Month: March 2018

As we grow, our idea of home grows with us. It is the day to day experiences in our lives which change the way we view the world. They are what shape us, our ideas, and our actions. Going to college is a big life event for most people. It is a chance to get out from under your parents control and grow up, become more responsible, and to explore the kind of person you want to be. In the memoirs The Glass Castle and Fun Home, the ideas of home and growing up are explored. My project is to take the Facebook platform, through the site fakebook, and use it to explore growing up and experiencing responsibility in a modern digital way while also connecting back to the idea of what is home and how personal growth is achieved.

This is my version of a modern memoir for the digital viewers. It is like other memoirs only in its ability to explain personal events in my life for the public to view. It differs from the memoirs of Jeanette Walls and Alison Bechdel only in the ways of its digital nature, and the fact that I am not speaking directly to the reader like theirs. Otherwise it is my account of events that have happened in my first term of college.

https://www.classtools.net/FB/1544-qYNvR8

In this project I hoped to explore growing up in a more modern and digital way. I wanted the fakebook profile to come of as more modern and what we, as the first “digital” generation would post online in order to catilogue events in our lives becuase most people rely on sites like facebook and instagram to catilogue their lives rather than analogue keepsakes like journals and scrapbooks. I tried to keep the posts as authentic and “unscholarly” as possible in order to bring some authenticity to the project becuase most people do not go on facebook and type out a whole paragraph about their life for the whole world to see. I did however make these posts longer than I usually would because this is a class project. Looking back, I do believe this project could have been better represented by a blog/wordpress as it is more of an online journal.

Today I found myself on a train. I have never been on a train before and I really do not plan on too many more trips on one after my ride. There was so many people all rushing to board and to find the best seats. It was like watching organized chaos unfold in the most mundane way possible.

While I was on this trip, I noticed myself looking out the window, watching what passed by the view of my seat’s window on the way home. I started to wonder what it would be like for the Wall’s family (throw back I know) always moving from place to place with no set home. As the train passed through the farm land with the small houses of the people who own the farms I began to wonder who lives there and about their lives.

Were they like Alison Bechdel and her father, with people struggling with the concept of masculinity, or were they like Jeanette Walls and her family, struggling to make ends meet in a world that doesn’t value the life of an eccentric nomad with no means to pay for goods?

It was a long ride full of deep thoughts for me. I imagined one house had a small family where the parents spent the day tending the cows that surrounded their small home, making milk products to sell at the local farmers market not unlike Rosemary Walls with her art, with two small children, leaving to go to school every morning and returning to the house late afternoon to do their homework at the dining room table while their father cooks dinner only made complete by the milk from the cows fresh from earlier in the day.

While this imaginary life for the people who lived in this small house may be the furthest thing from the truth, I do believe there is some beauty in imagining the lives of those around you.