My Toes are Cold.

            I have always felt like I belonged to a different generation, that I grew up with my parents. I have tried to convince my roommate that I am truly an old person and these new things are too much for my aching mind and body to handle. That the technology is too confusing and too stressful. That I would much rather listen to my Bruce Springsteen and Simon and Garfunkel then listen to her Lady Gaga and KiD CuDi. I’ve tried to convince my friends that swell and peachy keen are more of my vocabulary than LOL or JK or their shortened speech. That I much prefer talking to someone in person than texting them. Or I that like receiving or writing a lengthy letter instead of deciphering an email. I have spent a lot of time thinking about my generation and how sometimes I feel as if I am lost and don’t belong, and how I am stuck in the past, and how I fear the future.

            The readings done in this class have encouraged this fear within me. All of these guesses of what the future holds. The reign of technology, and big brother, and war, and death for fun, killing for sport. The discussions we have had about entertainment getting more and more violent, the brutality, and barbarianism of it all, scares me. The loss of language and education and the burning of books, never having enough, always wanting more, taking more. So much destruction in order to bring peace? It doesn’t quite make sense to me. These books and articles and videos and all we have discussed have left so much for me to sit and ponder about.

            If anything this class has given me a lot I have to think about. I have been opened up to many interesting and thought provoking books and people. Now what do I do with this information I have been given. Do I continue to run and hide in a past I was never a part of, living in a generation that is not my own? Or do I take what I have been shown and try to mold it to my liking, create my own future instead of riding the current, and letting others make my future for me? I’m not sure any of these things can be answered by my magic eight ball and now I know not what to do.  

ARGH!

                I am at a loss on what to write, where to start, what to focus on. Right now I only want to focus on one thing, myself. Ever since I started reading The Hunger Games, the cavity inside my chest has ached. I have grown sad, and I am not entirely sure why. I know it has to do with the barbaric actions in this book, the drawing of a “lottery” in order to watch CHILDREN fight to the death for lives. I feel empty as I try and reflect on the novel. And the main thing is I don’t want to talk about it. I want to build up my own wall and I want to disconnect. Katniss, she struck a nerve in me. Her distrust in people, her not so secret need to feel secure and be loved and protected again. Her distaste for the happenings going on. Collins did a good job in writing this novel, or at least to me she did. I feel for the characters raised for the slaughter, the injustice of this practice. I feel disgust and in this feeling I come to the realization of things in my life in my society that parallel this world. The movies we watch, the television, the sports like boxing and fighting. I see these things we do and I think we are no better than the Careers, that we play these games and watch them not really seeing what it is like to be sitting in District 12 or 11 or any of the poor Districts. Not being the person struggling for survival in a game that their chance is so slim the thought of it deters the player. And yet we pay money to see the gore and glory, the fights and the competition. We promote the continual downfall of our society. And I feel helpless to stop it. I know we aren’t at a point where we are outright killing eachother for a source of entertainment, or at least not the majority of us. But when will tire of these meaningless competitions and games, the computer generated gore? When will we move on to the real version? When will are entertainment turn dangerous? Our horror movies turn live? And because we enjoy these things, we enjoy the suspense and the horror as long as we aren’t being hurt we won’t stop it. We will let our world deteriorate into “the hunger games” into “the most dangerous game” into “the lottery”. And will it be too late. Will we be able to recover once we discover what has happened? I don’t want to think about this. I want to curl up into my ignorance is bliss. I want to pretend that not in a million years anything like this could happen. But the sad thing is I’m scared that what I have been talking about is truth. That we fall, and with it our humanity will be stripped from us. We will be no better than the fallen tributes turned into ravaging mutated dogs.

BLEH!

Not So Real?

                So for this assignment I chose to watch “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”. Why you may ask well, because it always seems to be on, and my friends have subjected me to this torture on numerous occasions so I figured I would at least get some homework done along with it. Anyway I watched that two episode special on the Kim Kardashians wedding. I was stunned and am always stunned by the way these girls act on television. Yet I guess that is why people watch them. They are outrageous. Kim is the perfect “bridezilla” but can’t be too out shined by her mother. These K. Kardashian girls bring reality to a new level, or is it the same level, where you can’t be sure how real it truly is. Mrs. K. Or Kris Jenner, or whatever her name happens to be, gets a face lift or some sort of work done for her daughter’s wedding. And they film the whole thing. These women make money off of every possible thing. Which is why I’m a little peeved that I sat through those wedding episodes even though their wedding lasted all of five minutes.. they made back all the money they spent on that wedding and then some for it to end in divorce. I feel duped. I feel like the whole thing was big script and I watched it play out before my eyes.

            As I watch previews for reality TV and as I fall under the pressure and actually watch these shows (Yes, I admit, I am part of the problem) I find myself wondering how many of these people are really who they pretend to be. And I find myself thinking that 99.99999999 percent of the time they’re just getting paid to be that person. Yet we watch it anyway. We watch these shows with no plot and we enjoy them and we pay for them to keep them running. Why? Because we enjoy watching other people make fools of themselves. We enjoy watching other people get in fights or have a bad day or have a great day and go out to the bar and get laid. We are living through these other people and instead of us going to get laid we are sitting on the couch.

            It’s time to get up, turn the TV off. Stop paying for these shows by watching and supporting them, and make our own reality. I have a hunch that it might be a little bit more fun to play the part instead of watching someone else.

Week 6?

            “Big Brother” refers to the government in this novel. It is an almost always present entity watching your every move, controlling what you say, do, and think. Regulating every breath you take. Do I think that we are living in a so called “Orwellian” society? I think we’re coming pretty close. Our government is slowly seeping into our lives. From satellites to the IRS to our web history; from when we talk on the phone or send out an email we are no longer just talking to ‘Tom, Dick, and Harry’ “Big Brother” is also sitting in monitoring our actions trying to pick out trigger words. And yes, I understand it is for our safety and, hell, I have nothing to hide from the government, so go ahead and stick your nose into the public. I do feel more protected and safer knowing that the government is watching over us, or has the ability to track our cell phones. It’s not like they are using it to stalk us and control our everyday lives. Or maybe I’m just not bothered because it doesn’t directly affect me; it doesn’t interfere with my life. No one is shoving posters or propaganda in my face. Out of sight out of mind. I feel the same with the government’s role in airport security. I don’t fly on a regular basis. When I do I want to know I’m safe and no one on my flight has weapons of destruction mass or otherwise. I’m not bothered by the little things. So what if I can’t bring bigger than a 3 oz. bottle in my carry on. Why would I need bigger than that sitting in my seat? And I have no problem with the government continuing its path as long it doesn’t start telling me what I have to think, what I have to do, when our society starts crossing farther over the line into 1984 then action needs to start, but I’m not really worried because I feel that as Americans we are to opposed to anyone taking away our freedoms and our independence that we won’t let “big brother” be our life support keeping us functioning.    

"Human Touch"

“Look at you, you weak little girl, sitting in a corner on the dirt ridden floor.”

“Awwww sweetie stop crying everything will be okay.”

“*silence*”

“Get up! It’s time to hunt. Time to kill. Time to bathe in the blood of our prey and feast upon the flesh.”

“A-B-C-D…  E-F-G”

“STOPPPP!”

            It’s not the lack of modern technology that keeps me confined to the civilized world. It instead is my fear of solitude.

When I think about Thoreau and his time spent in that cabin, I don’t think how he survived without mail or a grocery store or how I could compare that to surviving without computers or indoor plumbing or all modern technology. I believe I could function somewhat normally in society without my television always distracting me, or without my cell phone buzzing persistently. The part I can’t fathom is the lack of human interaction.

I think about how this man survived living by himself. I need people. I know this. It is one of my many weaknesses. I need people in the most basic ways. I need human contact. Without it I fear for my sanity. You see I’m already all sorts of crazy, which I just play off as quirkiness, but the thing everyone else doesn’t realize is the moment I’m by myself is when I can’t escape from the truth. Being alone allows time to think. And I do believe thinking is great, but it also can be dangerous. I know I can’t handle being left to my own thoughts for a day or two. A year alone just to think, and what I wrote above would happen. I would no longer be by myself. I would be consumed with isolation and I fear my only coping mechanism would be to create these other personalities to help me survive on my own.

  And then I’m going to connect my fear of isolation to FEED because I feel the need to make a connection. When I read Feed and I watched these people m-chatting and living in their bubble communities I felt that they were isolating themselves from each other. And I don’t mean that they were physically separate from each other, but emotionally there was a disconnect. And you truly see this when they are in the hospital without their Feed and they struggle interacting without the technology chip in their heads. Then you continue to see this with Violet and Titus’ relationship. How different their behaviors our due to the way they were raised. The people of this “future” or other reality are lacking, to quote Bruce Springsteen, “a little of that human touch.” I mean they even create life in incubators. The sense of being connected to a parent or child, of being connected to another person is lost. And we are left alone. All alone.

It's All About aMErica!

It is all about me, the individual. When I first read the two assigned articles I was offended by what the author had to say about not my generation, but about me. Heck I was more than offended I was enraged. So much so that I stormed across the hall right into my friend’s room and I went off on a tangent about how absolutely ridiculous this man was, insulting me and other such things. After my rant I calmed down and went back into my own box, and continued on with my work. As I was picking out quotes and asking questions about them and divulging my thoughts to my paper that’s when I began to realize that this book was not all about me.

Just like it’s not all about you. It’s about the bigger picture. It’s about the future. In class I feel like I heard people just going off on how none of this affects us and who needs politics and history and literature and fine art. I heard people get angry about the things I was angry about in the beginning. That what he said doesn’t apply directly to me. I read, I’m not lazy, I am busy, I am smart, so on and so forth. And that is true, you do read, you are going the distance, doing your work and getting a degree. You may not be the lazy one who watches 3 hours of TV a day or who spends their time playing video games. That may not be you, but when you step back and look at America as a whole, and you look at our generation as a whole, it’s not talking about you. It’s talking about a statistic. It’s talking about us as a whole with numbers on our heads all averaged out. And me being a math major who am I to argue with those statistics?

So when I look at those numbers and see that we don’t know about politics, I think yes this one does apply to me. I don’t know nearly what I should about government, and one day I’m going to need to because one day this generation is going to be our government. So we need to take the initiative for the rest of our generation and learn about these things. Same thing about history. The common phrase among us is history repeats itself. We learn from our mistakes so we don’t make them again. We learn from our history so we can prevent bad things from happening. Next on my list of why we need to learn, is literature. Sure you might not like reading, you might not understand why you have to read a bunch of shit written by a dead guy, but I only see why it’s useful.  My first point in this is that reading builds your vocabulary. The less we read the smaller our choice of words becomes. I fear that one day all of words will be wiped out and we will be reduced to grunts. My next point with literature also has to do with art. It’s the art of words, the art of story, the art of a picture, or a piece of music. There is something about reading a great book or seeing a mesmerizing piece of artwork that just makes you think and question and appreciate things or see things differently. Why would you want to not read a book or go to a museum? Why wouldn’t you want the rest of our generation to do those same things so you can talk about it for hours so you can have something to say to fill the void or to replace the monotonous video games or TV shows? Wouldn’t you rather hear these ideas than read somebody’s status update about how the ate a taco and then took a nap? To me these questions seem simple seem easy.

As my last contribution I just want to address the technology aspect. Yes we have all of this technology and we are updating it and coming out with new things on a daily basis, but why would you want to chain yourself to a computer or a phone? Why would you want to put so much faith in relying on a machine? Wouldn’t you like to see the world with your own two eyes? Or hear about your best friend’s day with in person rather than over the air waves? Well, I guess to go back to the beginning because if you haven’t noticed yet that’s something I like to do. This post is all about me. All about how I feel and how I view our generation… how I view MY generation. All about ME in America.  

Sarah Connor

Back to my terminator comment, computers shall take over the world. Recently we have surpassed the age of technology and jumped head first into the actual computer and a virtual world or our own virtual reality or at least the start of it. We have begun to do everything online. We shop online, we pay bills online, we bank online, we get educations and degrees online, it’s like we don’t even need to meet up in real life anymore. And if we miss a person’s face or voice we can get that online too. We have become dependent on the internet and its magical powers. We no longer need to step out of our houses any more. We can work from home; we can order things to be delivered to our door. When we get lonely we can go to a dating site and meet a future spouse. When we get horny we can watch porn streaming straight from our computers. I agree with Lasn and Second Skin whether we like it or not our reality is slowly being stripped down to ones and zeros and turning that of the virtual variety. And these online multiplayer role playing games are just adding to our need to never leave the computer chair. We can have a source of entertainment, we can socialize, we can travel the world (real and imaginary), without buckling a single seatbelt. And for those people who may seem like real geeks to some of us can finally find their soul mate or their new best friend who understands them completely.  And if they want to that and spend their hard earned money on a computer game than who am I to judge them. I personally am all about the tangibility of items, but that is just me. And that’s the point everybody is entitled to their own opinions. But once again back to the terminator and rise of the technology. We are slowly sinking into the roles of the computer sending out emoticons instead of actually feeling emotions and our computers are just continuing to advance and gain more intelligence. Oh, Arnold Schwarzenegger please save me from the human races demise!