home site and wordpress

I'm moving to a more comprehensive wordpress site; my posts will be at www.rphofer.com.

"When the anesthetic of being right is truly removed, change will occur, for from that vantage point one can only become mad or wise. Once awakened, the wound must heal or be forever scratched." I was thinking through this at Ava Roasteria a couple nights ago. I was sitting on the leather loveseat, writing out a short story, and frequently looking around the shop. A sense hit me that I really didn't know much about the people who were coming in and out, who were sitting around. I could apply labels and quick judgements based on my past experiences, but these were not necessarily accurate. And the same realization applied to my physical surroundings, in a way. Usually I interpret the room I'm in based on unconscious patterns, or categories. As in, how I decide where I want to sit at Ava; it's based on what is available and how much pleasure I think I can get by sitting in a certain spot. But if I let all those safety mechanisms fall away, I am left with a flush of sensory perceptions and ever-new situations. And it's scary, and seemingly unmanageable. I think this is one reason why people live with "purpose." We don't know how to live in the ever-new world, and so, for the most part, we allow our mind to assign meanings based on past experience and judgements. Yet if I engage with the process of sensitization, I believe I can find a way to live in the world without being run by my mind clicks. And for a sensitized person, I think being aware necessitates a movement towards madness, that is, being unable to cope with the reality of not-knowing, or towards healing the mind's incessant habit of labeling.

vacation

One week into Winter Break and I'm feeling pretty good.  I had some major stress going on there at the end of the quarter, which I'm looking at now with chagrin.  I got sick after the quarter, which is not unusual for my body after I let it rest.  Prolonged stress over time, as a result of misty expectations, is not my cup of tea.  In fact, I think this is one reason why it can be difficult to progress through school, especially if you haven't been doing it for awhile.  And at the end, the stress was more about an assessment at a moment in time, nothing new in the world of education.  I had already learned many things, it was about putting them into a displayable form, and I think that's a legitimate way to do things, I just wish it didn't feel like it all comes down to a single point and then BAM it's over.  It all seems strangely inhuman, like a got shuffled through a gate and now I've been branded: 3 months in 2010; A, B-, B+.  Oh school. 

Class

Class time grows stranger and funnier to me, the more classes I take and the more I grow accustomed to moving around to different environments.  I think it's because class time can be used in so many different ways, and so often it is used in a very simple way: one person lecturing or leading a discussion where people take turns giving opinions and displaying knowledge.  Even though nothing really gets done outside the classroom in this way, our ways of socialization have produced this strange way of doing education.  It feels like getting educated then becomes putting in a lot of time and learning how to talk in a certain way with peers, yet there is not often collaboration or knowing much about the people you're talking with.  It's really a shame because the way class is normally done might be the most ineffective and least inspiring way.  This leads me to consider ways in which class time could be made more interesting and more effective.  Here's a start:

Time is open-ended; when we finish then we can simply leave, and we have 10 minute breaks every 40 minutes.

Every class involves some sort of activity in which small groups work together and report back to the class.  That way we get to talk with each other.

Do simple exercises which illustrate the concepts we are talking about.  In small classes, make sure everyone in class grasps the concept before moving on.

Limit the amount learned over the course of the class.  Focus on making people successful in the contrived environment of the classroom.  If they really love the concepts, they will go on to work creatively in the field.

EMICPDX

I'm currently a graduate student at Portland State University, studying Communication. This blog will most likely be a place where I can write about what I am coming across in school and how I am relating it to living my daily life, and how it changes my perspective. And I'll post creative expressive pieces too.

An "emic" account is a description of behavior or a belief in terms meaningful (consciously or unconsciously) to the actor; that is, an emic account comes from a person within the culture. Almost anything from within a culture can provide an emic account (thanks Wikipedia).

This term came to me from a paper I was reading for class. The opposite term is "etic" meaning an observation from someone outside the culture under study. These two terms are most frequently used within anthropology. Since I moved back from Japan in August, I've been having a daily routine filled with etic experiences; everything here feels local, smaller, and kind of funny in a way. Because when you've grown used to a different environment, coming back into your home culture is trippy. Maybe EMICPDX is a way of observing my home culture from within it, though I have a kind of fading memory of life in Japan pushing me to make sense of daily life here.