Structured prompted writing exercises.
“Communities” inquiry and exploration:
My Communities of Practice
Service industry
Coffee industry
Writers
USF student community
Family
Friends
Book club
Communities that Interest Me
New York Media Twitter
St. Pete bar regulars
Evangelical Christians
Tik Tok
NHL
"Eloquence"
The reason I chose to underline the three groups in each list differs. The first list, the communities of practice, the underlined are the communities I'm the most involved in and the ones that are important to me. Those I underlined in the second list are communities that have affected me in one way, however in each I am a bystander of and I experience them in a way distinct from those whom are central and active in them.
I have long experience in the service industry, and there are several different facets as to why it's important to me yet also why it's interesting. I've worked in service since I was a teenager, and it's an industry I've gotten to know so well. The majority of my friends and my closest relationships are with people who mostly still do or at least have worked in the service industry, and the sort of passive yet unavoidable way it's an invasive component of my life outside of it is actually really on brand with the culture of the industry. Maybe if I every have enough money to forget the experience I'll eventually feel removed from it, but I don't see it as something I'll ever refrain from being cognizant of or hyper in tune with; as in, sitting inside a restaurant or going to a bar as a guest, rather than being acutely aware of the experience of each person working in the restaurant.
My experience with a writing community is not as distinct as that of the service industry or even that of my family, and though I do experience it in terms of the way community is in its conventions, I feel as though my experience in a writing community is more in terms of identity, but I also feel that perspective reflected. I have and have had friends and peers to share and discuss writing with, and I have active communication with people within and around the writing community I have for one of my jobs. However, my personal perspective and stake in this community is a bit different than the one created and sustained by getting a job and making and forming relationships, just as it's much different than the unchosen distinction of my family in terms of both love and participation. Writing is much different than both of those things, which I suppose is why the way it's important to me and how that manifests is different, too.
My family feels like the unavoidable and unchanging parts of a person that they might altogether like, dislike, or experience in different ways as they age. I don't mean this in a negative sense, but more so kind of the opposite because its reality sits beyond that. I have a reverence for my family that I know is distinct from any other part of myself. I know this is kind of literally what the definition of family is, and it's because of that probably that I feel this way, but it's so interesting to think of how concrete they and their dynamic would be if I was any other version of a person. Anyone who knows me well knows how much I love and value my family, specifically my dad. So community in terms of my family feels unable to be grasped by the word, and in light of that it doesn't have anything to do with me; but because of that, it's able to feel like it has everything to do with me.
In terms of these three entities, the word 'eloquence' is relevant by their effect. They're eloquent in terms of their influence, entanglement, and identification of or on me, so much so that it takes reflection to fully understand or realize how deeply. The rhetoric of these three communities is communicated interpersonally.
Microstory:
Sam and Alex used to work together every Sunday morning. This was when the New York Times had been publishing a flash version of the Modern Love column for some time now, but it was still before too many people knew about it; before the paper started printing worse things. They would make pots of coffee for when people arrived in an hour, and they would read each other the short paragraphs about love, family, heartache, and healing. Some were happy, some were sad, some were that thing in between that is equally both and neither.
"Oh, this one killed me," he'd say. Or, "Please listen to this."
Then Sam would look up, over, and smile, and not ever need to say much else.
It didn't take long for the paper to get worse. They made an Amazon show out of it, the longer column, and the once un-performative truths in the smaller clumps of sentences started to feel less real. It took more stagnant minutes to find a good one to share with one another, just as, for some reason, their schedules changed.
Microstory:
The decision for my Grandmother to self-isolate wasn't one she made herself. If she would have eventually chosen it, her five children had already beat her to it. Luckily, one of my aunts recently moved in with her. It was more because my aunt was older than it was because my Grandma was old enough to warrant help. I call her often, not as much as I should, but even without contact I can assume it's very lonely. She does her best to never let us know what she misses, and when any of us visit her outside of her front window on speakerphone, she smiles and laughs as much as she would if we were able to sit on her couch, hug her.
To compensate, she's gotten more into Facebook. She still posts 'happy birthday's' as personal statuses and not direct messages or wall-posts, but she sits there and she scrolls for a while, commenting, liking, occasionally clicking over to her other tab to check on the panda-cam at some national zoo.
Personally, I don't go on Facebook other than to verify someone's birthday that I should remember by now. My brother, I guess, does, which I learned when my Grandma called me and asked, "Is Nick okay?"
"What do you mean?" I asked more so out of curiosity than concern, due to the fact that she's more out of the loop than I usually am, due to being on a sort of familial-house-arrest.
"Well," she started, concerned, "he posts these things on facebook... and they're sad."
"Sounds like him. They're probably jokes or something much more dramatic than ever necessary. Let me check." I checked, and they were memes. My Grandma couldn't possibly know that.
I tried to explain that they weren't serious, but it's hard to communicate that speech can be unfounded and still exerted; in Nick's case, repetitively, shared to a public of people without context. "Yeah, Grandma, I- it's weird. People just post things that other people post that they think are funny... But usually they're not funny, I guess unless you've been on the internet for hours. And I guess it doesn't really make sense. I'll call him."
I texted him, "Nick, Grandma thinks you're depressed. Get a twitter."
On Donna Harraway’s Cat’s Cradle:
This article was pretty hard for me to get through up until the second half when I felt I began to understand it, and then I still had to read through it a couple more times in order to feel confident in my grasp of the material. Afterwards, which, I talked about it for two days to anyone who would listen. From my understanding, Harraway endeavored to sort of reconstruct critical theory by what seemed like criticizing critical theory itself. Rather than taking specific themes or phenomenas and expanding, critiquing, or contextualizing them, she used cat's cradle to recontextualize the way we view, discuss, and operate within theory. Instead of focusing on different social issues independently, Harraway proposed the idea of the "knots" in cat's cradle to place-hold how each social issue (which she discussed are only "social issues" when a person is innately outside of the prime narrative or reality that's otherwise complacent to change and without need of, essentially, critical theory) are under and overlapped by each other. From what I understand, this entanglement is both due to innate relevance of subject as well as an altogether experience as a sort of other, or at least as someone who is in the position to need to critique and change. Because, Harraway is saying, if each idea continues to stand alone, everything can continue to be altogether stagnant. However, if they are knots, if they are related by existence, they will always be relevant to each other, and that's how change can happen.
Some quotes on this that I liked:
"The point is to get at how worlds are made and unmade, in order to participate in the process, in order to foster some forms of life and not others. ... The point is not just to read the webs of knowledge production; the point is to reconfigure what counts as knowledge in the interests of reconstituting the renerative forces of embodiment. I am calling this practice materialized reconfiguration; both worlds matter."
"Like other worldly entities, these discourses do not exist entirely outside each other. They are not preconstituted, nicely bound scholarly practices or doctrines that confront each other in debate or exchange, perusing wars of worlds or cashing in on academic markets, and at best hoping to form uneasy scholarly or political alliances and deals."