Sawyer Steinmiller: My Averagely Average Bag
As shown in the title, my bag is averagely average. There is nothing too crazy in there, but it does get extremely heavy. When I carry it throughout campus, I think to myself that I am helping my core, but I really do not think that much progress has been made. Starting from the top, there is the bag itself. When school shopping, I chose a grey backpack as to not contrast my outfits. I thought that grey pretty much goes with anything and I stand by that. I didn’t want to stand out too much, adding to the averagely average vibe. On the bag are two Pokemon pins and a Pokemon key chain. I added these small trinkets as a means to start conversation. Nerds in the video game community try not to out themselves, and these trinkets might encourage someone to talk about gaming without me having to expose myself. Surprisingly, this plan has worked extremely well, and I have gotten many compliments. My physics lab binder is to the left of my backpack. I placed it front and center because physics lab is my favorite class. The Best We Could Do is next to the binder solely for organizational purposes. The calculator might be the least average item in my bag. The pink color really contrasts the vibe my bag gives off; it was my sisters in high school. I have grown to love it, and it has also received a lot of compliments. Next are my notebooks- the first one is my green physics notebook (green keeping the theme). The red notebook are my notes for my class on comics (this class). I chose red because English courses always seemed like a ‘red’ or ‘yellow’ class but the Barnes and Noble didn’t have any yellow notebooks. The black notebook is my Econ notebook; I chose black because I always think of black suits when I think of Economics. Last but not least is my blue math notebook. In my mind, blue has always been the color associated with math. Below are my folders. I only have three folders because not that many of my classes give individual papers. The red and blue folders are color correspondents with their respective notebooks, but I had to buy a white folder for physics because Barnes and Noble did not have green. In between my folders are my scattered pens and pencils. I came to college with one pencil and have grown my arsenal throughout the semester by finding spares on the floor. In high school, I was the guy who never had a pencil going into class, but I have always had one at the ready in college. Under my folders is my dongle. Honestly, I still haven’t used it, but I have a sneaky suspicion that it will come in handy in the future. In the bottom right is my Econ textbook; I really hate Econ. Honestly, I still haven’t opened that textbook yet and the midterm is Monday, October 21st. In the middle is my PACE book. I personally think that PACE is super useless and I always forget to do the surveys. Last and least is health. Health is my least favorite class because the entire thing is just memorization. I stayed up way too late for many nights studying the test, and I still probably did poorly on it. I thought it was super ironic how the class preaches getting sleep, but I essentially had to stay up late because I am really bad at memorizing things.
Is representing yourself in a catalog of the stuff in your bag a type of writing? Why or why not?
This image is not really representative of me as a person from at outside perspective, but it really does describe me. I try and give off the image of an extreme extrovert who doesn’t care about what other people think. While I am still an extrovert, I care immensely about what others think, and carefully craft each conversation I have to show a better me. I know it sounds very fake, but it is actually something that I am very proud of. Verbal communication is my best skill, and I am not afraid to use it to my advantage (that sounded evil but I am not- I promise). My communication strategies can be seen through the trinkets on my backpack and my dongle. The trinkets on my backpack show how I try and start certain conversations and the dongle is also there as a backup. If anyone needs one (which many people do), I have one just in case. While making the image itself, I tried to be as organizational as possible; this hopefully made it visually pleasing. This assignment was surprisingly not challenging at all. I thought that the description would be very difficult and I would have to make some lame parallels to my life, but that was not the case. The connections came easily to me, and I had a lot of fun. Representing myself in a catalog was a type of writing because it gave a new and unique outlet to describe myself. Normally, people show things about themselves through their actions but this was totally different.
