Final Proposal

The fourth most common mental illness in the world is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and millions of people suffer with the agonizing thoughts that come along with it.  People who are diagnosed with OCD struggle with obsessive thoughts that tend to interrupt their daily life along with relationships they hold with people.  The cause of OCD is unknown but, there have been links to strep throat in children and pregnant women who get OCD symptoms.  There are so many unknowns tied to OCD and that was one of my primary motivations to write this paper.  The brain chemistry behind OCD is similar to depression, the brain doesn’t produce enough Serotonin and medications are very necessary for controlling these chemical levels in the brain.  Prozac is one of the most common antidepressants a person with OCD will take but, it comes with some risky side effects such as suicidal thoughts and actions.  A family coping with someone who suffers with OCD can be very difficult and compromise some relationships within the family dynamic.  A person with OCD attempts to block out painful thoughts by performing compulsively and this may interrupt their daily life and in that case requires diagnosis and medication.  The unknowns tied with OCD are very intriguing to me along with me having a personal tie with the mental illness goes along with the idea of OCD altering the family dynamic.  

Research Paper RD Proposal

For my research paper I plan on doing an informative piece on OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  I am interested in this topic solely because I have a family member who suffers from it.  My cousin who is now 19 years old lives in Manchester England and has had OCD since before I can remember.  He has had many types of treatment including medications and therapy.  In my paper I want to talk about the different treatment options and how they may differ in Europe.  When I interview him I plan on asking things about his symptoms and how they arose, as well as his feelings on them and if he tried to resist at all.  His disorder definitely affected the family dynamics during his younger years.  Me and him would always hang out when we were little and I remember getting into countless fights and he would always push me around.  I would like to talk about how this affects many families and what they do to cope.  I picked this topic because I want to dig deeper into the disorder and understand more of what my cousin goes through.       

Heart Of Darkness/Research Paper

For the Heart of Darkness I am planning on doing a compare and contrast piece.  I want to take evidence of the book being racist and evidence of it not being racist and answer the question "Is Heart of Darkness racist?" A very simple question but, yet, we do not know the answer to it.  There are many instances where Marlow speaks of the blacks as being animals and gives them animal like traits.  Along with Marlow being showed as being a racist the narrator at the begging of the book also talks about the blacks as being of a "different complexion".  Is this a reflection of Conrad's beliefs or he he merely painting a picture for us?  There are also many instances where Marlow goes into detail describing the blacks as if they were on the same level as him.  So this simple question begs to be answered yet, I don't think any of us will ever know the answer.

For my research paper I have two topics that I am thinking about doing.  I either want to interview my grandpa and have him talk about his experience with cancer or talk to my mom about her experience with kidney stones and hives.  Both these aspects have to with how illness affects the family and that is the main question I am looking to answer.  I want to talk about how illness disrupts the family dynamic and pushes challenges on not only the ill person but, the entire family.  Family dynamics are altered in order to care for the ill and this may burden the rest of the family along with the normal structure that once was in place.  Transitioning is another aspect of the family dynamic that is hard on each family member, especially the younger ones and both my grandpa and mother got sick when I was younger.  I know from personal experience I didn't really know what was happening because of my innocence and lack of knowledge on the subject.  So those are just two ideas I have for my research paper but, they both tie in with family dynamics.

Heart of Darkness: Marxist Lens

In Heart of Darkness Marxism seems to be a recurring theme.  When Marlow describes the mad he comes across in the town office we are presented with the idea that there are different types of classes.  Conrad uses different colors on the map to represent the different levels of society.  "I was going into the yellow.  Dead in the centre. And the river was there-fascinating-deadly-like a snake." (Conrad, Pg. 74)  The map is covered with different colors representing the different imperial powers that make up Africa.  The yellow one that he points out is described as being in the center and covers some of the most mysterious attributes that Africa has.  The river is described as a snake which is closely related to being evil and even describes it as "deadly".  The yellow portion covers a vast amount of land, however, and more land tends to mean more power.  As well as having land it also has the river which flows through it which is a very important resource.  The color yellow is also close to the color gold, meaning wealth or riches.  Yellow is a color of power and because of this being the portion of the map covering the most land and having resources it is considered to be powerful.  While this is a very subtle way of dividing out the power, the author is claiming that not everyone has the same amount of power in the story.  Some part of Africa have more power than others and he uses colors to symbolize the different power that each portion has.

In Rufus at the Door and Agatha McGee the two main authority characters are portrayed as women who show many masculine traits throughout the story.  They use these masculine traits to hold power over the other characters in the stories. This, however, is contradicting because they are women and women are not supposed to be holding the power over the men.  On the other hand, in Dodger's Return Ross struggles with showing his masculine traits and power even though he is a husband and these traits are expected of him.  Hassler uses symbolism throughout these three stories to show how these characters portray and struggle with power. 

In Rufus at the Door there are many instances where Marxism is present. A higher social class between the students touring the asylum and the people in it is one example. When the bus approaches the Asylum the teachers and students automatically think they are apart of a higher class than the patients that are locked up.  Asylums are looked at to be a place where crazy people who have no social or street skills go to lay rest.  The young kids in this story were even taught to believe this “...Miss Sylvestri stood at his shoulder and delivered an unnecessary lecture about how lucky we were to have been spared from craziness and retardation.” (Hassler, Pg. 22) Miss Sylvestri delivers this lecture in order to instill her belief on the students that the people in the mental hospital are part of a class of people that they should be happy to not be a part of.  This class of people is to be seen as having no skills to fend for themselves and don’t contribute to society in anyway.  They are people that have no value and are almost a waste of space.  Miss Sylvestri believes her highly educated class of people are ranked much farther above these mentally disabled people found in the asylum.  Her sense of freedom, education, and power give her the mentality to talk down upon them and share her beliefs with the students.  Miss Sylvestri is portrayed as an authority figure in this story, she promotes her social class and lets the children know they should be grateful to be apart of such a high social class.  Their education is the main foundation for this belief and even though many of the kids don’t appreciate it Miss Sylvestri certainly tried to make that clear after the visit to the asylum.

This was my best 300 word paper I believe because people didn't have that many comments about changing things.  The only things I tweaked were the intro and conclusion.  In the intro I polished my thesis being more clear about the social class difference that immediately happened when the bus approached the asylum.  In my conclusion all I changed was the last sentence summing up a little better the idea of Miss Sylvestri making sure the children knew they were apart of a higher social class.  Those were the only things I changed and I believe this paper was one of my better ones.

The id and superego often have a power struggle and this power struggle can easily be seen in the scene where Holly and Harry are on the Ferris wheel.  Harry is identified as the id, the pleasure seeking center.  He strives to be rich and has a greedy complex that causes him to go to extreme lengths to make money.  Harry ends up killing hundreds of people in order to get instant gratification of his desire for money.  Holly on the other hand is seen as the superego because of his sense of right and wrong and his drive to put a stop to the id, or Harry in this case.  Holly's moral values and Harry's greedy desires show a power struggle between both men in this scene.  The both test each other with body movements and gestures.  Harry justifies his crimes with the reward of making money while Holly suppresses his ideals with his moral value, that killing people in order to gain money is wrong.  Both men struggle to over power the other in this scene which can be very similar to id and superego struggle.  The id strives for immediate gratification of their wants while the superego tries to suppress these wants with morals. 

Snow White and Gender Lens

We watched Snow White the other day in class and one lens that is very noticeable throughout this movie is the gender lens.  Snow White is portrayed as a very weak character who is always needing guidance or help out of situations.  She is given this assistance because she is beautiful and fits the stereotype of the typical weak female character.  For example she has the 7 dwarfs who save her numerous times in the film getting her out of trouble.  Snow Whites innocence and almost stupidity overshadow the dwarfs efforts when she eats the very intriguing and mysterious apple given to her by the witch.  The cinematic element of color effects how we see the apple.  The apple is bright red and red is tied with temptation.  The apple is also shiny with a perfect outer shell making the apple very intriguing and impossible for Snow White to resist even though the dwarfs say not to eat it.  When Snow White was placed in her glass case after eating the apple she had to once again be saved.  In this instance the prince makes his way to Snow White to kiss her and wake her up.  When the prince approaches the glass case we notice it has light shining on it drawing a lot of attention to Snow Whites beauty.  This cinematic element really puts focus on her beauty and how she must be beautiful since she has all these men going out of their way to help her. She is a very beautiful who fits the typical stereotype of a woman who always needs saving and needs a man by her side to stay safe.  Her image also shows that you must be beautiful to receive that help because the Queen, a character not portrayed as beautiful, never receives this same attention from men.

TED Talk Elab

I'm going to talk about Anna's TED Talk mainly because it was a topic that made me interested to hear about something I new basically nothing about and that was 4H.  I had no idea that 4H included things like photography and crafts, I thought it had something to do with just the fair and cattle.  Anna was very calm and comfortable talking about this subject which made her TED Talk easy to follow at this point.  She seemed to never run out of things to say about 4H and never stuttered or paused.  It was also not a dull or boring subject to hear about and she kept the listeners attention.  The visual aid also helped with that.  I wish her TED Talk would have just been about 4H and how it helped her be creative because she didn't seem as comfortable talking about schools and how they were talking away creativity.  Maybe if she would've brought in some statistics it may have helped or going more into depth about solutions to getting more creative could have helped as well.  I really enjoyed hearing about the 4H and wished she would've said more about it but, overall Anna's TED Talk was very interesting to hear about and very well organized.  I enjoyed it!! Nice job Anna!!:)   

TED Talk

My topic for my TED Talk is something all od us are affected by and that's gossip.  Us as girls particularly know how tempting it is and we can all say we have done it.  It is a part of life but, why do we do it? We all know the consequences and hurt that it can bring to us if we find out our "friends" were talking behind our back.  Nothing good comes out of gossip and my goal for my TED Talk is to inform and persuade.  I want to talk about the process of gossiping and the cycle that happens when a rumor gets started.  I will also have a visual aid for this.  I want to persuade people as well to make a change and put a stop to this domino effect because once something is said you can't take it back.  People may forget what you said but, they will never forget how you made them feel and taking a second to think before you speak or assume can benefit everyone.  Your attitude and the type of person you are shown directly through your actions and words.  Gossip may relate to someone's characteristics they possess such as jealousy, hate, envy ect.  So I want to explain also why people gossip and the motives they have.  We are all guilty of this action and my goal is not to target anyone or anything but, to merely make people stop and think for a minute before they say something.

When we watched the TED Talk on the blind man one thing I wrote about in my double entry journals stuck out at me.  I can't get out of my head the fact that throughout the entire twenty minutes this man talked about his vision impairment and would say the words "I see" or "I saw".  Such thing is physically impossible for a blind person to do but, the way he goes about sharing his stories and memories in this ironic vocab somehow works for him.  As I talked about in my last post he talks so highly of his disability and doesn't let it effect his life in a negative way and I think that's another reason why he uses this sort of vocab.  To him being able to see means something different because he was born blind and has no prior knowledge of what it really means to see.  He uses the word "see" meaning read.  He talked about he could see the different images and words that were read to him.  It's hard for us to imagine exactly what he means though because he has never "seen" anything in his life so we wonder what he must picture in his head or if he pictures anything at all.  This is way I chose this double entry journal because I just don't entirely know what he meant my saying he can "see" and maybe there really isn't an answer.

Claire had a double entry journal from the TED Talk we watch about the blind man and how technology helped him "see".  He talked about when he was little and how his mother would read him stories and he spoke so highly of his vision impairment.  He stated "I was born in the right place and right time." He was born with what some people would believe to be one of the worst things that could happen to someone but, this is all he knows and doesn't look for pity or sympathy from anyone. Instead he uses it as a tool for happiness.  Claire talked about how his statement has great impact on your privileges and things we cannot control.  I agree with her because after all it is up to us to determine our futures.  We cannot help the fact that we were born blind, or deaf, or have a disability but, we can control our attitude about it and what we make of it.  Claire also wrote down that this can cause barriers which makes it challenging for us to overcome but, again what we make of ourselves from said barriers is what we can control.  The blind man in the TED Talk had such a positive outlook (attitude) on such a life changing disability (barrier).  He couldn't help the fact that he was blind but, chose to not let it ruin his life.  He almost looks at it like a gift and I think that's why he says "I was born at the right place at the right time".

I have a few ideas for the TED talk and getting some feedback would be awesome.  My first idea i was thinking of doing more of a narrative approach with a more personal story.  I wanted to talk about my journey with volleyball and what a champion is in my eyes.  More of a definition piece rather than an argumentative or persuasive.

Another idea I had was talking about doing was eating disorders and the perfect plastic image that media puts in our minds.  It is implying that to be beautiful you must skinning, have perfect skin and be 6 feet tall.  I was gonna go more of a definition route on this piece as well defining what beauty is and how media has altered what it means to be beautiful.

Going off of the whole "what is beauty" I also though about beauty pageants and talking about the negative affects of them.  The show toddlers in tiaras would help with my evidence because in this show it is obvious that the 3-9 year olds have some attitude and ego issues and to me it would be interesting to look at how beauty pageants affect what they think about their image.

Also when it comes to sporting events I wanted to maybe talk about what makes a fan or something to do with being a good sport. I remember reading in the paper an article a Moorhead woman submitted about the Bemidji Student section at a football game having unsportsman like comments.  I strongly disagreed with this lady's letter and would argue or define what a fan is.

My last idea is the tobacco advertising campaigns that have been going on lately.  I think they should shift more to target teens because being a smoker for life starts when you are young.  The ads try and "scare" the observer into not smoker but, in my opinion they should target image.  Again, image is important to young people and if they new their image would be ruined because of smoking they might not try it.

If you have any feedback I would love to hear about it! Thanks!

In Gayle Rosenwald Smith's The Wife-Beater many fallacies can been seen throughout.  One example is Begging the Question when Smith says "The name is the issue." She is trying to pin the many cases of abuse on the fact that people attribute this name degrading statement to a piece of clothing. Claiming that people think it's okay to call it a "wife-beater" and in turn they look at domestic abuse as something overlook just like the name of this piece of clothing.  This helps her argument because she ties the two issues together making people think they are related, that the name is what is causing this abuse and that people don't think twice about the name. Another example is is Hasty Generalization when Smith states "Maybe youth today would rather ignore the overtones of the term wife-beater." she uses this generalization to attack youth in hopes that they will stop using this term.  The generalization will spark some attention by youth readers, which was her purpose in hopes to change their vocabulary and change their behavior.  Lastly Smith uses Begging the Question again when she says "...children of abusers often learn the behavior from their elders." She uses this in hopes that her audience will believe that correlation proves causation. She is stating that if a child has an abusive parent that they too will become abusive. Smith's use of fallacies throughout her story help to support her main purpose and persuade people to change the context and meaning of what a "wife-beater" is.