Assignment 9

My E-Prime Day

According to certain medical specialists my mother appears to have bleeding in her brain. They also claim she appears to have a blood clot in her heart. Based on my impression of her when I visited her on the weekend, she seemed extremely weak and sick. Her doctors seem to think that she will die of a stroke or a heart attack. At this present time, it appears there is nothing they can do about it. Due to the circumstances I feel sad, worried and distracted.

Can I synthesize East and West?

The first thing that comes to mind is a recent exercise I learned in my Qi Gong class. It was a tonification exercise in which we brought Qi into our bodies. While doing this exercise, we visualized that various parts of our bodies were glowing with white light, like a light bulb. Each time we brought more Qi into our bodies, we visualized that we were turning up the electricity, so to speak, in order to make our light glow more brightly. This may be an obscure example, but I thought it was interesting that we were doing an Eastern exercise while visualizing Western concepts such as light bulbs and electricity.

Eastern and Western influences are often combined in cuisine. I am reminded of a horrible example of East/West fusion that I experienced in a restaurant in Maine last year. I ordered a salad with Cajun chicken, black beans and raw greens. When I tasted it, I discovered it had soy sauce on it. I called it “Asian-Cajun fusion”. Needless to say, it wasn’t good. Of course there are plenty of wonderful examples of cuisine which blends flavors from the East and the West. This was just not one of them.

Another example of how the East and West come together is in music. There are several artists both Western and Eastern who combine elements of various cultures into their music. One example that comes to mind is Asha Puthli. She synthesizes jazz, disco, rock and Indian music into an exotic and original musical style.