Before:
In my auto ethnography I want to explain my five senses by answering the question what is I? This paper is directed to whomever it may concern. I want to grasp the reader’s attention even though the paper is twelve pages. I want to arise questions and then support my questions with my own life experiences. I want it to be a personal paper so I will use a lot of my own life in this paper determining what is I? I will use all of what I have learned this year when I write this paper. It is the Goliath of my English 101 career and I am David who will overcome it.
Brock Kawana
Professor Harrison
English 101
12 April 2009
There is No I in Brock Kawana
When I reflect on my title of this particular paper, it makes me think of what I have learned this year. Not just in English class but reflecting on life as a whole component. I have written more in this class than my previous twelve years of education combined. These classes I took prior to college were significant in helping me with my grammar, punctuation, formatting, and other mechanical objectives in English. However not one of those classes let me freely think. It was a constraint to my own personality, my own individuality. There was always a restriction or a certain way to write everything. I was like the three legged dog in the pound. The one with the big blue eyes that you cannot turn away from and the only thing they want is to just get the hell out of there. All they need is that one person to take them under their wing, give them a chance, and change their life for the better. I finally got out of the dog pound when I came to English 101. I was set free, given a fourth leg to stand on my own and now I am ready to live.
I came into English 101 my second semester of college. I was on academic probation due to my lack of focus, effort, and determination in the first semester. It was the lifestyle I was caught up in that put me in this position. The parties, the new people, the freedom of being on my own and the crazy life of college that was portrayed in the movies had now become a reality. It was a shocking truth I was faced with; I was fucking up a golden opportunity of a college education. I saw some of my friends get thrown out of college after the first semester, and they had to start their life in the work force or back in community college. I went home and listened to my friends who were not in college talk about how hard their lives were now. They did not have as many friends as they once did or any free time to do what they wanted. It was just work, work, and more work. That is when I realized that I was living the dream in Indiana. To quote my own work from a blog entry entitled, “Cornfield Paradise”, in which I had to re-write lyrics to a song. I wanted to sum up my feelings for college, what I experience everyday and what I am going to do. “I really hate classes but I got to go. I got to quit this procrastination and get off academic probation, fool! Indiana, Pennsylvania its own little heaven. The only class I am down with; English 101-017.” I had it all; a chance for an education. I found the class that I was in love with. The class I never was absent from because I was excited to go every day. I found my niche in college. I was confident when writing, creative, and a new passion arose out of me every time I had an assignment. I had a second chance to do better. That meant everything to me after I saw the look on my parents faces when they saw my GPA from the first semester. When I opened the letter at home, displaying my grades from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, it was as if my heart went into my stomach. In my mind was a slideshow of all the events leading up to college; the visits to campuses my senior year, graduating from high school, signing my letter to IUP, and my mother in tears when I shut the door to the car and headed towards my dorm room to leave her. All the while my parents boasting with pride on their faces. I had to make up for my wrong doing. I had to find out who Brock Kawana wanted to become, who he was as an individual. There was an option I had, of two different paths I could take in my life. I did not know the outcome to either one, but I feel as though this class saved my life.
When I state: There is No I in Brock Kawana, I am not stating the obvious of grammar composition based upon there is no literal “I” in my name. However I am underlining a metaphor which describes who I am as a person, not my label. I had to analyze myself when I went back and re-read my own essays and blogs. When Marlen first proposed the question of “What is I?” to the class, I said that I is not just my outer exterior but what makes me my own individual, including such things as personality, beliefs, morals, thoughts, ideas, and so on. Now as I am writing this paper after what I have learned through the class, I still agree with my previous statements. I have also come to the realization; Brock Kawana is made up of his own five senses: taste, sight, smell, touch, and hearing. It never occurred to me while we were in the class that this is what makes up I. My five senses have a reflection on my own self in everything that I do.
Taste:
The first sense that I had to analyze was my sense of taste. To me taste is the black sheep of the senses. It is the one that does get overlooked because I expect to know whether something would taste good or bad. I will gladly touch, smell, see, or hear something before I taste it. I think taste is more of a psychological thing than anything. If I would not be able to see what I taste it would take much longer to process in my brain what I am eating. When I taste something it seems to be based off of my brains evaluation of how it looks or smells. In my blog I described how it felt to eat what my partner in the class, Keith, was feeding to me with my eyes closed.
I could feel it in my mouth and it was just as hard as a rock. I thought it was more of a stale cookie than a granola bar. I was just sucking the granola out of it, because I did not know if I could bite down on it if that would be safe or not. I could feel the honey and oats coming down onto my tongue and it seemed to all be reminiscent then, and felt comfortable eating it finally.
Due to this taste test, I concluded that my sense of taste could be overcome by blocking out the mental images of what it could be. The challenge of a taste is summed up through the television show Fear Factor. On the show contestants have to eat the most revolting food that my mind could think of, pig intestines, cow tongue, and bull testacies. Although I have never eaten one of these foods, my mind portrays them as being disgusting. It seems to me that the sense of taste is more of a mind game than anything else.
I wanted to portray this mindset in my first essay titled, “My First Kitten”. My story dealt with a boy who has a fascination with having a cat as a pet. He loves cats the most, but is allergic. When he goes to his Aunt Betty’s house though, she lives on a farm and has tons of cats. There was one specific cat that his sister would torment him with, Mittens. Mittens was the leader of the cats, she had these green eyes that could see right through him. Even though his eyes weld shut because of the allergic reaction he is still in love with the animals. He would go to his Aunt Betty’s every year for an Easter brunch, and each year she would make a new dish. This is how she earned the name, Crazy Aunt Betty, because of her atrocious tasting meals. This year was different though because instead of cooking the normal squid and tuna, she had cooked his most of feared cat Mittens.
I think my stomach was excited because it was expecting the worst and got something pretty decent. I felt something sharp hit the inside of my cheek and just completely stopped. I tried spitting it out but it went down my throat too fast. It felt like a razor blade had just cut into the back of my throat.
Even though he never got to have a cat of his own, he did get to eat one in the end. I wanted to show that when he did not know what he was eating, he thought of it to be “pretty decent.” Then as soon as he found out what it was his mind altered the taste and it became a horrible nightmare that he was eating a cat. In a sick and twisted proverbial roundabout way he got his first kitten in the end, just not in the way he expected.
I am a smoker which means my taste buds are slowly dying each time I light up another cigarette. When I went to go and get the nicotine patches at the Health Center, they told me things would start tasting better due to not smoking. Needless to say the patches did not work and I still smoke cigarettes. I do not think my sense of taste will ever go away completely because I will always know what it once tasted like and have that mindset imprinted on it. The other senses will also become stronger and help my sense of taste realize what it is that I am about to taste.
Sight:
In my own experience sight is the sense that seems to get the most credit. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” A quote I would hear throughout my life from numerous amounts of different people. It sets a template for the sense of sight; I believe what I see. My eyes cannot lie to me because I am looking right at what is going on. Then when I was thinking about all of this as I was about to write my blog a question pondered across my mind, “What if I could not see?” I started to feel more ignorant than anything. I do not know what it is like to be blind. I tried to get the best visual, no pun on words, of it by closing my eyes when doing simple tasks. I would try to walk around my dorm building with my eyes closed and everything felt and sounded differently. The area of room on the elevator seemed so much larger than before, the opening of the door hit with such a loud presumptuous bang! When I would cut off my sense of sight, the other senses would grow stronger. I could feel each and every part of the elevator button, the cold medal that circled around the main part of the button in which I had to press. The ding in which I knew what floor I was getting off confused me because I forgot to count how many dings there were, so I was lost. I thought to myself, “If it is this hard doing such simple tasks, what else could a blind person wonder about?” This led me to the writing of my blog entry about what a blind person may wonder on an average day.
A simple task like laying in the grass to others is time consuming. For me it’s a learning act as the time will pass as I feel the flowers blooming. I can sharply hear the crickets chirping, bees a buzzing making me aware. I hear people walking past saying, what is that boy doing lying over there? I have images of what a cloud looks like or is the sun really that bright? They say the sun sets but where does it go off into the night?
My main point in my blog was to express the things I take for granted everyday through my sense of sight. I portrayed this through a blind boy laying in a field or the Oak Grove if you must. These interpretations let me believe that I am truly blessed to be able to see all the wonders that the world has to offer. I do take it for granted every day I wake up and just expect to have the ability to see. Why do I not praise my senses every morning? They are what keep me in touch with my surroundings. They are what truly make up my whole self. I believe the one of the worst things a person can do is judge somebody by their outer appearance. If we were all blind, nobody could be able to do this act of judging. We would all just be people towards one another, with voices, emotions, and the only way to judge would be by what we say. I do not believe I could make an assumption by the tone of someone’s voice, or the way their hand feels when I shake it. Therefore my thought process of sight has changed drastically after this blog entry. Sight is just not what I see; it is a reaction to my surroundings.
Smell:
“Nothing is more memorable than a smell.” (Ackerman)
Smell is the most memory associated of the senses. If I were to think back of a scent that made a lasting impression on my nose it would be my dorm room. I started to realize that each time my roommate was in the room when I walked in there was a different kind of scent. As I would walk thru the door my nose would immediately flare out with a sting of odor if he was sitting there. This was probably due to his lack of showering and washing clothes. I am not saying that I am the cleanest person in the world, but damn I’ve been known to shower. Ever since my roommate has gotten a girlfriend he has texted me at least once a day asking to use our room privately for him and his girlfriend at some point during the day. The first time I got this kind of a text, I thought nothing of it. That was until I went back into my room once they were done. My friend was with me as I was about to open the door. We were talking about something stupid at this point, and then I opened the door to my dorm and we both just immediately stopped speaking. This wave of body odor, sex, unwashed clothes, and garbage seemed to combine into this breath taking scent. All the horrible odors in the world seemed to be captivated right there in my room. I remember my friend exactly said, “It smells like a dumpster in here.” In turn my response was along the lines of, “I would rather be in a morgue with all of the dead people than be sitting here!”
This smell was so nose provoking that I had to explain it in my smell essay. I use more Lysol and cleaning products than a person with a phobia of germs. I am in a constant state of Germ-X-ing my hands, because I have no idea what has been touched and what has not. I am more worried about how he smells than I am about myself. It seems that when he smells better it is a better day for me, because my room will smell good when I walk thru the door. I wanted to create an advertisement campaign that let other roommates in my position get a way out of their hell hole. I wanted to the point across that there are ways to manage with a smelly roommate. My three step guide was called “A Roommate Nose”, which implied a roommate will know that they smell and what they can do better after this process. It dealt with three main components: body odor, their bed, and garbage. As absurd as it sounds, I did use my nose when writing my paper. No, I did not sit there and type with my nose or stick a pencil in my nostril and make a mind-map. When I was writing my essay it was a lot easier to recall how the room smelled because of how memory oriented the sense of smell is. It is challenging to describe how something smells but I can remember how it smelled exactly because I was there to smell it. “Our sense of smell can be extraordinarily precise, yet it’s almost impossible to describe how something smells to someone who hasn’t smelled it.” (Ackerman)
Our sense of smell is directed straight to the mind. It creates images of what a fresh baked cookie looks like just through the smell of it. If I were to close my eyes and smell something my brain would draw a conclusion as to what I smell. It may not be the correct image but the fact is it immediately sends a signal of a good or bad smell. There are many smells throughout our life whether it is a batch of fresh baked cookies at Grandma’s house, my roommate reeking to the high heavens, or the smell of clean sheets before I fall asleep at night. All of these send a signal back to my brain to create a positive or negative effect. When Ackerman states that “Nothing is more memorable than a smell.” I believe this is true because it immediately goes to my brain and is imprinted there to stay.
Touch:
Touch was my easiest sense to write about but also the hardest. I know I am contradicting myself through that statement so let me explain first. It was so easy to write about touch because it is such an emotional and physical sense. In turn it was so difficult to write about because of how those very same emotions and physical actions affected me. Not every touch is a positive touch. When I sat down to write my touch essay, all I could think about was one incident replaying over and over in my mind.
My mother’s boyfriend had moved in with us at the start of my seventeen year-old summer. I did not trust him. Every time I was around him I got a bad vibe, as if I had a sixth sense telling me that he was just not a good person. This was not me being childish that a new man was living with me who was not my father. It was just something did not feel right. Time went on and this man and I seemed to get into a new fight every day. I had always loved coming into my house as long as I could remember, until the one day I stood at my door dreading hearing the sound of his voice telling me to do something. I felt like a prisoner in my own house. I woke up every morning and he would sit there on my porch smoking his cigarette and each time I just wanted to shove the ember into his eye. He had made my life a living hell, but I could do nothing about it because my mother seemed to be happy. What I wanted to do was leave and get the hell away from him. He would beat me to the punch. I was sitting there one night after my football game and holding a rag over the cut in my leg from a cleat. I could hear this man start to yell at me about a knife that was left in the sink, instead of just putting the knife in the dishwasher he always had to make a scene. It was like that for every single detail in my life. I could not explain to you how lazy I was in this man’s eyes. Truth be told I did my job, he was just fucking crazy. I could no longer take his harassment so I went upstairs out of disgust at him as a human being. He kept yelling at me as I hobbled up the stairs and into my room. I was sitting there in my room as I could hear muffled voices that sounded like my mother sticking up for me along with him yelling. This is where I believe I and all humans are born with a sixth sense. All I heard was a slight ruffle from a kitchen chair sliding across the tile floor and I flew down the stairs as fast I could. There was no longer pain in my leg. When I came down the steps and into the kitchen my mother ran to me and put her arms around me as she hid behind me screaming, “He hit me! Brock he hit me!” I remember it was as if a switch went off in my brain. I had never felt like this before. I wanted to kill this man I was staring at, but in the most vicious way possible. I had turned into a savage Neanderthal off of one touch to my mother. I remember cussing him out with a few words and I felt like a father telling him, “You do not touch girls!” I ran up the steps with my mother, locked my door, and sat her down upon my bed as I waited by the door with my baseball bat. I had no idea what I was going to do? I started to have second thoughts. If he were to beat me down what would happen to my mother? I was so lost and I just prayed. I prayed that he would not come up the stairs. I prayed that he would just leave, leave me, and leave my family alone forever. He then ended up doing this the next day, which was one of the happiest moments in my life. When I came home and saw that all of his stuff was gone, it was pure ecstasy.
I look back on that experience and realize that I went absolutely ballistic off of one touch. What about if he would not have left? What would I become then? This is why I started to write my paper about child abuse. Their parents are not going to leave; they are just going to beat them over and over again. If I would have had to go through that experience again, I can confidently say I would probably not be here right now. I would be in jail for attempted man slaughter with a Louisville Slugger. Touch is a sense that can affect every person. There are different ways to touch somebody sexually, caringly, abusively, and so on. I believe this is the sense in which has the most responsibility when I use it. It can change lives or emotions. Thus it is a powerful sense.
Hearing:
When I think of hearing it is everything that is in my life. There is no specific thing that I can hear. I can play a song, but that will not be the only thing that I hear. Somebody can knock on the door when I am playing or the sound of each breath I am taking. Is there a place that is purely quiet? Is that a possibility? I wonder that, and then I wonder why would I want that? Hearing gives me the ability to express myself. It lets me hear what others are saying and then use that very same information to draw a conclusion. Hearing was a hard topic for me to write about because there is so many things that I have heard throughout my life. I started to think what is my favorite thing to hear? What affects me the most once I hear it? It could have been screams and how I then think something is wrong. It could be any song in the world and how it makes me feel. Then I thought deeper about what I write in my papers and how I present myself. I came up with, the sound of laughter.
When I hear laughter it is an indescribable feeling. I have aspirations to do stand-up comedy one day for this sole purpose. I believe that laughter can heal any situation. It is shared with every human being; the art of laughing. I like to believe that even the guards in front of the royal palace or a monk has politely snickered to themselves at one point in time. When I write most of my blogs or papers in this class I like to base it off what I think is funny and then I create a story off of that. Humor is not just a joke; it is a tool that can be used effectively. I think the world should use humor in more instances. For instance I think there could be a type of therapy for depressed persons in which they could use humor. When I hear the world around me I embrace all of it. With each new voice, each new sound of my footstep I am one step closer to my destination.
In Conclusion:
I is truly ever changing because they all five senses are related to my brain. Through my experiences in life I will never be the same. Each day something new is brought into my life whether it is positive or negative and I have to deal with it in a certain way. This is why “I” is a bunch of contradictions. No one can say that I am going to be the same way I am like this forever. There are so many experiences I have yet to go through. It seems as though I live in phases throughout life. When I was little all I wanted to do was ride my bike without training wheels. Then I get older and bikes are no longer cool, I need a skateboard. As soon as I turn sixteen, a desire arises to get a car and a job to pay for that car. Then when I am eighteen it is just about living a life free away from everybody with no rules. I go through these phases that all mold who I become. So I is living in a bunch of contradictions. As I look into the mirror I am wearing a peace sign around my neck that my friend gave to me. My definition of the symbol is not just peace to the world. For that to happen we all have to find peace within our own selves. It is what I am striving for in myself, a sense of peace. When I can find that I do not know each day I live on being “I, because that is all I know is me.
After:
I used all of the personal experiences I could. I thought I made good points when addressing certain aspects of my paper. The paper’s flow made me continue to read it. I thought I provided a bit of a bang when I introduced my paper at the start and then fed my personal life story into it. Writing can always be made better I believe, but I do like where I ended or just began with this auto ethnography.
Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Random House, Inc., 1990
