Place of Mind

When I was a kid, computers started to be released for a reasonable price and were common in households. I would look at them as a place to play solitaire and nothing more. I would think of computers as a place to escape from reality and just do whatever I want. I would look at computers as the future and complicated. They were messy with a lot of cables and too large and heavy to move once you placed it down. Now they can be made a lot more compact and simpler than before. Once I looked into computers I realized that they were just like the human body. The wires in a computer are the veins and arteries of the whole build connecting everything and making sure it all gets power. Once you break it all down it is not too complicated like separating the body into all of the body systems. They all have their purpose, but when you get into the specifics and the scientific names you get lost. After looking at computers for years I have gotten complacent in thinking I know a lot about them, but just like our brains we don't know it all. We have only scratched the surface of what we know, but there is more that we have not found out about. I have not learned everything, I have only scratched the surface and learned the basics. As I learn more I become a better human and am able to relay my wisdom to other people that can use their wisdom combined with others to better society and the world.

As Roland Barthe put it in his excerpt from "Camera Lucide" the punctum is what pops out and catches your attention immediately when you look at an image. The first picture shows a bunch of complex things that most people won't know about. It screams headache to the viewer and reasonably so. A computer or even a laptop is something every uses. A typical college student normally has their macbook and coffee in class typing away. Some people have computers to play video games. Your phone is a miniature computer that is portable. A computer can be used for many things and has many purposes. People have many purposes, some people are doctors and help save people and others are businessmen that keep the world spinning and economy working.

The large piece at the bottom of the first picture works the same as a brain. The box with the bright red letters on it saying ASRock B450M-HDV R4.0 has the motherboard in it, without getting into the specifics and getting lost in the names of all the parts, is essentially the base of an entire computer. It is connected to every other piece and sends signals to every other component to let them know what to do. Without your brain your body wouldn't be able to function. When you think about it and look deeper you can go back to the factory where each piece was built and all of the people and machines that have worked together to construct it. It took an entire company and team to come up with the idea of a motherboard and computer. They all worked together, some may have hated each other and some may have enjoyed working on it, to achieve a goal. In relation to the factory, you can go back decades and centuries to trace your ancestors and roots of where you came from. You can go back thousands of years to see if you came from a different country or continent or to see if your family had a lot of money or worked hard to get some money.

At first glance, the picture of the computer case may have no meaning at all, but once you look into it it shows that at the beginning it is empty. The computer case is empty until you put things in it just like our brain. Our brain is not literally empty, but it does not have information about a certain topic until we look into it and apply ourselves. Your body and brain is like a glass. The more you learn the more you grow and the more your glass fills. Once we apply ourselves and put ourselves in a position to learn about something we become more full as a person. We learn more and use that to advance to the next step. Just as the saying goes "You learn something new every day."

The keyboard may look like a normal picture of a keyboard for a computer. It is not any fancy one, it just has lights in it that light up and give it a little added effect. The lights do not change the general idea of a keyboard. When I first got this keyboard I would just type randomly to hear the sound the keys make and see how the keyboard felt so that I could get used to it. Now, every single time I go on my computer and use my keyboard I don't think anything of it. Anyways, when you first look at the picture of the keyboard, the punctum, you see that there are just a bunch of letters scattered around on keys. But there is more to it than just letters. It goes back hundreds and thousands of years to when the alphabet was created so that people could create words to communicate to each other. Back to when keyboards were invented in the 1800's and when typewriters were invented to be able to type things on a piece of paper and send it to their family and friends.

The puzzle most likely looks like a random puzzle that is not even close to being done. The puzzle is of a man with his white horse heading towards a bridge that they have to cross to get to a city of castles. That can represent plenty of things, but the first thing that probably comes to mind is the idea of going on a long journey to achieve a goal. On the journey to achieve your goal you will encounter obstacles or a bridge that you will have to cross. The bridge may be an injury that stops you from playing your favorite sport or failing a class and having to retake it to pass it the second time and move on. Once you cross that bridge you can then get closer to the castles, glory, and joy of achieving your goal. After a long day of retaining complex information that I look at on a day-to-day basis, I relax and can come home and try to put together a puzzle. Doing this can help keep my brain moving and working even when I am not learning. Puzzles help me with my problem-solving skills and time management skills. When I am on my way to achieve something there may be something that is in my way and I have to overcome. I have practiced overcoming obstacles while putting together a puzzle when I don't know which piece goes where. In life I may want to only spend my time doing puzzles or playing video games, but what I have learned from doing puzzles when I am stuck on one piece, is that I don't want to spend too much time on one thing because then I can get lost and won't be able to move on.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill & Wang, 1980, pp. 16-59. Composition Flipped, writing101.net/flip/wp-content/resources/documents/camera_lucida_excerpt.pdf.