The Self

Daughter of Chaucer. Clementine Kruczynski / Kate Winslet (Eternal Sunshine of a spotless mind) manip, digital print. 4 March 2009.  Online Image. Flikr 21 February 2010.

Question #1. Is there a self that I can control? Everyone is capable of controlling ones self. It is important that people realize that you have control over the decisions that you make. There are some cases where a mental problem will keep someone from making certain decisions. People need to realize that they have to power to make decision. 

Question #2. What forces shape our sense of self? The different situations and the people that you are around play a major role in shaping our sense of self. People can act different around certain people, therefore some people have many versions of the self. This can be a problem because if you are pretending to be more than one person you could hurt other people. 

Question #1. The film begins with the end of the film. It starts off with joel waking up after he has already gone through the whole mind erasing. This is important because the audience doesn't really know that it is after the fact until the end. He woke up in fear and that shows the audience that he is fearful after everything that has happened to him. 

Question #2. What was the central conflict of the film? The central conflict was that joel and clementine both wanted to have each other erased from their mind, but through the process they realize that they really don't want it to happen. Through Joel's mind erasing process he is trying as hard as he can to not forget everything that he had with clementine. 

The Social Me

The song "complicated", by Avril Lavigne fits into our topic about the "social me". In the song she is explaining to a boy that he acts so much different when he is with other people. She does not understand why he has to put on an act and be a totally different person. This fits into the social me because when you are around certain people you feel that you have to act a certain way. When he is around her he can act normal, but around his friends and other people he is a completely different person. This song ties into Order and Chaos because you think that it might be easy to put on a different act for the different people you are with, but it can cause a lot of problems when the people who really know you see the differences that you have made. The people who know how you really act might not like the other you and it can ruin friendships or relationships.

Why do you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you're
Acting like you're somebody else gets me frustrated
Life's like this, you
And you fall and you crawl
And you break and you take
What you get and you turn it into
Honesty Promise me I'm never gonna find you fake it

You come over unannounced
Dressed up like you're something else
Where you are and
Where you sat, you see
You're making me
Laugh out
When you strike a pose
Take off all your preppy clothes
You know
You're not fooling anyone

Lavigne, Avril. "Complicated." Let Go. 2002.

The Ethnography of Speaking: A Micro-Analysis

Notfreelance. Typeset Dialect 1. December 15, 2008. Online Image. Flickr. February 7, 2009.

1. Describe a small speech community to which you belong to: What languages and/or dialects do you regularly use(=the code), and what are the social norms for their use? Note the kinds of interactions you all engage in over one "typical" day: What are the topics discussed, the settings, the purposes, the "key," the types or genres of speech, etc?

The Setting and Scene: I was with a group of my friends in one of our dorm rooms. The four of us all happen to be from different states. One from New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and I am from Massachusetts. We all have little things that we say differently. The type of conversation for the day was mostly about the super bowl that is taking place tonight.
Key: There was an all around positive tone until we started to talk about who we wanted to win the game. three of out of the four people wanted to same team to win, so the one person for the opposing team's tone started to change. They began to get all defensive, and they were not happy that the rest of the group was making jokes.
Instrumentalities: Sometimes when I start talking very fast a little bit of a Boston accent starts to come out, but when i am talking normal people say that I don't have one at all. One of my friends works at a restaurant and she started to talk about how the biggest seller there is a "hoagie". I had no idea what she was talking about. In MA and CT we call them subs. The girls from NY and PA say thing like "callage" and "psychalagy". They don't really pronounce their "o".
Genre: All of my friends have different sayings that they have learned from the places where they live. My friend from PA calls a funeral a viewing, and I have never heard anyone call it that. In Boston people use the word "wicked" to enforce that something was good or bad. The first time I said "wicked" a friend thought I was into the play wicked and it came from that.

Everyone has their own way of speaking. People have their own dialect depending on where they are from. From being with a group of people from different places and watching the films about the different dialects it is funny to see that even though we all speak the same language there are different dialects everywhere you go.

Professor Lovett's Lecture of The Brain

Hurleygurley. The Lime Jello Brain. 06 February 2005. Online Image. Flikr. 02 February 2010.

From going to Professor Lovett's lecture I was able to learn a lot about the brain that I didn't know. I have taken psychology class, and I have learned all of the functions of the brain. Going to the lecture taught me all of the ways that the brain can be damaged and make a person different. What I thought was interesting was the man that had the rod go through his frontal lobe. You would think that it hit his brain and he died, but it shocked me to hear that he lived and he is fine except his personality has completely changed. He is now like a different person. The frontal lobe controls the personality. I have learned a lot about the "self" in this past week of class. From Franklin's article I learned that you need to come up with a list of virtues and fix all of your problems. From the brain video and the lecture I learned that you might think you know one's self, but it can change instantly when your personality is changed.

Virtues

In Franklins reading he said that in order to find the self you must improve all of your faults until they are no longer faults. I think that this is the wrong way to do it. If you concentrate on one thing that you want to change then you will have a lot more success. If people try to fix all of their problems at once then things could become very chaotic. In Juhan's article he talks about forgetting what has happened in the past and thinking about what is going on now. This is good and bad. It is good to leave things behind in the past, but it also could be bad because there are many things from our past that were happy and if we think about them, then it could encourage or future.

For my list of virtues for the week some of the things I decided to do were try and minimize the amount of junk food that I eat. I tried to limit myself so I was not constantly picking up chips and candy. I also made myself go to the gym everyday of the week. Another problem i had was waiting until the last minute to do work. I tried to make myself finish everything in advance so i could relax at night.