Blogging Around 5-13-2013

This week, I read some of my classmates blogs and responded to their posts!

First, I read and commented on Kali's post where she talked about her process when creating our Mashup projects:

Next, I read and commented on Ruxi's blog which discussed the process of writing and editing her Short Story:

You are the weakest link

Goodbye

Dialectics: Truth and Ignorance.

Truth and Ignorance

Truth: a fact or belief that is accepted as true

Ignorance: lack of knowledge or information

Imagine you were in a world, and you find out that the world you're living in, the world as you know it, was fake. A chimera that you've been taught to believe is real. Would you want to live in the truth, or go back to the ignorance. 

You might choose to live in the truth, but what if the truth was unbearable. The Truth was something you couldn't even dream up.

In The Matrix, Neo is introduced to reality, a world completely unlike the ones he thought he'd been living in for years.
He's asked to choose between reality and ignorance when he's given the choice between the red and the blue pill.
The red pill will only submerge him deeper into reality, whereas the blue pill will send him back into ignorance where he can continue to live the life that he had previously been living.

The question then naturally arises, which pill would you have taken?

*

Right now, I believe that the world I'm living in is true. The blanket over my legs is one I put there, and my dog is on my bed because he's my dog and my family bought him, not the matrix.  But what if I am not actually living in the truth, what if I'm actually the ignorant one and I am in fact living in the matrix. How do I know? You don't, but that's another blog post. see this post

Ignorance and truth, although seemingly not extremely related, can be seen as both opposites, as well as extremely relevant.
In order for you to be ignorant, there must be a truth to ignore. If you use the word ignore though, that implies that you are aware that there is the possibility of something more than your ignorant life....

cue Twilight zone music.

Metacognition: The Mashup

Hello.

     When writing my Mashup (A compilation of multiple sources and medias used to convey a single message) we were given several ( I love that  word) choices from Mr. Allen. Immediately  my eyes were drawn to the topic "Challenging the Status Quo." As soon as my brain processed the words, the High school music song "Stick to the Status Quo" assaulted my mind. This song then continued to play on repeat for the remainder of class.
     After being forced by my internal mp3 player to think about the status quo for a solid class, I realized it would be a fun topic to do this project on.
     While searching for my sources, I initially went into the task looking for examples of Jane simply challenging the status quo, but my mind began to deviate a bit. I soon began seeing patterns about how the more society tries to push the norm on you, the more likely you are to rebel and try and deviate from that set norm.
     I found this very interesting because you wouldn't expect that something that is made to be a fairly reasonable standard for society, often ends up creating an "uproar" rather than normalcy. Status Quo also seemed to foster the idea of normal into other peoples head, while fostering the idea to defy the status quo in others.
    While putting together my mashup, I feel like I could have been thinking more clearly than I was. By the final steps of the project, I'm thinking I might have been overly confident. I think I should have taken more care with organizing and thinking about the chronology of the elements.
   I'm really happy and proud of how my Mashup turned out, but I feel like given a little more time, I could really think about my project and add to it for the better.

-jordan

Metacognition: Writing a Short Story

Howdy.

In this blog post, I'm going to be talking about the oh so lovely process of writing a short story. Sounds Harmless right? Wrong. The first step to writing a short story is reading some to get your brain flowing, and then you have to think of the plot, or at the very least, your main character(s).
     I hit a block here. Considering the fact that I was only on the first step of the assignment, I wasn't feeling too hot. Then an Idea hit me. The words started flowing out of my pen onto the blank page in my notebook. I thought my idea was great. I girl who goes out for a run, she witnesses a car accident, turns out her husband was a part of it and died. Great idea at the time, three drafts later, not so much.
     I was left three days before a complete draft was due with absolutely nothing. Now I had to come up with a completely different story idea and I had three days. Two of which were spent looking at a blank computer screen. Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with a story idea that isn't completely obtuse? Probably.
    Anyways..... I basically spent the whole weekend attempting to write my story, and the idea didn't come until my family ditched me to go to a St. Patricks day party. I cried for like two-ish hours, and then it dawned on me that, if i just changed the names around and the alleged assignment around, that I'd got my story. Awesome.
    Something that I learned through writing my story, was that original and intelligent ideas are very hard to come up with for me. I supposed this implies that I'm not a very creative person. Never have been never will be. (No seriously though, I can't do a craft project well for my life.) I have a lot of ideas, but not many of them are great by any means.
   I think it's pretty sad that I've lost whats left of my creativity. I feel like creativity is almost suppressed in school nowadays with very straight-forward/rigid assignments. Welp, that's another blog post I suppose.

***

And now some parting words.

My mother regarding the fact that my brother sounds like a dying whale when he's annoyed/remotely sick.

"It's hard to tell if he's got a hang nail, or he's dying."

-my mother for ya.

An Inconvenient Truth: Mankind is Stupid

      In this blogpost, I will be discussing a truth that is rather in convient. As a part of mankind, I think I have the right to say this, as a whole, I think we're pretty stupid.

     When you look back at history, we look like absolute idiots. Sure we can capture energy from the sun and have any information you need in a light up box on your lap, but really compared to all the really dumb stuff we've done? Allow me to list just a few: WWI, WWII (didn't see that one coming did you? ;), race superiority, etc. I'm pretty sure those outweigh the technological advances that we've made.

    In class this week, we've been discussing love and how the motion picture "Once" compares to how we perceive love. Today in class specifically, we were talking about all of the insights that "Once" has given us about love: Love is uncomfortable, Love is hard to speak about, and the one I'll be focusing most on in this blog post is Love isn't always fair.

   Okay, for some reason, from what I see, most people get upset when things don't go their way. I'm pretty sure someone has told them in their life that "Life's not Fair," so why they would get upset when everything doesn't go their way baffles me. Don't get me wrong, I get upset when something doesn't go my way too, but I try and move on just like everyone else does. (some people are better at this than others.) It also helps that I'm a strong believer in the "Everything Happens for a Reason" theory, so there ya go.

   Well now that we got off on that tangent, back to our regularly scheduled programming. I think that people who think that everything is easy and is going to go their way are stupid. I know, I just called myself and probably the majority of the planet stupid but hey Jack, this is the internet, I can say whatever I want.

   Plot Twist------

  It seems like every history class since 6th grade, we've started out the year answering the question "Why do we study history?" This question bothers me because I personally don't think we should study history, al least not at the depth we delve into it. Anyways, the answer we always seem to come up with is: We need to learn history because it prevents us from repeating the past. children have been learning history in school since my parents were in school, so when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and I think we've repeated history just a couple times ya know. They're only been like half a dozen + genocides, countless civil wars, a couple of times when we discriminated against people.

    Mankind is stupid. We learn about something every year for 14 years, and then go and start another war. We say, life's not fair, and then mourn for 2 years after our relationship doesn't work out.

    This inconvenient truth bothers me because, as a member of mankind, I don't like calling myself stupid  but as the term implies, it's the truth.  Mankind has been stupid though for over 2000 years, (although I think it's gotten exponentially worse in the last 300.) So I guess we're just going to have to work on being a little smarter, and think before we perform an action.

**le sigh**

Best of Today: Darkness

hello interweb.

In today's blog post I'm going to be referencing a discusion we had today during class about the Book "Heart of Darkness" It's really a very interesting book about an adventure into the Congo during the late 19th century.

The main point that stuck with me from today's fishbowl discussion was from when were were discussing the title of the book- "Heart of Darkness" - where it came from, and for that matter, what is the "darkness"?

via

During class, we not only discussed that the darkness the Conrad was referring to was the colonization of Africa, but that the Europeans during the time period were really the one's in the darkness. They had no clue how terrible the actions really were that were going on down there in Africa.

I think that this a really cool and unique way to analyze the title of the book. I think that being able to access the title of the book and find the deeper meaning of it like we did in class can bring you deeper into the book because it's shows you almost a hidden tidbit that the author planted that many other people may not see.

I think that the insight that the Europeans are the ones really in the darkness is a valid and accurate insight into the book. It definatley makes sense literarily and historically. An insight that I've somewhat developed myself is that maybe the book is titled "Heart of Darkness" because the Europeans believed they were doing something good by civilizing the African's (the heart) and the darkness comes from the fact that although the Europeans see it as a good thing, (having a heart.) The heart, in all reality, is filled with darkness.  I doubt that made much sense, but i suppose it's pretty self explanatory anyways. Maybe.

I can definitely see myself using these insights, as well as the other ones we brought up in class to help with my understanding of not only the book, but also to the history we've been learning about recently. I think it's really cool that we get to connect our english work to what we're currently learning in history class. It gives you a much different perspective on what happend and I think that's a very academically enriching experience. :)

-jordan

Blogging Around: 2-1-13

Hey Hey Hey :)

Today's blog post is all about other peoples blogs!

I read Emily's blog post about procrastination, and shared my thoughts on the subject in the comments.

The next post I read was Stephanie's post about preparing for her recent trip to New York. She talked about how she prepared for her trip and her extra precautions resulted in a much smoother trip.

Thanks for reading and Go check out these peoples blogs! They Rock!

:D

Metacognition: Writing a Poem

Hello children of the planet earth as well as numerous other planets that according to the string theory and my dad, exist with people with the same DNA makeup as us.
Today I'll be discussing how I wrote my poem for english classe.

I don't know about the rest of the classes poem, but my poem was pretty much based on my life. I wrote my first draft of the poem probably one or two months ago. I started out knowing exactly how I wanted my poem to be. I wanted it to be about a girl who is asocial, like myself (because the poem is like I said, based on my life.). She basically hides behind the computer screen and lives her life on the internet instead of with her real-life friends.

After conferencing with my english teacher, we decided that I needed a more finite moment or event in my poem. In this edit of the poem  something about it seemed really off to me. I didn't like how the poem was turning out.

I conferenced with him a second time when we got our graded draft back. I wasn't happy with my poem, and I wanted to figure out how I could change it and get the poem back on the track where I wanted it.
As we were talking, we realized that "the character" liked the fact that she was able to control everything on the internet, whereas in real life, her friends are unpredictable and hard to control.

I wrote the final draft blindly. I wrote what came to my mind, it was a completely different poem. Pretty risky considering it's an important part of my grade :/ For some reason, I thought that band-aid would make a good metaphor for how the main character was feeling when her friends found out about her internet life. Thus came the name of the title.

I think I learned a lot about myself while I was writing this poem. 1. I'm an anti-social 2.I need to be in control 3. I would rather be at home then out of my house 4. Sometimes I like my computer more than I like my friends.
To be honest, these things kind of scare me. :( I think I've done a lot of soul searching this year, a lot of which is documented on this blog. I think I like that, but sometimes it makes me frustrated  because I never do anything to change myself.

Anyways, back to my poem.
I feel like writing this poem was a lot more enjoyable than I thought. I found a topic I wanted to write about, and the words just flowed from my fingers. I wasn't expecting to like writing my own poem, but I really enjoyed it, I think because I connected soooo heavily with the main character. I think I'll try my hand at poetry again sometime :)

Check out this poetry blog! I love her stuff :) -> http://letting-this-all-go.tumblr.com/

Get Organized 12-26-12

Hello all.

For today's blog, we were assigned the task of organizing something in our lives, and then addressing some points that relate the the task.

What I organized:
 I took on the task of organizing my makeup drawer. After coming back from a trip which involved throwing randoms bits of makeup in a bag, and then throwing it all back in a drawer when I returned, the drawer was looking less then satisfactory. I decided to clean and tidy the whole drawer up.

~

While I was cleaning my drawer, I felt in control, It didn't take me very long because I knew where everything needed to go. Everything has a place, and it should always be in it's place. Things like this little shred of obsessive compulsive. Why? My room is a disaster area. I'm not kidding. Whatever signs they're putting up in NY because of Sandy, they should put one on my bedroom door. But when it come's to small places like my makeup drawer or my backpack, they have to be perfect. Not a pen out of place, all my notebooks have to be in order from biggest to smallest. I wish I could apply this obsession to my entire room. :/

After completing the project, I feel slightly more in check. Although I don't feel completely relieved, because after all, it was only one drawer out of my entire room, I do feel better because It's one more thing I can tick off my list. I know it sounds weird  but I  like being able to see my makeup drawer spick and span, not an eyeshadow out of place because it's the one thing in my life that I can count on being organized.

I fell like through this project I've learned that I'm slightly more obsessive compulsive than I expected, but still the messy Jordan that we all know and love. I really wish I could become an organized person, but I don't know if I could do it. Trust me, I've tried. Numerous times. There's just something extremely daunting about trying to organize your whole life. Oh well. Baby steps.

-Jordan

Metacognition: Am I too closed minded?

     This year in academy, we've done a lot of thinking about ideas that we see frequently in literature and the world around us. I've noticed as we discuss these topics in class, that I'm not one to look at other peoples opinions. I'm very closed-minded. For some reason, I can't stand poetry. This is likely due to the fact that I am closed minded. People keep telling me that maybe if I looked at the poem in another way or try to look at it from the poets perspective, but for some reason I can't.
    I really wish that I could open up my mind a little bit more because I feel bad and sometimes even stupid because I can't understand where people get their ideas or opinions from.
    As you can imagine, this tends to cause problems. Being closed-minded this year and in general has made it a lot harder to learn and understand people's opinions. I think that if I learn to be less closed-minded, that I can get a lot more out of this year.
   I'm wondering if being closed minded is the same as being pessimistic? I don't see myself as a pessimistic person, but could that be the base of my problems? If I learned to see the glass as half full instead of half empty, maybe seeing other perspectives would come easier as well. I think that my life in general would improve if I started to become more optimistic, and out of all of my classes.
    I haven't noticed my closed mindedness before, so I'm wondering if it's something that I've started to "have" recently. If so, I really wonder what caused me to not accept other ideas. Like I said, I've always seen myself as a fairly optimistic person, so I'm really wondering what brought this on.

   In order to try and stray away from this, I'm going to try and look at everyone's opinions evenly, no mater how much it pains me. ;)  I really want to look at everything with open eyes and be able to view the world like everyone else does. It bothers me when I can't see where people get their ideas, so if I try and open up my thinking a little bit more, I think that my life will be a lot happier and easier.

Picture

Blogging Around: 10-28-12

Blogging Around.

Here are some comments that I've made on some of my friends blogs this week!Be sure to go read the full posts!

This is the first blog post I read Emily's Post

Her post was about the over/misuse of the word or idea of depression.

Here's the next Comment and Post: Kira's Post

I also read posts from these blogs:
Nikki's Blog
Toby's Blog
Anna B's Blog

-jordan

An Inconvenient Truth: Poetry is Deep

If you've talked to me recently, you know that I am not the biggest fan of poetry. I don't mind some poems, usually ones involving the description of the seasons, but love poems, critical poems, "deep" poems, no. I can't stand them. I can't stand reading them, I can't stand thinking about them, I can't stand analyzing them. Okay I can't stand analyzing any poem. Most people say that when you analyze a poem it adds a deeper meaning. I completely disagree with that. I think that when you analyze a poem it sucks the life out of it. I don't think that all poetry was written to be analyzed. For example: 

Rose are red

Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet

and so are you.

Arguably, this is a poem. here is what bother me most:

when they're saying sugar is sweet and so are you, it expresses the unconditional love that they have for a person. You can infer, that this means the person who wrote the poem is obsessed with the person it was written for etc.

I cannot stand this. I think that poetry can be taken literally. Some poems may have even been written with that pretense, that people will take them literally. Like I said before, It's like squeezing the life out of it. You know the saying "you can't squeeze water out of a turnip" well some poems are turnips. You can't analyze them because there's nothing to analyze!!!! I really wish that we could all just take a look at poetry literally and not try and beat a dead horse. I think it we'd actually get more out of it!

With some forcing of the brain, I can see whee some people are coming from with the analyzing. I guess some people are just more inquisitive and that's why they want to look deeper into the poems. (correct me if I'm wrong in the comments down below) It blows my mind though, I don't understand it. 

This kind of reveals to you that I am a bit of a closed minded person. I'm not one to open up to other peoples opinions, much like a very protective dog.

I personally apologize for this extremely ranty/rambly blog post.

and now back to your previously scheduled programing.

-jordan 

iMedia: Ted Rives: A story of mixed emoticons

Today in class we watched Ted Rives perform his poem about mocking birds.

This sparked me to find another poem performance of his. The one I found, I thought, was quite relatable and funny as well. 

     The poem is very different from other poems that we've read in class this week and last. In order to truly understand this poem, one must watch the little slideshow that goes along with it. I think that this brings a whole new perspective to what we as high schoolers perceive poetry to be. We recognize poetry, in general to be very boring, confusing, and a lot of the time, unrelatable. The way Ted Rives presents this poem makes it a lot more interesting and easier to comprehend. Being an extremely visual thinker myself, having the ability to see the poem really helps make it easier to swallow.

     Another thing that makes this poem extremely different is the fact that all of the visual aids/pictures are emoticons. Emoticons have become increasingly popular with the emergence of the countless emoticons released with the iPhone. He uses the emoticons almost in a mocking way with his poem. At the beginning, he shows the mass of symbols which look like gibberish, but when he tells the story along with it, it somehow grows to make complete sense. You can't help but laugh when reading this poem. It becomes more and more almost sarcastic when you look at it. They way he almost pokes fun at the overuse of emoticons without actually cracking jokes is right up my alley.

     I think that this poem or whatever you would call it is important, not just in general, but important to the high school age group. I think this because like I said, it shows a completely different side of poetry, one that is not usually seen. I also think that this is important to society because it's starting the transition  of poetry from lovely dovey sonnets by Shakespeare and love notes from Emily Dickinson, to the critical and almost satirical literature of todays time.

I really want to find some more of Ted Rives' Poetry. From the two that i've now seen, I'm intrigued  I really like the way he wites. The way he recites his poems has a very obvious rhythm. The rhythm of the poems gives it almost a musical ring the the poem. I think I like this type of poetry, but i'm not quite sure yet. I don't think I've read quite enough poetry to form that opinion yet.

~jordan

Best of The Week: Gender Vs. Sex

Throughout last week in class, we had a very interesting and, at times, heated discussion regarding the difference between Sex and Gender, and what differentiates each one.

I think the conversation started when we were discussing Viginia's Woolf's writing in chapter 3. We were trying to understand why she turned orlando into a girl. As we were flipping through the pages, we saw the passage that discusses that Orlando hasn't changed, but her sex has. This sparked quite the discussion.

At the beginning of the discussion, I thought that sex and gender were the same things. Sex is if you're guy or a girl, that's what gender is too. After trying to fight out the discrepancy we looked the two words up in the dictionary. Sex is someones genetic makeup of XX or XY. Gender is the state of being male or female with reference to cultural or social differences rather than biological ones.

Like I said, before we looked up the definitions, I thought that Gender and sex were the same. I feel that if your genetic makeup says your a guy, then your sex or gender is male. That doesn't mean that you don't/ can't have feminine mannerisms, or be gay, it's just different from your gender or sex.

Based on the definition of gender :->

I think that it is safe to say that your environment definitely effects your gender. I think it was Nish who brought up the "letting the child pick their gender," but I think that it's really impossible to pick your gender, because the way that you are raised, and the people around you definitely effect how you act, no matter if your biologically male or female.

While we were discussing this, it made me think of how we as humans are so easily categorized. We're categorized by what activities we're envolved in, our gender, our sex, our income, our race, where we live, etc. I think that this is a product of our world today. It's naive to think that it wasn't always like this, because it most likely was. It's natural to place people in categories. It probably wasn't as bad 200 years ago, but there's always been segregation of people in one way or another.

~jordan

Captured Thought: Wizards, Vampires, and Werewolves, Oh My!

Okay I'm just going to say it flat out, and then explain myself. Try not to judge me too much though.

I sincerely believe that there is a possibility that Wizards and vampires are currently coexisting with us right now. (I only say this because I am a vampire haha just kidding ;)

Okay, Now I'm going to backtrack and explain to you why I believe this.
       In Harry Potter, Harry has no idea that there is such a thing as wizards until he finds out he is one. The entire world has no idea that there are such things as wizards, unless they are one. So in my mind, this tells me that there is possibly a whole civilization of wizards living out there that we don't know about just because we aren't wizards.

     Now on to vampires and Werewolves. In Twilight, Bella has absolutely no idea that there is such a thing as werewolves. Even when chaos starts to ensue, no one else finds out about the vampires. Also, we don't live on the olympic peninsula of Washington, so how do we know that this isn't actually happening there?

     I know i don't have very solid evidence, if any, but having these childish or even irrational thoughts kind of makes me laugh at myself. I think the thing that may have given me these ideas is how developed the civilizations are in the books. Even though they probably aren't real, the authors created a  whole other world where these things do happen.

You may still think I'm crazy, but my theory is, how can you disbelieve something that you can't prove right or wrong?

~jordan