Blogging Around

I first commented on Stephanie's post titled "Metacognition: Get Organizing (A Tribute to Aristotle)."

"Firstly, I'd like to say that you were very successful in covering all the different interesting aspects of your room. Your blog post really intrigued me, yet it was practical enough to be understood and applied to one's own organizational projects.  Personally, I was mostly surprised by the love you displayed for all of the things, from instruments to old projects or essays, in your room. It shows that you are a constructive and high-achieving person with a very well developed sense of strong work ethic and the rewards that come with it. 

As far as structure, you started with analyzing your psychology in regards to what degree of organization you prefer for your room to have, how that influenced your feelings, what you cleaned first and last, then finished with a particularly interesting quote that almost related back to your first few paragraphs. The revolution you made while explaining your project--by which I mean connecting your first and last paragraphs--was notable. In the first one, you explained how you believed your room was relatively in order but there was a lot of hidden clutter and that it was "agonizing" when life is too busy to organize your belongings "in the moment." In the last paragraph, you essentially delved into the dynamics of our thinking as pertaining to organization, and referred to an insightful quotation. In both, you believed in the strong implications of a well-organized workspace, but transitioned from essentially describing your personal feelings to achieving a state in which you understood them and were able to make specific connections between your situation and psychologically and philosophically intriguing ideas. Also, your reading a book in the middle was almost symbolic of the "enlightenment" you gained in the process (I'm aware it didn't shift your thinking too much but just to mention something). Finally, I thought it was interesting how your perspective and psychology about the organization of your room was pretty in order to start with, like your room itself, but as you progressed in your cleaning project, you really internalized the reality of your project and its implications. Your mind essentially, then, achieved a state of understanding and rather than feeling, "knowing" the dynamics of organization in the big scheme of things. This is not unlike the way that your room, through becoming more orderly and rid of "hidden clutter" became more unified and in solving the problem of unnecessary complexity, perhaps more simple and direct to perceive."

I then commented on my fellow classmate Elizabeth's blog titled "360 Degrees: Number of kids in a family."

"Elizabeth, your blog really opened up a new aspect of life to me. Before I read your blog, I was well aware of the duality centered around the fact that while lack of money does prevent many couples from having children, in some cultures it is the reason why couples choose to procreate. On one hand, parents don't have children because they don't want to provide a child with a life filled with struggle, but on the other hand many couples in the deepest of poverty try to have as many children as possible so that, upon growing up, these children can be helpful with domestic duties such as gathering food, and so the parents can have someone to care for them in their old age. However, after reading your blog, I became aware of the degree to which the former of your claim I mentioned (lack of money prevents couples from procreating) has very strong implications in society.

Offspring is no longer a sole joy resulting from communicated love between people, however it is purposely sought in order to raise children that will actively engage in society and continue lineage. Much more care is taken to the specifics of how children are raised at home, as there exist thousands of parenting books about how you can establish stronger bonds with your children and raise them to be healthy, happy, and successful adults. For many prospective parents, the increasing complexity of our expectations of our children (as you mentioned with postmodernism) makes them believe that they perhaps are not economically suited to raise a well-rounded child (ie, involved in athletics, music, has access to learning resources), and that is sometimes positive because it avoids having children plunge into a future of struggle and uncertainty. However, it also perhaps causes self-conscious parents to worry about whether they are capable or incapable parents, willing to persevere with the many implications of parenthood but doubtful about whether their child will enjoy the environment they are in, and be happy, and they fear the possibility of that not happening. It's pretty interesting how this is related to post-modernism, because lately there are more financial support programs, parenting classes, books, and psychologists or counselors than there were a couple hundred years ago. We have higher expectations for our children but that is met with increasing gentleness towards those who, because of money issues, learning problems, or a disability can not achieve this ideal image of a child in the 21st century. To sum up, I am on one hand supportive of the trend of our culture and yet I'm a little disappointed that economic problems and doubtfulness undermine the ability of certain families to have offspring."