Essay About Family: Cutting Strings :: Personal Narrative essay about my family

Cutting Strings I’m in bed, scanning the ceiling for a light that isn’t there. There wasn’t one last night, or the night before, so I shouldn’t have expected anything different than the textured surface that my retinas now scratch across in a long diagonal. The same grey, dried-paint-sharp ceiling that they don’t show in the brochures. Always without a light. Sure, one of those fake-Southwestern lamps with a plastic lamp shade sits beside me on the coffee table, but it’ll just fall with everything else once this island of a motel room shrinks down to a pinpoint and these two beds, those dresser drawers, that mirror, Jessie, Bekah, and my own elusive existence tumble into the empty gap. â€Å"Are they still out there?† I don’t see her, but I imagine my 16-year-old sister Jessie gaping at the blank TV screen, hoping somebody will answer her question. â€Å"Yep,† Bekah rattles off too quickly. That’s right, I realize. Still outside. Probably in the car, pinned under the hard rain. It was raining when we got here. Some firefly of a town at the crossing of two faded freeways in northern Pennsylvania where it snows a lot in the wintertime for the skiers, my dad told me in a watery voice while our minivan hummed down the off-ramp. Watercolor black, I thought while I looked out the window, except for the yellow, splotchy Super-8 sign and the white motel lobby. My two sisters and I brought the luggage down and we’re still waiting for mom and dad like dead puppets, and I’m still wishing for a light fixture. Like the bubble-shaped one that hung in my bedroom about two thousand miles away, before I turned 18 on this family road trip. Before this second act, when my parents stopped flinching their puppet master wrists from above the stage, and so I finally cut my own strings, just to fall flat on my plastic face and deflate like a balloon. The door clicks open. What can I hang on to? The ceiling is blank. â€Å"Mom?† I hear my sister’s drawl and think desperately about a light fixture, this one big, with crystal chains and gold bars. I can feel the mattress slipping below my back. Take your things. Swinging from chandeliers? No, too much. I’d just hold on. â€Å"Take your things and get out,† Mom says. â€Å"You’re sleeping with your dad tonight.† My two sisters and my older brother and I never heard much, but my mother would sometimes tell us about how her parents beat her and did other things too.

Lifestyle Disease Essay

Lifestyle disease which may also be referred to as Non-Communicable Disease, has in recent times become an issue of grave concern for governments both globally and regionally. The World Health Organization (WHO) Secretary-General, during a General Assembly Summit (first ever summit on deadly chronic illnesses) in 2011 deemed in a statement â€Å"†¦the spread of non-communicable diseases as a socio-economic and development challenge of epidemic proportions†¦Ã¢â‚¬  . In another report from WHO, Dr. Ala Alwan, the organization’s Director-General for non-communicable diseases further states, â€Å"lifestyle diseases are responsible for 63 percent of global deaths based on WHO’s estimates for 2008.† Here in the Caribbean Governments have begun taking steps to arrest the problem of lifestyle disease through an initial Heads of Government meeting of Caricom held in September 2007 to â€Å"start a campaign to galvanise the Region against the scourge of such disorders as obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, heart attack and some kinds of cancer.† So what is meant by the term lifestyle disease? Lifestyle disease has been defined as being a disease that is associated with the way an individual or group of people live their lives and can be caused by such factors as poor diet and nutrition, lack of exercise and chronic stress. Poor diet and nutrition is a major cause of lifestyle disease in both adults and children. Individuals in these modern times live a â€Å"fast-paced lifestyle† and have become â€Å"wrapped up in raking in the moolah† and take very little time to nourish their bodies properly. Many persons now eat out more often than before, consuming a lot of ‘fast food’ and ‘junk food’ with high salt content and saturated fat. Individuals are also consuming more meat and eating less fruits and vegetables and getting less fibre in their diets. Many persons also because of their busyness skip meals causing many to overeat and others due to their circumstances may under eat therefore not getting proper or enough nutrients into their bodies. The drinks being consumed also contribute to poor nutrition. The sodas individuals drink especially children have high sugar content which is not healthy. The habitual consumption of alcoholic drinks can also affect one’s health in a negative way. What one eats is important to one’s health and the practice of poor nutrition and diet can have negative long term effects on one’s health such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and  diabetes. Another major contributor to lifestyle disease is lack of exercise. According to WHO, â€Å"physical inactivity causes 2 million deaths a year worldwide†. In a world where one has access to many types of exercise gadgets and various exercise videos, individuals fail to avail themselves with these devices and have become lazy, and lead more sedentary lives. People including children now choose to spend more time indoors instead of going outside and doing any kind of physical activity to stimulate the heart. They are either watching television or sitting in front of a computer playing or working, or on a tablet or phone for many hours at a time. Many persons even in the work place do not use the stairs and instead choose to use the elevator or escalator to move from one floor to the next. It is said that laughter is the best medicine but do you know that exercise can cause your body to release chemicals that cheer you up? The human body was meant to move and lack of physical activity can lead to such health issues as obesity, lack of energy, stress and it can also affect the heart. Lifestyle disease is associated with the daily habits of people and is a direct result of the lifestyle someone lives. It can be caused by several factors such as bad food habits, physical inactivity and stress, all of which negatively affect one’s body thus contributing to disease.

Defining Family and a Personal Reflection - 572 Words

In this discussion, I will be explaining how I define family. I will also include my immediate and extended family. I will also describe what family means to me, how mine differs from other families in my neighborhood, and also how they are similar. I will also describe my family’s ethnicity and how it may affect any of my family’s health. To me, family is a group of people that are brought together by blood, adoption, or marriage. I also believe that people do not have to be blood-related to be considered a family. If two or more people have a connection with one another where they can rely and depend on each other and have an emotional attachment, I also believe that to be considered family. Golics, Azam, Finlay, Salek (2010),†¦show more content†¦In my extended family, my mother has a sister and a brother. My mother’s parents are both still alive. My father has fourteen siblings and both of his parents are also still alive. Of my dad’s sibling they all have children and someone even have great-grandkids, so my extended family is rather large. Two ways that my family is similar to other families in my area is our upbringing and making time for one another. My family grew up together living on a farm along with many other families in our area living on farms as well. I believe it has made my family develop a stronger bond working together quite often. My grandparents on my father’s side grew up farming as well and my father followed in their footsteps, which is what my two older brothers are doing as well. We also make time for one another by taking time from one our lives to celebrate birthdays, holidays, and personal achievements together. We also take vacations together whenever possible. Other families in our area celebrate holidays and vacation together as families as well. Two ways that my family is different from others is that my family has stayed pretty traditional as far as our roots, not that we are oppos ed to otherwise. My family has no same-sex relationships, we are all of Catholic religion of the same ethnicity, nor has my family ever adopted a child before. Another way my family is different is by how large my extended family is. The Catholic families in theShow MoreRelatedThe English Phonetic Of My Chinese Name1624 Words   |  7 Pagesof a person given at birth is extremely significant as it is one of the few qualities a person has when they are young. It is why parents argue, stress out, and put a lot of thought into picking the a name. The name that is selected will remain a defining piece of a person’s identity for the rest of their lives. As people grow older, they realize how important their name is to their identities. 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