Fireside Chat: Broaching the Uncomfortable, but Necessary

For my fireside chat presentation, I decided to raise awareness of sexual health.  The topic I chose was newborn circumcision.  In retrospect, I think I should have done more on the basics than I did.  I had a number of students come up to me afterwards asking for clarification on some of the things I presented on.

The main topic of misunderstanding was what an STI was.  I told them it was politically correct as Sexually Transmitted Infection aka STD (sexually transmitted disease).  I made a rookie mistake and forgot to focus on my audience.  The information I present was what I thought a good adaptation of a research presentation I did for my nursing class.  What I didn't realize/remember is that I was speaking to an audience who has none of the in-depth education I do about human health, and especially as it relates to human sexual health.

If I were to do it over, I would focus more on the basics, like fetal development and how that creates the situation after birth for the decision of circumcision.  That, or I would just go over basic human sexual organs and how it relates to sexual health as children and adults.  My weaknesses aside, I thought the presentation went well.  I was able to present the information I wanted to in a timely manner and I was able to gauge audience reaction to my slides.

It's fun, sometimes, to watch people squirm a little in their seat as I talk about subjects that are largely taboo.  They shouldn't be, though.  People should be comfortable to talk about sexual health in safe environs such as the fireside chat, home, or the classroom.  That's basically what the LDS Church's Gospel Principle's manual states.

I do believe that if children don't feel safe to bring this topic to their parents, then they will just google it.  And I, for one, will not entrust the sexual education of my children to Google.  I do find it odd that in Mormon culture we place so much emphasis on our bodies being temples and that we should keep them sacred that we miss entirely the discussions on haow to keep our bodies clean in other ways beside the spiritual.  We definitely need more help with the physical, mental, and emotional health of our earthly temples.

And that is my personal quest: to help those who wish to educate themselves and their families in safe environments have the tools to do so.  There is little in our LDS literature that can be used as a good guide, with enough and appropriately detailed information to be useful in educating about how to take care of our mental, sexual, physical, emotional, and spiritual selves.

Concerned Citizen

You can watch the video HERE

We wanted to present a concerned citizen that was making an effort to reach out to the community by serving the individuals that need assistance locally.  Megan is a mentor that spends time with special needs kids in order to help them have more opportunities in their community and to learn to better develop social skills.  She takes them hiking, to soccer games, movies, and other activities to help them discover new interests and hobbies.  It was touching to us that Megan takes time out of her schedule to mentor these kids, especially Nick, whom she talks about in the video.  Her attitude of changing the community in this simple way reminds one of what Goldbard states in Human Rights and Culture: From Datastan to Storyland.  It is discussed in this article that anyone who wants to be influential in a certain issue or problem must engaged with the feelings of others about this certain subject.  

As we engaged with Megan, we felt that our perspective was changed on the way in which she interacts with kids such as Nick that she works with.  We feel that the things that she expressed in the interview can open the eyes of the viewers in the community to the opportunities available to them right in Provo.  They discover here that they can be a friend to kids with special needs and, like Megan, connect with these kids that they otherwise would not have a chance to interact with. It appealed to us personally because of the moving influence that she’s had with these kids.  She and others like her encourage and inspire us to get outside of ourselves, get into the community, and be a loving representative of Christ by doing as he would.

Interactive Game

To play my interactive story game, please use this LINK

The world has always been enthralled by games.  Some of our largest, most expensive structures have been built for the joy of the game: the Olympic stadium in Greece, the colosseum in Rome, hippodromes, soccer stadiums, football stadiums, and every two to four years, another Olympic stadium/park.  We have television shows that command our daytime with games and there’s a lot of money to be won on those shows.  Even TV shows such as The Blacklist, White Collar, House of Cards and the like are about games played over decades, cultures, governments.  Even in our scholarly fields, games are at play.  To win, you must get an A, the highest score available to each player.  Economics is another playing field, where each partisan tries to make the most money off of someone else.  Then there’s the lottery.  We could talk for days about the different ways games have hijacked our society.

But perhaps, there is a positive way that games shape us.  How?  By using that format to tell us a story we might not encounter ourselves.  Playing only our story could be dangerous, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie alluded in her TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story”.  But if we can step into someone else’s shoes and walk or ‘play’ a mile, we can understand where they are coming from and combat the issues together. 

Malnutrition and Poverty (MAP), the Twine game that I created, is one such experience.  MAP takes you through a speed-date as a single parent, with a limited and low income, with responsibilities and obligations that must be met, and no help to reach for.  This is a situation found in many parts of the USA.  There is an epidemic known as obese malnutrition.  That sounds like an oxymoron, but there is no truer utterance of the condition.  The reason that people are becoming both obese and malnourished is because the types of foods that are low-cost are also high-calorie, highly refined and loaded with carbs, sugar, salt, saturated and trans fats, etc.  Foods such as vegetables, fruits, meat are all highly priced. 

How do you feed a family of four when you have $250 a month?  It might seem like a lot of money, but spread over 4 weeks and 3 meals a day, it comes down to about $2.25 per person, per meal.  So, what do you buy with $10 that is sufficient to meet your family’s caloric needs? Not the bag of oranges for $5.  Not the broccoli that is $1/pound.  You buy the pasta mix for $2 each that will fill your kids’ stomachs.

In this game, there are very limited choices, but that is not so different from the everyday life of some Americans.  This is there story.  German novelist Juli Zeh said that “what people call there daily choices are really just a well-thought-out game.” And in the game of nutrition, having a low income is the worst handicap a player could have.

World Building Collaboration

Because of the collaborative effort of this assignment, the artifacts illustrating the world of Chroma can be found using the following link: World Building: Chroma

Artist Statement:

Identity is a multi-faceted ordeal: race, religion, socioeconomic status, health, gender, sexual orientation to name a few.  And there are many more categories that fit under the great identity umbrella.  A good portion of these traits cannot be seen, they are felt, heard, thought.  However,  what if you could see every part of your identity summed up in one trait?

We built a world in which that is the case. From the time you are born until you complete adolescence around age 20, your skin color changes.  People are born with all colors, which combined together is the equivalent of a semi-translucent white. As individuals grow to experience feelings and emotions, their skin starts changing colors. The rite of passage in this world is the solidification of your color. When the individual has their color solidify, they are not able to change it anymore, and that color will define his place in society. There is a second-rate class of citizens whose color never solidifies, they are known as Prisms. This caste is seen as inferior because they wear their thoughts, emotions, feelings, and experiences in dramatic, prismatic ways. This makes them hard to hire, harder to befriend, and harder to trust.  Becoming a prism is a thing of nightmares; a scare tactic to keep children in line.

           

To showcase this culture, we chose three artifacts: a drug elimination campaign poster, a radio advertisement, and a blog post. The anti-drug campaign poster shows us the community’s commitment to saving the population from suffering due to illegal drugs. Color drugs, is a way to change the individual solid color to become better accepted. However, most of them end up losing their own colors and who they are in the process. This artifact correlates to our own society as people does not feel accepted; drugs, vicious and other harmful things became their escape of reality.

           

The radio advertisement, like many that pop-up on free music-streaming platforms, allows citizens the opportunity to seek help in coming to terms with an evolving personality within the restriction of their skin color. This is reminiscent of addiction recovery and depression support group advertisements that one would see in our world. Our goal with this artifact is to criticize the idea that individuals can only be one color. People are complex, their whole being can’t be defined by only one simple characteristic like the color of their skin.

           

The blog post unveils the experiences of our outcast Prism culture, subjugated by their solid-color betters, fallen prey to discrimination. Like in our society, these are the marginalized people that can’t fit in and often have to face prejudice.

          

This colorful world mirrors our own reality of visual prejudices.  As Julian Bleeker states in his short essay Design Fiction:

“…fiction can be understood as a kind of writing that, in its stories, creates prototypes of other worlds, other experiences, other contexts for life based on the creative insights of the author. Designed objects — or designed fictions — can be understood similarly. They are assemblages of various sorts, part story, part material, part idea-articulating prop...”

            We label people into boxes, punishing them forever for being who they are.  We marginalize, we use the fear we create to develop false, harsh ideologies of how to treat others.  In the name of unity, conformity, we have fallen prey to exclusion.  Overcoming this obstacle is difficult; if only it were as easy as taking a self-help course like Color My Mind.  And that it came with a 10% discount.

The illusion of originality: webspinna battle

Originality is something that is strived for by any artist.  Each wants to make her mark in the rapid, ever-expanding world of artistic expression.  Jonathan Lethem in his montage The Ecstasy of Influence discusses how artists, be they authors, painters, or other creators, often find themselves in a debacle when creating a piece of art.  In the fight for originality, the artist can become suffocated by the shear volume of already produced works.  

Indeed, this suffocation could completely choke the artist from creating anything.  How is an author to feel when his magnum opus parallels, almost mirrors, a fictitious tale already written?  Is he then guilty of plagiarism?  What if he had no clue that this tale had already been told?  As Lethem iterates, many artists must come to the conclusion that their art is influenced and in part derived from pre-existing products.  As Carl Jung postulates, there is some merit that mankind has a collective unconsciousness that bleeds across geographical and cultural barriers and marks the influence for so many similar pieces of art.  

Our Webspinna battle is no different.  Although our idea of conflict is somewhat original, the works we use to accomplish our foray are the products of other artists.  We begin with an establishing notion, that Dr. Yellow is the embodiment of happiness, sunshine, dreams, and accomplishments.  Mr. Blue upends this delightful atmosphere by reminding us that the world we live in is full of blue, sour moments; rife with maddening irony; and oftentimes contains experiences we would rather have swept underneath the carpet.  

Dr. Yellow tries to cure our depressed friend, but Mr. Blue convinces us that we each have a monster inside of us, one that is hard to face, and that sometimes this monster gathers other heathens around us.  Mr. Blue also makes clear that no one owns his will but himself and that he is not at all afraid to say ‘NO’!  Exasperated, Dr. Yellow tries desperately to out-compete Mr. Blues repertoire of anti-establishment, reject-driven, and disheartening rhetoric.  

But in the end, both Mr. Blue and Dr. Yellow realize that we are each who we are, even born into these different states of being.  Finding a common ground, we experience at last a harmony worth our attention and focus.  Perhaps the best solution to our characters’ objecting viewpoints is for them to agree to disagree.

Textual Poaching: Identity Verification

Photo courtesy BYU NLC

Photo: Chris Olsen, courtesy BYU NLC

Photo: Chris Olsen '76, courtesy BYU NLC

PC: Laura Thompson 

PC: Laura Thompson

PC: Laura Thompson

Identity is a fairly loaded concept in today’s ‘modern’ society.  Occupations, race, sexual orientation, culture, socioeconomic status, etc. are all up for grabs when it comes to defining one’s identity.  What makes determining this identity more difficult is the perception that comes with each individual aspect.  How ready is the gay high schooler to admit his sexual orientation when he attends a catholic boarding school?  What hope does a child born into a home unable to afford decent meals of adding ‘college graduate’ to her identity?  Though these circumstances could end in any number of ways, no one can dismiss that the culture that surrounds each of us plays heavily in how certain, if not all, aspects of our individual identities are perceived or available. 

Adding to the complexity of identity, Henry Jenkins in his book Textual Poachers discusses how texts, which includes many media—like television, can become parts of individual and collective identity.  These texts are taken from the author by the reader and hijacked into a world appreciated only by those who share similar ideas about the subject.  These texts then become ‘real’ because the reader takes what is inanimate or fictitious and, like Dr. Frankenstein, summons a creature only he or she can appreciate.

These creatures appear as Star Trekkies, Pottermore, Team Edward, etc.  And these creatures can be just as much a part of someone’s identity as religion or race.  And again, one cannot deny the influence cultural context has on identity perception.

A great deal of my current identity resides in my future profession of nursing.  Nursing is one of the few, if not the only, profession where men who are nurses are given the prefix of ‘male’.  This is because nursing is a traditionally feminine profession.  Nursing is laden with a history of kind, dedicated women who cared for their fellow humans despite the chagrin of their male medical superiors.  Perhaps the most iconic nurse, Florence Nightingale, is the embodiment of that history.  And it is precisely that history that demands a distinction be made since men were ‘allowed’ into this profession.

The photos I have decided to ‘poach’ are historical photos found in the Nursing Learning Center at Brigham Young University.  To me, they personify three distinct and recognizable aspects or duties seen in nurses.  Nurses' primary duty is to carry out orders prescribed by the physician, as long as it resides in the nurse’s scope of practice.  This includes setting up intravenous (IV) access, administering medications, cleaning wounds, etc.  Nurses are also known for going above and beyond, often seen consoling patients for any number of reasons.  These are also traditionally seen as feminine aspects: men don’t clean; men don’t console; men don’t take orders. 

By placing myself in the position held primarily by a female counterpart, I am declaring that these aspects are as much a part of my identity as my sexual orientation or religion.  And, I am declaring that these aspects needn’t be seen as strictly feminine in nature.  A man can be capable of providing comfort to those who need it.  A man can clean up after someone.  A man can take orders and give medications.  In short, a man can do anything a nurse can do because a man is who I am and a nurse is who I'll be.

Medium Specificity

Read article here: The Metal Raindrop

Narratives can take on many forms: first-person, third person.  Narrators themselves can take equally if not more numerous forms, depending on the narrator’s identity, relation to the story, gender, level of knowledge of events within the narrative itself and the narrator’s own biases or lack thereof.  Scott McCloud iterates in his graphic novel Understanding Comics, where artist (author) and patron (reader) diverge is usually at the point when the understanding of what constitutes the medium they are sharing also diverges.  McCloud talks specifically about how comics separate themselves from painting, photography, and other illustration mediums. 

Literary narrative also has to separate itself from poetry, biography, and historical writing.  It is also not merely prose.  Literary narratives must have, as the name implies, a narrative—a story.  Literary narratives are a symphony that can only be properly performed if the participant and the author come to a mutual understanding through the narrator. 

Literary narratives depend on the reader’s ability to read, understand textual symbolism, and connect events to the overall plot.  Literary narratives depend as well upon the author’s ability to arrange language to fit the audience that is skilled enough to understand the narrative being written.  And when author and reader meet on the field of mutual understanding, that is where the fun begins.  

In The Metal Raindrop, many aspects of literary narrative are emphasized.  It explores the strengths and enormous power a literary narrative can have.  The Metal Raindrop also admits that literary narrative is bound by that which it reveals, for the Reader can never know what the Author has not yet written.  Our narrator reminds us of this constantly, pointing out things that the Author neglected to tell us.  And true to literary narratives, the Author only gives us the pieces we need to know in order to understand the story.

In the beginning, the narrator tells us of the lack of need for a large fire.  At the end, we realize that it is not just that he is alone in his study, but alone entirely.  And the end of the narrator is the end of the narrative, as a literary narrative should be. 

Our narrator also comments on one of the most powerful things a literary narrative can do: create images and ideas inside the human mind.  Since literary narrative can only function if the author can write and the reader can read, it is limited to humans.  Even within our species, there is limitation due to language and culture.

Despite these limitations, the written word has changed and influenced mankind since its inception.  Humans have tried to do physically what words do mentally, film and painting being great examples.  Many are the people who confess that they enjoyed the book better than its film adaptation.  And though film is influential in its own right, it still does not have the power of persuasion that a literary narrative has.  And as the narrator wishes, let us all hope that our own narratives end better than his.