Cousins at a rodeo

Every post I incorporate my own thoughts so I don’t want to be mister talkative.

But I will say this.

I signed up for this class to open my heart and that is exactly what is happening.

This last week’s novel and seminar showed me how cold hearted I can be. I read the book without sympathy or compassion whatsoever. It was only after hearing my classmates’ opinions and reading Jasmine’s blog that I realized my stone heartedness.

Being able to learn about different aspects of popular american culture are rewarding. And instead of making me hate my country it makes me appreciate my country’s diversity. I want to embrace the different cultures instead of homogenize them. And that’s what this class is doing for me.

Perhaps it is my sensitivity and defensiveness that makes it seem like people do not listen to each other and to speak in class is a waste of time and energy. I knew long before this class that I am a one on one person who has conversations that last for days, weeks, months and even years with my closest friends and family… so being in a group where you have to be prepared to only say snippets and then be over spoken is very difficult.

I was shocked that I couldn’t even get two people to understand how easy a raspberry is to dug up because they kept thinking of them as vines like blackberries. But they are not blackberries, they are raspberries. And it seems that something as simple as that would be easy to convince someone else of. I felt like I would need an encyclopedia with every variety of raspberry plant and still they would tell me there was some random raspberry that wasn’t covered. I guess what I’m trying to say is this… In general, I do not talk in groups because I do not think people are inherently good listeners, myself included. I think the majority of us hardly listen at all to anything besides our own chatter. Many people are selective listeners and only listen to people who have similar opinions to reinforce their own and make themselves feel a connection. So that has been a difficult thing to get past for full credit; when you see certain people talk and a room full of people stare down, then others talk and everyone looks up. Very strange. Maybe I’m the only one with listening problems.

Something else that shocked me about this last week.

In my seminar group I was honest about the way I felt about the book. I didn’t like it. One person was obviously distraught about my opinions and later said to me, “What the fuck have you done with your life?” I thought it was absolutely hilarious to think that in order to have an opinion about something other than the popular opinion (It was a wonderful work of art) you must be prepared to make people very angry.  Even when those people pride themselves on being against the grain.

I suppose I need to find more tactful, graceful ways of saying I don’t like something. And I guess I need to have a published book in order to say I don’t like somebody else’s.

All in all, this was a great week and I am very excited for the next half of class. Though it is becoming very difficult to  to annotate the novels properly when reading and writing so much.