Organization of my posts in categories of popcycle

Family:

Where I Came From...

My Punctum God

Antidefinition of my name

Punctum Meanings of images

Party Central

Trying to connect my thoughts

Career:

Links that have to do with my profession

My 'fetish'

Remix Culture

Style as a rhetorical concept

Entertainment:

Emma Watson

Entertainment and Fiction

Emblem

Pale September

Etymological definition of fantasy

High concept

RSA animate

Community:

Home page

Emergency and Exigence

Edward Rutledge

Columbia and Lexington

Edward Rutledge

I went to Mellow Mushroom's trivia night last night. What does this have to do with English 460, you ask? Well, one of the questions was "who was the youngest person to sign the Declaration of Independence, also a future governor of South Carolina?" and I got it: Edward Rutledge. I remembered it from some long past history course - my AP teacher would be proud.

He has many buildings named after him, not to mention one USC building on the Horseshoe. The family name is a very old-world historic South Carolina name, with a house/museum in Charleston and various businesses using the moniker.

That is probably why he comes to mind immediately when we are asked to come up with a community figure. I don't know how many of my peers even know who he is, probably none of them, and I have no idea what it says about my childhood that I do remember that minuscule detail, but there it is. It probably just means that I have a good head for random trivia.

Another local leader that comes to mind is Moultrie of the infamous Fort Moultrie in the Civil War, and... it would be utter nonsense to mention any current local leaders.

Entertainment and fiction

I would now like to discuss what fiction means to me.

Everything.

My head is 90% in the clouds. Fiction, especially but not always fantasy, whether in books or movies or photography or music, has always been my escape. I sometimes feel that I get melodramatic when I talk about my love of books, but if that's the only area of my life where I am melodramatic, I'm ok with that. They are life changing for me, and I will always believe that.

I previously mentioned Harry Potter. I will not talk much more about it, just that it is inhabiting an incredibly personal era of my life, which will effectively end in July 2011. There is no coincidence that one of my most respected celebrities also plays a major part in the Harry Potter movies.

A few more books I will mention. Beside Harry, the other most life changing book series for me has been Outlander.

I read this series like inhaling crack cocaine in my sophomore year of college. First of all, it was a hard family time for me, so I think I escaped a little too much into the web of fiction that Diana Gabaldon expertly wove. But this book, it changed my entire ideal system. I don't think it's what the books set out to do, but they did it anyway. It's hard to describe, without being verbose, but just trust me. I am a different person for having read those books. They are incredibly personal for me, maybe even more so than HP. But Diana Gabaldon gave readers every single mundane or exciting detail of her characters' [longgggg] lives. I felt as if I knew them like my own family. Outlander is hands-down the reason I studied abroad in Glasgow.


Basically, a book or book series cannot make it into my top 5 without being incredibly close to my heart. So in the interest of being brief, I will list other ones that have affected me this way. The His Dark Materials series, anything Brandon Sanderson ever wrote, especially Warbreaker, the Chaos Walking series (I just finished this yesterday, and WHEW.), and Lord of the Rings. All of these have some fantastical element to them, many full blown fantasy. I wonder what it says about me that they are so vital to my personality.

Let's move on to movies.

The only one I really want to talk about, though there are others, is Cemetery Junction. It was released in Glasgow when I was abroad, and I don't think it ever really caught on in the US (or really, in the UK - I think it was a flop). Isn't it funny that reading Outlander led me to Glasgow, where I would watch this movie. Funny how things that change our lives are linked.

I went to see it alone one dreary, boring day. I was having problems with homesickness at the time, which adds to my aforementioned statement that the context of my having watched this movie definitely affected my interpretation of it. It is not that great of a movie. That is to say, I doubt it won any awards at all. But I came out of it feeling so moved, so absolutely affected by it, that I am [probably the only person in the world who is] glad it was made. I felt it spoke directly to me, although my situation was far different than that of the characters'. Maybe if I watch it again, I won't get the same sense, but it was honestly the first time I had left a movie theater with that feeling of... undefinability.

But this ties into entertainment, and childhood, and career (I want to be a book cover designer because of my early-adopted love of books). It is what makes me who I am, is important to every nook and cranny of my person.

Party central

As a general statement, I am a shy girl. That doesn't mean I'm not confident, but, well, that's kind of beside the point. The point is, I don't particularly like being the center of attention. However, something that stands out in my childhood is the vast multitude of parties that I have been thrown for my birthdays.

Hopefully my father will never read this, but if he somehowdoes, let me start with the blanket statement: THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT I DIDN'T LIKE MY PARTIES. They were some of the best moments of my life. But I can honestly say that I had the most parties of the girls I knew. My parents tried to devise more and more devious ways to outdo the party from the year before. Most often in my youth it was sleepovers, chuck-e-cheese type places when I was really young. In the tenth grade, I was thrown an epic surprise party. It was intricately planned by my father with my friends as co-conspirators. I was fooled, though I had some previous suspicions because of people acting funny beforehand. But they had rented a huge conference room at a local hotel, fooled me into thinking that I was working an event for my friend's father, and voila... I walked into a makeshift club filled with everyone I had ever met (ok, I exaggerate) and complete with my very own DJ! We danced the night away, though I wish I had had some warning because my hair was dreadful. My sweet sixteen was an absolute success, lavish and insane, an adolescent's dream.

Then, for my 19th, my parents topped themselves. I had been to the Darfur Rally at the State House in October, and told my parents about this performer, Danielle Howle (a local celebrity), that I thought they would like. Lo and behold, they got a hold of her manager and brought her to my house for my birthday party! My friends, family and I gathered in my living room, she sat on the steps, and gave us a concert! It was quite surreal. I'm still not sure it even happened, but I have proof:






This is me and my parents with Danielle Howle afterward.



I have decided that from now on, I don't really want anything more than a nice dinner for my birthdays. I have had more than my share of attention for a yearly event that everyone experiences. But the memories of my parties are some of the best of my life.

Antidefinition of my aforementioned boring name.

Laura = Mountain Laurel
Christina = Follower of Christ
Windham = defined in searchforancestors.com as "A town in the county of Norfolk, England, said to be a corruption of Wimund-han, 'the home or village of Wimund.'"

However, those strict definitions don't particularly describe me, though I do associate myself with Christianity, as it is how I was raised.

LAURA. A Laura by any other name. No, that doesn't work, then it wouldn't be Laura. Anyway, as my wise friend Erin just told me, I am named after Mountain Laurel, and I adore the mountains - Eureka! I love hiking and just... being there... and... now I'm excited.

Also, mountain analogy associated with religion. Which path shall I take? And... Petrarch! So I hike, I explore, I find different paths!

When I was a child, I got so mad when people pronounced my name "WindHAM" The H is silent. So I would tell them that I am NOT a ham on a flagpole blowing in the wind, no sir. But it proved that I kind of am a ham, in the ridiculous goofy vein. I definitely was and still to some extent am a ham. Maybe the fact that I shied away from that pronunciation means I shy away from my funny side. OR MAYBE THAT'S JUST NOT HOW IT'S PRONOUNCED.

Wind. Winddddd. Does it mean anything? Am I blowing through life's windstream like a leaf? Am I getting ridiculously philosophical? Yes. I'll stop. If I was a musician, wind could mean the instrument sections of Winds... but I'm not, so it doesn't. But I do enjoy windy weather, though not when wearing a skirt. The wind literally has bitten me in the ass many a time. Too much info. I'll stop. Wind could be associated with the climate of Scotland, where I studied abroad last semester (with miss Erin, coincidentally).

I also like Ham. It's a good food. Quality stuff.

Take away the L from my first name, you have "aura". I have an aura. Not sure what exactly it is, but I have one. Erin says goofy and colorful. Myes, colors, myes. Patterned. That is my aura. A confusion of color and pattern. I'm alright with that.

Let's see. I'm running out of associations. I shall continue later.

Note: While researching for my much later post on my emblem, I was at an Elvish language site, and had an epiphany! Laure in Elvish means "golden" or "golden haired". I am in fact golden haired, and prefer to think that I am golden as well. I also found a site which actually translates my name from English to Elvish. Here is the screen shot:

My punctum God

This is bizarre: please don't judge my childhood self for her imaginative construction of God. But, whenever anyone mentions "walking with God", I envision myself, mentally 3 or 4, walking with an anthropomorphized Curious George dressed in the yellow suit. He is very wise, and I guess he is what made me comfortable with believing in a higher power as a child. I wasn't even that enamored with Curious George. It's all very interesting how children come up with the mental images that they do.

Where I came from and how I feel about that in general.

By name only, I am Laura Windham. Because of the fact that Laura is derivative of Laurel, the mountain flower, I would say that by definition, I'm not quite myself. That is, no one would ever describe me as a delicate flower, though sometimes I tend to overdo floral print in my wardrobe and surroundings. Windham was a village in Germany, though the name is largely English in origin. So although my name means and mountain flower in Germany, I prefer to think of Laura Windham to mean mighty warrior princess, or strikingly beautiful creative genius.

But this has little to do with my career choice of graphic design. On my Windham side, I come from a family of artists. My grandfather dabbled with watercolor, very basic stuff. My father was very close to a creative genius, an immensely creative man who shared his love for art with inner city middle school students for years. He was an expert at realism, but preferred creating fantasy scenes of anthropomorphized animals or abstract situations.

But my mother, eh, well, she's an accountant. She had to be forced into creative thinking, though she rose to the task very well. I like to think that my choice of graphic design came from the marriage of both of my parents' ideologies. I do not possess the massive creative spark that my dad does, but I have an eye for aesthetics along with a very logical head on my shoulder.

When I was a child, I was quizzed on the masters. Literally at age 6, I could look at slides of impressionist paintings and name the artist and part of his life story. When I was 10, my father decided to keep up with technology and get photoshop 2.0 (laughable now). He taught himself the program and taught me the basics. At that age, I decided I didn't like the covers of my pop CDs and decided to redesign Britney Spears and Shakira, etc. CD covers. I liked to think that they would both thank me for my genius if they ever saw my designs and would hire me on the spot. As far as childhood experiences go, that was the introduction to my love of design. Between then and now, I fluctuated wildly in my wishes for my future career, but always came back to what I loved and was good at. Recently I realized that I should combine that with my obsessive love of reading and presto! A career! Book cover designer! (Hopefully tangible book covers will still exist for as long as I need a career.)