JP Noda
9/14/12
Miss Santana
Hidden away in the Sun Devil
Recreation Center there is a room that from opening time to closing time will
always be full. This
room is the weight room and from six in the morning to eleven at night people
will be in there working to achieve whatever personal goals they have. The
building is a symbol of health and a symbol of students taking the time to make
their bodies all it can be. The building is one of the most crowded and most
used buildings on campus. Clubs meet there, health examinations such as
physicals or concussion tests can all be done in that same building. And tucked
away in a corner of the gym is a room. This room is obviously important to the
average student because students will cram into this room and lift and workout
for hours until it’s time to quit. The weight room is about the size of a high
school basketball gym and is filled every inch from wall to wall with free
weights and lifting machines.
The only time you can get any productive lifting done is early in the morning
anywhere from six in the morning to about three in the evening. Yes the Sun
Devil Recreation Center weight room is more than just a room filled with sweaty
guys and girls and is more than just a room in a school gym it has so much more.
At first glance the weight room does look like just a room
full of guys sweating and staring at themselves in the mirror and well it
really has so much more to it. The room is full of young athletes and guys who
want to make themselves look as big and as strong as they can. If you take this into the lens of mark twain
and look into the tourism aspect and the weight room the wonder it brings at
first glance and even the emotions that fill the room. And as you dig deeper
into the weight room and learn its functions mark twain’s ideas of the risk of
the place and how a place that once had so much meaning to you can all of the
sudden lose that love or romance for the space.
As a tourist walks into the halls of the Sun Devil Recreation
Center they may notice the big shiny metallic like machines that line the walls
and crowd the floors but as they explore they can find themselves in a room.
This room is filled to the maximum capacity with meat heads and jocks. They
swarm the machines like flies on an old birthday cake. Most of the people
making noises as they struggle to lift the weights and as their muscles tear on
miniscule levels and continue to be in the room for hours swarming each machine
as if their lives depended on it. While this seems weird and uncharacteristic
to humans and to the tourist it seems chaotic and even hellish a tourist may
see this place as a pit of sweaty and gross men but to the local it is the home
and the training ground for great athletes and body builders alike.
As you walk into the room full of people you start to be in
awe and wander about the fullness of the room and why people would spend three
hours lifting a piece of metal wrapped in plastic. What’s so special? And why
do people spend so long in this one crammed room? What is so special about it?
The weight room in the Sun Devil Recreation Center is full of machines that
bring awe to the eyes of the untrained sun devil or athlete. But these machines have a purpose these fancy weight lifting
machines were designed to build machines of their own by crafting the simple
human body into a well-oiled athletic machine.
The room is filled with emotions each person in this crammed
room brings their own emotions to the table. At first glance if you look at
every person in the room the emotions all the hundreds of guys and girls
crammed into that tiny place. Your fist thought might be anger. But there is so
much more each person has their own reason for being there in the weight room.
The emotions can range from the frat boy who wants to find that lucky girl. The
dedicated athlete who spends day in day out eat, sleep, and dreaming of his or
her future in the sport they love. The emotions continue to range to the person
who has been overweight or out of shape their entire life until they got here to
ASU. These people are the ones who have the most emotion tied up into all
physical activity to just stay in the best physical shape possible. Not necessarily
an emotion but a chemical reaction in all men is the production of testosterone
and when lifting weights that chemical flourishes and can even cause false
emotions like anger or even lust.
Looking deeper in this mysterious room you get a great sense
of danger and maybe even fear. The room has so many people that a weight being
dropped on you can bring a quick trip to the gym to get into shape into a long
trip to the hospital to cast your broken foot. Not just physical danger by
having weights dropped or fall on you is the possibility of some testosterone
pumped frat boy being rubbed up on the wrong way and starting a fight. Emotional
and self-respect issues and damage can be done here. If you have a skewed view on
yourself or any self-confidence problems being in a gym with a big group of
guys all trying to show off and one up each other may not be the place for you
it can only hurt you more if you already have issues and can hurt you in ways
that a simple trip to a doctor cannot help.
When you visit a place enough the love you have for it can
diminish pretty quickly after a month or so. Even the love you have for a
significant other can wither or become annoying after a month of day to day
contact to them. The Sun Devil recreation center is the same way after days of
being in a gym over and over you can lose every love for it fast. The mysteriousness
and the tourist aspect of it being all so new and fun can become nothing. All you
will want to do is stop going or stop caring. That once great romance with the
gym and all it stands for can become a great hate and within the course of a month
or two become nothing but a deep hatred.
The Sun Devil recreation center is the foundation of all physical
activity on campus this building is what helps make future athletes and coaches
and maybe even models in the future. This small room tucked away in the Sun
Devil recreation center is what can define who an athlete is and make people
who they want to be its so much more then just a weight room. It gives people
the tools to become whatever they want.
After reading your first draft, I was really impressed. The amount of detail that you use in the beginning really helps me get a picture of what you are trying to describe. As you continued on in the paper, the detail got deeper and deeper. I like how you described all of the possibilities of why there are people in the rec center using the gym. I really like how you use the lens of Mark Twain right at the beginning of the body paragraph. By doing that, you make it so I have a whole new view on the weight room that is not my own. You make a very strong connection with Twains lens about the risk of the place. After you explain it, you back it up with the idea that the weight room is in fact a dangerous place and the people who use it, do in fact have the chance of injuring themselves. Aside from the physical danger, I like the use of the emotional danger from the people who are in the weight room. It gives the sense that you need to get your own work done and not worry about other people. The only advice that I would give to you would be to try and lengthen your conclusion a little. It is good as it is but I feel that if you tied in a Twain reference one last time that it would really solidify the paper. Other than that, good job!
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