For this project, we studied the wide range of things that essentially mean happiness or meaning. This included; existentialism, transcendentalism, food ethics, and many different personal philosophies. We immersed ourselves in this project by watching the movie Harold and Maude, reading numerous books; a Tale for the Time Being, Into the Wild, The Bluest Eye, Cat's Cradle, The Stranger, and by taking a look at many other resources. For my project, I created an inspirational video called "Cuida". In my video, I decided to feature the Guarijio idea of Cuida, Cuidarse, and the idea that they link together to create a hello that means take care in the indigenous language of Guarijio. My second, and deeper philosophy that I decided to take on was that we live our lives in moments, and we need to take them and take care of them, because they are the only things that we see when we look back on our life. As I traveled down to Mexico for my LINK Internship, I created many beautiful moments that I know I will always look back on, this was my main inspiration for this project.
Over the course of this project, I definitely gained many new insights. When I started this project before I went to Mexico, I was planning on taking various pictures that represented different meanings and happiness to different types of people, but after going to Mexico and having such beautiful experiences, meeting so many beautiful people, I decided that it doesn't matter what meaning looks like to you, because every different kind symbolizes the same thing. It symbolizes life and all of it's ups and downs. Because at the end, you won't be thinking of the bad moments, when all you could do was sit and pull your hair out, no, you won't be thinking of the times where everything went the opposite way of yours, no. You will be thinking about the times that you overcame those situations and saw beauty in the ugly. The times that you saw beauty in everything because it is quite amazing that a person can speak, breathe, listen, feel, in the big vast universe that we are yet to discover. This personal philosophy of mine really grew from the book, a Tale for the Time Being. This beautiful story bases itself upon a young Japanese girl who is very depressed. As the story of Nao's life unfolds, it is very obvious, that the way she lives her life is very unhealthy. Her father tries to kill himself, her mother is almost never there for her, she is bullied close to death at school, really, she has no reason why she shouldn't be depressed. But yet, Ruth Ozeki, the author, has a way of demonstrating the beautiful moments that Nao experiences. I distinctly remember when Nao travels with her hooker friend to a different part of the city, and she describes the different lifestyle. As Nao sees it, it is a different world, with people with all different colors of hair, shops for the most random materials, but somehow, she can fit herself into it. I believe that this is one of the moments that Nao thinks of whenever she is sad. That moment, of everything so unfamiliar, but still so wonderful, is a moment that gives her the hope that she needed to push through the weird life that she was living. This time of the book showed me a collage of weird, sometimes uncomfortable things, coming together to create one beautiful moment for a little girl who desperately needed it. Moments, these are our foundations, these are what we live for, and what we live on. These, are what we will carry with us to wherever our souls are headed.
After studying this topic and creating this project, I couldn't be happier. But still, I know that I cannot leave this feeling like I know everything there is to know. For this project, the path I chose, was based on humans, people, how they live. But there is still so much that I wonder about this crazy world, and I am sure that I will never stop wondering these things. How can this universe be so big yet hold us? How can this be it? There has to be more that just this universe. There has to be more than just a big galaxy of things that are constantly exploding and dying. How can I be of any importance to all of that? Is there even an importance to be? This project haws shown me the most important lesson when looking into all of these big, scary, questions. There is no answer to be discovered. There might never be.
"CUIDA" My visual and written portion of this project. Please Enjoy!
Rhetoric and Ideology Project
1. This project was based on the concepts of rhetoric and ideology. I actually was not here for this project, so I didn't learn about these in depth, but their definitions are:
Rhetoric-the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.
Ideology-a system of ideas and ideals, especially one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
For my project, I talked about being grateful, and its true meaning. After coming back from a 3rd world country, I found that I had many changes in my perspective, especially on this topic. I would sit in school here listening to people complaining ab0ut how they hated being there, or hated the outfit they were wearing, and I felt very saddened. I now realize that there is a lot more out there than just a life in a small American town. I showed all of what I saw in Ecuador, to use rhetoric and convince the audience what the true meaning of being grateful.
2. AS I stated earlier, my project incorporated rhetoric by giving some examples of things that we take advantage of in our day to day lives, and showed how compared to other countries and cultures, we have a lot to be grateful. I played the guilt card as some might say, but I really do think and hope that it made an influence on my audience.
3. I connected to this project by being able to do it on something that I am really interested in, and by showing my whole past 4 months to all of my friends, teachers, and family which was very satisfying.
4. The only thing that was challenging was not being here for this project and coming in with only a week left to exhibition. Other than that I really enjoyed this project. If I were to do it over again, I would just be here for it because it sounded very interesting.
5. I haven't really learned about rhetoric or ideology, but being a young american seeing other perspectives and cultures, then coming back into my own, I feel that I have learned a lot. I have a lot of ideas about soci0logy in the united states and it is very interesting to me to see and compare our values and those of other counties.