I liked the Beard story a lot but I found it awfully sad. It was very descriptive and genuine so it was easy for me to imagine every detail. It reminds me of stories I would have to read in my AIDS and Epidemics class written about individuals dying of HIV from their doctor’s point of view. The story was beautiful and the part I liked most was when Jo Ann said “no matter how much you miss them they never come back once they are gone”. Literally, she was talking about the deceased, but figuratively she could have meant her husband or her collie or anyone who wasn’t playing the same role in her life that they used to. And even though her husband came back to console her, his love for her never came back. It could never come back because he didn’t love her anymore. He looked at his wife like he looked at the collie on the damp blankets. And for some reason I can visualize exactly what that must have felt like.
"The Midwest is very brown isn’t it?” says Chris’s mother to Jo Ann on the phone. Brown is the color of dead leaves and shit which makes perfect sense in this story. When you mix all the colors in the spectrum your allegedly get black but anytime I’ve tried I always got brown. This reminded me of a quote from On the Road. “There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded. At least that’s what I thought then…”

The Richards story immediately struck fear into my heart thinking that someday my mother could be like this. I’ve never had any experience with grandparents because they all died before I was born but the idea of my parents becoming senile frightens me. I could see myself becoming annoyed with my mother were she to do this and that frightens me too because I should be mature enough by now to not lose my temper with her. “But we’re not really angry at her, we’re angry at it. Whatever it is.” I hope I am mature enough by the time it happens.

I guess this is a good group of stories to read over Thanksgiving so that I can be thankful for my life and my family’s and how neither of us has reached any of these states yet.

I enjoyed the Sedaris and Strayed stories the most because I could relate to them. Not to their circumstances but perhaps to the authors’ thinking. Whenever I like a quote I write it down. These are the passages I wrote down: “It’s so rare when one knowingly does something for the last time: the last time you take a bath, the last time you have sex or trim your toenails. If you know you’ll never do it again it might be nice to really make a show of it…There must exist some middle ground, a place where one was tortured on a daily basis but still allowed a few moments of pleasure, taken wherever one could find it. That place seemed to be Raleigh, North Carolina, so why the big fuss?...You can’t brace yourself for famine if you’ve never known hunger, it is foolish to even try. The most you can do is eat up while you still can, stuffing yourself, shoveling it in with both hands and licking clean the plates, recalling every course in vivid detail…”

I liked the satirical nature of this reading. I hated the father and the way he tried to dominate and manipulate everyone else but I figure he only did that because he was scared and trying to control his wife so as not to lose her. The story’s mother reminded me somewhat of my mother, unconventional and non-conformist, minus the cigarette smoking. I think if my mother got cancer she wouldn’t tell us either. I remember a few years ago she got into a car accident and the only way I found out was when I noticed she didn’t have a car anymore. She didn’t want to scare me by telling me.

I wrote down a group of passages from the Strayed story as well: “We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Greif is a thing that we are encouraged to ‘let go of’ to ‘move on from’…. And if they don’t – if they have loved too deeply, if they wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live – well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help… We act as if all losses are equal. It is un- American to believe otherwise…But it was not to be…We loved each other but love was not enough…I thought about how if you lose a ring in a river, you are never going to get it back, no matter how badly you want it or how long you wait…But this isn’t fiction. Sometimes a story is not about anything except what it is about. Sometimes you wake up and find that you actually have lost your nose…”

I liked this story because the author was young. She just went through a tragic loss and she was confused and messed up and I think that everyone has stages of their life like that. Frankly I don’t believe that all losses are equal. Any losses I’ve suffered have not been as devastating as having to lose a mother however a loss is a loss and quantifying a loss doesn’t create a different reaction to the loss.

All of these stories share a similarity in losing someone you love. But for the most part they all seem unresolved as in the learning to accept this loss has not been achieved yet and may never be.

Push was the most disturbing book I have ever read. I thought A Color Purple was tame compared to this. I’m really glad this book was fiction although it scares me to think that things like this I’m sure have happened in the world. I feel like every harmful and hurtful thing that could possibly ever happen to someone happened to Precious. I think I still am severely disturbed by the idea that she was being molested by her mother. I’ve heard about girls being molested by their fathers and although the thought frightens and troubles me, I’m no longer as phased by it. The part on page 21 where Precious describes the sexual interaction between her mother and her still nauseates me. I first read it when I was in my bed about to fall asleep and then I had to get up and put a Disney movie on to take my mind off of it.

I was equally appalled by the description on page 135 where we hear Mama’s confession and learn that Precious was being molested by her father since she was a newborn. I can’t wrap my mind around this concept. I hated Mama. I knew she was just a character but I still hated her and blame her for the disasters in Precious’s life. Mama was jealous of her own newborn daughter when her father molested her. I can’t even believe the mentality of someone like that. It seems that her entire life Mama held this against Precious and enslaved her as punishment. Even the descriptions Precious uses when describing her Mama’s appearance are vulgar. She is fat, disgusting, dirty, smelly, greasy, eating a whole ham hock. When she opens her legs it reminds Precious of a can of haddock left open on the counter on a hot summer’s day.

The book is very graphic. Nothing is simply implied. And the broken English and Ebonics contribute to the pain of the character. After finishing this book I thanked god that I didn’t have to deal with any of the trauma that Precious did in her life. Ultimately it was a success story but Precious had to go through a lot of rain to find some kind of rainbow.

I think my favorite part of the book was the end when we got to read all of the girls’ stories written in their own language. This helped to further develop their characters and allow the reader to experience what they had.

I think its interesting to mention that when Nicolas Ealy came into the class he talked about how desire was the ultimate cause of all pain. Many of the songs I listened to were written as a response to unfulfilled desire. Sarah McLachlan literally says in her song "Possession", "Would I spend forever here and not be satisfied". This song, like many other songs, is describing a situation of unrequited love, which is really unfulfilled desire and is indeed one of the most painful lessons to learn. Alanis Morisette knows what I’m talking about too. "You oughta know" is a song all about being replaced. One side moves on and the other side is left pining. Taylor Swift’s song "Teardrops" is about unrequited love in the sense that the person she loves will never know or love her back and yet she can’t give up her feelings for him.

I find a lot of pain comes from feeling isolated and lonely. Like in the Travis song he thinks he is the only one persecuted by the world. He asks "Why does it always rain one me? Is it because I lied when I was seventeen?" as if his pain comes as a result of some karmic retribution.

I found the Eamon and Frankee duo very interesting. They sing to each other and like Frankee says "There are two sides to every story". They are both on the defensive about each other and I’m sure Frankee really ripped into Eamon’s ego when she released her song. Its funny because after you put your walls down and get defeated by love its natural to be on the defensive, building back your walls in attempt to not get hurt again.

Top fourty songs don’t really inspire pain in me. I think it’s because I feel like these songs are fabricated and not necessarily written from experience. They have ulterior motives of making money and I don’t trust the singers so I can’t feel their pain. But I had never before heard the song "Soap and Water", or a song so bluntly talking about divorce so it was more poignant than many others. And I clearly know that Kurt Cobain was a very distraught individual so I don’t feel like his songs are faking. When I think of the most painful songs I immediately think of Jeff Buckley. He has some real tearjerkers I’ve cried along to.

The timing of having to read Beautiful Boy could not be more ominous. My best friend’s little brother has always been a mixed up kid. He’s a senior in high school failing all his classes with no motivation to do anything other than smoke pot and hang out with his friends. I had taken Steve’s senior pictures for his yearbook so I dropped them off last Sunday when I was in town. When I saw him he looked about forty pounds lighter than the month before, when I had taken the pictures. He ran in and out of the house, not acknowledging anyone, just running into his room to grab some clothes and money and he was off. His hair was disgusting, he looked like he hadn’t showered in a week, he was gaunt, pale, dark circles under his eyes. Then my best friend broke down and told me the whole story.

Steve hasn’t gone to school in weeks, he’s been suspended and hasn’t bothered to come back. He doesn’t sleep at home, he doesn’t eat at home, he lives with his friend. The last time he came home he stole a credit card and four hundred dollars from his parents. The last time I saw him was when I was taking his senior pictures. None of this had happened yet. This downward spiral snowballed out of control in a month. It’s obvious that he’s doing some type of drugs, how else could you explain his rapid weight loss and stealing money? When my friend told me this I was halfway through reading Beautiful Boy.

I was terrified for Steve. Because I was reading this book I was learning all this information and seeing it through a parent’s point of view. I felt horrible for my friend and her family. I didn’t want them to go through what I was reading about in this book. I told my friend about the book and suggested maybe he should go to rehab before he turns 18, remembering what David Sheff wished he could do to Nic. I couldn’t believe something like this could happen to a sweet boy like Steve. I couldn’t believe that this could happen in Granby, CT, to someone from a small upper-middle class town, someone from a close family and good upbringing.

As of this weekend Steve is in the hospital. He was forced to go after his parents called the police. After this weekend he will move to an outpatient facility for 10 days but from reading this book I don’t think that will be enough time. I fear he will revert back to his old ways and continue to hurt himself and others. Everytime I read I get so depressed. I want to keep reading, hoping to learn more and more, but at the same time I feel twice the pain because I can witness it first hand destroying my best friend’s brother. I just hope that his story ends up like Nic’s, a happy ending.

I found this article much more interesting that Murray’s but the scene that Rehling starts out with is silly. I know the article says that 90% of serial killers are young adult, white males but what percentage of young adult white males between the ages of 20 and 35 are actually serial killers?

I thought it was coincidental that the article talked about the genre of a "white trash" serial killer, since for Halloween my costume was white trash and Halloween is the ideal time of year for fear and horror. I think what Thomas DiPiero mentioned about the white male protagonist was interesting. He argued that these characters are dependent on women and people of color to define their identity. So in essence white masculinity "is not represented so much as an identity as a hysterical response to a perceived lack of identity".

I like how covertly these stereotypes are placed within horror films and yet as the viewer we still don’t even realize it. It’s like a math equation where the stereotypes follow a certain pattern and I love how Rehling breaks apart the equation and analyzes them in this article. I.e. "The female detective, as Carol Clover has noted, has her roots in the slasher genre, in which increasingly the male rescuer/survivor function has been rendered "marginal or dispensed with altogether."

I love the archetypal framework for every character and plot that is examined in this article. For instance, the protagonist in each movie is always a foil of the antagonist. I think I will be more aware of the patterns and stereotypes after reading these articles. I may even be able to predict the plot of the next slasher movie I see.

In her article Hostel II Representations of the body in pain, Gabrielle Murray comments that teenagers who were 10 when 9/11 happened are now 16 or 17. They are "grown up being told you are going to get blown-up. Terror Alert Orange… They want something to scream at" that is as shocking as the events of their lives. I think this is an interesting point to bring up. It says something about that generation which I think could be true. I’ve heard that my generation has a three minute attention span because that was how long it used to take for a modem to dial up to the internet. I think it could be the same reaction. When these children are brought up watching the news with topics like 9/11 and bred on orange, yellow, and red alerts, they will need horror equivalent or greater to entertain them in movies. It only makes sense.

In Edelstein’s review he claims ‘fear supplants empathy and makes us all potential torturers, doesn’t it?’ which is true, especially in relation to Abu Ghraib. I said this in a previous blog post and I think that when humans are in a situation of fear they will turn on their morals, logic, and better understanding in order to save oneself. This is the common archetype of ‘torture porn’. Murray writes that torture is not used to ‘unearth secret information’ in times of war and hostility, but torture serves the sole purpose of isolating and therefore controlling a group through their bodily vulnerability. We see this statement supported by the predicament in Abu Ghraib.

The label "torture porn" repulses me a little. Murray defines it as ‘the representations of mutilation and torture in films are pornography because they are illegal or at least unacceptable to contemporary cinema audiences’ while Susan Sontag claims that torture has predominately a sexual nature.

I really enjoyed the part in the article in which Murray discusses the exhibit in the art gallery, Blind Light. I would have liked to see and experience it myself. I think the disassociation between mind and body happens so often that we forget we function as one. The mind controls what the body does, the body controls what the mind thinks. It takes a piece like this in which one is totally incapacitated visually to create a connection between body and mind once again. And just thinking further on this idea, Sontag says "the Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one", which I agree with. But take away our visual dependency such as in this piece of art and we are panic stricken. I imagine myself in this glass cube terrified, heart palpitating, trying to escape, clawing at the sides like a rat. Though horror and torture porn movies depend on visuals to frighten and entice, there is much to be said about a new degree of horror that is created by obstructing our vision.

The first thing I noticed about this book, The Wounded Stroyteller by Arthur Frank was how the topics of modernism and postmodernism were following me everywhere. The day I started reading this book a teacher in another class of mine was asking us the difference between modernism and post-modernism regarding art. I felt foolish because as a senior art major I should definitely know the answer to that question but after being plagued by it through this entire book luckily I’ll never forget it. To sum it up, I think modernism could be described as the absence of decoration or excess. Form follows function. Postmodernism came about as a reaction against modernism and embraced ornamental and attractive elements again. The medical version that Frank describes is similar to the artistic approach. Frank says modernism occurs when technical medical expertise overtakes the bodily experience of illness. Postmodernism is then when ill people realize more is involved in their experience than the medical story they can tell. The similarity between the art and medical world is that humanized detail is subtracted from modernism and again restored with postmodernism.

I feel when Frank first starts describing “The Remission Society” he is describing what Wall talks about in the last chapter of his book Pain: The Science of Suffering. There is really nothing being done about the people in pain. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies are researching for the cure to ailments to help prevent pain, and Doctors and Surgeons are taking care of injuries, but those with chronic pain after seeing a doctor and before being cured by a miracle drug, they are left isolated. These are the people in the remission society.

I wish the book actually told the patient’s stories instead of just analyzing them. It’s a disheartening topic because it really makes me think how fragile life is and puts it into perspective. Some parts I found interesting were the breakdown of the archetypes of the stories in the Restitution Narrative, and how Frank describes an ill body as similar to a car breaking down. The chapter I loved in the book was the Chaos Narrative. I feel like my life is a chaos narrative! I can relate to the parts about chaos the best. It made me think about Abu Ghraib. When we make a judgment about what those soldiers did we are creating a Chaos Narrative. “Chaos Narrative often begins with the listener asserting how in such circumstances he would find a way out.” If we fell in, we could get out.

I think there was a lesson for me reading this book. Frank talks a lot about the voice of the person with illness. How the voice is lost or gained or how it is taken away from the ill person. My little brother has been suffering with some stomach illness for more than 3 years. He’s the leading valedictorian in his 11th grade class but he’s a procrastinator and since academics come so easily to him he doesn’t have to try. He hardly ever goes to school and probably misses about 3 days of school every week due to his stomach problems. He’s been to doctors and specialists but they don’t know what is plaguing him so they can’t diagnose him and therefore don’t know how to help him. For the last 3 years I have been a brat of a sister always making comments about him missing school because he could get away with it just because he was so smart. That he was using his stomach problems to his advantage and he didn’t need to miss so much school, he was just being lazy. Honestly I don’t know what the f was my problem but I’m glad I read this book because it gave me an epiphany. This whole book defends and explains the character of the ill person, talking about how society doesn’t take their illness seriously if it doesn’t have a clear diagnosis and if the illness lingers, those in the remission society are belittled. I feel ashamed to admit that I was doing exactly this to my brother, someone whom I should have never condemned no matter the circumstances. I have to thank Arthur Frank for making me realize this.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib was a difficult movie to watch. I can’t believe what a terrible situation these soldiers were put in. I am so thankful that I don’t have to do what they do.

First off it’s hard for me to make any kind of verdict about these soldiers because I am not and was not in their situation. To be able to leave the life we have always known in America, our family, our friends, and go to war on the other side of the world I think you have to be in a certain mindset to be able to cope. Clearly this mindset includes a hardened heart and some kind of hatred for the opposing side. Simply kill or be killed. It would be necessary to have this mindset to survive over in Iraq. Therefore I can’t possibly sit in comfortable old Hartford, Connecticut and point fingers at anyone. That’s exactly what Donald Rumsfeld did to these soldiers. First he sent a memo approving the harshest torture techniques since the country’s creation, basically telling these soldiers to “keep up the good work”. But then when the pictures leaked, Donald Rumsfeld himself accused these soldiers of sadistic activity, stabbing them in the back and calling what they did shameful, putting these soldiers on trial and in jail.

Now I know what’s ethical and what’s not. The prisoners in Abu Ghraib should have never been treated the way they were. They should never have been violated and debased by the prison guards. No living human being should ever be dishonored in the way that they were, this is unethical. But it happens. It happens because these soldiers are thousands of miles away and they are fighting an ambiguous conflict in a foreign land where everyone could be an enemy. To these soldiers everyone could be an enemy because we don’t know who isn’t an enemy, who isn’t in Al Qaeda, and who isn’t interested in distressing Americans. They must take this very grey area and try to do their best to divide in into black and white and somewhere between this division they got mixed up dividing duty from morals.

When the whole reason you are in a foreign land is to defend your own country, to interrogate prisoners to try and find some evidence to protect your country from getting attacked I think one could get carried away and forget to question if what they are doing is morally acceptable. It’s elementary but I think sometimes we all forget it is better to be kind than to be right. But then again, it’s easy to be a hero from the comfort of your living room but when faced with the actual situation, one might respond differently than originally anticipated.

The last thing I have to say is that I don’t agree with this war. I think we should work on democracy in our own country before we go stick our nose in someone else’s desert. Our government right now is a total bureaucracy. It’s not fair that the rich WASP government figures get to sit tight in Washington and make all the decisions exclusively for their benefit and try to pass them off on the American citizens as if they had our best intentions in mind. Like how Rumsfeld totally backstabbed the soldiers at Abu Ghraib as soon as the pictures leaked and sided against them and sent most of them to jail when it was he who advocated the torture tactics they implemented. Meanwhile General Miller got promoted after the scandal leaked at Abu Ghraib even though it was Miller who recommended that the military prison guards abuse the prisoners. It’s a disgraceful system in America where the top 1 percentile keeps getting richer and can be absolved from their delinquencies because their fathers are friends with the governor, or they have money. And its even more upsetting to me that there’s nothing the 99% of the rest of us can do about it. God bless America.

I don’t know if I would have been able to follow the information conveyed as well if The 9/11 Report was just written as a chapter book. It was a very unique approach to sending out the facts regarding 9/11 to the public. I thought I knew a lot more about what happened 9/11 and the events leading up to it until I read this book.

I think it is ridiculous how our country could have taken measures to prevent 9/11. There were many warnings including a daily briefing delivered to George W. himself that headlined, and I quote "Bin Ladin determined to strike US". That was the most obvious of the omens, but there were many other subtle ones including the threat in the London newspaper and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Even after all this much attention wasn’t given to counter-terrorism.

I think it is very ironic that the US supplied billions of dollars in assistance to the Afghanis fighting against the Soviets. That same money would later be used against us when it fell into the wrong hands of Al Qaeda. No good deed goes unpunished, I always say. I also find it ridiculous that the sharing of information between administrations such as the FBI and CIA wasn’t encouraged. What kind of a childish grudge is going on between these two that they won’t get over themselves to help the greater good of their country and exchange pertinent resources? I could go on criticizing the government for its inefficiencies. How the FAA no fly-list contained only 12 names while the government’s contained thousands. And why wouldn’t the government give their list to the FAA since these were the people handling such matters?

On page 49 the book talks about how missile attacks against Bin Ladin were in conversation, yet the government was hesitant because as many as 200 people could be killed in collateral damage. If the United States flew over Kandahar and fired missiles aiming for Bin Ladin, but perhaps missing and killing hundreds because in fact Bin Ladin wasn’t actually there, do you mean to tell me Kandahar would not retaliate? One of the captions actually reads "And for one reason or another, no action was taken." HA!

The next page is just as asinine. The first caption states "Though it was believed that President Clinton wanted Bin Ladin dead…" …what? Was there really speculation about this topic? Isn’t it a pretty black and white issue? And wasn’t Clinton a liberal who was against the death penalty? Anyways I’m glad the US had Massoud to turn to, to help us in our fight against Bin Ladin, however I do disagree with his massacres of the innocent and heroin trafficking but hell, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

There are a few questions I have that the book left unanswered. How was the message sent out in code? 2 sticks, a toothpick, and a lollipop? Why were the pilots to crash their planes if they could not reach their targets? In honor of the Taliban spirit wouldn’t it make more sense to choose any populated American destination and crash the plane there as opposed to an isolated field in Pennsylvania? Also a few points the book made that I found terrifying were how Bin Ladin considered acquiring WMD a "religious obligation" and how plutonium the size of an orange could level lower Manhattan. I really fear for these things falling into the wrong hands however I don’t think the war we are waging is helping. I think we should have never gotten ourselves involved at all, and I think the sooner we get out of this war, the better. Al Qaeda probably hates America because we get into everyone’s business, try to take over everything, and impose our lifestyle on them. If we were to just leave them alone we probably would have never made enemies. Its never too late to make peace.

It was hard for me to read this book while not around a computer as I am tempted to google every image Sontag discusses. I think the lack of imagery in this book really detracts from her argument and I wonder why a book written mainly to discuss art does not include representations of the art in it.

I noticed that she mentions Sarajevo a lot and I was a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know much about what went on in Sarajevo prior to enlightening myself on wikipedia. The material was dense. I had to re-read often to grasp the ideas. It was also hard to visualize what she was explaining and not see the photograph. Being a photographer myself, I can relate to much of what she says. I loved the part when she described a Sarajevan man yelling at a photographer. "Are you waiting for a shell to go off so you can photograph some corpses?" It’s funny to me because it borders immoral. Photographing desolation in foreign countries makes for good pictures, success, money, and victory in the job field. But while in the process of trying to retrieve a good picture does the photographer forget that they are exploiting their fellow man?

This book explores a lot of the same concepts as another book I’m reading called "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger. They both mention how reproductions and the creation of the camera have desensitized the human race. People now aspire to become images. In a way reality has been abdicated and there are only representations: media. I like this quote from the book: "It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked." Berger talks about that too. Sex sells and if it bleeds it leads.

While reading I came up with an idea to solve this problem. Would outlawing the nightly news show be a solution for desensitizing horror? Imagine news was banned from TV in the way that cigarette commercials are. People would certainly be allowed access to news online and in Newspapers but video footage would not be allowed on television. Banning it from webcast would just make it a taboo that someone would capitalize on. But if news was banned from TV wouldn’t it create the necessity for only actual information and eliminate competition over ratings, and lessen painful imagery?

I think it’s funny that the book addresses the fundamental question but still can’t answer it. Why do we take/look at pictures of pain? "To make us feel ‘bad’; that is, to appall and sadden? To help us mourn? Are we the better for seeing these images? Do they actually teach us anything? Don’t they rather just confirm what we already know (or want to know)?" I don’t know if anyone can answer that question. The best explanation I think we’ve ever come up with is that old adage "if it bleeds it leads". I also think Sontag raised an interesting point when she mentioned the Holocaust Museum in America and how there is no slavery museum honoring the dead of that tragedy. America can touch the issue of Holocaust because it didn’t happen here but slavery is a topic that’s still too close for comfort therefore we’d better just ignore it for another hundred years until we forget about that mistake.

"How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!The world forgetting, by the world forgot.Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd..."

I’m not exactly sure what this quote means but I like it. How much I wish I could have the procedure done in the movie to forget someone. The one guy I loved and wasted 3 years on is moving to San Diego next week and I’ll never see him again. I feel like the characters in the movie must have. What is the point of having the pleasure if all you’re left with is the pain? I’d rather not have any of it at all. I’d rather have no memory than have a bad memory of a good thing. It’s not worth it.

I think I love this movie because it gives the viewer a chance to see what it would be like if you never met the person that caused you so much pain. I must have a bleak outlook on life right now because if you really think about it everything that brings you pleasure can give you pain. And when you surrender yourself to something, such as love, you can be destroyed by it in such a vulnerable state. But humans really are pleasure seekers and when we feel love we can’t stop ourselves. We can seriously consider the consequences but it’s really an unstoppable force. Something that could only be leveled by a brain-damage inducing machine. The movie let me escape into my desire of "I wish I never met him." But it is really kind of sad because that’s not the way the world is. When life wants to teach you a hard lesson you get to deal with it. We don’t have an easy way out of our pain. We can’t go see Dr. Howard to zap our brain. We can’t medicate ourselves to the point where we won’t remember someone who hurt us. If we do it’s with drugs or alcohol, not with an uppermiddle-class American procedure like what was shown in the movie, making an appointment just like a dentist.

Pain shapes people, without it we wouldn’t have much character. If Joel didn’t have memories of Clementine what in his life would he have? He is portrayed as a boring thirty something year old working class American. Granted, I don’t know his life but his childhood memories didn’t reveal anything traumatic. Clementine, on the other hand was created to be a weird character. She dressed weird, she acted weird, she died her hair weird colors, her name was even weird. The writer of this movie wanted to make it very clear that these two people were opposites and complete personality antithesis’s of each other. I would like to know what went on in Clementine’s life to make her the way she was. I would have liked to see her memories. I have a feeling she had some alarming ones.

Because of my current situation, I’m biased. This movie is really a powerful love story, sending the message that fate brings two people together and cannot be overcome! That even erasing someone from your life completely to the point of erasing a memory won’t stop love! It’s a cute message but it’s not real. One of my favorite Dylan lyrics goes "It was gravity which pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart". That message I can more relate to. I wish love was controlled by fate and I wish pain could be erased from your memory but unfortunately it’s only a movie.

What can I say about Pain: The Science of Suffering by Patrick Wall? The book was enlightening. Pain is not a topic I have thought about objectively until now, besides having it. Around chapter 4 I felt the book became more interesting. I was taking little notes about the book while reading it and until chapter 4, I didn’t have anything to write down. I guess I’ll use this blog post to discuss everything I found engaging in this book and interrupt with some ideas of my own.

William James, professor of psychology at Harvard, proposed that our emotions were "an awareness of our general body reactions to an event, rather than to the event itself", for lack of better words or meaning getting lost through rephrasing. My understanding of this is that our body chemicals and composition trigger an emotional response not vice versa. This is an intriguing concept that I would have never thought of. I guess it must take a Harvard professor to deduce such things.

Next is the topic of congenital analgesia, a very rare disease in which one feels no sensation of pain. I swear while reading about this the only thought that came to my mind was how much I wish I could have been born with this disease. Growing up to never feel physical pain seemed lucky to me and I was jealous of these people who could never physically hurt themselves or feel physical pain caused by others. Of course when I stopped daydreaming about this phenomenon and got back to reading about it I felt foolish. To feel pain is our body’s response to danger. I think the book used the example of a child touching a hot stove and instantaneously pulling away, burnt. Without feeling physical pain one would never experience the peril in touching a hot stove and could seriously burn their hand and get an infection. Then I felt sorry for the people in the world with congenital analgesia. They could end up doing some harmful damage to their bodies because they don’t get the warning signal of pain.

I always found the phenomenon of hypnosis fascinating so naturally I would enjoy this section in the book. I forever have wanted to be hypnotized but never had thought about how hypnosis could occur anytime one succumbed to a higher power of authority. I also never realized hypnosis was used for surgery back in the day. I still want to be hypnotized someday.

Another part of the book I enjoyed was the bit about ultrasound. My mom is a chiropractor and this summer had begun giving me ultrasound treatments for unexplained pain in my hip and knees. I find it funny that the author regards chiropractics as an alternative form of medicine after I know how much schooling chiropractors have to go through. I think my mom would certainly disagree with the author's opinion.

I feel like during the course of the book Wall contradicts himself and also never makes a commitment to anything he describes. He criticizes but he doesn’t necessarily advocate anything he illustrates, as far as treatments or methods. I guess as far as humans have come in technological and medicinal advances, we really don’t know a whole lot about how pain is caused, why, or what works to treat it. We are basically clueless as far as causes and effects of the body and its processes. I understand Wall when he says we have a long way to go.

I also agree with Wall in another point he brings up though I had never before thought about it. There is really nothing being done about the people in pain. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies are researching for the cure to ailments to help prevent pain, and Doctors and Surgeons are taking care of injuries, but those with chronic pain after seeing a doctor and before being cured by a miracle drug, they are left isolated. I know many of these such people in the limbo of medical care and though I don’t know what can be done about them or how they can be helped, at least Wall brought an awareness to this topic. Identifying the problem is the first step to recovery, don’t they say?

In closing all I can say was that I wish this book was more about psychological pain instead of just physical pain. I am really more interested in learning about psychological pain than physical pain. I think I enjoyed the part about placebos the most because it dipped into the psychology of the human as well as animal mind. I find the marvel of placebos bizarre and extraordinary. I kind of wish there was an omnipotent third party in my life that would offer me a placebo to help me with my pain.

The last point I will make was that it was a useful book for me to read because it offered insight into something that was previously undiscovered and unexplored in my mind. It even helped me recognize some medical terms today when I was at my wisdom tooth consultation. That should be a fun experience. I can’t wait to try my mom’s ultrasound machine on my face January 5th.

My name is Nadya. I’m a senior photography major. I really love Bob Dylan and a lot of other music. I try my best to be nice to everyone and not judge anyone because I figure it’s a good way to live. I hate 'about me’s' because I prefer subtlety but I did read On the Road this summer and I feel like I can identify with this quote.

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."