Category: English

Number of times I have called my relatives this week: 9. I used to talk to my grandparents a few times a month now I talk to them most days and I talk to my brother every couple of days.

Number of times I have called my friends this week: 10. I never used to call my friends because I saw them almost every day but now the only way I can talk to them is on call.

Number of times I have slept less than 8 hours: 5. I normally don’t sleep until late and because I have online school I have to wake up at a certain time.

During social distancing I have been using platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet and Houseparty to not only talk to my friends but also attend classes and training. Initially choosing where to work was a hard choice for me as we had a desk that needed to be built and not a lot of time or space as my bedroom couldn’t fit it in. We have an extra room though as my brother moved out years ago and the bed in that room is smaller so I chose to build my desk there. I didn’t really move anything around but I pushed the bed closer to the wall. Sometimes if I am lazy I will do my classes sitting on my bed but I also had to do that when I had to quarantine in my room. This is only for online classes. If I am talking to my friends on a social app I normally just call them from my room because it’s more convenient for me. I haven’t removed anything from my background as my background is a plain white wardrobe I just always make sure that it is closed.

I also had my birthday during this so I did a big group call with my friends from my dining room table so that my mum could also be there. I didn’t move anything from the display then because my friends have been to my place before and I didn’t feel the need to shelter my flat from them.

To a certain extent advertising a corrupting and manipulative influence on our lives as the main goal of advertising is to sell us something, whether it’s a lifestyle or a product they want to influence us. The strategies they use may not be seen as ideal to the modern audience yet somehow can get away with being controversial. Sometimes it’s even the controversy that sells the product. For example, pop-up ads are seen to be annoying by most people yet if you see it enough times you might just want to click on it manipulating you into believing you need this product in your life. Some advertisements might even make you believe that your life is worse off without it. This creates a toxic image around advertising as we see things we might not necessarily need yet it is being shown off and as if it is a necessity to live. Additionally, with the rise of mass sales and more online stores, there is a higher need to grab people’s attention whether it’s on a tv ad, billboard or even a sponsored post on Instagram advertising and branding is everywhere whether you notice it or not. This can create a major influence on how you live your life but this does not mean that all advertising is a corrupt and manipulative influence in everyone’s lives.

I had my whole day planned out, to the minute I knew what I was going to do and when I was going to do it. I like to keep to a schedule as much as possible though Donald sometimes doesn’t agree with it. It was supposed to get ready in the morning, do my morning facial routine, order flowers for my parents, say goodbye to Tiffany, yoga with Janelle and dinner with our guests. Not anywhere was there room for Tiffany to tell me that my husband’s daughter is donating to his biggest competitor. Yet now I am sitting at dinner with my parents trying to celebrate them when all I can think about is how I have to tell Donald, I love him but he has quite the temper and the worst thing he could do is disown his own daughter on twitter and then I only find out because he sent me the tweet.

I wonder how long Donald and I will last. Will Barron have us over on our anniversary? Maybe his wife will buy us intriguing flowers. The future is so uncertain. Who knows if I will be a first lady within the next few months. Or if I will even be allowed near Ivanka. The idea that one o this own can’t say they support you would create the media to have a field trip. I want this family to stay together. Even if Ivanka secretly supports Hillary, this family can win my husband a presidency. I’m not 100% sure that’s what I want, but that’s what Donald wants and if he stays in the Republican party, that is what he might get.

Adichie effectively portrays the protagonist Melania Trump as someone who has two different personalities, her inner thoughts and the actions she then takes whilst additionally drawing empathy for her.

Adichie shows from the very beginning that Melania is the protagonist by depicting Ivanka as the antagonist. This is done by having Ivanka not care about Melania by undermining her with snarky comments such as “Melania looks great, but we have to think about how to make her more relatable”. This portrays Melania to be the victim and Ivanka to be antagonising Melania in front of her father. Additionally, with Donald not standing up for his wife it invites empathy from the reader. Additionally, with Melania feeling invisible it creates a good base for her to be the protagonist in this story. The lack of intimacy in Melania and Donald’s relationship is obvious in the way that “He copied and pasted his tweets to her in text messages”. This further portrays Melania as the protagonist as she tries her best to keep a loving relationship with her husband yet all she gets is a tweet that she never gets a say in and a husband who doesn’t stand up for her. 

Moreover, Melania is portrayed as the protagonist by her two different personalities in the short story. In her mind, Melania is a strong woman who knows what she is talking about and how to convey it yet the way she portrays herself to the outside world. When Melania was preparing herself to tell Donald the Ivanka supported Hillary Clinton she knew how to do it specifically down to the scent she had to wear, “the jasmine scent he liked”. This shows that she is actually an intelligent person who knew what she was doing and how to get her way yet she never wants to hurt her husband’s feelings, or worse, her husband lose an election. Furthermore, Melania knows more about politics than she lets on. She thinks about how Donald renouncing him being with the Republican party affects his chance of winning yet when she raises any sort of issue with the way he runs his campaign she is simply told she’s being “European”. This undermines her in a multitude of ways not only saying her opinions are irrelevant but they are only irrelevant because of where she comes from.

Overall, Adichie portrays Melania to be a strong-willed woman who knows a lot about how her husband works yet is seen as an outsider in her family.

In “The thing around your neck” Adichie invites empathy onto the speaker in a multitude of ways. One way she invites empathy is by changing the personal pronoun from I to you. This helps with empathy because it draws you into the story and the reader can see themselves in the place where the reader in. This also helps with empathy because it’s a way for the speaker to detach from their real life. The detachment shows that the speaker isn’t pleased with what went on and how it affected her. Furthermore, Adichie invites empathy by showing a great contrast from the US and Nigeria having the speaker embarrassed of their home country. They refer to Nigeria as a place where someone would “gawk at the lives of poor people” yet was never embarrassed by the US saying they “won the American visa lottery”. This feeling of embarrassment is something that everyone can relate to and by blatantly putting the embarrassment in different sections of the story it attracts empathy because feeling embarrassed is an emotion everyone has felt at one point in time.

Personally I believe that I do have an accent but it really does vary as I do this quite a strange thing where it depends who I am talking to. When I was younger I had only lived in the UK meaning that I had a very British accent but not a posh one, I grew up in the east midlands so I had a very strong accent. Now it has sort of dulled down into the generic British accent sometimes sounding a bit like what I used to when I was younger. I only use this accent with my family, my friends in the UK, people I meet with my family or on my own outside of a school setting and people I’ve known for a long time. I’m not 100% sure why I change my accents because I don’t intentionally do it, it’s more of a subconscious switch. Some people think my British accent is fake yet to me it’s my most real one. My other one is sort of a generic accent, sort of American but a bland sort of type. This is the one I use at school. Other people notice the switch because it happens quite a lot yet no one really ever thinks it’s weird once they’ve known me for a while. I guess my two accents are the two different sides of me.

I think that nowadays everyone is dealing with some sort of worry, stress or anxiety due to the uncertainty of the situation at hand. It has especially hit hard for lots of students as they are either losing face-to-face learning time with their teachers as they work towards their exams for the following year or the chance to prove themselves has been taken away from them as their exams have been cancelled leaving an uncertainty on what this means for their future. For me especially I have been worried about what my lack of exams mean in the future, with everyone before me either taken their exams or not taken them there is no real guide to how this will play out in my future. It affected my work ethic to begin with as I felt that everything I was doing or even working for was useless causing me to not see the point of even working at all. Eventually, I got over that and I knew that I would be taking some of the classes next year so to carry on would be the best option. Next time I face any worry I think I will try and use the worry budget and let myself deal with my issues quickly before moving on.