Category: Student Posts

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Laura's Avatar

I have never needed or been asked to create an avatar before in my life. When charged to make one for this class, I spent an absurd amount of time trying to figure out something that represented me as a person. What I figured out is that there is not one image that does justice to a one’s personality. We are all diamonds: multifaceted people, with some roughness around the edges.

In this collage, I attempted to draw from various aspects of my life. The Red Cross represents my desire to become a nurse in the future, but also pokes fun at my weird obsession with giving blood. I consider baby sea turtles to be my spirit animal so they are represented up top. No, I do not have a fascination with churches, but the one depicted here is from el Zocalo in Mexico City, one of my favorite places in Mexico to visit. My entire family is from Mexico and my heritage is huge, important part of my life. My favorite food chilaquiles, pictured above as well, reminds me of family meals in red tile kitchens and the fantastic bonding that occurs over comida. Though I am Mexican, I was born in raised in the South and I’m sure proud of it. The two images in the middle depict my hometown of Greenville and the ports in Charleston, the cutest southern town there ever was. I have grown up with a love of getting to know and understand other cultures, so the suitcase represents my enjoyment of travel. If I did not have to be realistic about my life, I would travel. The last picture of the soccer balls illustrate my deep rooted love for the sport (obviously, because what else do Hispanics rave about) and the fact that I was a referee for six years before coming to college. All in all, these images capture the very most important aspects of my life and how they come together to define me.

Gone Home Reflection: Hollow

After playing the game Gone Home for three hours straight I found the ending completely unsatisfying. Expressing my frustration to another classmate he posed an extremely important, and eloquently worded question: Why? Sadly, in my state of irritation, I never stopped to consider why I despised that ending so much. Kaitlin was home, Sam was pursuing her happiness, and her parents were making an attempt to fix their marriage, case closed, story over, the end. Still, it wasn’t right. When I picked up that journal in the attic after hours of wandering around and reconstructing a timeline of what happened the ending was hollow. I tried expressing this to my friend and he responded with “were you hoping for a resolution?” No, I got my resolution, which was fine; it just didn’t sit well with me so I decided to dedicate this blog post to investigating why.

The game starts with the front edifice of the house illustrated in dark, cold colors—black, grey, varying shades of purple—giving the mansion an empty and haunted looking exterior. However once the game commences and you begin moving around and exploring more rooms you realize the house becomes a brighter place to be. The cassette tapes and records you can play make the house less spooky and the lights you are able to turn on and the doors you are able to open make the house less confusing and cold. But the empty feeling the setting creates lingers through the entire game. This is one, beautiful allegory relating to Sam. Sam was at first isolated, confused, a pariah amongst her peers. She struggled in her new high school and clearly was not a fan of the house. When she met Lonnie she started turning on lights, she grew into herself and began to understand her feelings and began learning who she was as a person, which is fantastic but there was still emptiness there. Sam doesn’t tell her parents where she is going; she lies to them and isn’t even accepted by them.

I don’t know about others but I was expecting to be relieved when I finished playing Gone Home. I felt that I would be rewarded after hours of investigation and attention to details, but I wasn’t. Her parents are gone. While trying to rebuild their relationship with each other they left their daughters behind. Sam is gone. She left to live as the person that she truly is, the person she felt that she needed to hide from her family and the world. In an attempt to pursue her ultimate happiness, which could not be satisfied by her own family, Sam left her sister behind. Kaitlin is all that is left. By the end of Gone Home both you and Kaitlin have the complete story of what has happened at home over her 11-month trip abroad. In the end, in possession of heartbreaking information about her sister, Kaitlin is left alone in an empty house with only echoes of the people she loves and it is the hollowness of this that supremely irks me.

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