Blog 3

My experience regarding the creation myth was an interesting journey. Writing my own personal myth made my understanding of what a myth is in itself change. Before, I believed myths to be something of the past, out of millennials reach. Of course, I know that myths evolve over time now, I mistakenly presumed that they just went up till the early twentieth century. A myth can be about any object, ideals, or new generation of people. Writing my myth of Hope was quite fun because I could focus on the dark, twisted, and the emptiness of life, which to me is an interesting topic. I first thought of what the subject of my myth should be, then I came up with "Hope Within Nothingness." The isolation felt when being connected to the world via the social media.  I wrote all the thoughts that were circling above me for about thirty minutes. Using stream of consciousness when writing is my favorite type of creative writing because I can let go and just write. Letting the myth create itself then going back an hour later to organize my thoughts. By reading about mythology, presenting as a group regarding a myth, and finally making our own myth becomes the most in depth form of attaining knowledge. The three different approaches combined cemented the knowledge of mythology within my consciousness.

However, the long, bothersome, and tedious task of having to build a website was utter torture. Firstly, to someone who plans on never using these kinds of websites it’s completely useless. Secondly, typically students should have taken at least a class on the basics of creating a website not have it thrown in their faces. It’s like throwing someone who doesn’t know how to swim into the Pacific Ocean and expecting them not to drown. Then on top of it all teach a swimming lesson to the others being thrown in after with this so called finished work that classmates are supposed to look upon. Thirdly, because I’ve never done a website before the whole thing would collapse upon itself. Every single time I presumed, I had fixed a link it sent me somewhere else. It took me a week and a half just to get the layout not even the text I’d written before. My main point, how can a person be guided into this website making business without having the necessary knowledge to create one. There should be a prerequisite for a computer class, especially since literature majors aren’t required to take this class even though they apparently they need it. Moreover, through my daily editing, I managed to make progress with the design of the myth website. All being said and done I'm proud of my myth website, but I still firmly believe that there should be a tutorial given in class. It took weeks to get the most basic things to work. I'm sure that there will be other students taking my place in this technological struggle. Taking them into account and offering in class tutorial on how to even build a website will make the overall class's grade improve.

Writing about Poetry and Writing Poetry

Writing about poetry can be an intense experience because it takes people places, sometimes dark places other times beautiful places beyond our imagination.  Trying to figure out the secret meaning that’s hidden within the poem is much like trying to figure out a puzzle with thousands of pieces scattered on the floor. The poems words saved hundreds of years in a time make us time travelers. We can be in any time in history and experience the poets heartbreak even though we’ll never meet them. There are steps that the author took in writing, first they needed to decide the type of poem  out of over fifty different kinds whether a ballad, elegy, or sonnet is able to convey their message.  Writing poetry can be the same for people of the future maybe the people of the 22^nd century can read what I wrote and wonder about our current time. Writing about poetry is on a completely different sphere than my setting myself under a tree while pondering the famous authors lifestyle and writing about that. The poetry I’ve read has taught me many a things in life and pushed me to find the underlying meaning the author was trying to get me to grasp. Reading poetry hasn’t made me a better writer of poetry, mainly because nothing interesting, shocking, or emotionally traumatizing has ever happened to me. It’s hard to write about something I don’t know anything about except in the cases when I read others work. That’s what makes great poetry writing about one of the many downfalls of the human experience that would be a way to connect to the people of the present and future. I learned that standing in front of a crowd to read poetry can be interesting and meaningful. I felt my classmate’s emotions as they spoke, they turned their words into images before my eyes, and some were hilarious while others depressing. If, I were to teach poetry having students express themselves in this type of poetry slam would be a positive way to get them to interact and understand each other.

There are millions of other bloggers to choose from that are beyond phenomenal, I can’t promise you that my writing will be mind-blowing, but it will be interesting. Welcome to my little corner of darkness, I call a living nightmare of relentless torture.  Albeit, in life there are ephemeral moments of ecstasy, happiness, and satisfaction to make it worth enduring. My name is Elisa Frias, I know very little about anything really, from the moment of my birth I have been stumbling, struggling, and just plain trying to figure out what to do with it. Through my writing I am able to escape the 21^st century reality of self-centered netizen that record their entire lives on the many social media applications from their reasoning behind their current style in life all the way down to their bowel movements. My rejection of these social norms has forced me to focus on my education and career, which are mostly exempt of these forms of severe mental torment. Moreover, I managed to be one of a few that received a full scholarship to Shanghai, China from the Chinese Government. Being paid to learn Mandarin is something that I never thought, I’d ever get to experience because of my ability to express myself on paper.

            I have been made to be part of media technology probably as long as most people have, since I was old enough to sit up straight.  Media incorporates aspects of society, simple morals, and accepted behavior. The media provides us with bits and pieces of our living reality for it cannot completely encapsulate what we go through in our daily lives. Media and Technology can be incorporated to teach math and science like some shows on Nickelodeon, to teachers incorporating it in class to make it more fun. These are the obvious positive uses of media and technology. However, as a student media technology has been ineffective throughout my life. These instructional technologies build these insurmountable walls that make it much more difficult to learn. The main focus is on figuring out how to use these ever evolving technological computer programs that we are told are supposed to further student’s learning. The opposite is occurring, it is just getting in our way. For example this blog has taken me days to try and figure out. It will be different next year than it is today.  The new technological advancements that occur in months to a year will make the version I've learned obsolete. I'll be forced once again to relearn what I thought I knew, this is a waste of my precious time, life is short. I don't intend to spend hours worth of time that accumulate to years on something that isn't even real, but virtual. I could have just written it and handed it in to receive my grade. Also, it stomps out creativity and originality overall.  Most students look up the work of scholarly individuals online and never get to form their own personal ideas separated from this black abyss of endless virtual online information. The idea of being forced to acclimate into this zombie type of brainless person would undoubtedly force me to opt out and exit this thing people call “life.” I recoil at the thought of spending years inside, a sheep among sheep, addicted by this so called "advancement."