Javier A. Tabush

Essay #1
 

Through out these two first weeks of the MPC I figured out many things, some I found interesting, and some I didn’t. I found myself in different situations and used different learning techniques by myself and also during group work. I feel that these past two weeks haven’t been as interesting as I thought they would be, well at least the dialogues, it has been very hard for me stay on task and to understand the information that I am receiving.
 

My favorite class so far is the drawing class with Kassandra. I feel like I can really express myself during that time, and connect with my inner self at the same time that I’m drawing. It actually doesn’t matter how the final outcome turns out, but the process of making that final drawing, just like everything in life. If you make your best through out anything you do during your life, the final result doesn’t really matter, though it will probably be a positive one.
 

I watched a movie recently, a French movie, called UNTOUCHABLES, and I would really like to share it with the MPC, for many reasons. First of all, there is a lot of classical music in it, very beautiful music which I’ve never really appreciated before, but the MPC and this movie specifically has helped me. Second of all, because it’s in French, and I really like foreign language movies because the fact that it is spoken in a different language, gives a little extra, and you really have to dig inside the movie. Lastly, because it leaves an incredible message, which you will find out after watching it. As the movie started, I knew already that I was going to relate it to the MPC, because those “AHA” moments have been happening ever since we started in September.
 

During one of our dialogues with Bert, we had to build a chair. We were given all the different parts with a set of instructions and we built it. Afterwards we all sat down in the same dialogue circle and discussed a text about the different points of view between naturalists and physicists. I can relate this with our drawing class with Kassandra, because she gave us a task which was also about different points of view. She gave us an upside down picture of Hayek, and we had to draw it from top to bottom, part by part. At the end we all had different results from the same original picture we were given at the beginning of the class. This is exactly like the chair. We were all sitting down around the same exact chair, but had different points of views of it.
 

Related to the chair building, we also had a discussion about systems, and during our meta-dialogue, I feel that that was the topic that we wondered around the most. What is a system? We came up with the following definition: “A system is a set of functions that work together under a set of rules”. That is why I related it to the chair, which is pretty self explanatory after developing the definition.
 

We talked about past, and how we need to learn about our past to learn about our present and about our future. This is completely related to a movie we watched during the first semester called “Shooting the past”. It showed us how a set of varied and different photos tell thousands and thousands of stories from the past, and how those stories that are figured out, help the characters understand certain events from the present.
 

I feel that everyone’s past is amazing; we just have to really look through it, and there are many ways to do it. Archeology (like the Chilean movie we watched), through photography (like in “Shooting the past”), through books, essays, and the most important of all, through documentation, which is a term that covers all of the other resources. Documentation is something that I didn’t use to do, and due to the MPC, I now do. I’d never realized how important was to document everything. In my case, I don’t like documenting every single detail of every single day, but I do like documenting things that impact me during my weeks at the MPC, and not only during the MPC, also outside of it, just like the movie I mentioned.
 

I forgot to mention another movie I recently watched called “Cloud Atlas”, which talks about serendipity, how everything is connected. I can relate this amazing movie, to this essay I’m writing right now, relating everything I learned in two weeks to things outside the MPC, inside of it, around it, and basically everything that happens throughout my life.