21 Questions

TITLE: Its My Birthday!

TOPIC: Self

SOURCE: My thoughts and conversations the weeks leading up to my 21st birthday as I go about my daily life at home, work, and school.

RELATION: The Robbins textbook describes identity as a construction of culture and multifaceted view of self. This interacts with positive and negative views of the same self.

DESCRIPTION: I am one of the first of my friends to turn 21. Last month I had a roomie turn 21 and he literally went crazy. He started drinking every day because he now could and engaged in self destructive behavior that literally led to a shift in the chemical balance in his brain. He was so confused about who he was and what he was doing here. I didn't ge why his twenty first birthday was so pivotal to his identity that achieving this milestone so greatly altered his state of mind.

Tomorrow is my twenty first birthday and now I know a lot of what he felt. It's scary getting old. I feel like I have been waiting all my life to reach this age and now its all downhill. In conversations, I was really excited up until recently. As the date looms, I have been getting increasingly uneasy. Others keep telling me they can't wait till I can buy them beer and alcohol. I felt like I was too young for anything and now it's not an important date at all. This is so odd because I never realized my age was so connected to my identity. Even a couple months difference can drastically change how a person perceives their self. The ability to legally buy alcohol and go clubbing is not as important as it once was. Give me my youth back!

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: Aspects of our lives affect our identity without us ever realizing it. In the space of a month I have gone from a confident and excited youthful self to anxiously awaiting old age. You never realize the different integral parts of our identity until you are confronted with great change. 

Society affects our perception of self in crazy ways. We don't realize the media feeds us that we are inadequate due to our age. Our inability to buy alcohol make us think we can not have fun. I never realized that until I could buy alcohol that it isn't that fun after all. And I haven't even had my birthday yet.

The "S" word

TOPIC: Sex


SOURCE: An uncomfortable conversation between an acquaintance and myself in my living room last night around eleven at night. This was our first meeting in many months and she was talking my ear off. This acquaintance is a bit lost on social norms and taboos at times so this conversation shouldn't have come so much as a shock to me.


RELATION: As illustrated in Chapter 5 of our Robinson textbook, cultures do not agree on sexual norms. The traditional Chinese cultural norm viewed sex as a tool for creating male heirs while the other two cultures described in the chapter enjoyed sex and viewed it as not even necessarily directly related to procreation. This conversation I was unfortunately a participant in is an example of one viewpoint of American sexual standards that led me to ponder American sexual standards in general. 
 

DESCRIPTION: I like to think I'm a friendly laid-back kind of a person, but there are some people that really test my tolerance levels. One acquaintance, let's nickname her "A" for the sake of anonymity, is one of those people. As a result, I have done my best not to spend too much time alone with her. This has worked out pretty well for me the last couple of months due to the fact I'm ridiculously busy with school and I literally haven't seen this girl since January. Yesterday, this all ended when she appeared at my house with one of my room mates and baking supplies. They had decided to make cherry pies for the house. Now don't get me wrong, A is really quite nice. She doesn't mean to be annoying or embarrassing, it's just a part of who she is. At times, she really goes out of her way to be a sweet and caring friend. When that happens you momentarily forget why you avoid her and don't invite her over more often. But then she opens her mouth and ruins it.
It all started with a joke she found on facebook or some other trendy website she likes going on. Something along the lines of "My girlfriend thinks I'm being a little cocky, well I can show her a little cocky! Wait...". I laughed a little bit for this one, it was about the hundredth she had read us, but somehow she felt I reacted more strongly to this one than the rest and posted in on my boyfriends facebook profile. I felt this was odd, but aside from protesting I couldn't very well hack her account. When my boyfriend came back from work he laughed it off and made a joke about threesomes, including an open invitation to me and A. A proceeded to further this joke by adding all the things she wanted to do with us, graphically. I was put off by this, maybe I'm just not sexually expressive or experimental because the thought of a threesome just sounds like a lot of work and is awkward to me. My boyfriend, who would love nothing better than to say yes to her proposals, even seemed a little out of his element by this time and made some comment about me probably not being comfortable with that. Then A bursts out "You know, that's how I always wanted to lose my virginity, in a three-way. Oh my god, I forgot to tell you Sarah! I finally lost my virginity." Thank you, A. I did not want to know that. Then she proceeded to try and tell me every detail. I really do mean every detail, this girl has no filter. Despite the fact I clearly did not want to hear about her sexual milestone, I now know quite a bit about it, except for the guys name or who he is.




COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: 
I know this sounds odd, but I only care about the sex lives of people I don't know. Honestly though, a lot of us are that way. We read tabloids and watch tv shows chronicling the sexual exploits of celebrities and fictional characters but one mention of our neighbors, coworkers, or parents having sex can turn us red with embarrassment in five seconds flat. Sex talk is very much taboo in our social parameters, talked about in whispers behind closed doors. The media, however, glorifies it. 
My parents are severely strict followers of the Christian faith. We never talked about sex in my family. Ever. My father said things like "Never let a boy touch your 'no no place' " and "Cover your 'tata's' or you'll look like your cousin". What does that even mean to a five year old? My mother never even attempted to breach this topic until I came back from college and she abruptly started sharing stories of old flames and thirty year old gossip. It was terribly awkward and I was not equipped to handle that kind of exchange. Clearly, as my conversation with A shows, I am still very uncomfortable talking about sex. 

21 Jump Street

 How They Were In High School

How They Were in High School Undercover

TITLE: Watching a Movie Because it Starred Channing "Sex God" Tatum  
 
TOPIC: Interpretive Drift

SOURCE: Yesterday at 9pm at the Broadway Cinema in Eureka, I and three friends watched this hilarious movie. Laughter rang through out the relatively packed theater as the audience identified with the story which ironically details two men as they undergo interpretive drift and come to realize the affects of it is messing with their friendship.

RELATION: The movie synopsis is
"In the action-comedy 21 Jump Street, Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) are more than ready to leave their adolescent problems behind. Joining the police force and the secret Jump Street unit, they use their youthful appearances to go undercover in a local high school. As they trade in their guns and badges for backpacks, Schmidt and Jenko risk their lives to investigate a violent and dangerous drug ring. But they find that high school is nothing like they left it just a few years earlier - and neither expects that they will have to confront the terror and anxiety of being a teenager again and all the issues they thought they had left behind."
The movie is about them adjusting to the new culture of high schoolers which demonstrates “the slow, often unacknowledged shift in someone’s manner of interpreting events as he or she becomes involved with a particular activity.” RR Chapter 4 p. 94-95


DESCRIPTION: My friend Monica had been begging me to go see the movie Mirror Mirror for a couple of weeks now and I was pretty game to watch it. However, my boyfriend and our friend Tyler didn't share Monica's sentiments and we ended up seeing 21 Jump Street instead. I was looking forward to it because I love Channing Tatum and I have been itching to see a good comedy. We got our tickets, popcorn, and extra large ICEE and hightailed it to the theater where there was a bit of a crowd already. We sat near the front and waited for the Previews to come on. I have often found that Previews are more entertaining than movies, and more often than not better than the actual movies they advertise. The Previews were so good it got me pumped for the movie and I was not disappointed. The movie was amazing. Channing Tatum was ever handsome but Dave Franco even gave him a run for my heart. But what bugged me was how during the entire movie I would recognize cultural anthropology terms. One that kept coming up for this movie was "interpretive drift". As the movie progressed, the characters played by Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill begin morphing into high school stereotypes to match their respective classes and social circles.This goes unacknowledged until the climatic point of the movie where it causes severe conflict in their relationship.


COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: The movie was a classic case study of interpretive drift used for entertainment purposes. Through my experience in Cultural Anthropology I can now identify this. As a result of this movie, I can see how this applies in my life as well. In high school I underwent interpretive drift. I started out a little book worm. Then I joined Color Guard and became a bit of a band geek. I began to observe the world differently and act differently. I like to think for the better because I gained a lot of confidence and interpersonal skills. But then college created an entirely new view of the world for me and I underwent interpretive drift again.