Grounding Essay

For the last class we were asked to bring in five artifacts that reflected us and what our values were. The artifacts I chose were my cable TV remote, my tenor saxophone reeds, my car keys, my copy of the Dishonored video game, and my copy of the graphic novel Batman: The Long Halloween. I thought hard about what each item should be, and I feel like these five items really got to the heart of what my values were and appropriately reflected who I was as a person.

The first item I chose was a bit of an odd one, it was my cable tv remote from when I was living in Pullman. While it is odd, I feel like this item kind of summed up how I feel about living an era that is so technologically advanced. In an age where cable television is slowly going extinct, I still cling on to it. Even though I can enjoy access to streaming services, there’s something about cable that I still enjoy. I enjoy the satisfaction of when a commercial break ends, I appreciate the surprises that the commercial breaks sometimes bring. I feel like if everybody just switched to streaming, we would miss out on appreciating the little that we get from traditional cable. I have often been called an old soul which I did not really believe up until very recently. I’m starting to realize that in a modern sense, I am an old soul, I don’t like owning a digital of a movie or video game, I like holding it in my hands. I love holding a physical copy of a book and turning each page not just a kindle edition. 

The second artifact that I chose was my saxophone reeds. Music has been a huge part of my life since fifth grade, and I believe its going to remain a part of my life forever. My grandfather was a musician, and even wrote a song that was professionally recorded by Cal Tjader and Mary Stallings. People have often said that I remind them of my grandfather and how good of a person he was. Music is what makes me feel connected to him and so I feel like music helps me emulate so many of the values that he stood for. I don’t think playing music is what makes me who I am, but I do feel like every time I play, I become a little bit of a better person. 

The third artifact I chose was just my car key. It is a simple thing, but a car key represents a large part of my personality. I have ADHD, so being kept inside during this quarantine has been difficult to say the least. Overall staying in a single place is tough for me. Being able to drive allows me to just escape everything. I’m able to go anywhere and I’m able to see and notice new things, and being able to do so is something that gives me a feeling of gratification that I don’t always get when I sit at home. 

The fourth artifact I brought was my copy of the video game Dishonored. I enjoy being able to think while I have fun and playing video games allows me to do that. Whenever I play video games, I think about not only how to beat the games, but how I would write the storylines myself if I were in the position to do so. For whatever reason I connect with what the characters do in their decision making and I’m a person who hopes that these fictional people will resolve to make the right decisions and be good as opposed to giving into temptation. 

My fifth artifact was my copy of Batman: The Long Halloween. I am a comic book nerd, and I love the idea of superheroes fixing everything that is wrong. I also would like to believe that when comic book writers create these stories and these characters, they’re giving a bit of themselves, and that these ideals are what they imagine the world has the potential to be like. Over the past few years my faith in people and in humanity became very diminished and reading comic books again has recently started to give me hope that good values and good people will always prevail.

I never really thought about the fact that these items represent aspects of me up until now. I had to think quite a bit about who I was and how to put my values into words. It was really only after I chose these items that I was able to really get into my head truly put into words who I am as a person and what I represent. 

For my implicit association test, I chose to take the IAT regarding my response to presidents. For this test they pretty much take our current president, and the way we respond to certain tasks will determine our preference for one or the other. For my test, the current president is obviously Donald Trump, and for the past president it gave me Richard Nixon. The results of the test said that I ultimately had a moderate automatic preference for Richard Nixon over Donald Trump. Taking this test was interesting, particularly when I was asked to differentiate the positive words from the negative words. When I was going through it, I made one or two mistakes and there were certain words that I hesitated on. The experience kind of served as reminder to me regarding how quite a few words are orthographically similar. I remember taking anthropology and linguistics, but there are times where I forget that sometimes I do to need to use it. The most interesting part of the IAT was when I had to differentiate between the connotation of certain words as well as differentiate between Nixon and Trump. There were various times I got a bit turned around on what keys to press so I made more mistakes than I probably should have. I did expect the results indicate what they did. I am definitely not a fan of the current administration, and while I dislike Nixon based on what I know about him, I wasn’t around when Watergate happened, so my dislike towards him is completely secondhand. I feel like it’s just a lot easier to overcome secondhand dislike, compared the dislike you feel as you see someone commit actions you disagree with. The biggest thing that I really took away from this experience is that ultimately neutrality is impossible. No matter what as humans we have preferences of who we’d prefer to be around, even if one is forced to choose between the two worst people on earth, they still have a preference, because that’s how the human brain works.