Author Archives: diana.achaibar

I have come to the conclusion that the poem I will use to create my digital essay and paper is “Fear” by Raymond Carver. The overall message that I want to get across is that in the current world we live in, fear is playing an increasingly significant role in the reason why people can no longer live stress-free lives. We ourselves are the ultimate reasons why we truly cannot be happy and live without fear, because we create fears out of our everyday troubles and uncertainties.  Due to the media publicizing unworthy events and the new discoveries revealed to us, people are finding flaws in almost everything. Whether it is reality or exaggeration, our focus on the worries in the world is only dragging the true essence of life down.

For my digital essay I will be doing a skit. Although my ideas may change I want to create a dramatic, yet lightly humorous, story line based on someone who is being negatively affected by the news and media on ridiculous matters. I believe that I will be able to depict the proper mood in my video by choosing the appropriate song to play in the background.

First off, I’m extremely excited to be making a digital essay for class because I’ve always wanted to create my own video and never really had any motivation to go through with it. But now since its mandatory, I finally have a legit excuse! When I first heard about the digital essay I was overwhelmed with how many ideas I had in mind, and I still am. There are several themes that I’ve been focusing on such as, happiness deriving from acceptance and self-realization, and society’s impact on the happiness of individuals. I don’t necessarily know how to narrow down what exactly I want to depict in my digital essay, partly because I’m still not sure as to what I will want to use as my literary evidence and poem.

When looking at the selected poems by Audre Lorde we discussed in class, as well as a few others that she has written, I didn’t exactly draw any personal connection which makes it very difficult to choose any of them as my focus. I am more on the verge of perhaps choosing a poem that I have come across in the past or maybe some song lyrics. I’m clearly nowhere near making a decision. I just have a whole bunch of things jumbled together as of now.

At first, creativity to me seemed to be something you had to be born with. Like said in the “Education and the Changing World of Work” video, left of your brain is for logic and right of your brain is for creativity, and I just thought I was a left brain person. Things came easily to me, just as long as they were obvious.  Creativity was something I thought I did not have and could not have because I simply wasn’t capable of manifesting my own intense ideas. Over time I began to realize that I actually was a creative person but I wasn’t allowing myself to go further than just black and white. When it comes to school, I believe that listening to other students’ ideas helps me generate my own and enhances my ability at becoming creative.

Ambiguity is something that to a certain extent drives me nuts! Although I can handle not understanding things from time to time, I feel extremely deprived when things are too vague and unspecific. In my opinion, it all comes down to whether or not I am willing to give something a try and actually use the right side of my brain to come up with interpretations. It definitely isn’t exciting for me to be confused. When being confused there is absolutely no way for me to proceed in doing whatever it might have been that I was doing.

“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway are two short stories that I believe share the significance of change and its relation to happiness. In both stories there is a female character that is put in a serious situation where they must undergo an intense thought process.

Mrs. Mallard is a character that is told her husband has died and she is now forced into thinking about how her life will change. Despite the tragic death of her husband, Mrs. Mallard becomes psyched and ready for the single life. She is no longer under control of her husband and she is free, as well as young. She was being deprived of living a happy life simply because of the existence of her spouse. What this makes me think about is Kate Chopin’s book “The Awakening” which seems like an elongated story similar to her “The Story of an Hour”. I noticed that in both of these stories, the main female character seems to have no other option but to die because in some way or form it was her only chance at being free and happy. I think that’s a tad bit extreme.

Jig is a character that ponders upon the thought of whether or not she should have an abortion. It seems like her options were, have a baby and lose your husband, or kill your baby and live happily with your husband. The only problem I had with this was that her happiness could have come along with either option, something I believe she failed to see.

Both Jig and Mrs. Mallard encounter short moments in their life where they come close to change and it is clear that their willingness to make these changes is driven by their belief of how happy they will be in the outcome. What I believe this is saying every decision we make in life, minor or drastic, has to do with how we want it to affect our happiness. In other words, we do what we do because it makes us “happy”.

Nature versus nurture has always been a theory questioned by many humans. Many people find it important to know what causes their actions and how exactly they occur in the ways which they do, whether it is due to the environment surrounding us or if it is hereditary. It becomes quite clear to me that society itself and experience with the outside world play huge roles in how humans develop mentally. In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle he addresses “children’s play” and when observing an eighteen month old baby he discovers that the baby has turned an experience into a game. He states that the baby “was in the first place passive, was overtaken by the experience, but now brings himself in as playing an active part, by repeating the experience as a game in spite of its unpleasing nature” (14). As a child, you are yet to discover new wonders in the world, so through experience you begin to form reactions that enable you to feel different emotions that you are born with. Such an example is one that leads me into believing that nature and nurture come hand in hand. Without nature you would not have nurture since nature is what enables us humans to practice the innate traits we are born with, such as happiness.

In Plato’s The Republic Book Seven “Allegory of the Cave” he tells a story about prisoners who are chained and live their entire lives in a cave having no connection to the outer world other than a bright fire off in the distance. I believe that its significance of this allegory is to demonstrate that one’s surroundings is a vital part in determining their morals and beliefs. Since the prisoners grew acceptance of the dark cave they were in, they did not know that there was actually much more in the world, and having lived such a long time without any doubt, it was hard for them to believe that there really could be something beyond the bright fire. Their senses and innate traits had adapted to the surroundings of the cave and they had become content and satisfied with their lifestyle. In both Freud’s and Plato’s pieces, nature and nurture intertwine and enable the characters to further develop mentally and create certain beliefs and morals that shape one’s own personal idea and definition of happiness.

-Diana Achaibar