Love and Art are Not Gone 120

  Welcome! Come on in. Make yourself comfortable; there’s plenty of space here to stretch out and get comfy. My name’s Colson Combs, and I’m excited to share my writing and work from LANG 120.013 with you! I’m a first year student at UNC Asheville majoring in Music Technology. I’ve worked long and hard to have these pieces and I hope that you enjoy them! Over the semester, among other projects, I’ve created four pieces of communication designed to build my skill as a writer and thinker in several different areas.  First, I worked with my classmate and fellow Music Technology major Giuliana Chiquito to craft an informative infographic detailing how writing is used in the music industry. In the process of creating this infographic, we interviewed our music theory instructor Dr. Andy Jurik about how he uses writing in his work and did online research to cultivate our points. We used Canva to design the infographic and Giuliana made quite a few inspired design choices! I also created a Per

 

  Our human condition is to seek meaning, and the meaning that we seek is love. I’m not talking about platonic or romantic love. The love I speak of is expansive and indefinite. Our clarity is so easily clouded by discouraging news, petty dramas and numbing fears that we forget ourselves and our places in the world amidst discouragement. We resign ourselves to the ways things seem and the apparent hopelessness of our collective human situation when beauty and truth wait for us just beyond the curtain of our worries. I write this from a sun-dappled patch of grass outside of my dorm. The sun warms my skin as the cool breeze ripples over me, and a few ornery patches of grass poke at my back where I lie. Gleaming magnolias and faded fir trees sway gently in the wind, and their quiet sighs comfort me like the hush of the ocean in Summer. The air smells clean and fallen leaves dance in wild twisters. Once I turned from hope and wallowed in existential despair, but no more. I have found meani

Colson Combs LANG 120 Mar 15, 2022 Annotated Bibliography Enten, Harry. “American happiness hits record lows.” CNN Politics, Warner Media, 2/2/2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/02/politics/unhappiness-americans-gallup-analysis/index.html . This text discusses the self-reported results of several surveys which have found that happiness is decreasing in the United States. It touches on results from Gallup’s January 2022 “Mood of the Nation” poll, the General Social Survey, a Marist College poll, a Monmouth University poll, and more Gallup results. It describes the sorry state of American happiness according to these polls and dissects in detail their results. This is a quality source and readers should trust it because it comes from a widely-read publication, is well-rated on the Ad-Fontes Media Bias Chart, and supports itself using several well-cited and widely known surveys. Its author is a Senior Data Reporter for CNN and previously wrote for The Guardian and FiveThirtyEight, which is

It’s no secret that the United States is far from among the happiest countries in the world. As the fields of Positive Psychology and Happiness Research have grown in recent years, so too has our awareness of our own dissatisfaction, despite our status as one of the most prosperous nations in the world. The disconnect between our apparent success as a country and the reported happiness of American citizens is causing many to question measuring American wellbeing in terms of GDP and other cold, mechanical indicators (Ingraham). "diagram crisis curve" by iXimus [Pixabay License (https://pixabay.com/service/license/)] Source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/diagram-crisis-curve-down-loss-5222683/ The World Happiness Report, published annually by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network since 2012, analyzes Gallup poll data from around the world every year and summarizes it in a series of papers discussing various prominent factors in the state of happiness.