"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!

Oh,CRICKET!

I could not think what to write today’s blog about, but suddenly it came to me. As I was sitting on my bed in my third floor dorm thinking “hard” about my work load and future assignments I was interrupted by this incessant chirping. I was outraged by this aerial assault. That’s when it slapped me right in the face. Noise is what I should write about, it must be fate.

As I thought about this disturbance I began to wonder when I became this girl. As a small child the sounds of nature, the outdoors, that was my soundtrack. I liked to tell people that I was musically deprived, because I didn’t own a radio or a walkman or a CD player until I was in middle school. The only music I listened to was the faint sound of Bruce Springsteen coming seeping out my father’s door. So at night or during the day I listened to the outside, and growing up in rural Pennsylvania, that meant crickets, rivers, rain, and the way the trees creaked in the wind. These sounds never bothered me. In fact as I continue thinking of it I think of how much I miss it.

As time went on and I got older I was given music and a TV and a cell phone and then I lost all sense of familiarity to the earth. I was trapped in this technology. The overpowering presence of technology is another thing Lasn focuses upon. And I feel that these two things go hand and hand in corrupting society today and the future of America. We have stopped embracing the natural things in life and instead we have produced machines to entertain us. We have become dependent on automobiles and cell phones and the internet, and with the introduction of motherboards and wireless we have the power to block out what we once relied on.

I fear that technology may fail us and we end up with “the Terminator” on our hands. At first that may sound silly, but if you think into it it kind of seems plausible; the idea that technology is advancing to extreme heights. Also I fear that the children of today will never know what life was like before everything was handed to them on factory belts. Or the only way they may learn about postal service is in history books.  Sometimes I feel like my childhood was something I read in a history book.

That’s not how I want it though. So now that this issue has been brought to my attention I want to try and stop myself from straying from natural world. And I suggest that we all do the same. Because it’s sad to think that I was so easily perturbed by one of nature’s creatures calling a mate.    

Cynara

Cynara is the name of the woman behind the artichoke.

Gabby is my name and I have no fame to it. I am a mathematics student in my sophomore year. Choosing this class was pretty easy, it was the lesser of two evils. The last book I read was probably There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.  The reason for reading it was to prove to my friends little sister that I knew all the words by heart and could read it in one breath. I failed the first half of that. Don't get me wrong I love books. I love to read books, but a lot of the time it's easier to multitask with a movie or tv show (A Pup Named Scooby-Doo being the most recent addiction). It is sad what my world has come to.  The written word is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Hopefully this course shall change my slow downfall into visual media death.

 So Zeus took Cynara to be his mistress and brought her up to Olympus. She missing her mother snuck down to earth to visit her. When Zeus found out about this he got angry and threw her down to earth turning her into the very first artichoke. (At least that's the Greek Mythology to it.)