Response to: This American Life - The Giant Pool of Money

             "I was really happy to see there were no major suicides, people weren't jumping off bridges, and there weren't a lot of personal disasters." said a attendee at an NPR gathering in 2008, when the mortgage subprime crisis began to deeply settle in. The laconic, fresh, verdant green dollars we earn or inherit decide more than happiness or a luxurious way of life, they also determine survival. Simplistic rectangular cut pieces of paper, derived from a tree, dyed and printed. How bovine.
              Listening to this podcast made my head spin, and by no means do I hope to sound dense. "Global pool of money...Seventy trillion dollars...Nervous armies of Investment Managers... Alan Greenspan...” is fading in and out, dimly. The sound of the conversation drilling and repetitive like the sound of water slipping down a rusty drain, hitting the furnish, instituting a headache in my brain. Is it possible only the world's geniuses can understand such psychobabble? Not to sound harsh, but you must have to obtain an IQ nothing lower than 140 to comprehend such communication. It feels like I'm listening to the African San Bushmen tribe, unable to decode their "clicking" language.
              It makes me a little nervous, marveling my confused mind around the amount of money existent in the world today. All of the cerebrates, making their calculations, counting their pennies and dimes, flicking effortlessly through their stacks of green, with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant, Benjamin Franklin, and countless other late President's staring back at them in awe. The distant sound of a safe locking, and the chilling echo it makes as it spins shut. Such an intricate instrument the market bestows. We now face Charles Darwin's theory "Survival of the fittest" in a new manner. Disregarding physical attributes, we now yearn for financial stability in order to survive.
           What happened to common courtesy? It must be buried somewhere along the ruins of Mt. Vesuvius. People, losing their humanity, not caring about the Marine who needed the money originally intended for his son's college fund. Only caring about the next Black-tie event, being able to afford the Armani suits usually seen on GQ models, and sipping elegantly on Clos Du Mesnil champagne. What about the family who is going hungry? The elderly couple who is losing their home, unable to pay for their mortgage? What becomes of them? Aren't they more than just mortality numbers? All of the devastation circulates far away, and stays like a the naughty child in the corner with the cone hat, such a nuisance to the elite. How do we change this? I'm left dumbfounded and inept...

Response to: This American Life - The Fix Is In

           Is the fix in as we speak? Are we being decided for by some higher power or authority? In this episode of This American Life, we are told the true story of the fix being used in the worldwide liquor market. Men, sitting around a table, controlling the financial market of their sales, and doing it in such a simple manner. As if they held the smile of a friendly milkman, but were really robbers in disguise. They were going to control the market and steadily keep upping their prices as a unit, without anyone's knowledge of their corruption.
          This makes me question if the fix has always been in. The story of Mark Whitacre uncovering his own discrepancies, and the discrepancies of the company he worked for, was one of the few that anyone has ever known. What other fix's are we blind to? Are they existant in our everyday life? Is there anything we can really do about them, or is this fate that has taken charge? We must ponder that the fix may not always be in financial terms, but maybe in other situations too. It may just be the things we think happen by chance, really don't happen that way at all.
          A movie called "The Adjustment Bureau" has just recently premiered in theaters. Although I have yet to see it, I have some inkling of what the movie is about, just by reading it's title. Supposedly, there is a group of men who control the events of the world. Imagine, if everything is set for the human race, even in our own individual lives. Who you marry, how far you accel successfully, and every other factor of your life is determined for you. As if the human race is a colony of ants, with children, dictating them. The children tease the ants with food, stomping on a few here and there, taking them from their mortal life. Helpless and unarmored, even defenseless and fateful, the ant's don't even have prayers to save them.
         Will it always be a wonder if the fix is in? Or will we discover more and more what has been decided for us? Do we really even want to know, or are we content with nonchalantly taking things as they come? Like someone backpacking through Europe savouring every experience and not questioning how they came to be, loving them and cherishing them whether they are beneficial or deteriorating to their sense of self. I feel we must pry at what we find occult, until our knuckles bleed and the skin under our nails comes one with the bones that are it's structure. We are so unique, and deserve a say in what happens to us, we can never allow the fix to be in.

Personal Essay Assignment: The Enigma of Dreaming

The Enigma of Dreaming

Everyone obtains dreams throughout the process of dreaming. The act is so common, yet majestic against any other. As if divulging into an unparalleled universe, the dreamer gets to experience another world, another bursting surreal life, in which there are no limits or expectations. Dreams allow us to be free from our everyday slavery, our rules and regulations. By dreaming, awake or asleep, we can escape into our own personal desires, and hold onto our childhood imaginative sense we all so desperately need and crave.

“There's a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams.”  Wrote Stoddard King, Jr. Multidirectional, our dreams grow and twist like an Oak tree. The branches of the tree serve as the asexual parent of dreams, giving birth to numerous amounts of branches until the tree is in full bloom. Like this plant, a young, innocent little girl dreams of becoming an artist. She sits, by her new easel, smelling the woodwork, breathing in the Cedar. She begins to fantasize about what she will do with her art. She imagines she will imprint her mark into the beams of the sun, the soil below her feet, and everything in between. She will be the heartbeat of the planets. Even known in the heavens, and the angels and cherubs will whisper about her. Her dreams are forever spiraling and growing like the branches on the Oak tree, and there’s always rain and sunlight, feeding their photosynthesis.

When we dream, we let our spirit flow. Our dreaming is so jejune, and at the same moment, so unexplainably natural. It’s as if we are one with everything, and the daily dilemmas of time and love are silenced by an anonymous entity. Whether we are distracted while awake, and slip effortlessly into our unconscious mind, or we are asleep and forcefully jump from the brink of the two airy atmospheres –the known and the unknown– we disappear from what is cemented to what is malleable. Like putty in our hands, we form organic means.

Renowned Psychoanalyst and Neuroscientist, Sigmund Freud, wrote in his work Interpretation of Dreams that, “Some writers flatly assert that dreams know nothing of moral obligations; others as decidedly declare that the moral nature of man persists even in his dream-life.” This leads me to question if the two worlds we exist in are simultaneous. Do take with us our morals, values, and life-learned lessons into our undiscovered world? As if we put all of our beliefs and cognitive emotion in a box, and float through the skies until we reach our unnamable dreaming nirvana. The clouds create a fog and the course is ever changing.

When I doze off into this unchartered territory, this unexplored horizon, I don’t know what to expect. It is as if I am deity of the art world, Salvador Dali, waiting for my work to paint itself. Sometimes I dream of things that inhabited my thoughts during the day. I dream of the bonds expanding even thicker in my blood, between those I was derived from, my family. Their souls so ultimately connected to mine, they exist where I exist. Yet, other times I dream of non-relatable things, people and stories I don’t know in my waking life. Strange things, dreams that make my skin rise in small circles, and make my knees shake. My mind may wrap around them for hours on end.

I sit here, feeling peculiar. I imagine a hand, doused with pure glimmering skin, emerging from a starry night sky. The hand is open, inviting. I want to grab it, but I’m not sure how. I now create a hand, birthed from my forehead like Greek Goddess Athena was birthed from Zeus. Full grown, and armored with my inherent qualities, the hand is sure of itself. It knows no boundaries, only desires. However, existing still in consciousness I am unsure of this unknown voyage. Will the connection of daily occurrences and nightly dreaming ever be more than tedious analyzing? Was Edgar Allan Poe right when he wrote, “Everything you see or seem is but a dream within a dream”?

It has been said for centuries, maybe even eons that those who dream, succeed. Although, what is success? Leaving out a societal standpoint, I believe it is achieving that in which we want most. What is the formula for this dream, what is its genetic makeup? How does one have a dream that creates something life changing, something not normative? Some say that truth and time tell all, but where does this fit into our complex state of dreaming? How can we find the validity and accuracy in something almost paranormal?

Whether awake or asleep, we dream. These images and visions come to us, either randomly, or fatefully. Sometimes, our dreams are like meeting a stranger, forever mysterious and enticing. In other instances, they’re like passing a familiar face on the street. You stop and stare in both scenarios, dumbfounded. We may pry with our fingernails at the “Pandora’s Box” of our alter dream world, trying to let out the secret of our dreams, the good and the bad.          

I believe the box is buried deep in a tomb, sealed shut. Only the wind, the earth, and the stars know the true being it bestows, and they keep their secret safe, inhumed in the depths of the galaxy, that holds the key that can unlock all of the confusion and perplexity of dreaming. The question is will this this inspiring key, ever be found? Or will the universe swallow it whole, before we have the chance?