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Saharsh Week 1: A Voice Silenced

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    Afghan women wearing burqas in public - New York Times If I was to tell you that you were to wake up tomorrow and the language and parts of your identity no longer are yours to choose: your voice, your self-expression, and your education, all gone. Everything that defined you stripped away, and you were powerless to do anything about it.  Not because you failed. Not because you lacked ambition. Not because you lost sight of your dreams. But because someone else decided that you are no longer entitled to pursue them.  The school you were supposed to attend no longer exists. Your childhood aspirations must be forgotten. The streets you roamed as a child are no longer yours to navigate freely. The choices that build your identity are taken away until there is nothing left that is truly yours. Now, what would you do?  This sounds like a nightmare, a world where our identities are taken away from us one part at a time. Millions of Afghan women and girls do ...
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Alisha Week #1 - Otherworldly Perceptions of the Self

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  Dr. Heisenberg Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, Duane Michals, 1998           Within the past few days, the world lost two major public figures, Tim Curry and Dolly Parton (rest in peace). As the world began to mourn the dearly departed, I noticed an interesting divide in what exactly people mourned about each person. Some focused on their public personas, praising their incredible accolades and connections; some focused on the their integrity as people, praising their contributions and support for minorities. It has made me start to think about how I will be remembered.           There are two main aspects of each of our identities: internal and external. How we view ourselves and how others view us, respectively. Obviously, it is our external identities that dictate our legacies—we can’t exactly tell anybody how we viewed ourselves when we are gone. Yet I remain fascinated by the notion that for every person who ever lived...
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From Syntax to Subtext

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From Syntax to Subtext      Ending a short text with a period has a passive aggressive tone. Something that can start an argument fast. “Sounds good”- reads like a simple agreement, “Sounds good.”- can feel like a threat.      In person, tone relies on voice, pitch, facial expressions, body language and social cues. On a phone, these cues vanish in their entirety: emojis and punctuation are left to fill the gaps to establish emotional context. A period can signal finality, or passive aggressiveness. A joycat establishes obnoxiousness; a laughing face is playful. Farther on the spectrum would be a ROFL face, which signals heavy laughter. These all alter the sentence structure and your message perception.       Source      What makes this compelling, to me, is how the audience drastically alters the context of the semantics of a message. If you put a period in a message ...
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“Individualism?” Don’t be Daft!

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        The trees are dependent on the environment, but the environment is purified through trees.       The topic of individualism tends to be lionized in contemporary society, but to further perpetuate the lie of the individual existing truly as an independent subject would be foolish.  In history class, we learn about the codependency of colonies to the imperial core (without the raw capital of the colonies, the empire would not flourish) and the reliance on mutual understanding and bureaucratic decisions to further beneficial trade. (international alliances such as NATO) In biology class we learn about the cycles and how the environment is affected by our actions. We learn about the dependency of trees to the sun, soil, and rain; the dependency of soil nutrition levels to human action; the dependency of humans to the trees. In nature, a tree dying would be detrimental to the rest of the ecosystem, so why do we as humans think so h...
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