Final 5 Hour Project Completion!

I have spent this quarter's five hours copying out poems, which today I distributed discreetly throughout various random books in the library. This final project has a lot of elements to it.

As my final gift to the school, I'm most excited to leave poetry. Most of the poems are poems I like / have collected, and a few of them are my own. This way, kids flipping through scifi novels or enormous anthologies or reference books during projects will come across a random little handwritten poem in the book they're holding, and most of them will laugh and show their friends or throw it out, but maybe one or two of them will like the poem and google the author and discover some poems that they like. I'm hoping that at some point, some of those poems will find their way into unsuspecting and eventually appreciative young hands.

Some of the reference books and more obscure novels are hardly ever picked up. What will happen to the library books? They'll be here for decades more. If they are moved out, someone will buy them somewhere, or they'll end up in someone's library. I've found love letters in old volumes in used bookstores. Or I suppose there will be a massive apocalyptic book burning and they will all go up in smoke. The point is--they could be found yellowing in a hundred and fifty years, or they could end up in a compost heap. I love the possibilities.

I also wrote an article for the paper earlier this year about the value of printed books over ebooks. One of the arguments I made is that books, especially when they are old books, books that are passed down or resold, or shared books, hold important things in them--dedications, broken spines, pressed flowers, notes,  etc. Books are a personal form of history. By distributing poems in books, I feel like I've proven this point just a little bit more. An online library couldn't offer students this surprise of a handwritten poem hidden inside their archaeology textbook. When you pick up something like that, you have a strange connection to something anonymous. It's cool.

In terms of a soc project and not just the end of my career here, that's where this challenge connects. Distributing some of my own poems is still not easy for me, but it shows how far I've come from being super secretive about my work. Distributing poems, to me, is a small way of giving to and connecting to the world and to this school after I've gone. I didn't write a proposal for this project, so maybe it's a little too quiet and impersonal, but I like the sense I have of leaving parts of myself here--that's why I handwrote the poems rather than printing them out. I also got to say goodbye to all the books today while I slipped the poems in, touring the library, flicking through the more obscure ones no one ever checks out.

Included is a photo from one of the first days of copying out poems... just a few!

Q3 5-Hour Personal Challenge Reflection

This quarter I worked to stay in contact with my best friend at school at the University of Chicago through traditional letters. I wrote her a letter every day from the 27th of February through this past Friday. I alternated between postcards, little stock cards, and envelopes full of written pages. In addition to updating Corinna on my life etc., I included a piece of writing every day, whether a quote or an excerpt from a poem I'd recently written, etc.

Writing letters to Corinna was much different than speaking to her on the phone. I took note of a lot of things in my life that I don't always--small things to remember to put in every evening's letter, like the tea I made that afternoon (we are both tea people), things I've been writing about lately, how my tests and classes went, how my relationships were going, how my college stress was, etc. Normally when I talk to her on the phone, which happens maybe once or twice a week, I sort of tell her how that single day was and we talk about her life as well, of course, but I don't offer the same sense of daily life or important details (or receive it).

Including writing also allowed me to think about what parts of recent poems I should include and really realize how what is happening in my life relates directly to what I am writing and how I express things. Normally, I'm an avid diarist, but this past month, what with challenging myself to write daily poems and daily letters, I've put everything (in condensed and poeticized form) into other mediums. Looking back on it, it's kind of like when you smell something on the street and it suddenly reminds you of something in your childhood (the way your nursery smelled, your mother's perfume, etc.) because you can't recall exactly what was going on but you get in touch with your past self in a small way. I don't record things as explicitly as I do when I keep a diary, but in some ways it's more interesting that way.

The actual experience of letter-writing is one that is difficult but that I like. I enjoy handwriting and controlling things aesthetically but it can be frustrating. Also, forcing myself to do something every day isn't easy. Many days I do not want to do it, but I don't often regret it afterward, and I'm happy I've sent the letter. I think it's an important exercise in discipline, and I think Corinna appreciated it. For some reason, hearing about things days after they've happened is a strange but cool experience because the emotional intensity has since dimmed. Sometimes she calls me worried about something I mentioned in a week-old letter (how long it takes things to get to Chicago... actually ludicrous) and it's funny to see how little those things matter after just a few days.

I've included a picture of a postcard I sent, with a little drawing of this amazing museum attached. My camera has since been fixed--apologies for the blurry photo.

Q3 5-Hour Project Proposal!

This quarter I want to do something different for my project. My best friend, Corinna, is away at college at the University of Chicago. We talk on the phone sometimes, but the distance means we have a sort of strange disconnect and don't always know what's going on in each other's lives. Once, in her junior year (my sophomore year), she did an art/experimental project where she sent me a little painting every day for a month and I had to write a memory that I associated with it to see if any of our memory associations matched up. This quarter, I'd like to do something similar but less art-related, and send her a letter every day. It won't necessarily always be a long letter; sometimes it might be a few sentences about what's going on and the day and such things. I am thinking about also sending one line a day of a short story that I'm writing, because I need some sort of motivation and I wonder how it will develop over the course of a month. So, I want to start the week after break, and send letters every day until around the end of the quarter (approximately four weeks). I'm hoping it will be a soc-type experiment in that I process things, consider what to tell her, and communicate via a (hopefully not dying!) classic form in order to improve our relationship.

Q2 5-Hour Work!

Over the past term, I've worked hard to catch myself when I feel myself starting to get testy with my brother, before I snap at him. Sometimes, I have snapped anyway, but definitely less than I usually would. I don't spend a lot of time with him; usually, we only spend time together in our car rides to school, because after school he runs track and I have homework and we both tend to hole up in the evenings. My family doesn't usually eat dinner together; sometimes I fetch takeout for Grant and I, but usually we fend for ourselves.

In the mornings I've been asking him what his day looks like. I used to get on his case about academics in the morning, but I've been trying to steer clear of judgment as best I can and talk to him about his frees, his electives, and the things he likes. The wonderful thing about my brother that I often take for granted (pun intended) is that he's forgiving and easygoing--these things usually translate to "forgetful" and "lazy" in my personal vocabulary, but they shouldn't. If I snap at him in the morning for two weeks straight, which has happened, and then on a new day I ask him about his friends or how he likes biology or what his weekend plans are or even computer games (which I know nothing of), it's easy to get him talking and he's not begrudging in the least. We spend a lot of time not talking, too, but that can be peaceful or awkward depending on how nice I'm being. A lot really hinges on that. It's terrible, actually.

I do think I've been nicer to him lately. Often I find myself wanting to reprimand him for things and simply hold my tongue. It's a hard thing to quantify, but it's significant.

I sat him down to talk to him about my attitude towards him. I've apologized before, but it doesn't usually change much. We both know I'm going to college next year; he says he's happy I'm leaving, and I forgive him that because I think we'll like each other better when I'm gone, and in the rest of our lives. When I talk to him about our relationship, he's quiet, grateful, and forgiving. I apologized, joked about how angry I get, joked about our differences, and he brushed it off. He's both an understanding person and one who simply doesn't want to expend any energy caring. The truth is that I'm luck he isn't as begrudging and miserly with his affections and hurts as I am, and that he's open to reconciling--the moment I'm up for some fun, it's as if that's what he's been waiting for all along.

Look! We are little children! I'm pretty sure we got along a little better back then, but not much. :)

Q2 5-Hour Personal Challenge Proposal

So, I want to do something different for my personal challenge this quarter. It can't exactly be measured in hours and it might not even be a valid idea, but I'm going to propose it in any case. I'm really horrible to my brother. As a person. For some reason, every single thing he says or does makes me angry, even natural things that don't bother me when they come from my friends. Inexplicably, I have an innate zero-tolerance policies when it comes to him. I know most siblings don't get along too well, but I guess I feel instinctually like I'm unusually and unnecessarily hard on him. Generally, I feel pretty good about myself as a person, but after I get upset with him or while I'm feeling frustrated by him I have this horrendous sense of myself in me as well as the feeling of anger. Basically, even though I feel as though I can't help but be horribly mean to him, I have no respect for myself because of it. SO: for this quarter I want to try really really hard to be nice to my brother. I try sometimes, but it's like trying to stop biting my nails... it never actually happens. Sometimes if I buy donuts afterwards. But not really. So maybe for homework it will work. If it works out, I feel like as a social science project it will end up helping both me and him and hopefully show me a better coping strategy / relationship sense to work with.

Q1 5 Hour Work!

Pictured is a partial family tree I created after talking to some of my family. It isn't finished because it's difficult to format it correctly so that each generation stays on its own line and to include everyone I'd like to without going off the page, but right now it gives a small picture, anyway.

For my 5-hour project, I interviewed members of my family about their lives before I knew them. What's interesting is that different people (sometimes based on age, but sometimes I think based on personality) tell stories in different tones and lights. When I speak to my grandfather, he tells everything the way he might recount a story from something he's read; there's a specific chronology to everything, like everything he remembers is carefully stowed away, and he seems very sure of what he remembers enough to tell me and what he doesn't. He played in the army bands in World War II (clarinet and saxophone) to avoid fighting. He'll tell me about how he got involved and all the great musicians he met (disappointed that I've never heard of most of them), and when he gets into the war details, which he knows like an encyclopedia, my grandmother is the sort of person who starts editing out loud.

My mother, who I also talked to, always tells me that she had a life before me, you know, in that frustrated and defensive way that parents sometimes do--but she's still relatively reluctant to talk about that life. Everything she tells me, she tells me as though I should already know it--like her life is a history book, or something. She assumes lots of things--"well, of course we were wearing bellbottoms, it was the seventies"--and it's entertaining, but she also has a lot of things she hesitates to talk about. She skims over relationships very quickly. When I came out to her, she told me she wished I'd told her earlier because I'd been harboring some sort of secret but also because she had experiences that she wanted to discuss with me , now that I was seventeen etc. etc. etc. and had told her this and had a girlfriend etc., but when it comes down to it, she's very awkward about actually revealing information about her life. I think maybe she's suppressed some important pieces, or at least decided not to reveal them easily, and she's caught off guard by my questions.

The truth is that me and my mother are a lot alike. There are some things, especially certain relationships, that are very important within my memory but also very private, and I think in some ways I both never ever want to discuss them and desperately need to. There are a few experiences that I get very awkward and quiet about, the same way my mother does, not because I don't trust people but because I don't know how to translate my experience and how intense and important the memory of it or the truth of it is, and it scares me that I might misrepresent something so significant.

Q1 5 Hour Personal Challenge Proposal

For 5 hours first quarter, I want to interview my family about their lives before I knew them. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more privy to snippets of my parents’ personal lives before I existed; this is the kind of information you’re never interested in as a child, but that eventually begins to fascinate you when you grow into a time in your life when you want to connect / separate yourself from your parents (at least for me). For one project last year, I interviewed my grandfather about his experiences in WWII, and it got me more interested in talking to my family about our heritage and my parents’ experiences while I can. The thing is, I never seem to have the time. So: I will interview my parents and grandparents (~4 people), most likely in my own house on afternoons when I am not swamped with work, as respectfully and interestedly and accurately as I can, because I would like to have some motivation to better appreciate the journeys and history of the members of my family as I never really have.

(I’m not sure if this is at all acceptable for a personal challenge, but I thought I’d throw it out there.)