we love to have more, problem is more doesn't have an end

I was intrigued by Huxley's view (summarized by Postman) "what we love will ruin us" more than anything. In the society we live in, we are used to instant gratification and that subconscious thought that voices that more is better. 

Less is more. 

not the other way around. We in society have to learn that, no wonder so many people deal with long term unhappiness. Everywhere we look, from the moment we start kindergarten, the larger the box of crayons, the more colors available to us, the "cooler" and more satisfied we are supposed to feel. I'm pretty sure that after using only a third of the colors available to me, and even after that it was pretty saddening when I came home one day to find that my precious box of crayons had melted down, because it had been left on the window sill. Later we are "told" that we must have the greatest amount of friends, because the more people like you, the better you are. All through those adolescent years we yearn to be known by anyone and everyone, our self-esteem validated by the number of people you forwarded those chain emails to and who could hit 500 friends on Facebook first. Having matured so much, instead, now we obsess over the likes, re-tweets, follows we have on various social media, all the while ignoring the group of friends you decided to hang out with that evening, but not caring because just like you they are on their own phones, imprisoned by their virtual paradise. Why is it that no one ever posts about the broken memories, the times we messed up, that year where nothing was going right? It's because you can't have rainbows and puppies in the same spectrum as reality, the puppies grow up and the rainbows fade away. Plus you can't show how many more amazing moments of life you have experienced than the person sitting next to you then. We love it. We have loved, but never lost in terms of gaining more until we realize how much time we lost trying to obtain what we thought we loved. Eventually, it becomes a race for a job with the best income, putting in hours you could use to cultivate your hobby, something that makes you happy, but who wants hobby happy, when you can be forever climbing the work ladder. Then buying the nicest car so you can do something with that money, and then being obliged to pay hefty sums to keep up with the maintenance of this car. Not to mention having to pay for better gas, so the car doesn't become useless and rotted with that regular gas, so you might have to pay 40 cents per gallon extra, reaping the benefits of our slowly depleting oil supply. Yet it won't be enough, because you can only keep the car for a year or so before it becomes deemed as old and there is a new model that is faster, smoother, and equipped with so much more. Just so much more. So much more. 

You just aged a decade or so reading this, hopefully you are wiser. If we can understand and avoid what will ruin us, then maybe we can actually live. Living requires you to experience hardship, anger, sadness, and not just to be disillusioned into believing that everything is happy and perfect every moment of your life, as portrayed by your social media. Start living in the real world, if you stick it out, its a pretty good place to be.

Spiral into suffering

When I first heard of Maus, I immediately compared it to Animal Farm.

But it wasn't until I had read the first book of it, that I realized how much the "graphic" part of the novel helped in developing the story and making it easier to understand and possibly to relive. 

I chose to review this page in the book. It wasn't until recently that I realized that the path they're on resembles that of a Swastika, a symbol of the Nazi power at the time. There is nowhere they can go that they will escape the Nazis. 

The line on the top of the page itself says, "Anja and I didn't have where to go". Vladek says this, but I think Art meant to have "from the Nazis" at the end of that. It was meant to be implied. The more you inspect Art's drawings, nothing is done unintentionally. Every single picture, frame, and spacing is intentional and serves the purpose of furthering the story without any words. Simply pictures. Truthfully, I think this novel was driven not by the words, but the pictures. As we talked about it in class, had it been a regular novel, not a graphic novel, it would not have had the same moving effect.

The Swastika ultimately leads back to itself, a sort of square spiral. It appears never-ending, just like the continuous suffering faced by the persecuted Jews, the Holocaust didn't end. There were those whom the Holocaust had taken their lives away.  And then there were those people who had lost their sense of living to the Holocaust, the survivors, not really survivors, just there. Not part of the world, but lost in their own world of memories, nightmares, and thoughts.

A picture represents just a thousand words......

The topics that sparked my interest of this week were about how bias is also present in pictures.

"A picture represents a thousand words", after this week, I think that quote needs an adjective describing not how many words, but instead what kind of words the picture conveys. It is interesting, no one is capable of not having bias. So the accurate representation of the picture depends on what your bias is or if you have a slightly open mind, what the photographer/artists' bias was while capturing that moment. I think this connects back to the compare-contrast in-class essay we did on the birds. The two authors had different backgrounds and therefore different perceptions of the birds. With that in mind, no one can take the same message from a picture, it will remind people of different moments, like Mrs. Dalloway, they will float from memory to present time connecting various sights, sounds, feelings...people.

Perspective is really what makes our world go round. Going past the literary world, into other fields, if different people hadn't thought of the same problem in a unique way, we wouldn't have the technology, food, music, language we are so fortunate (and unfortunate) to have access to now. (Unfortunate because: #thedress). From differences in what God rules us, to how to use a piece of cloth, perspective has shaped how the humans have evolved.

I want to go on about this, but it doesn't seem right to. That's just my bias, make your own as you please.


If you know why the gif is there.... kudos!!! :)

feeling peevish

This past week we watched the movie, The Hours, a film loosely based on Mrs. Dalloway.  I'm glad that we did see the movie, it is always interesting to be able to compare and contrast and try to find linkage between books and movies. In the whole movie, there was this one line that for some reason stood out to me...

"So that's the monster"

Julia Vaughn, Clarissa's daughter mutters it to Sally, as Laura walks into their apartment.
Richard's physical ailment of AIDS doesn't seem to be the reason for his illness. The real reason is because of how heartlessly Laura abandoned him, her child, her son. What mother can bear to leave her children? I don't think I understood exactly why she did it. There was an experiment done with a monkey and her child. The scientists took the pair to a swimming pool, and placed them right in the middle, with just a rod. At first the monkey was keeping her child above her, away from the water. But gradually as the hours wore on and the level of the water rose, there came a point where she left her child and took the rod to reach the deck. (Please note that this experiment didn't take place during modern times, it took place during the time of kings and empires.) Both mothers, the monkey and Laura, left their children, as much as I want to condemn them, I can't, it was a matter of survival. I feel utmost sorrow for them, and as well as disdain.  I really don't want anyone to face such a decision.

There was also the matter of Richard, Laura, Sally, and Clarissa having read the book.

Seriously.

Clarissa read the damn book. She knows that Septimus goes out the window. Yet she stands there perplexed as to why Richard is sitting on the window ledge, after having called her "Mrs. Dalloway".
Yes, I know, having this happen to them, links the book, and the people together, like Clarissa Dalloway feels linked to everyone in the book.

But come on. WHY??!?!

It is agonizing to watch something fall apart slow motion and knowing you can do nothing to save it.

Why not 4 am?

It is a serene night; it is quiet and warmer than before. Almost like the night a few months ago, it was when I was green to studying and decided to befriend the early hours of the morning. 4 a.m. with fog outside like a scene from the movie Casablanca, with the mood as nostalgic. "How many secrets can you keep? There's this tune...". Light reverberations from the master bedroom can be heard, every intake of breath, a snore. I never used to sleep after my dad slept, and wasn't used to trying to drown out the snores that cut the calm like a pebble in a still lake. If only he could stop. Even now it is constant, hardly a night goes by without a snore. By now it has become a part of the night, a rhythm of familiarity. A welcomed reminder. Every night spent, wearing down on the spot on the rug, so much that there is a faint difference. No difference to those that have not been a part of the night in a small, lit room,(the only one still lit on the whole street), just to the owner of the rug, only to me. The four walls are a part of me, leaving this....this small haven....will rip apart and add in a new part of me. Hopefully the next small room is as comforting as this one. A solace. Even if the circumstances are as unpredictable as they can be. Hopefully its Ann Arbor and not anywhere else. I don't want it to be anywhere else. Hope, is not all I can do! I have more, I am more. Hope will not be the decider of where I spend my next four years. I can't let Hope be the decider. Too many other people that have Hope deciding for them. It's too long of a wait. No, not a wait, a race, its always been a race. Why a race? Was there no other way? Why race and not something like bridge? Instead of mindlessly sprinting to the destination, not caring for those around, continuing on to the only finish line, why not use some teamwork, a unique method, multiple ways to victory, and maybe a little luck. Its a game, not a race. "...crawling back to you", the song fades in and then away, a bass guitar holding on till the end. Its too early, not late enough, dawn peeks through.

Stream of Consciousness

The phrase itself sounds like a ramble. It doesn't seem to stop until finally you reach the last consonant, 'ss'. I was interested in finding out how the literary style of stream of consciousness came into being. So here is what I found...

Dorothy Richardson, born on May 17, 1873, was known as the "pioneer of stream-of-consciousness" her writings would later become a strong influence for Virginia Woolf. Richardson was way ahead of her time and was a very independent lady. I feel like she is the embodiment of what Modernism was, she wanted to express herself, took a different approach to life, even went almost as far as raising a child out of wedlock. (This child would have been an already married H.G. Wells', but unfortunately, Richardson suffered a miscarriage).

Richardson wrote a novel, that "stretched 12 volumes" in just stream-of-consciousness. 12 volumes.
And we thought one novel was hard.....

Speaking of, Virginia Woolf had a awesome passage personifying the sisters "Proportion....and Conversion"(100). I was quite giddy over it in class. The passage perfectly put the the Doctor in his place, alluding to his "sense of proportions", and revealing that the trauma Septimus faced was chaotic and unyielding. Even a small reminder of the war was enough to send him into a spiral of horror. The psychological deterioration and pain, in my opinion, is the worst type of experience anyone can have, worse than physical pain. After all, half of physical pain is the psychological aspect. So the quote, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, words will never harm me", is fundamentally wrong. I wish it were true.

Words can harm, but keeping hurtful words and traumatic experiences ingrained in the mind is the path to human destruction.

The coherence in this post was at an all time high.


(Link to Dorothy Richardson down below)
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dorothy-richardson-pioneer-of-stream-of-consciousness-is-born

Negativity in Effect

"This imagined past-what never was-is a choke hold"(Alexander 48).

The quote encompasses what feelings Meena Alexander is trying to convey in her essay. The essay narrates Alexander's identity that is essentially made up by the different places and moments she has been in. The "choke hold" that her "imagined past" has on her is painful and restricting, but most of all it is cutting off the air, cutting away her actual life. Her actual past is buried beneath this illusion of how it should have been.

I hope that Alexander was thinking about this only at her worst moment.

It is pitiful for someone to not be able to accept the past, if not be proud of it. It is because of the past that the identity of a person is shaped; each individual, experience, feeling has profound effects on a person. To disregard the very foundation of you is not only degrading a person's identity, it wipes it out completely like an ice age to the dinosaurs.

We spoke a lot of about the identity aspect of Alexander's piece and also how the other stories related to finding/developing an identity. But the main reason Alexander's piece stood out was because of its constant negative connotation with what her past was, it makes it seem that she never decided to appreciate her past. It was a conscious choice that if made might have helped in certain ways. I know that this is just an essay depicting only a specific moment of her life, but still, the shame hit me hard. An identity injected with doses of various types of experiences is no less than one consumed by a single consistent experience.

Not a single person should try and imagine their past. It never seems to help them rise out of the hole they think they're in, but bury them ever deeper.

Wasn't this just full of sunshine.