Reflection

Looking back I have to say I am surprised and impressed at how far I have come. In my first class (which was technically the second class) I was extremely nervous at how I, as your average 'white' guy would function in this class. Everyone seemed to be a CSRE major, and I didn't even know what that stood for. I remember listening to people describe their identity stories and thinking "When have I ever had an identity crises?" and "What identity issues do I have?" The thought had never entered my mind, I thought. In retrospect I had thought about the concept of identity within my own family, but never quite couched it into those terms. I'll come back to this later in the blog post.

For now I think I should talk about my favorite blog post - my post about Ah Toy's suicide note. The story of Ah Toy was briefly told in the 'Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture' I bent the rules of the blog posts a little bit since my suicide note was not written to anyone in particular. But I thought the spirit of the post fit within the guidelines. Anyway, since I had not read the actual book, writing the suicide note was a little difficult. I couldn't capture Ah Toy's dialect. But I thought I was able to gleam a sense of his frustration and mix it with a little of my own past frustrations with girls and produce a heartfelt suicide note.

Back to my thoughts on identity...I have a much better understanding of how to talk about identity and what is my own identity. Over the course of the term I feel like I have been able to make more insightful comments in class as I've grasped the language of identity. And I think that's enabled me to reflect on my own identity issues with regard to my mixed religion family. That helped me put together my thoughts for my last meeting with Ms. Hobbes about my final paper. I certainly have thought about the loss of Judaism from generation to generation in my dad's family, but I had never quite articulated it as a question of my identity. Hopefully I have learned enough this quarter to write an articulate thoughtful paper on this subject. I hope so!

I really enjoyed this class, and I hope everyone else appreciated my "diversity" as well.

Ben