Final Doc

"This I Believe"

Feedback!

I really, really dislike the act of going and asking someone to give me feedback on my work.  I think it has to do with the fact that I hate giving feedback and I know it can be a hassle so I don’t torment others with the task of reading a crappy piece of writing for some benefit.  Most of the time when I do get feedback it’s only from though assignments that I get feedback from anyways, or when I know that something is so important that I don’t trust myself not to get feedback. 

Now I do realize that this is a really terrible view of feedback and I should be more open to getting more, blah, blah, blah.  But for some reason I just haven’t found that person that Anne Lamott was telling me about.  That one person I trust to give me feedback and give it truthfully and respectfully.  I really like getting feedback and sometimes even the craziest and weirdest suggestions help me to understand how to focus on a subject or to convey an emotion.  I think I can be really helpful in a group setting like our discussions in class because then you have people playing off of each others suggestions to come up with really amazing and interesting ideas for you to think about and implement. 

I think that my goal, though I’ve been working on this goal since I was a freshman in high school, is to find someone that I trust to give me feedback and I can bring them anything and they won’t care or mind.  I need to work on asking people for help rather than doing everything myself.  They really seem simple but I’ve had 6 years to try to fix them so they really aren’t as simple as they seem.  

Belief

I was reading Marilynne Robinson’s article and I have to say that I really did not understand any of it.   I think what she was trying to say was that religion needs to be focused back to it’s purest form of being religion and not being about anything else.  Robinson says, “Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.”  I really like and dislike this quote for two reasons; one, it think that it’s true that religion can get muddled in nonsense and distraction.  It can be deformed from what it really means and gets stuck in ideas that have nothing to do with belief, or in just belief based on nonsense.  What I dislike about that quote is that it says science cannot bring us wisdom. Now I don’t understand the context that the quote was in so I could be taking it out of context but it seems like she is saying that only religion can bring us true understanding, which is the definition of wisdom.  I believe that science can be a way to understand the world better and bring you closer to knowing there is a God.   Though I do believe it can be difficult to get a true understanding of the world, or yourself, or of other people through science I don’t believe it to be impossible.  That’s just nonsense.

Back to the topic of belief, I think that when we want to express our beliefs we should in a way that shows we are passionate about it but we aren’t looking for people to force our beliefs on.  I think that many times we are taught about belief or religion, or doctrine in a way that we are shown what to think and why we should think it.  It’s not always yelled at you that you should believe this and believe now, but there have been times when I’ve felt taught at rather than told about.  Everyone should be allowed to share their beliefs but you shouldn’t do it in a way that makes people feel like you know better and they are stupid.  Because often times when I’m being taught at I don’t want to learn or believe what I’m being told even when it’s in Sunday school.  I want to be shown a belief in a way that I want to go out and decide whether I believe too.  

Pdocast-Stephanie Cuzner

A Simple Beauty

I was really excited that this was our assignment for this week because from the beginning of the semester I have been walking through the MOA wondering what they were building and why.  My first response to the exhibit was that there was a lot of Qur’an’s and I thought that was really interesting.  I’ve never really Bibles in an art museum before and I just thought that was so interesting that they would create artwork around their most sacred book.  It made me think that I should be doing that to my scriptures.  I think creating beauty around their scriptures is so amazing and they honor this book with beauty and why shouldn’t we do that with out scriptures?  It’s shows how much they appreciate this book.

 I really loved going and visiting the exhibit and seeing the amazing artwork, most of my life I have seen European artwork and Islamic artwork is nothing like European artwork.  It’s so beautiful in its own way; bring out the beauty in the simplest bowl or rug.  In most artwork made in Italy or Paris it’s a painting or a sculpture of people or a landscape, there isn’t any bowls or scissors or rugs that were considered art and put in a museum.  But I really like that these pieces were put in the show because they are beautiful and unique and amazing.  I think that I really learned something about what I consider art and what my creative tendencies are.  I was going through this exhibit and just marveling at the bowls and the rugs and the scrolls that were in this show.  They are just bowls, someone could have eaten out of that thing but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful because it really is amazing.  I also really like the scissors the show, they were a bird but it was a pair of scissors, which is amazing that something so simple is really stunning.   I think this shows that I love everyday things that can be beautiful and can be made to be marveled at.  

Dance is the hardest profession in the world

If you got the reference in the title, you're awesome!

Here are Jacy and my 30 1 second films centered on dance. Enjoy!

30 Second Video - Dance

Erin and I did our video on dance.

http://youtu.be/3XytEQCQnrQ

Let's Do Some Homework.

For my photo essay I decided to do a process.  I choose to do my process of doing homework one night, from the beginning to my midway procrastination all the way to the end.  I choose to take some pictures of both my desk and what had accumulated over the night and also what my screen showed.

 

For my photo essay I decided to do a process.  I choose to do my process of doing homework one night, from the beginning to my midway procrastination all the way to the end.  I choose to take some pictures of both my desk and what had accumulated over the night and also what my screen showed. My process for homework is the same almost every night.  I begin with my homework and just let everything possible accumulate onto my desk before I basically drown in books and papers which is just about the time that I take my procrastination hour.  As seen in two photos it usually starts with looking at one site and leads to having five different sites open along with my iTunes and anything else you can think of.   After my hour of procrastination I usually get everything finished just in time to have another hour of not sleeping before I actually go to bed. 

             I really liked this week that we talked about how everyone’s community is different and that word told to ten different people will bring about ten different images.  Just the word procrastination told to ten people will bring about ten different ways that they procrastinate, with youtube, with facebook, with tumblr, or for me all three.  I’m not sure what I learned doing this project about community but it did get me thinking about all the different ways that people procrastinate and eventually get their homework done and how it happens.  Some people have to be in a certain chair, in a certain building, or there are others that can only do homework to certain music.  Everyone has a way of doing something and it differs from what another person does.  When asking a group of people to do one process they could all do it different but the end product would more or less be the same.    

Thoughts from places and an ode to carrots

So I happen to like random things that happen in life and I really enjoy watching other people's boring life even though they might find them boring themselves.  I think that digital media is good to express ordinary things because other people like to know about what happens in other people's lives, as boring as they might seem to ourselves.  Also expressing your life can be easy online or in a video because you can pick and choose what you post or talk about because you have the power to edit.  I think it would be easier to talk about ordinary things because you don't know the people that are reading it and they choose to read it rather than you just boring your life story on someone that doesn't wan to hear it.

A type of video I found about ordinary life were started by the vlogbrothers called thoughts from places which were then adapted by other people.  It's just a video about a day in someone's life.  It's video and a voice over telling the audience about what they are looking at or an interesting insight.

Here is a video by Charlie McDonnell.
http://youtu.be/MDmuLWQggXc

A thoughts from places in South Africa.
http://youtu.be/76D9BBrizPM

And a link to the vlogbrother's playlist with their thoughts from places video.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9EF0C1C9A93295C5&feature=g-user-a

And now my ode:

Carrots. Oh how I love them, their crunchiness, their sweetness, oh just thinking about them makes my mouth water.  To me, there is only one way to eat carrots, and that is raw with the peel still intact.  Cooked carrots, too mushy, carrot juice, too bitter, Boiled just sounds gross.  In soups and stews? Well, they are just too soggy, and really when enjoying cake would you really want carrots in them?  No, the only way to really enjoy carrots is raw.  You may think, well, then all you need to do is drown them in ranch, and then I will eat them all, but no.  You see the thing about carrots is that if you get them grown the right way, and just ripe enough, they are the sweetest things you will ever taste.  The crunch when biting in will release the sweet, carrot juices that will flow into your mouth, and your taste buds will sing.  Really, the only way to get this magnificent taste is through home grown carrots.  Yes, you pull them out of their warm, dirt, home yourself.  That my dear is the only way to get the perfect carrot.  Now these home-grown goodnesses are not always accessible. When that happens you must make do with dressing. My dressing of choice for these orange roots is ranch.   Now when you have this you can only put a dab of ranch, and then if you get too much, sometimes you have to wipe off the excess.  You have to do this or else the taste of the carrots is lost in the sour taste of ranch.  Too much ranch can create the taste that is too much ranch and not enough carrot goodness.

            Now you may ask, well, what about baby carrots.  Well you have to be careful about these mini carrots.  Some are just the middle of the big carrots without the peels and cut down to size.  This is not how carrots should be enjoyed, because the middle of the carrot is the worst part a carrot.  It can be bitter and leave an aftertaste that will last in your mouth for hours.  This is not good eats.  This is bad eats.  No that is why you must be very cautions of baby carrots because sometimes all that it is is worst part of the carrot. 

P4A (Project For Awesome) and the Vlogbrothers

Each December, usually the 17^th and 18^th for the past five years YouTube has been attempted to be taken over by an online community called the Nerdfighters.  This take over was started by the Vlogbrothers, John and Hank Green, when they decided that first year that they wanted to figure out a way to make YouTube no longer about cat videos but about trying to make the world a better place by decreasing what they called “world suck”.   Each year from that first year they were able to expand their deceasing of world suck with the help of people at YouTube and with the help of the community they have created from vlogging to each other and to the Nerdfighters.

(Click on the first few links to get an idea of what P4A is and who John and Hank are.  And the links at the bottom of the post are about P4A.  The YouTube page for 2011 and the website with info about P4A during 2011)

http://youtu.be/-6BgPJqAkP0

http://youtu.be/AiBPkBCL7vY

http://youtu.be/vgD1tVd9ubA

These two brothers started a project in 2007 with no idea of what would come out of vlogging each other every weekday for a year.  They didn’t know that they would have a way to branch out to more than 300 charities and bring the focus not to themselves but to the world and how it can be changed when a community comes together instead of trying to change the world on their own.

The community that the Vlogbrothers made is based upon awesome, their two rules to being apart of their community called Nerdfighteria is to 1) never be mean and 2) DFTBA (Don’t Forget To Be Awesome).   This community has done more than just brought about a way for YouTuber’s to expand their world outside of their computers, they created a place where all the other Nerdfighters care about each other and feel like they belong.  Which to me can be more meaningful than raising money because it’s given people hope that the world isn’t full of evil or mean people and things. But that there are people who feel the same as you do and want you around to share the awesomeness of being awesome.  DFTBA.

http://www.youtube.com/user/project4awesome/featured

http://www.projectforawesome.com/

Optimist

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2qEn8L

I found this video one day when I was procrastinating on stumble upon (which if you don't know about this website thing-y then you have to go look it up) and I got interested in it because I was wondering if it was from the Festival of Colors that happens in Spanish Fork. Which I turned out it was, and then I was really intrigued with the title of this documentary. Optimist is not only the name of the song that is being played during the video but it’s also what these people are gathering together to be, to gain optimism from the simplest act of throwing colored powder.  The idea of throwing colored powder into the air is such a strange concept when you don’t know anything about Hindu festivals or Holi.  But yet it is beautiful and it draws happiness from people, coming together to get dirty with colorful chalk.  I’ll bet that some people that go to this festival don’t even know what they are really celebrating and what it really means but yet they are celebrating. They gather in optimism to celebrate life and being alive and doing something that they may never do again.  It’s a beautiful metaphor. The innocent celebration of life.

The story of this celebration could have easily been done with the medium of photography but then you lose the music that is being played during the film.  You lose the whole experience of knowing that the picture express optimism but so does the music.  The music could easily be taken away but you lose that feel of calm simple happiness that it brings.  There are many types of optimism and forms of happiness but the music narrows down that spectrum and gives you that calm happiness.  The simple optimism of celebrating life with complete stranger and colored chalk.