This is Water Questions/Essay

Megan
Christians in the World-6
September 18, 2012

This is Water...

In the speech "This is Water," the speaker,David Foster Wallace begins with the story  about an old fish and two younger ones. When the old fish asks the younger ones how the water is, they respond with, "What the hell is water?" he goes on to say that young people are not aware of the things going on around them. David Foster Wallace bring forth the idea that life consists of fundamental choices that lie entirely within the human person and allow people to engage in the world differently. I find this to be credible to the extent of the human person and their own actions. While people can choose the actions they make, they can't choose those actions of the people around them, which could possibly effect their own life.

While Wallace's ideas are very true, we choose our own destiny by the choices we make, he has not placed into consideration the actions of others. While I personally may choose to get into my car and drive to school, forces outside myself could cause the SUV next to me to swerve into my lane, and kill me. While i choose to be in the car and drive on that road at that time, I don't have the super power to stop the accident from happening. (Trust me, if I did, I would get to school much faster on most days....). I often make decisions that have effected my entire life as of right now. I choose to work really hard last year, and as a result, I am taking harder classes, which causes my work load to increase, which more often then not, stresses me out more then I like to admit. These choices have been a fundamental choice, and have allowed me to engage in the world differently.for this reason I find what Wallace said credible.

Often, in the audio version of the speech, the audience will laugh and clap at the irony in Wallace's speech. He is often is making fun of the crowd for something they maybe didn't even realize they were doing like going to the grocery store and complaining about the long lines, or anything else he talked about in the speech. It was humerus to them because they probably knew people who do that, or maybe could see themselves doing it in the future. I work in a grocery store as a bagger, and right after 5:30pm, I see this same scene every day, so the fact that he mentioned it kinda made me chuckle a bit.

One thing in the speech I found really interesting was the way he changed the perspective of thinking half way through. he went from all the negative things about sitting on a highway in traffic when trying to the grocery store, then after a while, switched it to all the positive things that could be going on in the lives of the people around us. frankly, I find myself doing this too. My friends keep me in check with this too, always saying how I could totally have it so much worse off, and I guess that's what hit me the hardest when listening to the audio, even though that probably has nothing to do with the point of the speech. I found it to be most important.