Topics

Here are some writings on some of the topics. You can read for practice. The italicized section is a set of questions or an assignment. You can complete the assignment or answer the question for you final exam paper. (Just choose one and write for 1.5-2 pages.) Remember this is just one option for the Final.


Who Am I? Identity and vocation
I identify myself in part as a teacher and as an intellectual (someone who thinks about things). A common cliche is that teaching is a "calling," not a profession--that is, one is born to teach; it's not just a job. It's difficult to identify yourself with a profession now, though, so although I identify myself as a teacher, it's hard for me to identify myself as a teacher at a certain place because of how difficult it is to settle down into a permanent job. (I was proud to be a teacher at this University, but my time here is almost over.) This isn't just a problem for teachers: it seems adults need to change jobs much more frequently now than in the past.

How do we identify ourselves with our vocation when it is more difficult to identify ourselves with our specific job?



Food My relationship to fast food and Taiwanese food.
The food here is very good. I don't eat at expensive restaurants, though. In part because I only eat at simple restaurants, I find myself missing some of the Chinese food and Taiwanese food restaurants in America. It's funny that I seem to prefer a simulation ("fake" ethnic food in America) of local food to the actual local food of where I live. I try now to eat things not readily available in the U.S., so I can miss it when I leave Taiwan.
I'm going to look at another topic as well: fast food and "taste" in food. I have read that childhood is the time when we develop our palette: the food we get used to then becomes our sense of what tastes good. The drawback is that, now that many children are raised on fast food, we identify fast food with good food, and our eating habits become worse while at the same time we lose our ability to enjoy more sophisticated food. I'm not sure I agree, though, because it wasn't until I was an adult that I started to enjoy many different types of food. I still like fast food, though, food I ate all the time in childhood.

Do you see taste in food getting more simple? Too simple?


Eating Habits My fear of eating and my daring
Like a lot of people, I have a love-hate relationship to food. I am often afraid to eat for fear of getting (more) fat. I'm especially afraid of getting fat again since I have lost a lot of weight in the last two years. I am quite daring, though, especially at eating spicy food. I think restaurants understand that a lot of people are daring when it comes to spicy food, for it seems that spicy food in restaurants isn't often spicy. I will eat the spiciest serving at some restaurants and not be bothered at all. Some restaurants do not cater to the stupidly daring customers, however: I will sometimes get food that is extremely spicy, and I pay for it.

What are some common fears about food? What sort of weird games do people play with food (trying spicy or unusual foods, etc.)

Remorse and Regret
Recently on CNN I saw an interview in English with Edison Chen, the Hong Kong celebrity involved in the photograph scandal. His apology and his sense of remorse seemed very self-serving. He says he has not talked to any of the women whose lives he hurt. I wonder how sorry he really is if he won't take the difficult step of trying to talk to them. (It will certainly not be a pleasant coversation.) Cecilial Cheung said that he is a liar: he is not trying to help the women, only himself. It seems true.

self-serving=behaving in a way that benefits you. This often applies to things that seem to be directed toward other people, like apologies, volunteer work, etc.

Why is real remorse so painful? How do we try to "get out of" apologies? Why are we fascinated with famous people and their public expressions of remorse?


Class
My class position is interesting because I am considered high class because of my education. However, my class is rather low in terms of money.
Our last movie, Yi Yi, seems entirely about middle class life. It has a lot to say about growing up, growing old, and how to face life's challenges, but all of the characters and all of the situations seem entirely "middle class" problems. (Maybe this isn't fair, though, because feelings like desire, passion, murderous rage, are all human feelings.)

How is class a complicated issue? Are some movies, etc., too class-bound (about one class) and/or not interested enough in how class affects our lives?

Humor and Jokes
I've always laughed at obnoxious and vulgar jokes. There's often a lot of clever use of wordplay, etc., in vulgar humor. My big problem with jokes, though, is that I laugh at inappropriately offensive jokes--not because they're funny, but because I can't believe that people are so full of hate and invested in stereotypes that someone would make such a joke. I'm laughing at the racism or hatred in the joke, but someone might think I'm laughing because I agree with the joke's hate.

Are jokes a good source for understanding language? Why is vulgarity so interesting? What do offensive jokes tell us about ourselves and our culture?


Health
When I became more focused about staying fit, I started to develop some bad habits. First, I started exercising too much. At times last year I went to the gym three times per day. Second, I stopped getting enough "fun" exercise, like basketball, and focused probably too much on weights and other workout methods. Third, I became obnoxious. It's hard to become interested in something without becoming an annoying person. You start telling people that they are doing something wrong, you talk about a subject with friends who don't care about the same subject, etc. You get so excited that you try to force your excitment on others.

What "positive" phenomena can we become addicted to (exercise, studying, etc.)? What are the drawbacks?

Cultural Metaphors and Cliches

I recall a book I read some time ago. It's central idea was to explore the "logic" of a metaphor by American poet Wallace Stevens: "Death is the mother of beauty." Why 'mother' and not 'father'? There's a good, complex explanation.

Write about a particularly intriguing metaphor without repeating your Paper 5 topic. For example, what does the metaphor "X is the mother of Y" do differently from "X is the father of Y". You could also look at some metaphors in art.

Trauma
People take others' trauma and use it for themselves. It's common to see people who take, say, the suffering that their grandparents faced and act as if they were the ones who suffered. It's good to have a sense of historical memory, but don't we sometimes go too far in our passion for the past and really "steal" the trauma of others? My fear is that it will affect how we see the world today. Certainly we don't want a world where traumas of the past will occur again, but we also want to understand how the world has changed, and how the manifesting of traumatic events also has changed.

What are some examples of people wrongly appropriating the trauma of others?

Stress and Frustration
Stress is bad and I don't want to write about it. :-) I do agree with the Blues music tradition in America, though: we can sing of the things that stress us as a way of making the stress go away.


Belonging and "Fitting In"
I have a sense that I belong here, but it's hard not to feel like an outsider. The main reason I fail to "fit in" is because I don't have the time or work ethic to improve my Mandarin: I work in English for a good part of the day, and I'm tired from my other responsibilities. I also feel that, in some situations, I am only allowed to 'fit in' in a certain way: there's a place prepared for foreigners here. But I really can't understand the complexity of the social system or the ways in which we can fit in until I have stronger skills in the languages spoken here.

Describe some phenomena related to the difficulties of 'fitting in,' or tell a personal story that you haven't already told related to the topic.

Technology and Evolution
In a lot of our presentations about technology, students talked about how technological developments have made things more "convenient." I wonder about the problems related to thinking too much in terms of convenience. Are there things that shouldn't be convenient? Do we develop bad habits because of our preferences for convenient things? Should we identify technology always as an 'advance' instead of a 'change'?

Write about a technological development and discuss it in terms other than "convenience." Or, talk about some of the problems about being too obsessed with (or "hung up on") convenience.