(Im)Possibilities

Overall, I feel that the progression our class has made while working on the collective assignment over the past few weeks has been amazing. I remember having my doubts about how this assignment would go when we first talked about it like Sonita pointed out today. Admittedly I had my doubts, I thought this assignment would result in only a few people typing up the assignment while we all tried to get in a contribution. However, I was surely wrong as this assignment turned out to produce what I think is a truly remarkable paper. Continue reading “Growth Through Finality: Seeing the Strides We’ve Made on The Collective Assignment”

Suzanne was frustrated by the bureaucratic government that decided an arbitrary limit on how many sessions sexual assault victims could go to simply because of budget constraints not a consideration of whether they made enough progress. The victim felt guilty at first, defending her adult, married assalent like a “defense attorney.” She described herself as innocent, rarely drinking or smoking with honor roll, but that this night, she was as guilty as he was because she was so passive. She wrote the truth in her journal, buried deep inside her backpack. Suzanne immediately gave off a concerned, sympathetic vibe because she said she wasn’t ready to talk but that she couldn’t help it when Suzanne looked at her in her eyes simply saying “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” Suzanne helped with police statements, court cases and the other semantics. Suzanne made it clear that the limited charges of fourth degree sexual offense instead of rape was in no way indicative of the truth of the matter. Suzanne gave her a sense of being heard and believed, unlike the law. The therapist also did a good job of prodding enough that other things came out; her parents were divorced and she had a boy in her life who wouldn’t commit to dating but kept her around with well placed affection. Suzanne clearly explained to the young girl that love is an action and that she didn’t have to commit to this pseudo-boyfriend. Between the rape and this boyfriend, Suzanne helped her realize her self worth and that she has agency over her sexuality. “She cleared the path for the woman I am going to be.” She was a victim’s advocate and life coach and she wanted to hug Suzanne but was afraid she would reject the gesture. At the end of the sessions, she went in and asked Suzanne to hug which she did, and the emotions were overpowering as Suzanne was able to say “You’re a good person, Allison. You are better than what happened to you.” Allison stopped smoking (the cigarettes were a symbol of the event because he gave them to her) and she also stopped seeing the pseudo boyfriend. She was given all the important advice, she took it, and the emotional hug at the end. While she would never completely recover, in the sense that her childhood is shrouded with that memory, she maintained the ability to keep herself in a better place by doing the right things, despite it being hard at times. Suzanne taught Allison to reach out and express needed emotions.

The beginning talks about how a therapist is like a dwindling safety net as the termination process ultimately leads to being released back into the wild. The therapist enjoys seeing future wedding cards, gifts, obituaries and whatever else indicates how the client progressed after being terminated from therapy. She also likes seeing old clients in public as she always remembers them, without fail. Authentic connections however brief, last forever. The therapist compares the termination to a break up as sometimes it is sudden, by text or simply by disappearance and the client never responding again. These are the worst for therapists as the lack of closure is difficult to tolerate. Also the “lifers” are the ones with such a traumatic history that they should be entitled to a lifetime worth of therapy. Psychotherapy was compared to ongoing “spiritual hygiene” Clients become therapists so that they never leave therapy- this is interesting and surprising as one might think that someone who went to therapy would not be able to reverse roles and help others when they themselves are hurt or damaged. The crow metaphor was interesting as well, however, it was not very informative of real life therapy as it is more the idea of being rehabilitated and visiting the center that helped you after you are strong enough on your own to leave. This therapist lets his clients go if they want to leave, that is, they will not stop someone who resists by leaving just as it gets hard and beneficial. Other therapists might but that is wrong because clients should feel autonomous and in control of their respective destinies. Watching clients fly away is bittersweet as it is good that they can leave but you can never truly predict how well they will do in the wild.

In this class, we see that there are multiple crosswalks among disciplines and the pieces of literature we read, such as ideas relating to consent, medical malpractice, and racism. Not surprisingly, I also see a connection between Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One among the literature read in class, as well as texts read outside of it.

Continue reading “Abel Opens the Gates”

I had never heard of the hookworm epidemic or the Black Belt region, so the articles about Alabama peaked my interest.  After reading one of the articles I learned that the region is coined Alabama’s Black Belt because of the rich, fertile soil that it provides (Sheets 2017). Continue reading “The Issue in Alabama’s Black Belt”

Everyone relies on other people in their life, although some individuals might be reluctant to admit this reliance.  This reliance causes issues when the people you rely on fail to do what was expected of them. This is demonstrated in both the article “UN poverty official touring Alabama’s Black Belt: ‘I haven’t seen this’ in the First World” and through the texts we read during the semester. Continue reading “Reliance on Others”

This semester has been an extremely interesting and insightful one. I am currently enrolled in two courses with similar topics; this one and a sociology course titled “Gender and Science”. I signed up for both thinking that the topic names may have been a typo as there wasn’t a very long description for either of the courses. But, I signed up anyway because the title for this course, if it was correct, seemed intriguing and I had heard that Dr. McCoy as well as Dr. Eisenberg (who teaches the sociology course) were good professors. Continue reading “Gender/Race in Science and Medicine”

The Apocalypse is a subject that everyone has thought about or discussed with friends when trying to come up with something to do. The most common question asked is what would you do if the zombies came after us, which results in a bunch of speculation that was unlikely to happen. There are many quizzes across the internet that will help you figure out whether you would survive post-apocalypse, or anything that is wrought forth with it.  Along with the topic comes the inevitable talk of how its going to happen; will the world end by storm, fire, an outbreak of a disease that separates us into different groups?

Everyone likes to think that they would survive the apocalypse based on the movies or novels they have read. Either secluding themselves in a bunker hidden away from civilization that will keep them safe and occupied for years to come. Or going head first into battle with each other, or against the adversary that was made from the disease or outbreak that has caused the disarray. Most of the time when people think about the Apocalypse, they don’t always think of a weather disaster, there is one thing that comes to the forefront when thinking about the world ending and wanting to survive. And yes, I am talking about everyone’s favorite subject to discuss or avoid: Zombies.

Zombies have had a pivotal role in post-apocalyptic lore across the television. Everybody tries to make their own version of zombies so that their idea can seem original, but they are all seen as the same; slow moving, can be killed by decapitation or fire. From shows or movies such as Game of Thrones, to the Walking Dead, to World War Z, and I Am Legend. Even though none of the motion pictures state there are zombies in it, everyone who has watched them agrees. Even in Zone One there are two new subgroups of Zombies to add to the board of variety.

What classes a zombie as a zombie is the reanimation of a dead human or animal corpse. Everyone has a general sense of how to kill zombies and defeat them. Every show or book that wants to incorporate zombies comes up with their own way to defeat them, but they all tend to fall into the same category. For Game of Thrones, the White Walkers go around behind the wall, turning the dead into wights, extremely fast and strong people who can only be killed by fire or a special material; in the movie I Am Legend, we have a ‘cure’ for cancer that has gone wrong and is turning those infected into these strong creatures (darkseekers) that can’t handle daylight and actually die when exposed to UV light; in World War Z, the zombies can be destroyed by head shots, or the complete destruction of the head; in the Walking Dead, the zombies, or a variety of zombies, with different names for the type they are, and can only be killed by destroying the brain. And recently in Zone One, we have two groups of zombies; one that moves fast and is active in trying to kill you, or one that sits there and doesn’t do very much, and the only way to kill them would be to shoot them in the head, or death by decapitation.

Poverty is the state of being poor or the state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount

Throughout the semester, all of the novels and articles that we’ve discussed relate to poverty. The article and novel that I felt correlated with poverty the most were “Hookworm, a disease of extreme poverty, is thriving in the US south. Why?” written by Ed Pilkington and Zulus by Percival Everett. Zulus and the Hookworm article both dealt with negative biological affects on people and poverty.

Zulus dealt with the life of a women, Alice Achitophel, who becomes impregnated by a rapist and has to deal with the environmental tragedies of a nuclear disaster. Alice is the last women on earth who is pregnant which is an issue for the apocalyptic time period during the novel. The only food available is cheese because everything else is contaminated. Of course, pregnant women happen to eat more than the average person because they’re eating for two persons. Her being pregnant causes issues with the distribution of food because it’s already an issue that there is barely enough food for everyone. When there’s a person who is obese and pregnant, that causes an imbalance in the fact that 1 person is getting an advantage.

Hookworm is a disease that “enters the body through the skin, usually through the soles of bare feet, and travels around the body until it attaches itself to the small intestine where it proceeds to suck the blood of its host.” This parasite conquers the amount of food that you admit in to your system which then “causes iron deficiency and anemia, weight loss, tiredness and impaired mental function.” If you’re already dealing with poverty and struggling to get food for survival that has nutritional values, a disease like this takes more of toll on you.

In comparison to Zulus where poverty is already affected by a greater cause , the impoverished areas in the United States where hookworm is popularly contaminated with, is dealing with poverty due to similar reasoning. According to the article “Causes of poverty in America”, those reasons are poor economy, lack of affordable housing, drug use, lack of education and medical expenses. The issues with both situations are that the people are lacking resources.

Here in the United States, one of the states that have been affected the most by hookworm is Alabama.The people affected by hookworm in Alabama lack resources in that poverty is a large factor. If you are poor, you can’t afford a $15,000 septic tank to filter the water coming in from the terrain under your home.  According to “Hook worm infections and Sanitation Failures Plague Rural Alabama” only “half  the households with septic have a failing system, or worse, no means of waste disposal at all besides a pipe directed at the backyard.”

This is sad because people are trying to maintain their resources and fix the issue but they all cannot afford to do so. Similarly in Zulus, Alice’s secret of being pregnant was held by people who were trying to deal with the same issues, which is to go back to their normal lives and survive normally.

“Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.”

–Eli Khamarov

–So is an unwanted disease.–

Just like many other undergraduates, my academic career did not go without some unexpected twists and turns. Despite the stereotypes surrounding Asian American parenting (which I must say, are often true), my parents never steered me towards any specific subject during my early and later childhoods. By leaving me with the impression that they completely trusted whatever decision I made, I have always set high expectations for myself in response to that trust. In doing so, I placed myself in my own self-constructed cycle of constant apprehension and satisfaction without any proper guidance, like a rickety hamster wheel.

Unfortunately, the huge imbalance between the secondary education and the college education systems in North America almost threw me off. Even with a specialized high school education from the city, I was not prepared to enter college as a pre-med Biology major. And yet, here I am in my junior year as a pre-med English Literature major with a Biology minor and the beginnings of feeling like I am on the right track. However, do not be mistaken that I regret entering SUNY Geneseo as a Biology major. In fact, I definitely would not have gotten here without the two subjects clashing together. Continue reading “My Happy Place”

A few weeks ago I attended a panel called Trans? Fine By Me!, which talked about the everyday struggles the transgender community at Geneseo faces, and it was held in light of the offensive comments that were made by a professor earlier in the semester. Hearing a number of Geneseo students and faculty members speak about their experience on campus was eye opening, and involved a lot of critical thinking internally, one of the learning outcomes which we have been talking about in this course.

I thought I would share a few things from the panel with you all, and talk about how it made me feel. One example that stuck out to me from the panel was a Geneseo faculty member talking about the same sex bathrooms on campus. m. It turns out that Geneseo just turned mens restrooms into gender neutral bathrooms. That being said, they basically just changed the sign outside the bathroom and left the inside the same. I never really gave this much thought, but the student talked about how it makes the members of the transgender community feel as if it is still just a men’s bathroom and makes them feel like outcast. Another example was a student was talking about telling his professor that he had a sex change, and what it led to. After telling him, the professor was calling him a her every once and awhile, and would then correct their self by saying the proper pronouns. The student then elaborated and said how he would have prefered it if the professor would just call him by his name, instead of he or her. This would keep him  from being embarrassed when the professor corrected himself by saying “her, I mean him”. This student also mentioned how when something like this happens, he would go home and feel so upset by it that he could not even focus on doing hours of homework and studying, clearly showing that these every struggles have a major affect on their lives.

Upon hearing these two examples among several others at the panel, I began thinking. I thought about how I never really thought that transgender men and women faced such difficulties, and that I truthfully never paid much attention to that subject. This is an example of thinking critically by evaluating the assumptions underlying the claims of self and others. Up until this panel, I had an assumption made in my mind by myself on the struggles of the transgender community at my own college that was clearly a false and understated one. However, after hearing and visualizing how difficult these problems really are, I was able to come to a reasonable conclusions on the basis of evidence provided during the panel that I need to be more aware of the struggles my own schoolmates face and raise awareness among others to try and help make these problems decrease in occurrence.