everything in my life can relate to harry potter

so today, besides learning that dr. sexson bleeds green, we also talked about there was actually literature before literacy - it was just spoken. it sounds like an oxymoron, which oral literature should sound like, but the concept makes sense. obviously, people had a way of communicating before they had a way to write things down - and why not call that literatrure? they told stories, gave speeches, probably did some simple math (i'm sure they chicken counted on their fingers, though!) and professed love - all things that we do today using writng. ok, maybe giving speeches is still an oral tradition, but that doesn't mean that minutes after a speech is made, the full transcript is available online for everyone to read....
i just like that we're able to push the boundries in this class, and take the written word and the spoken word for more than their face value.

we also came up with nine things in the room to help us remember the 9 muses, so here's my list:
thermostat: thalia (because who doesn't laugh when they adjust the temp.?)
blackboard: calliope (epic things should be in chalk)
projector screen: urania (because its dark when you look at the stars, and the lights need to be off to see whats on the screen)
quiet desk: polyhymnia (that biznatch needs to shut up)
projector: terpsichore (when you dance, you project your skills for other people to see)
old desk: clio (it's old. history is old.)
bullitin board: euterpe (poetry should be posted)
"let it snow": melpomene (cold makes me sad)
weird f thing: erato (it looks kindof phalic. just sayin)

the odds of me remembering the names are low...but maybe next week i'll be able to. i still can't remember anyone but calliope without looking. i think i'm going to associate the muses with harry potter characters instead, because i know hogwarts better than my own family....
calliope: hermione (both have weirdo names)
clio: professor trelawny (ms. cleo and sybil both claim to know the future)
erato: harry (i want to make wizard babies with him)
euterpe: ron (i just wanted ron and harry to be next to eachother in line)
melpomene: malfoy (what a tragic prick)
polyhymnia: luna lovegood (she's kindof sing-songy)
terpsichore: neville (he gets sick/hurt alot)
thalia: hagrid (he's funny, and he might have a thyroid problem)
urania: snape. because he's an anus.

ok, that's as far as i'm going today, but here's one final thought: so, in the mormon church, people give testimonies - like, on how much they love god, or how they got their calling to go on a mission, etc.....i wonder if they know about the whole testicle thing. luckily i know alot of morms, so i shall let them know promptly! i bet joseph smith never saw this one coming...lolz!

a whole new world

so all of this talk about scheherazade on monday got me to thinking...about aladdin. i don't know if anyone else was as obsessed with that movie as i was, but let's just say i once attempted to memorize all of the words to "friend like me" - you know, the song genie sings to introduce to the audience to his awesomeness...best summed up as "EXTREME COSMIC POWER!...itty bitty living space." anyway, at the beginning of the song, genie says "now ali baba had them 40 thieves, scheherazade had a thousand tales" ....and that concludes that little nugget of info about how Disney attempted to incorporate knowledge into my third favorite movie.

alright - i have googled curiosity, and this is what i have found (after i got sidetracked and read about benjamin button for ten minutes):
Curiosity is an emotion that causes natural inquisitive behaviour such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and many animal species. The term can also be used to denote the behavior itself being caused by the emotion of curiosity. As this emotion represents a drive to know new things, curiosity is the fuel of science and all other disciplines of human study.
props to whoever did this entry for spelling "behaviour" in the best way ever. my favourite colour is greene.
i find it interesting that "curiosity killed the cat," but it's also responsible for fueling science and all other disciplines of human study. that's a pretty sweet reputation you have there, curiosity. a creative killer. i find that curiosity is also why i talk so much - i can just tell that people are curious about me, so i let them know without making them embarrass themselves by asking me why i continue to be such a hot mess. and of course, with out curiosity, we would cease to communicate and ask questions and learn. so basically, that cat got a raw deal, because he was probably onto something awesome.
i also decided to look up jordano bruno, because i thought jordano was an awesome name, and i'm pretty sure i'm going to start adding an o to my bf's name from now on...and then i found out that it's spelled giordano. oh well, guess i'll just have to convince jordan to spell his name giordan.
basically, he was uber smart, and interested in the universe and memory, and he was burned at the stake...i get the feeling most of the intelligent people burned at the stake were a result of low self-esteem on the part of the pope and latter-day evangelicals. like, "oh crap, that girodano dude is on to something that seems like it might be true....lets label him a heretic and burn him. promptly." and so we end up with another martyr for curiosity. damn cat killing popes.
just like how jafar wanted to kill aladdin for getting the lamp - i mean, it was ultimately curiosity that led aladdin to follow disguised jafar into the desert, just to get swallowed up by the sand tiger. then abu's greediness got them the lamp, and the desire to love jasmine got him to the palace. so, the combination of curiosity, greed, love, and of course, a genie to guide you along with his oral wisdom (bee yourself!) will bring you the best. life. ever.

so i'm still trying to find something in the three books for class that really pop out as provocative, but all i'm finding so far is a lot of things that i don't particularly want to remember. ha! but hopefully something will scandalize me sooner or later....although the future looks bleak for ong.

p.s. if you want to be taken to a dream world of magic, hop on your carpet and click here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd07uvkTeKo

memory timeshares

my memory cabin is like my self control around gummy bears. nonexistant. i really don't think i can have just one place to go to - i have like 10 places where i like to relax and think about stuff, and as far as an old abandoned church is concerned...well, that just seems drafty and creepy to me. i feel most comfortable storing my thoughts in different places - my self loathing memories are reserved for the spot in front of the mirror in my room. my aggressive memories are in my workout brain. my calm memories are stored in my "lets take a walk" brain, my organizational memories are in my bed, at approximately right before i fall asleep, and i know my super happy memories are stored in my mind all over the place, but they usually come to me when i'm spooning. spooning evokes happy memories. anyway, i'm not sure if i can build a memory cabin, because i like the way my memories are all scattered and kept under different roofs. it's more like i have a bunch of memory timeshares that i make annual payments to in order to reap the benefits.

but i do have one place that i think about alot, and i hope my memories from it never fade entirely - it's the house i grew up in on wagon boss rd. it's on a double cul-de-sac, and it's on an acre and a half of the best yard ever. tons of trees, a hill perfect for rolling down in the summer and mini-sledding down in the winter. i had a chartreuse room, a hot pink room, and a basement where all my barbies lived. 16 foot high vaulted ceilings and a piano that was so out of tune, the blind dude who came to fix it one day pretty much laughed for an hour while he tried to make it not suck. i took lessons on that piano. maybe that's why when i play hot cross buns, it sounds more like a dying seal. anyway, this house is the bomb. and i say "is" because i can still see it every time i go to my parents present home sweet home - it's literally through the trees. see, we loved the neighborhood so dang much, we moved back - only to a different, but equally awesome house (not as many trees, but whatever). but, because i have a life and i don't live with my parents, i don't see my old house as much as i'd like. and i'd like to make it my memory cabin, but i know the people who moved into it after we left messed with it and remodeled my dream house into an abomination of 8434 wagon boss rd. now every time i think of my house, i also think about what it might look like on the inside now that new freaks live there. ok, that's not fair, i don't know if they're freaks - but i do know the dad punched one of our beloved cul-de-sac neighbors over a dog problem. for seriously. blasphemy! they don't deserve our house!

so if my memory cabin is currently a work in progress, i guess i'll talk about what we did in class on friday....well, we talked more about how plato hated the idea of writing because it makes your memory muscles get flabby - which, actually, i don't necessarily agree with - in this day and age, writing is how we remember (along with massive amounts of pictures posted on facebook), so for us, aren't we actually flexing our memory muscles? take that plato - i totally p'wnd your theory. go pontificate somewhere else, old man.

i also took some notes about....oh, hey, there are the lyrics to a paramore song written in some awesome purple pen...whoops! guess i wasn't paying attention like i should have, and now i can't really remember what we talked about. but i do know i'm still kindof confused on what we're supposed to be reading, and what our reading groups are supposed to be doing. i'm in group 3, so that means i'm presenting stuff on chapter 4, right?

i guess my goals for this week are to find out what's going on, find a cabin in the woods, and find a better way to take notes ;)
p.s. i've had the business of misery stuck in my head for like a year - seriously, it won't leave. i've written the lyrics to it so many times during so many classes. dang you, paramore! and your catchy lyrics!

Whoa! Tangent.

"Aristotle's theory of memory and reminiscence is based on the theory of knowledge which he expounds in his De anima. The perceptions brought in by the five senses are first treated or worked upon by the faculty of imagination, and it is the images so formed which become the material of intellectual faculty. Imagination is the intermediary between perception and thought" (Yates 32).

I really like this idea of imagination preceding knowledge - it's like we can't know anything until we've imagined it in our own head first. I might see a squirrel with a nut and at first just see a hungry squirrel. But then I can see him returning to his little home in a big tree, bringing the nut to share with his little squirrel babies and his loving squirrel wife. Then, they'll all sit together at their little table and eat together, while planning a family picnic out on the lawn of some big house with the best trees and nuts in town. All of the sudden, I have a thought to write a children's story about a squirrel family. Genius. Ok, so I don't actually "know" that the squirrel has a life beyond gathering nuts, but being intellectual isn't merely based on knowing truth. If that were the case, then all of those intellectual storytellers would be out of a job, because aren't they just regurgitating what they've heard? I mean, sure, it may have been considered truth at the time, but does anyone actually believe that Odysseus encountered a giant cyclops that ate some of his crew? Why didn't cyclops get to tell his story? And how come he didn't make any baby cyclopses (word? yes? no.) with a lady cyclops? Maybe because he was the only one in existence, ever? But anyway, my point is, it takes an imagination to picture a little squirrel family, or a cyclops with a hankering for sailors, or global warming for some people ;) But if it's true for them, it's true. It's a thought that they'll have forever: avoid huge caves that may harbor a giant one-eyed man - it's cyclops, and he's not a nice man. Or, don't mess with the salmon in the river, or the river goddess will eff you up. I think in the sense of oral storytelling, the "truth" is perceived with active imaginations, and then the thought of whether to take it seriously or not is the part that leads to so-called "intellectualism." But, on the flip side, if my senses pick up the smell of cupcakes outside of my mom's house, and I imagine the delicious morsels in my mind, the thought of them (and my obsession for cupcakes) will lead me to the truth: my mom...is burning a cupcake scented candle. Fudge. No, wait, not fudge. Cupcakes.

That's a whole 'nother subject though - memory smells - I know personally, every time I smell cinnamon I think about Big Red gum and how my friends and I used to lick the wrappers and then stick them to our face and see who could stand the burning sensation the longest. Fun times! And every time I smell Abercrombie & Fitch cologne, I think of one of my guy friends who had a serious obsession with it in high school and made me gag every day at our lockers. Would those count as "thinking memorable thoughts?" That reminds me - in class today, Sexson said that it's easier to remember grotesque and tragic things...shouldn't it be easier to remember pleasant things? Like the day your kids are born? Ew, never mind - birth is disgusting (so I hear. I mean, I know I was a part of it, but luckily I have no memory of that grotesque act of womb-exit). Wait, here's one - I remember the day...ok, so every major even I'm trying to think of is either kinda sad, really sad, or not really that good of a memory. Oh, hey, this one time I turned 21 and I actually don't remember that at all. Whatever. Ooo! I have a good one - the day I made cheer leading when I was in 8th grade. I knew my freshman year of high school was going to be awesome, and it totally was. I even became a better speller....through memory! Woo hoo! I think by my senior year I knew like 200 cheers, and most of them involved spelling...a-tt-a-c-k, b-e-a-gg-r-e-ss-i-v-e, b-o-z-e-m-a-n, h-a-w-k-s, r-o-w-d-y AND r-o-w-d-i-e (who knew there were variations on that word?) and the list goes on and on...

Ok, I think I've gone on a good long tangent, that, if spoken would make WAY more sense. After reading what I just wrote, I'll go ahead and say "sorry you just read all of that. please don't judge me in class."

Ciao!

why is memory so important?

for my very first blogging experience, i'm going to ponder the importance of memory...here's a little ditty to get us started:during my senior year of highschool, i took AP psychology, and one of our first assignments was to write about our very first memory. i was really stoked because i totally knew my first memory - i didn't even have to try and remember it. i just knew. it was me, trapped in my backyard behind a huge mound of snow, crying and waiting for someone to come save me. i was only wearing sweats and some awesome moonboots, but still, i was cold. then i saw my dad with the video camera, looking for me out in the yard, and i popped up and yelled at him for not saving me in time. i was going to die in the snow. awesome first memory, right?well, later that day, when i was telling my parents about how awesome i was for remembering their potential child-neglect/abuse, i was told that there was no way i remembered that day. i was 2 and a half years old. but i had a distinct memory of that day, and i was sure it had happened - like, 99% positive. then my dad showed me the home video of me, stranded in the snow bank in our back yard, yelling at him for not coming to save me. it was in december of 1989, and i was, indeed, like 2 and a half years old. so....it was a faux memory. alot of other kids in my class had the same experience of creating a first memory based on something they had seen or heard about themselves growing up - which made me realize that memories are not concrete. it also made me realize that having to memorize the prelude to romeo and juliet as a freshman in highschool was a waste of my time...and then i found out, by actually trying to say it all, that i really did remember most of it. WEIRD! i think memory is subjective, and it obviously changes everyday because we add new memories everyday. i wonder how our brains decide which memories to throw out in order to make room for new ones? because if our memories are so important, why can't we remember anything and everything? why do i still know all of the words to every *nsync song, but i can't remember half of what i learned last semester? and what's up with selective memory? how did that work with oral storytellers? hmmm...i think i'm gonna go take some ginko biloba...if i can remember to.