i am who i am and it's all your fault!

Hello blog! Sorry I'm late!

Ramage's lovely book on rhetoric has left me at the edge of my seat, biting my fingernails, just sweating at the thought of what words will be found on the following pages. Psh. I really wish that was true. Yet, with as tedious as this reading can be at times...I must remind myself..it could be much worse. At least it's written in english, and I don't need a translator to decode the words.

I rather enjoyed his ideas of identity, because I feel like he really broke it down in a way that was easy to understand and to apply to real life. It made sense, and I liked that. We can only control certain aspects of our lives, and it would be foolish to think that we are to account for everything that we are. Unless you've held yourself in captivity in a hut in the woods somewhere (or something of that nature), you can't really take credit for all of your viewpoints.. would you really want to? I think life would be a lot less interesting if we all just sat in our little corners of the world contemplating ways to present ourselves to the public. Where's the fun in that? The energy exchange between people is what makes life interesting... whoa, I'm beginning to falter off topic here. I don't even feel like I've said anything here. Maybe I'm just dense, but I've never really thought of that point before, and, well, Thank you Ramage! Hooray for identity classification. I don't know... I think it helps to be able to view your own identity as well as the identities of others in the context of -given -readymade -constructed. It takes the weight off of the situation. Like, chill out, we're all messed up because of each other! Or how about, we're all GREAT because of each other! The one point that really grabbed me in this section of the book was "Indeed my motivation to modify or accept various of my given traits is largely determined by my time and place." I think that sentence really says it all, he probably could have eliminated a few paragraphs having just said that.