Agua

The water metaphor which was discussed in class is "culture is like water to a fish, it is absolutely essential and it permeates every single moment and action of a fish, but it is probably something a fish never ever sees or thinks about..just as our culture permeates our actions and actions without us realizing it." It was difficult for me to come up with an example of "water" in my life, but then it hit me. It was probably so hard for me to realize because it is actually just like water to a fish. I am always surrounded by it whether I'm the one using it or somebody else is. What I am talking about is technology. These days, no matter what, everybody is always somehow connected to technology. Everybody has cell phones. Everybody owns a computer or a laptop. Everybody has iPods. Everybody always has the choice to stay connected. Technology is always surrounding us.

I try to navigate the water, or technology, around me by staying respectful. Technology sometimes interferes with relationships. I have found myself having conversations with people, only to be interrupted with a text or call that they have recieved. I find that extremely disresepectul. Even though you do have the option to stay connected, it doesn't mean that you always have to respond to it. Sure, I love having the ability to shoot a text to my friends to see what they are doing or to just check in, but I don't think it is necessary to constantly be sitting on your phone or laptop to almost stalk people. Since when did it become so important to know what everybody else is doing? Why can't people just stay concentrated on their life and mind their own business? More than once, I have found myself annoyed with my phone. I have an iPhone, and I am obsessed with it. I know that I probably couldn't live without it. But sometimes I find myself ignoring it. I always have my iPhone on me, but there have been times where I just don't answer any of the calls or texts I have gotten. The fact that I do this actually bothers my friends about me. It's kind of funny but they have gotten mad at me when I don't answer their texts, but they don't understand that they shouldn't take it so personally. It's not like I am purposely ignoring them, I just don't want to talk to anybody. I want to stay in my own little bubble and worry about just myself and not feel the need to talk to everybody. I think that I behaviorally adjust to the cultural forces going on around me by setting my own guidelines and not conforming to the common belief that since you have the ability to answer to texts and calls, you have to respond to them.

Two values which I embrace are Individual Personality and Religiosity. I think that it is very important to be your own person and not confrom to everyone around you. I've been described by my friends more than once of being "real," and I take pride in that. I don't find it necessary to act differently around different groups of people. I am constantly true to myself. I think that I have my own style in the sense that I wear what I want. I have huge blonde curly hair and I embrace it. I'm goofy and I don't try to hide it. In my middle school days I would always straighten my hair because it was different, but now I embrace it. I like being my own person and having a unique personality. Along with embracing my Individual Personality, I also embrace Religiosity. Religion is every important in my life, and after going to a Christian summer camp two summers in a row, I learn that there is not reason to hide my religion. At camp I learned more about my Christian religion and how to share it with others. I also learned that people will have different viewpoints on religion and they sometimes may shut you down or treat you differently because of your beliefs, but I have learned how to deal with those and always stay true to my religion. Two values which I may creatively adjust to find my own hapiness would be Romantic Love and and Progress. I would first adjust Romantic Love to find my own hapiness because first of all, I don't think that all love needs to be romantic. I think that it is possible to be in love or love someone without it having to be romantic. Secondly, there is a quote that I like which is "Just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to doesn't mean that they don't love you with all they have." I think that is quote explains how you can adjust a value into your own. This quote is true, love doesn't always have to extremely romantic or the way that you pictured it, but you can adjust to it and it can then be just as perfect as you expected it to be. I would also adjust Progess. I chose progress because I think that progress has multiple interpretations. Progress for one person could be more or less the same for another person. I measure my progress after I set my own goals. Whether it be progress in the work environment, school environment, or with friends, I can change my progress and adjust it to how I am doing with my goals. So, I live by and adjust different sets of values depending on my outlook on life.

Infantilization

Before the discussion about infantilization a few weeks ago in class, I never really thought about how common it is to want to treat adults or even teens like children. The one place that kept coming into mind when thinking about infantilization was our own school. Stevenson is the epitome of treating it's students like little kids. I feel like we have more, crazier, security gaurds than some airports. Don't get me wrong, there are two security gaurds that I do love, but I always feel like the other ones are trying to find the smallest, stupidest thing we do wrong to get us into trouble. At lunch, security gaurds walk around and just stare at you and your friends while you are eating; your just eating! If you go into your bag and shuffle around looking for something, they will automatically come up and accuse you of texting. If you even need to share a chair with a friend at lunch because there aren't anymore chairs, they will yell at you and tell you to find a new one.. even if that is impossible. I understand that they are there to try to keep us all safe and to inforce the rules, but I think they take their jobs to the extreme. Also, so do some teachers. Teachers claim that we are in high school to learn to mature and get ready for the real world once we are out of high school, but if teachers continue treating us the way they are, it will be impossible to prepare for the real world. The first day of school my spanish teacher told our class that we aren't aloud to use the bathroom unless it is an emergancy. But one day when a kid clearly really needed to use the restroom and claimed that it was an emergancy, our teacher wouldn't let him. Who denies anybody the right to use the restroom? Even kids in preschool are aloud to use the restroom when they need to- they just need a supervisor to go with them. Atleast we don't need a teacher to come with us to the restroom, right? That's a plus. Maybe we are treated like this because they feel like since we are under their watch they need to have complete control. I don't know. But in my opinion, the faculty at our school should not claim that we are in high school to mature and prepare for our lives ahead of us, if we aren't even given the opportunity to do so.

Culture

So it has unfortunately taken me a while to spit another blog out, but I've finally got something to say. Our culture is obviously different than other cultures when it comes to our customs, language, and values. When I was thinking of some words/phrases/and sayings that we use compared to other cultures, the one word I came up with to describe it was sarcasm. When I started working at a restaurant as a hostess, I met a busser who was from Columbia. He didn't speak much english because he had just moved to America, but I managed to learn just a little bit about him. He had told me that he moved here by himself to stay with his Aunt and Uncle to make money for his family who still lives in Columbia. Recently, however, he has improved his English dramatically and I am able to carry on hour long conversations with him. I asked him how he learned English so well and he said he learned it just by talking to other people in English. When I asked if it was hard to learn, he laughed and said that it was incredibly hard, because there are so many words that have different meanings. He also mentioned that he had a hard time understanding people at first when they were being sarcastic. When he said that it clicked into my head that we had a discussion about this in class, and how real it is in our society today. As I was driving home I was thinking about how hard it would be to enter a new country, without parents, not speaking the native language. I think that we use sarcasm in our language because we have gotten so comfortable with eachother we don't think about the double meanings to what we say. When people say "Shutup!" or "I hate you!" that can be understood more ways than one. I was walking in the hallway last thursday and I heard one girl yelling "Shutup! I hate you!" when she was trying to flirt with another boy, but then I turned the corner and somebody yelled "Shutup!" and it was apparent that they were actually mad at the person they were yelling it to. To somebody just entering our culture and trying to adapt to the language, it would be very difficult to understand the meanings behind our words if we were all always sarcastic. Before my friend from Columbia learned was even the word sarcasm was, he was confused. Obviously people won't ever stop being sarcastic; I don't think that it is always bad. But I do think that it is important for people to think before they speak to different people, because what they say could be taken the wrong way.

Social Construction of Reality in "A Bronx Tale"

In the film "A Bronx Tale," the neighborhood that Collegero, or "C", grew up in was socially contructed based on the environment and the people that occupied it. There were no written rules to help with the construction of the community, but everybody who lived there knew them. In my opinion, one of the people who played a significant role on the rules and expectations of the community was Sonny. Sonny had the master power to help with whatever was needed, or to kill whatever was needed. However, Sonny's power didn't come about out of respect and admiration, but it was the outcome of fear. Under the fear of Sonny, people knew to respect him, and to respect everybody else that Sonny would want you to respect. The community knew that if Sonny asked for something to be done, it had to be done. They knew that they could not deny Sonny of anything that he asked, because there would be a consequence. Also, it was known that the African Americans and the Italians did not get along, and they weren't supposed to interact. I think that this came about because of racism and because of just following what the rest of the people in the community were doing. Nobody thought to step out and befriend people of that race, so when C met Jane, an African American girl, C thought that there was going to me some issues. He thought that both the community and Sonny would judge him and there would be severe consequences for him having interest in an African American. However, Sonny threw a curveball when C told him about Jane, and Sonny told him to go for it. That is another example of how Sonny had power over the community. Basically, whatever Sonny said goes, and if he approved, everything seemed okay. Sonny was the dominant character with forming the construction of the community in the film. Sonny had the power to control the community because everybody feared him. They feared that if they stepped out of line, their lives would be more difficult or would even be put into danger. Sonny had the group and the connections to basically rule, so the took advantage of it. Without a figure like Sonny, I think the rough community would lack protection. Sure there would be police to help, but I believe the neighborhood would be more dangerous. So, overall, the community was formed by Sonny taking charge, and everybody was secretly greatful for having somebody look over them.

Abandon Ship

Last week, we did a boat activity where we had to chose who was to get booted off of the stranded boat. Surprisingly, a lot of the characters I thought were to stay and which characters I thought were to leave, didn't. The character I was playing was Quarter Master MacDonald, and little was known about me. My role sheet said that I served in the navy, and I suffered injuries to both of my hands from an explosion to the point where I couldn't use them. I was married, and I had four children in the U.S. 

When we started, it was surprising to me when the rest of the shipmates chose to kick off characters like the pregnant women and her husband, or the fat self-made millionaire. In my opinion, those two characters were equally important as the man who was going to release important information to the public to help with the world's ecology problem. But, in the rest of the shipmate's eyes, people like the pregnant women and the fat man were not important just because they didn't seem to have any important reasons to stay; they didn't have anything to offer to the world. Maybe the pregnant women was so important to me because not only would she be taking her own life, but also her unborn baby as well. As for the husband, I think that he chose to go too because they are a pair- they are young and in love and one cannot live without the other. As for the self-made millionaire, he chose to leave because he was a little overweight and thought he was taking up too much room. I feel that today we are all so quick to judge people based on their outer appearance rather than people's worth. This man must have been brilliant to become as successful as he had, yet he was thrown off because of his body and not because of his brains. Along with my character, I was thrown off for the same reason. Nobody knew anything about me, making me useless to society. Also, my hands didn't work, so I was useless to the shipmates. 

Tying this activity back to the discussion we recently had about stereotypes, I feel that this process of judgement and dismissal occurs everyday within society. Within the first 7 seconds of meeting somebody, our initial impressions are made. Whether these impressions are that the person is fat, tall, skinny, mean, caring, funny- they aren't based off of any factual information. They are just made because of what we see, or because of what we have heard.  I think that the same thing happened on the boat. We got on the boat, read everybody's description, and then chose who we were going to kick off based on the two or three sentences about them. I think that is why the fat guy was thrown off, and I was thrown off, the person with useless hands, and the elderly people were thrown off-  we all thought that those people weren't anything to society or they weren't as important to save because of their outer appearance. 

I liked this activity because it was based on a true story, and we also got to experience how people act and how people justify their choices. Every person had a reason in their own mind as to why they wanted to throw somebody off. But nobody had a legitimate reason that would truly make it okay to throw that person off the boat in real life. All of the reasons were based off of judgement, and I find it interesting how everything our class has talked about is beginning to tie back together to form a bigger picture, and I'm looking forwards to the next discussion to see how it relates as well.

Freaks and Geeks

The show Freaks and Geeks that we watched was funny, serious, and also opened my eyes. It was interesting to me because at Stevenson, I really don't think groups like that exist. Sure, there are different groups of friends who hang out with each other more than others, but I don't think that those groups are classified as simply the "freaks" and "geeks." The groups of friends at Stevenson are all mixed and have different labels. I think that if they were filming at Stevenson, they would have groups such as: the athletes, kids involved in theater, kids not involved in anything, the staff, and maybe even the freshman would have their own group, because they are always the newbies and everybody is interested in the new "bait." 

I think that in the "Stevenson World," the staff would have power over the students, and the different grade levels would have power over the younger grades. Clearly, the staff would have power over the students because they run the place and expect us to treat them with respect. If we don't though, they have more power out of anybody to punish us or warn us for the future.  Also, I think that each grade has power over the younger grade because we each feel like we have more experience and we are wiser than the younger grade. For some reason, that makes us feel like we are better than somebody younger than us.

I'm not sure if I know what important symbols there are for the Stevenson society, but if I'd have to chose one I would say our mascot, the Patriot. I think that it represents a strong, powerful individual.  By attending Stevenson, each student becomes a Patriot, and therefore must represent who and what we are.

So, hopefully we can watch more episodes of "Freaks and Geeks" that relate to our lives and our class in the future, and I'll be able to blog about those then too!

Who am I?

For starters, my name is Erika and I am finally a senior this year! and I'm looking forwards to graduating highschool and moving on with my life. I am a generally caring, sincere, and loud (depending on my comfort level with my surroundings). I find myself to bethe happiest I can be when I am somewhere on a beach. This summer I went to Hawaii for two weeks, and it was probably the two best weeks of my life. I spent my days waking up early (gasp) and surfing and spending time with my family. In the winter to keep myself occupied, I love to go snowboarding with all of my girlfriends. Also, music is a big part of my life too. Each month I find myself obsessed with a new band or song, and I'm always relating my life to the songs I'm into. This week, I've been listening to my friend's band 'Good Luck Jane' on repeat, and you can check them out on iTunes or at www.myspace.com/goodluckjane. I'm also heavily influenced by my parents and my three best girlfriends. Since they are who I am constantly interacting with, I am able to grow, learn to know who I am, and who I want to be, based off of our experiences and views on life. Well, that's it now! gooooodbye.