There's More Than Meets The Eye

    Taking a class like popular culture is important in your academic and lifetime success because it teaches more than essays arguing whether Marilyn Monroe and Pamula Anderson are both important sex symbols of their time, it teaches important life skills such as critical thinking, listening, and organization. For popular culture classes the context of these classes are merely a bonus that you learn while the major aspects you are suppose to take from classes like these are important life skills that will help you grow as both a student and a successful human being. I know quite a few people in my life who could have learned how to listen a little better or learned better organizational skills and these skills are skills that can be learned from classes like popular culture classes.

Happiness, It's More Than What You Buy

       In the article Billy Sim Chuck Klosterman explains how he makes a Sims avatar that he tries to model exactly after himself. What Klosterman struggles to do however, is to model the avatars personality after his own. After all do we really even know our own personality or who we really are? Because Klosterman struggles to mold SimChuck's personality into that of his own he experiences trouble when trying to make SimChuck happy. Normal things that make people happy like friends and hobbies don't cut it for SimChuck. Instead, materialistic things like expensive TVs and beds are what make SimChuck happy, so Klosterman buys his SimChuck expensive things that make SimChuck happy for the moment but this happiness doesn't last long. SimChuck wants natural happiness, which is the happiness one feels when they recieve what they want, and Klosterman buys SimChuck the expensive things to try to give him natural happiness but what SimChuck exhibits and what most people in our society fail to realize is that the things that we think will make us happy for a long time won't actually make you happy for that long. SimChuck does recieve natural happiness by recieving the expensive, materialistic items that he desired but only for a short period of time. In order to have long lasting happiness SimChuck must broaden his horizen and start focusing on things like friendships and hobbies rather than nice cars and houses.