I didn't know what to do.
I still remember the day we had to start with some idea for our experiments, which could be a complete mess, weirded out, and have had absolutely no direction. Looking back at my previous writing pieces from high school until the start of Junior year, I couldn’t see any element or idea that I could adapt and transform from its original narrative to a newer context, meaning, and purpose. The rules were simple: choose any theme or idea or element(s) or even a personal experience, and mold it to create something new, and to give it a new perspective and approach. I read through my previous essays over the past two years and tried finding my spark. I also didn’t want to just pick an idea and twist it without having substantial stories to support it. For context, previously, I have conducted contextual and descriptive analysis of advertisements and reading texts, comparative analysis between two forms of media, article annotation responses, a Twitter essay, a Photo essay, a Digital Literacy Narrative, and a Discourse Community Auto-ethnography, and out of all these I was most inspired by my contextual and descriptive analysis of “flowers” in The Hunger Games. It was after much deliberation and soul-searching, I found the way in love and romance which became my basis for using flowers to showcase my personal experiences, and interests.
Reflecting on my experiences with flowers, I was taken aback to my cousin's wedding this past summer and made me strongly analyze my current relationship. I didn't realize but the more I thought about them, the more I wanted to believe that the wedding had a profound and deep impact on my life going forward. The changing and dynamic relationships statuses of the 21st century have made me feel confused, torn, and anxious than ever before. While the wedding was magical - in terms of the grandeur, scale, decoration, colors, and the many sparkling elements - it was also daunting and a wake-up call to life outside my professional goals and aspirations. Critically reflecting over the past 15 years of my life, practically since I realized who I am and why am I going to school, I have realized that I have always, perhaps subconsciously, been the kind of person who wants to make her parents proud. My work, my achievements, my successes are only to make my parents proud and prove to them how I try and do genuinely try to be a perfect daughter. Ever since I have joined Michigan, I was always in this bubble that "I am only supposed to (note the emphasis on supposed to, as if there is a boundary or a limitation) work, work, work, and complete all my tasks, and reduce my time on other commitments such as social life, love life included. So this year, I decided to venture out and give something a try, more like an opportunity, not because I was desperate, but I was looking for something new.
Parallel to these ideas, another strong aspect that deeply and greatly impacts my perceptions and opinions on love and romance is my cultural upbringing and background. Saliently and indirectly, I was brought up in an environment where boyfriends and relationships were considered "taboo" and "something that we aren't fit for until we grow up," with "grow up" undefined for some and defined as “until you get married” for others. Growing up, I too considered this to be right and absolute, leaving no room for changed and contrasting perspectives. What was set was followed. Decisions were made from the head, leaving little or no room for heart’s choices. Cultural and societal norms defined, defines and might continue to define my life and significant personal decisions. Putting it all in perspective, all such notions and compressed surroundings seem oppressive and pressurizing on me --as if there is a cage, and I can fly out but only to a limited extent, and either stay within those boundaries or return to my cocoon. Perhaps, this is me envisioning how my life has been influenced while in reality, it could be looked at as perfectly fine and normal. Truly, I realize that love and romance cannot be defined and established in one specific way, but I tend to subconsciously.
Inspired from my confusion and anxiety, I decided to set foot on the other perspective of love and romance. Some of the driving questions were: 'Why love and romance?', 'What is their impact in my life?', ‘Did something trigger me that caused me to consider these issues more seriously than ever?’. I explore certain elements and gestures of love, romance, and Hindu marriages in my project. For me, marriages have been one of the "idealistic realities" in my life where I have longed to be part of one, and this year, I was blessed with the opportunity to attend one. Little did I know there, at the time, that it would inspire me so much to craft, develop, revise, improvise and enhance a project about it over 15 weeks.
Trial, Trial, Trial
Starting out, I wanted to incorporate a significant portion of personal experiences and reflections on my life, and use that to tie that with the colorful, large, bright, and electric world of marriage and wedding customs. I chose to present my first experiment as a long personal narrative to express my thoughts, feelings and connections between flowers and romance. During the entire process of drafting and finishing up my experiment 1, I realized certain subconscious nagging thoughts. I also realized that these only ended up coming out through my words in writing, rather than in any of the conversations with my friends and family. For experiment 1, I identified specific personal experiences that I never thought would have had an impact on my life such as the rose from my boyfriend, my cousin’s wedding this past summer, and the basic generalities of love and romance. I had a substantial amount of personal stories and a generic point of view, but it was messy, and directionless. I had no idea where would I be taking this experiment. Looking back, I realize that the purpose of this experiment was to transform my thoughts into actual words and read them out loud. It was sort of a vent, as if I had this desire inside me to just throw it out of my system and make and see connections between my relationship, and marriage. I could also see my culture and upbringing affecting the way in which I felt I was supposed to feel, act, and live versus the way in which I felt was feeling, acting, and living. More specifically, I found myself challenged between fixed, concrete notions in my head versus the constantly changing courses of reality. I knew I had something inside of me that struggled between what my head said and what my heart did. Perhaps to resolve that, I sought refuge to writing and expression of thoughts to words on paper. 12 weeks ago, I knew I had triggered ideas inside my head that could take shape and be launched on this platform, but I was at point blank about its execution.
Moving onto experiment 2, I think it was fantastically challenging and interesting to incorporate a different form of media and/or platform. I wanted to change it up, add some interesting effect and spark it up a bit with newer perspectives. Inspired from one of the assigned class readings, my experiment took form of a conversational transcript that exchanged questions and answers between my friend and me. This experiment required the most creative and strategic decision making. I chose my Caucasian friend who is from Omaha, Nebraska, grew up in a traditional Catholic family and lived in Nebraska all her life. Choosing which person to interview required me to filter out a lot of individuals. Firstly, I wanted someone who didn’t belong to a South Asian, specifically Indian and a Hindu background and culture. Birthplace, citizenship, and upbringing were not significant factors but I felt that they were connected to religion, traditions and family backgrounds. Another filter was that that person should preferably be committed in a relationship, which I felt would make the conversation more realistic than idealistic. My friend from Nebraska fit well into my filters and a conversation with her proved effective in achieving the main idea of this experiment. I could provide a comparative and contrasting analysis of different views and opinions on flowers being used in a romantic context and environment. The main question of what makes someone think when they hear the word “flowers” is itself subjective and personal. While I related flowers to love and romance, more of like a sweet gesture, my friend related it to more like appreciation, pride, and a token of congratulations from her family members. Being able to recognize and acknowledge differences has made me further strongly aware of my personal feelings about this theme, and opened my mind to new opinions. As a hopeless romantic, I was influenced by her to strongly uphold my views, but also to appreciate contrasting ideas. At that point, I felt I could “come out” and share my true deep feelings and talk about the romantic aspect of flowers from a “cliché, girly” point of view with no judgments. I was satisfied by how this experiment was influential in adding a new dimension to my theme and basic idea.
By the time it came down to do the 3rd experiment, I felt that I wanted to finalize my ideas and make the third one the pathway to the final portfolio. At this point, I had collected substantial data and evidence on flowers, and their connections with love and romance, but I also wanted to bring in another romantic gesture/element. In this advancing age of technology, I was immediately reminded of e-mails, the heavy use of text messages and instant messaging systems, and even more innovative and interactive forms of media such as Snapchat. I wanted to compare the materialistic and non-materialistic aspects of flowers and technological communications, but chose not to do so. One of the biggest cons of this idea would have been the limited knowledge and information that is available out there for me to present it on a larger scale. It would have been difficult and tough to gather information beyond it to present substantial claims. After speaking with our professor about my ideas, he recommended that why don’t I consider jewelry as my opposing and complementing element. Jewelry is extremely rewarding, both from monetary and non-monetary aspects – expensive, glamorous, stylish, and classy. Personally, jewelry is not my favorite, not in any respect, which is why it made me easier to write and think about jewelry since I could think of all the possible reasons that made me resent it. When I had my second element fixed, I had to then think about connecting flowers and jewelry with each other as well as note their presence, auspiciousness, and significance to Hindu weddings. As the first step, I decided to gather more information on jewelry. This also coincided with my differentiated form of conducting this experiment. I decided to send out a Google Forms survey via instant messaging and/or social media platforms such as Facebook, and gathered their specific thoughts about flowers and jewelry, and how often would they choose one over the other in different situations. This survey was selective as well but included a broader range –only women who were above the age of 18, disregarding whether they were in a relationship or not. A few of them included their names, and I had a hint of who had written which answers which was strongly telling of their personalities. There were about 20 women who had taken my survey and I feel that they were good representation of the data and evidence that I was looking for. The survey was the major component of my third experiment and alongside, I summarized the results and analyzed my key takeaways and learnings from conducting the survey and observing its results. The process was eye-opening since it reiterated the point that others weren’t as hopeless romantics as I am and that everyone responds differently towards love, romance, relationships, and how flowers and jewelry play different roles in the long-term and the short-term. I personally felt attacked when people strongly opposed the two elements, but also made me realize how every one of us is so emotionally and psychologically different. This experiment proved effective since it brought out the individualistic opinions that were not in controlled settings and could have been influenced by family culture, religious values, beliefs, and personal opinions.
from imagination to execution
Finally, it was time to launch this website. Being a complete non-tech-savvy person, I didn't know how to create, design, and present the plethora of content that I had inside my head. Nevertheless, there is no specific age to learn, so I decided to explore wix.com to check out the various site designs and layouts that would help me better understand WIX’s features and add-ons. Since October, we also started looking at previous Gateway portfolios that helped us critically analyze, understand, and decide between the different design choices and how each choice is meaningful to the project. As important was the project content, it was also important to keep in mind the layout, placement, and text font, spacing, font colors for visual appeal. This is more on the technical aspect of the website, content presentation and site design and thematic choices.
For my final project, I decided to have a combination of all the 3 experiments. There was no one experiment that I could absolutely adopt and expand it for the project. Throughout the past 15 weeks, I felt that I started off with a vague and generic idea/thought, and decided to gather evidence experiment by experiment to form it into a well-defined claim. Over the course of conducting the 3 experiments, I gained so much clarity and was convinced of my two elements – flowers and jewelry – being the highlights of my project. The third component of this project – big fat wedding –was in fact, not executed until the very end of the project, and was almost going to be taken out of the prospective final project. However, it was my course instructor who then recommended that providing a glimpse and showcasing a specific tradition and culture will add on to the generic claims of flowers and jewelry in a romantic context. Big fat wedding had to then be incorporated and launched! Additionally, content generation was more of editing, revising, and twisting certain aspects since most of my content has been directly transferred from my experiments. The most time-consuming content was the imagery for the big fat wedding page. It required more organization and decision-making as to how I wanted to present the slideshow, what images would I put up there and how were they relevant to my cause.
Choice-making and selecting from a wide array of different possibilities is not always easy. I spent a lot of time thinking about the font color, font size, style and the spacing between paragraphs, and decided to follow the conventional style of having patterns in my project. For example, the flowers and the jewelry pages are closely similar in page design and layout. Picking background colors involved trade-offs between visual appeal and the underlying symbolism to the bright, vibrant nature of classic Hindu weddings. Such trade-offs involved “experimenting” on the website several times, and changing the font sizes and colors to see what appeared the best. On the contrary, designing the home page was the simplest of them all, since after my background design was fixed, it became easier to bring in images whose colors fit well with the background.
The implementation stage was a trial and error, page by page. While it was important to think about how the components of a page fit with each other, it was also important to be consistent with the other pages on the site. No page had to extraordinarily stand out but no page had to fall behind either. As I kept developing and generating content – written text and images – I kept in mind the overall appearance of the site and how it looked to any common reader. Understanding easy usability was key in fixing text boxes, images, fonts and any other related designs. This was challenging and time-consuming, sometimes more than what I had expected it to be, but it started looking much better when most of my content was up there, ready to be published.
looking ahead
Overall, this process was time-consuming, mind-boggling, and confusing with every decision and choice that I had to make for every bit of this site. The technicalities of this website, the confusion about idea and content generation and the important layout and designing choices were all very crucial to this project, but were also significant in enhancing the ways in which I could present my content differently taking advantage of this digital space, as well as significantly improved my content-generating skills and made me more efficient and effective in getting my points across. This entire process made me learn so much more about myself – in terms of personal opinions, feelings, ideas and emotions towards this theme and contexts, but also explore myself as a writer. The most basic fact that this project had given me a great deal of autonomy, power and authority in exercising and controlling it as and how I want was challenging yet fun! This discretion, used to the best of my advantage, was interesting since I had all the power to either keep it the same way or completely flip it around. While I enjoyed this great deal of power, I also found myself falling in spaces where I didn't know where should I go with these ideas and vast amount of material information. I sort of wished then I had some guiding light to help me be on track again. My course instructor was extremely helpful and willing in guiding us with our ideas, thought processes, and our visions of the websites, but at the end of the day, we were supposed to generate the core material of the content. While I jumped between clarity and confusion, I felt that with every step, I learned much more about myself.
As a writer, I discovered how personal narratives and reflections on the small instances in my life allow me to use increased vocabulary and different words that help me make better and more suitable word choices in any given piece of writing. I have been able to spot on identify all grammatical errors and somethings which don't sound right. Additionally, I feel that with my increased reading of The New Yorker and following different authors has also changed the way in which I approach news articles, essays, reports, and other writing pieces. Continuous and regular reading of short essays has made a subconscious impact in critically judging my content and information. I have now come to better realize of the mistakes that I make in my content, such as deviations from the main points, and any unnecessary and non –satisfactory content. I am a more critical reader who can identify and make connections between the claim and the data that is provided as the reasoning behind the paragraphs. I have also realized that I do not want to stop writing from my own personal voice, that expresses my personal opinion on the issue. On the other hand, I would want to learn more on how to write in a more neutral voice that is unbiased and free from any underlying connotations and contexts.
Overall, this entire process and journey has been motivational and encouraging since it has pushed me to be creative and developing my own art on this large digital canvas. As a non-creative individual, there are many times when the business student inside me comes out and is extremely direct, straightforward, and clear in stating claims, this journey helped me relax those tensions a bit and make room for free-writing, whether it be a piece of junk or a solid component. From conducting the 3 experiments, I learned that messy and shitty first drafts are real and in fact, are even more helpful in generating a polished version since all the points are revealed and put out in words on (electronic) paper. My biggest challenge as a writer has always been finding the right motivation and the mood to write and write, as well as being too strict with the organization of my content, disallowing room for any changes. I would prefer being organized, by having a clear thought in mind, and being able to write according to pre-defined outlines. However, this doesn’t work in such projects where there is massive potential for generation of new and/or modified content everyday. My key takeaways from this course would be to open myself as a writer to new forms of writing, new settings, and new methods of writing. It is important to have change as the only constant as I grow and develop further as a writer.
Looking back, I see myself considerably improved, and much more confident about my writing – content wise and organization wise – since the time I took my first writing class here in Michigan – Writing 100: Intro to College Writing. I have been able to expand my horizons through good reads on various platforms, peer reviews, essay writing, research papers, and personal reflections. Looking ahead, I see myself becoming much stronger about my writing styles, content generation and opening myself to newer mediums of communication and writing. As I continue my journey in the Minor in Writing program, I want to further learn, grow and expand my knowledge and understanding in the world of writing.