#blogpost4

The loss of her. The loss of the heart. Subjected to the pain of lies. She was encapsulated by lies that did not belong to her. It broke her piece by piece, a sad story of Eve. Eve, like the bible, is a representation of what the movie displayed, a loss of innocence. This movie is a pure demonstration of how shielding people, especially the ones you love, from the truth will essentially lead to their demise. I believe the director tried to convey that the truth is freeing, and many times, the wrong party gets blamed for the pain caused to others. 

In my family, I deeply relate to this. Although we did not have adultery in my family, that I know of at least. I’ve been stuck in the middle of a secret. I have seen how my mom and my cousins hide information from each other, leaving the burden to me. I’ve seen how both of them got hurt, and instead of challenging pain into love, it was challenged into hatred and resentment, leading to a broken family. The unfortunate events of my life, secrets that are untold today, still hold the power of the division of the Adeboyejos. I also related to Eve, understanding her pain of feeling isolated. I could tell she never really felt like anyone was really there for her. She didn’t really have her person, especially with her father. I felt this with my father, as constant comparisons would saturate his tongue, pinning me and my brother against one another. Not only did I build up resentment for him, but also for my brother. I felt forgotten. However, in the end, just like Eve, I loved my brother above all. My father used to call the cops on me and my brother, and through all the fights with him, I would defend my brother till the end. Although his age was higher than mine, I had that Eve spirit that told me “protect.”

Being Comfortable Without Effort is the book for you if you're seeking for anything to help you remember to respect your process.This book, as well as I Decided to Live as Me, were written by Soo-hyun Kim. With the author's everyday experience of leading a chilling but purposeful life, it has the potential to console you.This book has given me a lot of advise on how to love myself, how to manage relationships, and how to deal with the everyday things in life, if the book You Are a Badass encouraged me to keep going.

When you have a balanced life and don't pressure yourself to succeed all the time, you will be able to work consistently.

This book serves as a reminder for readers not to push themselves to live. It has motivated me to work honestly and diligently without doing myself any harm. Despite the fact that I am enthusiastic about what I do, I do not empty myself in one sitting.The comparison points in our lives—career, marriage, vehicles, appearances, homes, annual salaries, etc.—keep lining up.

Every day, I push myself to work harder just because I have to. I know this is wrong. Work-wise, I treat my five families as one. This book, however, seems to slow me down while it speaks to me. I've been constantly aware of my life, overlooking things that need to be prioritized. I've learned to be more ardent about what I do without losing sight of myself.

Instead of focusing on those who have harmed us, let's focus more on those who love us.

Everyone can relate to this remark. I wish for you, the reader of this blog, to always cherish and adore the people that truly matter. Try to be more optimistic about life and let go of the people who have damaged you.

The book, Geographies of the Holocaust takes a spatial look at the atrocities of the holocaust during the second world war. From the first chapter in this book, it is discussed that this book takes a look at the happenings during this time period. This look aggregates information from maps and other physical location based resources and mashes them together with testimonials of the people who lived through these experiences and were able to tell their tales. This chapter states that place is a value from feeling, as described by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. This adds more meaning and a different perspective into the work of GIS on this matter. GIS is described in this chapter as being fundamental to blend together the physical location data with the testimonial, or story side, to create a better representation of these occurrences. This blend opens the door to new questions that can be asked once the data is analyzed. The note that place is the value of feeling adds a value of feeling to the work that otherwise would consist more of data analysis. It brings a real human element to the table. This chapter also takes a look at GIS as part of the spatial humanities. This is evident from the blend of the previously mentioned ideals. A very important takeaway from this chapter that will be reflected through the rest of this work is the fact that the authors did not want to make maps that were visually striking or conventionally good. They wanted to produce maps that told the real story, without the fancy gimmicks of digital cartography that can often blind the viewer to the real data that is being shown. 

The second chapter of this book was on mapping SS concentration camps. This chapter describes some of the difficulties with working on GIS with all of these details of the past. They describe the process of trying to make sense of dates. Such as something that occurred in late spring, where could that be placed. While working with data in GIS, it has to be made into a form that will be able to be processed by the software. In this case, something being described as late spring needs to have a numerical value of a date attached to it so that the data point can be converted over into GIS to be used appropriately. This was a prolific issue as specific dates were not found consistently in the source data. Another issue covered in this chapter is what is a concentration camp? Data from these locations do not make it easy to categorize any of these in a specific way that would help place each camp in a box. They all have such different qualities that just creating a definition in this manner to properly label data presents an issue. This is evident with Auschwitz, since it filled many different definitions of camp types at different points in its existence. Another issue was properly coding the work that each inmate had to perform and getting this information out of the source. This chapter also covered some findings. One very interesting one to me was that the maps that were created showed the reception and perceived need over occupied and Allied territories in this time. The results showed that across the board in the chronology shown, the support was always varied.

My phone is in my hands the moment I wake up. At the very least to turn off my many, many alarms. I immediately open any notifications or messages, mostly Snapchat. I answer my friends, or sometimes I message them first, asking if they want to go get food together before or after our first class. Unless I have less than five minutes until I have to be in class, I play a video from YouTube, play music, or I read fanfiction I already have pulled up online while I get ready. After I’m ready, or once it’s time to go to class, I put in my AirPods and listen to music.  As I walk and listen I normally play my phone games doing a few things until I run out of energy or things I can do at the time.  I normally open Snapchat or Instagram after that. If I don’t have any messages, I will go through some of my friends' Snapchat stories, or mindlessly scroll through my Instagram feed. 

That is just maybe the first 30 minutes of my day. I typically do not spend more than five minutes on Snapchat at a time. For YouTube I will throw on maybe a ten minute video of a compilation of scenes from a TV show I know and have already watched. Both normally put me into a good mood, or make me laugh a bit. If I play music right away, it tends to be calming soft music, or very depressing music if I wake up feeling depressed. The fanfiction is mostly me using escapism to forget that I am a physical human being with my own consciousness, so it does not matter how it makes me feel, as long as I am feeling in the story and not feeling emotions at anything in my real life.

After finishing most of my classes for the day, I get dinner or lunch with a few friends. Sometimes if we are not feeling up to talking to each other, I will continue reading on my phone, or scroll through Instagram. That app is the one that I never know how I’m going to feel using it. I use it to catch up on news, or friends who I do not talk to on a regular basis. Most of the time the news will make me sad, or I will see something talking about the injustices in the world, which will also make me sad. But there are also a lot of cute animals and people doing stupid things that make me laugh in between all the depressing topics. 

I will play games or read (while listening to music) during any short period of time between classes, or waiting for a friend to arrive. Typically it doesn’t make me feel anything in particular, unless I am reading a depressing story. Though I do also text friends during this time and it brings me comfort being in constant contact with people who I love and care for, even if it is just sending stupid pictures of our faces to each other. Sometimes it will make me feel validated if I am complaining about something, or outraged at something my friends are experiencing.  

(An example of a stupid photo we have sent)

Later in the day once I am back in my dorm, I tend to throw on a longer YouTube video. On average I would say these videos are someone I am subscribed to playing a game, or reacting to other things on the internet. I love this part of the day because I use it as time to decompress from interacting with other people through the day. Most of the time the videos make me laugh obnoxiously loud, even if I have already seen the video before. If I don’t throw on a video, I put on a TV show. I like to put the shows on as another way to decompress and as a form of escapism, whether it be positive or negative emotions, all depending on what I put on. Sometimes when I put on the shows it is to put me into a certain headspace for writing. I have put on romance shows, or historical shows if I was writing a love story, or something that takes place during a different era. 

Towards the end of my day I either go to a friend's dorm, or they come to mine, and we do homework together, or watch a movie if we don’t have anything to work on. I watch the movies because they tend to make me laugh, and it is something my friend wants to show/share with me, or vice versa. Once the movie is over, or one of us is too tired to keep working we go back to our own rooms. Now if I am tired, I will get ready for bed, using the same media I do getting ready in the morning. If I am still awake I will put on more YouTube videos, and typically play games on my phone while I semi listen to the video. 

Walter Benjamin’s short history of photography is a whirling pool of history, opinion and philosophy, so ferocious that I found myself confused throughout most of it. The overall view on photography, what it stands for, what it is used for, what it means as an artform, how it distanced itself from painting and how it was fought, how glorious the ‘plates’ are, etc. all felt disconnected from what I understood. In the very first section the author refers to ‘the rise and fall of photography’, but I felt nothing could be further than the truth. Of course, there is recurring a pattern in all forms of art and science, throughout history, where the elite of the genre dismiss new notions and advances. But with photography, I don’t think even the most biased of views can deny the vast growth that has come directly from availability. But it all made sense after seeing when it was written; 1931.

One thing I found very interesting, is how the technique itself affected the pictures so drastically. I am born in the age of cameras that need only a few milliseconds of exposure, and even that seems too much sometimes. But the ‘Daguerreotype’ required seconds and sometimes minutes. The author makes it clear that the way the subjects in the photo must stand still gives the photos a different atmosphere. I had never thought about this, and am curious if this only limits the practice, or it improves the photo in some non-linear way.

An odd thing that I saw in the ‘plates’, but wasn’t there in the text, was how low-detail they are compared to recent ‘plates’. This is not the odd part; what is odd, is that this lack of detail makes them in some sense underspecified and mysterious. It sparks imagination to fill in the gaps, and this extra mile the viewer goes makes the picture feel closer, as if the viewer helped in shooting it. My takeaway is, vivid detail can be powerful if it is very well-guided. If not, one should let the viewer fill in the gaps.

Catacombs, Paris Photo by: Nadar In: Gilman Collection Paris April 1862

Der Hamburger Künstlerverein Photo by: Carl Ferdinand Stelzner In: Wilhelm Weimar: Die Daguerreotypie in Hamburg Hamburg 1843

Napoleon III Photo by: Pierre Louis Pierson In: Second Empire Court Album of Napoleon 1862

The Philosopher Photo: August Sander Germany 1913

Farming Couple-Propriety and Harmony Photo: August Sander Germany 1912

Pommier Photo by: Eugène Atget In: Abbott-Levy Collection Paris 1898 or before

Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève Photo by: Eugène Atget In: Abbott-Levy Collection Paris 1898