Social Ideals

Hi guys!

So I successfully made it through exams. Yay!!! However, what's weird is that 1/8 of my college career is now over; that's kind of a scary thought for me.

Anyways, as I was studying for biology, I came across a thought that was popular during Aristotle's time called typological thinking. Basically, typological thought says that each species has an ideal and all species are striving for that ideal. This thought gained strength through statues and paintings like Michelangelo's "David" and Botticelli's "Birth of Venus." (or if you are da Vinci, the "Mona Lisa") Now lets fast forward into present day. When I first heard about this in class, I simply took it as a random fact I had to learn to do well on the exam. However, after studying I realized that our society sort of follows this thought process too. Sure we don't express this thought via classic statues and paintings of naked men and women and call them a representation of the gods, but through our magazines, TV shows, movies, and fashion shows we create a subconscious ideal figure that most people try to achieve. For women, society tells us that the ideal woman is a size 0 or 2 with a toned and tan body, big boobs, and a firm butt. She doesn't have blemishes, a bad hair day, and is always wearing the perfect cute outfit. Men, society tells us, are supposed to be tall, have defined muscles, a protector, a defined chin, and be able to "bring home the bacon."

But how does this make the people who don't fit that description feel? On December 14, Victoria Secret had their annual fashion show; a show that was self-proclaimed, "the sexiest night on television." 10.3 million viewers watched this show and it proved to be the most successful fashion show since 2002. But as a result of all those models strutting half naked down the cat walk, I saw status updates about how girls at my old high school think they need to go to the gym and stop eating. Some of my friends started posting a status saying that people should boycott the show so as to stop people from thinking this is what they have to become. Its not even just supermodels but also the actors and actresses of Hollywood. Sure there are a few actors who use the fact that they are overweight to their advantage but the majority of celebrities out there constantly have to watch their weight and appearance also. One fashion faux pas and the paparazzi is going to be all over them.

This social pressure we put on ourselves and others can be scary. I don't think eating disorders existed when typological thinking first began but obviously we as a human race have taken it a little too far. We will never stop looking up to people and that's completely fine for idols and heroes are a big part of a person's childhood but that idolization should not be taken to the extent of harming our health and self esteem so that others will like us more.

Comment if you have seen some horrifying example of what our society has done with regards to body image.

Thanks guys and I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season!

You Don't Know What You've Got 'Til It's Gone

Hi guys,

Yes I know that the title for this post is a total cliche but I don't care because there really isn't any other way I could describe this. So you guys know that I'm in my freshman year of college. To be more specific, the fall semester of my freshman year is coming to a close and that's causing me to reflect a little bit about my past.

So everyone knows that when you go to college, you have to pretty much make new friends. I'm lucky in that I came to school with some of my friends from high school but because I'm in the honors college, I'm forced to technically make a new set of friends because I live and learn with the honors kids more than my old friends. I would love for these two groups to come together ("come together, right now, over me") but I never truly made a connection with the people in the honors college. I know that it's partly my fault for hanging out with my old friends more than the new ones but the things I say with the honors college kids don't get the same amount of appreciation or for that matter acknowledgement. It also doesn't help that I was introduced to these people by my roommate and so it feels like they think I'm tagging along because I  don't have any other friends. When I'm with my old friends I feel like I can be as weird, nerdy, or crazy as I want to be and they will laugh and join in. If I were to do that with the honors college kids, I would feel like they are judging me. 

Now don't get me wrong, I have become close to a handful of people here in the honors college, but things still aren't the same. And I guess the main reason is because I've only known them for 4 months when I'm comparing them to friends I've known for at least 4 years. Now that sentence contains my next biggest flaw, I'm comparing friends. When it comes down to it, everyone is different (cliche and cheesy, I know) and no one can truly replace the connections and inside jokes I've made with my friends from high school. But as a person who's still trying to adjust to the ways of life in college, it's almost human nature to try and replace what has worked for you for so long. I mean, change is awesome and greatly needed at times, but if you're feeling nostalgic and a little homesick, wouldn't you try to make things like they were?

I guess in conclusion, I just want to say that I never really realized how much I would miss my friends. The main reason for that is because I figured that if I'm going to a school that a lot of my friends are going to also then I wouldn't really get the chance to miss them. But the 4 people with me in college can't even begin to make up for the other 15-20 people that made up my high school group.

Sorry for the depressing post, guys. Comment below if you're going through or have gone through something similar. What did you try to do to fix it?

Bye and DFTBA!

Oh, the Internet

Hello again!

I seemed to have developed a trend of posting something everyday but I just wanted to warn you guys to not get lulled into the belief that I will update this blog that often. Exams are coming up for me so I'm not going to have a lot of time to update this blog in the coming weeks.

Going back to the main purpose of this post, lately I have been watching a lot of YouTube videos which gave me many ideas for what I can say in this blog, but one consistent thing that has popped up is the amazingness of the internet. Emilythebravee posted a video talking about how through YouTube she was able to meet some of her now closest friends that she pretty much only met for once in real life at Vidcon (link to the video: http://youtu.be/NZw5X2cpyVM). This got me to thinking about the Vlogbrothers and the community that has developed simply because two brothers wanted to keep in contact with each other from across the country in another form other then text. (Keep in mind this is before skype, facetime, or other forms of video chat.) Now this community, called Nerdfighteria, has grown exponentially and does amazing things like donating money to build a well in a third world country. The goal to reduce "world suck" has continued to new leaps and bounds as more and more people are getting inspired by the Vlogbrothers and finding the courage to start blogs or vlogs on the internet. I don't want to attribute these awesome communities to just the Vlogbrothers but to also pretty much anyone who uses the (almost scary) power of the Internet. Rather than posting videos of people doing stupid things and hurting themselves, amazing programs have developed like P4A (Project for Awesome.) And not only are these communities able to do good in the world, but they are able to help people get more confident and find friends that they normally would not have had in their real life. With the Internet you can be whoever you want to be and that power is so freeing. Sure things can become harsh when people bully, (and trust me I'm not saying that cyberbullying is a small thing at all) but if you are able to put things like that behind you or even become part of a community like Nerdfighteria that encompasses so many different websites and people posting videos or blog entries to just have fun, then you'll learn that there is a world outside of what happens in your daily life. There are so many people in the world struggling with the situations given to them and our world doesn't really offer many ways to escape those problems. But with the Internet these struggling people can find an outlet, a world that doesn't include unemployment, abuse, or the other many flaws that our society frowns upon. With the Internet, no one has to know about the dirty details of your past if you don't want them to. You can create a whole new persona to essentially escape into, via the Internet. This new persona, however, needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Because, we can't escape too far from our reality otherwise situations could just become worse. There's no point in wasting our lives by keeping our horrible situations the same if and when we have the opportunity to fix them. Who knows, maybe its through the Internet that people find ways to fix their problems whether it be financial, physical, or emotional. Of course, the Internet is not a magical fix-all for the horrible situations in our world, but for just one moment maybe we can pretend it is.

I hope you guys had a good weekend!

"I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT MY PHONE!!"

Hi guys!

So yesterday I was riding in the car on my way to a Christmas party and my friend who was driving was telling me about how the last time she used her GPS it took her down a road that the GPS probably thought would connect to her final destination but in actuality it didn't. Once she realized this, she had no idea what to do. Which is understandable seeing as she was driving in the dark in an area that she didn't know. Obviously if the GPS couldn't guide her to her final destination, she didn't want to trust it to get her on the right track. Luckily for her, she called some her friends who were trying to get to the same house and she eventually found her way. But this got me thinking: how in the world did we get so reliant on technology that we can't even get from destination 1 to destination 2 without a GPS? Granted my friend had never been to that house before but what happened to the days where people would sail the globe by looking at the coastline and the stars.

Now I'm not much better then my friend because just 15 minutes ago, my phone wasn't responding, like the screen was black and no buttons I pushed did anything. I had been FaceTiming with a friend (clue to the type of phone I have) and he had to go. So since he called me, my phone automatically shuts the screen off just like all iPhone's do. Then I had to text one of my friends but when I pressed the home button nothing happened. Now the home button had been a little glitchy lately and so I just tried the sleep/wake button, but nothing happened again. Now that got me worried. I plugged the phone in to see if the battery had died without me knowing and still nothing. Then I got to thinking, what would I do for the next couple of days? The college I go to does not have an Apple Store nearby to help me out and so I thought that I would be stuck phoneless for the next 2 weeks until I could go home to my local Apple Store. That of course freaked me out even more. I basically thought I couldn't live with my phone. My friends tell me when we're meeting for dinner via text, I call my parents to let them know what's going on in my life, my phone is my alarm clock, and I probably couldn't make it to class on time without my phone because I don't wear a watch and college doesn't really have clocks everywhere you look.

Obviously this is a problem. Just 5 years ago I didn't have a cell phone at all, much less an iPhone. I seemed fine then without that piece of technology but now it appears that I wouldn't be able to function without it. How crazy is it, that my life depends on this tiny rectangular piece of steel and glass that while is amazingly smart and essentially a mini computer, it still does not pump the blood in my body or allow me to think and type this very post?

Now I don't really have any genius ideas as to how we can fix this problem and I don't expect our world to get taken over by crazy robots who are mad at how we abuse our devices but with things like Watson, Siri, and other artificial intelligence type programs we could get so reliant that we stop thinking and doing things for ourselves. During Thanksgiving break I was watching Wall-E. While the movie mainly satirizes how we should recycle more or our planet is going to be covered with our trash that we won't be able to live on Earth anymore, it still touched on how humans sit around and let technology do things for us. Machines cleaned us, changed our clothes, fed us, and the only way we had contact with another person was through a screen in front of our faces. That's ridiculous and of course we don't have the technology right now to do things like that for us but who's to say that later down the road that technology won't get invented. I guess my take home message for this post is, be careful with how much you depend on the technology around you.

Bye!

P.S. I had wanted to write a post touching on this subject but hadn't been planning to until after exams were over. I guess its just a big coincidence that my phone has to freak out on me today especially since I heard that story from my friend yesterday. Oh and if your iPhone mysteriously stops responding also, try pressing both the sleep/wake button and the home button at the same time until you see the Apple logo appear.