Technology

Online learning is more difficult than classroom learning, but it is also much more convenient. While I love the classes that I go to on campus, for the majority of my education, I am not available in person. So for people like me, online learning is the best option. I say that it is more difficult because you are required as a student to be in charge of your own use of time, which is hard for anybody, not just students. Me being a stay at home mom though, it is pretty much my only option! I think that English in particular is challenging because of how many preconceptions we all bring into writing. It’s a little easier to see things from different points of view when you are in a classroom setting, so when doing an English course online, you are more than likely to simply form your own idea, and run with it.

My favorite technology that we used this year was actually the Final Presentation. I am also finishing up a web design course this semester so when I had to “embed” my power point presentation into my blog, I went right in and edited the html. It just made me feel good to finish off the year knowing exactly what I was doing! I enjoyed the blog also, but I took a break from my personal blog when I started the one I used for this class, so I am excited to get back to my own. I miss writing about my everyday life. Things that I don’t even have to think about, make outlines for, or revise. This day in age, technology is unavoidable. I’ll have a degree in the use of computers for an art form by the time I’m done, so I will always enjoy embracing technology in learning.

Here is a website with tips on being a successful online learner

Final Presentation

Final presentation

View more presentations from Nikki Evensen

Reflection of English 102

I honestly enjoyed this course more than any of my other “read and respond” courses so far. I’ve mentioned before that this is my final English course for my degree, so it’s been extra exciting knowing that I have officially gotten through college English! Not that I don’t enjoy English, because I truly do, but after years of helping my husband with his, and then years of doing mine, it’s been a long haul. In addition, I love how much confidence this class has given me for the rest of my courses. After all the work I did this semester, I know I will be able to do well on any other writing assignment given to me from now on. I really honed my skills on analyzing, not summarizing, and for some reason I feel like my vocabulary really improved this year. I know for a fact the reason why I enjoyed this class so much was the content. I loved Frankenstein once I was able to really get into it, and I think I’ve talked to 4-5 different people about the last article we read about zombies. That’s way more interesting content than a review about a review about reusable energy or something. To me at least! Plus I was able to use my favorite author for the final. I wish that more classes were categorized this way, (i.e. monsters in literature, or romance in literature) because it really does make it easier to read and write about what you love, or enjoy. While it was challenging, I overcame all of those challenges, and I’m very proud of the papers I am putting in my portfolio this semester. I’m also proud of being able to say that I’ve read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and I have a polished opinion of it. Most importantly, I’m proud that I am officially college educated in English. It was a great semester! Happy Holidays!

Zombie Photoshoot

Zombies have always been a favorite in my house. This was a couple years ago. Enjoy!

Final paper draft

Heather Evensen

Cline

November 6^th, 2011

The Things You Own, Can Get Expensive

            There are many ways men deal with growing up. Some crave it, and some try to avoid it at all costs, but it happens anyway. Sooner or later it’s time to move out, go to school or find a job, pay rent, get married, have kids, and do laundry every Sunday. Some men have issues with this cookie cutter existence that has become so normal in today’s society. Some men are wondering how much pride they can really have in a house that looks just like the neighbors, or driving a mini van with two kids and a dog in the back seat. Some men are craving a world where things are much different. A place where a man’s worth is based solely on his abilities. A place where the type of car that you drive, the style of clothes that you wear, and the job that you have means absolutely nothing. What matters is your ability to stand up for yourself, to break the mold. Author Chuck Palahniuk created this world in his underground classic Fight Club, and director David Fincher made that world come to life in his film. The story represents consumerism at it best. It shows how generations are becoming lost in a world of IKEA furniture and Gucci underwear, and the dangerous length some will go in order to escape it. 

            Fight Club takes place in a modern society, with an unnamed main character (he will be referred to Jack from now on,). Jack is in his late 20’s, works a good job and lives in a nice apartment. His job has him traveling constantly, forcing him to give in to the little conveniences that come along with travel, “Everywhere I travel…tiny life: single serving sugar, single serving crème, single pad of butter, the microwave cordon blue hobby kit, shampoo and conditioner combos, sample-packaged mouthwash, tiny bars of soap.” (Fight Club). Jack has been trained by repetition to believe that he needs these things. Not just that he needs them for comfort, but that they help shape who he is. He is the guy that travels. His entire existence revolves around this single serving life, or so he thinks. He says:

Like so many others I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. If I saw something clever, like a little coffee table in the shape of a yin yang, I had to have it…I’d flip through the catalogues and wonder, what kind of dining set defines me as a person? (Fight Club)

So he is a drone in society. He does the same thing over and over again every single day, and he doesn’t even like it. He has expensive, handmade dishes in his cupboards but no food in his refrigerator to put on them. He is the perfect example of a modern day consumer. Everything serves a purpose of convenience instead of need, preference instead of function. Then, he comes home from a business trip to find his apartment up in flames. He sees all his belongings strewn out over the parking lot, embarrassed by his empty refrigerator. He begins to struggle with the idea of not having all the things he thought made up who he was. After all, what kind of person could he possibly be without a nice set of flatware? This is when Tyler Durden comes in. Jack’s “other personality”.

            Tyler is everything that Jack is not. While Jack is thin, Tyler is muscular. While Jack is wearing a suit and tie, Tyler is wearing a bright red leather jacket. Jack is an example of a man who has structure and lives on a schedule, while Tyler does what he wants whenever he feels like it. Meeting up with Tyler right after leaving his burning apartment, Jack begins to take on a different mindset, Tyler’s mindset:

Tyler: Do you know what a duvet is?

            Jack: A comforter

Tyler: It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and I know what a   duvet is? Is this essential to our survival? In the hunter-gatherer sense of the word, no. What are we then?

            Jack: Consumers

Tyler: Right. We are consumers. We are byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.   Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines. Television with 500 channels. Some guys name on my underwear. Rogain. Viagra. Allestra.

            Jack: Martha Stewart

Tyler: Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all goin down man! So fuck off with your sofa units and Strinne Green stripe patterns. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say lets evolve. Let the chips fall where they may…the things you own, end up owning you. (Fight Club)

Tyler points out how silly they’ve become as men. How all the things that Jack thought shaped him as an individual, actually made him less of an individual. It made him just like every other person who bought the same sofa he bought from IKEA. But how does a man evolve in a consumer driven society? What can he do to save himself? Find another man, and beat the crap out of each other, how could you not feel like more of a man afterwards?

The first fight club was just Tyler and I pounding on each other. It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn’t toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Someday I’d be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice condo and a car…Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw. (Palahniuk 49)

Jack and Tyler found just what they needed in bare-knuckle boxing. Not for money, not for sport, but because it made them feel like men. Real men. They were using and perfecting their ancient fight-or-flight instincts, and afterwards, they felt like they could do anything. Like starting an organization called Project Mayhem, and blow up commercial coffee shops, destroy advertisements, and create chaos. James Annesley explains:

Vigorously opposed to consumption in all its forms, Durden is the catalyst for the development of the network of ‘fight clubs’ and the founding of ‘project mayhem’, an anti-capitalist, terrorist organization bent on taking America back to year zero. Dreaming of leather-stockinged heroes from the American past, he seeks to bring down the Sears Tower and leave only wilderness in its place. Central to these ambitions is a very specific image of masculinity that is defined as antithetical to consumption. Where the shop windows of contemporary culture are filled with flimsy dresses and tuxedos, Durden looks to reject these commodities in favour of durable items of clothing that are, one assumes, crafted by manly, unalienated labour. The implication is that real men aspire to things not commodities. (45-46)

So Tyler’s wild attempt at saving his fellow men is to destroy society. Burn the buildings that hold their debt records, and destroy the corporations that crush the self-employed. This, on top of weekly boxing matches in the basements of bars, and all should be right with the world. Annesley continues with:

Exclusively male, the fight clubs promise an escape from ‘ornamental’ masculinity. Fighting, the raw punching of fist on skin, thus becomes both a release from the mundane currents of consumer society and a visceral critique of that society. These fights, in contrast to the seemingly false images peddled by advertising and the media, are presented as moments of truth, authenticity and reality. Durden’s claim is that ‘You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club.’ (47)

There is now an entire army of men all over the country following Tyler’s antics. The irony is that they are supposed to be escaping the mold. They are promised a life more full and natural as men, yet they are doing nothing more than Tyler’s dirty work. They’ve simply traded one routine for another. “Getting fired, Tyler says, is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives.” (Palahniuk 83). For the “space monkeys” of Project Mayhem, giving up treading water and doing something with their lives meant shaving their heads so they all look the same, chanting propaganda all night long, and not having a name unless you die. But Tyler is very convincing. In a speech before a fight club he says:

Men I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential. And I see it squandered. God damnit, an entire generation pumping gas, and waiting tables. Slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes. Working jobs we hare so we can buy shit we don’t need. We are the middle children of history man. No purpose or place. We have no great war. No great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars but we wont. We’re slowly learning that fact, and we’re very, very pissed off. (Fight Club)

            In the end, the message is clear. Nothing gets burned down, Jack shoots his own face off to rid his body of Tyler, and winds up in a mental institution (in the book version). So while man may hate his cookie cutter existence, anarchy is not the answer. There is potential to become a drone in an anarchist society as well, working for some crazy guy who has spit personalities and fight himself in parking lots, or sacrificing opinions and voice to someone bigger and stronger. So love it or hate it, consumerism drives the world. We cannot escape it, and according to Chuck Palahniuk, it’s too dangerous to try. 

Work Cited

Annesly, James. Fictions of Globalization : Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary American Novel. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing , 2006. eBook

Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Norton, Edward. Fox 2000 Pictures & Regency Enterprises, 1999. Film.

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Henry Holt and Company LLC, 1996. Print

Annotated Bibliography

-Annesly, James. Fictions of Globalization : Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary American Novel. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing , 2006. eBook.

            This book, from the Yavapai College Ebrary uses the movie Fight Club as an example of identity versus consumption. It goes along exactly with my thesis, and even though it may have a bit more focus on the masculinity of the film, Annesly captures the consumerism theory perfectly.

-Giroux, enry A. America On The Edge, Henry Giroux On Politics, Culture, And Education. Gordonsville, VA, USA : Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. eBook.

            This book is almost exactly the same message as Fictions of Globalization. Palahniuk created such an uproar about the latest generations of men, and how they view their over stimulated society. Every review of his book recognizes that for the sake of mankind, man needs to bleed every one in a while, provide something for himself. Even if it’s a broken nose…at least he started, fought, and then finished his fight. That’s exactly what this review gives my paper.

-Palehnuik, Chuck, Script. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Norton, Edward. Fox 2000 Pictures & Regency Enterprises, 1999. Film.

David Fincher was outstanding in creating a film from Fight Club. The narration was almost verbatim, and the performers were spot on to the characters created in the novel. I will be using the movie for only a few quotes, where the characters refer to consumerism in a more specific sense; like plugging IKEA and Starbucks. This will simply create a little more for my readers to associate with personally. I’m sure Fincher added those modern day associations for the same reason, and they will serve equally well for my paper.

-Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Henry Holt and Company LLC, 1996. Print.

This book is where most of my primary sources are going to come from. The language alone will back my thesis. There is so much satire, but at the same time, it’s not satire. It’s the bare boned truth, put very harshly, in a way only few will appreciate correctly. Palahniuk’s characters represent what men would be if anarchy broke out, brought on simply by the complete loss of possession. Where would we be as a society without our Starbucks, or cell phones? These are questions in my thesis, and Fight Club answers them flawlessly. 

The Final Paper

For the final paper I decided to go with option #1; finding a theme within several narratives from the same author. I chose this option because it immediately made me think of my favorite author, Chuck Palahniuk. 

I have read all of his books, and he has a very strong recurring theme about socialism and consumerism. These particular themes seem to be the most present throughout the novels, Choke and Fight Club; therefore I have chosen these two books for the paper. Surprisingly, I have never read one of Chuck’s books twice, so beginning to re-read these books has been fantastic for me, especially re-reading them with intentions of marking my favorite lines for quoting. It’s just made me pay so much more attention to the meaning behind these stories.

I’m hoping to accomplish my best paper ever (no pressure or anything). I write so well when I respond to things I am passionate about, and being able to pick my favorite author for this project will make a big difference. Not to mention that this will be my final English paper of my college education. So, I will be re-reading Choke and Fight Club, and I have several sites bookmarked that have amazing reviews of Palahniuk and his work. Luckily for me, his themes are significantly obvious, and every review I’ve read will back my thesis seamlessly. Hopefully making things a little less difficult. Here's one of my favorite ones, which compares the book to the movie (which I might use as a source also) Good luck to everyone with his or her papers!