Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Romanticized Nature

            I know I romanticize nature. Whenever I think about nature, I don’t think about the run down backyards of St. Paul at this time of year, or the sloshing of dirty rain water on the freeway along construction sites. When I think of nature what pops into mind is huge redwood trees which seem miles high, rising above me with the sun shining through the rustling pines as I walk along a trail of red pine needles under my feet, with a small river running somewhere along side me. This seems like a perfect scene to me, except for the fact that I would have to travel to get anywhere that would resemble this kind of nature. This perfect idea of nature is a romanticized version of what nature actually looks like. To say I love nature would be an overstatement, because in order to say that I would have to love getting drenched by rain when walking into school, love being bitten by mosquitoes and other annoying bugs, and love the windy days which mess up my hair. But I don’t love all those things. I love the idea that I have of nature in my mind. Although this idea doesn’t reflect what nature truly looks like 99% of the time, that doesn’t mean I advocate for the destruction of nature itself.
            I decided the song Big Yellow Taxi by Counting Crows exemplified this relationship to nature perfectly. The song depicts a ‘tree museum,’ where people have to pay to go and see trees because they’ve become so rare. All the nature, more commonly referred to as ‘paradise’ in this song, has been replaced by parking lots and other things humans believe we need. The song continues to show how as we neglect nature more and more, we will eventually kill all nature around us, including the trees and birds and bees. The repeating line in the song states “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” The singers were showing how humans are neglecting nature and treating it wrong because we believe that nature will never truly be gone and that there will always be more time to save nature. However, it won’t be until nature is already gone that we realize that we really do need nature.
Something that worked really well for us was the group dynamic. Mick, Meera and I are perfect partners for each other. We’ve worked together several times throughout the semester, and we always work well together. Also, we all grew up in North Oaks. This worked well for us, especially with this project. North Oaks is more commonly referred to as “the woods.” Although there are houses everywhere, it’s as close to the woods as people seem to get these days. Growing up in this sort of environment was a good experience for me personally- my family and I always took long bike rides around Pleasant Lake, or spent days on the beach with family and friends.  
            Meera, Mick and I were able to split up the work for this project pretty evenly. We all worked together to select passages from our four group texts that we felt reflected that questions that our project revolved around. Once we finished with all of our annotations, Meera and I worked on a script that would depict how each of our sources showed the human and nature relationship in creative ways. Later, Mick scouted out North Oaks to find pictures that depict man’s relationship to nature. Many of these pictures show nature existing by itself, while also showing small areas where humans have interacted with, and in many cases ‘ruined,’ nature. Once he took pictures, he sent them to me in order to come up with a PowerPoint which I believed depicts man and nature interacting with each other. In almost all of the pictures, we see a trend on nature being disrespected by the human race. 

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Officially Emotional

                 After watching multiple videos on the life and adventures of Chris McCandless, he has started to feel like a real person. Being able to put a face to the name has done more for my emotional connection to him than reading about his life, including parts of his journal, has throughout Into the Wild. Throughout the book, it is clear that Chris is both highly adventurous and a usually happy guy (except when it comes to his parents).  Out of all the pictures and slides people uploaded of him, celebrating his life and the anniversaries of his death, I never once saw a photo where he was not smiling. Even a photo from Chris’s last few days was included in many of these videos, titled “Last photo taken on Chris’s camera. Disturbingly thin and weak, resigned to his fate but smiling clear as ever.” Before these photos, Chris was just a character in a book. Now, he seems more of a real person, with family and friends and dreams.
The videos posted on YouTube about Chris McCandless fall into two major categories: videos and slideshows about Chris himself, and videos about the movie that was made about Chris. I definitely liked the videos about the real Chris McCandless better. These made me feel more connected to him while the movie trailers had the exact opposite effect. I found myself wondering whether or not Chris would have wanted to have a movie made out of his Alaskan adventure. He trekked off through Alaska because it’s how he wanted to live his life, not so he could be the hero of some movie for everyone to see. It seemed as though the movie tried to make his journey look like it wasn't as hard as it had to be in real life. I didn't like thinking about his big Alaskan adventure as a story for others solely to enjoy, especially since it ends in his death.

 The videos of Chris made me feel more connected to him for two main reasons. First, as I said before, being able to put a face to a name goes a long way for me. Second, I used to be an explorer (not in the way Chris was, but still). I spent my summers canoeing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, the Quetico in Canada and hiking in the Big Horn Mountains in northern Wyoming. I left all types of communication, including my phone, behind, as well as family, friends, and the ability to shower for weeks at a time. I loved camping. I loved turning corners and seeing expanses of mountain wilderness, separated by rivers and trees. Something about the explorer spirit seems lost these days, as technology becomes more important than family and social experiences become more important than solo experiences. A lot of people seem to start out with an adventure/explorer spirit, only to lose it as they grow up, just as I (mostly) lost mine. This was not the case with Chris. He was an explorer until the very end. This is something I have to appreciate about him, making the death of such a spirited, young boy even more tragic. 

Real life photo of Chris McCandless taken off of his camera after his death. 

What Paramounrt Movies seems to believe is an accurate representation of Chris's journey. 

Monday, April 14, 2014

The Human Experience

For my video tryptich, I decided to try and express emotion in connection with place through various sounds. In order to do this, I used some of the general themes we’ve explored throughout the class thus far (technology, culture and human).
My first video revolves around school. This vine contains multiple frames of school with shouting, groaning, and general noises of disagreement scattered throughout the video. Although this is a personal reaction to school, it’s also probably a reaction many people share and can there therefore relate to. One thing I found really interesting about this choice of location was my immediate reaction to school paired with the amount of time I spend here. From this I would draw the conclusion that the more time you spend somewhere, the less enjoyable it becomes. School also clearly fits into a larger category of Culture. We spend a lot of time throughout our lives in school, so much that until we’re 22, we’ve spent no more than three months outside of school at one time. This is where we become cultured.
The second video in my tryptich portrays popular restaurants, especially with the students of SPA (including myself). The audio in this video is me saying ‘YAAASSSS’ whenever a new restaurant pops up. For those who don’t know, there’s a viral video spiraling around called ‘YAAASSSS GAGA’ right now. I decided to use this variation of the word ‘yes’ in order to connect some really popular restaurants to a really popular video. This took two parts of personal enjoyment (tasty restaurants + internet sensations) and combined them. I wanted to give the impression of combining personal enjoyment to enjoyment that others get even around the world. I figured this would be a way to combine the human experience and a cultural experience.
The final video is from a clip from the first Lord of the Rings movie. In this clip, Frodo and Gandalf are riding on a carriage into the Shire. The rolling hills of green grass are flowing in the wind as they pass fields and fields of beautiful greenery. This is what I titled my ‘wishful place.’ Having grown up watching Lord of the Rings, I’ve explored the movies and books in every way possible. Between memorizing half of the movies to buying merchandise from multiple different places, I’ve tried to envelope myself into the culture of the movies in many different ways. However, one way I’ll never be able to truly explore these movies is by actually living in the world that Frodo and Gandalf get to (although this may not be a privilege when we think of what they have both gone through). Therefore, I decided to deem this video ‘my wishful place.’ One thing that I really found interesting about this particular video was that the one place I would love to go is a place that lives truly only through technology. Although there are so many beautiful places on earth, with amazing sights to be seen and experiences to be had, this is a place that will never truly exist for humans. The same could be said for those Harry Potter fans who want nothing more than to go to Hogwarts, or the Twilight fans who want to live in a house with the Cullens. Often, the places we want to be most are the places we can only access through technology.

YAAASSS GaGa Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Pn0JKmy5-M










Thursday, February 20, 2014

Our Teacher's Death

2/18/2014
I told myself I would write my Ishmael blog post tonight right after finishing the book, since that’s when everything would be fresh in my mind. However, once I had three pages left, I threw the book down on the counter and made a very loud groaning noise, similar I’m sure to the one Quinn describes many times throughout his novel.  I didn’t pick up the book to finish it for at least another half an hour. As you may have guessed, here’s the line that caused me to refuse reading for another sentence:
“It was the pneumonia that got him – your friend the ape.”
            WHY DID ISHMAEL NEED TO DIE? He could have just moved on with the circus or gone to live in happy retirement with Mr. Sokolow. I don’t understand how the death of the big, wise, personified gorilla added any conclusion or knowledge to the novel.  After giving us Takers all the answers to the problems in our society, why did he have to die?
            I literally can’t even write this right now. I think I’ll go mourn his death.

2/19/2014
            We had a guest today from another class come to our period. At first, I really didn’t care either way that she was there, however, once we moved into discussion I became grateful for her presence. My main question after finishing Ishmael is why he had to die, and how this helped the book come together in the end. I believe our guest really helped clarify this for me and got the conversation flowing in our class, which seems to have been a problem throughout the semester so far. As a class, we came up with two main reasons why Quinn killed off Ishmael in the end. First of all, he never proposed a real solution as to what we’re all supposed to do with the information we’ve gained from this novel. After Ishmael died, he left the Takers to absolutely figure the rest of the problems and the solutions by themselves. It’s possible that with Ishmael’s death, the readers are supposed to see that there’s really no solution at all. Second, when we first start getting to know Ishmael, we learn that he has had four pupils before, all of who failed to learn completely about his subject of captivity. As long as Ishmael couldn’t find a pupil who he could transfer all of his knowledge to, he would be a captive of his own area of expertise. However, once Ishmael finally finishes teaching the narrator, he dies. It would seem as if now that Ishmael finished teaching someone, he could die in peace. This shows how we, as humans and as Takers, will never have our own peace until we complete our task as well.

            After I calmed down from finishing the novel yesterday, I realized that the death of Ishmael was really the only conclusion the book could have come to. If he had just left to live with Mr. Sokolow, he would always be out there, able to answer our questions and give us the easy way out. He already did enough for us throughout the book by bringing some wisdom to a thick-headed human. 





Thursday, January 23, 2014

Does Anyone Want To Meet My Dragons?!

I love my dragons. I play a game called Dragon Story, where I breed and raise dragons while completing quests at the same time. There are all sorts of different breeds, and you can expand your dragon island if you have enough money. Once you reach higher levels you start to reap more benefits, such as the Dragon Olympics Stadium and rarer breeds which bring in more coins and gold.


The first time I downloaded this app was two years ago, and I was quickly addicted. In fact I became so addicted that I forced myself to delete the app- although I loved being a professional dragon raiser, I realized an addiction to raising dragons is not an attractive quality.

However, I only ended up deleting the app for about a year before my brother reminded me of its existence. Low and behold, Dragon Story ended up on the front page of my iPhone again this past Fall. Months later I’m still ‘wasting’ (this seems more like a waste of time to other people than to me) hours of my day feeding my dragons and breeding them to create new and rarer types.

Through the ups and downs of my sophomore and senior years, Dragon Story has been a constant for me (not including the dark days after deleting the app from my phone). When going through social drama, I would repeat the mantra “at least I have my dragons” in my head. If I received a bad grade in a class I would convince myself that somehow I would grow up to be a professional dragon raiser. Although they’re only a mere gathering of pixels, I love hanging out with my dragons which only exist in a world where I alone can interact with them.

Online worlds and games are our release and escape from reality. Whether things are going well or poorly in life, we artificially share information online more than we talk with other humans face to face. The best times we have with our friends, when we receive good news, and funny family incidents always end up online in the form of pictures and statuses. It’s almost as if we need to prove to each other that we’re off doing something that doesn't revolve around being on social networking sites. Of course, the most popular way of proving this is to put it online for everyone to see.

Even the bad times end up online. Fights between buddies and family drama come out in the form of tweets more than anything. Why do we do this? Why do we share some of our most private and intimate moments for not only our friends but for the whole world to see? Often it seems we seek the pity and helping hands of those friends who want to pick us up when we’re down. We like to send out something that shows we’re sad in order to see who will respond with help, to see who really loves and cares about us. Does that make sense? To show that we really love each other through a computer screen? Probably not. However this is the world we live in, and if that’s your preference then that’s your own choice.

As college comes up, I’m making a January 22nd resolution to start spending more real time with my friends before we scatter ourselves all around the globe. If a result of this is less time with my dragons (who I do consider friends of mine) then so be it.