iMedia: The American President

http://youtu.be/mWRVbWMvi7c


This Clip from one of my favortie movies, The American President, it brings out the imporatnt traits of a president and what the American people should be focused on.
In the movie clip Pres. Andrew Shepard, played by Michael Douglas, is giving a speech to the American people and mostly to his competitor, Bob Romson, about needing serious people, character and the little things that are not relavant to his presidency like his girlfriend, or burning an american flag.
This reminded me of Obama, how people make such a big deal about a little detail, like his birth certificate, or his background. Obama has wonderful character and you need that to get elected as a president but the American people shouldn't worry about the little things in the president's life, as long as they are doing your job you should not worry. But as said in the movie , "the American people do have a funny way of decideing what is and what is not their business" -AJ.
The little things make you think if it will change the presient's ways or not. But Michael is saying they do not matter, he is the president and it is his life. According to him it is time for serious people, not the ones blaming other's for things so they look bad, we need serious people in serious times and something like a birth certificate is not as serious compared to an overthrow of a president in a thrid world country.

Inconvenient Truth: We are mortal

The hard fact to face is that we might not be living for another one, ten, twenty fifty years; we are mortal and we will die within the next ninety years. Everything we take for granted today we might not have forever. I live thinking nothing is to be cherished or valued because we will be back to those place or have those friends or possessions back, the truth is we might not. We need to value everyday for what it is, live in the moment and realize we are not here forever. For me, death is my number one fear, maybe for others too, but I try not to think about it and enjoy life while I can. I get joy from simple things like nature, sunsets flowers, trees, and try not to let a day pass by where I regret something. I think people do not value or treasure what they have because they do think that they are immortal and are going to live to see tomorrow but the sad truth is we might not. But the good thing about a timeline is you cannot procrastinate about life goals as much you only have about one hundred years to experience what you can, if that. Some other people also are satisfied and ready to go, they know they have lived a happy and satisfying life and are ready to go. In general you have to realize you cannot take what you have for granted because it might not always be there for you. Bottomline, we are mortal and one day we will die, hard pill for me to swallow but I try not to think about it, but I cope by treasuring everyday given to me.

Blogging Around 5.4.11

First I commented on Katie's blog about the connection between challenging the status quo and happiness. She said she learned to take a step back from her life activities and realize what makes her happy. Then she changed what she did in order to be happy. I Responded with:

This is definitely true with me too Katie. I get so absorbed in what I do and just go along with it and it is kinda blah, but then you take a step back and realize what could make that moment even more special for you or the people you are with, it makes a difference in you satisfaction. Like if we look back in 50 years at our lives we want to remember what we did and we want to know that we were happy back then. This is a great connection that made me think about my own life and to really realize what needs improvement for satisfaction. Good Job Katie.

Then I commented on Kathryn's about the Do You Mind questions we do in class. She has learned a lot from herself and other in the class because of these questions. And it opens up new ways to think about the questions given. I said:

I totally agree with you Kathryn. Do you mind questions are great because they make you realize so much about yourself because you can be totally honest and no one can judge you and you do not even need to tell anyone your thoughts. The sharing part is great too, you can find out and absorb the way others around you might see a question differently than you that you might have passed over. DYM questions are good to get to know others and yourself more deeply and teach you things like living in the moment and realizing what is going on around you in the world.

Best of the wek: Who programs who?

Another DYM?!?! question discussion made me change the way I think. The quesiton was that people program computer. How do computer progra people's brain and mind and make it new? I said that people ulimately are the soure of the programing of our brains. How is started with people programing the computer programs. I was ultimately trying to think of a program on the computer that shapes our brains, like internet or computer games or google, but then i thought of the computer did not make thos programs humans did. So those progras that shape our mind humans made so the computer doesn't really program our minds, it is the human that programs the computer to program our mind, which i found ironic. And maybe one day the humans will actually make a computer program that can really program us, but ultimatley it is the human. That was a major realiztion i got out of this question. We are creating robots, computers and programs to replace us. The realization of who programs who?

Mash Up: Solidarity

Solitude: The act of being by yourself, lonely and possibly reflecting, thinking, and finding oneself.

1. I could not explain the soul-sick feeling I got underground that night, when there hadn't been an R train for forty minutes and the platform was crowded as if it were rush hour. I couldn't explain how cut off i felt, sealed in a pneumatic tube of a commute that spit me out every morning on a gray sidewalk teeming with business suits, and spit me out again at night in a peaceful, isolated, hopelessly square far Brooklyn.

2. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened.

3. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.

4. http://vimeo.com/21294655

5. But when you notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for an kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy.... But perhaps these are the vary hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring.

6. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and soft chant, They is, they is, they is.

7.

8. But your own solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths. All my good wishes are ready to accompany you, and faith is with you.

9. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we being, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us.

10. I am glad, in a word, that you have overcome the danger of landing in one of those professions, and are solitary and courageous, somewhere in a rugged reality. May the coming year support and strengthen you in that.

11. And sometime I also had glimmers of another thing I’d once known: how effectively information can be used to wall off emotion. How the gathering of information can take the place of actual understanding. I had built, as I am only now realizing, quite a substantial wall. As if any wall could block out those two towers.

12. I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

13.Bon trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren’t real.

14. Strangers, waiting, up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night
Streetlight people, living just to find emotion
Hiding somewhere in the night

15. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

16. And to speak of solitude again it becomes clearer that the fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary.

Works Cited

1. Powell, Julie. Julie & Julia 365 Days, 524 Recipes 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. New York: Little, Brown and, 2005. Print. (52)

2. Rilke, Rainer M. Letters to a Young Poet. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Print. (23)

3. Rilke, Rainer M.(8)

4. Sorgjerd, Terje. "The Aurora on Vimeo." Vimeo, Video Sharing For You. 21 Mar. 2011. Web. 22 Apr. 2011. http://vimeo.com/21294655.

5. Rilke, Rainer M. (53)

6. Wolff, Tobias. Bullet in the Brain. Print. (4)

7. "Google Images." Pharmacy Escrow. Web. 22 Apr. 2011. .

8. Rilke, Rainer M. (44)

9. Rilke, Rainer M. (62)

10. Rilke, Rainer M. (109)

11. Barrett, Andrea. The Sea of Information. Kenyon Review. Print. (17)

12. Albert Einstein (No Source)

13. Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin, 2010. Print. (164)

14. Journey. "Don't Stop Believing" Escape. Colombia, 1981. Vinyl

15. Henry David Thoreau (No Source)

16. Rilke, Rainer M. (87)

Best of the Week: Change

One of the Do You Mind?!?! question was If we could change something about ourselves what would it be. Most People said they would change their height( I would too) or their eye color , mine was i would change where i was born so i experienced a whole different upbringing. The culture you grew up in would be different and i feel like depending on where you'd live you know/ wonder certain things. I always wonder about people born overseas learn about in school or about the U.S. I do not know if they would learn all fifty states and have a different way of learning about all the wars and such. Or if i was not born in the middle of nowhere, Illinois, what state would i be born in? I think about it all the time in class how people from other places view Illinois or the U.S. in general. I think what really made me think about it was I watched a video about the Jonas Brothers and they had a concert in Illinois and they said it was in the middle of nowhere but for us it is called home. So depeneding on whre you are born you know certain places or you do not and you grow up differently and that was a big thing I thought about this week that made me wonder a lot.

Blogging Around 4.21.11

First I commented on Klauida's Blog. She wrote about how much we have grown and learned in Humanities thus far this year. How it has changed her way of thinking and acting. I agreed with what she was saying because I feel the same way. "I thought your blog post was great and definitely true. I also learned tons from this class and I reconized it outide of school too. Except when I try to explain it to others they do not understand it quite. I may not like the class all day everyday but I can definitely take away alot from it, you too it seems. Now we get to go off to college with the knowledge of creativity, philosophy, sophisticated and concise wiritng, and a new mind set. I agree with you this class has changed me and how I think and act and I am allowed to think more deeply and write more deeply. I enjoyed your blog and it made me think a lot about what actually I have learned from Humanities.

Good job kaludia :) ".

Also Dajana's blog about cleaning and reorganizing her room , I really connected to. She talked about spending hours listening to music while cleaning and throwing away and donating her things. I said, " I feel the same exact way. I almost cannot work in my room until everything is in place and cleaned up. A cluttered mind is from a cluttered space but once you clean it up you have a clear mind to create, think, imagine etc. It is good to throw away things you do not need and give to charity what is still wearable".

Connection: Lit Circle Books

I read the book Cognitive Surplus and I connected it with the book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. I am responding to Angela's Blog.

Similar to what she wrote, both book are about the internet, but the authors go about them in two different ways. My author, Clay Shirky, likes the internet mostly and all the cool things you can do with it, the gathering of people creates opportunity and change. The Author of the The Shallows does similar, reviews the internet, they both found the internet gets us closer and more frequently interacting with other people. The Shallows simply goes through how different site change and alter your brain, for example living with the internet you have a new schedule and new faster ways of finding things out etc. Our author says its better to be on the internet interacting than by yourself. It is emotional satisfaction as well as being in touch with others, even by watching a movie.

So the difference between the books is one is about all the cool features of different site and what good things have come out of them like charities, friendships, and improved sites and networks, Cognitive Surplus. The shallows is more that people living in this recent time have grown up with internet in their heads, there is not need for dictionaries, encyclopedias or books so the reliance on the internet is major. No need to talk to people in person anymore either because we have Facebook an aim. I am glad I read my book instead of that though, Angela's book seems really dry, I thought ours would be too but the stories inside were really interesting it turns out.

Cognitive Surplus Response

A main topic in my reading was the use of the adjacent possible. Connecting it to the protests in Egypt and all over the world now, the adjacent possible was blogging over the internet, as in the book how Korean teens used a website to organize a protest about the import of American beef. I found it rather funny we are less lonely when watching TV, it is true, and I just did not realize it. The adjacent possible was created through the invention of the internet, phone, media and more.

“This Behavior was readily apparent, but the other researchers had missed it because it didn’t fit the normal way of thinking about either milkshakes or breakfast” (13).

Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York:

Penguin, 2010. Print.

This quote is a perfect example of challenging the status quo, Gerald Berstell saw what others could not. They were trying to see what could improve their shakes and instead of looking at the product, Gerald looked at the people and the time the shakes were consumed. This to the author was challenging the status quo, going against the norm, to get the answers. The authors says there were two main parts to the Milkshake Mistake, closed minded to the breakfast food options and totally thing it was the milkshakes fault for not selling. Gerald gets crowned with the honor of thinking outside of the box, challenging the status quo and figuring out, in a new way, how to sell more shakes.

Captured Thought: Walking in the Halls

A friend of mine on Facebook wrote a question as their status about "Do people in England walk on the left side of the hallways at school?" or for that matter the sidewalks in town too.

This is not really my original thought or idea but it got me thinking. I personally cannot answer that question because I have never been out of the U.S. So, I looked it up and I found that the norm is to walk on the left side but people walk equally on both. The people also said that it is just walking against the flow when you walk on the right side of the hall or sidewalk. So even though it was not my idea or a mind boggling one at that, it was a question I pondered upon. Of course to the people in the United State we think walking on the right side is the norm and the right way of doing things so to us its weird to walk on the left. But its a bit of thinking outside the box to think about people in another countries and their norms of walking.

Connection: Once and protest in Egypt

A few weeks ago we watched the movie Once. At first I thought it was terrible because the main characters do not end up getting together and I thought the story was left hanging in the end. But upon further discussion I found out they did that on purpose and that is why I did not like it at first, it was not as predictable as the other love stories. They challenged the Status Quo and they made the characters go their separate ways and that is what changed my mind about my the movie. It is a better movie knowing that now that they did that on purpose and the two characters just stay in love and live happily ever after.

This reminded me of a rather recent event that occurred in Egypt. The same situation occurred here too. If the people were going to take the predictable route, they would have been quiet and lived with their government the way it is and seemed to live happily ever after, because it would have been quiet. But no, due to the protest in Tanzania the Egyptian decided their government needed changed too and used the adjacent possible to protest all over Egypt. They challenged the Status Quo and took the unpredictable route and are rioting to get a better government. They are out on the streets lighting government building on fire and throwing things at military vehicles etc.

Even though Once is a much less violent these story than the Protest going on in Egypt, they are very similar. Both challenge the Status Quo and use their adjacent possible to either make a better film or get a better government. The insight on challenging the Status Quo gave me a better understanding and appreciation for the movie Once. Also gave me more insight on the protest in Egypt and Tanzania, which I saw on the news but did not care but now I realize it is rather important. Now I am more aware watching the news and appreciate the film Once more.

Metacognition: First Semester

Starting off in Humanities I thought it would be less reading and more about art. You warned us if we were in the class for that then we should leave because it is not all about art, and that is definitely true. I feel like I have learned more than can come to my head right now about analyzing essays, words and finding helpers such as organizing principles. We got taught the importance of creativity and learned how to go about interpreting it. We got taught vertical listening and dot connecting/creating. We pointed out key skills in other we could use for our own success such as in the movies; Falling Down Stairs and Born into Brothels. We got to learn deeper meanings that come from philosophy and also got to find the beauty in many different things from writing to art. We got to challenge our selves and keep creative journals by our Mindbook and kept tabs on our thoughts with our blogs.

I am really glad I took this class. It is not at all what I expected out of a creative English class, I actually learned a lot broader topics than just art and I am thankful for that. This class will help in the future when I have tons to read and won't think I'll finish or when I think I have no purpose here. This class gave me the skills to break down a big reading task or organize the impossible. This class so far has been an unexpected help with other life situations. It has opened my yes to other places around the world and I am very glad I took this class this year and am excited for what is to come.