Personal Narrative: Fatigue

Feeling exhausted, I focus on my breathing. I breath in through my nose and then out through my mouth, breath in and out. Repeat. After passing the mile mark, my coach is shrieking for me to relax, because I am on my way to qualify for cross country states. The top twenty girls qualify, and I have been dreaming of this day since freshman year. All I have to do is hold my position, and then I am golden. Suddenly, my legs begin to feel like jello. My running partner slowly fades ahead of me, and I cannot keep up. It feels like I am running backwards as the rest of my teammates pass me one by one. Fighting fatigue, I tell myself I am finishing this race, whether or not I have to crawl like a turtle to do so. I am crossing that finish line.

I have never been one to excel under intense pressure. Though throughout my entire life there has been an ever-present yet latent pressure to do well in my academics and somewhat excel socially, the moments where all is on the line are when I have been unable to perform to the extent of my ability. And, this knowledge I have about myself, instead of encouraging me to “do better next time” and “use the past as a learning experience,” - as many of my coaches and mentors have told me - simply works to build a level of nervousness nearly impossible for me to overcome.

I guess, by the time I realized that I had physically pushed myself too far it was too late. I spent 12 days hunched over with what my doctor thought was 'Sciatica' but found out today that it's actually a herniated disc. Which during seven of those days, I still worked. Now? I need to pray that PT will fix this problem I made worse.

“Guess what I’ve got?” announced dad. Both Troy and Roy payed no attention to him. However, I got off of the couch and walked over to him. He opened up the bag and handed a box to me. My eyes widened and a smile found its way onto my face when I saw it was an adapter with four slots for our controllers. The picture was of what the adapter looked like with random videogame art work as well and read Sucks you right into the multiplayer action. “Now the three of you can play together” stated dad.

It was a beautiful summer evening at my uncle’s firework stand in Stillwater on July 7, 2012. We were sitting on the cement next to the giant metal building containing thousands of dollars worth of fireworks. I looked up at the sky and noticed it was getting dark. Together we were thinking of what we could do to pass the time before we had to close the stand. So we took a small 200 gram cake cleverly labeled,’’Stressed Out”. in the parking lot..

Fatigue. What a faithful friend. It creates frustration. It slows down daily functions. It removes extracurricular activities you once could accomplish. It causes you to not want to wake up in the morning. It encourages you to sleep when you’re supposed to be working. It tells you that you can’t do anything without the energy that it has stolen. But what can you do? Sleep more? What if it comes with some condition you have? What if the doctor has told you they can’t do anything. It’s something you must do yourself. Wow. I forgot; it steals hope. Hope that you can go hang out with your friends. Hope that you can pass your classes. Hope that you will one day overcome all your adversities. But I've determined the worst part of the day is the morning.

Well then after the card game Me and my cousin began to watch Iron Man. After a while I saw something very intriguing on his dresser so I went over there and began to look at it. It was a very interesting car of some sort. So I asked my cousin if I could mess around with it and

My grandmother was a great woman who I loved very much, but being at her house all alone

It was a late summer night, when Hanna and I became bored of lounging around and watching T.V. “Boredom: The desire for desires” (Tolstoy). We decided to text a couple boys, Cole and Daniel, and have them come over to hang out. At the time, we thought this was a wonderful idea; however, it was much later than we were aloud to hang out with anyone, let alone boys. Cole and Daniel decided to still come over. Now, our problem was, how to sneak out of Hanna’s house. Making our decision once the boys arrived, we decided to crawl through the narrow window in the basement. Sneaking out the window was tougher than we expected. Once out the window with the top half of our bodies, we had to plunge our hands in the mushy mud and drag the bottom half of

Anxiety and overwhelm took over me, as I began to ponder what college I would like to attend as the first semester of my senior year is coming to an end. As I began to look through what college best suits me, I knew that UNT was the perfect candidate for me. As I finalized the application, I knew that once I got into this college my whole world will drastically change as a new chapter in my life begins. Growing up in a Hispanic family wasn’t easy as I constantly had to modify my lifestyle to fit in with “my people”. My diverse culture and poor background are truly a blessing as I got the opportunity to obtain various scholarships.

Sometimes the fatigue from a long day’s work makes you want to relax like a potato, thus “couch potato”. Especially now that we live in a society where it requires a certain amount of effort and requires people to push themselves to the limit to live on a daily routine. I don’t really do much but I’m very lazy though.

I was in my bed resting being watched by a hospice nurse as part of my twenty-four-hour watch. Someone was walking through the door and it was Mitch. I felt such happiness every time I saw him it meant a new lesson to talk about, but this time it would be our final goodbye. Mitch walked in smiling and I just looked pale and weak on the bed. I struggled taken my hands from under the sheets and I placed them in Mitch's hands.

Click. Blue light flooded the room. It covers the couch that lies by the wall in an ominous blue hue. I can feel my excitement building as I start to unfurl the cords. I hear the pounding footsteps He’s coming. I flick the switch on the Playstation 2 and it whirs to life. I hear the faint sound of the disc spinning around inside the mechanism. The startup sound of the game station echoes from the TV’s sound system. Dust flies from the machine and tickles my nose.

Peeking over his shoulder, I sometimes try to join him, not in the hiding, just in the disappearing. But he no longer needs — or wants — me to play with him as we did years ago on a silver Game Boy Advance. On it, I would be his eyes and his fingers. I read the words he did not know and used my more nimble, less chubby fingers to control our avatar’s movements.

Personally, I can do without certain types of technology, but as a gamer, there are certain types of technology I can’t do without. While, I don’t consider myself a hardcore gamer, I do play a wide variety of video games from first-person shooters, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) and Japanese role-playing games (JRPG), to platform games and turn-based tactics (TBT), and so on. My interest in video games overall is partially because of my interest in technology and future technologies, which is why out of all the readings provided this semester, I decided to focus on the following readings: Murakami and Fujinuma’s “Ubiquitous Networking: Towards a New Paradigm”, Vries Tantalisingly Close: An Archaeology of Communication Desires in Discourses of Mobile Wireless Media, Serino et al.’s “Pokémon Go and augmented virtual reality games: a cautionary commentary for parents and pediatricians”, and Jack Loomis’s “Presence in Virtual Reality and Everyday Life: Immersion within a World of Representation”.