The Pleasure Scale Final

Tiffany Houpt
Professor Habbestad
English 104
2 December 2013
The Pleasure Scale
As we go through life we will experience different events that will help shape the scales that we use in life. Biss talks about how pain is our own experience and no one else can feel the same intensity of pain that we feel at any given point in the day. I believe that it can also be turned around no one can feel the same type of pleasure that I feel. There is no way that I can write a scale of pleasure that fits every person that is on the earth; the only scale that I can make is one where I use the pleasure that have happened to me during my life time. As we age we tend to go through events that will change our outlook on life. Something that may have been a pleasure to us when we were younger may not be pleasure to use when we are older. Take for instance playing on the playground as a young child, that was to time of the day we all waited for we got to go outside and play on the jungle gym. That would not bring me pleasure it would make me depressed just for the fact that I can no longer play on the jungle gym because I am not small enough to enjoy to the level that I would want to.
0
Imagine a world where there is no such thing as pain. Now that you have done that do you think that there would be pleasure in that world? If there is no pain there can be no pleasure they go hand in hand. If you have never felt pain then how can you know what pleasure is? Biss talks about how there is not an absolute zero on the pain scale that she has designed (171), but I believe there to be a point where there is absolutely no pleasure on a person’s life. The Pleasure Scale plays off of the Pain Scale, because for there to be pleasure there must not be enough pain that takes away from the pleasure. Absolutely no pleasure would be when you are in so much pain that no matter what you do or is happening to you all you can think about is the pain; this pain can be either emotional or physical pain. The way that I think about my pleasure scale is that the less pain I feel the more I am willing to feel the pleasures in my life. So as my pain scale goes down the higher my pleasure.
1
While I was trying to figure out what it feels like to only feel a scale of one on the pleasure scale there were so many different things that it could be. First I had to figure out what type of pleasure was I talking about, just like when it comes to pain there are different types of pain emotional, physical, and psychological; when it comes to pleasure it involves all three of them. So when it comes to the one the lowest level of pleasure that I could come up with was when you were working in the sun all day and you go inside and you get a big glass of ice water. I remember working out in the hay fields and being in the sun all day all and the only thing I really had to look forward to later in the day was that big glass of ice water.
2
What is the number two?
It is the first prime number after one. “Although the distance between one and two is finite, it contains infinite fractions” (Biss 173) there are so many things that could bring upon stage 2 of the pleasure scale. What would be the second level of pleasure? Food and water is life for all of us, when only a few hours without food we all go looking for it to fill that void that we feel. There were times in High School when I played softball on both Junior Varsity and Varsity back to back after school without a chance to eat. The Varsity eat during the Junior Varsity game and vice versa, I just remember after the Varsity game going up to mom and telling her that I was dying of hunger. Now we all know that it was not true, but when we would stop and get food on the way home the pleasure of just tasting the food made me happier than I was before.
3
Getting food after the game had no comparison to the fact that when I got home and was able to take a shower and get all the dirt off of me; this bring us to the third level of the scale. Stage three for me is combined with the fact that I was no longer hungry or dirty and was almost ready to go bed. Who does not enjoy going to sleep? After a longer day of being at school for eight hours and then playing to softball for three hours, hitting the pillow and going to sleep is a lower pleasure than some people would think. When choosing where to put sleep I had to compare it to all the other things that brought me pleasure in my everyday life.
4
“Although all the numbers follow each other in a predictable line, many unknown quantities exist” (Biss 179). Sitting around the house with having nothing to do and just relaxing and reading a book rates really high on my pleasure scale. To some people that may be a weird place to put relaxing and reading. The way I looked at it was that after a hard day’s work nothing is better than going home and relaxing with a good book. There was a point in my life that I refused to read any book even if it was for school. My best friend growing up allowed me to borrow one of her books when we were in junior high and after that I was hooked on them. Over the past four year I’m not really sure how many books I have read, but I think I have read about 200 books maybe even more. The library not my high school was one of my best friend because I could check out any book I wanted to within having to pay for it. By my senior year in high school I had read all of the books in the library that I wanted. After graduation I used to the money I got to buy a Kindle Fire and I have over 200 books which I have read.

5 People have a need to be accepted by other people within their community. There were time when I had no idea where I belonged within the hierarchy of the high school life. My freshman year of high school I was stuck between the friends that I had in junior high and the possible friends that I could make if I broke away from said friends. As I thought about where I wanted to fit in I chose the friends that I had in junior high because I felt they were safe and I was already accepted by them. There were point throughout my high school career that I met new people but I never connected with them on the same level as the people that I had been friends with for five or more years. Even though I had been friends with these people for a long period of time I never shared my fears or dreams of life with them. That is why the being accepted by people in the community is only a four on my scale of pleasure. Even though I was accepted I never felt safe.
6
The sixth step on my pleasure scale is when I got accepted into Texas A&M University. My father had been on me for two months that if I wanted to get into TAMU and Mays Business School then I better hurry and finish my essays and get my application turned in. Disaster struck two days before I went to summit my essays, the hard drive of my computer crashed and everything that was on my computer was lost that included all three of the essays that I had written for my application. So I had to rewrite all three of my essays felt that this was a sign that was not going to get into Mays Business School. I got my essays done and turned in. On September 29 of 2011 I found out that not only did I get into Texas A&M University I got accepted into the Mays Business School. Up till that point in my life I had never known what the pleasure of doing something on my own felt like.
7
If we compare my scale to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs my scale is all over the place. He scale of pyramid that he uses starts at physiological needs then safety needs, the next step up is love and belonging, then esteem and last on his pyramid is self-actualization. As I move further along my pleasure scale the further I get away from the physical aspect of life and the more I move towards the emotional parts of my life. The first time I experienced what would consider my seventh level of pleasure was on the first day that I was at college by myself. My roommate had not moved in yet and all my parents did was dropped me off and left. The fact that I was on my own with no one really depending on me or telling me what to do, I felt a sense of freedom that I had never felt before. Here I was away from my parents and family for the first time since I was born and I was happy. I was an independent person with no care in the world. The fact that I no longer had to listen to my parents order me around to do this or to do that made going to college that more of a pleasure in my life.

8 Think about what your eight step on the scale would be I bet it isn’t like mine; the seventh step on my scale is money. On Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs financial safety is only the second stage. Why is money my eight step? Because without money could not be where I am today. Money symbolizes the things that reached and thing that I haven’t reached yet. Growing up my family didn’t have a lot of money, don’t get me wrong we weren’t living in poverty. When we first moved to where my parents live now we were only living on one income and that was my dad and he was a police officer in the next town over. That is point and time police officer were not making a lot of money. My mom was a stay at home mom taking care all of us kids and animals. When I got old enough that I started going to school and brother and sister could watch over me my mom started to work again. My dad stopped working for the police station when I was seven. He started to weld for an oil drill bit company because my mom did not feel comfortable with my dad being a cop without a partner. At his new job he was getting paid almost twice what he did as cop, we were finally in a comfortable position when it came to money. I was the only one out of my parents’ three children that went straight into college out of high school, both my brother and sister went into the military. I knew that this was going to be hard on my parents’ income but I could not see myself going into the military. In 2009 my dad became 100% disable through the VA and he was no longer able to work. When my dad found this out he was happy and at the time I could not find out why. It turned out that if he was 100% disable unemployable I got a monthly living expense while I was going to college, and since he joined the military in the state of Texas I was able to use the Hazelwood Act. So I no longer have to worry about if they would be making enough money to pay their bills and help pay my tuition, because thanks to the monthly living expense that I get I don’t ever have to ask my parents for money. My eight scale ties into my seventh scale because money also gives me the freedom to do what I want when I want.
9
The ninth step in my scale was the hardest one for me to decide on. The feeling of being loved. It did not occur to me that love was the ninth step in my scale until I went home for Thanksgiving. Just having that feeling that no matter what I do I will always have my family to fall back on. My siblings and I were sitting around the living room making fun of each other, but we never take any of it seriously because we know we don’t truly mean it. We do not always get along with each other but we always have each other’s back.
10
This is the final step within my pleasure scale and perhaps the easiest one for me to pick. The biggest pleasure that I have my life is when I first wake up in the morning. Why do you ask? Wake up in the morning tells me that I made it through another day and that God thought that I deserved to have at least one more day in my life. Waking up means that I still have a life to live and that there are still many different types of pleasure out there that I have not experienced but still have the chance to experience. The chance I could find the person that I will love and spend the rest of my life with and making a family with him. The chance to make a difference in someone’s life. There are so many different pleasure that a person can experience and we will not all have the same reaction to them but we can experience the same thing but on different level. Once I hit the final step on my pleasure scale it starts all over again because it is a new day. With every new day comes new types of pleasures. Coda
As I was researching the different pleasure scales I could not find one that had anything to do with what I was writing about. The scale that you just read was what came to my mind for the steps within my scale. Writing this scale started out as an assignment for my English class, but as I wrote it became more personal than that. I want people to understand the things that have brought pleasure to my life. I could have just wrote what I thought everyone wanted to hear from me. That is what I what to do I want the reader to understand that my pleasure are not their pleasure and their pleasure are not mine. I could be happy for them but I will not feel it on the same level as them. As I was writing this essay it allowed me to remember things that I had forgotten about until I put it on paper. I had forgotten that my family was not always as well off as we are now, or the fact that I never really felt safe sharing my life with the friends that I grew up with. When I was first thought about writing about that part I trying to figure out if I really want to put myself out there like that. To get my point across I had to just because they are your friend doesn’t mean that you trust them with your secrets. If I was to write a step for everything that every brought me pleasure I would be writing for the rest of my life. Every day brings new meaning and experiences into my life that shape the scales that I use for my life.
Work Cited
Biss, Eula. "The Pain Scale." Comp. David Bartholomea and Tony Petrosky. Ways of Reading An Anthology for Writers. Ninth ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin 's, 2011. 170-82. Print.
Wikipedia, ed. "Maslow 's Hierarchy of Needs." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Nov. 2013. Web. 30 Nov. 2013.

Cited: Biss, Eula. "The Pain Scale." Comp. David Bartholomea and Tony Petrosky. Ways of Reading An Anthology for Writers. Ninth ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin 's, 2011. 170-82. Print. Wikipedia, ed. "Maslow 's Hierarchy of Needs." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Nov. 2013. Web. 30 Nov. 2013.