Metacognition: Get Organized!

For my "Get Organized" project, I decided to organize my room.

At first I was fairly reluctant to organize my room because I do not spend more than 3 days out of the week in that bedroom so I did not see the point in spending my time cleaning a basically vacant room. However, I thought about it and realized that my room was a mess and I would feel better if it was clean.

Originally I hadn't planned on doing anymore than cleaning out my drawers and organizing my clothes but for some reason I had to start with my bed and make it orderly so that I could put the things that I needed to organize on the clean bed.

I started with taking all of the blankets and books and clothes off of my bed and stripping off the sheets and the comforters. Then I put new sheets on my beds and new pillow covers, and then put the blankets and pillows back on the bed. Next I cleaned the floor, organized my desks and then organized the inside of my clothes drawers.

After I had finished however the floors were a mess of books and papers, not to mention half of my clothes. I realized that I could not go on with the organizing of my clothes drawers without cleaning up the clutter on the floor.

BUT THEN, I realized that items on the floor needed to go on my desks which were basically invisible underneath the cups, papers, yogurt tins, lotions, and books. So I now had to clean off the top of the desks and throw out the trash and put the papers and books away in extra drawers.

Throughout this whole process I was completely aware of how long this whole project was turning out to be but I wasn't necessarily upset. Once I got started I wanted to keep going so that my whole room was no longer a chaotic mess.

I finally got to my clothes drawers and I decided that I wasn't only going to organize them, but I was going to go through the clothes and pick out the clothes that I never wear and give them away. I've done this before, but this time I did not want to convince my self that I would wear that blue top one day even though it's been in there for longer than a year AND it doesn't even fit. Talk about hoarders.

At the end I felt very accomplished that I had done all that, and now my room had this new calming feel to it that made me want to clean my other room at my moms. But then again I probably won't. That room is 10x more worse than this one was...

Anyway, what I found out was that I have a very specific way that I need to go about cleaning my room. My though process was very organized and it reasoned out what I needed to first in order to do the next step and so on. I hadn't realized it before this project that my mind functions a lot more calm(er?) when my room is clean.

Until next time,
Rachel.

iMedia: Silk

I chose a prompt that required that I pick either an image, a video, or a musical composition to write about. Silk just so happens to have all three of those aspects.

It's an image because you can create this wonderful picture of art that you create and you can share it around the web.

It's a video because you are creating this ongoing sequence of designs that you can move and create for however long you wish.

It's a musical composition because it has this beautiful sense that the patterns are being created to the sound of music, and it has this musical flow as it's being played back when you're done.

Silk is an experimental interactive generative art page created by Yuri Vishnevsky. It's available in the app store for iPad, but I happened to 'stumbleupon' it on the website StumbleUpon.com. When I got to this interactive webpage I was awed by how unique and intricate the designs were with just a click of the mouse. By clicking anywhere on the black screen and you will create a beautiful wispy pattern as you move the mouse.

It struck me how anyone could create beautiful art through technology on a website. It also struck me how a program so complex could be used so simply by everyday people.

This kind of advanced technology should matter in our culture because it gives us the chance to integrate art when into the world of computers. I believe that this simple website is so important to me and our culture because it gives anyone the opportunity to create a beautiful work of art while stimulating our creativity.

Try it. Experiment with your creativity.
 
http://new.weavesilk.com/

Until next time,
Rachel.

Best of Week: Sophie's World

This week in class we began reading the novel, Sophie's World.

So far, the book follows a 14-year-old girl, Sophie, who started mysteriously receiving letters from an unknown person. The letters have either been questions addressed to Sophie like, "Who are you?" or "Where does the world come from?" or have been written lessons teaching her about the History of Philosophy.

What made me stop and think were the lessons her 'teacher' sent her.

The lessons talked about all kinds of Philosophers and their theories about the world that completely fascinated me. They asked questions that I had never even considered to ask. The whole idea of this novel seems to be to get the reader to stop and really think about these questions as if they're the ones being asked.

I've sometimes wondered about these kinds of questions but they've never consumed me the way that they consumed Sophie's thoughts and actions. They've never gotten in the way of hanging out with my friends or not being able to focus at school like they did to Sophie. (But then again I'm not the one who received mysterious letters questioning who I am from a random person).

But the problem might be exactly that. We all know about these philosophical questions but for whatever reason, they don't interest us. They don't have that wow factor that seems to be affecting Sophie.

This book has already got me thinking philosophically about the questions Sophie is being asked and we're only on the first 50 or so pages of the book. I can't wait to read the rest.

Until next time,
Rachel.