taking a look back to the beginning

Well here we are at the end of the semester, it all happened so fast! I was looking over all my past notes and blogs and i ran across the blog towards the beginning of the semester where i was searching through the Chronicle for the past references. I was struggling to make a link. I stated that maybe since we had just started the class that was the reason i couldn't find anything and that i just needed to give myself time to learn more.

Well now during the last week of classes i decided to look back through a chronicle to find the past. I hate to say that i came up empty handed. I felt quite discouraged from not being able to do what i had set out to accomplish.
Then i started think of all the group and individual presentations and how so many links were made with ease to the past. So now i feel better because although i may not be able to read this mornings paper and find a connection to the past, during a discussion of many movies, song, poems, plays, books and almost anything else i can find a link to the past. This idea makes me feel like i learned a lot now instead of feeling defeated.

Although this time of the semester is so stressful and just piled with loads of homework and studying i love to look back through the class notes, because it reminds me of the place that we stated. This then bring up the idea of T. S. Eliot and his fine words of wisdom....


"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time"

We are ending up the class in the same place, but i am no longer the same person. I have learned and reflected on too many things this semester to have not been effected. I guess a part from being here to get a degree, this is what college is all about, putting in the time and effort to learn something and forever be changed.

Today was the first of the group presentations and it is just so funny to me that we have all been in the same class together but each presentation has been completely original and nothing like the one before it. It just amuses me that although we all have been sitting in the same class all semester together each person has gotten something different from the class. This idea is evident in all of the blogs. It is so interesting to go through different people's blogs and see how they interpreted or responded to a certain idea or theme or book. I love diversity and it looks like this class really allows people to explore there own ideas and interpret things in their own way, whether it is through poems or pictures or just written responses.

My five lines

I realized that i never posted my five lines that I picked from Ovid's Metamorphoses, better late than never

"Now, when it wills, the fatal day (which has
only the body in its grasp) can end
my years, however long or short their span.
But, with the better part of me, I'll gain
a place that's higher than the stars: my name,
indelible, eternal, will remain." (pg. 549)

There were so many lines in this book that i was thinking about for my particular five lines but my mind kept getting captured by these lines. I think they are so inspirational. These lines speak to me in a way that they wouldn't of last year and probably won't next year but at this point in my life and everything that is surrounding me, these lines are inspirational and comforting. I guess they just remind me that things don't die, they change...Ovid is proof of this, he is not dead...yet he lives each time I open his book and absorb his words.

Cupid and Psyche

Ok, I know we were only supposed to pick one picture of cupid and psyche...but i couldn't these are all great

"But - and here you must excuse a horrible idea which i hope nobody will ever put into practice - if you shaved the head of even the most beautiful woman alive and so deprived her face of its natural setting, then i don't care whether she originally floated down from Heaven, and was reborn from sea-foam like the Goddess Venus - i don't even care whether she were Venus herself, with everyone of the Graces and Cupids in attendance, Venus dripping with precious balsam and fragrant as Cinnamon, and with a famous girdle of love clasped around her waist- the fact is, that her baldness would leave her completely without attraction even for so devoted a husband as the God Vulcan" (pg 31 from the Golden Ass)


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I couldn't help but think of Britney Spear during this passage. I guess she didn't read the Golden Ass before taking the razor to her head.

Pyramus and Thisbe

I really liked this story. I think Shakespeare also enjoyed this tale because it seems to have been the inspiration for his Romeo and Juliet. This story was very captivating. Sometimes i think it is hard to get into stories that are in prose form (especially when they are so long), but something about this story really captured my attention and i couldn't help but let my thoughts be taken away with this story.

This photo is of mulberries and if you read this myth then you know why they are red. Originally this fruit was the color of snow, a pure white. The blood of Pyramus changed them red when he killed himself because he thought the love of his life was eaten by a lion. When Thisbe came out from hiding from the lion she found her beloved Pyramus dead, killed by his own dagger. She, from grief of losing her lover, also decided to kill herself with his dagger, but not before she begged the Gods to keep this fruit the color of their blood to show and remind everyone of their tragic love.

"And may you mulberry, whose boughts now shade one wretched body and will soon shade two, forever bear these darkly colored fruits as sign of our sad end, that men remember the death we met together" (115).

After she pleaded these words she also used Pyramus dagger to take her life. Although it was a very tragic story it was still very captivating and worth taking a look at.

Modern Day Lysistrata

It looks like in 2006 Aristophanes Lysistrata was put to life when these women in the story that follows decided to use her idea of withholding sex from their husbands and boyfriends in order to have them give up their guns.

This article was copied right off of the news.com site. The link is at the bottom if you are interested.

Gang wives call sex strike against crime
From correspondents in Bogota
September 13, 2006 12:00

THEY are calling it the "crossed legs" strike.

Fretting over crime and violence, girlfriends and wives of gang members in the Colombian city of Pereira have called a ban on sex to persuade their menfolk to give up the gun.
After meeting with the mayor's office to discuss a disarmament program, a group of women decided to deny their partners their conjugal rights and recorded a song for local radio to urge others to follow their example.

"We met with the wives and girlfriends of gang members and they were worried some were not handing over their guns and that is where they came up with the idea of a vigil or a sex strike," mayor's office representative Julio Cesar Gomez said.
"The message they are giving them is disarm or if not then they will decide how, when, where and at what time," he said by telephone.


I copied this page from this link if you want to check it out. I thought it was very funny and worth sharing