Babette's Connection to Happy Endings

in "happy endings" by margaret atwood, she says that the focus of a story should not be on the what, but the how and the why. babette's story focuses mainly on the what. this is the contradiction. she remembers all the whats- the person, the room, the TV, the product she was trying to get, but none of the how. jack asks her how it was. she tells him she cant remember. jack asks where. she tells him nothing. her focus is on a what and a what and a what, not the how or why.

Girl Scouts

To be honest, I have no idea how it conditions them to act in certain ways. I could only think of three ways and I hope one of them is right. The first is that it conditions them to have a reverse role and bring in money for their organization, which is different than the man bringing home the money in a house. The second is that it teaches them to be personable and open, but that sounds like a good thing, so my third idea is that it teaches them to be too open with people and to want people to buy their stuff as a sick and twisted idea of being accepted. Something like when someone buys their cookies, they feel accepted. No cookies; no one accepts them. They will do anything to get people to buy their cookies, which (I may be reading way too deep into this) trains them to be willing to do anything to be accepted and feel wanted. I have no idea if that's right, but that's where my words took me.

Deconstruction!!!

So I was talking to Steven, the guitarist I play with at church, and he said that he absolutely loved thie one guitar he played at work. (He works at Mills Music) So I asked him what love really is if you could say it about a woman and a guitar. And he said that it was an emotion. What's an emotion? A feeling. What's a feeling? Something that makes you cry or laugh. What is crying? That's as far as we got before he told me to shut up. When I told him about the assignment he told me that it kind of makes sense. His creative writing professor told him that the words don't matter as much as the emotion you can create with them. I think it's a weird statement, but kind of true.

Writer or the Written?

Does the writer always agree with what he writes? Or is he just trying to make some money? I think he has to do what is in the best interest of his company and the money he can make. If he writes about a Chinese person that can't drive, it doesn't mean that he seriously believes all Asians can't drive (even if it is a proven fact), but it means that he knows everyone will laugh about that. He writes it not with the intent to be vicious and mean, but it is so that he can get people to laugh. However, I think writers should be held responsible for what they write. If they write something with the intent of making fun of someone, they have to be held responsible for that. I don't think we can say that every joke that might be demeaning is meant to hurt someone.

What is art and who's to say it is?

Art is anything you do to express yourself, as long as it's done with purpose. In this sense no one can decide what art is except for the person who is creating it. The quality of the art, however, is determined by other people. Not just anyone can judge art. Only people who know what art truly is and know and understand all types of art can determine. Someone who hates dancing and knows nothing about it could not say whether or not a dance is good. Same goes for painting or writing or singing. Anyone who calls something that is designed with purpose "kitch" is unimaginative, intolerant, and unsophisticated. Only true artists can understand and respect a work of art when they see it.

Conclusion: Art is always art if it is created with a purpose, and the only people who can judge it are fellow lovers of art.

Disorder in Travelling

The man in "Travelling" by Simon Ortiz, is the picture of disorder. First, his method of finding places on the globe, spinning it and picking a spot, just seems to be a picture of disorder. The orderly method would be to find a place you want to look for and then go to the globe, but this mand goes to the globe as a way of finding out what he is looking for. Another way the disorder is celebrated is found in the simple fact that he is probably crazy. His actions show it a little bit, but I found his craziness in the statement, "Travelling the known and unknown places." If you travel somewhere, either you or someone else has to know ther existence of that place. If you are travelling somewhere then you must know it exists because you are in it, but the craziness is shown in the fact that the man is travelling somewhere that is unkown. The disorder is celebrated through insanity.

Where does meaning break down?

I believe that meaning breaks down in a combination of two ways: an inadequate understanding of reality and an inability to express the understood with words. In Atwood's "Toast" she writes, "What is flour? We'll skip that part, it's too complicated." I think she is saying that whatever she would say would mean nothing to us, because we would not understand it. If we cannot understand something, what does it mean to us? All it means is that we are incompetent to understand, and we learn nothing about what we are trying to understand. This is added to when we try to express complicated things with words. Love - how do we express love with words? Some may say it's not real, because you can't explain it. You can try to say that it's this tie between two people, but then people will say, "well then how come no one else can see it." Then you can explain that it is an emotional thing, but people will say, "Aren't emotions made up?" You can go all the routes with trying to explain that it's a choice you make, or a feeling you have, or this thing our brains invent, but no matter how many words you use to try and explain love, it will never be adequate in expressing what it is. Someone who has no idea what love is will never get the picture clearly. That is where the breakdown is: it is in the inability to communicate reality with words when the concepts are too hard to be explained.

Hyper-reality

The hyperreality of love has created this idea that love is simply found and easily held onto. In many of the movies and books today the idea of love is that there are two people who are perfect for each other, they date, they marry, and they live happily ever after. This idea is the hyperreality we are accustomed to; it is what we expect in a realtionship. Love is not always easy, and often times it is not that the people begin perfect for each other, but that they grow into being perfect together. In the words of William Shakespeare, "The course of true love never did run smooth." That is so true, because no matter how close you are to each other life will come and try to rip you apart. You try to hang on, you hang on tight and you fight will all the strength - that is when you find true love. The expectation is that love is just found in another, when the reality is that love is found in the struggles and battles you go through with another person.

http://www.theromantic.com/lovequotes/love4.htm

PoMo Crisis!

postmodernism has some ideas that cannot blend with christianity. for example, pay no attention to authority vs. Christ's teachings to obey authority. kind of hard to put those two together. however, i think we can take some of the stuff that is not harmful. life is not orderly; life is chaotic. we should celebrate how chaotic life is, because that's what makes it exciting. honestly, sometimes there are things that are relative. for example, if i held up a color and you called it blue, but i had been taught that it was green...who is right? did God name colors? the color is still there...that's not relative, but the name it is called is relative. so i think as christians we need to look at postmodernism and reject the things that cannot fit into our beliefs and take the things in it that are beneficial. there is always a little bit of truth in all deception - it is when we can determine between the two that we can take the good from it.

Metafictional endings

the last paragraph/chunk thing in "Happy Endings" is about its own ending. it says, "so much for endings." it then goes on to talk about how boring plots are. it ends by saying that stories should focus on the reasons and not the results. it adds to the story, because that is the theme it is trying to push, but instead of just saying that with the story it openly says it in a little summary at the end.

Captain Jack is post-modern?

yep. he is. he is a post-modern good pirate and protagonist in an epic adventure who loves to turn bad situations into a comedy. thats quite the blend of genres. also, he is very relative in his good vs. bad ideas. his good is anything that betters himself, essentially.

ANTS!

so for my little expiriment i went to starbucks. i usually go there to talk to people in the morning at least once a week. i like to do it because some of the people have a lot to share and its cool to listen to. but this week for my project i met jerry. jerry is a 42 year old computer programmer. he has 2 kids but one of them dropped out and moved away. it was really cool to hear him talk about how much he still loves his son. i had never really heard that from anyone before and it was really good for me to hear, because for a while i completely abandoned everything my dad believed in and went my own way. the ants project was definitely a good one.