Passim Points

Okay okay, here’s your first exercise on your art journey toward enlightenment. Think of 8 different emotions / concepts and use only lines to depict them. I know this might seem a little crazy, but it’ll be fun! Don’t be afraid to get a little crazy. Don’t think about thinks rigidly, really feel the lines and let them take you away. Your final creation will be an abstract masterpiece! For my practice run, I chose anger, joy, tranquility, depression, human energy, fraternity, illness, and growth! I think the most fun I had was definitely with the anger one, because anger is something really easily expressed with lines, especially scribbles! For the rest, I found myself using more and more shapes to express the more complex concepts. Which is okay! It’s good to just let your mind wander and your hand follow.

As many of us know, Corona has drastically affected our daily lives for better and for worse and keeping oneself happy and healthy is essential to surviving quarantine! With so much anxiety surrounding what will happen regarding the virus and in the future while also being unable to participate in normal routines, it can be hard to stay in the moment. Mindfulness, the practice of focusing and reflecting on the present moment, is an especially excellent way to push toward that healthy balance. I’ll be sharing 3 different ways to practice mindfulness… through art! I know you might be thinking, how can art help me be happier? Or maybe, I suck at drawing how am i going to do this! Have no fear! The exercises I’m going to share with you, for the low price of zero dollars but the reward of happiness and satisfaction, are incredibly simple! All you have to do is click on the next post! Enjoy!

  Q: How would you characterize Fatima’s relationship to her body in The Body’s Defenses Against Itself? A: From Fatima’s memories of her childhood, I got the sense that the judgemental nature caused by her shame doesn’t stop at other people, it also affects her own ego. The cycle of too much sweating resulting in shame and embarrassment due to her peers and thus more anxiety highlights how little control she has over her own body.  From my perspective, in addition to being shamed about her anxiety induced and amplified hyperhidrosis, Fatima really seems like she’s dealing with more behind the scenes. Perhaps due to the fact that she couldn’t control her sweating, she wanted to control a different aspect of her body, her weight. From her longlasting grudge against Christinia, we know that her non-chubbiness is something she takes pride in.  While recounting when her body started bleeding again at age 33, Fatima thinks “I try to believe the bleeding is just part o...

  “I wanted to be free to be selfish and self-destructive and indulgent like the white girls at the high school my parents worked so hard to get me into, and once they did, once we moved into a neighborhood where no one hung out on the streets, where everyone was the same pasty shade of consumptive blotchy paleness, all it did was make me want to get away from my family. I envied white girls whose relationships with their parents were so abysmal that they could never disappoint them” (Zhang 154-5). Jenny’s response here to the big changes in her life, her little brother being born, moving to a suburban neighborhood and switching to a majority upper-middle class white school, highlights the contradiction of her parent’s hopes. They want the best for her, but they don’t entirely fit the white suburbanite mold of “parents”. Even though they’re often away from home, Jenny still feels repressed by the expectations they hold.  Not only is this a story of the conflict between ...

Then he wanders toward the U.N. soldiers at the corner, their rifles shiny in the twilight. They’re walking away from him, as if they were a mirage. The soldiers won’t wait for him but Jean doesn’t let up. He does everything to get their attention, screaming and crying, tugging at their shirt sleeves. They don’t understand what he says and begin to look around anxiously. Eventually they break free from Jean and disappear into the night.  We limp on into the chilly night, ascending the stony road into the hills. There’s a smaller mob coming toward us. These are our people on Maman’s side, and they’re all in military clothes. The next day Jean and I awake to gunshots. I return to the road and look back, our house is burnt to a crisp. Maman is no longer outside on the ground. When I return to Jean I notice a white vehicle coming down the road toward the bush. I quickly run back into the shade of the leaves, but it comes to a halt a few meters before us.  UN soldiers ...

  Within the war short story genre, pervading lonliness persistently appears thematically. In effect, the loneliness of war amplifies other emotions, even when positive, to an extreme and thus negative point. For example, Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” conveys how young  soldiers cope with being drafted into the Vietnam War, thus torn from their youth. Jimmy Cross is only 22 years old and as the leader of the plattoon he finds himself constantly conflicted with desires to be with his crush, Martha. The most important things Jimmy carries are pictures and letters sent to him by Martha. The members of the plattoon, in semi-sexualized fashion, jokingly refer to carrying objects as “humping” them. So, “...Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps...it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.” (O’Brien 253) With the replacement verb, the impossibility of their hopes and desires is portrayed as something that weighs them d...

  “The Machine Stops” ends on a heavily marked criticism. Its narrator narrates the ultimate irony of humanity’s demise within “The Machine Stop”’s universe through omnipotent, bible-esque language. “And heavenly it had been for so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body--it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend--glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colorless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.” (E.M. Forster 77) Alone, this small portion of the verse sums up all the pessimistically apocalyptic outcomes of human’s “evolution”. Which is really de-evolution rather than evolution. The cause? The comfort of technology. That which first began as simply a betterment to the human ex...