Kurt Vonnegut explores a few themes in his short story “Unready to Wear”: Humanity, progress, and fear rank among the most prevalent. However, he also explores the idea that the human body is holding humanity back, that a consciousness free of flesh would finally be free in the ultimate sense of the word. I think that this sentiment is shared by most major religions. Hinduism considers salvation to be becoming One with deity and losing sense of self, including ones body. Most Christian sects believe that in the after life, humanity will liberated from death and disease by being separated from their bodies, believing that ones body is the root of these pains. This is (as far as I understand) also the case in Islam. Our doctrine differs. We believe that bodies can be consecrated and perfected, and (more importantly) that having a body is an integral part of what…
The Data of Humanity
If Professor Croxall asks, I’m not a procrastinator. I finished my reading and my project well before it was due, and I’m typing this blog post with plenty of time to spare. I definitely did NOT waste several hours by playing with graphs on gapminder.org instead of doing the several pages worth of essays that I have due at the end of the week. No one is that irresponsible, right? If anyone else asks, then I’ll admit it: I am a procrastinator, and I spent a lot of time messing with the graphs on gapminder.org. Professor Croxall might give me a pass on this one too, because in Ramsey-esque style, I think my screwing around was it’s own form of hermeneutic. Gapminder is just a graph of economics, comparing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with average life expectancy in any country and any given year. You can see, over time, how…
Many Eyes Make Light Work
BEHOLD! Our presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17KZIoeCXqbJE26U-evsIt7HgqVp_TrqL7Dj2lDJ4ZNg/edit#slide=id.g101fb19784f_1_408
Sound of Music
Greatest Showman
The Wizard of Oz
Chocolate Pudding Pie
In her ever-growing enthusiasm for Halloween, my wife decided to make a chocolate pudding pie, with a white chocolate spider web design on top. The spider web design was new, but the chocolate pudding pie was not. She’s made it many times before, and it always turns out perfectly: rich, creamy, deeply chocolatey, with a perfect flaky crust. This time, I offered my help as she made the final stirs to the batch of pudding while it was on the stove. She handed me the spoon and took the pot off the burner, and told me to keep stirring. The position was uncomfortable for me, leaning far over the stove to avoid the still-hot burner. She said I could put the pot back on the burner to make it easier, since we were just about finished. Something went wrong, though, in my attempt to help. The pudding never set. We…
Art: Copying the Nebulous
I play guitar. Or rather, I play as much guitar as any other twenty three year old college student who says they play guitar. I’m not particularly good, but I grew up playing music and I used to practice a lot more than I do now. And, perhaps like any other twenty three year old guitar player, I’ve tried writing songs. I used to write songs more when I had a lot of time, especially on my mission. In writing the songs, I felt that I was more creative than I had ever been. Without forms of media, I spent my days experiencing life and my evenings songwriting. I had about a half a notebook full, ranging from Christian acoustic to moody homesick songs: perfect for a missionary. When I got home and finally had access to the vast library of music that I used to listen to, I took…
Gaming and Identity
A few months ago I was able to build my own computer. It was a big step for me: I’d dreamed about it for years since seeing my brother build his own. No longer would I play games on my crappy old laptop and deal with bad renders or an overheating CPU. With a beautiful new computer, playing video games has become a much bigger part of my life now than it was before. Over the summer, when my only responsibility was working to afford rent, I spent hours each day playing Apex Legends (a popular first person shooter similar to Call of Duty) with my brothers. I’d never devoted that much time to a single game. The closest I came was Faster Than Light, but that was because (besides its incredible gameplay) it had pixelated graphics and I could play it for a few minutes in between classes. This…
The Negative Space of Digital Humanities
In Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay entitled “The Humanities, Done Digitally,” she wrestles with the arduous task of defining a new field. Any other field, from English to economics, has the benefit of a long tradition of discourse which can help define a field. This discourse provides a structure which allows any work to be judged and included or excluded from the field. The digital humanities, however, has no such benefit. Fitzpatrick writes that the term only originated in the early 2000s, although its predecessor, “humanities computing,” had been around for a few decades before that. In any case, the digital humanities is a field in its infancy, and the mere naming of the field was done “specifically out of an attempt to make ‘humanities computing’ […] more palatable to humanists in general” (Fitzpatrick). Thus, digital humanities has struggled to define itself not only in name, but in substance since its conception.…
Dubliners: Disappointment
I struggle to grasp the meanings of short stories; I’m analytical in an Economics sense, but hardly in a Humanities sense. Reading the first 6 short stories in Dubliners was interesting, but I hardly grasped the meaning in each story. It wasn’t until talking to my wife (a former English major turned Editing major, and lover of Irish literature) that I started to connect more dots. Although these stories are different in plot and characters, they each end with a sense of disappointment in the end. In “Araby”, our protagonist finds a fair that is dilapidated and dark, a reflection of himself and his search to please his love. In “Two Gallants”, Lenehan is granted a gold coin tainted with betrayal, despite his hopes to leave his life of treachery. Through talking to my wife, I’ve learned that these stories in some sense reflect the Irish identity. Ireland is distinct…
