinking to myself. In an article that talks about the lives of dyabilities and how they have evolved, mentioning how we view our own independence is something I probably wouldn’t think to relate to. The way the author worded this quote was also one of the ways it struck out to me in comparison to my other annotations. Being able to look at how our independence isn’t so much of something we should value so high rather than when we are dependent on others, we are defining our quality of love. People who don’t have disabilities where they are dependent on someone for everything, we many times view asking for help as a weakness. But in the case for people with disabilities, their caretakers are willingly doing the most for them as much as they can which is an act of intimacy. When I was highlighting this quote while annotating, I was making connections that I never really realized before. I never thought about how our independence and how we are dependent on others, yet disabled people are dependent on people always and we often look at that within ourselves as something weak like we can’t ask someone for help yet disabled people are some of the most loving people.