Fireside Chat

The belief I chose to share with the class in my fireside chat is that defining a family supersedes just blood relations. I chose to share this belief because it’s something I have believed for a long time, and for the personal reason of me and all my siblings being adopted.  I know that my family is a forever family because we have been sealed together in the temple.  But even families that are put together, and aren’t sealed, I believe will find a way to be together forever.

                One potential problem with this belief is the issue of homosexual couples. Personally I believe that constitutionally they have the right to get married and create whatever family they can together. There is a television show on ABC Family right now called The Fosters. This show exemplifies my belief very accurately I believe.  It’s about a lesbian couple, and the different children they’ve had, adopted, and hope to adopt. In my fireside chat I wanted to get across the message that some families can be chosen, and that even without blood tying them together, they can be as strong a unit as any other. I believe that this applies to homosexual couples.  It’s easy to get attached to people, and two people raising a family together, are of course going to feel love and care for each other. They’re going to love the children they are raising, even if there ways of attaining them are unconventional.  They are a family.  The only problem with this is that I still believe marriages and families should be created between a man and a woman, and on the other side there will only be families headed by a man and woman.  It’s almost crass to say statements like that in modern times, but it is what I believe. But I still believe that there isn’t one way to define a family, and families headed by homosexual couples are as much a family as the Walton’s are.  Unfortunately, I might have to leave you hanging. I don’t have a solution for the dilemma I perceive.  Just thought I’d share my thoughts. 

My family is so precious to me, and even with all the things that aren’t perfect about it, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  When I was younger, this was a different story.  I was always bummed that I didn’t belong to a family who didn’t make me unload the dishwasher and clean my room.  Upon further examination though, I’m pretty sure they don’t exist. I think of the life I could have had with a young single mom, compared to the life I have with a loving mother and father, who have a secure way to provide for their family, and I feel so blessed.  I’m not one of those people that believe in fate.  I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, and that everyone in my life is meant to be there. I don’t think you can live like that, because then you’re always asking why, and sometimes there isn’t an answer. But in relation to my family, I know that they are where I’m meant to be.  I was supposed to go to the parents that I did, and be in the family that I am.  Why? I don’t know why.  That question might have already been answered with my life, or maybe it’ll be answered in the future.  All I know is that my Mom, Dad, Brother, and Sister were planned before any of us came down to this earth.

Concerned Citizen

Concerned Citizen Film

Shaunelle Holyoak was the person of interest in Brittany and I’s concerned citizen documentary.  She works as a night manager at the Provo women’s shelter, interacting with homeless women and children.  In addition to that, she just recently got accepted into UVU’s social work program.  She honestly cares about people and their well-being.  Not only the women and children that she works with, but her friends and family, roommates, ward members, basically anyone she comes in contact with.  Because of the caring characteristics she exemplifies through her life, often putting others before herself, I figured she would be a wise choice for the Concerned Citizen project. 

            Unfortunately for us, as budding documentary filmmakers, Shaunelle is unable to disclose the location of the shelter to anyone.  Let alone allow people to film her while she’s there.  So we were addressed with the problem of having to find some other way to visually fill the time then just with her interview, since we couldn’t show her in the work environment she was talking about.  We decided to focus a little more on the social work program that she was doing at school, and what        she had learned from working in a social work setting. This was so that we could show her doing school work and have it make sense with what was being addressed through the dialogue.  I think ultimately this helped us focus the documentary on her, and her beliefs.  If we had been able to show her at work, I know I would have been tempted to include all her dialogue about her duties and jobs as the night manager, and left out the stuff that makes her story unique.

            Arlene Goldbar, author of Human Rights and Culture: From Datastan to Storyland says,”Culture is key to creating the conditions that enable human rights and therefore security rooted in caring rather than correction.” The women that Shaunelle works with, who sometimes identify strongly with a culture, don’t have the means to express it.  This is because they are working to just to satisfy their basic human needs of shelter and food.  Their kids sometimes, don’t even have all the materials they need to do well in school, and find it hard to participate there as well. Shaunelle’s work tries to give these women a leg up, so that they can get a footing in the work force, or at least be able to provide for their kids. Once these women have their most basic needs fulfilled, they can share their experiences and culture with others.

Game for Change

play the game

In December of 2013 Ethan Couch, a 16 year old from Texas, was sentenced to rehab and 10 years probation. Not a big deal, until you realize that this is his punishment for driving drunk, from alcohol he stole, and then smashing his car into four people, killing all of them.  How did he get such an extremely, almost unbelievable, light sentence? His severe case of Affluenza.  The book “Affluenza : The All-Consuming Epidemic” describes the affluenza diagnosis as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” This was applied to Ethan in the sense that he had been coddled his whole life, never getting disciplined, always given what he wanted, and as a result his judgment was impaired.  His defense claimed that he couldn’t be held responsible for his actions because of it, and somehow, someway, the judge bought it.  If his parents are so incapable of raising a decent human being by not punishing him, wouldn’t it make more sense for society to step in and do so. I believe it would be a more reasonable response to give him the harshest punishment, so that the consequences of his actions could sink in a little bit for once, instead of the opposite. 

            Blogger Jessica Ann Mitchel responded to Ethan’s case, with the Diagnosis of Povertenza.  Her explanation of Povertenza is that it’s an illness that those from poor socioeconomic backgrounds suffer from.  They weren’t able to get a quality education or employment.  The result being that they’re development is stunted, their judgment impaired, and can’t be held responsible for their actions either.  To me, this seems like a more practical defense then affluenza.  In an underprivileged area, peoples options and futures are restricted, whereas Ethan had a huge amount of paths he could have taken.  His parents wealth could pretty much take him anywhere he wanted. But of course, no court would buy povertenza as excuse for breaking a law.  In fact, youth from poor areas usually get handed the toughest sentences possible.  Mitchel says,” Essentially, the poor are expected to be more accountable for their actions while the wealthy are viewed as inherently respectable (especially if they're white).” 

            Am I taking away some depth of understanding to Ethan Couch by telling this one single story? Possibly.  But what about another story of his that his defense lawyer shared in court to help, surprisingly enough, his case.  When Ethan was 15 he was found alone in a car, with an unconscious, naked, 14-year-old girl. I feel like it would be a favor if no more stories were shared about Ethan’s past.

            My game is meant to represent the two sides of povertenza and affluenza.  In the first level, you are one of the affluent, given everything you need to succeed.  In the end, when you kill the monster, you win the game.  The second level is the opposite. You’re faced with a bunch of challenges, given little, and when you kill the monster, you’re punished, and there’s no way to win (hopefully.) You get trapped in the jail cell, unable to get out. Is that justice? No, I don’t think so.  All I’m saying is if our justice system is going to rehabilitate the rich white kid, they need to do the same for the poor black kid as well. 

Glitch Art!

P&P I love, I love, I love you 1:55

Kiss Me :16

Sweet Home Alabama 1:00

That Sunday, That Summer :07

I care :13

Gabriel's oboe

If I ain't got you 2:33

I want you!

Brittany and I battled Together Vs. Apart.  The thought behind it was to compare sounds from the beginning of relationships, to the ending of relationships.  I was in charge of the “Together.” Looking for the sounds to represent my theme was fairly easy since I really really like romance in films. Performing what I had created in front of everyone was nerve racking. I was lucky enough to keep my hands from shaking so much that I couldn’t press the buttons. During my 2012 Christmas piano recital I was not so lucky.  I don’t have an exactly clean and shiny track record when it comes to being up in front of people.  Overall it was a good experience to be in front of the class sharing what Brittany and I had created.  As a result of my own experience performing in front of the class, I tried really hard to be a good audience member. 

Ever since I was little, I have made collages.  The binders I used to carry around in high school were covered with collages I’d made from pictures in magazines.  A whole wall in my bedroom back home is covered with a similar magazine collage, only much larger. Lethem talks about collages in his work A Plagarism. He talks about how a man’s song was influenced by multiple different things from history and his life.  The ending result, being a unique song, was still made up of the things that had come before it.  With this understanding of collages, parts of the bible can be described as collages.  The books Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the synoptic gospels because of how similar they are.  It is believed that the books of Mark and Luke drew from the Book of Matthew and another source.  However, the books of Mark and Luke have a different purpose then that of Matthew.  The intent of Matthew is to show Jesus as the new Moses to the Jews.  The purpose of Luke is to let gentile christians, who have been marginalized by Jewish Christians, know that the Jesus’s message is for everyone.  Seeing as how these are chapters in the best-selling book in the world, it’s clear that plagiarizing or, creating collages from other peoples work, can return some pretty amazing results.   The collage of sounds Brittany and I gathered from the internet, is admittedly nothing compared to the Bible.  But the same concepts were used with similar results.  Using elements already established, we were able to utilize them a different way, to tell a broader story.  

World Building

Pathos;  a city that has discovered the solution to the question of renewable energy. They harvest human emotion, controlling the incontrollable. Scientist discovered the 4 most potent emotions to power the city. They are exhilaration, depression, anger, and calm.  These emotions are harvested in different sections of the city.  Through architecture, lay out, services, sounds, and responsibilities the different sections are built to produce their certain emotion.  The emotion is stored and transferred from the bracelet on the subjects arm.  When one emotion is filled up they move to the next section of the city in order to feel another emotion.

                One aspect of these different sections is the clothing the people who are living in it wear. For my group I designed these clothes. When approaching these designs I tried to think of how I and others would feel when wearing these clothes.  Evoking a certain feeling from the characters in the story, and from the audience, was the most integral part of designing these clothes.  The one design I think I really got correct, was coincidentally also the easiest.  The people who live in the depression section of the city wear baggy, drab, uniform, grey jump suits.  I feel like this is the most correct one because I know that I and many others would be miserable wearing this getup.  Depression would be much easier to achieve if you have no control over whether you feel good about yourself or not.

                In Design Fiction by Bleeker, he references books in his studio that are there for inspiration.  When I am put into a situation where I have to create something, I often try my very hardest no to be influenced by anything else.  I fear that if I do, it’ll just end up being a copy of their work.  When designing the uniforms, I attempted to block out any knowledge I had of the futuristic  films Divergent, Tron,The Island, and other similar films.  It wasn’t easy, and maybe not entirely necessary.  It’s hard for me to draw that line between copying something and being inspired by something.  Bleeker allows himself to be inspired by what he sees and experiences around him.  Instead of trying to copy these films, I tried to be inspired by them and the genre they came from.  In the end I settled on styles that were also similar to the genre, but hopefully unique.   

Medium Specificity

No matter how much I wish I could, I cannot afford a new outfit for every day of life.  So, instead of switching up my wardrobe, I switch up the outfits.  What I believe defines fashion is the necessity of looking at something familiar, pairing it with something else familiar, and making something entirely original.  I love to get dressed in the morning . . . and afternoon . . . and evening. I have a tendency to change my outfit multiple times a day.  It’s just how I function.  I’ll be totally 100% behind my outfit in the morning, but by the afternoon I’ll think of one way or another to improve it.  In the evening I’m going to be doing something different from what I was doing in the day, so I better change up my dress for that as well.  As a result of my obsessive need to recreate myself, I have a whole heck of a lot of clothes.   As a result of the whole heck of a lot of clothes I have, I find myself recreating myself a lot. 

In Glamour magazine is a feature that shows how to mix and match the same few items of clothing over and over again into different outfits. The intent of this feature is usually to show how a person can pack light for an extended vacation.  On Pinterest in the past year, there’s been an explosion of the same topic—only done for sister missionaries.  Girls will share tips on what kind of blouses and shirts sisters should bring on their mission to keep their style exciting, even though it’s limited.  I recreated this idea, focused around one accessory—a pink bow belt.  The decision to focus on the bow belt was twofold: first I needed to do this assignment and second, the belt is a new purchase and I wanted to see how I could play with it.

Focusing on the medium of fashion and then refining that focus onto just the belt and how it can function in fashion definitely speaks about the resourcefulness available in fashion.  Not resourceful in the sense that I’m saving the planet, cause I’m not.  It’s resourceful in the sense that I can use the same clothing item over and over again for years and years, and still find a new way to wear it tomorrow.  

In Show and Tell by McCloud, he talks about how the idea of comics was first introduced in ancient times.  The same goes for fashion, in the sense that what was most practical was the most fashionable.  In modern times for lots of people, fashion has moved away from the practicality of living and more towards the practicality of what looks good.  But, thankfully people are creative and have the ability to rework an item of clothing into a different outfit and still remain enamored with their own personal style and clothing choices.  

Thanks to Ryan Running for the pictures.