Take a look at other students’ responses to Prompt #2. Look for projects that seem to overlap with yours–in terms of sources, questions, topics, or methods. Note these similarities and some ways that you and these other students might be able to help each other.

Describe how your research topic builds on or contributes to some conversation about the origins, meanings, or functions of selfhood. What other thinkers, scholars, or writers are part of this conversation?

1. I was born at4:30 am, July 9th
2. I love driving on the Northern State Parkway much more than the LIE
3. I had a Narc car.
4. I love bacon and my Mom’s pork chops, yet I always wanted a mini pot belly pig and the sickening irony of me cooking bacon while he walked around my house concerned me.
5. I am afraid of and disgusted by Rats and mice.. but I am fascinated by squirrels.
6. UP is a favorite movie of mine.. (maybe this fact isn’t so random) I have a constant underlying fear that I am ill equipped financially to care for my aging parents.
7. My latest obsession is finding silver hairs on my head and forcing all of my loved ones to confirm my findings.
8. my first pet’s name was Matisse, she died of cancer and it began a long line of my pets losing their lives to Cancer. She was essentially my baby.
9. I want to travel this year… I must
10. Every emotion I experience dances across my face
11. As I grow older the minutia of the day slowly crushes my soul daily
12. It kills me that sweatpants are unacceptable work attire
13. The few times I have been hospitalized they have been intensely, painful emergencies
14. I stopped going to the gym
15. I don’t attend circuses… The treatment of the animals pisses me off. I stay away form some zoos as well
16. My Chihuahua, Arliss has a middle and last name
17. I respect the mission of my employer, but am disappointed by the beauracracy and petty personnel issue that cloud our purpose to serve our community.
18. I wonder if I’m as intellectually astute as my classmates at times.
19. Math hates me
20. I prefer wearing neutral colors and black
21. I will not get on a Roller coaster.. period.
22. I must have Thai once a week….such an addict
23. I just discovered that Soca music makes me smile on a daily basis
24. I do have a temper
25. Café Bustelo … my life blood

I enjoyed this exercise… I liked the lines from Viegener most when he was telling me something he’d learned from visiting places and hanging out with people, like hearing it from a friend in conversation. That said, most of mine are I-oriented, but if it weren’t on a blog, I may have written more things about people I know and experiences we’ve had.

1. It took me 13 years to feel comfortable saying I was an editor.
2. My hand usually starts to cramp up within about 12-15 lines of manual writing.
3. I’m always categorizing things as fair or unfair.
4. I wish I’d been breastfed as a child. If I had, I think I’d have a much better immune system and memory.
5. When I hear working mothers make fun of stay-at-home mothers, I cringe.
6. My mom’s favorite saying is, “Fake it ‘til you make it.”
7. My grandmother on my mom’s side’s favorite saying was, “Only boring people get bored.”
8. My sister and I text each other a lot. Most times the texts are psychological reviews of our upbringing where we are looking for corroboration. Other times, they’re just about things we watched on Netflix.
9. Lots of people believe good luck and bad luck both come in threes.
10. Last year, I had to stop eating all citrus and chocolate because they started giving me migraines with aura.
11. I’m not naturally an explorer. I have to force myself to go out.
12. My mind always goes to the worst place first.
13. There was a point a few years ago where I started curbing my exposure to glorified horrors. I stopped watching scary and/or violent movies and network TV news.
14. There should be more time to think and do and dream, and less time spent working for the man.
15. Whenever my dad orders food at a restaurant, he never likes what he orders. Then he sits and drinks coffee for the rest of the meal with this adorable, disappointed pout on his face.
16. When I was a child, we would visit my grandmother on my dad’s side once every few years. She came from a family of Carneys and had an amazing collection of elephant tchotchkes. I remember looking at them for hours while my dad visited with her and talked. When she died, I wondered what happened to them.
17. My brother and I look a lot alike.
18. I wish I were smarter so that I could understand NASA’s website and my sister’s boyfriend when he talks about nuclear physics.
19. When I found out the universe is flat, I had a hard time believing it.
20. When you’re in a relationship for a long time, you can instantly tell how the other person feels without words because you feel it, too.
21. Everyone’s at war. Everyone’s at love.
22. There seems a point in people’s lives when they don’t want to be reminded of the past anymore, especially by photographs. It’s usually when they are older and have lost their partner and/or someone in their family/circle of friends.
23. I believe in the serial comma.
24. These days, when trying to give a sense of a band’s sound, people always compare them to Wire (but none of them ever actually sound like Wire).
25. I always want to skip over text set off by parentheses and em dashes when I read, but I can’t bring myself to do it for fear I’ll miss something important.

1. I was raised by a Christian mother and a Muslim father, who sent me to Catholic school (for the discipline!). In spite of their best efforts I’m agnostic now.

2. I come from a very musical family, my father is a percussionist, my brother is a producer, one uncle is a bassist and another uncle is a producer, my grandfather sang opera. I can’t even read music. I often wonder if I’m adopted.

3. I’m extremely introverted, but I perk up when lecturing (it’s more impersonal).

4. I like kids, but I don’t, and have never wanted, children. People say I’m selfish. I just think I’m very self-aware, and I know what I want for my life.

5. My dog is obsessed with putting her bottom on everything (she has it parked on my keyboard right now). It’s very embarrassing when company comes over.

6. Although I was born and raised (by very strict Jamaican parents) in the States, I don’t really feel “American”. All of my friends are also first-gens.

7. My paternal grandmother worked for comedians Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley. They took me to Las Vegas for a baby commercial audition. My mom nixed the whole thing, and took me back home—who knows, I could have been Rudy Huxtable! (well, maybe that wouldn’t have been that great…)

8. My dream job since I was in 1st grade was to be the team physician for the LA Lakers. But I was told “girls can’t do that job”…Fast forward to today, there are 2 female physicians in the NBA. I still kind of wish I had given it a shot.

9. I’m terribly clumsy on my feet, but my specialty in all of the research labs I’ve worked in was microsurgery.

10. If I had three wishes, one of them would be to make my dog live as long as I do. I love this little stinker. As she attempts to close my laptop to stop me from working…

11. As a child I used to stay awake at night trying to imagine where the universe ends.

12. I don’t believe in ghosts, but sometimes I smell my grandfather’s cologne wafting past me, even when there is no one around.

13. I own more than 50 pairs of shoes, most are heels. Most days, I wear Converse. I’m not proud of it. It is a problem.

14. Today a colleague asked if the tattoo on my wrist was for “Isis”. As in, the crazy terrorist group. The worst part is, I don’t even think he was kidding. IT IS NOT, by the way…good Muslims don’t get tattoos, it is haram…but then again, so is plucking your eyebrows. You see why I’m not religious.

15. People harass my father and step-mother because of their religion. I often wish religion didn’t exist. It’s so ridiculous to me, the way people treat each other in the name of “God”.

16. My best friend has end-stage renal disease. She won’t allow me to be tested to see if I’m a match for her. It’s the most frustrating thing to not know if I could save her from the hell she is going through, and that she won’t accept my help.

17. I hate mornings. All the classes I teach start at 9. It is hell.

18. I got tenure this year. I’m supposed to be happy. But I kind of feel…meh. Relieved, but still, meh.

19. I’m allergic to chocolate. But I eat it anyway. All. The. Time.

20. My doctoral thesis was about the effects of bisphenol A on the brain. But I sometimes still eat food out of metal cans, and I have a refillable hard plastic water bottle. I should know better.

21. I have lived in NYC for 15 years. And I’m sick of it. If I had the opportunity I would move to Paris. Tomorrow.

22. When I was 8, I was flying back home to LA (from visiting grandparents in CT) and we experienced a severe turbulence episode and emergency landing. “Bring Me A Higher Love” was playing in my headphones. Now Steve Winwood songs can trigger a panic attack (it’s making me uncomfortable even typing about it).

23. I can be very slothful. I will happily stay in bed all day watching a Law and Order marathon. Or SportsCenter. Or Seinfeld. Or reading the Sunday NY Times.

24. I still email with my 11th grade AP Biology and AP English teachers. 

25. I only talk to two people on the phone: my mother and grandmother. Everyone else gets a text. I hate talking on the phone.

Admittedly I began Matias’ book with a bit of skepticism. Not so much at the quality of the book but in my ability to find meaning in a series of random thoughts. To my surprise the style in which Matias has written seems to offer a much deeper look into the life of the author then any narrative or biography I have read, assuming of course the “random things” are true. It is hard to say if through this book we know the true Matias, or through anyone’s list we may know the “true” author, but I do believe there is a different truth to be spoken of. This kind of list allows the reader insight into the abstract mind of its author. Granted the list is infinitely shorter than the amount of thoughts we are consciously aware of in a given day, or hour for that matter, but it is almost as if various masks we wear in the countless relationships and social environments we find ourselves in are removed. Ideally, we are left with an unfiltered and unaltered truth. A truly vulnerable mind.

Some skepticism remains, but only in a sense that repeating every random thought, or a fully random idea seems improbable. Not just because randomness is hard to create when our worlds are full of environmental ques and unconscious relations, but because as Matias says numerous times, the list leaves one vulnerable and consciously or not, I imagine there is some rephrasing or edits that take place to seem more relatable in some cases while deflecting in others.

That said, this book was an incredibly entertaining read. I think a serious of random thoughts in it of itself is an exciting ride because for so many brief moments I find myself relating to the author and in others refuting them. It seemed like a tug of war with the author and myself trying to understand his life while questioning my own through a similar lens. This of course is just my opinion and I do not think this type of style would be for everyone, it may very well be my personality that finds the offered content intriguing but at the very least I would find it hard to argue that what is written here is not only brave but a very interesting perspective on the life of any individual.

1) I don’t want to be any more real than one of Virginia Woolf’s fertile facts.

2) Scientists are studying the intelligent movement of insects to design miniature camera-robots to crawl around inside our bodies.

3) Whenever I cheat on my vegself, it’s always with bacon.

4) Abyssopelagic- the bottom of the ocean.

5) When people tag me in unflattering photos on facebook, I click “hide from timeline.”

6) If this is cathartic, I’m probably not doing it right.

7) Has my critical studies education made me more self-reflexive?

8) Clocks are creepy. Every tick feels like a tiny extraction.

9) Do not copy Viegener. Do not copy Viegener.

10) I can be naturally random(ish) too.

11) I spend an absurd amount of time having imaginary conversations with my mother in my mind.

12) I once tested positive for HIV but it was a false alarm. I was volunteering at a farm at the time and apparently I petted too many goats, which carry heterophil antibodies, which imitate HIV antibodies.

13) I miss living on a boat.

14) I squander freedom.

15) I really love being introverted.

16) But not obsessive.

17) While reading, I highlight things I understand and agree with. This is probably the antithesis of learning.

18) Why are so many of my random facts unsavory?

19) When great thinkers and writers become your friends, you realize most of your friends are dead.

20) There is nothing cozy about being alive in the world.

21) Bikram Yoga is everything it’s hyped up to be.

22) My father’s favorite author is Michael Savage. I love him anyway.

23) I wish I had money so I could hire Paul Browde to be my therapist.

24) The concept of “false consciousness” confounds me. Who has “true consciousness?”

25) I’m happy when I’m curious.