The Final

2. Plurk:

            What can I say about Plurk? After the first day of Nanotexts I was overwhelmed, I was going to be reading many more novels than I ever thought I would be in only one quarter, I was going to be writing a blog every week about those books and on top of all that I was going to have to figure out how to work this new technology entitled Plurk.

            When trying to explain this class to my friends it find it very difficult because none of them have ever really written a blog, let alone even heard of Plurk. They all sort of look at me with very confused expressions. Even today after spending 10 weeks in this class, I still find it hard to fully describe what plurk is. I suppose it is an information sharing site that it unlike anything that anyone has ever really seen before.

            After almost completing this course, I cannot see how it would be remotely the same without the use of Plurk. On the first day I remember Tony saying something along the lines of, “With plurk we will become one large super-organism, all moving as one.” And in a sense we really did. Each day about half of the students brought their laptops to class and decided to contribute in that manner.

            There was one day when it was decided that there would be little to no verbal communication at all. Those people with their computers had meaningful conversations about the texts we were reading at the time while the rest of the class had the opportunity to go up to the front of the class and use the main computer to communicate through Plurk.  This class secession was interesting to me, the conversations through plurk were different from the ones we had in class because when one is talking through plurk they have to pay attention to the number of characters that are used. They have to think about the small.

            The word ‘nano’ means very small or minute. In this class of Nanotexts, we have been looking at the small and how it is important to the big, the rest of the world. Before this class I didn’t take the time to think about the little things in life such as pollen or scale that make such a large difference in our world. 

            When reading the Filth it really made a difference when I found myself only looking at the pictures or only reading the text. With this graphic novel it really mattered that I looked at the small and paid attention to everything going on in order to fully catch what the story was about.

            In book group I read Midnight Robber, and in a sense Plurk can be related to this as well, there is the web that Tan Tan is trying to be liberated from but in the end she cant be. Plurk is very much like a web, if not like the web in Midnight Robber, than just like a web in general. All of us who talk though Plurk are intertwined in the web whether we want to be or not. Being in this class means that we are part of something larger than ourselves; we are part of a super-organism.

            Nanotext truly would not be the same class without the use of Plurk. It has opened my eyes to the small and will forever have changed my view of the world.

        

3. Blogs:

         I just finished reading Kaitlin Duffy’s blog and I really enjoyed reading about the class from the viewpoint of someone else going through the same thing that I was. I now know that I was not the only person who was slightly confused at times and completely lost at others.

            She opens her very first blog with, “These first few days have been an interesting experience for me, and continue to be. I am lost some of the time, but most of the time I am consumed by curiosity. This is a new way of looking at the world. So here goes my first Blog.” I remember feeling the same way even though I did not post it in my blog. I too was confused and still am from time to time during the class.

            “One day artificial intelligence that we create may leave us behind unless we are able to evolve as quickly as it does. But humans cannot possibly evolve as quickly as we are evolving artificial intelligence, so the only solution seen by many is to become robotic in a sense ourselves. Through technology it is believed that the human life will be extended, from 80 years to hundreds and hundreds more. I don't believe that technology should extend our lives longer than what is natural, technology should only be used to cure and keep people healthy so that they can live to natural old age.” Blogged Kaitlin. This seems to be a main theme that we saw throughout the course of this quarter with this class. When we were watching the various movies they kept reminding us of what is coming, more and more technology.

            “The advancement of technology cannot be stopped, but I believe eventually there will be regulations placed on the advancements. People fear what they cannot understand and I definitely now fear technology and I sure don't understand it. The movies Eagle Eye, Pulse and other horrible science fiction movies didn't scare me, I actually laughed them, but this Technocalyps Part 1 definitely did the job.” I couldn’t agree with Kaitlin more, I was scared out of my mind when watching the movie Technocalyps Part 1 although I don’t remember blogging about it. I enjoy the technology that we do have today and I look forward to the advancements that computers will make in the near and distant future but I in no way am looking forward to technology totally taking over our lives. I love my life the way it is but I fear that as we progress and evolve that our dependence on technology will get out of hand and be too much for us to even survive.

            “As humans, we have a need to know. But at the same time there are things we don't want to know. We shut ourselves down when something is being said that we don't want to know, we avoid truths that can hurt us. Or maybe it is more dignifying not to know, respecting someone when they tell you to drop it or knowing that not knowing is safer. There is a relief of not knowing or an intense feeling of curiosity.” I can see this in my everyday life and in this class as well. When we were reading books that were more ‘conventional’ it seemed that the class had more to say about the topics at hand, maybe this was because there was more to talk about with these books or maybe it was because more of the class had actually read them. Speaking only for myself, I can say that I did not finish reading The Ticket That Exploded, the cut up text was too much for me to comprehend and I did not enjoy reading about the topic on hand. This relates to Kaitlin’s blog because she is talking about knowing and now knowing. When attempting to read The Ticket that Exploded I found myself not wanting to know and therefore I started not paying attention to the topic at hand.

            As humans, there are certain things that we are comfortable with and there are others that we really aren’t. It is different for all of us and I can only speak for myself when I say that I am not in general very comfortable reading about sex in the very graphic sense. Many of the texts that we read in class involved sex that was very descriptive and it made me very uncomfortable at times. The only explanation that I can think of as to why it would make me so uncomfortable is that sex really shows how cruel some people can be. It is a weapon in some senses and it shouldn’t be.

            My experience in this class has been an interesting one, I have totally changed my point of view on many aspects of life and I have formed new opinions of some things. Reading Kaitlin’s blog was great because it helped me to realize that I was not the only one having some of the thoughts that I was having throughout the class.

 

1. Others:

            When reading Radical Alterity by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Gillaume it made me think back to high school, when I would be in a sporting event against a rival high school or maybe walking down town and seeing someone with a sweat shirt with the mascot of the other school. They were considered the other to us because we knew just enough about them to know that we didn’t like them; I mean they went to the other school; of course they were less than us. But at the same time we knew hardly anything about each one of them individually.

            But of course this book was not about high school rivalries, not even close. I wrote a blog talking about this book and a quote from it on page 85, “you can enjoy all of the positive aspects of your own culture, but you also absorb all of its stupidity; you are much more sensitive to it than in other cultures. So it always feels good to get away from your culture.” This was one of the only things from the book that I almost fully understood. I know what it feels like to travel to a foreign country and look back at your own culture in disgust. Living in France was one of the best things that I could have done. I gained so many life experiences and I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to go. I was able to really see what a different country was thinking about us, without having to filter the information and opinions from second hand sources.

            For me, being someone who is rather technologically ignorant, I found plurk and blogging to be a bit of a learning curve, the other for me. I had never heard about plurk and I had never thought about writing a blog, it was never really something that interested me until I started taking this class. The other in my eyes is something that is out there and is different for everyone. I know that many people in this class had been involved in blogging in the past and so for them maybe plurk was the other. It was something that they had to take time to figure out and work with. Through plurk it seemed that the students could be who ever they wanted to be. They could recreate themselves if they felt like it. With the option of making our names to be what ever we wanted, the otherness started right off the bat. When given the ability to make your name whatever you want it gives the creator the chance to truly become their other, or at least become closely acquainted with it.

             The other can really be anything. Before taking this class I had thought of the other as being aliens of some sort. It seemed logical to me to think about life on different planets as being ‘other’ to us humans. On a clear night my favorite thing to do is to get away from light pollution and just look up at the stars. I cant help but to think that with all the space out there it is almost impossible for there not to be life out there somewhere. No one knows what these other life forms would look like if they exist. And no one knows where to look for them either and this is what makes them ‘other.’ The fact that it is entirely possible that there are other beings somewhere in space just proves that we all have our ‘other.’ Something that is totally foreign to us. But yet is quite possibly very similar to us as well.

 

2. The Small:

            What can I say about the small. The small is something that I never really thought of before this class. Before taking Nanotexts the closest I got to thinking about the small was seeing how little I could make my hand writing to fit on a note card for a study guide. Looking back at this, it is very close to what the class was about. Although my handwriting got increasingly worse as it got smaller, it was cool to see how many words and how much information I could fit onto one small 3x5 inch piece of paper.

            The Nanotext class started with the small during the first week of us meeting. We watched the movie entitled, ‘The Power of Ten’ this movie was simple and very easy to understand and it made me think about how small humans really are in the big scheme of things. When film first starts with the shot of the couple sitting on the picnic blanket and then zooms out by a power of ten every few seconds, passing the City and State limits, expanding past the world, looking at the milky way and even farther. It really goes to show that we are very minute when you consider how much space is out there in the universe and beyond.

            As a bit of a side note: The universe is big. So big, that just that fact, just it’s mere bigness, is enough to blow your mind. And it just keeps getting bigger. If you were to look outside at night, and stare at one spot you wouldn't see it but there are approximately 10,000 galaxies in your field of vision. Each of those galaxies contains anywhere from ten million to one trillion stars. The average star is roughly a million times the size of Earth. And yet, with all that junk, the Universe is more than 90 percent empty space. All of that, in this tiny spot.

            Just thinking about the largeness of the universe makes me think about how small we all are. Paying attention to the small things in life is important to understand the big picture. When reading The Filth, it was extremely important to both read the text and follow along with the pictures. When I found myself not looking at the pictures I had to reread the pages because I knew that I would have missed part of the plot.

            It was the same with reading Radical Alterity, there were portions of the book that I did not understand and I believe that the reason I did not understand it was because I was not reading it closely enough. If I had been reading it with the small in mind I am sure I would have understood the concept more fully.

            It is the small things in life that makes the difference. Three weeks ago I was sitting in Red Square for about 3 hours working on some homework, after the day in the sun my throat started hurting like nothing I had ever felt before, we thought it was a cold of some sort but after going to an Urgent Care facility it became clear that I was allergic to something in the air. Pollen is a substance that many people don’t consider to be harmful of even noticeable. It can be just as harmful as a virus and in many different forms. Similar to pollen there are the many viruses of the world. These viruses enter our bodies in many different ways and will affect all of us differently depending on our different immune system.

            The small is something that I will now be thinking about in my day to day life and in the classes I will be taking in the future here at Western.

3. Animals and Machines:

            In my mind animals and machines are two very different species, if the word species is even the correct word to use when talking about a machine. There is a hierarchal system and at the top there are humans, closely by animals, and then by machines. Animals have feelings, beating hearts, and life.

            A huge difference between animals and machines is the fact that Animals can feel. They can feel pain, loss, joy and happiness. All these different emotions are part of what makes them closer to humans and what makes them different from machines. Another reason animals are above machines is because they can reproduce and machines cannot. Through reproducing we find love coming from the mother to her babies (in most animals), this is a love that you will never find when looking at machines.

            Machines are manufactured by humans, we built them and we know how to take them apart without too much trouble. This is another reason why they are at the bottom of my list.

            But what about “Little Worker” from Paul Di Filippo’s Ribofunk? She was a hybrid of sorts, with the emotions of a human but the ruthlessness of an animal when protecting a loved one. This is a rare species and not one that is currently out there roaming the streets of Bellingham, let alone the rest of the world. Not yet at least. With the advancements of technology basically anything is possible in the future.

            There are a few reasons why humans are at the top of my list. The biggest thing is that as humans we have written language. Other animals have communication; in fact all animals have some sort of communication. It is the fact that we, as humans, have written and spoken language that sets apart from the animal world. There are animals out there that are just as smart if not smarter than humans and yet we are at the top of the food chain. We have evolved enough, to the point where we have this technology all around us, some that we have no idea what to do with. There is no one person that we can thank for starting the ball rolling for technology, all I know is that each year, heck every day technology improves from the day before. Everyday humans are making advances in the world and there is no end in site.

 Something that I have never been able to understand is why humans consider it to be just and acceptable to kill others for no reason at all. “That person has a different religion to me, I think I will kill them.” The world does not work like that. It is things like genocide that make me question myself when I put humans at the top of the hierarchy. Some of us humans don’t deserve it, some of us are not better than animals. There are even some humans who are so trained and brainwashed that they will just follow orders and not question authority at all. These people are more like machines than anything else. The people who are on the killing side of genocide have no feelings, no hearts and therefore they are no better than a common machine. They are no longer human.

 

Sci-Fi

Sitting down and writing a blog on a beautiful Friday afternoon might be one of the hardest things to do, so we will see how this goes.

I have never been drawn to the genre of Science Fiction, for some reason it has never appealed to me and so when I started this class and was looking at the different books that we were going to be reading I was a bit concerned that I would be totally lost and confused the entire quarter. Once we started reading the books in class I didn’t have problems with most of them so I am somewhat unsure why they scared me at first.  I guess we are all scared at first of the things that are unknown to us. In high school I was scared to be coming to college and once I graduate college I am sure that I will be scared to join the ‘real world.’

Reading the book ‘Postsingular,’ I am finding that the character I am watching is the little autistic boy named Chu. With my previous experiences dealing with autistic children I know that many of them have special gifts when it comes to math and science, many have the ability to memorize numbers and recite them in perfect order within only a matter of minutes of studying the list.  My cousin is autistic and she is very similar to Chu, she is socially behind in development and her language skills are not all the way there but she is very intelligent when it comes to math and knowing strange facts about numbers that I would not expect a 15 year old to know. With this in mind, I feel like Chu will somehow have a huge impact on the story line as the book picks up.

Today in class we discussed Science Fiction and how in some ways it can be defined as simply looking at the world from a different perspective, a different point of view. The book that I am reading for book group is ‘Midnight Robber’ and even though I am almost finished with the book, I am still very much confused at to who the speaker is throughout the story. At some points it seems as though the story is being told from Tan-Tans eyes because the speaker refers to ‘daddy’ and other times s/he refers to ‘Antonio’. It is this type of viewpoint, the one that changes that makes this book Sci-Fi a Sci-Fi.

Memories in a sense are Science Fiction too because everyone remembers an event differently. Just an hour ago I was on the phone with my brother talking about a trip he and my mom took when coming to surprise me in Maine where I was going to college at the time. He remembers walking out from behind a building and seeing me take a double take because I was not expecting to see him all the way across the country at my Cross Country Race. He tells me that I had a look on my face that made it seem like I had just pissed my pants.

I of course remember this event in a totally different way. I can clearly see my mom and brother walking out from behind a building and I my mouth just dropping open in complete shock. I was overwhelmed with joy to see them. And of course there is my coach who was the mastermind behind this entire plan. He remembers it in a different manner all together. He knew where my family was standing and he could see me walking towards them. He got to see the look on my face and my frantic embrace as I tried to understand why my family had flown across the country to see me. My coach’s point of view would be the one of science fiction. He tells the story from the eyes of an outsider to the events.

Mask

On Monday, the 18th we discussed the concept of ‘Fancy Dress’ and how when we first meet new people many of us in society will put up a mask, only showing the new person certain aspects of their personality that we want to.  

The concept of fancy dress is taking this mask idea to a new level because the people who chose to dress that way on a daily bases really are showing us their personalities. Maybe they are unsure as to how else to let the world know who they really are so they decide to show us through the way that they dress. When I see someone wearing a ‘unconventional’ outfit I tend to look at them for a longer period of time than I would someone who was dressed ‘normally’. To me this means that they really are catching they eye of the public and making the rest of us think about why they might have chosen to dress that way.

I have been known to do this, when I first meet someone new, I am very shy and I talk hardly at all. This concept of only showing certain parts of your personality is relevant in the way that we dress as well.

 Each and every one of us dresses differently and we do so for different reasons for many of us, but for the majority of society they dress a certain way to attract a group of people. Most of the time they dress to attract people they want to be friends with, lovers with or just associated with.

Once the desired person has been attracted it is possible to let down your guard, take off your mask and show them who you really are and why they should like you. 

The other me

This past weekend I took the 6-hour drive home to Spokane to see my family and my boyfriend. I noticed something while waiting in the terrible traffic through the pass on the return trip yesterday afternoon. It seems as though I am a different person when I go home. My world is totally different when I am at home with my loved ones. I find myself relaxing much more, not worrying about schoolwork or friends or my life at school in general. Life is easier, I can eat real food, take a break from my life here at school. I am not exactly sure whether this ‘other me’ would be considered to be my doppleganger because there is hardly any shift in me when compared to the differences between Ned and Greg of the Filth.

If in fact the other me is considered to be my doppleganger, then it seems as though everyone has many different doppelgangers. For instance, I have a friend who acts one way when she is around me and then as soon as she gets around a certain group of people her entire personality changes, she literally becomes a different person. She will look in the mirror to make sure that she looks just so and she will constantly be talking about things that I never expected her to be discussing. I can see this in myself as well, depending on the group of people I’m with, I will say different things and act a different way. It is in all of us to behave differently in different domains. We all have doppelgangers but they are not just out there wondering around, the ones that we have are in our heads, just waiting for their turn to speak. 

I'm here, and here and OH! I'm over there too

Today in class the topic of ‘where’ was brought up. Before today I had never really been able to rap my mind around the idea of being in more than one place at once but during and after the discussion it makes total sense to me. Which is saying a lot because more often than not I find myself lost during these 80 minutes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

            At this very moment there are many things on my mind; writing a blog, my various classes, finals, summer, and many many more. With all these things on my mind, it makes it so all of these things are here with me. Now, not each and every part of all of them can be here, but the idea of all of them are here. I do not and physically cannot have summer here in my dorm room with me but the idea of the warm sun and the beach are in my mind. That is how it is with all things, places, and people we think about. They may not physically be there with you but the ideas of them are, the way they look, the way they smell, and all the various memories you have experienced with this person, place or thing.

            With this idea of being anywhere that someone is thinking of you, it makes complete sense that even when an individual passes away they in a sense are not really gone. Sure, their bodies will be gone, but their soul does not die until the last person with any thoughts or memories of them passes away. And even then, when a living relative looks at an old photo of someone who lived in the past and starts thinking about that person, the dead person is now ‘alive’ again, if even only for a moment. 

All too recently I have had this experience. At the beginning of this quarter my grandmother passed away and I know that even though her body has not more life, that her memories and the impact that she had on the world around my will follow me through my life. I am thankful that I was able to be as close to her as I was because she was an amazing person and I would hate to lose or not have these amazing memories of her. When I have children I will tell them the stories of my memories of my grandmother and I would hope that they would pass those stories on to their children as well, this was I would wish that the memories of her would never die.

Little Worker, Huge Love

I found the story ‘Little Worker,’ from Ribofunk very interesting because it was told from the point of view of a companion of a Prime Minister in Canada with her many duties and roles in protecting him from any danger. The character of Little Worker is appealing because as the reader, we are not sure what sort of species she is at first. Maybe she is some sort of feline with the emotions and mental capacity of a human? She wakes up, grooms her fur and is then on her way, starting the day with some breakfast, not cat food but some eggs instead. In order to be aware of all that is going on around the house, she sits at Mister Michael’s feet.

When she gets up, cleans her fur and stretches it makes me think she is feline; then when she is complaining about not being about to eat bread and jelly, I find myself thinking she is human as well.

Little worker has the love, compassion, envy and selfishness of a human. I see this when reading about how much love she has for Mister Michael and how much hate she has for his wife. “Mister Michael’s wife was not the kind of wife he deserved.” The fact that there is never a name given to the wife shows that Little Worker really hates the woman’s guts. Though Little Worker has compassion and envy of a human, she has the violence of an animal. “The part of her inheritance that was 30 percent wolverine took over.” Animals have the ability to turn off their compassionate brain and just focus on what needs to be done, even if that means killing humans. Especially if that means killing humans who might be threatening a loved one.

Coming from Alaska, where weekly I would see mother moose and their calves or mother black bears and their cubs, I learned pretty quickly not to get in the middle of these families. Mothers of any species are very protective of their young, especially when that species is part wolverine, like Little Worker. Whether Little Worker sees her self as a mother figure or a possible lover for Mister Michael it does not matter much because either way she will want to protect someone she cares about, just like I am sure we would all do.

Little Worker is some sort of a hybrid species and she is caught between two worlds. For those of us living in society today it seems very strange to have a hybrid species, very foreign and scary. It is scary because humans have the ability to do terrible things and animals have the ability to not feel remorse for the actions. This makes the creature naturally feared, if you can even use the word natural. The definition of natural according to dictionary.com is, “existing in or formed by nature.” In my mind, a hybrid creature is not formed by nature, therefore cannot be natural. So maybe it would be more fitting to call them artificially feared.

In the future I can see the possibility of there being hybrid creatures and I believe that as humans we will grow to accept them for what they are, or rather, what they will be.

Just so you know.

On Plurk these last few days the class has been complaining about the student who joined us out of the blue on Friday, May 1^st.  Her name is Eli and just like Shane, I went to High School with her. She is a different kind of person, very intelligent and bright, but I will admit that she interrupts a lot and it gets her on peoples nerves most of the time. The conversation about her on Plurk makes me angry because none of you, with the acceptation of Shane, have ever met Eli. You don’t know the type of person she is. She is a very intellegent person but none of that matters because you are pissed at her for interrupting you once, maybe twice during our class.

As a class, we should NOT be calling her a bitch here on Plurk. I mean how old are you guys? As far as I know we have all graduated from high school and as far as I am concerned the name-calling should have been left behind in the halls of our high schools. We are in college now, it is time to grow up and start using more mature language. Otherwise you just look like dumb high schoolers.

She interrupted many of us when we were still talking and that gets annoying, she was questioning many of the things we were saying and that made us very uncomfortable. But that is no reason to start calling her a bitch. Part of the reason that you got so frustrated with her is simply because she was from outside the classroom, looking in on the very different style of learning we have in Nanotexts and she was questioning us. She didn’t understand why so many people had their heads buried in their laptops while we were watching the various films. She has some very different ideas than many of us because she is very much in to science. I for one think it might be cool to have her back in class again. (Maybe after someone tells her about our not interrupting each other rule so as to not have a repeat of last Friday.) It is always nice to get a different perspective every once in a while.

Running

"Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run. I like to make people stop and say, 'I've never seen anyone run like that before.' It's more than just a race, it's a style. It's doing something better than anyone else. It's being creative." – Steve Prefontaine.

Running has been on my mind for as long as I can remember, but it has been even more so in this last month because of the 12 kilometer Bloomsday race in Spokane, Washington. A race that draws people from all over the United States and the world even, a race that includes ages ranging from 8 to 80 years of age, a race who’s numbers reach 50,000 on a yearly bases.  This idea of getting outside of ones self in order to truly see the world from a different view point is amazing to me and it is something that I try and achieve each and every time I lace up my running shoes and head out for yet another out of the body experience.

I run. More that most people think is normal, a lot more. I love it, especially when it sucks and I collapse at the end of the day smiling because I’m dog tired and sore as hell. Pure bliss, by my definition, consists of nothing more than miles of trails stretching forever in front of me, mine for the taking. I love the feeling of pain fighting for control during a race. I hate being called a ‘jogger’. I need to hurt; it proves that I’m alive. I hate running almost as much as I love it. The most quintessential form of art, the human body pushing itself beyond the maximum, into the unknown, while all ideology flies by, like and human…dissolving. I was born to run, not born to run faster than everyone, but given that desire…I’ve met few people with the same passion for running. It never ceases to amaze me that after 20 miles of torment I can wake up the next morning begging for more.

I can’t say that I know what an out of the body experience feels like but as far as I’m concerned, running and long segments of physical exercise is the closest anyone can really get to reaching that sense of enlightenment at this stage in our world with the technology that we have.

When I am running, I enter a different zone, a place where I can think about everything and nothing at the same time. A place where everything makes sense, but at the same time nothing does. I ask myself why I go run and there is only one answer.

Runners High.

No, its not any kind of drug you can find on the black market or what not, it is something that comes from within yourself. Runner high is that feeling you get when you are dog tired, dead on your feet yet you feel so great that all you can do is smile. The feeling I have at the end of a long race is like nothing I can fully explain. Runners High is ‘The Other’ in this case because it is something that many of us do not understand either because we do not run or because we have never run fast or hard enough to reach that level of knowledge. To know that I have just pushed my body to its limit is what makes me believe that this is an out of the body experience.

"A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more. Nobody is going to win a 5,000 meter race after running an easy 2 miles. Not with me. If I lose forcing the pace all the way, well, at least I can live with myself." –Prefontaine.

A couple Random Thoughts

Just a warning, this blog has two random thoughts that don’t necessarily relate to each other but they have been on my mind this week and I figured I should put my thoughts into words.

         For me the readings in this class are very interesting but at the same time they are confusing and at times very hard to follow simply because they are such foreign topics to me. The classroom discussions are what really help me to understand what is going on in each book and how they relate to the world around us. While I’m reading I try to make connections to my life because it really helps me to grasp the concept of each book.  That being said, on page 85 Baudrillard was explaining that “you can enjoy all of the positive aspects of your own culture, but you also absorb all of its stupidity; you are much more sensitive to it than in other cultures. So it always feels good to get away from your culture.” I was an exchange student during my junior year of high school. I traveled to South Central France, in a town called St. Etienne. I was one of the lucky students because I was placed into a country where I had some background knowledge of the language, having taken three years of high school level French previous.  I know exactly what Baudrillard is talking about when he says that you are more aware of your own cultures stupidity when you are in other cultures. I stayed with a host family, and being completely immersed in the culture gave me a totally different outlook on the way we live our lives here in America. Every Wednesday in France the children have half days at school and parents come home from work to have a large family lunch that will usually take the majority of the rest of the afternoon. Here in America we would never dream of leaving work or school on one day a week to spend some quality time with the family. The concept of family life and meals in France is totally different and rather refreshing, coming from a culture where we are always on the go. We stop at a fast food restaurant on our way to work instead of waiting the extra hour to spend quality time with our loved ones. Living in France for that period of time was an amazing learning experience, I learned about the French culture and about different aspects of American culture that I didn’t think about before. In the future I want to return to France and live there separate from an exchange program.

            I wake up thinking of what needs to be done today, go to class wondering if I have finished all of the reading for today, get ready for bed reflecting on the day and anticipating the following day. I am never truly living in the present, constantly making lists of things that must be accomplished, one right after the other. A close friend told me recently that for one day, and one day only I should not think about anything except the subject at hand. He mentioned this because I am always stressing about the various things in my life that need to be accomplished. I never ‘live in the moment,’ I never stop to look at the world around me and really appreciate it for what it has to offer. Coming to class on Friday, the 17^th made me step back and really try and live just in that moment, not thinking about anything else that was going on. This classes forces me to learn in a totally different way that I’m used to. So far it has been a steep learning curve with plurk and posting a blog every week, but I am getting used to it and I really enjoy this English class.

You have nothing to fear but Disney itself.

We interrupt this laziness that has defined this blog of late for an urgent message regarding an insidious evil which threatens the very fabric of Western civilization.

I'm not talking about Cyberterrorism or the apparently unkillable Tony Almeida. I'm talking about Disney.

Yes that's right, Disney. The one with mouse ears, cuddly woodland creatures and the majority ownership of ESPN.

As of late I've been compelled as a normal human to protect anyone from the swirling winds of crappiness and loserfication which has buffet Jacob and Benjamin every day. I valiantly and successfully kept the purple dinosaur at bay, and I've saved them from the cuddly suckiness of Boobah and Teletubbies until the day I passed them a joint for the first time. But i was blind to that old friend, who every Sunday night of my childhood dished out healthy, wholesome doses of Chip 'n' Dale, the Apple Dumpling gang, and Escape to Witch mountain.

Unbeknownst to me, Disney's marketing team was not content to roll back and forth on their private islands made of Krugerrands fairy tears. Sensing a vulnerability in the young psyche, they stole a page from George Lucas, wrapped their hands firmly around the withered, chapped teats of their glorious past, and squeezed out a dastardly plot to desecrate their legacy for spectacular profits.

Thus was spawned the bane of my existence -- Disney Princesses.

Don't ask me how this malevolent force swept past our defenses. I've rocked back and forth late into the night, my knees clutched close to my chest, trying to comprehend how it gnawed through America's floorboards, crawled into it's daughter's ears, and wrapped itself around their cerebral cortex.

As I was at Hastings I noticed a mother and her young daughter. The daughter, not much older than 10, was wearing a princess dress.A debate took place between the two. about not whether to wear another princess dress, but which one. And for the love of god what sadistic fuck invented the Pretty Pretty Princess game? You've already taken America's young minds, Disney... must you also take the dignity of the parents?

And what sort of lessons are these princesses teaching? You'll never be happy with out a big, strong handsome prince? Living in the woods with seven vertically challenged miners is a good idea? And let's not forget that if life kicks you in the teeth you should just suck it up, cause eventually a fairy godmother will materialize and fix it all? You know, just like in real life. *

I'm all for introducing kids to strong female role-models. I think Disney even dabbled in some of their own for a day or two. But from what I can tell these cel-animated bitches have done nothing but reinforce the importance of coordinating jewelry with your gown, which might cut it in fair-tale land but not here. If this shit continues I might have to send my future daughter to Dagobah to "unlearn what she has learned."

And one last thing... Don't even get me started on the impending whoring of my beloved Muppets, whose de-coolification began with their last Christmas special and will probably continue until Fraggle Rock is revealed to be behind the auto shop at East High School.

* By the way, have you ever gone back and read the original fair tales these princesses are based upon? Holy crap, there's some seriously messed up shit going on! At the end of snow white the wicked Queen has to wear heated iron shoes until she's dead! I read one version of Cinderella in which her step-sisters were struck blind! And there's a lot of huntsman with axes roaming around doing things that would get you a part in the Cannibal Holocaust sequel. Grimm times, indeed...

Putting on a Show

Could someone or something switch us off? Could it possibly be true that our world is just a hologram, or a dream, or a performance? Although it's about the weirdest thing one could think of, there are some tantalizing clues this might indeed be the case. The English class entitled Nanotexts discusses this topic within the first week of attendance.

Donald Duck was putting on a show for himself and whoever else wanted to venture into his back yard to observe this scaled down world he had created. When something ‘out of scale’ enters the back yard, in the first case, the naturally growing tree was out of scale according to the new world Donald was creating, he pulled it out of the ground, greatly disturbing Chip and Dale who called that tree home. And so the battle begins, Chip and Dale, run away and hid from the crazed Donald and finally they are able to come to a compromise. The hugely out of scale tree is put in the middle of the train track, becoming a tunnel and everyone is happy, the tree is no longer ‘out of scale’ in Donald’s eyes and Chip and Dale still have a home. A sign that is hung on the tree shows that these characters are putting on a show for us, they are always been putting on a show for us and therefore it is possible for us as the observers to simply switch off the television.

“Lose yourself.” When we travel to the Universal Studios Theme Parks, we are told that we can be something that we are not normally in the real world. We are told that if we want to we can tear off our shirts like the Hulk; we can wear a white dress and stand over a vent just like Marilyn Monroe; wear cocktail dresses and gorge ourselves with ribs and other messy meat products. These are all actions that most of us would never dream of doing in our day to day lives here in reality. That is what Disney is good at; they have this down to a science. They know that all of us want to get away every once in a while, we do in fact want to lose ourselves, we want to act like children without a care in the world for what others think. But how much of this caries over into our day-to-day lives? The answer is none. I try not to stuff my face with meat on a daily basis because I know that it is not only unhealthy but also it is looked down upon in society. When we are children we are more carefree, we don’t care what people think, we just want to have fun and experience everything that we can. Disney is putting on a show for us and we completely buy into it while we attend the parks and in turn put on a show ourselves.

Morel brings a group of tourists to an island and proceeds to take photographs of them without their knowledge for a weeks time. At the end of the week they vanish and the fugitive tries to come up with different theories as to what is happening. As it turns out, Morels Invention has somehow processed the photographs from the previous week and now the images are replaying on the island and they will continue playing for all eternity. The fugitive has to watch the woman he had fallen in love with everyday until he decides to record himself in the machine and it kills him. This is another example of a show, well; more of a hologram in the sense that it can be played over and over again but the people are not really there. They would just be figments of our imagination if we were to be on that island witnessing the goings on.

Our universe could fold up. The dimensions we live in could be wrapped up. The very fabric of our physical world could be disrupted by some unprecedented, weird physical event. From one second to the other, our reality would no longer be there. You never know what will happen tomorrow.