Last blog ever

Confusion- that's where I think am at the end of this semester. Chaos and confusion. It doesn't sound like a happy place to be. In Paradise Lost, it was kind of between hell and earth. . . but I think it's where everyone should be when they want to learn something or achieve something. I'm not implying that ambition and knowledge are on the road to hell, but I think opening yourself to chaos helps banish away fears and inhibitions. It clears the way to truth, because true truth shouldn't be obscured by fear.
Sometimes, when our focuses are so narrow, we miss the bigger picture for the path we are familiar with. I admire Christina's blog and paper on depressing topics. Stories that end in sadness are often dismissed or disliked, I think, because people fear to feel sad or depressed or to put themselves in someone else's shoes. The people who do that miss out on a fundamental aspect of humanity. We can't empathize or sympathize with other's sorrows if we refuse to open ourselves up to the whirling torment they experience. My family used to watch tons of Law and Order SVU- special victims unit. It was full of gorey, horrific, "heinous" crimes. It made you feel kind of icky on the inside when you think about all the child rapists and killers out there in the world. But glancing at those actions and dismissing them in the same breath as sad, without looking at the victims or perpetrators, I feel like we're missing something crucial.
Narrowing down isn't bad though. We wouldn't make any sense of anything, if we didn't try to break things down in a focused, organized strain. I just think that when we do narrow down,we can't forget to open back up again. "Invention does not create out of the void, but out of chaos." Shelley. In another class, I have been focusing on things too specific and in this class, I have had little organization to absorb anything. For awhile, I felt like I was on the brink, looking down in the spaghetti soup of everything with no way to get in without going mad. By midnight on the night I finally finished my paper, I felt like I had a small toilet paper of direction trying to contain a universe of ideas. I felt awful, but how exciting is it to know that there are so many things that can connect and create truth if you could only find a toilet paper tube large enough to get them organized. Or if you could only empty the tube you follow and fill it up with new information and life. Like my brothers once took water samples from this fountain in Boise to study the organisms that live in it. Each water sample was full of life, but not necessarily the exact same speciman of life. But they couldn't take in more water until they emptied the cup they had. So in chaos, we are emptied and filled up. Maybe we're the toilet paper tubes. I don't like that image at all. I'm so little. I'd be a tiny toilet paper tube.
But maybe a class like this, where we can read and discuss online and in class, expands how much we can hold, so we're not bipolarized into low and high brow. We can flow between the two and make connections. Networking at its best.
Thank you all for your reflections. Now I'm done.