Profile update and Reading Response:

I’ve touched base with Mary Ellen and we are meeting on Friday for our first interview. I’m a little worried about having a draft due on Tuesday. Hopefully the interview will get me a good start and we’ll have lots of opportunity after workshops to do more interviews.

Reading from our texts gave me a much clearer picture of the profile should look like and what it should be about. I was struggling with what the story should be about, and now have better ideas. I have a list of thing to think about when writing and what to think about in the interview. I love the idea of “ask stupid questions” that has come up a few times.

I liked the Virgina Tech piece, Virgina Tech Struggles to Recover From Shootings. It gave an enlightening profile of a campus struck by tragedy as they try to “return to normal.” Quotes were used sparingly and were effective. I like the piece on a personal level because it got off of the media’s emphasis on the motive, what happened the day of, and the horrifying stories of the survivors, but rather focuses on the place, and those who still have to live their daily lives. It also used many techniques the reading talks about- a could see the beginning, middle, and end. Quotes were effectively used, and there was a flow and rhythm that kept you reading.

I chose not to read a lot of the other articles on the Cho and the gun and VTech, for personal reasons.

Home Is Where the Bed Is

I’ve called many places home in my short 22 years. After moving to Florida from Michigan at the age of five, my parents continually rented houses. Growing up we spent our summers in Charlevoix, Michigan, and the school year in Naples, Florida. Luckily for me, after moving to Naples, we didn’t move cities again for seventeen years. The Florida houses were all in Naples during this time; I did not have to worry about changing school and making new friends. For 10 years we had the same summer house, then we decided to just do summer apartment rentals. In Florida, we would move rental houses every August. The routine usually went: August, move into new house, in June, board up the Florida house for hurricanes, pack for the summer, pack up the car, close the house, drive to Michigan, open the other house (or move stuff in from the storage unit); and in August close the summer house (or move back into storage), go back to Florida, open up the house, pack it all up, and move into another house.

Then one day Dad came home with the best news I had probably ever heard. I was about ten years old. We’d finally bought a house in Florida- no more yearly rentals. My parents had not owned a house since I was two years old. They’d finally done it. We were going to live in one place for a long time. We wouldn’t have to pack up so many times each year. I was allowed to paint my closet purple, put the little stars on my ceiling and put as many nails in the wall as mom would allow. I couldn’t believe the news.

I have lived in around 25 different homes now, but I can’t even recall them all any more (we only lived in the house we bought for five years). Yet I can only blame myself for a handful of the different homes; I happily went out of state for college, and eagerly went abroad for school twice. All of these occasions requiring more packing, more moving, more “homes.” I was encouraged to be independent, and grew up loving the idea of traveling and seeing the world. I was independent early on; I loved the privacy of my own room. The worst punishment my parents very gave me for misbehaving was taking the knob from my door so I could close the door to my private domain no longer. My older sister loved this; she would barge in, at random times, not only scaring the crap out of me, but invading my most sacred bubble. In this space, my favorite place has always been my bed. It has always provided me a sense of comfort I never fully understood.

Sitting on a bungalow porch on a beach in southern Thailand on study abroad, the student fellow for our program and I had a long chat about how you never really know “home” until you leave it. The conversation started about knowing the environmental situations, but as the sun set on the beach, we talked about what home means to us. This is when I began to realize that I could be at home anywhere in the world as long as I had a bed. The physical space did not matter. Home is where my heart is.

While one of my homes is always where my family is, I found that when I moved away to college, I needed to find a way to make my space my home so that I can find the security that comes with being “at home”. For many, this sense of comfort and relaxation is provided by the physical space of their house, I have found that sense in the space of my bed. When I lost the space of having my own room in college and travels, my bed began to signify my home space. A simple space of a bed provides me comfort, security, and relaxation. I love to curl up on my bed, and read, do my homework, or chat with my friends on the phone. I even sit on my bed with my laptop and wireless to do my best thinking. Bed signifies the opportunity to close my eyes on the problems of today and open your eyes again with a new opportunity for tomorrow. As an extremely vivid dreamer, bed provides an escape with from the realities of this world. Bed can be a place where I go to experience immense pleasure, or where I go when worn out from immeasurable pain. Through all these relocations, I have found that I can anywhere where my bed can be found, I willingly call “home.” I can quickly settle in, add touches of myself to the space, and it is home.

With my ability to make nearly any place my home, I have an advantage that allows me to adjust quickly in new situations. I am not afraid of going places alone, because I know I’ll be able to find home there as long as I have my bed. Now that I’m getting ready to start “my own life,” moving is something I think about a lot. Despite the fact that I can make many places home, I’m ready to move in June and stay put for more than one year.

Which Story to Write

A friend showed me this article, and I had to share it. I find it rather disturbing. It’s about a sushi restaurant that offers this special sushi platter that is served ON a model (woman of course). The writer notes that, “To an onlooker, the most disturbing aspect of her job might be Hadaka’s rule that forbids a model to eat the sushi that rests inches away from her mouth.” If I was an onlooker, I think seeing that a woman was being used as the plate, trying to stay still while “lying supine and being poked by chopsticks” would be the most disturbing for aspect for me! It’s not a narrative article, but it’s worth a read:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/dining/18nake.html

This weeks readings and the latest event at Virginia Tech made me think about the focus of journalism articles and how to choose what story to write. While I see the need to present Imus’s story as The Power that Was did, I think we’re just giving him what he wants. The story from the NYTimes brought up a point I loved and made me think- the need to tell the women’s story and stop focusing on Imus’s. In the same way we are giving the shooter what he wants by talking about him on the news and not his victims. Reading the selections from the book about how to pick a story topic, I see the dilemma in which story to write. The author of The Power that Was does take a new stand on an already popular story, but I didn’t find the style very intriguing. I “heard” neither Imus’s voice nor the author’s conveyed in the story. I also think that we were focusing too much on Imus, and that’s part of what didn’t interest me.

So how does one decide on which story to write? Do you write a story about someone you don’t like, or the “bad guy” because it’ll make a good story (and one that people want to hear)? How does one decide?

I had not heard the whole story of the Virgina Tech incident before last night, so watched a primetime special (I think it was 20/20). They did a nice job talking about the victims and their story and focusing less on the killer. What was ironic was this news broadcast talked about how media coverage of similar events leads to copycat incidents (so how were they being any better?) and how media needs to be careful about its coverage. I caught the last end of Oprah tonight and they were talking about a similar issue- making sure to honor the loved ones lost and not about the killer. But people do want to know about the killer and what made him do this. So do we write the heartfelt story about the victims? Or the one about the “bad guy,” which in many ways is giving him what he wants? This really makes me see the struggle in picking a good story.

I loved reading the handout article too. I thought it was very well written because you strongly heard the voice of the 10-year-old boy and still heard that of the author’s. It was also so fantastic to read about families that are working to combat gender norms and issues of sex and sexuality in their young children.

SBlogs

Kat asked in her blog if anyone had a soldier blog. I was interested in reading one as well so I Googled “Iraq soldier blog.” Turns out there are many interesting soldier bogs out there.

The first link took me to site that has links to many of the individuals blogs. Interestingly, soldier blogs even have their own designation (according to this site): sblog ("s" for soldier). The web page author designates who is writing the blog (deployed soldier, from someone who has since been lost in combat, from family, from a veteran, etc.). Here is the site:

http://www.aapavatar.net/blogs.htm

Skimming though them, I came across this blog, who’s comments I found interesting: http://www.bootsinbaghdad.blogspot.com/

He has a link to photos and multiple videos. This is the one video I watched:
http://www.bootsinbaghdadfilms.blogspot.com/

The title is what intrigued me: Boots in Baghdad: A Grunts Life. That says a lot to me about how this soldier must feel. And the videos caught me off guard. The one above is of returning fire on enemy troops. Studying sociology and psychology, the soldier’s language you hear totally astounded me. I wasn’t really that shocked, just caught off guard. And it is shocking to me to actually hear and see this, rather than just reading about it. Anyway, you don’t see much in the video. It’s mostly black with the sparks of gun fire. But you do hear, very clearly, from someone right near the camera, “Light the mother fuckers up.” Wow. In social psychology last quarter, we briefly studied war, war-mentality, war-training, and killing. Yes, you are trained to dehumanize the enemy, that’s seemingly the only way war will work, but I was still shocked to hear as a civilian. And when you really think about it, that men on the other side of the fence could be dieing from the gun fire we’re watching, makes my stomach hurt. Don’t get me wrong, I completely support our troops, even if I don’t support the policy. I do not for one minute think anything less of the soldier who yelled that. I take issue with our training of soldiers.

The whole thing that this was all made possible for me to see, from the boots in Baghdad, is an amazing conquest of technology though. At the same time, I’m not sure how I feel about it. Should I be able to watch gun-fire and war so openly? Without any training or preparation? But this type of media I think works for the armed forces. After all, it does look remarkable like a video game.

Zoo Blogs

So this week we were asked to share a blog we enjoy reading. I don’t read blogs. Ever. I never got into that whole livejournal thing, and never really found them interesting. But I never looked. So I started searching for one that I might enjoy. Having just 6 and a half hours of Frelon tech rehearsals, I was drawing blanks about anything I might actually like reading a blog about. So I Googled the first thing that came to mind- “panda blog” and oh the joys I found there. Let me start with a short background of me and pandas. It started when I was 5 and a friend of the family gave me a stuffed panda puppet for my birthday. I really liked this animal, was drawn to pandas I found in stores, and asked for more. It quickly spiraled out of control. I now have way too many pandas. But it became my signature. Every time my family and friends saw pandas, they thought of me. I to this day receive goofy things mailed from around the world, “Saw this and thought of you.” So how could I tell everyone I didn’t want any more pandas? I had a guaranteed way to make sure that my family and friends thinks of me frequently. So I stuck with it. And I do love them, they are great, adorable animals. And I do keep tabs on the pandas in captivity here in the US, as well as the two in the Chiang Mai, Thailand zoo that I visited multiple times on study abroad. Therefore, I thought I should see if they have a blog. Sure enough- there are many panda blogs. They are very strange for the most part. Many are written with zoologists and the zoo keepers. Lots of entries are all about mating, assimilating to new environments, or just something new in their environment, or about what they did that day (keeping in mind that all pandas ever really do is eat and sleep and maybe get about 30 minutes per day of play time in with their roommate). The first link below is my favorite. It keeps tabs on lots of the other panda news cycles and it’s entertaining. The second one is more serious from the San Diego Zoo- but how serious can you be when you write a blog about how one panda climbed a tree in his pen, only to find that below, in another pen, was his brother? (In case you were wondering, the bears then carried on a “conversation” for a few minutes and are expected to climb trees to meet each other again soon.)

All information about pandas blog

San Diego Zoo Panda Blog

As for my remarks on the writing process:

I did not like it. I got so caught up in writing a “paper” that I feel my final product is crap. I’m also not fond of the fact that everyone gets to read it if they wish. Yet, it is a very good growing experience for me. I also couldn’t decide what bit of the story to run with. I wasn’t sure I had more to say about any one of the parts. Marin had suggested that I run with this idea of bed as home. But I couldn’t make it into a very good metaphor. I didn’t end up saying a whole lot on that matter. I’m also not really sure still what all this really means for me. I’m also couldn’t decide how much of a background to give. For instance, do I give more information about the major moves? Do I explain more about why we moved? I know it needs a lot more work and I look forward to hearing what everyone in my group will have to say in workshop tomorrow.

Personal Narrative Draft

I’ve called many places home in my short 22 years. Luckily for me, most of the places were in just a few cities- we moved houses, but I was able to stay in the same schools most of the time. I have lived in around 25 different homes, but I actually can’t even recall them all any more. I seem to remember a house we lived in for a short time in between two other houses. I know what city it was in, but can’t remember where it was located within the city.

I can only blame myself for a handful of the different homes; I have gone abroad for school twice, and happily went out of state for college. All of these occasions requiring more packing, more moving, more “homes.”

People have very drastically different ideas of what constitutes home and what they are willing to call home. I found in college that many people hated to call their dorm rooms “home.” People who have lived in the same place for many years, and they equate their sense of home and that security with the physical building. In college, I found many friends who did not decorate their dorm space, and do little to make it their own. For me, I have found that I can anywhere where my bed can be found, I willingly call “home.” I can quickly settle in, add touches of myself to the space, and it is home.

As a result of constantly moving, I find myself attached to my material memories and belongings. My mom calls me a pack-rat; I prefer to think of it as keeping many memories. I also find myself unable to pack lightly when I travel. Which I think has to do with my desire to make where ever I am in the world feel like my home. I had moved most of my belonging to Michigan from Florida by my sophomore year of school and was quick to decorate my apartment in Thailand. Sitting on a bungalow porch on a beach in southern Thailand, I talked at length with someone about how you never really know “home” until you leave it. This is when I began to realize that I could be at home in the world as long as I had a bed. Even in my current small cluttered apartment that I hate I have been able to find a sense of home. I put up some artwork, set up my bed, and find in the space a sense of safety and escape- as much as I hate the space itself.

Even as a child I loved the privacy of my own room. The worst punishment my parents very gave me was taking the knob from my door so I couldn’t close my door to my private domain any longer. Having a bed represents that sense of privacy for me. I would love to curl up on my bed, and read, do my homework, or chat with my friends on the phone. As I travel more and more, and lost the space of having my own room, my bed began to signify my home space. A simple space of a bed provides me comfort, security, and relaxation. Bed signifies the opportunity to close my eyes on the problems of today and open your eyes again with a new opportunity for tomorrow. As an extremely vivid dreamer, bed provides an escape with from the realities of this world. Bed can be a place where I go to experience immense pleasure, or where I go when worn out from immeasurable pain. You can easily decorate your bed, adding touches of yourself to the space. While one of my homes is always where my family is, I found that when I moved away to college, I needed to find a way to make my space my home so that I can find that security. For many, this sense of comfort and relaxation is provided by their entire space of their house, I have found that sense in the space of my bed.

Now that I’m getting ready to start “my own life” and in eventually (in a long while) my own family, this is something I think about a lot. I’m crazy good and packing boxes and cars full of stuff. And I don’t need to be able to see out the back of the car to drive. Moving does have its benefits. More than anything I’m ready to move and stay put for more than one year. I know that with my passion for travel, I will continue to have many more homes in my day. But with the ideas of “growing up” and starting a family, I debate whether it would be more beneficial for our family to move for a while, or do I want to plant my roots firmly from the beginning? I wonder where my next home will be with my graduation quickly approaching- choosing where to move can be a big decision. I do love to travel, but after so many years of packing everything up and moving at the end of every year, I look forward greatly to the opportunity to settle down for more than twelve months, but where do I go?

So I sit here and try to write my paper and find myself stuck, so turn to the class for maybe some advice or guidance:

I find that just by knowing that I have to write “an assignment,” I automatically turn to my sociology/scholarly paper writing style (rather than a more interesting journalistic fashion). Does anyone have any advice on how to keep the writing interesting? Because right now the writing is very dry.

Thanks! Have a great weekend.

I'm trying to experiment with photos on my blog.

Home around the world...
As one way to show aspects of all my different homes, I'm sharing a collage of photos of me in the places I call home.

So here I go! It’s my first blog for class. I’m still not sure about this whole thing and will have to work on it a lot more this week.

I’m realizing how beneficial this class will truly be for me in my career (hopefully with a women’s organization, non-profit, or health clinic). I have a habit of not letting anyone read anything I write (aside from close family and friends for proof-reading purposes), so this whole blogging idea is a big step for me. I think it’ll be a great skill to have in my choice of career fields. I’m hoping to have confidence to be able to write for newsletters, even in mass emails and other such form of communication.

I have been touched and inspired by so many of the stories we read for this week. I find them engaging, and moving. The article that most spoke to me was Pattern of Migration by Trish O’Kane. This piece really spoke to me, mostly I think because I could relate so well. The writing brought out the voice of the author. While she has had no where near a mundane everyday life, she’s not writing about all the adventures she’s had in her life. She just fighting with this idea of “home” and brings the reader with her. Banaszynski says in Stories Matter (pp. 5), “Stories are histories. Write and edit and tell yours with accuracy and understanding and context and with unwavering devotion to the truth.” I think O’Kane does a beautiful job of that by not giving too much detail about all the back stories (which I would have loved to hear more about), but rather states enough to educate the reader of her history, give her story the necessary context, and drive at the truth of “home.”

I was so moved by this piece, and it made me think so much about my own life, that I’ve been thinking of using this idea for my personal narrative. It just seems so unoriginal to me: You mean another college senior is troubled by what “home” means to her? Therefore, I’m going to just grapple with it now, here in my blog: Up until last year, I’ve lived in more houses/apartments/rooms than years I’d been alive. This year ties me up 21 houses/apartments/rooms and 21 years, but with another move in a few months and another birthday, seems as thought I’ll never get a lead in years. While my story is not the same as O’Kane’s, I understood her sense of not knowing where home is. Growing up, I have always had many places I can home. Home was where ever my family was- where I could find my older sister and parents and friends. Home was also where my bed was, once I started living by myself. I have always loved my own space, and I love my bed. So dorms, my current tiny rat-whole of an apartment, have been my “home” as well. Home was never a house to me. I never understood that idea really. I have many places I call “home” at once. Luckily for me though, in all these moves my family never moved far. We mostly stayed in the same town with a few exceptions. Now that I’m getting ready to start “my own life” and in eventually (in a long while) my own family, this is something I think about a lot. Do I want to move? I’m crazy good and packing boxes and cars full of stuff to make the most stuff fit in the space. And I don’t need to be able to see out the back of the car to drive. It does have its benefits. Or do I want to plant my roots firmly? I can empathize with O’Kane’s struggles to find home. I struggle with where I want to be next year. More than anything I’m ready to move and stay put for more than one year. My older sister (who is a psychologist, by the way) and I often talk about what kind of influence all the moving had on us. For instance, I blame my pack-rat nature on that I was always moving, so attached myself to more “stuff” than necessary as comforts. My sister, on the other hand, will never leave Chicago. The site of boxes and moving vans and the mere thought of moving makes both of us both sick to our stomachs. Not is a sad, nostalgic way, in an “Oh god, here we go again…” way. I know I get my idea of home from my parents. When my Dad dies, he wants to be cremated and scattered and sea, and my mom wants to be where he is. We don’t even have a “homeland” we have each other.

I’ll wrap up this week’s blog with a few questions I’ve been thinking about:

What makes narrative journalism, journalism, and not ethnography or autobiography, or creative nonfiction short stories? What defines the journalism aspect especially when you’re writing about your self? And how should I approach writing the profile and explanatory pieces differently than writing an ethnography or personal history for sociology?

How am I ever going to keep a submission to around 800 words? This blog is already over the word limit and its just a blog! I’m truly worried about word limits. As an HDSR major, I’ve been trained in a lot of ways to be long (detailed usually, but extremely long and wordy). So this whole idea of telling the whole story in just a few pages worries me. Something I’m really going to have to work on.