Learning Journal #29 (4/9)

I'm somewhat at a loss for what to do with this last learning journal post ... It doesn't seem possible that this could be the last one! It doesn't seem like the semester can be ending! It doesn't seem like I could possibly be officially stepping foot in London exactly one month from today. Can it really be? I've been saying it for weeks, but I think I'll say it again: this does not feel real. There's too much to be done between then and now; a month might as well be an eternity. And yet it was only the bat of an eye ago that I was saying, "It's still more than two months away" to a friend, so I'm sure this next four or so weeks will go by with just as much speed, if not more.

It's funny, but I don't really spend so much time thinking about going to London and being in London anymore. I guess I never really did, but you'd think that it would take up a little more of my brain time than it really does. Maybe it's just because it still doesn't seem real at all that I don't think about it, at least not in serious terms. There have been so many other things on my mind lately—finals, classes next semester, graduating next April, applying to graduate programs—my brain's already living after London, it seems like. Things have been so stressful that the field study has become almost something to check off my list so I can get onto all these other things that I need to do. Even worse, it sometimes jumps up in my mind like a barrier that's keeping me from other things I want to do this summer with friends and family. I hadn't realized this until this weekend, and it struck me that this is remarkably tragic. I'm going to one of the world's greatest cities, and I'm already thinking of it like it's over because my brain is completely preoccupied with the future beyond it. This is not something that I want. 

Living in London is going to be hard because I already know I'm going to get horrifically lonely for a bit (that's just the way I am and I'm already mentally preparing myself for it) and because it's going to be tempting for me to go away into my little library corner and sit there all day and then go home and sit in my room and be a hermit because I'm so stressed about being by myself in a foreign country and doing a project that will inevitably stress me out while I'm missing out on all the fun things that my friends and family will be doing together while I pay for four months of housing contract in Provo because I haven't been able to sell my contract yet, so why didn't I just stay in Provo in the first place because it would have been a whole darn lot easier?

Calm down, calm down ... I'm not serious. Entirely. I'm just trying to explain that as soon as I start thinking like that, I'm going to kick myself or something, because that is not the attitude I want to have at all. Yes, staying in Provo would be easier. It would be a lot easier. And yeah, I'm going to miss out on doing fun things with my friends and family. And it's true that I'm going to be working on a project that's probably going to be very frustrating, because that's just the way that projects are. And I know (oh boy do I know) that this is going to be one of the most emotionally taxing experiences in my life to date. But I know it's going to be worth it. Doing this project is going to do amazing things for my ability to do academic research and synthesize real information. It's going to be integral in me figuring out if this is the kind of thing I want to do long-term or not. It's going to help me get into graduate school and pursue whatever I decide my dreams are going to be. And the benefits don't even stop at academia!

And so, I have a resolution: I am going to live in London.

So what do I mean by living in London? Pretty much just what it says. I'm going to live my life in London. I'm not going to think about what I'm missing back home or in Provo. I'm not going to think about what's ahead. London is going to be my life, and I'm going to make every effort I can to live in the present. Not very often anyways. Thinking about all the things I have to do and everything that's happening outside of London will inevitably stress me out beyond my ability to do anything productive, let alone enjoy myself.

Again, this is not what I want.

I want to enjoy my time in London. I want to be able to have a good experience, immerse myself in life there, and not be stuck thinking about things beyond what is right in front of me, and furthermore way more awesome and exciting than anything I could possibly be doing in the U.S. (This is a significant part of the reason that I chose to have Eng317 be one of my classes that I take while in the field--it will basically force me to enjoy London and do the things that are most helpful when I'm stressed. It's basically an academic tranquilizer, honestly. Not that I'll need a tranquilizer or anything...).

This is going to be a great experience academically, culturally, and personally. I can't wait!

And let me just say it ...

See you in a month, London!

Learning Journal #28 (4/6)

I figure since I spent so much time preparing for my presentation, I might as well put the fruits of my efforts on here:

London Field Study Sp/Su 2012 on Prezi

Learning Journal #27 (4/4)

Reading about culture shock this week was really interesting. In fact, I think sometimes we can even experience a kind of culture shock during the course of our normal lives, even when we haven't actually gone anywhere that actually constitutes a new culture.

I felt something like culture shock the first time I came back from a semester at school. Home was kind of like going to a new culture: my family had moved to Missouri right after I graduated from high school, so it wasn't really home to me, and when I realized that life at home had gone on without me, that I'd somewhat lost my place of belonging within the family, that there were jokes I wasn't on the inside of ... it was really rough. I was all kinds of emotional for about a week before I could get anywhere even close to normal. Not exactly the best time of my life, but it certainly taught me a lot of things. I think one of those things might be how culture shock is going to affect me. I could almost go down the list of symptoms and say, "Yep, that's going to be me" and "No, I won't do that." I'm sure most people would argue that you can't know until you get there.  I'd argue that I'm more in touch with my emotions than most people I know, and I'm almost 100% certain that I'm absolutely right. I'm sure that at some point in the first month of being there, I'll write a post about whether or not I'm correct at present (just wait and see ... I will be!)

My mom has been dealing with me for the past 21 years, and so she's really got my number when it comes to handling my emotions (which are many, and frequent, and potent), and I'm really grateful that she's taught me so well how to take care of myself because (1) I need it badly, and (2) I think it will help me cope with culture shock. I mentioned this in class, but she gave me a mantra a couple of years ago, kind of a set of questions to ask myself when I'm feeling upset or angry or whatever and don't really know why. Or even if I know why, but I'm overreacting. The mantra is, "Never let yourself get too hungry, too tired, or too lonely." So, when I feel myself getting down, I ask myself: Have you eaten today? Are you well rested? Have you talked to people today? Have you taken time to be by yourself today? (Because for me, being over-socially-stimulated can be just as lonely as being under-socially-stimulated.) In class, we also talked about making sure we get exercise, so maybe that'll be another question to ask myself, though I don't think it's as likely to be a problem since I plan on taking long, lovely walks every morning, and I don't exercise any more than that on a regular basis anyways :)

So, that's my plan for handling culture shock! I'm 150% sure it's coming, but at least I have a plan. It feels good to have some kind of preparation!

Learning Journal #26 (4/2)

I've been thinking a lot about the "why" behind my project. As more and more people have been asking me about my plans for the summer, and I've concisely explained that I'm studying how the perception of God changed as a result of the Copernican Revolution, and watched blank stares come up on their faces, I've found myself thinking, "Why am I really doing this?" Sure, there's the fact that it's something study-able that I'm interested in, something that doesn't really seem to have a book written about it, something that is intensely personal and that I, nosy as I am, want to delve into and explore. 

But what does it really matter? Who really cares about changing definitions of God? It's in the past, it's not going to change the future, so why do it? 

I've recently permitted myself to take up reading for pleasure again, and found the following quote in John Green's Looking for Alaska: 

With a sigh, he ... wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? ... [And then said, "E]verybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget ... I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that questions and the questions each of you posed...—how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip ... called 'people's rotten lots in life.'"

I guess the real reason that I want to know, that I care at all about how these people understood God, is because it matters to me. Because when I am lost in the labyrinth of suffering, there's only one way I know to get out, and that is to rely on God. And if I don't know who God is, if I have no functioning way to define His existence and understand how that definition relates to me, then the labyrinth has won, and I have no way to come to terms with those rotten lots in life that I get.

Ultimately, I know how heavily I rely on my understanding of God and my relationship to Him, and so it's nigh unto impossible for me to comprehend the magnitude of something like Copernicus coming along and bringing that understanding into question. I just can't fathom what that would be like, or how I would cope with it because it would be such an intense test of my faith. I think it's the incomprehensibility of the situation that draws me to it, knowing that I would just shatter on the inside if I found out that suddenly that something I had constantly counted on, which showed me just how much I matter to God, wasn't true anymore. My mind and heart just hurt thinking about it, and maybe that's just because it's fairly early in the a.m. and I'm in the middle of reading a really dramatic emotional-roller-coaster of a book, and therefore am prone to my own dramatizations of situations ... but I still think my point is valid. I know that I would care if my cosmological paradigm shifted, and so I can't imagine that they didn't; I just want to know how they coped, how they tried to reassemble their definition of God, which is so vital to the relationship between God and man.

Learning Journal #25 (3/28)

Every now and then in the enormous notebook that holds all my notes for all my classes, I'll have a page that is covered in hasty, scrawling cursive that doesn't fit quite on the lines. It's almost always got a huge star next to it that says, "For Field Study!" Today, I thought I'd talk about one of them.

One of my favorite TED talks is by Brené Brown, and it's called "The Power of Vulnerability." Apparently I wasn't listening very well in class because I was reading the transcription of her talk, and copied the following quote:

... we make everything that's uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up. That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable, the more afraid we are.

My first question written right after this quote is: were people during the Renaissance more uncertain before or after the Copernican Revolution?

To start off, I've seen how much people during the medieval period accepted mystery. The play cycles that depicted Biblical stories were called mystery plays, so the idea that some things remained unknown wasn't a problem. I think this was also built into their cosmology, which of course continued into the Renaissance. Sure, they built their universe system, but they didn't have much definite proof to back it up, or to prove it wrong.

Then, of course, Copernicus came along and crushed it.

One of the books that I've included as one of my annotated sources is a book by Jamie James called The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe. While this book primarily focuses on music, it contains some wonderful explanations about how the course of science was forever changed by scientific discoveries that started with Copernicus, and which I think gives a bit of an answer to my question. He writes:

Picture to yourself, if you can, a universe in which everything makes sense. A serene order presides over the earth around you, and the heavens above revolve in sublime harmony. Everything you can see and hear and know is an aspect of the ultimate truth ... It is not simply a matter of faith: the best philosophical and scientific minds have proved that it is so.

This is no New Age fantasy but our own world as scientists, philosophers, and artist knew it ... Those ideals are gone forever. After the revelations of modern scientific enquiry, educated people will never again be able to face the universe, now unimaginably complex, with anything like the serenity and certitude that existed for most of our history. ... 

The asking of ... questions was the intellectual breakthrough, and the answers were as poetic and expansive as the questions, for there existed no data with which they were expected to conform, aside from the perceived order and beauty of creation. "Doing things" was disdained as unworthy of science, whose true purpose was to elucidate the fundamental unities that explain the function and thus the meaning of the phenomenal world. 

As scientific observation accumulated information, ostensibly to make the answers to the questions more precise, the universe revealed itself to be far more complicated than anyone had ever imagined. The assumption throughout centuries of science had been that there was a logic underlying the apparent chaos of creation, but that the human perception was too clouded and fallacious to discern it. By the nineteenth century science had abandoned that position, and the search for the fundamental unities became more and more a theoretical goal. An abrupt conceptual turnabout had taken place: whereas Plato had taught that anything the eye could see was illusory, modern science teaches that the only things that do exist are those we can see and touch... (from p. 3-5)

I know that was an absolutely enormous quote, but isn't it great? There were some others that might have been better, but I returned the book to the library, and that's all I can pull from the Google Books preview. As I see it, the discoveries which started with Copernicus did a couple of things. First, they made some things more certain. By giving the science and mathematics behind his observations, Copernicus introduced a new level of certainty about the structure of the universe to the world. However, it did another thing: it opened a whole new can of uncertainty worms, and these uncertainties were not just about how the universe was built, but about what that meant for humanity.

Science, of course, has been forever changed. While as a discipline it once accepted mystery and uncertainty as still valuable, now we've gone so far as to do exactly what Brené Brown was talking about: we've pushed for certainty. We need to see numbers, facts, reality. And yet, with every new discovery, it seems that the certainty we seek gets even further out of our reach. I've been watching The Fabric of the Universe on Nova recently, and it seems to me that the deeper you get into science and the universe, the weirder it gets, the more questions there are to ask, the more answers remain elusive. It's that whole, "The more you know, the more you know you don't know" sort of thing.

I guess it just seems to me that the more we get into trying to make things certain, the further we get from understanding them. Maybe there's more truth in mystery than we realize. Because really, in terms of defining God, my own experience has told me that the more people try to find tangible proof, the more it eludes them. Finding proof of God comes through faith—through accepting mystery. Or, as Keats would put it, through negative capability, "that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." It's only then that tangible proof comes.

I don't have time to fully explore what I'm thinking right now because I've spent so much time writing this already. But I want to explore later (note to self!) the relationship between perceptions and definitions of God and the controversy between faith and proof. That is, did the response to the Copernican Revolution initially encourage more proving, or more faith in God's mystery? For myself, I totally reject the idea of an unknowable, unexplained, undefinable God; I think He means for us to know who He is. But at the same time, we can't expect to prove who God is—faith is absolutely necessary. So we have to accept, but we shouldn't blindly and blithely accept; we should think, but not so much that we lose the ability to have faith. It's the entire controversy that we're currently discussing in my Christian History class—faith vs. reason. (Goodness. No wonder Martin Luther made such a beef about it.) I understand the concept, it's just difficult to verbalize. And it's even more difficult to mesh with the whole concept of changing perceptions and definitions of God as a result of the Copernican Revolution. Add this to the stack of things to think about ...

Learning Journal #24 (3/26)

After preparing for class last week by reading up about books, television, and radio in English newspapers, I found myself asking one big question: why is everyone so obsessed with Doctor Who? Having been raised on Masterpiece Theater and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I thought I had this English entertainment thing down without ever seeing an episode of Doctor Who. But after seeing three articles about "the Doctor's new companion" on the main television page, and even on the paper homepage, I began to wonder if this was an issue of national concern, rather than just a weird corner of Tumblr fandom.

Apparently it is.

Apparently, it has also been running for forty-six years (with a sixteen-year hiatus of cancellation somewhere in there), and is the most popular science fiction television series of all time. Doctor Who knew? (My apologies. That was horrendous. Absolutely unacceptable. Moving right along ...) A Google search about the popularity of the show includes results such as "The Doctor's skyrocketing popularity in America" and "Doctor Who prompts surge of popularity of bow ties" ... now that's what I call power!

I read an article, "What  Makes Doctor Who So Great?" by Kendall Korolowicz, who describes the show as "something of an institution for the whole country." His explanation for the show's popularity is its

... sheer level of originality and diversity of its storytelling caused by the production team’s willingness to go as far 'out there' with itself as possible. Giving themselves a universe of opportunities with a character that can travel throughout the universe they decide to boldly go to the places that other TV shows, primarily American TV shows, have no sack to go to. Other shows like Star Trek may go around the spectrum with what they do, but Star Trek is still science fiction, while Doctor Who, in a fashion that makes his regenerative abilities quite symbolic, can change to any genre at undeterminable will.

An interesting interpretation. I suppose if it's really that popular and pervasive in English culture, I'm going to have to watch it. For research purposes only, of course.


... ;)

Learning Journal #23 (3/21)

I found Fox's chapter on linguistic class codes fascinating, and how both pronunciation of words and the words themselves are indicative of class. I don't think we're half as aware of class as the English are (at least, as Fox describes them), but I think Americans do have some reflection of this in our culture. Like the English, we have regional accents: southern, Jersey, Utah ... lots that seem to be attached to actual states. These affect pronunciation, and sometimes word usage. For example, in, say, Colorado, someone can offer you a Coke, and you will say "yes" or "no" and that's perfectly acceptable. In the south, someone will offer you a coke, and if you say "yes" or "no," they're going to ask you what kind, because "coke" doesn't mean "Coca-Cola," it means "soda." But back to the point I was making, I don't think we attach class distinctions to these sorts of linguistic variations for various reasons which I'd assume include the sheer size of the U.S. compared to the U.K. and general lack of attention to class distinctions in the U.S. period. We just don't have the class-ridden history that England does; in fact, we've kind of made a point of dismantling the class system. It's kind of a selling point for us.

At any rate, I realized as I was reading that, for whatever reason, I was subconsciously cataloging words I shouldn't say and congratulating myself for saying "upper class" words ... I was a little bit appalled because for one, I'm American, therefore I'll probably have a lot more problems in the way people perceive me than my socioeconomic class. Soon afterwords, I was scrolling through Tumblr, and found the following gem:

I had been previously made aware of the difference in the meaning of the word "pants" in America vs. Britain, but I had no idea about suspenders. It was at this point that I realized that, if I'm going to try to English-ify my grammar, I should probably worry more about eradicating the word "pants" than the word "pardon." Because talking about my pants in public is going to be a lot more problematic.


(FYI, there's a whole list of words that have different meanings in Britain vs. the U.S.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_having_different_meanings_in_British_and_American_English:_A%E2%80%93L)