Summary

         How can I sum up in just a couple sentences the main thing I have learned this semester?    I think it is that humanity has a grave error.  It is that later generations don't learn from the mistakes of older generations and that we continue to walk in the same pathways that others have in an unending circle.  It isn't that we are all the same, it is just that the experiences we have are very similar to others around us, before us, and even the people who will come after us. 

Toy Story

       On the way out of class on Monday, I was talking to Autumn and we got on the movie topic.  Somehow,  the Toy Story trilogy came up.  Kind of strange, I know, but it is a little mythological and personally.  I think it may have been that we had been talking about graduation in class, actually.
      I grew up with Toy Story,  literally. When Andy, from the movie was around the age of seven, I was that age, too.  As he went to camp and got older, I got older.  In the finally movie,  Andy is leaving for college.  I remember that Dad really wanted to see this movie, and so for Father's day, we went to see Toy Story 3.  I had just graduated college and was preparing to leave for College.  My senior had been rough, and I was, and wasn't, ready to step out on my own.  To say the least, I bawled.  Yes, the movie was about Toys, but here was an end to the life of Andy and Woody together.  Woody was moving forward, just like Andy, to a new unknown.  It scared me, and the feeling of leaving the things, or friends, or family, you love is the most bittersweet emotion I have ever had.  It is that apocalypse.  It was the lifting of a veil and turning of a page for me.  My parents told me all summer that I was starting a new chapter in my life.
     Toy Story summed it up perfectly.  From the mythological number of three, the creation of the friendship between Woody and Buzz, the Initiation that Woody goes through (struggles with loosing his arm and the pain he deals with because of it) to the apocalyptic end of becoming a toy belonging to different child.  For me, the story had a moral of how hard change is for people.  We are more comfortable in what we know and so stepping of the edge into the unknown isn't something we deal well with.  This may not be true for everyone, but it is most definitely true for me. 
     I don't think I will ever see things the same because of this class.  This movie is just another example of seeing mythology in the every aspect of my life, including movies from my childhood.

Our Own Tree

  After class on Friday, I remembered something that I thought was interesting about trees.  During Autumn's presentation, she talked about her friend calling her a tree.  I smiled and thought about it literally for a second before an image from my anatomy lab popped into my head.  Technically, we all have a "tree" inside of us.  In the back part of the head lies a portion of the brain called the cerebellum, which is responsible for coordination and movement.  If you cut this portion of the brain in half, you can see the different types of matter (white and gray) making the picture of a sideways tree called the Arbor Vitae, or tree of life.  Once again, I am surprised by trees all around us and, in this case, inside us, too. 

Final Project

At the beginning of this last school year, like many of my peers, I was still contemplating the courses I would eventually take during the course of my education at Montana State.  I had fulfilled a core here and there, but had never sat down and made sure that every course was on track and placed specifically into chosen semesters.  This year, though, I was required for ROTC to plan out the next three years in the exact courses I would take for each semester.  As some students in this class are probably also aware of, this course fulfills MSU’s diversity core. 

            My expectations of this class and what it has turned out to be, though, are stark opposites.  I had always wanted to take a mythologies course, and believed them to be about just that, old myths or tales, or stories.  I even expected it from this class.  I believed before stepping into this class that I would be learning stories from Greek mythology and then regurgitating them for tests.  Black and white, cut and dry.  I found, though, that this class was more about my own life and the lives of every individual who has been, is, and will be an inhabitant on our earth. 

            Our book was deceiving.  When I arrived at the book store before the beginning of the semester to grab all of my textbooks, I was relieved to find that it was only one book, but was still hesitant after quickly flipping through it.  All I could think was here we go. 

            And off we went.  From the very first lecture, I was hooked.  When Dr. Sexton said that it was a third grade level, I didn’t really believe him.  In class, though, I felt like I was in third grade all over again.  This is my deep secret that I keep from other professors.  In lectures during every other college class I am in, I listen and scribble down notes as fast as I can, hoping that some of the information sticks. I leave these classes discouraged and weary praying that the week goes slowly in order for me to fit more monotonous study time in.   In Mythologies, though, I sit in wide-eyed wonder, soaking in every word.  I struggled at first, finding it hard to wrap my science-based mind around this idea.  It was a gray area, not the straight answers I was used to receiving from my other teachers.  But ideas slowly started to build.

            At first, when I thought about this assignment, I didn’t know what to do.  I had learned to look for specifics, but I didn’t want to talk only about examples for this paper’s entirety.  If I did, I would just have to copy and paste my blog into a Word document and hand it in.   For me, the big picture, and what I have learned as a mythic detective, finally became clear this last weekend.  I started to go into this idea in my blog from Monday, but don’t believe I fully explained my thoughts on the subject as well as I wanted. 

            This last weekend, I noticed a trend, one that I constantly see in everyday life, but was never sensitive to.  Mistakes are repeated over and over again.  One early mistake that stands out most vividly for me is from third or fourth grade.  I could not spell the word because and instead would spell it as “becouse.” I must have been correctly hundreds of times.  I would have to write it over and over, but still I would be writing an essay question answer and the spelling would be wrong again.  To this day, my mom will harass me about it.  The funny thing is that my dad has the same issue with spelling that I do.  I would joke that it was genetics, and I still think that it is to a degree.  But why, if my dad had these mistakes, didn’t I learn from them.  Why couldn’t this tripping block be moved on from?   

            In class, we talked on the first day of Myth being the precedent behind every action.  Everything has been done before, nothing is original.   We as humans like to believe that we are different.  We make fashion and behavior statements to try and convince ourselves that we are our own individual.  After this class, I don’t think that these tactics work.  We can’t be different through our actions because somewhere along the line, someone has already done the same thing we have.  So many times, my parents have told me that each generation becomes “worse and worse”, meaning that we become more evil as time progresses.  Whether or not I can take Ovid’s work realistically, his stories paint a vivid contradiction to that belief.  Humanity has not changed.  Then I also remember that Ovid received inspiration from elsewhere.  His stories were passed down to him.  Multiple times throughout class, it was mentioned that Ovid was trying to outdo Homer.   This is just another example of an individual trying to become unique and original, but in reality is just repeating exactly what has already been done. 

            When we started to talk about the parts of myth, I was still confused, enjoying the learning process, but not completely grasping the concepts.   I contributed it to my lack of experience in the English classroom, but maybe it was my unwillingness to see what was right in front of me.   But like I said, this weekend something just snapped into place.  Where else had I heard of a beginning, middle and end being pertinent? None other than in human’s themselves.  We are born, and go through our own creation story.  Each story is a different variation, but it is all the same.   Each of us has a mother who carries us and gives birth to us after nine months, give or take.  After birth, we grow and are shaped through childhood by our families or life.   We learn good and evil.  Just as in the stories Ovid tells for beginning, we learn when to speak and when to keep quiet, as well as to not snoop into things we have no business being involved in.

We have middle, a time period of trial and error.  In class it would seem to be our initiation era.    I believe the main initiation most individuals experience is during our puberty years until we have passed into adulthood. We like Arachnae learn when not to brag and who we shouldn’t upset.  We learn when to heed the advice our parents give us.   Not all of our life stories are as heartbreaking during initiation as the characters in Ovid, but each individual goes through some life changing moments. 

Then there is our end.   When we die, although we don’t know what happens, we pass through a doorway and start a new adventure in the unknown.  It is a never ending circle.  It was the Ouroboros that started my contemplation of the cycles that we go through in life as well as the continuation of these cycles.  I also see it as the rings in trees.  For me, this is part of the significance of trees.  I know that in many Ovidian stories, trees were transformed people.  But I also believe that they hold a secret in the rings they have inside.  They may grow in years, but they continue to grow the same way every year.  Complete circles make up the rings inside trees.  I used to love counting the rings on large cottonwoods that my dad would cut down at our place when we were younger.   Even then, before this class, I knew there was something special about trees.  They were much older than any human.  I would start counting the rings, but eventually give up because it took too long and I would skip away, excepting that the tree was much older than I or my parents.  The funny thing about trees is they are silent and they sometimes hunch over like a wise elder.  You can whisper secrets in a tree and they, unlike the wind, will keep the secret quiet.  They seem to have missed this cycle of having to relearn from past mistakes. 

I wish I had learned more from the mistakes of others instead of having had to make them all myself.  As I stood in formation this weekend and watched a girl in charge of personnel accountability be yelled at in front of our platoon, I saw two mistakes that we had learned not to do over the course of the year.  The first was to keep a close eye on who was with you at all times and the other to always pull people aside to reprimand them.    I made mistake after mistake as well during our training exercises, and every time I would want to hit my head at the simple mistake that I had been taught multiple times to be careful about.     I hate failure, but there seems to be this cycle I can’t get out of.  I learn more through failure, though, than I do when just being taught something. 

On the bus ride home when a friend of mine asked me about Professor Sexton’s comment of mythologies are everywhere and we just have to find them.  My mind started turning.  I finally came to a conclusion which I think is the main theme I have learned from this class.  The precedent has been set, but that doesn’t mean we are immune to follies and mistakes that those before us have made.  It just means that this is the life cycle that has been set for all humans to work their way through by trial and error.   

I have never been more grateful for a class.  I won’t forget it and I will probably keep Ovid with me for a long time. 

Ripples

It's funny.  When I first thought, and started, this final project, it was more of a mod podge of stories and collection of things that I didn't really know how to fit together.  But the more I mulled it over, the less I like the concepts I had decided to use.  They had no real impact on me personally, and felt more like a repetition of everything we had discussed in class and what I had already wrote here.  I didn't want to suck in and spit back out everything I had already discussed into a compact paper just so that I had something to write about for the final project.  But then part of me wonders if that was more what this class wanted us to appreciate.  On Jake's blog where he said that he had to be truthful and say he hadn't read all of Ovid, I had to agree with him and raise my hand in guilt, but I was surprised at the response to this that Professor Sexton had.  The more I think about it, the more I wonder if we were supposed to gain a more broad understanding of myth than I first thought, though.  The  more I contemplate all of the concepts we have discussed, the more the dominoes fall and the more I believe I understand.  I feel as though I have learned more in this class, in some ways, than I have learned in many classes and wish I could continue into next year with the same type of class.  This final presentation feels a little like an ending and transition to the turning of the page in order to become a mythic observer in my life, without having to look for it just to blog about, but instead to be able to appreciate and notice things, that before, I would not have cared about.  I really liked the pictures of the ripples above because it makes me think of how the class interacts.  Each one of the main circles is a student and we interact, sparking new ideas.  We continued to grow on our own, though, throughout the semester building upon our original foundation of the ideas of myth. 

History Repeats

  This weekend I was able to participate in field training for a class of mine.  It was cold and wet and people were not always happy with each other.  Mistakes were made and individuals chewed out but overall it went well.  On the ride back, I was talking to a guy that was in Prof. Sextons Shakespeare class and then another girl, who was with me when Prof Sexton was talking to me in the sub and told me that mythologies are everywhere, asked about what Prof Sexton was talking about.  I quickly gave her the idea of mythology but I could tell she wasnt super interested.  But by bringing up the topic of mythology, it got me thinking about relating my weekend to mythology.  I started to think more broadscale though.   Mistakes is what my mind went to.  When I was younger, my parents told me that my generation had more problems than theirs and that their parents had told them the same thing and so on and so forth. But when I started reading Ovid, I noticed that the things he was takking about were things that were the same as what we deal with now.  We as people still look at things we shouldnt and tell secrets we shouldnt and hurt each other.  I think that this is because everyone has a beginning and middlr and end and that we have to learn from our own mistakes and dont take advise as people very well.  Whether ornot this is the reason for repeating history, or myth, or not I dont know though

End songs

I found a song this weekend that reminded me of ends.  Partly because of the movie it came from, though.  It is "The Call" by Regina Spektor.  I was listening to musicwhile driving back to Bozeman and it randomly, or maybe on purpose.  It is thesong at the end of the movie Prince Caspien and is when the children are passing through thedoorway on their way back to their own world and to me the doorway is the end.  And thestart of a new adventure for the children back in England.  Here is a link to the song:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNsQewlFtEs

Simplicity

       For some reason, Wednesday felt ordinary and normal, more so than usually.  I cant explain why it just does.  In reality, though, it was different than most days.  I got up earlier that morning and had my final APFT test of the year, this is my army physical fitness test.  I suppose you can call me a goal person, but I have been striving to achieve a perfect score this entire year.  This is a certain time for a two mile run, a certain number of push-ups in two minutes, and a certain number of sit-ups in two minutes.  This was one of those victories, or milestones, that I was able to reach.   After PT I was sitting in the Sub with another girl from the program when I saw Professor Sexton.  I was working on my anatomy and physiology reading for the day and he asked me about mythologies and reminded me that everything is mythological.  This is really true.  A day that should have been considered abnormal felt more normal than usual.  I started to have my mind wander toward mythologies and different men and women who accomplished great things.  Recently, Margaret Thatcher has passed away.  A women who I would  consider a historical hero to me, she was able to accomplish what she set out to do in England and win her battles as well.  while many would argue st her political decisions, I saw her as a strong woman who defied the normals and thought she could do it better.  In a way it reminded me of Arachne but without the end that Arachne saw.  I was reminded, though, that everything is mythological and has been done before

Woman's Punishment

In class on Friday, I was very interested in the ending topic.  I think I had always thought that men got the worse punishment in our creation story, now we all have to die, can it get much worse?  But know looking at our discussion, I am starting to question that.  I am still a little confused at the analogy of death and knowledge.  But what definitely spoke me was about the scientific look at the size of a human's skull.  I had just the day before been in my anatomy and physiology class talking about the size of the brain and the cost - need analysis of the size of a human brain, or how large a baby's skull could be.  What my teacher said mimicked what Dr. Turner said.  The size of a woman's pelvis determines the size of a baby's brain.  So when I started to look at it this way, I started to wonder if pain wasn't really the main curse that Eve was given, but instead it was the limit to our knowledge.  I know that my A & P teacher would hate this, because immediately after telling us that woman's pelvises determine brain size, he said that statistically there is no proof that brain size determines how smart a person is.  But I do wonder if it was easier to have children and we didn't have this restraint, how much our knowledge of things would have differed.  I know that Dr. Turner also talked about Knowledge and death go hand in hand and also that science proves our stories.  I just was a little blown away at this new look at an old story that I have known since I was very little.  

Apple Blossoms

  Spring Storm and Pear Trees was the free verse Poem that Doctor Turner read on Thursday of last week.  While I immensely enjoyed all of his works, this one gave me the most vivid mental picture, not because I knew what pear trees in bloom looked like, but because of an apple tree that while growing up had sat in front of one of my bedroom windows.  I had claimed the tree as my own, and was very quick to yell at my brothers if they started to climb it or break it's branches.  Thinking back now, I believe in a way I considered it a dear friend, who grew older with me as the years passed on.  On windy nights, it's branches would scrape against the window of my room, scaring me at first then becoming a lulling sound in the storm.  In the winter, it stood solemn and bare, but in the spring it was the most romantic tree.  Although it never produced fruit, every year thousands and thousands of blooms would fill the tree producing the most wonderful smell and I would leave my windows open just to bring the apple blossom smell into my room.  Along with the pale pink flowers, bees would swarm around the tree, creating a relaxing sound.  Bees were always something that scared me when I was younger, and although I loved the tree, I would avoid it outside because of the hundreds of bees that traveled to collect pollen and nectar next to my house.   But when I got older, I actually worked with bees for a summer job and my fear of them has decreased tremendously.  As we are talking about "the end," or Apocalypse portion of this class, I have to think of bees a little bit.  All summer long, these little insects work much like ants.  Every morning after the temperature raises to around 50 degrees, the workers leave the hive and start their daily journey to find nectar and pollen.  They will travel up to a five mile radius in order to find both food and water.  One hive can produce up to 100 pounds of honey in one summer.  This is all to prepare for winter.  This made me think of the end period.  I don't know why I associate winter with end, maybe because it is the end of the year or maybe because of the cold harsh weather.  I was surprised at how Spring Storm and Pear Trees made me reminisce of childhood memories though.  

Be Careful What You Wish For!

I had to laugh in class the other day when Professor Sexton was talking in class the other day about being careful what you wish for.  I had an experience when I was eight that mirrors this point of view perfectly.  My Aunt and Uncle had come over for dinner on a Sunday night in the late spring (I still remember the fact that it was a Sunday) and my cousin, brother and I were outside playing.  My cousin had on a blue cast that ran from his wrist to the middle of his shoulder.  I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen and was slightly jealous of all the signatures he had on it.  I couldn't help but think how much I wanted a cast just like it.  Sure enough, the next day while playing on the swing set my Dad had built for my siblings and I, I fell off the trapeze bar, backwards, and dislocated and fractured my left elbow and arm.  Ironically, it was the left arm, which was the same side that my cousin broke.  So to say the least, the entire ride to the hospital, riding on a gravel road, I was telling myself that I would never again wish for something that I really had no business wishing for in the first place. 

Perspective

I loved reading all the different displacement stories from the class this weekend.  I think I got though all of them, but I'm really good at missing some on the side of my blog, so I will have to continue to keep looking to make sure that I did read them all.  With some of the stories, the "theme" story stuck out very quickly, others you had to read quite a ways until you saw it, and then others I still am puzzling over.  What really struck me, though, was perspective.  Seeing how differently everyone weaved Ovid into their stories was what I enjoyed.  Some people to small clues while others used the plots of the story from Ovid.  I kept thinking how the story was either like the "Signs and Symbols" or like the displacement story that Professor Sexson read to us from his former student.  Two completely different ways to displace, but both still masterfully done.