Presentation Reflection - Affirmed Taboos

When considering just what I was going to do for this presentation, I was stumped. I was working with EVD and fatcatrex, and kept offering ridiculous ideas based off of the different levels of subjectivity and interpretation that acting and enacting experiences required. We were going to do something like this: tell two people to imitate riding a bike, and then falling off that bike. We were going to blindfold the people and put them in the center of the room (hopefully far enough away from each other so that they don't collide), and see how they personally enact a specific command. However, we didn't end up doing that because of the possibility for bodily injury and also because I think our taboo game was more effective in communicating what I learned in this course.

So, what did I learn? I learned that nonfiction as a category was intellectually dissolved, as most of our class discussions circled frustratingly around reality/fact/fiction with the general implicit conclusion that nothing was actually real or true. However, once I the classroom or mentally exited the discussion when it became too painful, I realized that in order to function I would like to believe that nonficiton is a category, and that things can be real or not real, and there are still some truths in the world. Am I being an intellectual coward? Am I running away from all of the new and exciting things I learned about form and style of nonfiction? No, I don't think so. I think that this was a deeply flawed class that did nothing but inspire depression and hopelessness. Nothing exists, nothing is real? Okay, yell about it all you want in class. Everyone who played the taboo game went right back to pre-class definitions, describing our 'taboo' 'unreal' 'unmeaningful' 'untrue' words in terms and examples that affirmed their original pre-class meaning, and demonstrated their utility in a non-abstract setting. EVD and Fatcatrex may have come to other conclusions about our exercise, I do not speak for them. I will expand on these thoughts later in my 2-3 page essay.