Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

My impressions of this text were less than enthusiastic. I kept asking myself; What is the author really getting at? His sentence, "The irony is that after we have worked really hard on something urgent for a long time, we do escape the numbness for a while-stepping out of the building, noticing the breeze, the cracks in the sidewalk, the stillness of things in the shop window." seems to be saying that not being numb leads to pointless observations. Sure, we enjoy such times, but they serve no purpose but to relax us. The author's message is that we should take a look at how numb we are to bad events, and how greatly we appreciate being entertained. It seems to me that this is just human nature, we focus on the good while trying not to think about the bad. then again, maybe things have gotten so bad, and our lives so stressful, that we have decided to ignore the bad and spare ourselves the bad news. Human like to be happy, and they will do some unreasonable things to get that way. John? 14:10, 3 April 2007 (EDT) (original sign) New Sign: John? 17:45, 3 April 2007 (EDT)