babli_ms

mood: relieved

So before the chaos of this stress fracture (boo) I finished a semester of honours. Boy was it full on! Especially the second half of the semester when all the assignments were due. I did three subjects, which is what we had to do. One was Critical Methodologies. This was a cultural studies subject and we learnt different theories of analysis that we can possibly use for the thesis. This was a major disappointment. When I started the application process for honours I thought this subject would be about the methods we needed to use to write our thesis. I thought they would teach us techniques of how to write an honours thesis. Instead it just turned out to be another cultural studies subject with lots of theories like deconstruction, bla bla! The biggest suffering point was that we had to keep an ongoing workbook of each week's lessons. There would be various questions for each week's topic and we had to answer those plus critically analyse the readings and write some reflections of our own. Me being me, I left it to the last minute. I only started it during the second half of the semester, which meant I had to write each week's log plus catch up on seven weeks. And it wasn't just a matter of writing it. Each week's topic was so difficult to decipher! The language was so hard that I had to google some of the topics to find secondary sources that would better explain what it was talking about. Then, me being me, I went on blabbing about each week's topic. In the end this assignment itself ended up being 14,200 words! This is more than the thesis! We then had to write a 3,500 word essay. We had to use one or more of the methodologies we've learnt, apply it to our thesis topic and explain how the methodologies are applicable and what its drawbacks are. This ended up being about 3,800 words. So that was 18,000 words for one subject!

My favourite subject was Celebrity, Charisma and Fame. As per the name this subject was about the various aspects of celebrity construction, why they are revered by society, why we pay so much attention to them and what makes them charismatic. We also looked at fandom and how fans are fanatically involved with celebrities. We had to do a presentation during one of the weeks for a topic of our own choosing. I chose to do reality television. I defined reality T.V. and talked about the various aspects of it, including analysing why people enjoy watching other people getting humiliated. It's because of a concept called schadenfreude, which is a German word and means deriving pleasure from other people's misfortune. We enjoy watching other people's inadequacies to feel better about ourselves. My final question was 'Is reality T.V. real or as fake as this?' By 'this', I mean a photo of me superimposed on the Australian Idol background. Here you are"



Kerry did it for me in a matter of five minutes! It was such a hit! I had a power point presentation for this presentation. I saved the photo till the final slide. And the text 'Is reality T.V. real or as fake as this?' came first in the final slide. The photo was the very last thing to appear. Everyone started laughing and clapping! It was a rage! I was happy! I just wanted to finish the presentation off in a fun way and this idea occurred to me. Thanks to Kerry, I was able to execute it.

We also had to write a 4,000 word essay on a topic of our own choosing. I chose to talk about fandom in Indian cinema for Indian stars. Not just Bollywood, but all over India. Fandom is especially prevalent in South Indian cinema, particularly Tamil and Telugu cinema. People do crazy things for their favourite stars. Each star has a fan club set up for them, with thousands of members across the country. The members are mainly from lower caste and lower class sections of society. It is said that these fans participate in these things to escape from their own lives of hardship and poverty. Not only that, they hope to alleviate it. They do crazy things for their favourite stars. They build temples for them and pray to them. Once, an actor called Chiranjeevi said a lady cut off her thumb and smeared his forehead with her blood. Rival fan clubs fight with each other if one insults another star. That's democracy down the drain! It was a very interesting essay to write. But of course, I was already in pain with my foot by this time. But I managed to finish it, although everyone was pushing for me to get an extension. I wanted to get it over and done with. So that was another 4,400 words. It is now 22,400 words.

The third and final subject was Eco Interventions. This looked at ecology, the environment and climate change from a humanities and cultural studies perspective. It looked at why certain aspects of the environment is important to us culturally and what they mean to us. We looked at various aspects like animals, water, cars & bicycles, land, etc. For this subject we had to attend three forums. The first forum was on climate change, the second one was on animals and the third one was a Q&A session on different aspects of the environment. We even had Tim Flannery as speaker for the first forum. Us honours students had to organise the third forum. But one of the students ended up doing most of the work because he is deeply involved in university activities and he had all the contacts. He's also a technological genius so he organised the sound systems, recording, etc. We then had to write a forum review on one of the forums. This was 1,500 words but mine ended up being 1,800 words.

For the essay we could choose any topic we wanted, related to the environment from a cultural perspective. I chose to write about cars and the dominance of it in our culture. I wrote about the gender significance of it and how it defines masculinity. I wrote about how cars are designed differently for women because it is assumed by car makers that women only use cars for domestic purposes such as shopping and taking kids to school and other activities. I also talked about how cars decide how urban spaces are designed. Roads for cars dominate urban space and pedestrians and bicycle riders are relegated to the side. I then talked about the environmental consequences of cars and gave pointers to how the use and design of cars can change to better protect the environment. Of course, the ban of cars would be the best idea but that is not practical and would definitely be met with protest. As usual I left this essay to the last minute so it was race against time the last few days. My friend and I started and finished at the same time we were neck and neck throughout! So it was good moral support. That was about 4,500 words.

I wrote a total of approximately 28,700 words this semester!

There was also a presentation for this subject. I did mine on water. I talked about how Aboriginals  treat water as a precious resource of the land but how the British exploited this resource during colonialism. I also talked about how society looks down on recycled water, especially for drinking. We learnt a concept called hauntology. Human spirits come back to haunt when they have been mistreated and have unfinished business in this world. These spirits are neither here nor there. The people who mistreated them can never escape punishment because they will always be haunted. Similarly, when we mistreat the environment the distorted disfigured version will always come back to haunt us. We have mistreated water. Therefore it has come back in the form of recycled water to haunt us. Recycled water is the disfigured version because it contained all sorts of disgusting things like faeces, dirt, etc. and it has come back to haunt us. We can never escape it. It was a fascinating perspective on water.

The best part about this semester was the camaraderie between classmates. We are very small groups in each class. So everyone got to know each other. We're all on facebook and some of us are on MSN. So there were four of us who would gather on MSN every evening and bitch about honours till midnight. It was so much fun and relieved all of our stress. I have never felt as close to university mates as I have this year and that's been awesome! I hope we continue to stay in touch. In fact I was supposed to go out with them the night after I handed in my final essay but I was stuck with this stress fracture and could not walk. Oh well, next time. And now, it's thesis time! I'm scared but excited!

In the meantime dad bought a new PC! The old one just died. It's Dell, with a 22" monitor. It's awesome! *Touchwood*. Also, my dad has officially booked tickets to go to America at the end of the year! We're leaving on December 22nd and we'll be there in time for Christmas and New Year's Eve. Now he has to book tickets for New Zealand! We want to leave on the 14th of December, return to Sydney on 22nd of December on the 21st or so and head to America on 22nd. The reason we're going to do it this way is because it is too expensive to fly from NZ to USA directly. I can't wait!!! It will be another family re-union!I hope my foot recovers by then!

Well I think I've caught you up on everything. Oh yeah! My grandmother came on Monday! We wanted her here to lift our spirits during this time. Mum and Dad were exhausted looking after me and I was feeling a bit down as well. We all feel better with her here!