Exquisite Corpse

An Analytical Critique of Two Exquisite Corpse Drawings

By Aaron Kinchen



Two exquisite corpse drawings were completed during Tuesday’s class session, varying wildly in style and appearance. Other than myself, the other two members of the small group included Lisa, the rotund lady from China; and a cheerful, attractive, hirsute young man from Pakistan whose colorful remarks enliven class discussion (unfortunately, his name escapes me.)

The first image seems to caricature a portrait of a man from the late 1500s. The face features a van-dyked gentleman with hair long enough to tuck behind his ears. The forehead is high, with a strong furrowed brow. My initial impression of this grinning face was “Shakespeare”. The Bard’s body is a tree trunk. Over his chest, where his heart should be, there is a hole. This depression appears as a cored out part of the tree where a great branch once embedded its fibers. The rest of the nondescript torso leads the viewer’s gaze down to the hips of the corpse. He appears to be donning gaily decorated tight pants. Around the hips, there are frills accentuating a horizontal line. The garment’s material is full of rapidly struck pen marks, repeating an “x” to create a pattern. The feet look more like cotton blossoms with elongated thorns protruding as phalanges.

The face so clearly masculine, clothing slightly feminine, with the body of a hollowed out tree; these innate elements make it difficult to deduce meaning from this exquisite corpse. Perhaps this man has an urge to wear women’s clothing. Societal pressures force him to repress these feelings. Therefore, where his heart could be, is simply a hole.

The second image depicts a longed necked female’s head, sitting atop a boxy torso. Instead of legs, there is an enormous high heeled shoe with a wheel attached at the metatarsal region. Dissecting this creature from the top down, her hair is large, voluminous, and angular in places. She has a thick head band which covers ears. Her bangs stop at the mid-forehead level, which leaves room to showcase her long eyelashes. Her nose is slight, and her lips are rather large and out of proportion for her face. She has a round jaw, not to pointy, and not much of a chin, either. Her neck is long, nearly twice the length of her head. About two-thirds of her neck is covered in stripes that inch up at intervals from her shoulders. Below her shoulders, there are two circles (meant to be exposed breasts) with dots in the center, to denote her nipples. Overlapping her left breast is a heart, with the letters L O V E oozing out from it toward the floor. Her left arm is much longer than the right arm, and reaches down over her crotch.

From the waist down, she is all stiletto with a wheel. Perhaps this means that she is a woman on the go. Forced to over style her hair and stretch herself to the limit, as is evinced by the overly long arm, it is no wonder that her heart doesn’t hold love.

the influence of money and possessions

Mathilde returns home after hearing the news of the “diamond” necklace being a fake. She would try to cover it up to her husband as much as she could for she knew he would be furious with her over this matter. Mathilde was really hurt deep down over this ironic situation since her and her husband has worked so hard the last 10 years to repay this diamond necklace.
Husband: Hey honey how was your day?
Mathilde: Oh umm… my day, it was alright
Husband: What’s wrong dear? You don’t seem yourself.
Mathilde: Oh nothing, nothing at all. Let me put dinner on would you like a glass of wine?
Husband: Seriously what’s wrong? You seem upset about something. Well listen I was going to wait to tell you this but I went to the bank after work today and I think that we have enough money to spare to treat us to a nice little vacation. We really could use it after all of our hard work these past years.
Mathilde starts crying because she feels guiltier of the situation now.
Husband: Why are you crying dear? I thought that news would make you happy and you are crying, what is the meaning of this?
Mathilde: I’m sorry honey, I didn’t want to tell you please don’t be upset with me, but I spoke with Madame Forestier today while I was walking and told her about the mishap with losing her necklace and that we have finally finished paying off our debts for it after ten long hard years of working and as it turns out the necklace that she lent me was only a clay necklace and was only worth five hundred francs.
Husband: Oh my god! You’ve got to be kidding me?! You’re telling me that I’ve been working 18 hour days 7 days a week to pay the necklace back and it wasn’t even real diamonds?!
Mathilde: I’m really sorry dear I didn’t want to tell you.
Husband: I can’t believe this, had you done what I suggested in the first place and just confronted Madame Forestier about losing the necklace none of this would have ever happened. I wouldn’t have had to work 3 jobs, I wouldn’t be in so much pain from working so hard over the years, and I’d still have my father’s inheritance. Do you know how much that meant to me?
Mathilde: I said I was sorry honey I wish I had done that… I wish I knew the necklace wasn’t real diamonds… but I can’t change the past.
Husband: I can’t bear to look at you right now. I never want to see you again. Get out of my house woman.
Mathilde: No.. What? Why?
Husband: I said leave now damnit. Get out NOW!
Mathilde left the house thinking it would be best to let her husband cool off. So she went wandering around town looking for something to do to pass time. She began to wonder what would happen if she went to Madame Forestier. After thinking about it she decided to talk to Madame Forestier and explain the situation of how this news of the diamond necklace really being a clay necklace has destroyed her life and marriage and her husband kicked her out of the house. Madame Forestier, being a very understanding and generous woman, gave the necklace back to Mathilde. Mathilde then brought the necklace to sell it and she was surprised to get 38,000 francs. She then returned home once again with the money from selling the necklace.
Husband: What are you doing back here woman? I thought I told you I didn’t want to see you again.
Mathilde: Look honey I talked to Madame Forestier and she gave me the necklace back, I sold it for more than what we paid for it so now we won’t have to work anymore and can just enjoy ourselves.
Husband: Wow. I didn’t think she’d give it back. That’s great honey I’m sorry that I was mean to you before but I was just very upset, you have to understand I was very upset learning that working these last ten years was for nothing.
Mathilde: But it wasn’t for nothing dear… just think of what we can do with all of this money…

Twitter and crazy hypertext

1. I think that my life would most likely be described at in stellar time. I feel like our lives were intertwined in some crazy way. It’s like we were at some point going through the same things. We all had midterms the following week and none of us wanted to study. On weekends, we had more time to update our twitter and see what each other was doing on their free time. It was so weird seeing what everyone’s weekend consisted of. Some people were working, hanging out with friends or flying across the country. Yet when our weekend ended, we all went back to our lives going to school and work.
It felt good see what everyone did outside of school. It made me feel like I was bonding with people I didn’t really know so well before. I still don’t know them that well, but I feel close with them by knowing what they are doing. It shows we are not all that different from each other. However, our differences make us who we are define us as a person.

2. I honestly don’t know what the designer intended for us to learn from the hypertext. I spent about thirty minutes on it and didn’t get anywhere! I was definitely running in circles. I wasn’t attracted to any words in particular. I did try to remember which words I clicked on so I wouldn’t click on them again. By that time, I forgot where I was in the story and could never really piece it together.
I think that what this says that while I like things to be stellar, it is easier for me to understand things in teleological time. I think that life in general is stellar, but when a story is being told, it is easier to be told in teleological time.

NEXT STOP !

Stellar scenarios are the basis for me winding up this class, as for just two years ago in my line of business, a great big party that had been taking place for the previous 5 years came to a screeching halt, suddenly the music stopped, the carpet was pulled from under us, and our financial system came to a stop. Now faced with the reality that I may need change my line of work, I register at Baruch and subsequently the path takes me to this class. Unlike many who belong to many social networking sites, this was my first. All my socialization has been always been in person or by phone.
I feel the Twitter assigment has allowed me to identify better with my classmates and place a personality behind the name. Subsequently, I was affected by one student’s who recently informed they dropped the class. The student did not at this point elaborate why they dropped, whether it was trouble understanding the assignments or a briefly discussed health issue. In the sales business, many times I’m forced to strongly compete with other people. I have to beat others to the deal, just as they want to beat me. Its part the high, part of the thrill. I also strongly believe we should reach out and help others when possible.

“A Labyrinth of Labyrinths”, As read this I feel I like I’m on a bus ride in our Professors Mind, and where being taking on a journey discover the other side. For as much as we may plan for our outcome, chaotic events will intervene and we will have to assimilate and integrate these events into our lives and make decisions accordingly. I believe I chose these words because right now I’m at the center of several paths as look to discover where my life will be going next.

Choices, Chance and Circumstances

The type of time that I believe I live my life by is Stellar Time. Entropic Time, as life does seem to be full of random events, I do not believe that there is no purpose or meaning to life. We are all here for a reason. This is an innate intuitive feeling that I have. I strongly believe that it is illogical to feel that our lives serve no meaning. I believe our lives serve great meaning in regard to the big picture as well as to the individuals we share our lives with. As Teleological Time may be of a realistic type of time, it does not seem fitting for me because I do not believe my life unfolds in a streamlined manner and goes from point A to point B. Yes, I have goals set for myself, and yes there are certain steps I must take in order to achieve these goals, but life tends to be more fluid and these steps seem to always shift and change, and my goals, as they are important, there are many other important aspects of my life. Stellar time is one that I feel best resembles the way the time in my life exists because I often find many thoughts or experiences in my life to intermingle with each other and I find that my thoughts and experiences intermingle with the thoughts and experiences of other people. The many random things that we experience affect us as a whole. These collections of experiences make us who we are. Without this intermingling, we would be different people than we are. If our thought process kept each and every experience separate and individual in our minds, with no overlapping or connections, our lives and the world would not make much sense to us. Without others, our experiences would be pathetically minimal. It is experiencing those around us, who each have their own experiences, that enrich our lives. On a typical day, I have my set responsibilities that I must address, whether it be work or school. Outside of these two structured parts of my life, anything is game. But, at the same time, when considering my structured responsibilities of work and school, as they will dependably be there for me to be responsible for, the experiences that I have when at work and school are never repeated. I always have something new to take with me, which becomes a new part of me. These experiences are contributed by those around me. And I contribute to the experiences of others. And these experiences help to make us the people we are. When considering my experience with Twitter, I saw this play out. I saw how, for instance, the occurrence of the springtime morning snowfall affected us or did not affect us. Where some of us wanted to stay home but could not, and others wanted to stay home and did, there were also people that morning who did not even realize it was snowing as they slept through it. Another classmate mentioned how she feels guilty when she eats late after school. I too feel this same way sometimes, and as I know just from logic that others must feel this way, it was assuring to hear from someone that she too goes through this. There were quite a few classmates who have a rough time working as they are students. This is also something that I can relate to as some days it can be a great physical and mental struggle to keep going with this lifestyle, but we all keep going because we know the importance of an education and we know that we will not be students for very long, that we have to just go with the motions and school will be out of our life's equation and we will just have to go to work. As Stellar Time moves on, we collect our experiences, we introduce our experiences to other people, they introduce their experiences to us, and we all grow from these inner and exterior interactions. And Twitter seems to be a new and different platform in which these connections and overlapping of experiences between people can occur.

The author mentioned that the Garden of Forking Paths tried to explain that “time is not uniform and absolute,” time is more fluid and too are our lives because there are numerous possible alternatives. The choice we make is not the only choice available to us. Perhaps what he also meant is that if we all experienced different circumstances, if we all chose one of the other options available, we would be different because of this, and we would contribute to the lives of others differently, helping to make circumstances for them different as well. The author explained how the story plays with “multiple existing realities” and with the “end and beginning, real and unreal, cause and effect…to describe this world of multiple possibilities,” that our lives could have unfolded in numerous different ways, but unfolded in this way due to choice, chance and circumstance. The word “labyrinth” is used frequently in the hypertext to explain the story, as our lives are of a labyrinth and equally so are our minds. Our lives are fluid with no set structure, we have choices we must make, we make the choices, and our lives move on to the next set of choices that are open and available to us due to the previous choices that we made, and so on.

Twitter

1) I think that we are all, as students, pretty much influenced by teleological time. We have one goal: To graduate. We try our best to reach it. We go to school, study, do our homework and so on and so forth. So as students, teleological time is quite influent.
However, I do other things in my life, I’m not only a student, I have a part time job, I have friends, I enjoy watching movies and singing, etc. I would say that my life is then a mix of teleological time and stellar time. My life is affected in multiple ways by different elements and situations. Sometimes I plan to do something, like going on vacation to France visiting my friends there, but some unexpected event happened – my visa application got rejected. In some cases even if you have a very specific goal, intermingling scenarios can slightly or totally change your plans and alter your final goal.
I consider teleological and stellar time as the most influential time for my life.
I wasn’t really affected much by what others wrote on Twitter. However, it did help me to understand my peers better since we only meet each other couple hours a week. Even though nothing unanticipated really happened that ruptured my daily construct of living in Twitter, I felt really good of reading what happened in others’ life. For example, when I’m studying for my exam and I see someone who is also study for his/her exam, I feel like I have a partner who share the same goal with me. Then, I don’t feel like I’m fighting this alone.


2) While reading the hypertext for the first time I’ve found the layout a bit cramped and noticed that I was attracted to the works whose letters l or i are stuck to another letter. At the first reading I was more trying to recognize every word than understanding the whole thing.
Once I read the entire text I look back and notice some different lightening on some words, but at first I thought every word received the same lightening.
After a second reading, where I pay much more attention to the meaning of the story, I found myself I very attracted to the special lighting words, that I didn’t notice before.
I was indeed attracted to some words more than others differing from my first reading to my second one, but I have no idea on what this might say about me. Maybe this says a simple thing: I’m Taiwanese, English is not my mother tongue, so when I read I try to be really careful about each word one after another to make sure I understand everything.

Tweeter open my eyes (second attempt)

1
I was really affected by my peers’ activities during this week. They help me think about myself. Some of my followers tried to cook, to do something that they had never done before. Others went to visit their doctors, their family and relatives. All of those activities are in my agenda and I never had time to realize them. The tweeter experience makes me understand how I neglect my health, my social life, my family and my friends. I realized that there’s a world out there, I had to get out and live my life.
I think during this week I met a beautiful lady that really changes my daily activities. We went to movies and to lunch after work. I learned with this experience and tweeter that my life is unbalanced. I need to start socializing more as before, go practicing my salsa step. However, school and work fulltime don’t give me enough opportunity to realize this part of my life. Maybe next semester, I’ll take less class to balance my life.

2-


The text seems very confusing and odd. I was very lost and felt that I was in the labyrinth and could find the end of the story. I felt that I was turning around without seeing the exit. I think the author want us to understand that our life is sometimes a maze. We, as human beings, should find a way to get out of our problems because we have the power to control our life and our destiny. We can decide to fail or to succeed. It depends of the amount of efforts and willingness we employ to realize our objective in life. In this hypertext, I select the world “murder” because I believe nowadays; this word is one of the words that hinder the world to become a peaceful place for everybody. We kill our brothers and sisters for nothing; we went to war and kill our neighbors for our own agenda. This word is really one the most violent words of the dictionary.

Life Around Us...

1) I believe in stellar time. Many events were happening at the same time in our peer’s life. It was amazing to experience that we are certainly not alone in this world; moreover, it was actually more amazing to see that many things happy to many people at the same time.
I am usually very tired when I get home from a very long day at work and at school but I am not the only one! Many students posted in Twitter they were very tired as well. I thought I was running out energy, but I now understand that is a normal pattern for many of us that work and study full time.
Our lives nowadays evolves around going to work, going to school, study, write papers, cook, watch our favorites shows on TV and that is about it! There are about 30 people in this class from different places with different cultures; however, their lives appear to seem alike.
I was primarily affected by one of the messages about hoping that the subways work on time that day… I smiled and though: “I hope that too” In fact I left my house a earlier the next morning just in case.
It also caught my attention the reflection of my peers. Some of us were saying we need start eating less, start exercising, or even start improving certain things in our lives.
What really impacted me was that I felt so connected to my mates throughout this activity since our lives are interfering minute by minute.
2) I believe the designer intended for us to learn that there is more out there than we think: other people and their lives… and that those lives interact with each other. This activity was designed to open or expand our minds and look “outside the box” and realize the world that surrounds us.
I was more attracted to certain phrases than to specific words. I was attracted to any type of sentence that suggested a goal; for instance: “I gotta stop eating” or “be more active in my classes”. I like to hear people wanting to improve –in any sense. As soon as I read those phrases, I felt related to those students; moreover, I felt they had my support.

My Life on Twiiter

1. The twitter assignment was interesting. I do not have a myspace or facebook so the majority of my interactions with friends and family are by phone, in person or email ( email I use rarely), so to have twitter was just odd to me. It felt as if I knew what everyone was thinking or doing without taking the time to literally make an effort to contact them to find out. Its as if people were answering questions without me asking them. I think Stellar time influenced my life on Twitter. I'd see others twitters and was motivated to get up and do something myself. It was as if there comment had an effect where I could be doing something and decide to do something else based on the twitter I just read. I did find it difficult to remember to twitter, I lead most of my life by face to face interactions or by phone so twitter although interesting I knew I would not continue after this assignment. Before twitter I believed time was teleological. I planned out my day and would usually follow through on all my goals without issues. After twitter I now know that as the situations change at times it will require you to define it by a different whether it be teological, stellar or entropic.

2. I found the hypertext to be confusing. At times I could follow the order and see where it was going then I'd click on the next one and be completely lost, feeling like no I've already been here what is next. I did feel as if I were running in circles, it reminded me of life. Its like you have a goal in life then something happens where you must take a different path to get there then something affects that path, etc. You then find yourself in a kind of circle avoiding the potholes to get to your goal and once you get there you have a new goal and back to the same circle you go. Your in a circle but there are different paths you can take to get to that goal.

Labyrinthes of life

1. Even before the Twitter activity I believed that the world is governed by the stellar time. Though our lives are subtly intertwined with one other we do not notice most of the time that a slight change in the trajectory of one’s path can cause drastic transformations of another one’s. This happens due to the fact that in a day-to-day life we usually focus on short- and medium-term goals. To be more specific the question is how to minimize time and other resources moving from the present point A to a desired point B in the future. As it’s known from geometry the shortest path between two points is a straight line. Therefore, more often than not we tend to perceive time and our existence in a teleological fashion as a linear combination of intervals and milestones. Though our path is constantly crossed by millions of other humans we tend not to give this fact any attention since 99% of such encounters do not bring about any immediate tangible change in our current condition. Yet nobody can ever tell the cumulative effect of these small variations that we with our single-minded plans are constantly exposed to. The importance of these at first sight minuscule interferences from outside is usually noticed only at the critical situations or emergencies. Than we become sensitive enough to perceive the presence of others realizing how much we depend on each other. We have to stop (or be stopped) and face the inconvenient truth of having just a partial control over our seemingly delineated and well-planned lives.


Having said all of the above, the Twitter experience appeared to me more like a fountain of chaotic signals, which barely had an impact on my daily routine. I think that the reason for such a perception was the fact that I didn’t know good 90% of the screen names that I was following and therefore couldn’t relate personally to the people that posted them. For comparison, having a profile on Facebook, updating my status on a regular basis and responding to updates of others, I get a sense of presence of my friends who are either in the City or hundreds of miles away. For me personal relationship is key.


2. The hypertext activity turned out to be very interesting and thought-provoking. It’s clear that the author tried to create an illusion of an individual life path with all its intricacies, unexpected twists and mistakes that most of us tend to repeat. Like in real life you never know where your next choice is going to bring you to and there is no other way to check but to make this choice. Like real life the text was divided into certain parts of cohesive text that would be partially unreadable because of black stains and illegible design. And then when a page is read you have to make a choice from the given number of options and risk being brought back to the very beginning of your reading.

I wasn’t particularly attracted to any of the words. Every time I tried to choose a different word or phrase hoping that I’ll be brought to a page that I haven’t read yet. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Running in circles I managed to read about 2/3 of the text. I think the tactic that I chose tells me that I’m a person who pretty easily gets bored with what he has and is constantly looking for new experiences choosing different ways to reach them. Unfortunately or fortunately, sometimes another turn into the depth of the labyrinth brings you right back to the entrance.

New Life

1-I was really affected by my peers’ activities during this week. They help think about myself. Some of my followers tried to cook, to do something that they had never done before. Others went to visit their doctors, their family and relatives. All of those activities are in my agenda and I never had time to realize them. The tweeter experience makes me understand how I neglect my health, my social life, my family and my friends. I realized that there’s a world out there, I had to get out and live my life.
I think during this week I met a beautiful lady that really changes my daily activities. We went to movies and to lunch after work. I learned with this experience and tweeter that my life is unbalanced. I need to start socializing more as before, go practicing my salsa step. However, school and work fulltime don’t give me enough opportunity to realize this part of my life. Maybe next semester, I’ll take less class to balance my life.

2-The text seems very confusing and odd. I was very lost and felt that I was in the labyrinth and could find the end of the story. I felt that I was turning around without seeing the exit. I think the author want us to understand that our life is sometimes a maze. We, as human beings, should find a way to get out of our problems because we have the power to control our life and our destiny. We can decide to fail or to succeed. It depends of the amount effort and willingness we employ to realize our objective in life. In this hypertext, I select the world “murder” because I believe nowadays, this word is one of the words that hinderthe world to become a peaceful place for everybody. We kill our brothers and sisters for nothing; we went to war and kill our neighbors for our own agenda. " murder" is really one the most violent word of the dictionary.

Mazes in life

1. My initial reaction to this assignment was to think that our lives are not governed by one specific timeline. However, after thinking and looking into this on a deeper level, I began to think that our lives are affected more by a stellar time. As I thought about it I could not think of anything that you could do that does not affect or has not affected another person. Life may seem teleological because we all wake up with a purpose in our days, but then your day is bound to eventually shift paths from what you had planned based on another persons actions. While using the “Twitter” experiment I learned that although what everyone had posted may not have affected me directly, had affected someone in some way. Certain posts I could relate to or did affect me. For example, a lot of people posted about how busy there days are between work and school which I can definitely relate to because on days I have to work and go to school it is a 14 hour day or more for me between working, commuting to and from Manhattan from Long Island, and going to class which kind of brightened my day up a little knowing that people are going through the same experience as I am. Also someone posted about calculus and derivatives which made me think about the calculus class that I’m in and having to do my homework for it which made me kind of mad. Being that it snowed on the first day of spring, I do not think that anyone really expected it so much and even though it was not a lot of snow at all it still seemed to make mine and most everyone else’s morning a lousy one based on their posts on twitter.

2. The hypertext activity was very confusing to me. Every path you took in the hypertext lead to a different ending which made it very difficult to follow. To me, this activity symbolizes that in life, every decision you make has an affect on the outcome of your life and I think that the designer intended this activity to show just that. I did find myself running in circles trying to figure out where this all was taking me. I was not necessarily attracted to any words in particular rather I was just lost in a maze it seemed. Maybe this says about me that I am still not entirely sure what I would like to do for the rest of my life, but if I make the right choices and take the correct paths I can become very successful.

Twitter The world on our feet

Daouda Kinda
Twitter, This network is great in so many way. Using twitter in less than a week I realized how random life is. I have been able to share my daily life activities with my classmates’ lives by just posting what I am doing and by reading my colleague posts. Twitter is nowadays used by so many and event notorious politicians an business men. The first time I heard about this site was on the news. The news reporter emphasized the ongoing use of twitter by house representatives and senators. We are leaving in the information world where technology has help us reduce physical distance and to connect and share information to each other in a matter of seconds. When I sign in for twitter I have no idea what I was going to do. However, as I started I didn’t take time to understand the beauty and joy of being able to connect my actions to someone else somewhere else. People around the world used it to share, inform, and show their feeling, ongoing activities sadness…. They have found something interesting that no matter what they are going through someone else somewhere is pretty experiencing that or just gone through it. Haven’t said that I read the post of a colleague who just lost his grandmother. In a matter of time a quick post was up there to support him because on the other hand another person that he doesn’t know had loss her grandmother too and wanted to share her support. This was amazing and showed how interconnected we are. I believe that our lives are interconnected in way that we have a hard time to explain……

Twitter & Hypertext

1. Teleological time effects most of us because we pretty much have our day planned unless something unexpected happens. I think twitter was a pretty nice experiment. at first I was hesitant and did not know what to write until I saw some people posting. I have to admit i went back on it more than I thought I would, it was interesting to me to know what other people were doing at that time. I did find some posts I could relate to, for example, the ones about midterms. Also, although my day was boring as a result of work or schoolwork, I did not get to post much. I think twitter is a little similar to facebook and myspace but I tried to be pretty casual and straight forward with my posts. Also, twitter can be a very useful tool to interact with your professors and classmates. It is surely better in my opinion than e-mail and we should continue twitter till the end of the semester. I think most of us get discouraged at first because we think its pointless or something of that sort but it really is not. This way we kind of get to know one another a little better and we don't have to be careful about being casual or professional so it shows peoples actual personalities or close to it.
   
2. Borges hypertext activity was pretty confusing to me, I found myself running in circles the entire time. I think it was purposely designed to be that way. I think the author's point was to show us that life keeps moving forward and even the smallest of decisions can effect our future. Also, I think the author was trying to teach us not to have regrets in life and to deal with whatever happens, learn from it, and keep moving forward. I must admit I was attracted to violent words such as revolver and murder because to me violent stories and movies are interesting and fun, I like "action". This could mean that I am attracted to violence which I think is not such a good thing. I do think the suggested 15 minutes were not enough time, I probably spent about a half hour because I was so confused.
   

Can we cross the same river twice?

1.TWITTER is really popular in these couple weeks. Right after we received this strange assignment, I found that there are so many people, who from various industries, pay attention to this simple designed website. The famous surgeon uses it deliver instant messages to his peers and fellows, to demonstrate how an operation was done. An U.S college student use TWITTER to sent message to let his professor know that he was arrested in Europe because he attended a political protest. It is a window for people to illustrate the detail of their lives, and their thoughts. As one of its participators, I realized that we could hardly live alone without the impact from the others. Our peers’ joy, sadness, or frustration would often remind us something else in daily lives. For instance: the other day I was totally loosed by “post mid-term syndrome” and felt like not doing anything, even I still had tons of homework and projects unfinished. I browsed the TWITTER posts, sudden I found there was someone who just lost his beloved grandma. While I felt his pain, his post also reminded me my grandparents, and how much that I should appreciated that both of them still be around us. I called my grandparents immediately, also spend sometime to chat with them. They showed so much care to me and kept encourage me “be good in school” (it made me feel like I am a five years old). For the rest of the day, I was able to be more focus and more cheerful. This is amazing part of life. The stranger’s life event may turn out to push you moving forward in your life. We all unintentionally play a role in someone else’s life. When something unpleasant happened, it could be an opportunity; and when things go perfectly smooth, it may lead to a crisis. In an informational society, we construct our goal base on reaction to the society. Therefore, stellar time is the best concept to fit in our living.

2.The hypertext is well-designed and 15 minutes is not enough to read through the whole thing for me. However, I do get the meaning behind the text. Its form tells us that the life is not a linear experience; it contents numerous possibilities in every single step that we choose. We choose something which attracts us the most at that moment, and then we might step into something we expected the least. On the web, we are able to click “back” icon and discover the other possibilities; sadly, we can not do this in our real life to explore if there was a better solution in our previous life. As Greek philosopher Heracleitus’ famous analogy of life: “Upon those who step into the same rivers different and ever different waters flow down.” This hypertext also reminds me that movie "The curious case of Benjamin Button" which illustrates an alternative of the common life.
I was more attracted to nouns than complex sentences in the text. Probably it is because I am an easy-going person and I tend to choose simple solution while I face challenge. However, easy solutions may lead to more confusing situation. That is the tricky part of life.

Forking Paths and Weaving Time

#1 It is easy to think about time as Teleological. When my eyes are closed the whole world falls away and at times when I’m dreaming it even seems that my own existence falls away. Yet based on the Twitter activity it is apparent that time is stellar. My peers had lives that existed outside of me, and frankly had nothing to do with me. While that in itself is not a revelation; I am not a narcissist. The activity allowed me to take peeks into their lives at various times of the day. Understanding this it is hard to ignore the teleological aspect of time. Events happen one after the other and there is an ebb and flow that was visible on Twitter with everyone’s blogs. If you wake up late one morning, and you miss your train which leads you to miss your test, on and on it’s easy to see how one event affected another. At times time seems like a set of dominoes that goes on into eternity. What makes life interesting is there isn’t one set of dominoes there are infinite sets that intertwine and weave in and out of each other. What I found interesting is that while all of our lives are very different, a lot of the experiences had commonalities. There were times when nothing interesting was going on in my life and I wasn’t sure what to Twitter about. When I logged on I would see there were others who were in the same position. Then there were times when homework, school, or just life in general was overwhelming, and when I logged in I would see that others felt the same way. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I was affected by what they were writing, but I think that I’m not very different from my classmates. We are all presented with similar challenges, and we react to them in similar ways. I personally think this is amazing on some levels since we are a very diverse group.

I have to say the only unanticipated thing that interrupted my daily life was the fact that I was tweeting. It wasn’t second nature to tweet about what was happening at the time. I think I just “go through” life and I don’t stop to think about it or write about it. I just live it.

#2 The Borges hyper ext was a circular activity. No matter what I clicked on at some point I would come back to the beginning of the text. It was truly one big circle. I wouldn’t say that I was attracted to some words more than others because at one point I was trying to see if I would come back to the beginning of the story or would I go in a different direction. I think the designer was not only making a point about time, but about life. Time and life seems to repeat it’s self. This is true now more than ever with everything going on in the world’s economy. Many times it feels that we’ve been in the same situation and you know that once the situation subsides, you’ll be back before you know it. It’s a comforting thought and a disheartening one all at the same time.

Time and Destiny

1) I think time is Stellar and Teleological for most twitters and I because everyone has some sort of idea about how their day will end, but sometimes things happen that ultimately change you eventual actions. For example tomorrow you may plan on driving to school or work; however someone else’s plan for the day might be to steal a car. That car just happened to be your car. Ultimately you’re forced to miss work or school all because of some stranger. On twitter most people have some sort of purpose in their daily lives I am pretty sure no one just sits around all day without trying to accomplish something they planned. You might have planned on just sleeping all day and then someone else’s action or comment may make you do otherwise. For example when the professor mentioned Good Will Hunting it made me reflect on some of Matt Damon’s movies and I eventually decided to watch the Bourne Ultimatum. If it wasn’t for her comment I would have went to the gym instead, so if I start getting fat it’s because of her Good Will Hunting comment. Everyone is unique in their own way but we do share similarities with others, so even if you’re a leader and not a follower I think it’s safe to say that a lot of your actions will be the result of someone else’s doing or opinion. Therefore I don’t time clearly falls within one category, I think its Teleological and Stellar.

2) The hypertext activity was very confusing but I think it kind of symbolizes life and your destiny. Your destiny is in your hands but you’re unable to accurately choose what you want your destiny to be. For example you could freely choose any words on the text to click but you can’t choose where this text will lead you and every word you click on has a detrimental effect to where you will end up in the text. I think this can be compared to real life as well because you chose to go to school at Baruch instead of many other colleges however your life would have turned out to be completely different, you may have met you future spouse at one of these other schools or many other different scenarios, your life could have been better or worst but you would never be able to know. Which I think brings up a special point as to why it doesn’t make sense to have regrets because you have no way of knowing what the future holds. So what I think the text is saying is that your destiny is in your hands but you’re just not aware of how to choose and this is what I think makes life so challenging. I the hypertext I just kept going in circle I was mostly attracted to words that pertained to violence such as: murder, revolver and hang. My main reasons for choosing those words were because I thought they would lead to the most interesting parts or they were all somehow connected.

Twitter and Hypertext

1. Discuss what type of time most influences yours and others' lives based on TWITTER. Were you at all affected by what your peers were writing? Did anything unanticipated happen that ruptured your daily construct of living?
After several days of experiencing twitter, I notice myself enjoying “peeking” at others’ personal lives and find people are unconsciously affecting each other. At the beginning, I was hesitated about what should I write in that little word box until I saw a lot of students begin to complain how midterms and homework stress their lives one after another. I could feel the same way as they did but I didn’t want to make the twitter become a “complaining tool” that full of unhappiness and dissatisfactions gathering together. I do believe that in fact these students are having something happy to share with, but they rather choose to amplify the negative than the positive. Then I didn’t mention anything about midterm but my mood was affected by seeing all the words like “tired, lazy, sleepy…”. Moreover, Twitter as a media for people to communicate and share lives does help people to get to know each other and keep people updated with the majority. On the other hand, I found the stellar time has the most influence to mine and others’ that life doesn’t go in linear track and we can’t go in one straight direction in our life. By observing others’ life styles, we will find new directions to move on.

2. Spend about 15 minutes playing with the hypertext reading of Borges' text. What do you think the designer intended for us to learn through this hypertext activity? Did you find yourself running in circles? Were you attracted to certain words more than others? If so, what do you think this says about you?
I find myself running in circles and back and forth which is quiet frustrating and confusing and I also find I tend to click on the words I don’t really understand and sometimes I will click on the same word again which makes me stuck in the circle. Maybe it tells me about the problems of my life style and my personality. I am a typical Capricorn who is obstinate and always chose stay still in my own path. This hypertext activity illustrates the problem of my personality, and perhaps it is the inner purpose of designing it.

life in a garden of possibilities

Although I, myself did not post on twitter, I was still able to view and interpret those who did. I most strongly identify with the idea of Teleological time, which lends itself to the idea of cause and effect. To me, this incorporates the idea of stellar time as well. Life is a result of cause and effect and this includes planned and unplanned directions. Staying up late one night, would lead someone to be tired, which in turn could cause them to oversleep. This effect of this could be missing a certain train or being on the road at a different time than normal. This then could cause the person to meet their future spouse or maybe escape a near-death experience. This intermingling of scenarios that affect our daily lives are represented in stellar time but also lead to a cause and effect answer or response to our daily conditions and experiences. Now that I think about it more, I feel that my life could actually contain elements of all three time scenarios. When my ex-girlfriend and I broke up, I readily identified with the entropic or chaotic view of time. For a brief period, my life was a jumble of feelings and confusion with no inherent outcome. Obviously, this way of thinking has been replaced with a certain degree of autonomy. Knowing that every Tuesday and Thursday I will be on the 8:07 am train to the city and that on Monday, Wed and Friday I must be at my boss’s house at 7:30am replaces chaotic time and is the very definition of teleological. Although this at times and there is a lot of them, can seem boring, it is in a way comforting as well.



2. Spend about 15 minutes playing with the hypertext reading of Borges' text. What do you think the designer intended for us to learn through this hypertext activity? Did you find yourself running in circles? Were you attracted to certain words more than others? If so, what do you think this says about you?

At first this reading was very confusing but after several minutes, ( I really mean hours) I understood the idea and meaning behind it. Our actions no matter how small or large all cause very distinct ripples or changes in our life. In the hypertext simply by clicking one inch away from another spot led you down a different path. This can easily be applied to life. Taking a job in another country or even in another field will create a new pattern that was not formed until you made a choice. I was not drawn to any specific word or phrase throughout the text; I was more interested in how many different paths I could choose and follow to reach a different point. What also I feel is interesting is how my choices along with another individual’s decisions all lead to inherent effect or interaction between us. Personally I haven’t reached this yet, but I find it crazy how so called “soul mates” can one day find each other among the masses and this is the result of each decision they made large and small that led to their lives becoming aligned with one another, even for just a short time. What are the chances?

Chaotic?

The Twitter experience was not new to me, since just like a lot of other people I am using facebook. However, it was interesting that people participating in this experience were all my classmates and, what is more, my current literature professor. I could see that a lot of people shared not only their thoughts on particular situations but also generalized and expressed emotions on a deeper level. Sometimes we could see and feel each others’ excitement or irritation, etc. A lot of us may be sympathising others and some comments can make you laugh maybe because you have just the same activities or thoughts as this other person. My opinion on the different times that we live in is dual. I believe that partially people live in stellar time, where a lot of scenarios are connected to each other and influence us daily. On the other hand, just like the Twitter has showed, a lot of activities are unexpected and you never know what may happen to you next or you might not know the details of the upcoming events, since your life is not only affected by you, but others play a huge role as well. That means that we may also be living in chaotic time.
As of Borges activity I found myself clicking on the words that I don’t know the meaning of or things that I am curious about, such as “lost labyrinth” or “chess player.” As for me, I believe that he wanted to show us how linear and at the same time chaotic our life is. As I see it, the linear part is shown through us clicking on different words and going somewhere else, to another page. The chaotic side is reflected through us going in circles and selecting different words. We might be in a bad mood and select a different word than we would have if we were in a better mood.

Following the Followers...

1)I used to get lot of request to follow in the twitter an year ago but I used to avoid it as I thought it will be just another chat site... but when I was compelled to be there... my view changed towards twitter. I was skeptical at first so when I created my account, I didn't post anything. I observed it for 2 days. In those two days I followed people from outside our class. After reading the updates I found it to be funny and started posting and sending request to our class mates. Since then I followed up and did post message regularly. I like to listen to Politicians so I was following CNN as well as Google. Barack Obama which I deleted later on but still follow Al Gore...right now he is working on a new book... I don't know why but I find some of US politicians very inspiring....Before Primaries, I used to follow everyone irrespective of their party. I was fascinated by Ron Paul as well as Barack Obama. I still follow Barack Obama as he is facing very tough time...but I like when he comes up with any solutions or experiments...I know any country should not be experimenting things but as he terms, there is no "quick fix" to the problems that US is facing today. I find him consistent and love when he brings things honestly. This is the only reason I like to follow the news. Besides that I loved to read the updates from Everlyn as she faces tough time with her kid. Following in twitter I found that everyone has their own life and thinking. It changes with small unexpected events. I try to live my life in a routine manner but it all depends on when I wake up. If I am able to get out of the bed by seven in the morning…I feel lot of energy in me and things go as I or planned. But if I am not able to leave my bed by seven, everything gets delayed. May be I am superstitious but this is fact. Overall I think it was nice experience and I think I am going to continue using twitter in future.
2) I am sorry but hypertext went off my head… I could not get anything from it. After so long I have been challenged by anything like this. Right now I have my mid terms so I am not using my head but once I am finished with my mid terms, I am definitely going to read it again and again until I understand it.

"36 hour Sunday"

1. Discuss what type of time most influences yours and others' lives based on TWITTER. Were you at all affected by what your peers were writing? Did anything unanticipated happen that ruptured your daily construct of living?

I think that most of the people I was following did actually planned their steps in advance or, at least, they expected things to happen in a certain order, predicted one. Hence, I assume time is stellar for many twitters as well as for me. Through the Twitter activity I was able to find more about people surrounding me. I think my daily activities are planned ahead and I know how I am going to spend every minute of time so valuable for me. However, sometimes unanticipated events occur and at the moment you think that you will not be able to deal with that turn of events. But you able to adjust accordingly to all unexpected twists, even if the outcome is not favorable sometimes. By spending some of my time playing with Twitter, I came to conclusion that many people do the same thing as I do: they are able to adjust to unanticipated events in their lives. One of the multiple posts that attracted my attention is that where a person offered to expend Sunday to 36 hours. I would even offer a better “bailout package”, which will extend all days of the week. It is very true when it comes to me: time flies so fast that seldom all planned tasks can not be finished on time. I am a full time student who is part time employed and I know how time is precious. Where is that magic key that can turn back time? I was thinking of this subject for some sometime during my life.

I was not able to experience all “beauty” of having snow on the first day of the spring: my plane was heading to San Francisco. However, being a New York myself, I could portray the feelings of the people participated in Twitter. The idea that I was not at New York at the time contributed to my excellent mood.

2. Spend about 15 minutes playing with the hypertext reading of Borges' text. What do you think the designer intended for us to learn through this hypertext activity? Did you find yourself running in circles? Were you attracted to certain words more than others? If so, what do you think this says about you?

The hyperactivity seemed to be a bit complicated. I was not sure what direction to follow, which word to click. The hyperactivity depicts the truth about our lives. Very often we are given a number of possible solutions to the same problem and our responsibility is to pick the right one, more suitable in a given situation. The hyperactivity offers is an endless story. By clicking one work somewhere in the middle of the text, you are being transferred to entire different part. You have to be careful with selection of the next word to avoid going circles. In general, I am a very curios person and this activity was interesting for me, because I wanted to know the truth hidden under a next highlighted word.

Tweet Tweet

1. Using twitter was a brand new experience.Although i was not able to fully use it i enjoyed the time i had with it. It as interesting to see what was going in our classmates life, being that we see them as "classmates" and not as humans. After using twitter, i found that my life is mostly affected by, teleological time. In the students i followed i saw many students seemed, to live life in a teleological time just like me. Although some posts were sad, and emotional, i did not at all feel affected by what my classmates were writing. In the couple of days in twitter, there seemed to be no events that had an effect on my life. Throughout this twitter experience i learned that my classmates are human just like me. We all have goals and use our own ways to achieve them. I didn't feel like our lives intermingled or had anything to do with each other.
2.In the hypertext reading of Borge's text, i have no clue as to what we were supposed to get out of it. I was very lost. But i did find the reading pretty fun. For some strange reason i was very attracted to the words of death,die and dead. As a person I'm not too sure what that says about me, but I'm sure it is along st the lines of me being afraid of death.

Obstacles and Patience

I believe that stellar time influences my life and other lives based on Twitter. After reading every ones’ updates I felt that how some of my feelings about some things are similar to them and also how that affected my daily life. For example, after seeing Professor Milstein’s post that she goes to sleep at 6 a.m. and only getting two hours of sleep, I felt that I am not the only one who sleeps less than everyone. I actually live in Long Island, so I have to travel almost two hours every day. That is why I always complain how I can not finish my work and get good hours sleep. But now after I seeing that post, I believe that I must be lucky that I get more sleep than my Professor. Also, another peer posted that she also has accounting exam and studying for it. This whole weekend I was struggling with Accounting. After experimenting with Twitter I have seen that I had similar experiences with some of my peers. Also, this weekend my friends from Buffalo came to visit New York. But I had so much work and my accounting exam was on Monday that I could not manage and go visit them. I felt really bad in the end. So, here I felt that stellar time influences my life most. Also the Twitter experiences showed that how stellar time interacted with my life and all the students’ posts. It showed how a barrier or a hardship affected peoples’ daily lives.
After playing with the hypertext, I felt that Borges wanted us to have patience and see different words or parts of stories differently. For example, if I clicked in one word it would take me to another part of the story. I felt like something was missing and turned the story in a new direction. So, I felt that his idea was to make the reader have different opinions and have their own conclusion about the story. I was attracted to some words such as murder and attacked. I think this is because I saw a dream last night about a thief who murdered a guard somewhere. So, maybe this says about me that if something happens I keep thinking about it over and over again. That is why I was attracted to those words because I have seen a dream like that and kept thinking of it over and over again.

"The Best Is Yet to Come"

I really enjoy the experiment on TWITTER because it is a strong connection for friends. I love to know what they are doing because people just too busy to talk about themselves and we are too busy to listen. Put aside the benefit of receiving information from the others, I did affected by the peers writing. Professor’s two hours sleep time was truly impress me. That was the time when I thought I would never make up my heavy load of homework and tried to give up. Her dedication and inspiration remind me the reason to come to Baruch – to push my life to the next level. No wonder she can accomplished many things in her early age. Her motivation will inspire me to fight for the laziness for the rest of time. Maybe it is unintentional, but people do affect to each other in many ways. I remember an experience on the train. There was an African American lady with her son. The kid said some “mamamama” words to his mom. And just as usual, I thought he was cute and asked “he only knows one word “mamamama”, right?” I had never thought this question would offend this lady that much. She was very angry in answering my question, “no, he knows many words!” I felt so bad at that moment. It made me feel miserable for the rest of the day. I imaged that she would conclude how rude Chinese were and treated the other Chinese badly. I believed the careless mistake not only gave her a bad impression but also caused her a negative feeling towards my race. Therefore, it would be totally my false if the next Chinese got an unfair treatment because my unintentional sentence. It was so unanticipated that one sentence could upset me for that long time – and I remember it still. There are countless interactions between people. See a friend online and google talk for more than one hour and forget what I supposed to do; send greetings to everyone to make them happy; talk to someone sits next to me and gain a friendship…
I’ve happen read one of the Goosebumps books before. It was fun because each time you read can have different endings. A coin is needed when you read the book. At the beginning, you pick three different tools. Having a special tool or not is whether you can solve the problem you face in the book, which will lead you to the different situations. In one problem for instant, picking a banana or a flashlight in the beginning also result different endings. Coin toss is used to determine your luck in many occasions. Basically, this illustrates the two types of elements affect our lives, the random chance and the tools (or skills) you acquire. For example, you meet a friend on the street. He mentions a nice job opportunity. This is a random chance you meet a right person in the right time. The chance you meet him may be the result of you miss a train or he leaves office too early. And then, you go to interview. Evaluating your excel skills and networking knowledge, the manager puts you into an appropriated department. One might argue that this is a stellar time because the “intermingling scenarios that affect our daily lives”. However, I believe this is a completely science analysis. Chance the coin toss is 50/50. Whether you meet your friend is also 50/50. Having a skill ready for your interview is a critical element for your success. That is why we should keep studying more to strength our ability. I think I should be the only one who still believes Teleological time in the whole class. In The Matrix, even full of Descartes’ philosophy thinking, it suggests the purpose of life as well. The key maker is decided to open the doors for the one; the one is decided to create a “new” world; you cannot see the ending if you haven’t made the choice… All of these are linear time concept. One more thing I want to mention that, there is no use to think about all those interactions too much. Missing one opportunity is the way to lead you to a better one - “The best is yet to come”. Giving up the stuff in hand is the way for you to grab the others-you have to empty the water in your cup in order to get another cup of tea.

Mobius strip

1. discuss what type of time most influences yours and others' lives based on TWITTER. Were you at all affected by what your peers were writing? Did anything unanticipated happen that ruptured your daily construct of living?

Based on Twitter, I persist that chaos time most influences yours and others' lives. As I logged on Twitter account and followed my classmates' posts, I followed what their posts meant to be. For example, when Jessica posted that there was snow outside in the early morning, I first looked at the outside through the window. Moreover, when Prof. Dana posted that BBC and BAPE are on sale, I did not know that what BBC and BAPE were. Therefore, I researched those on the web. In my opinion, these two cases can not be anticipated. In other owrds, both happened utterly in random. I did not even guess not only Prof. Dana posted for the sale of BBC and BAPE but also Jessica posted about snow outside in the early morning. They might have more other words to post than those above; they could post their favorite movie star, study, or food eaten in dinner. l had certain events which were completely random. When I walk on the street as usual, my left ankle was suddenly sprained. Moreover, on the last few weeks, the U.S. dollar rate was not stablized; it kept horribly increased.


2. Spend about 15 minutes playing with the hypertext reading of Borges' text. What do you think the designer intended for us to learn through this hypertext activity? Did you find yourself running in circles? Were you attracted to certain words more than others? If so, what do you think this says about you?

With the sentence from hypertext "he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.",
I think that the designer intended for us to learn through this hypertext activity emphasizes an infinite series of times.
In fact, when I Saw the words "infinite series of times" and "that fabric of times", one thing is just flashed on me. That is Mobius strip. It has many similarities with the definition of times he mentioned in hypertext; it has a number of straight lines and converging and diverging curves.
I feel that I am walking on the Mobius strip over and over. It will be stopped only by the death.

Life with purposes

I believe my life is teleological time type, which means a cause leads the result. The different purposes are the main topics in our lives. For what I am thinking, if my father never came to United States for his American Dream, my life would be a huge difference from today. I would be someone like my elementary schoolmate, who dropped out of school at her sixteen years old and began to work in a manufacturing factory to support her family. She then has an early marriage since her early twenty. The cause is my father’s decision to go to United States, and the result is my family immigrated to United States and I was able to go to college for my education. People live under different purposes, such as most students wrote on the Twitter, they are paying lots time to study midterms, isn’t it the purpose of being good students, good student can result in you have a good looking resume and degree. It is for your future job purposes. For myself, I major in finance, because I want to get a job in financial institutions. However today’s economy rupture my purpose of seeking my future job. Therefore, it is hard to say that the life under purpose is better than other, because our lives can be affected by other situation, too.

I think the hypertext reading of Borges ‘text is very creative, it attracts my attentions to predict the next coming words, although it is always out of my guessing. I am not sure that I am in the circles, because I am so confused by the reading. Surely, this is a great piece of reading with challenged.

Complicated time.

In this life, nobody was able to get everything done smoothly as they expected. They have to struggle with many difficulties in order to solve their own problems. I think that stellar time affected my life most and others’ lives as well. For instance, my day often begins with going to work in the morning. After finishing working, I go to school until the late evening. Later, I finish my day by having dinner and preparing some things for the next day. This routine is repeated the same every day without changing. However, this schedule doesn’t work well everyday, sometimes, I was interrupted by the work and couldn’t handle works at the same time. Being a full time student and working, I was too tired to balance both working and studying together. One day, I planned ahead to finish my reading papers for my class, however, I couldn’t finish it. Since working the long time made me so tired, I just want take the rest at the end of the day. As a result, I couldn’t finish what I had planed before. Sometimes, I want to stop the time flying in order to finish all my works. Time is money, and it’s true especially when I live in New York which is always busy with the crowds outside the streets. Looking back the past, I realized the time flied so fast that I missed many opportunities to achieve some goals in my life. Playing around the Twitter, I found some people very similar with my life. They always change their lives, and some unexpected things might happen to them which they never know. For example, through this website, some people might suddenly found their friends after a long time they didn’t see each other. Or they planned to go on vacation, but finally their works turned to be busy in which they had to delay their plans. Even though we have the plans ahead, we cannot finish them as we expect. In my life, when something unanticipated happened, I was very hesitated to decide which one I should do first. A few days ago, I got a phone call from my cousin inviting me to his wedding party this week. However, I have a midterm exam and go to work at that time. I couldn’t decide whether I visit my cousin or I have to move my exam earlier and cancel my work. I think that most people also dealt with all obstacles the same time which was not easy to solve. For these above reasons, I believed that the stellar time had an impact on our lives especially when we live in this complicated society.
From the reading, I ‘m almost lost the direction in which I cannot follow what will happen next. When I click each word, it comes out many different possibilities. I think that the author wanted to attract the readers’ curiosity since the text is so chaotic that they have to follow next to read. This way is very creative and doesn’t make it boring when they read a long story. To me, when I like to click the new words which I don’t understand the meaning, it appeared the definition very detailed and its some synonyms. Through these words, it might evaluate about my personality. For instance, if I’m a curious person who always wants to know something new, I will click any new words in the text. Anyway, it’s little confusing with this new activity, I found very interesting to play with it.

A maze of words

I believe in the stellar time, because I feel that anything can affect our daily lives. For example, if you wake up late you'll miss your train or bus to go to work. Or if you had something planned for weeks and all of a sudden it's cancelled, it affects your life. On our twitter assignment there were plenty of times that just by reading everyones comments affected me or at least bothered me. For example, someone posted a comment saying that it was their day off. That just brought my mood off because my only day off is Sunday and I was so jealous at the fact that people have days off and could relax and I can't. There were a couple of unexpected things that occured over the weekend, I didn't expect go out on Friday night knowing that I had class on Saturday morning; which I would never do. And I still went to class on Saturday morning with a serious hang over. But I do feel that things do happen for a reason, no matter what unexpected thing happens, everything happens for a reason.

I feel that the hypertext activity was very confusing and made me read over at least two times. I think that it was really confusing and I guess you can say that you were going in circles. Also I feel that I was from several points starting from the middle of a story or the beginning or the ending. Just going back and forth or like I said before in circles.

My understanding from this activity, I feel that it's trying to tell us in order for us to understand things in life or get things right we have to go over them more than once. Even if you have to start from the beginning or from the middle or the ending.

Tweets and Mazes

1.) During the "Twitter Experiment" I really got the sense that time was stellar. Reading each post showed me how much I have in common with these people besides an English class. When Professor Milstein was talking about "Set It Off" and "Good Will Hunting", it made me go back several years since the last time I saw and enjoyed these movies. Her post made me think, "Should I reactivate my Netflix account so I can watch these movies along with so many others that I haven't seen in years?" I left a post about filling out my NCAA brackets and a couple of hours later I saw another post about brackets. Did my brackets affect his? Did the teams I picked factor into the percentages which factored into his choices? I don't know but it is certainly possible. Another post about someone going to Atlantic City made me laugh. I was supposed to go to Atlantic City for a Bachelor Party but couldn't make it because of work. I could have been at a Blackjack table sitting right next to this person without even realizing it. Maybe this person would have won or lost more money due to my presence at that table. Another post that changed my thought process were all the ones about snow. By the time I rolled out of bed all the snow was gone and the sun was shining. I thought to myself "Wow this weather is finally turning around." Then I saw all the posts and thought shit, this winter is never going to be over and I went from good mood to bad mood instantly. This experiment showed me how other people's actions affect my thought process and how I go about doing things which makes my sense of time stellar.

2.) This hypertext activity reminded me of these Goosebumps books I used to read. At the bottom of every page it gave you a choice of where the story would go next. For example, the story might say, "He approached the door at the end of the dark hall. If you think he opened the door go to page 15, if you think he turned around and left go to page 36." I used to love reading these books as I love solving puzzles and mazes. This hypertext basically reemphasized Borges' belief of different times. If you select a word you might get one part of the story first but if you picked another word you got a different part first. If you didn't pay careful attention you would be running in circles with no end in sight. I was mostly attracted to the one word links such as enemy, friend, revolver, omission, dead, and died. I felt these were more abstract then the phrases and I felt the one word links would deliver more surprising results than the predictable phrases. I guess this tells me that I like to think outside the box and that I like surprises. 

I believe in stellar time

My believe is that life runs on stellar time. Every action of every person affects all of us. What I feel like today may change another persons attitude. For instance, I work in pharmacy so if a patient ran out of medicine and we feel like being generous and giving them a couple of pills until they see the doctor that is our call. Therefore, say I woke up in a bad mood or another patient has mad us upset that may cause us to not give that person with the problem any extra help. Stellar time is very real because some of us can cause a change in another person's life and not even know of it. I also believe that people come into your life for certain reasons and change you personally for good or bad. We may think we meet these people randomly but I think due to stellar timing everyone comes into our life for a reason.
Twitter has allowed me to get out of my box and view other peoples views on personal life, school, and other aspects of life. Its was fun viewing the comments, at one point I was at work reading them and I just burst out in laughter from one of the comments. I also saw that it is hard for many other people juggling school and work. I think I will stay on Twitter as long as its still funny. It has also proved a little of my point about stellar time, by that one post that made me laugh my day was changed. Someones perspective about Costco made me have a good day.
From the reading I gather that the author wants us to also leave our box and view a text in a whole new way. He wants us to view the text in a way that is more surprising, we don't know whats going to happen next where it could take us. You can also find out a little about your personality because of the particular words you may choose to click on. For example if one chooses to keep clicking on the more violent or aggressive words you can see that you like action and hoping clicking that word will lead to others like it. I love to see or hear new words so I basically take to weird or new words.

Teleolgical

1.My life is extremely teleological. I used to live with a stellar point of view but I found it got in the way of my goals and just in general living my life because I was so busy reacting to others. Even when forced to read other people's thoughts I still found it had no effect on me because I am extremely goal orientated right now. It may seem rude but frankly I need to be concerned with my own life now. I'm drained dealing with the lives of others. If we let ourselves just fall into the sea of others , we will be a drifter all our lives.

2. I love the word labyrinth. It means maze but there is so much more going on in it. There are pitfalls, trick openings and areas that just makes no sense. I think that is what the designer of this story wanted us get out of this particular tale. So much is going on that we have to carefully inspect the pieces of the story to figure it out.

The magic of time!

1. Discuss what type of time most influences yours and others' lives based on TWITTER. Were you at all affected by what your peers were writing? Did anything unanticipated happen that ruptured your daily construct of living?
I think the time that mostly influences others, according to what I read was the stellar time… it’s as if things happening around everyone were just working to forge something. For example, someone found an old friend on facebook. It’s as if time was working on her back to make this happen. I didn’t notice many unexpected actions by most people… Almost everyone had everything already planned out: homework, job, traveling. However to me these last days were mostly chaotic… as if things just emerged out of nowhere. I was pretty much stuck home, when suddenly I received a call from my aunt to render a visit to her. That was completely random to me. But I guess it also has some stellar to deal with, eventhough it was random to me, something must have happened on my back. That is, scenarios were developing out of my life that did interfere with mine.

2. Spend about 15 minutes playing with the hypertext reading of Borges' text. What do you think the designer intended for us to learn through this hypertext activity? Did you find yourself running in circles? Were you attracted to certain words more than others? If so, what do you think this says about you?
I think that the intention of the author is to somehow connect the words/phrases you click on with the rest of the story… when you click on a hypertext is not as if you loose track of what you are reading, at least not completely. But rather it’s as if you still stay in touch with the essence of the story. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that a person that hasn’t read the story is going to be able to follow up. But for those of us that did read it, it’s like guiding us through Borges’ labyrinth.
Personally I felt very attracted to inconclusive words, those that made it unpredictable to determine what was coming next such as: chaotic,
Revolver, we do not exist. And this says about me things that I probably don’t want to say… for example a hidden disappointment I’m trying to hide.

The power of the small things

1. Discuss what type of time most influences yours and others' lives. Were you at all affected by what your peers were writing? Did anything unanticipated happen that ruptured your daily construct of living?

My life is most influenced by steller time. Everything in my life has some kind of purpose and draws into a bigger piece of my life. For instance, one may feel that the fact that I love to dance salsa is nonetheless but a simple hobby or interest. From my perspective, salsa allows me to tap into my creativity and expand the ways which I view things. Through salsa I expand my creative vision like painting or instruments does for others. In essence, the small activities that occur in my life have a way to intermingle and in some way affect my daily life.

when I received my paper back from my classmates I was immediately surprised to see how different the story unfolded from my original idea. Although I expected some changes I still believed that my ideas were better. Does this indicate that I am too pushy when it comes to putting ideas on the table? No, I simply like to finish things that I start. I had a vision for this story so it makes me uncomfortable to get side tracked.

On a normal day, many things occur that rapture my daily construct of living. For example, I have been smooth sailing the past few weeks with a systematic and well planned routine; however, a load of bad news and changing situations have landed on my back: My father is sick,my sister might be leaving NY and a few other things. So, there goes that short stint of smooth sailing. In brief, its rare that I get a time period without unanticipated interruptions.

2. What do you think the designer intended for us to learn through this hypertext activity? Did you find yourself running in circles? Were you attracted to certain words more than others? If so, what do you think this says about you?

I found myself running in circles. I was constantly looking to draw conclusions but could not find any. Does this say that I am bottom line driven. I would suppose so. I am accustomed to operating in a systematic process. This riddle-like piece of writing is definitely not my cup of tea although I do enjoy to solve problems.