On Purpose

 “it is the messy complexity of human experience that leads researchers to case studies in the qualitative or interpretive tradition” (3)

“an object (or person) does not have a fixed meaning” (5)

While I was reading On The Case and came across those two quotes I was thinking about several things in the background. I think I’ve been something like a case studier for a while without knowing it. I remember it happening in middle school, I would people watch a lot. In the middle of class id be looking around wondering what other people were thinking about. Especially if they were paying attention to class. I would usually come to the conclusion that I had A.D.D or something was wrong with me because everyone else was paying attention to class, and I was paying attention to them, and trying to imagine what they could be thinking about it. I still do it now, I wonder what it’s like thinking in a different pattern, other than my own. Then when I went to UTSA I took a philosophy of language class and we talked about a philosopher ( ill go look up his name later) who spoke about quasi-communication. He said the reality of the world was that we can never know someone’s mind, what they’re thinking and what meaning is to them. That the truth was, we were indeed all alone, in our minds, because the closest thing we could do to share our mind was considered quasi-communication. Unless I could implant what was in my mind into yours, you will never know what anything means to me.

 I remember thinking that means everything is pointless, because nobody knows anything about anything and we can’t share anything about anything, because everything means something different to everyone. “an object (or person) does not have a fixed meaning” (5)

It reminds me of the first time I learn what the word purpose meant.  I was in pre-k and we were playing simon says. And simon had said to lay on your side and kick your feet like your swimming. So I did, and my best little friend Jessica was behind me and I kicked her in the face.  She started crying, everyone stopped, and my teacher grabbed me in that perfectly soft spot by your elbow were it stings when it’s pinched. She took me to the side and situated me in front of her, but didn’t bend down so I had to look up to her. She asked me “Did you do that on purpose or on accident?”  I was an only child and had, at that point, never accidently or purposely done anything as far as I knew. So in my head I did ennie-minnie-minni-moe in order to choose my fate. I landed on purpose.

So I told my teacher I did it on purpose.

The word purpose for me means lots of things. And every time I hear that word I think about kicking Jessica in the face, being dragged off by my elbow by my teacher, and having to chose a word for my actions. I had to choose a meaning for what I did, and my meaning, what I was experiencing, didn’t have words to match with the outside worlds meaning. The way my teacher had asked me, as if the word purpose and accident was something that everyone should have already known, scared me out of asking what those words meant. Because she made me feel like those words were solid, but they weren’t to me. So I just chose one randomly to stop the questions and to go wallow in the guilt of kicking my best friend in the face. After that I wondered if I had done it on purpose without knowing it, since that’s the word I landed on when I was debating in my head.

Sometimes I get tripped up on meaning making and what things mean to people. I often find myself coming back to this quote from 1984 by George Orwell “He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one”. Everything does mean something different to everyone and maybe I will never know anything about anything. But I still find myself trying to understand.

“Through collecting observations, talking with other people, and collecting artifacts, case study researchers aim to enter into other people’s ‘imaginative universes’. That is, they aim to construct interpretations of other people’s interpretations- of others’ ‘real worlds’” (18)