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"Introduce yourself" sounds like such a simple instruction, but -- after having to do it for much of this week -- I am finding myself less and less sure of how to go about the task. What do people want to know about me? I inevitably end up rambling off a mini-autobiography of myself each time I am asked who I am -- but surely this is too much. So I offer you this: my name is Julie Gorham, and I am a current McBride student at Bryn Mawr College. If you would like to hear, or read my mini-autobiography, come find me, or send me an email and I'll be happy to oblige. 

For the purpose of this course, however, I am speculating that the most pertinent information about myself is why I signed up, and what I hope to achieve from it. In other words, who I am as a student. It is, after all, the student in me who hits the snooze button, then reminds herself that Einstein, or Elizabeth I, had the same number of hours in their days as I do in mine, and this sort of behavior simply won't do! I chose this course because, whilst I am intrigued by most things in life, I am particularly interested in people, cultures and societies, and how they change. How do we interact with one another? How do we learn from one another? How do we structure ourselves as groups? How do we maintain individual identity in the face of these structures? How do we manifest that? An example of such manifestation, in yesterday's class, would be that the vast majority of us (myself included) provided some form of cultural reference when discussing our individual selves. We identified, defined, and shared reference points with others, that provided an association with a larger group of people. In fact, often individuals associated their uniqueness with a cultural conglomerate. As an audience member, references made by others sparked my curiosity and (as I later discovered) provoked me to subconsciously affiliate any former relation I might have had with the culture being presented to the person identifying with it. As a speaker, I made my own references to serve as explanations for why I might be different to some, or most people in the room, as well as suggesting that my differences here are similarities (and thus, belong) elsewhere. Yet, after all of our differences were highlighted, many of us came up with the same, or similar immediate responses to the word "evolution." Situations with results like that fascinate me. As the course presents me with other situations like this, I hope to become a more receptive, and comprehensive listener; I hope to become better at identifying the sorts of relations I have spoken of, as well as discovering new ones; and I hope to improve as a writer, and teller of stories. Perhaps, after this semester, I will be able to mellifluously introduce myself!

Alright: a creation story. I choose J. R. R. Tolkein's creation myth, Music of the Ainer. I find the notion of creation via cerebration, and then music imaginatively appealing, and the concepts  and effects of harmony and discordance philosophically intriguing.

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Music_of_the_Ainur