Author Archives: SinTingLarissa.Ho

Digital Project

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Inspired by “Contact Lenses” from Audre Lorde

My paper is about how life is very different from the fairy tales and happy endings that you see on TV. Even though the things we see in the movies only happen inside a screen, we want to believe that it will happen in real life as well. This is why we start expecting love to happen the way they do in the movies; we are blinded from reality. But in the end since our expectations are not met we only feel disappointment. This is why we need to get ride of these false hopes and live life for what it really is.

For my video I asked my friends to help me so it was really fun. I got to hang out with them while being productive for school. This video is suppose to show what we want and expect from love versus what actually happens.I decided to take away most of the audio so that the songs I’ve chosen is what moves the story. It first starts out with the meeting (Enchanted) then moves to the romantic stuff you see only in the movies (Fairytale), and finally the way reality works. (Just a Dream)

Digital Project

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I decided to do my digital project on “Contact Lenses” by Audre Lorde. After reading it over and over again, I really got to understand the poem a lot better. This poem can be interpreted in many different ways. I see this poem symbolizing self discovery through daily life struggles. While at the same time this is like a love poem. The contact lenses represent a break away from the fantasies society put into our heads. All along we structure our lives through the happily -ever- after  endings we see in movies, and the fairy tale love stories.  We end up seeing only what we want to see in our relationships. We start being less logical and lose ourselves. So this poem is about the journey back to facing reality and finding ourselves again/ realizing that relationships is not like the movies.

I am not too entirely sure what I am going to do for the visual part of this project, but I imagine the beginning of the video being blurry. Although it is blurry in the beginning, the video gets clearer and clearer as it progresses. I want my video to feel like a persons dream. The video is representing the fairytale mindset we live in and the video is suppose to guide the audience back to reality. I might be taking a lot of different clips from different chick flicks/ romance movies and putting them all together to display this dream stage. While in the end I will show a short clip of an actual couple oor a single person. I am not sure yet.

Music

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When I started to read the poem I started to laugh because it clicked to me why Professor Kaufman would tell the class to just read it, and to not analyze it. Reading this poem was like a joke. It was laughing in my head all along just because nothing actually made sense. I enjoyed the poem more during the beginning and as I kept reading my focus was gone. I was just going along with it, and it felt like I was reading Plato again.The same feeling of reading and not knowing what I was reading came back. I was reading it but not understanding it; it didn’t make sense to me, but I kept going. Unlike Plato though, I didn’t even try to make sense of Stein because I was under the impression that it wasn’t suppose to make sense. So even though I read this in my head, my voice in my mind was very relaxed and patient. This patience didn’t last too long. By the time I was done with a whole page of the nonsense I got impatient. I wasn’t at a point where I was getting frustrated or angry, but I definitely noticed myself reading faster and missing certain words. To be honest when I was reading this, I didn’t actually know that Stein’s a woman. I tend to think that men are funnier people than women. So when I just assumed that the writer was a man I read it in a lighter mood and wasn’t intimidated. If I knew Stein’s a woman to begin with this might’ve changed. I probably would’ve read it with a more serious mood since I tend to think that women have more reasons behind everything they say, write, and do.

A Place

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When I’m on the train crossing the bridge, I always see these new apartments with the big windows. The type of window that is actually like a wall where if you want, you can get all creepy and look inside to see the apartment. Seeing these apartments make me happy because I can see myself in one of them one day. It’s not that I want to live exactly there ,but just the idea of having my own place. I don’t have a dream home; I just want a home that I can call my own.  I want to create my home from scratch. I want a place where I rule, not my parents. A place that I can decorate in any way I want. A place that offers stability because I know it’s mine. A place that I know will always be there. A place that I never want to leave. I love my home now, but it’s the idea of growing up and having my space in addition to having the option of sharing it with whoever I want. But before I start thinking about the way my home might look I should start with getting my own room. I’ve never had my own room in my 18 years of life which is probably why I dream about my future home so much. It’s go big or go home (haha get it?) but yeah instead of aiming for a room, I might as well aim for a house. lol Of course I would settle for a room to myself for now.

The Electric Slide Boogie

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Thursday, the new Friday. Today is Wednesday

and every minute I feel like I’m busy. What happened to

time? Where did he go? Too busy to let myself

go to bed, forget, and rest. But I will try.

Now that I’m here why can’t I fall asleep?

Is it the noisy train I hear from a block away?

The Chinese radio playing

in the room across?

Mother speaking loudly to my aunt in the living room?

 

The phone is right there next to me

flashing in a steady beat.

I see it and I hear it buzz.

I hear the buzz, the tv, the radio, the train,

the mom, the chopstick clanking against bowls.

Instead of sleeping I bet all my friends

are going out

having fun.

I get up

out of bed

and

go on facebook.

 

How hard it is to kill work with sleep.

Life doesn’t stop for anyone.

Can you hear me?

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I came across this article a while ago and I really wanted to share it with you all. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/science/21whal.html?_r=2

It is about a very lonely whale with no friend or family. She doesn’t belong to any tribe, pack or gang. She doesn’t have a lover and she probably never will…

She is a very unique baleen whale, singing at 52hz.  While on average an baleen whale communicate only between 12 and 25hz. With her being double the average amount of hertz, there’s no way that she can be heard by other whales. As a result of her unique voice whenever she calls out to others, her calls remain unanswered, and each cry is ignored. In addition to all this, as times goes on, and the longer she remains unheard she becomes sadder and more frustrated; her notes become more desperate and goes deeper into despair.It makes me so sad to imagine this poor whale, massive in size but still invisible because she’s different.

But this show how much you need others in order to feel happy. If you are alone who will you talk to? We can’t just talk to ourselves, because that will just be weird. You will need someone that you want to share things with. More than just being surrounded by company, you need company that will understand you and on the same page as you. We value or friends because you get to feel a connection that you probably won’t feel with a random stranger that just walked past you.

I understand that everyone needs to have their alone time once in a while, but we can’t be happy being alone all the time.

Leave it alone!

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It is getting late and I am tired. I read this over and over again, and in the end I am mad. Why is Freud and all these philosophers so interested in these random things? Is it really necessary and helpful to study these things? I feel like in life there are just issues that shouldn’t be studied. Studying happiness and the unconscious to come up with all these reasoning and theories is so forced. You have to force yourself to think about it, while some of these things shouldn’t be. Instead they are things that occur naturally so why do we have to try so hard to analyze it? A lot of the time there just might not be any answers to why things are a certain way anyway.

Why do we have to come up with a purpose for why a little boy is playing a toy? The boy is probably just having fun and playing it as a distraction, but no we are not satisfied with this answer. We force ourselves to look at the idea that the boy is doing it in order to do this and do that, for this reason and that reason, because is so natural for us to over think. Sure, subconsciously there might be a connection between the toy and his mom leaving, but is it even that important? If we put ourselves in his shoes we would probably be too young to know ourselves why we’re playing it. In our heads we are only playing with it because we want to. It is as simple as that, at 18 months we don’t care about all these things, we just do things to do it.

What happens in the cave?

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Book Seven begins with one of the most famous moments of Plato’s Republic, known as“the allegory of the cave,” which demonstrates the places discovery, learning, and curiosity can take us. Socrates starts off by describing a cave full of darkness and a bunch of men living in it. These men are bounded in a way where they cannot turn their heads; they could only look forward and face a wall.  A wall with shadows of statues on it, casted from the fire located behind them. Never seeing anything else besides the shadows, the men doesn’t know any better and considers the shadows to be real, and one of the only things present in the world. They know very little about the world. But as soon as a man gets the opportunity to be released from his boundaries a journey begins.

The man explores the cave discovering the fire and statues that’s been making the shadows all along. He is now learning things that are more real than just a shadow. His curiosity then drives him out of the cave into the real world, where he discovers the things surrounding him, and starts understanding the purpose of those things. Eventually when he returns back to the cave, all the other men makes fun of him. Since they are ignorant to the real world outside the cave. They don’t understand how much fuller his life is compared to theirs. Instead they question why would he ever go out the cave to gain sight to eventually lose it again. This is where the purpose of him coming back to the cave comes in. He returned to the cave not because he doesn’t like it outside, but it is his duty to educate and help the other prisoners in the cave.

Book Seven begins by comparing the natural condition to this because without education, which is composed of experience, learning, discovery and curiosity, humans are like the imprisoned men. Naturally when we are born we only know what our parents show us; we don’t have the ability to go off by ourselves. Just like how the prisoners see the shadow and nothing else, we only see the mental list of norms our parents and other interactions with our surrounding give us. When we finally have the ability to walk and go off by ourselves we get to discover the world through our own eyes and not be manipulated, just like the prisoner who eventually left the cave.