When we had our discussion last week based off the section in Dominion where Libbie decorates her home, Veronica said that she puts a lot of effort into decorating her home to reflect her personality and interests and that when she has people over, it feels somewhat like a performance. I absolutely agree with this and I thought this was very insightful and interesting because not only is playing hostess a performance, but also the inanimate house itself is expected to perform- to have comfortable places to sit, some hot coffee or other beverage to supply, and to have interesting objects to promote conversation are a few examples. But our homes are typically not only functional but also decorated in a unique manner. It’s interesting that we use our home decor not only to project a certain atmosphere but also as an extension of ourselves. Continue reading “What are we Hiding in our Home Decor?”
The Strength of Hyper Empathy
When attempting to finish the reading for the class of April 17th, I kept bursting into tears. I always knew how to separate my emotions as a human from being a student in a classroom. But Butler’s first few chapters of Parable of the Sower quickly seeped into my heart. I was impressed with how relatable the text became to my current personal situation, especially the ‘hyperempathy syndrome’ mentioned a few times in the text. Hyper empathy is a person that will actually mirror the feelings and emotions of another person and feel things to the extreme. “Being the most vulnerable person I know is damned sure not something I want to boast about.” (Butler, 12) By thinking about the significant difference between attachment and investment, I am slowly starting to realize the intensity of hyperempathy.
“I can take a lot of pain without falling apart. I’ve had to learn how to do that. But it was hard, today, to keep peddling and keep up with the others when just about everyone I saw made me feel worse and worse.” (Butler, 11) I’ve always thought of myself as a positive, extroverted person but no so much the past few weeks. By constantly receiving bad news by the people I care about, my ‘hyperempathy syndrome’ came in full swing. I felt weak, a loss of appetite, unable to get out of bed with no motivation to go to class. Something that is stigmatized negatively in today’s current society are mental disorders, such as depression, which I have recently been showing signs of. “A dumb little game of ‘If we don’t talk about bad things, maybe they won’t happen.’ Idiot.” (Butler, 61)
Saturday April 1st, 2017
“Neha…I received by official diagnosis yesterday and I have Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” (iMessage, 6:37pm)
Wednesday April 12th, 2017
“Okay so neha I gotta tell I haven’t been feeling this dating thing all that much with us. I think we’re better off as just friends than more than that. Sorry if that’s not what you were hoping for outta this :/ (iMessage, 1:47pm)
Wednesday April 12th, 2017
“I [my friend] was raped last semester…”
Bad things are constantly happening; it’s the question of if you want to listen or not. “I had felt it die, and yet I had not died. I had felt its pain as through it were a human being. I had its life flare and go out, and I was still alive. Pow.” (Butler, 46) Similarly, I felt the pain and fear both my friends are going through but I physically, am healthy and unharmed since I have not experienced a deadly illness or a sexual assault.
“People have had faith through horrible disasters before.” (Butler, 15) The receiving of the bad news stated above completely destroyed me but I realize I need to find the faith somehow someway, which is something that is becoming a slow progression on my end. By constantly bursting into tears getting through the first 6 chapters of Butler’s Parable of the Sower, it made me realize how fantastic and powerful the novel is; how the text written had such a strong pathos appeal that it actually moved and affected me, which I don’t believe is a bad thing. In the song Need You Now, Lady Antebellum states, “I rather hurt than feel nothing at all.” Crying is always seen as sign of weakness but I am slowly realizing it is a sign of humanness. One is human before they drive to be any other title whether it be ‘coordinator,’ ‘student’ or ‘professor.’
By always constantly relying on my resume to prove to others who I am, I am still trying to figure out who and what I am without my involvements listed on a sheet of paper considering I will also be losing my job next semester. “Nothing is going to save us. If we don’t save ourselves, we’re dead.” (Butler, 59) By putting myself first at times is something I am constantly trying to work on, instead of being a ‘people-pleaser’ 24/7. By discussing the distinction between house and shelter in class, I believe I have found shelter within my friends and personal accomplishments, but not with just myself.
Relating back to The Big Short, romantic relationships can very much be seen as an investment. I personally am investing my time and attention into certain people that will eventually be seen as a ‘debt’ instead of an ‘asset.’ I am constantly investing in people that will not give me a ‘decent interest rate’ in the future. They are losing value over time, when investments should be gaining value. Similar to our discussions in class, my romantic interests are cyclic in the sense of continuously making poor choices.
“Live. Hold out. Survive.” (Butler, 76), is not how I expected the reading for the next class period to end. By emphasizing survival, it reiterates the notion of hope; how what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. By holding out, being able to cope with emotions and then eventually help others who go through similar experiences, makes the discussion a cyclic chain.
Generational Memory and Property (a story about my grandmother)
I’m never sure how appropriate it is to share personal stories in English classes, but over Easter weekend, something happened that I felt related too deeply to our class not to document in a blog post.
Important context to the story: my grandmother is an 88-year old widow with 8 children and 20 grandchildren (a true generational matriarch). Her role as the leader of the family, however, is complicated by the fact that she lost her husband of 65 (yes!! 65!!) years last summer, and currently suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, which is degenerative in nature. She has, as a result, grown more confused and distanced from reality since her husband’s passing, a trajectory that has been difficult for us to watch.
Over the past weekend, my grandmother told my mother that she was sad her family didn’t come to visit her anymore, and that she wanted to give her children money at her Mother’s Day party. In a state of confusion, she said that she wanted to give each of her 8 children two million dollars so that each of them could buy a house. My mother had to gently explain to my grandmother that she doesn’t have 16 million dollars, and that even if she did, giving her children money wouldn’t make them visit her.
Although this anecdote is personal and sad in nature, it revealed a lot to me about the way the dreams my grandmother had for her children are inextricably linked to home and property. The story reflects a profound nature on my grandmother’s part to occupy the role of a provider as a matriarch in that she wanted to give to her children the finances to create a home for their own immediate families. It also expressed volumes about the way not only memory, but desires, become distorted through degenerative memory loss, as my grandmother thought she had the money to provide homes for each of her children.
The story reminded me (quite helpfully, l think) of the Turner house as well as Melissa’s family tree. Like the Turner house, my grandparent’s family home in Queens (which was also the home my grandmother grew up in) was once bustling with more family members than I can count on two hands, but is now only inhabited by my grandmother and her caretaker. The house, as a result, feels haunting in the sense that each room (even each object, really) harkens back to a deep history of a family that is no longer present in the home.
Further, my mother’s gentle reminder that money won’t incentivize her siblings to visit their mother circles me back to King Lear, when Lear makes the fatal flaw of allocating his property to his daughters based on how convincingly they can express their love for him. Like Lear, my grandmother made a moving error in judgment by thinking that she could receive love and affection from her children if she offered them money (even though I hesitate to compare my grandmother to Lear any further). Here, the affective desire of a parent trying to provide for their offspring (or kingdom) becomes powerfully complicated by property and money.
I don’t have any clear solutions after hearing this story (other than it inspired me to immediately call my grandmother), but I do feel that the connection between my grandmother’s desire to provide homes for each of her children and the readings/discussions we’ve had in class prompt me to think more carefully about the link between generational memory and affection.
Clean water makes houses makes safe communities
If I might take this opportunity to double post, I thought I should leave a citation for something I brought up in class yesterday. It was in response to Beth’s question for the day, “what is necessary for a house?” and she specifically brought up clean water and freedom from lead paint (negative freedom for you there, Jes) as possibilities.
Continue reading “Clean water makes houses makes safe communities”
You “Need” To Read This
While I would like this blog post to be able to clarify some of my ramblings from yesterday’s class, I can tell you right now that it is not going to. However, instead of using this space to fall into linguistic/philosophical problems which I do not have the tools to eloquently handle, I’m going to focus on one small—and violent—word; “need.” Continue reading “You “Need” To Read This”
Risky Business
I’ve been chewing on this post for some time, but it comes as an especially salient answer to Alpha’s question in class today, “what does any of this have to do with the Housing Crisis?”
I’ll begin by circling back to Lear. When we read that play, one scene that really stuck out to me was the moment it became clear that Goneril was angling to end up married to Edmund. This desire seemed so illogical; she was already comfortably married to the Duke of Albany, and pursuing Edmund put her in direct competition with her sister Regan, who up to this point had been her close ally. More than illogical—this undertaking seemed downright… reckless.
Dominion and The Aeneid
Spoilers if you haven’t finished Dominion yet! Continue reading “Dominion and The Aeneid”
Response to the article in Pam’s “Housing Loss: The Grief and Other Losses”
Original post here.
The article shared by Pam really got me thinking about the blame and lack of control felt when one is involuntarily pushed into homelessness. In Pagliarini’s attempt to explain how “learned helplessness” is an eventual learned symptom of being poor in America, he undermines the real issues at hand and continues the endless cycle of blaming the poor for being poor. In effect, he’s labeling the victims of systematic violence as the actual origin of this violence because they haven’t taken a hold of their own “control” yet.
The thing is, people who have fallen victim to foreclosure and homelessness really don’t have a lot of room to exercise their own control and agency. The mindset that these people have merely “given up” as a result of endless financial strains is problematic.
Despite Pagliarini’s attempt to set his article outside of the “Get Rich Quick” mentality, it ends up being exactly that. His article is riddled with a white privilege perspective with some classist ideals sprinkled in here and there. If we were to shove this article into Lelah Turner’s hands and say “Alright, here’s the answer to your problems. Get going!” she would laugh our face. It almost reminds me of the pee scene in The Turner House when Cha-Cha realizes the kind of life he is “destined” to live. From Cha-Cha’s perspective, as a black boy growing up in Detroit it’s as if his agency had been inherently taken away from him from day one. Ideas like “Get Perspective!” and “Achieve Success” are unrealistic and problematic to advise to people like Cha-Cha or Lelah (Cha-Cha being a black man and Lelah being homeless, both under their own kind of systematic pressure) because they haven’t had the same set of opportunities laid out for them.
Two paths to dehumanizing human beings
I was just reading this interview with Matthew Desmond, whose book Evicted just won a Pulitzer. I haven’t read the book yet and am hoping it’s not in the tradition of Alice Goffman’s On the Run.
But given Dominion‘s deep and complicated human characters, this line really jumped out at me:
“There are two ways to dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue, the second is to clear them of all sin.”
Mythology and Religion
The other day during our class discussion, we were discussing mythology and religion. This reminded me of my Bible as Literature with Dr. Drake in the Spring 2016 semester. Continue reading “Mythology and Religion”