Nostalgia: I think I will interview a few students and professors and compare/contrast their feelings about what makes them feel nostalgia. There will be interesting generational differences!
Obsession: I think I will make this one just about students. What do they feel they are obsessed about, and why? Do their friends understand their obsessions, or do they think they are weird? I am curious to find someone whose obsession is unusual. 🙂
My thoughts on some of the themes we have discussed in class.
Nostalgia- I remember enjoying Flinstone sherbet push-up popsicles, using my Winnie-the-Pooh thermos, stirring my ice cream so it became ice cream soup while my mom read my Bible stories, renting The Great Mouse Detective and 101 Dalmations over and over until my parents were probably sick of them.
Addiction/Obsession-A recent obsession of mine has been my battle with disorganization and how I feel like I am constantly trying to overcome it. I think college students (and almost everyone else) are obsessed with being constantly plugged it, whether to computers, cell phones, mp3 players/Ipods. It seems that in the process of becoming connected technologically, we have disconnected more socially. People with Asperger’s Syndrome sometimes have a hard time getting themselves away from video games or their computers, but I think everyone is way too plugged in. It’s sad, really.
End of Days-I’m not sure what to say about this. Is the End really coming, or are people being too paranoid? Are there any definite signs of the End, and what do they look like. If the End really is coming, I think the Signs will be bigger than we realize, not just people saying that the end is near, but Signs from God. (2 Peter 3:1-18, Matthew 24:36-37)
When I was a small child, my dad used to tell me stories from his childhood. He went to a Catholic school in a small town. Some of his stories were sad, some were funny and others were mystifiying. I always looked forward to hearing him tell them before I went to bed. I knew he would use a lot of different voices for the characters, and he would add his opinion in the story, looking back on it from his current perspective.
He had a lot of stories about the nuns that taught him. One of the recurring themes was that he grew up wondering if the nuns were really human. Did they even have feet? They wore long black robes and white habits. Some of them were very stern, and none of them showed any appreciation for my dad’s irreverant sense of humor.
I remember all of his stories distinctly because they were wildly original and I knew I could count on him to use squeeky, high pitched voices, low voices and everything in between. He and I invented two characters and created silly stories about them. They were Albert and Bill, two saber-tooth cats. Albert and Bill came to life after a family trip to a dinosaur/saber-tooth tiger museum. The big cats had funny adventures. Sometimes they would drive my dad’s car and run it into a cornfield. Other times they dressed up and pretended to be insurance salesmen.
Stories are important because they help people bond and spend time together. If the story is written, the reader can feel a connection to the author without even having met the author. When my dad told me those stories, he had found a way to relate a part of his past with me, in the present. Even though it was hard for me to imagine my dad being a young child (in the nun stories), I was grateful to hear his stories because it gave me a new perspective on his life before he was my dad. I was so happy to go to a school where I knew that the teachers were real humans with real feet, who weren’t intimidating like I imagined the nuns were.
I love stories, especially from writers who are passionate about what they write. We need stories because they are important to the growth of relationships, but also because stories can inspire people and change their lives.