h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just came in from pruning the tomato that exploded while I was gone, pic is on FB. I also harvested my first ever garden potatoes, have 4 of them so far! (Also a pic on FB)

for Mini. for Mini's mum.

Thanks Lil. A fantastic night. We made it through to the champagne breakfast at 0400 then caught the last bus home at 5am. Drunk driving on dodgem cars is great fun.

Thank you so much for the welcome, folks, it's very much appreciated. As I said previously, input will be minimal for a while, but I do enjoy reading this most sociable, personable forum with obvious care for all involved

Mini - best wishes from me to you & your mam, for a speedy recovery

Take care of yourself through this time

Isa

Well unless I can provide proof that mum is ill and in hospital, the essays are still due on friday. Have i mentioned before that I have a DEEP dislike for Sociology. These are the selfsame essays (or variants of) that i struggled through at new year shortly after S lost his grandfather (who I saw the day he died)

I didn't ask for an extension then, and it looks as though I'm unable to get one now.

No news, mum is still stable, They couldn't find the problem on the scan yesterday, so I think they are planning some poking and prodding today, or maybe a different type of scan. She is in the Glasgow Southern General Hospital.

I suppose I should go write about "the role the concept of anomie plays in Durkheim’s sociology."

oh and the other two essays which I haven't started yet.

Yeah really don' see myself passing these.

mini

They expect you to *prove* that your mum is ill and in hospital?!

yeah, unless I can give them a doctors letter *confirming the situation* then I still have to hand the essays in at 4pm on friday.

yeah, because I can drop everything, rush to Glasgow and demand a doctors letter. Of course if mum worsens i will be rushing to Glasgow, but the uni can off and take their sociology with them if that happens.

mini

The sociology department will have a fax machine, the hospital will have a fax machine. Ask the sociology department for the number, and then ask the hospital to fax a letter.

Ring switchboard at Southern General, Ask for the ward, ask fro the nurse looking after your mum, explain the situation, (also say that you're blind and can't travel easily). Ask if they'd be so kind as to do a quick letter and fax it. They'll need to check with your mum first of course. The nurse will have had to write sociology essays for her degree and will probably have hated them just as much as you..

Google tells me this is the number you need to ring: 0141 201 1100

hospital must be busy, the phone is just ringing out.

meh

will await 5pm update from Dad. try to get on with essay 2 which is . . .

"Discuss how social constructionism can be considered as offering a more sociological social psychological perspective with reference to either (a) attitudes, OR (b) attributions."

i may give the hospital another try in an hour.

mini

And just so y'all can see what I'm dealing with, here's the question for essay 3

“To have a sense of self and an understanding of self-identity is a means of orientation in the entire social space of Western modernity. In this space we orient our actions with one another by trying to gauge other selves: who they are and what they are thinking and feeling.”

Burkitt, I (2008) Social Selves: Theories of Self and Society. London:Sage. [p. 27.]

Explain how Burkitt’s statement provides a useful way into considering the social construction of selves and how this differs from the notion of the self as an ‘inner’ psychological entity.



yep!

mini

[GDZ]

Please can some-one translate what mini has just said her essay is on? Quite honestly that baffles me!

Or is Sociology really that detached from reality?

I've know idea what that means either.
I guess like other social sciences (and everything else) there is good and bad, hard and wooly all mixed up under the same umbrella term.
I don't know many sociologists but the one I do know seems a nice enough chap.

Answer everything with "consciousness is an illusion".

I was at a Barbeque with three sociologists over the weekend, but they assured me that they weren't post modern.

Can you Dad ask for a letter when he visits?

We have grandchildren, A--- and I, we do. Seven of them; all girls. They suddenly sprang up in each of three families. Our oldest son, I---, married a young lady from St Louis (A---), who had a 1-year-old daughter. Several years later, our second son, R---, married a slightly older lady with three girls, all in high school. Our oldest son and his wife have had two more girls in the meantime. Our oldest daughter, S---, spent a couple years with one guy, got pregnant, and he dumped her before he ever saw the cute little girl they produced. S--- changed her lifestyle for the better, met a military man (N---) who is kind, gentle, and has vision for their family. N--- takes such good care of my daughter and treats their little girl like she's his own. All our children understand the principle of "If you're living in our home, you are family." A--- and I had each had several marriage debacles before we met one another. When we married, it was a "yours, mine, and ours" situation. She brought two kids, I brought one, we produced another co-jointly. For us, it's never been a ~small~ family and now it's even more extensive than when we started. Even last night we had nine people sleeping under our roof. A---, Y---, and I (our present "in-house" family); my youngest daughter's boyfriend and his two sisters (who we've had staying the weekend because the older kids have been attending a bible teaching seminar over the last several weeks); and our oldest son's three girls arrived yesterday (visiting for two weeks while I--- and A--- scout a possible new career and home in Colorado).

Hello and g'day to Isa! Good to have yet another new face in the Atelier. Will await your more in-depth conversation when it becomes available.

Hugs for mini. For your Mum and for the stress of the sociology essays.

B4ifindoutwhathastranspiredintheRiftovertheweekend

I could answer all 3 of those without reading up on it because I recognize the sublanguage in which those questions were written. I could feel the delta waves in my brain surge as I read them.

Question 3:

“To have a sense of self and an understanding of self-identity is a means of orientation
~~~to be self-aware is to have edges, to know where our self ends and other people begin.

in the entire social space of Western modernity.
~~~this is mostly noise.

In this space we orient our actions with one another by trying to gauge other selves: who they are and what they are thinking and feeling.”

What the two sentences amount to is, because we know where our corners are, we can feel it when we bump up against the corners of other people and presume that they are people just like us. Since we have decided they are just like us, we also decide that we can empathize with them.


Explain how Burkitt’s statement provides a useful way into considering the social construction of selves and how this differs from the notion of the self as an ‘inner’ psychological entity.

~~~Eh, well, "useful"? I would guess that "social construction of self" means defining who you are by the reflections off other people's surfaces, as opposed to who I think I am when I'm not looking in the mirror. The question itself is suggesting that "social construction of self" and "self as an ‘inner’ psychological entity" can't be in the same room together. Is it really one or the other with Burkitt? This seems more like psychology than sociology to me.



I don't know whether it's useful for me to use all these visual images when discussing this stuff with a legally blind person, but hey, why don't we have a go at discussing this stuff as a way of helping mini? We're not writing her essay for her, we'd be holding a seminar from which she could draw her own conclusions.

“To have a sense of self and an understanding of self-identity is a means of orientation in the entire social space of Western modernity. In this space we orient our actions with one another by trying to gauge other selves: who they are and what they are thinking and feeling.”

translation.

if you know you are an individual. You also know that others are individuals. You act towards others in certain ways because you can guess what they think and feel.

"Explain how Burkitt’s statement provides a useful way into considering the social construction of selves and how this differs from the notion of the self as an ‘inner’ psychological entity. "

translation

How does Burkitt's idea of your personality being created by others in society differ from the idea of you creating your personality yourself?

yeah these essays are just plain nasty.

mini

Just had a phonecall from younger sister.

Second scan done today, they still cannot find the source of the bleed, there is quite a build up of blood now. Mum is feeling a lot better today though, eating and talking more. She is on different medication so in less pain. Plans for more scans and tests to find the source of the bleed.

Will phone or text dad about a letter.

mini