Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog with some commentary about what you discovered.

The blogs that I have chosen for this assignment are Tai Amy’s eng oh canada,  Heidi’s sine loco, and Alishae’s ENGL 470 A: Canadian Studies.

Common features:

-people: this is the most salient similarity, and as a result, compelled me to select these three blogs, despite the different life circumstances of the writers. They place home at the heart of the interaction that happens between people and above that of locality. Home might be a boyfriend, or a best friend, or family. Heidi describes that person in her life as someone who is both her place of refuge and joy. Home is still considered a vessel that contains the things one desires in life, but it often takes the form of a person.

-feelings: For Tai Amy, home is a happy word. Naturally, all the events that were described in the three blogs were largely positive. I have to wonder, though a home is suppose to give us comfort, there are tragic events in life that we might perhaps map onto the edifice which we call our home. Can we really divorce the negative emotions from the experience of home? For me, I might think of my bedroom, which is such a integral part of my definition of home, as a place where I might laugh hysterically at youtube videos, but it functions at the same time as the place where I go to in great sadness, to hide my face in blankets as I weep uncontrollably. It is the place where I daydream and smile on fond memories as I lay carefree on a fine sunny morning, but also the place where, late at night, I despair over and ponder life’s greatest mysteries.  If anything, I think that those hurtful feelings actually reinforcing the notion of home as a place of healing and growth.

-chronology:  Tai Amy talks about home as a place that must morph and does not remain stagnant. A chronology of pleasant events that qualify for home is the way Alishae has described her sense of home. All of these observations are immersed in a sense of past, present, and future. The home has served some function in the past which gives us faith in its current security, and also in thinking about the future in how we may choose to embrace or reject this home. Moreover, a house can document a past life and bring back memories, which serves importantly as a time capsule for its inhabitant(s).

-place: it seems necessary that after all of the radical revisions of the definition of home, it must return to a discussion of home as a place. This does make sense, because people can only meet together, exchange ideas, and form connections within physical and/or virtual space. In this way, all of the above themes are contingent on this aspect. For all three authors they have never stayed in a single place, so home becomes a multiplicity. It seems that the more mobile we are, the less inclined we are to define home as a physical dwelling, because how potent is our connection to a place if we can pack our bags the very next day and create a new home out of an unknown place? Humans have proved time and time again that we can do so.

Works Cited:

Abeed, Alishae. “Home Is A Feeling.” ENG 470A: Canadian Studies. UBC Blogs. 05 June 2015. Web. 08 June 2015.

Grauman, Tai Amy. “Home?” eng oh canada. UBC Blogs. 06 June 2015. Web. 08 June 2015.

Yolande, Heidi. “Lesson 2:2.” sine loco. UBCBlogs. 06 June 2015. Web. 08 June 2015.