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.

Individual Presentations

Reflection on individual presentations:
I thought they were all entertaining and wonderful. They just made me happy. I can't say they've all made me think- some have- but thinking is just too hard at the moment. I don't know what else to really say. I think the one that stood out the most (if I had to choose) is Rio's. Rio- I totally relate to the problem you were having. There were so many elements and so many things that were connected and seemed impossible to analyze as separate units. Trying to split the topic or narrow it down made my head explode a little bit. I sort of managed it in the end, but I'm glad that you left it all together. In some ways, it feels like that that is how it should be.
And someone said today in the presentations- my mind is going- that the paper was going down a confusing path- I bet it was Tom- this whole semester is so huge and contains so much, I think we should all be left to confusion. We should feel unsettled, like we know nothing. Or maybe we shouldn't. . . maybe that's just how I'm feeling and I'm projecting it on everyone else. I will reflect on this more later.

Presentation recap

Alright- in general, I enjoyed all of the presentations- there were all just fun. Kudos go out to Twenty Minute Lifetime- that movie was hilarious and trippy. Even now, I can't get the image of the pregnant man out of my head. I thought the tea thing was really cool, in the symbolism and the filmography. Kudos again Tom!
I liked how Dolce Domum picked a lot of low brow movies to illustrate how the themes have manifested into mainstream culture. Gladiator is one my favorite movies ever. I'm glad Rio picked it, because it does have such beautiful ways to think about death and immortality. It always surprises me how much Disney slipped into its cartoons and movies. I thought Hercules was a little hokey, but Beauty and the Beast was classic. As was Homeward Bound. I think I heard Lisa say that the movie made her cry rather than laugh. I did too. I love dogs.
The final group I saw- Eternal Return- did such a beautiful job with their script- way to be! I was seriously impressed with the dialogue and thought that some of it must have been quoted from somewhere. Sarah and Brianna were hilarious.

Newspaper

This has nothing to do with class, but if there's anyone interested in writing for the Exponent, you should let me know. Lots of the writers, myself included, will be studying abroad next semester, so there are plenty of open editor/writer positions. From what I understand, the editor positions for distractions, opinions and something else. ..I forget. . .are open. Those positions have stipends attached to them for anyone wanting a little more cash. The writing positions offer people a very little bit of money, but the experience is good and the hours/work are extremely flexible.
I can email applications to anyone who is interested. Applications are due relatively soon.
Thank you. . .That is all.

Page 191

Reading this page, I had a great sense of Catholic churchyness. At the beginning, he seems to be talking about a Catholic homily, which he doesn't seem to like very much, because he calls the priest an "unfrillfrocked quackfriar." The tone is mocking and disrespectful- he calls him a monkey- "Afferyank!- "Affe" is Monkey in German. The following passage affirms that sense of disrespect/mockery feel, at least for me, because the passage has the flow and sound of this church song they sing back at home called, "One Faith." "There is one faith, one hope, and one baptism, one God and Father of all" - "one gob, one gap, one gulp and gorger of all!"
The page then moves into childhood, which is connected, I think, because Joyce himself went to a Catholic boarding school. The boy on the page comes from "uncivilized" type of area, or at least a poverty stricken area, maybe, but people can see his potential. The older people seem to think he will turn out well, "incomeshare lotetree(lottery)"- they just have to take the chance. Kids seem to like him, and the speech switches to that of a youth- "tome to Tindertarten, pease." The tone shifts yet again from this optimistic view of this boy to something more negative, paralleled with the passing of a day. "but him you laid low with one hand one fine May morning in the Meddle of your Might, your bosom foe, because he mussed your speller on you." Something competitive perhaps? Maybe the guy encountered a bully or two. He's the nerd getting smacked and crammed into a locker. Or perhaps not?
This is what I got out of my page. That was a fairly anticlimactic way to end.

Paper Topic-Brainstorm Ramble

Even though all of the themes are all related, I'm most interested in the themes of Myth and Dream, Life as Fiction and the 20 Minute Lifetime. The recurring element to all of these is time and reality. I'd like to discuss that side of scientific time with philosophic time and how that all ties our themes together. I want to talk about death, reincarnation and life. I think a huge resource for all of this will be this paper Terry L. Fairchild wrote entitled, "Time, Eternity and Immortality." I don't know if Terry's a guy or a girl, so I'm going to call it it. It incorporates the scientific view of time and transcendental meditation with the Four Quartets. If you'd like to take a look, you could check out http://www.mum.edu/msvs/9199terry.html. I think it's a fascinating read on Eliot.
Time is all relative to the individual. I kept trying to think of how to verbalize this, but then I gave up, went to YouTube and found a video from the old version of the Time Machine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVlr24zD_KQ&playnext_from=TL&videos=2MHb7a0rIkk Time for the person "at rest" will be different than the person "in motion." It depends on perspective and consciousness. Patrick Stewart in the Inner Light fainted and found himself in a world where he was supposedly sick and feverish for four days. When we travel from this time zone to others, it's kind of like time traveling, because when we go east or west, we are either going backward or forward in time. "Time cannot be said to exist until someone witnesses it or feels its effects."- Fairchild.
Sorry this is so jumbled. . .I'm just trying to wrap my head around this. I think myth and dream come into the picture with time and consciousness, because we've created time to give ourselves a solid foundation for reality. At this time, this happened. . or in a few days, this will happen. It gives us a way to chronologically organize our lives. I think that's why we get so panicky and worried when we lose track of it all. Sick in bed, head injury. . .the Hangover. But dreams seem to be a more realistic way to look at life in terms of time. So many things can get accomplished in dreams. I've been wondering lately if dreams are just the other lives we have when we're not in this one. Herman wakes up to another kind of life. "My dreams have always borne a disturbing resemblance to life, as if even in my sleep I could not come up with something new, but now it was the other way around, now at last my life resembled a dream."
Back to Fairchild, it brought up E= mc² as "an image of immortality." And it was like a lightbulb turned on in my head, which is funny because the equation is about the speed of light. Ha ha. Anyway, something I remembered from high school science- energy cannot be destroyed or created. It can only be transferred, or metamorphosed. People have energy, in body and mind. When the body goes out, it returns to the earth, dust and ashes and all that. Does the mind do the same thing? Or does that energy transfer to something or somebody else? The Amber Spyglass talks about that. The spirits of those characters, their energies, returned to the land of the living, becoming the grass, the trees and the sky. When we dream, our conscious mind takes us somewhere, transferring our thoughts to a new world. The many worlds thing, by the by, could be possible if you take up String Theory and Quantum Mechanics as truth. So when we die, which I've often heard as "going to sleep," maybe it's just our mind traveling off to find a new home to occupy. I met a lady at the retirement home in town. She told me that reincarnation was real, because she could remember all of her past lives. She said that they were wonderful lives, but she was so tired. She told me that the next time she goes to sleep, she just wants to wake up in Heaven, and live the rest of her life(lives) up there. In Scrubs season 2, I think, they have an episode about death. A patient sees it as a big Broadway musical coming to an end. "As, in a theatre, The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed/ With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of dark-/ ness on darkness." It doesn't sound too scary to have a scene change, a change in worlds, but I think people fear it anyway. I think it's far worse to be left with "only the growing terror of nothing to think about;/ Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing--"
This is pretty much what I've been thinking. I have a lot of organization to do with it, but I think it's really fascinating.

For Good Friday. . .

I'm a little early. . . but with Easter looming nearer, I couldn't get this passage out of my head.

"The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good."
It's a passage I want to repeat over and over, until I can gifure out what he means by this.
I'd ponder this more, but my right contact has been funny for awhile and now suddenly I can't really see out of it anymore, making typing ridiculoulsy hard.