Tag Archives: extra credit

EXTRA CREDIT: Dr. Gretchen Henderson’s Life in the Tar Seeps

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One thing that I did not expect from Dr. Gretchen Henderson’s presentation on her book Life in the Tar Seeps was to be handed a stack of postcards and asked to write a short letter to a body of water. Any body of water. To the Pacific or the Atlantic Oceans, to the Seven Seas, to the river running along the Tijuana Estuary, to the puddle of water that never seems to dry up along the sidewalks where I live–any body of water that existed, no matter how big or small. I’ll admit, I was excited to write a giant, sweeping love letter to the Pacific Ocean as the entity that connects the California coast to the many seas of the Philippines. Initially, that’s what I wanted to write about. However, after the presentation, I found that I wanted to write a letter to the water store beside the Filipino restaurant in the shopping plaza near my house instead.

A large component of Dr. Henderson’s presentation was about nature conservation, but the aspect that stuck with me was the aspect of aesthetics in respect to what we choose to conserve. Whenever I think of nature conservation, I think of saving winding coastlines, lush green jungles, and sprawling forests. The tar pits in Utah’s Great Salt Lake are not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of nature conservation and the conservation of life within them. To be honest, I thought of tar pits as devoid of life before this presentation, so why should we protect a total wasteland that only serves as a graveyard for the living beings that fall prey to the sticky traps? ‘

As Dr. Henderson reveals in her presentation, these tar pits are naturally occurring, akin to the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, but the fact that there are more of them occurring is cause for concern. Climate change has caused more droughts in the Salt Lake area, causing the existing waters of the lake to dry up and recede. As the waters recede, more tar seeps out of the earth. These receding waters are home not to fish but to multiple forms of microbial life. Although the deaths of pelicans and coyotes and whatever happens to be trapped in the tar pits are considered a natural occurrence and a part of the circle of life, the cause for concern here are the receding waters of the Salt Lake and the microscopic lives that call those waters home.

Even in a “wasteland” filled with “death traps,” I learned that there was life and it was worth protecting in the same way that we want to protect wolves in the forests or whales in the oceans. It was in this “wasteland” that Dr. Henderson saw beauty and she shared that beauty in the short film that accompanies her book, where she voices over clips and images of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and the tar pits with field notes and ruminations on the role of art in helping nature conservation. What makes this drying salt lake any different from the ocean? The short answer: there is no difference. The waters that recede in this salt lake are the same waters that will make the ocean rise, as Dr. Henderson so aptly puts in the website of her book Life in the Tar Seeps.

In that same vein, what is the difference between the Pacific Ocean and the water store where my family refills our water jugs? There is no difference there, either. The water that sustains the turtles and whales is the same water that sustains me and my family. It is the water that we must conserve, no matter what shape or form it takes on.

Extra Credit Discovery Blog: Sirena

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The origin story if Sirena can serve as a lesson for the children it is read to listen to their parents. This story is set in Guam and is about a Chamorro girl named Sirena. She is infatuated with the water and swimming in it. One day, her mother is in need of some assistance in the kitchen when she asks her daughter, Sirena, to “-come, take this basket from your brother and fill it with breadfruit from auntie’s. Hurry, come directly back.” As she was on her way to her Aunts house, who so conveniently lives near a river bank, Sirena is convinced by the birds in the sky who begin diving in the water that she must join them in their play. It would seem that Sirena stayed in the water a lot longer than she had realized as the sun leaves the horizon and the realization that she has not fulfilled the errand her mother sent her on has not been fulfilled.

When she returns home, Sirena is scolded by her mother as she, figuratively and literally, curses her saying “Sirena, if you ever go in the water again, you will become an ugly, fat fish!”. Sirena then runs away from this scolding and flees to the river, and hops in. She chooses the water as she felt that her connection to it far outweighed the life she had on land. To her surprise, she did not turn into an ugly fish, but “-instead, [formed] an iridescent tail stretched down from her waist.” She whispered goodbye and that goodbye is to have said still echos across the land. Despite the fact that Sirena sort of got a happy ending, I feel it still gives a warning to the severity of not listening to your mother and failing to be well behaved as an outlined duty for children. I feel like the story argued that you either listen to your mom or you live an entirely different life; there is no in between.

EXTRA CREDIT–PANEL ONE: Humans’ Very Real Relationships with Not-So-Real Relationships

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I attended the first panel of Networked Narratives last Friday, March 15th. Presenters Warner Stoddart II and Micah Sakado talked about volunteering abroad with various foreign armies and the parasocial relationships created in V-tubing, respectively. At first, I wondered why these two wildly different presenters would be put together. What does volunteering for an army fighting battles that are not your own and engaging with a live stream of a fictional, motion-captured anime character have in common?

Only after their presentations did it occur to me that the common thread between Warner and Micah’s presentations is parasociality.

Thanks to social media, parasociality and parasocial relationships are regarded as symptom of delusion, a malady of the brain. Having a parasocial relationship with a celebrity or a fictional character can be met with at best, disbelief, and at worst, disdain or disgust. Why are these parasocial relationships met with such negative reactions when everyone in some way, shape, or form engages in these relationships? Sports fans buy their favorite athletes’ jerseys and music lovers attend their favorite artists’ concerts, so why the negativity?

Micah redefined a parasocial relationship as an “asymmetrical relationship with critical distance,” rather than a one-sided illusion of a face-to-face relationship. Defining a parasocial relationship as “asymmetrical” removes power from the “one-sided” aspect of the initial definition, as both parties contribute to the relationship in some way but there is considerably more effort being exerted from one side than the other. Micah noticed that the key to having a healthy parasocial relationship is for the individual to recognize that the relationship only evokes the feeling of having the relationship they desire rather than having the actual relationship. His interviewees said that they got into V-tubing because interacting with their favorite V-tuber was “like having a friend” or “like having a crush on someone”–the key thing to note is that these interviewees differentiated between having a friend in real life and a friend through the screen.

Warren, who presented on volunteering for the YPG Kurdish militia and Ukraine, among many other foreign armies, touched very briefly on the volunteers’ motivations for volunteering. For some of them, their reasons for joining were political, but quite a few said they felt a calling to “chase the dragon of combat.” I wanted to ask if there was also an altruistic approach to volunteering for foreign armies that these volunteers took. Did some volunteers feel like this was the best way to help the civilians affected by the terrorist groups? Did they feel a connection to these civilians, despite not knowing them personally? In a way, I can see some form of parasociality in the decision to volunteer.

Discovery Blog: Fortunio and the Siren

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For my preparation of next week’s class, I did not read the right/ the assigned tale. Nevertheless, as I found it highly interesting, I thought that I could write my discovery blog and share my findings:

This reading focuses on Fortunio. Fortunio was adopted as an orphan by a loving family, who could not have children on their own. Due to his secret power, he has wished for a sibling, so that his mother got pregnant. Years later, in a fight, Fortunio’s brother Valentino tells Fortunio that he is not the legitimate son of their parents. In his sorrow, Fortunio decides to leave his home, when his mother comes up to him and curses him to be swallowed up by sirens if he ever went on an adventure on the sea. Fortunio ignores his mother’s curse and travels to the west, where he encounters a dispute between a wolf, an ant and an eagle, that were discussing over eating a deer. Fortunio helps them dividing the food properly and they gift him the power to turn into each of the animals whenever he needs to and they part ways. On his adventure, he sees the Princess Doralice of Polonia, who is now promised to a bad looking man called Saracen that won Doralice as a bride. In the following days, he uses his power to transform into the different animals to get to know Doralice better. Doralice and Fortunio thus fall in love with each other and they marry. After they have married, Fortunio decides to travel the sea, where he gets caught by a siren’s song and gets swallowed by the sea, just as he his mother predicted it. After two years of her husband being gone, Doralice and their son decide to look for him to get him out from the siren. Doralice manages to free her husband from the siren’s hostage, when he suddenly uses his power again to turn into an eagle to escape to the ship. Back home, he lastly turns into a wolf to devour his mother and brother. (cf. Penguin, pgs. 89-100).

Reading this tale especially caught my interest, because it made me aware of the deep connection humans and the natural environment have that we now lost. Besides of the fact that the “dangerous” siren caught Fortunio and held him into hostage (and that he was too greedy to accept that he has everything he has ever dreamed of and did not want to stop), I found it even more interesting to see how deeply connected humans and animals can be. Fortunio never, not even a second, thought about the danger of approaching dangerous animals such as a wolf or an eagle. By helping them and approaching them with curiosity, he got to be a part of their world and could understand better, how both humans and animals can coexist together without harming one another. He even cares about a smaller animal such as the ant to get a fair share of the food. It is, as if Fortunio was able to recognize everybody’s existence in this world. Through respect, they become part of one world and there is no us-vs-them society. When I thought about that a little bit more, I got aware that we humans have lost the mutual respect to our nature. If we were a little bit more respectful towards our environment, we would be able to all live in peace together. Instead, humanity’s greed causes severe effects on our natural surroundings. Deforestation which causes the loss of the natural habitats of animals or anthropological natural disasters were only a few of the examples that directly came to my mind. We should all be a little bit like Fortunio and appreciate our coexistence with other living beings on this world.