Film Critique = DONE!

Film critique is done. The last paper, woohoo. I'm rather satisfied with it, I suppose. My brain is basically mush so it's hard to take a specific stance on anything. What I liked was that once I made an outline, the writing just kind of came. The outline worked much better here than in other papers. I don't have much to say about the paper, but I can talk about the movie.
Oops, that was a premature statement. Turns out I don't really want to talk about the movie anymore. So all I'll say is: Junebug = excellent movie. See it.

My brain is fried.

My brain is fried. Or is it toast? Maybe fried beans and toast. Just like the British eat. I'm rather fond of toast, but I've never been a big fan of beans.
Beans bring forth traumatizing childhood memories. Especially green beans. My daycare lady used to practically force feed them to us. They made me gag. She was evil.

Writing Prompt - What did you want to be when you grew up?

As a kid, I often had different answers for the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" When I was five, I sat down to watch the summer Olympics and was inspired to become a "somersault teacher." In kindergarten Space Jam became my obsession; it was only natural to aspire to become a member of the Tune Squad. Later, in 2nd grade, I was enthralled by the trials, hardships, courage and grotesquely chapped lips of Iron Will. I was soon dead set on winning the Iditarod. In 3rd grade Mrs. Johnson said I wrote well; I should be an author. 4th grade - a professional rock collector. And then in 5th grade we got cable, and thanks to various TLC and Discovery channel shows, I dreamed of Civil War reenactments, prairie dog wrangling, Wienermobile driving, comic book making, resort owning, park rangering, T-shirt designing, mail delivering and llama farming. And how many years later, I still don't know.

Ethnography = DONE!

The ethnography is now finished. It was one doosey of a paper, as if I have to tell you guys. I think it went very well, but I still have some issues with it; just like with any paper, it's never quite perfect. The biggest problem I have is that there were so many funny and interesting little things that happened in our subculture that we just didn't have either the motivation, time, or place for it in the paper. We should have class time just to share out loud all the interesting things we saw in our groups. That would be quite fun.

Film Critique Anticipation

I think it would be an overstatement to say that I'm anticipating the film critique. It would probably be more accurate to say that I'm not dreading it. Movie critique is kind of my "thing." My friends hate watching movies with me because I'm always making comments about shots out of focus and score placement and lighting. But that still doesn't mean I want to write a paper about it. Who ever wants to write a paper about anything?

Writing Prompt - What is deceit?

Deceit is when, on Christmas day, your mom puts the only thing you've asked for all year, the only thing you want - a Nintendo 64 - inside the original box of the last gift you could ever possibly want, the thing you've asked them specifically not to get - a Barbie party bus. The deceit brings a frown to your face, then a pout, completely forgetting all of your manners and all that its-the-thought-that-counts garbage.

You wanted to be kicking butt on Mario Kart, but instead your staring at a picture of a handful of plastic people lounging in their plastic hot tub, sipping from plastic drinks while imaginary power pop rhythms stream out of the plastic stereo system. Worst of all - it's covered in pink. Somehow you find it in yourself to open the box, your parents laughing hysterically at the painfull cringe on your face. But all is well once again when you find those two wonderfully stereotypical Italian plumbers smiling back at you.

Deceit is a horrible thing.

Interviews

Oh, the wonders of technology. I am really quite pleased with myself at the moment. On Monday, Phillip and I had out last observation of the Boy Scouts, and so we did our interviews. We had no plan to record them, we were just going to rely on frantic note taking. But on the way out the door I had a last minute notion and decided to grab the headphones that came with my iPod touch because they have a microphone in them.

As if I needed one more thing to add to the list of why that thing is awesome. So not only can I record interviews for my English paper, I can check my email, use it as an alarm clock (I use the Duck quacking noise, it really gets you up in the morning); I have an app with the top 100 primary documents in American history (history nerd!); it has a dictionary and a thesaurus, and it plays music. Seriously, it's probably the best purchase I've ever made, aside from my camera. And my wool socks, those were an excellent purchase.

But my point is that it was a slick as pressing record, pressing stop, plugging in the iPod, playing the little QuickTime file, and typing it up word for word. I feel much more confident in the outcome of the paper with some good, solid quotes.

Observation/Field Notes

Progress report: Recently finished observation. Going very well. Will need to do interviews next time. Need to read TCE and possible other examples to help with that. Took less notes this time. Not sure why, observed less or less to observe? Unhappy to have to miss favorite show (Chuck) to do ethnography.

Too exhausted to use pronouns.

Night-night. Or good morning. Whatever.

First Contact Story

More short than sweet:

When I pictured attending a Boy Scout meeting, I imagined it taking place in some kid's house, everybody gathered in the living room, seated on overstuffed furniture with a tray of sugar cookies and lemonade on the coffee table. When I learned it would be taking place at a church, I shifted this image to some kind of big open room, filled with tens of kids all seated in rows of folding chairs. It turned out to be neither of these. There were less than 15 boys and they sat at three tables in a horseshoe shape in a medium sized room/hallway.

All of my previous knowledge came from stories my dad told of den meetings in the bar basement led by a man whose roles included den leader and village idiot. In other words, I really didn't know what to expect.

My brother is 13 (about the same age as many of the boys there) and there is a perpetual posse of similarly aged kids running through my house. So when I overheard the chatter of video games, breakfast foods, motor vehicles, and sports, my initial thought was something along the lines of "oh my god, it's like I haven't left my house." However, once the actualy meeting begins, there is one large difference between my brother and his freinds, and these boys - they have a good amount of self-discipline and take the Scouts seriously.

TCE Chpt. 4 - Discovering Folk Terms

This chapter answered a lot of questions and raised a lot. There are so many things to think about when interviewing. Is this what it's like to be an ace reporter? In that case, call me Lois Lane (hey, Superman is on the cover of the notebook I'm using).

Personal Narrative vs. Research

At this point I feel like I'm just beating a dead horse, further discussing these papers. But heregoes.

Personal Narrative: Love the freedom of the writing style, hate the topic I chose.

Research: Feel restricted by the writing style, love the topic I chose.

Personal Narrative: Couldn't find a point to make because there really wasn't one.

Research: Couldn't find a point to make because there were too many.

PN: No bibliography necessary, to the point of bending/stretching the truth.

Research: Citations! icky!

So which one did I prefer? Honestly couldn't tell you.

Young @ Heart

My magic crystal ball (which is always accurate) is telling me that my future holds an entire week of Fix You playing over and over in my head. Fix You happens to be my second favorite Coldplay tune, but one that has long since fell out of my playlist rotation. It took a kindly old man's rendition to bring it back up. (A kindly old man whose voice was a deadringer for Johnny Cash. Holy Smokes, Johnny Cash singing Coldplay? Awesome). So in light of its return to the top of my Recently Played list, I'm forgoing any discussion of thoughts I may have on this movie concerning all those fancy things like age, friendship, and life, and elaborating on a character we didn't discuss really in class - the music.

Aside from the obvious attention grabbers, one I got a kick out of was the group singing Sonic Youth... Sonic Youth. What completely blew my mind was that these people, while making it very obvious that it was not their cup of tea, still accepted the fact that this was art, this was music, people actually enjoyed this; they didn't just dismiss it simply on the fact that it was created generations after theirs. It's an attitude I'm sure most teenagers severely wish their parents would adopt.

It's perfectly justifiable to classify the music as a character itself. The music is what they depended on, even more than the director Bob Cilman, even more than they depended on Stan to drive them there. It was the sole reason this group exists. One of the biggest and most important things they all had in common - their love for music.

I often think about this one ridiculously interesting PBS special I saw once on the science of music. This a completely unscientific and inaccurate explanation, but essentially, all of our sub-atomic particles (or whatever they actually are) have a rhythm, responding to sound waves and whatnot, so we literally have music inside of us.

Research Paper = Done!

Well I'm done now and am quite relieved. Although I enjoyed my topic, that paper was a pain in the neck. I blame the source of my frustration on my note taking methods, which weren't so great this time around. Typically for a research paper, I will just sit down with a source and a blank sheet of paper and just take listed notes. Then, when I'm done with each source, I'll go through and assign each note to whatever point in my outline if pertains. It's really messy and chaotic, but has worked just fine in the past. However, I think the level of work required has surpassed the level of my note taking, so I'm going to need to modify my methods. Not so much looking forwar to all those notecards.

Source Citing Grammar Gripings

Source Citing Grammar Gripings - hooray for alliteration. Why must this be so difficult? Of all the things I could classify as dumb in this world, one would have to be how all these Acronyms (MLA, ALA, WhateverLA) change the rules every year just to exploit all the poor college kids by making them buy new writing books. Who do they think they are? Jeesh.

Research Drafting

I'm currently mulling over my paper. I'm finding that writing this type of research paper (persuasive and contemporary) is not only very different from the personal narrative, it's surprisingly different from writing a history paper. It's actually probably not that different, it's just that I'm stuck in the IB History mode and I'm trying to get back into the English mode. The difference is that in history you're just listing your facts and occasionally analyzing things, with this paper, you have to prove a point, you have to have a take a stand and have a very specific thesis.

With that, I'm debating with what form the paper should actually take. I keep thinking in terms of writing some kind of editorial, where your opinion holds almost as much focus as the facts. And then there's the opposite end of the spectrum which is the rigid, monotonous, academic research report with very little opinion to help you meander through the information.

My writing group told me that my first draft made me sound like a lobbyist marching on the steps of the capitol, so I'm on a quest to find a median.

Research

I've been pouring over my research this weekend in order to crank out a reasonable draft for Monday. I'm having problems in that I have a topic, I know what I want to write about, but I'm feeling that it's much too broad. I'm good at summarizing things so I'm sure I could get a paper out of it, I'm just don't know if too much good content would be sacrificed in the process. So this is my attempt to decipher the chaos in my brain.

My outline looks like this, but the problem is that each of these topics could be an entire paper in itself, so I'm just working out a stricter focus.

Industrial Agriculture

+ Impact on the environment: for this we have many subgroups. There's herbicides and pesticides, loss of biodiversity, erotion/loss of topsoil, and polluted water systems

+ Human health concerns: meat that is raised on high amounts of hormones and antibiotics is not that great for you, same goes for crops, and water with all those agrochemicals

+ Social concerns - Impact of rural communities: this is the part that I find most interesting, but also the part with the least amount of objective/scholarly information.

+Economic concerns: don't have much information on this, but my sources elude to its importance

+ Reasons for existance: oh, the farm subsidy debate - makes my head hurt

+ The benefits of industrial agriculture: cheap food for a hungry world, an extremely important factor

Well, this looks like a job for my writing group. We'll see tomorrow.

Personal Narrative = Done!

Yay! It's done. I can't say I hated it or that I loved it; there were pros and cons. Of course, I liked the opportunity to write somewhat informally, it gives me the chance to work my snarky muscles (which I often think I have, but often realize I don't). But the major downside of this paper was that I really don't find anything that has ever happened in my life too incredibly interesting. Well, nothing interesting and profound. I racked my brain for any event with a "lesson." All I could think of was, don't eat suspicous looking bacon, don't eat cafeteria chicken 'n gravy, don't eat entire boxes of milk duds, don't eat worms, don't eat Aunt Susan's casserole, and most importantly, always look down while walking in a cow pasture. But ultimately, I'm satisfied with my paper, and ready to be done with it. Now just the gruelling wait for the grade.

Editing Workshop

Today was the editing workshop, and while I think writing groups are very helpful, I was relieved to have some one-on-one time with my paper, just me and it. Okay, so it wasn't just me and the paper, my green felt tip joined the fun too. Since I don't have much to say about anything else, I thought I'd elaborate on what a ridiculous sense of accomplishment I get from drawing circles and lines all over my essay. There's just so much you can do! There's spelling to be checked, commas to be analyzed, word choice to criticize, sentences to swap, structure to change, paragraphs to be eliminated, and smiley faces to be awarded. It's to the point where half of the doodles don't even mean anything, I just like making them. There are very few things that make me feel as important as a piece of my writing that appears to have been edited to death.

First Writing Groups

I think what will turn out to be very beneficial with my writing group is that I have had many English classes with all of them and worked with them before. There's an increased familiarity there. It's also a means of getting me to actually have multiple drafts of my paper, which doesn't often happen. However, there is a downside to this: sometimes I like to write my papers in chunks, rather than full drafts, but we'll see.

I'm looking forward to the opportunity to have three whole people that I know I can go to about any issues I may be having with the writing; they will know the paper, know the topic, and be able to give much better feedback than a random friend I have skim over it during passing time. Also, a somewhat non writing process related bonus is that we all get to read other people's papers! I always really like reading others' writing, especially for things like the personal narrative, and classes don't often get to do that.

U of M Field Trip

I thought the lecture today went very well, as I'm sure most of you would agree. Most importantly, I feel much more confident with the ethnographies. I'm sure it helped that the speaker was a contributing author of the actual text we are using. Now it's just a matter of deciphering my notes.

Some point I found important: remember description vs. reflection, cultural artifacts, recognizing the impact of your presence. But one thing I'm trying to keep in mind is to be careful with interview questions. Ask observant, open-ended, descriptive questions, because as they teach you in Stats and Prob (and Law & Order), it is possible to manipulate the answer by phrasing the question a certain way. I want to avoid getting a quote that supports what I want to see in the culture versus what is really there.

Personal Narrative

While making some possible timelines and just generally mulling over my story, I happened upon this quick video of Ira Glass elaborating on the building blocks of a good story. It's not much but it helped to get my thoughts flowing again.
He gives two essential elements of a story - anectdote and reflection.
An anectdote is a story in its simplest form, one event leads to the next event and to the next. Even if you have the most boring sequence of events it should create some sort of suspense because it should be set up in such a way that the reader expects something to happen.
And reflection is what we've been focusing on. All these events, this anectdote, needs to mean something in order to give purpose to the story.

Chpt. 1 - part II

This is from the same chapter but I'm having completely separate thoughts. Ethnography is a word my brain is having trouble saying, but we're working on it. But to get to a point, the book presents two ideas that I guess I was always aware of but have never put them into specific terms - naive realism and ethnocentrism. Both are things tht we should attempt to avoid in our ethnographies, if not in daily life. When I read these sections I immediately thought of one day a few years ago when I saw an interview with a rabid young Harry Potter fan. She was supposed to be offering questions for the interviewer to ask the cast of the movies later. I remember that as she stood in front if the camera, clutching her Potter pillowcase, she had absolutely no problem asking with her giddy American dialect, if Dan Radcliffe had an accent, or if he "talked real like us." I'm marking that down as the attitude from which we should probably refrain.

Chpt. 1 - Culture and Ethnography

Culture is a word we hear almost every day, especially in a school as diverse as ours it ha become somewhat of a buzzword. It's a thing that seems to have different connotations, a bad thing - as in modern American culture is rotting my naive teenage brain, and a good thing - as in what makes us all different and unique, multiculturalism. So I felt that I had a good grasp on its definition. Bit this book defines culture as knowledge, knowledge that is learned and shared. I find this incredibly interesting. Culture is what a group of people know, what they hold common in their minds. It is nothing simply as tangible ad clothing or food, these are things generated by culture, not vice-versa as I had always thought.

Personal Narrative - Crappy draft

I have to say that writing this way is somewhat liberating, mainly because I know that no one will be reading it. My story is about a houseboat trip my extended family took one summer when I was about five, and it is one of those stories that is always in my little anecdotal arsenal. But the last time I actually wrote about it I was in 2nd grade, so I sort of was channeling my inner 8 year old, which was quite fun. There have been a few golden nuggets that have found their way onto the page.

Introduction - FSTI

Asian pottery was not entirely what I was expecting when I opened this book but I'm enjoying the use of such anectdotes in each of these sections, they're driving the points. The point, of course, was that good writing stems from a good process; you can't just study the work of your favorite author and then expect to be able to write as such, you have to study how that author got there. This resonated with me because so many times I've read some great and genius work of literature and then have been expected to write something of my own, but get so overwhelmed and intimidated I sort of just give up.
But in reading this intro I got to examine what my current writing process is and what I should and plan to improve on. Identifying the audience, as we discussed in class, is something I think I've always done somewhat subconsciously. It's also something I, as I'm sure many of you, have had to get good at with scholarship essays. Discovering form, or organizing my writing, is a part that I've always somewhat enjoyed. I like finding certain thoughts that flow together and seeing what happens if I stick this paragraph here, that paragraph there and playing with sentence structure.
So ultimately I've identifyed my main trouble spots as finding a way to start and having the motivation and foresight to revise and edit multiple times. The book states "the difference does not seem to lie in natural ability as much as in the initial attitude a writer brings to the blank page." I found this very true. I so often set out to write something and simply can't because that blank page is so daunting, I have no idea where to start and I can't get that mean little voice in my head to shut up. Of course, once I get it all out on paper it's either to late to revise, or I don't really think it's that important.
…oh yes, and goal three - better conclusions... The end?