A Day in the Life Assignment: 15% of your final grade Due April 27th

The Technical Details:
Your paper should be double-spaced, in a twelve point font. Please do not list your name on your paper, but instead choose some random code word that you will recognize but that I will not. Please number your pages. Do cite carefully any outside  sources that you use for the paper. I will fail any students who plagiarize, whether intentional or not. You can use any citation structure that you like, as long as you are consistent, include the proper information, and use quotations for any material that you directly copy or quote from another source. Please feel free to use personal pronouns.

The Assignment:
Choose a day, and from the time that you wake up until you go to sleep, take note of every type of commodity that you use in a notebook. Quantity does not matter (ie, you can list "carrots" without specifying how many). Comprehensiveness does. Your list should include things like electricity, water, clothes, food, gadgets of all sorts, etc.

Then, having done this, type the list up. For each commodity, put as much information as you know about where it came from, and how it reached you. Some things will be impossible for you to find out. Explain that, and why. Other things you can easily determine. Use this information to annotate your list. (For ease of use, you might think about the list being grouped by "type of commodity," as opposed to a simple list, minute by minute, reflecting your day.)

After you have annotated your list as much as you can reasonably do, follow the list up with an analytical essay. What conclusions and/or connections can you make based upon your list about your lifestyle and the modern world? What is the significance of those commodities that you cannot trace? What would it take to trace them?  In what ways is your life connected to any of our course texts or discussions? What does your list say about the 21st century US?  What does this all mean?

This should all be presented as one document: the list does not need to be double-spaced, but they essay should be. There is no minimum page numbers, but I do expect you to be thorough.