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My final project

For my final project, I wanted to list all the different reasons why the sport of soccer is so important to my life, both mentally and physically. I didn’t think a video was the best way to accurately explain these reasons since I’m using specific pictures to represent the reasons. I got this idea from a show I recently binge watched, hope you enjoy!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rtSSpmeycOo0nAHoGSSU04JCEkoFIPXdZbbm7uMX3Ts/edit?usp=sharing

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Selfie project

With Spring upon us, soccer starts to take a larger impact on my life, as I play at least once a week when it gets warmer out. Not only that, but the “playoffs” in the professional soccer world are also happening at this time. With all that given, my proposal is to take pictures and videos of me watching or playing soccer and show everyone why I love it so much. 

I want to show the people around me as well; how they look at soccer and their feelings towards it in several ways. I plan to watch this weekend’s game(s) with other soccer fans and show their reactions to 22 middle aged men running around and kicking a ball. Then I plan to go play soccer and film how it starts, how I play, and how it ends. I am also thinking of doing an interview about the sport with close friends to get a more direct feel to it.

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CW Interview in Three Languages

(A/N: My computer crashed and i lost my files for the project so I wasn’t able to update it but at least i was still able to record it with a screen capture software, if you’d like to play it there are dl links in a previous  post!)

This is the interview I did with my boyfriend, Oskar Westin. He lives in Sweden and is currently visiting me now. He’s half-Finnish but only grew up being born into the Swedish language, he learned English because it’s a global language, and he learned Japanese because he wanted to! This is an interview in all three languages with various questions for each. (I even try speaking all of them…)

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This interview format was really unique because no one else has created something like this.What really worked for me is the format of the interview. I liked how it showed two characters speaking to each other, however, I thought it would have been better if the video showed options and a mouse clicking which dialogue the person was going to say next. I would also suggest maybe lowering the background music a bit as it distracted me from reading the subtitles and understanding what they meant. I enjoyed that this interview was conducted in 3 languages, which is an interesting feat!

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I really like this idea considering that I have played video games with this sort of structure all my life and I like the anime format. Watching this I remembered moments in my childhood where I’d be on my gameboy or psp clicking A over and over to keep the dialogue moving. I also liked the music in the background because it replicates the games that I’m talking about (there’s usually cheerful and/or calming music which this is). I think it has the potential to be really cool like that if you were to add more movement and activity in the video. I enjoyed it a lot though, great job! 

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Experiences of a college student

My older brother is a graduating senior at Syracuse University, with a bachelors in IT. These were his thoughts on his college experience, what he thinks about it, and how to go on from here:

What are some of the biggest things college has taught u?

- “So far college has been a tremendous journey which has provided me with

many great experiences. College helped me see what independence is really

about. Attending to a college a couple hours away in another state has really

helped me test if I am truly ready to be independent, which I think I am.

College has also taught me that you must take advantage of the opportunities

that present in your way, and creating these opportunities when they do not

show up. However, out of all things, college has really helped me found a

potential in my that I hadn’t seen before. Between many challenging classes,

work, and social life I thought I would never have time to do everything, but

with some time management training, I learned that I could successfully

accomplish all these and more. Once I saw this potential, my confidence

increased and became more motivated to get things done.”

Do u think the experience was worth the money?

- “College has definitely been a worthwhile experience and I wish I could do it

all over again. However, the cost of college tuition is very high, which deters

many from getting an education and leaves many others with large burdens

of financial debt (student loans). College is a great place to find opportunities

and develop oneself, but is something that it should be affordable to anyone

with the desire for a higher education. I am one among the students that will

have some student loans to repay post-graduation and even though I am

happy college opened many opportunities for me, I do wish I could of had

this experience without having to worry about paying thousands of dollars

once its over.”

Is “the struggle” when it comes to finding jobs after college real?

- “I think the answer to this question depends mostly on how one approaches

the situation. I have found that networking and building connections is key to

finding a job, or at least a job that you would actually want. Taking action

early, building relations while still at school and thinking what profession

you want to pursuit will make this “struggle” less of an issue. I’ve met some

peers that have found their careers and have everything figured out and

others that have not even started thinking what they want to do once they

graduate. I believe attitude is another key component to finding a good job.

The opportunity is always out there waiting for you somewhere, but you

have to do whatever is necessary to find it, thus your mentality could be the

deciding factor between working hard to find the dream job or getting stuck

at a mediocre job.”

Who are some of the brightest and some of the worst people you’ve met in ur college career.

- “During my underclassmen years of college, I mostly focused on the fun part

of college and was always hanging around with people that wanted to just

hang around and play video games. During this time, I was getting good

grades, but simply did the work because I had to do it and was more driven

towards getting my homework done so I can hang out with friends

(sometimes leading to mediocre work), but to be fair I feel like this is a

similar situation for the majority of students. During my last two years, I

started to focus more on school and started to hanging out more intellectual

individuals that were more focused on working on projects and thinking

about their futures. Hanging out with these guys encouraged me to become

more involved on campus, which definitely opened many opportunities.

Hanging out with people that were school and career-oriented helped me

land a position as director of the research center at my school as well as a job

at a startup company. Out of all this I can finish with one conclusion, the

people you hang around with really does matter.”

What would u do different if u could do it all over again?

- “Like I mentioned earlier, college tuition is very high and carries a burden of

debt when graduation happens. something If I would had done something

differently, I would of definitely applied to more scholarships to reduce my

college debt and maybe even go to a cheaper in state school like you did. I had 

a lot of fun though, not much I would change about that experience.”

What is ur biggest regret in college so far?

- “My biggest regret is not having started thinking about my career since the

very beginning of college. When I first got accepted, four years seemed like a

really long time and thought I had time to figure everything out. However,

I’m about a month away from graduation and realized that these four years

flew by really fast. I am not very upset that I didn’t start that early because I

had to go through that experience to learn, but I would consider that my

biggest regret. Start looking for internships and what you wanna do now that 

you still have time.”

Do you think u have solid plans for after college?

- “I am still in the application and interview process, so I do not have concrete

plans as of yet, but I think I will be fine.” (I could tell he was somewhat scared of

 that question)

Are u ready for the rest of ur life?

- “Life is something that is inevitable whether we are ready or not. I’ve learned

in college about my potential and that we can grow if we have the desire for

it. I am sure that I will have many more of these insights throughout my

career, thus I am looking at life as a learning process and trying to focus

living in this moment, since tomorrow is always a mystery.”

______________________________________________________________________

Before we did the interview, my brother asked me if he should be honest or just make the answers sound good. This made me think while the interview was going on, and I think to an extent he answered the way most people would. With the question about plans after college, I could tell that like everyone, he has some self doubt but he is trying to be as optimistic and professional about it. 

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Interview Proposal

I plan on interviewing my friend, who is an active member in the Douglass Residential College. She is double majoring in political science and Women & Gender’s Studies. She is a queer, Muslim woman, born and raised in Pakistan. Some questions I would ask are how her, along with her family, are coping with our current President. I also plan to ask her about the oppression she may face. The interview will consist of discussions on white privilege and Islamophobia- which are some pertinent issues that this country currently faces. I am able to recognize my privileges that I have been afforded- such as receiving an education, not facing racism, homophobic or Islamophobic remarks personally, being employed, etc. Not everyone has equal opportunity to achieve those same standards, due to their race and ethnicity. I plan on discussing the stigmas regarding third-world countries and how it affects their mental health, as well. Interviewing someone who is a minority will provide a safe space and promote a healthy environment.

This interview will most likely take place in her dorm, or somewhere in my residence hall. I plan on video recording this either with my iphone, or voice recording it, depending if she is comfortable with being on camera.

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Her proposal is her interviewing her friend in the Douglas Residential College, as she is very involved and has a lot of experience. The twist is that she is muslim and was born and raised in Pakistan. So she wants to ask about the experience and the challenges that came from that, how she feels about Trump and his movements, and overall what her mindset is. She then added the fact that she is also queer. I think she should ask her about how these things have shaped her and how she uses them to her advantage, or how she has learned from her struggles. I think the proposal is a very good idea because there are many people with major disadvantages, and this could put us into perspective as to how they cope with it.

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My proposal

For my proposal, I am going to interview my 23 year old brother. He is about to graduate from Syracuse University, and I want to ask him some questions about his college experience based on several categories. For example, his growth and development during college is an important factor because education is supposed to shape us in today’s society. I also want to ask him about his stance for several things: Was it worth it? What would you do different if you could do college again? What were the best and worst parts about your college experience? I also want to ask him if he has plans for after college already because I want to know how bad “the struggle” really is.

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Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong is an immigrant from Saigon, Vietnam. Ocean is a refugee from New York City. Ocean came from Vietnam now calls New York home. He came with his family when he was 2, and has lived his life as an outsider in many aspects. From trouble with understanding school in America to actually having dyslexia, Ocean has had to deal with a lot to develop the wisdom he now has. As he grew up, he didn’t stop being an outsider, with his religion of Buddhism and sexual orientation. In a way, he feels he was dissonant with the world, or that the world was dissonant with him.

  Ocean Vuong made his weakness of dyslexia into an irrelevant limitation that only made him a better poet. He began using his mind run wild with imagination and had no plan for his writing. Its abstract; and he makes it a point that he rarely writes now, and he doesn’t force it. When asked about writer’s blocks, Ocean replied by saying that he doesn’t believe in them and is suspicious of them. Writers think they cannot be writers if they do not have mental blocks. This showed me how open-minded Ocean Vuong really is. He does not worry about who will listen to him in his writing or how it will be interpreted.

 Ocean gets his ideas for writing from observing and listening instead; “Language excites me. Irrational thought excites me. I spend most of my time listening instead of writing. A shard of language might come: a phrase, a word, an anagram, and I’d just keep it in my pocket, like a little seed, warming in my fist.” He allows his ideas to grow and keeps little bits of language piece by piece to create potential for poetry.

 Ocean grew up with danger all around him, yet he focuses on the aspect of love and thinks that it is a repeating act in life. He said love to him has to be made, and it’s not something that you get from giving and taking. There is love in everything we do and that’s he describes his love for poetry and writing in my opinion. He concludes that there is a ‘sense of danger’ to all the aspects of his life. He calls being queer and colored a nightmare, but how is he to change what he loves? He loved poetry, he said, maybe before he was even born, since his mother introduced it to him in the womb with songs. Of course he had fear and anxiety in his situation, as he came from a family with a line of disabilities and he couldn’t even understand when the teachers told him not to run his hands through the hallways of the school. However, his love for it made him break through it and he began writing poetry in the English language. He didn’t learn to read until he was 11, and he was slower, but he was ok with it. And he continued loving poetry.

 I came to America and was thrown right into first grade, not knowing anything or anyone or how the world here worked, so I really paid attention to that aspect of Ocean. His story is very similar to mine, and I felt like I understood his perspective more than others would be able to because I also felt like I was looked upon as the stubborn one in the beginning of school. He also gets a lot of support from his family; there are not many scholars that come from Vietnam and Vuong has many accomplishments that make his family and race proud. He was even named as one of the 32 essential Asian American writers.

 To sum it up, Ocean Vuong is a very patient and free person who gained a lot of strength from the difficulties in life. Not many people would choose one of the hardest paths possible for themselves, like a writer with dyslexia, and not only succeed at it but love every piece of it. Ocean may not write everyday, but he is always learning and letting his ideas branch out as he holds on to the seed with little bits of language and observations, warming and growing in his hand.

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Questions for Ocean

1. What do you wish to accomplish with your writing? Is there any specific goal or target that you have? (For yourself or for society)

2. Did your religion have any influence on how or why you write? Does you sexuality?

3. What is your favorite form of poetry/writing and why?

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Film Proposal

My proposal is about sports, how they affect society and the economy, and how the world revolves around them to a large part of the world. Even if you’re not much into sports yourself, odds are at least of some of the people you know are. All the money spent, all the betting on every game every season, all the jerseys you see walking around every day; why are sports such a big deal? Why are athletes some of the richest in the world? Why do people go crazy over sports? This is a big question to me because I am one of those people and I check stats about several sports on the daily. I also own a good amount of jerseys. So for my film proposal, I will put a combination of several videos on sports I think say a lot and an interview with a friend who likes sports just like anyone else.

I am not saying that sports are bad. Or that everyone is addicted to them. But they are a huge part of our culture and they are a huge part is the daily lives of millions of people. I play FIFA or 2K almost everyday, and they are some of the best selling games in the world year after year because people love them. Sports are in the music we listen to all the time. We grow up playing sports. What I want to interview my friend on is his perspective of game associations and how they impact the world. They create bonds and make the world go round to some people.

This video just shows some examples that I want to show, from the athletes being emotional themselves because of the sport, to the crowds’ reactions to all types of games from soccer to tennis. It also shows people recording form their phones, which I think is a strong symbol in our culture as well.

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Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch has way too many favorite books to list. The thought of having to choose seems a little mind-boggling, so she thinks of her authors as her mentors and loved ones. For example, her mentors were Ken Kesey and Kathy Acker, her ‘foreparents’ were William Faulkner and Marguerite Duras, and her uncle was William Burroughs. He was that out of control uncle everyone wishes they had. She also would like to tongue wrestle Gertrude Stein. Other than reading and writing, some of her favorite things to do are fucking, swimming, travelling, and making art things. No particular art things, just art things. She also enjoys eating and drinking fine foods and liquids, cause who doesn’t. Yuknavitch lives in Portland, Oregon along with Andy Mingo and her son Miles. Mingo is a film director and focuses mostly on romance. She takes a lot of pride in her work; a lot of her pictures are of her work and not her life. Her life has quite a couple of twists however and she went through a lot to get where she is. Her father verbally, physically, and sexually took her advantage of in her youth while her drunken mother watched like it was normal. Thank goodness she was good at swimming. She was noticed and got a scholarship to a great school. You’d think she’d be set now, training for the Olympics and what not, but she wasn’t and something made her revert to alcohol and drugs. Maybe she never got over her childhood, maybe she liked escaping, or maybe she really fucking hates swimming. She probably doesn’t hate swimming though since it’s one of her hobbies. And now that you’d think her life went to shit cause she lost her scholarship, she actually moved to Oregon and found her life in literature. That mentor Ken Kesey from earlier actually worked with her at the University of Oregon by the way. She’s been married 3 times to date too, that’s another twist. Through all these forms of mental and physical torture in her life, Yuknavitch could say that her story is one of a kind and she could not have done it without her mentors and foreparents and uncles because they taught her how to express it and grow. She wants everyone to listen to her story; she shares a lot of links that relate back to her work and works that have moved her. I also read her posts as very enthusiastic and some have funny captions, even if they’re still just links for her events. Her Twitter is a little deeper in my opinion and she posts some of her actual feelings there. They’re actually pretty confusing but I like her profile picture. She acts like us teenagers in a way; Twitter is where you keep it real, but your parents might be on Facebook so you gotta be careful there. She really fucking hates Trump from what I can see. And a lot of other people. “dear mitch mcconnel: fuck you with a cactus”. Anyways. She loves a lot of people too and calls them out as well. My question is if you have too many favorite books, out of all your favorite authors who have inspired, motivated, matured, and educated you, which one has made the biggest impact in your life?

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Word art

This work by Barbara Kruger was one of the strongest that I saw because it can relate to any single person in the world that I have experienced. People never like to be blamed for something, even if they are rightly accused. From low wage workers to large companies, we always seem to blame someone else for the consequences that cause harm to people, the economy, or the environment. The image displayed is a terrified polar bear with barely enough room to stand without having to swim because humans are causing their home to melt. The thing that I found interesting is that it can track to regular people with their daily routines that can cause that poor polar bear to suffer. I can say I don’t want to recycle because I don’t think it actually gets recycled, along with all the other billion lazy people that use that excuse. A lot of Kruger’s other pieces try to depict what drives society, such as money and love. I chose this piece because its something I do myself, and I see other people do it all the time, and everyone always just ignores the subject. And no one gets the blame for something bad that happened, and then no one has to fix it because its no ones fault, and then the polar bears die. And it’s a cycle and it’s going to end the planet. And one way or another, its never our fault. This is for all of us who thing global warming is a myth, and who don’t do anything about it, and let the polar bears die.

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Art. pt2

Barbara Kruger

Bruce Nauman

Lawrence Weiner

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Art.

John Baldessari

Adrian Piper

Sol Lewitt

Glenn Ligon

Jenny Holzer

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Pledge of Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the majority of the United States of America, and to the contaminated water for which it stands, one Nation under discrimination, paycheck to paycheck, with bad grades and cheap knockoff brands for all.

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I want a president

I want a dog for president. I want a president that sticks with its people no matter what or how bad the situation may be. I want a loyal and smart shepherd that protects me from the toughest enemies. I want a bloodhound with three hundred million scent receptors to be able to detect even the most distinct needs of the country. I want a husky for president to teach me bravery and leadership. I want a selfless golden retriever who can show me love and support, who I can trust for companionship whenever I need. I don’t want a president that has hatred towards his people. I don’t want a dog that creates enemies instead of friends. I don’t want a dog that hates other dogs because of their breed. I don’t want a human to be president. Humans see hate before love. I prefer a dog for president any day of the week.

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“Drone”,“What I heard about Iraq in 2005″, “Hypernormalization” response

“Drone” and “What I heard about Iraq in 2005″ are two pieces of unique writing that reflect times of hardship and war. Both are also written in specific ways gets the authors’ points across. While Weinberger talks repeatedly about what he heard during the war, Sharif ends incomplete thoughts about hardships and terror with bullet points. I found them both to be very similar even though “Drone” was from a first person point of view (a witness) and “What I heard about Iraq in 2005″ sounds like its consisted of rumors about the war. The similarities that I see are that for both, the war just seems to be dragging on and nothing is certain. They live in a world of terror and both works are gruesome and describe death. 

“Hypernormalization” by Adam Curtis talks about the struggles we face in a world full of lies and deceit. Weinberger does bring up how Bush made people believe that they were winning the war when in fact things were going downhill. He said he had heard about hope and he said he heard about despair. This uncertainty is what I think Curtis was trying to show due to the struggles caused by government and media schemes. The gif of time passing by above I think is a good representation for “Hypernormalization” because there are good, neutral, and bad images for each year, yet when I look at it I can’t help but feel puzzled. The gif below I thought was ironic because there is a soldier at war, but what is really happening?