In The Twits, Roald Dahl presents what I consider a very wise idea on beauty. He says that Mrs. Twit, who he considers hideous (and I must say, the illustration of her included in the book seems to support this) "wasn't born ugly" and that "the ugliness had grown upon her year after year as she got older" (Dahl, 8). He goes on to explain exactly how this could occur, with a diagram to support his argument.
"If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets to ugly you can hardly bear to look at it."
"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. you can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-our teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely" (Dahl, 9).
I completely agree with this idea. However, I do feel that for you to fully understand where my agreement comes from, I need to explain better how I have interpreted this statement. I'm not going to lie: it's a rather broad interpretation, one that allows for a rather large number of causes for ugliness despite Dahl's rather specific statement.
In psychology, when you're writing a research question, you're supposed to operationally define all vague terms. In Dahl's explanation of how ugliness comes to be, the most important operational term, and the one that my interpretation of his analysis and subsequent agreement with seems to revolve around, is "ugly thoughts".
What in the world could Dahl be referring to here? If you read the rest of The Twits, it seems that he defines this term as something along the lines of "mean thoughts about other people". I do see how this could cause ugliness in a person, of course: the repeated curling of a lip in disgust could result in permanent angry wrinkles being formed on a face. Toni Morrison seems to agree with this more narrow interpretation of how ugliness comes to be as well, as her description of Mr. Yacobowski of the candy store, with his white eyes "edged with distaste" (Morrison, 49), does not wound like a physically appealing person, posessing a voice full of "phlegm and impatience" and a "lumpy red hand" (Morrison, 49). And who could ever forget the beast (of Beauty and the Beast), who's contempt for others actually got him transformed into a hideous monster? Dahl's more restricted definition of the path to ugliness does seem to have a fair amount of support.
However, I must ask. Is this really the only way ugliness can be achieved? Or rather, is this the only way that "ugly thoughts" can be defined? I tend to disagree, and from what I've read, Morrison feels the same way. In The Bluest Eye, she speaks through Claudia to describe the Breedloves path to ugliness, saying that though "you could not find the source of their ugliness," the Breedloves themselves had "accepted it without question," and that they "saw... support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance" (Morrison, 39). So what does this suggest could be an addition to Dahl's definition of "ugly thoughts?" Self-depreciating thoughts about the self.
However, this also offers us an idea as to where the inspiration for these ugly thoughts might come from, one that I feel continues to be an active, relevant factor in low self esteem among girls. "Billboards" says Claudia. "Movies" she asserts. And, last but not least "every glance." All of these things come from without, and two of the three have to do with the media.
Jessica Simpson, of the "chicken or tuna" variety, has recently launched a show called The Price of Beauty where she travels the world looking for different standards of beauty. This show, I'm fairly positive, was inspired by a series of vidicative comments made about her weight gain in various celebrity gossip magazines. Basically, Jessica Simpson is pissed that the word beautiful, nowadays, is only applied to that (very small and frankly somewhat unattainable) segment of the population that has the body of a Barbie.
Let me tell you something (or a few somethings) about Barbie. Over Christmas break, while perusing Half Price Books for a history book on Canada (which doesn't exist, apparently...) I came across a book with a bright pink spine and an enlarged, vaguely frightening picture of what is perhaps the most loved a hated doll in the world, Barbie. Named simply The Barbie Chronicles and published in 1999, this 250- odd page book contained within it a number of research articles, editorials, and poetry excerpts written on Barbie since her debut in 1959. Well. I'm a girl. I definitely played with that doll. And as the summary on the back of the book says, Barbie is to some "a collectible [and] to others... trash". Throughout the book, this statement is supported. However, the shear number of articles written on the plastic diva shows the influence she has had on American, and perhaps even world, culture. As Steven C Dubin says "Barbie... is as close as we have to a global litmus test for being human: If you fail to recognize her, you're hardly of this world" (Mcdunough, 19).
But let's step away from her influence for a second. Did you ever wonder where the idea for Barbie came from? The vision her creators Ruth and Elliot Handler had for her is actually quite noble. They wanted "an adult doll for little girls... onto which they could project fantasies of themselves as mature young women, not just as future mothers tending to babies (Mcdunough, 20-21). It's 1959. Loads of woman are still barefoot and pregnant- there's no arguing that the gesture is a noble one. But Barbie, that noble soldier of feminism, is based of of the German "Bild Lillu doll, a risque novelty item derived from a popular cartoon strip" (Mcdunough, 20).
Well. That explains the body, I suppose. But let's think about this for a moment. Barbie, the doctor, the teacher, the non-mother, the doll that, of the handler's noble vision is to be believed, was supposed to inspire girls to greatness, is based off a German porn doll meant to please men. Not very inspiring, is it? Yeah, we're teachers and everything, bit we'd better make sure we're still looking good for the laddies. But I digress, because this isn't about the angry feminist view of Barbie so easy to take. It is instead about what exactly it is Barbie is promoting.
If you're a little girl, and you look at Barbie, you see something unrealistic. We all have seen those pictures of a life-size Barbie, with her balloon-boobs and wasp-thin waste, that make it clear she would not survive in the real world. But Ann du Cille, in her article called "Barbie in Black and White" points out how "signature Barbies, the dolls feature on billboards, on boxes, in video and board games, on clothing... are always blond, blue-eyed, and white (Mcdunough, 131). And yes. They make colored barbie dolls too. My mom tried buying them for me too. I still have "Puerto Rican Barbie" with her huge flokoric skirt, sitting on my shelf. But as one African-American child said, the white doll is "the real Barbie" (Mcdunough, 131), and, if it is believed that a Barbie-like body is the ideal, it's no far stretch that whiteness, at least when the doll was originally made, was the ideal as well.
So here we are, living in a world where unattainable Barbie-bodies are the ideal. And there was Pecola, living in a world where everyone told her blackness was ugly. Is it any wonder that despite the fact she "had her own beauty, her obsession with blue eyes prevented her from discovering it?" (Bump, 357). Society had an obsession with blue eyes too, of course. We see that in the unwanted baby dolls Claudia receives every year for Christmas. But it's not because of her lack of blue eyes, at least I don't think it was, that Pecola was labeled as ugly. Pecola was riddled by "ugly thoughts" about herself, and whether or not she was beautiful herself is besides the point. No one was going to see her as beautiful if she didn't see herself that way.
Or am I wrong? Bump says that Pauline blamed "her general feeling of separateness and unworthiness... on her foot" (Bump, 356). Obviously, her negative feelings towards her foot didn't cause her foot to be crippled. But that's not what I'm saying at all with my "ugly thoughts" hypothesis. What I'm saying is that "ugly thoughts" about yourself cause other to see you as ugly. "Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset" (Morrison) for the short period of time when Cholly accepted it and even, it seems, thought it special and beautiful. And I myself can imagine that on her wedding day, Pauline glowed with an inner beauty that caused her foot, despite its deformity, to glide down the isle, all because Cholly instilled within her a sense of beauty that shone through to her outside. However, as soon as the dysfuncitonalism of her family started, I can also see Pauline "[spinning] a cocoon around [her] percieved ugliness" (Bump, 357), masking any thoughts of beauty that might have alleviated her apparently not-so-pleasing physical appearance.
How am I to close this? If you can't tell by how incredibly long this DB has turned out to be, I feel very passionately about this. It ties in very closely with why I want to become a psychologist and specialize in eating disorders. I honestly do not believe in ugliness. I believe that people make themselves beautiful or ugly just by their thoughts, thoughts which other can sense and which reflect back on themselves. Though, as Claudia observed, the standards for beauty come from without, beauty is still in the eye of the beholder, and beautiful thoughts will give them something beautiful to behold. Barbie thinks she's great. She says it all the time, advertises her beauty shamelessly. In fact, she has both sides of "pretty thoughts": thoughts about herself AND, if her talking varieties are to be believed, thoughts about others as well. (Ever heard her say "You're great" to the little girl in the commercials? Thought so.) It's no wonder she's considered the ideal.
So, if you want to be pretty, take a hint from Barbie: think pretty thoughts :)
People always say that the book isn't as good as the movie. I actually completely agree with this, and usually let the movie stand alone from the book, plot-wise. However, I feel that if you are going to make a book into a movie, and use the character names and snippets of the plot, you should still have some of the same messages the book conveys.
Is this a ridiculous expectation? Nope. I don't think so. If you're using the title, at least send a FEW of the messages the author intended to send.
Apparently, though, the creators of these books-turned-movies do not feel the same way. Perhaps the most upsetting case of this, for me, was the adaptation of Ella Enchanted, the book that taught me to love reading and sparked my obsession with fairy tale adaptations. They had the right actress: Anne Hathaway proved in the Princes Diaries that she could play the endearing klutz with sheer perfection. They had an amazing story, one that I didn't think it was possible for them to mess up. But alas, they did. Of course they did. Idiots.
Anyhow, so I went into the most recent Alice in Wonderland movie with this expectation that at least a few of the messages Carroll conveyed in his children's masterpiece would be made known in the film as well, especially since this movie was to be aimed at older audiences, many of whom would have realized the deeper meaning behind Wonderland and be looking for references the these ideas. I knew from the previews the plot was a lost cause, but I was sure that something of Carroll's message on animal treatment would survive.
Well... first of all, at the end of the movie Alice ends up killing the Jabberwock. Granted, the Jabberwock was out to get her, and he was working for the Red Queen, who was quite the conniving evil character and was not exactly pleasant to animals herself, ordering the head be cut off a frog for eating one of her tarts, something he only did, apparently, out of starvation. However, there was a certain bloodthirstiness throughout the entire movie, centering around a sort of prophecy about Alice, that was completely out of character with the original story. There were, of course, instances where I saw some of Carroll's original ideas. This came mostly from the white queen, actually (ironically, also played by Anne Hathaway... maybe she just likes to be in bad book adaptaion movies?). She was a polar opposite to the Red Queen, loved by all species, airy, light, perfect, etc. There were also a few instances where animals would apologize to each other or help each other out, such as when the other frogs didn't reveal that the eventually beheaded frog was the tart-stealing culprit, or when the flamingo being used in the Red Queens game of croquet apologizes to the hedgehog it's about to blast into. But on the whole there was this air of desperation not for Alice to find herself but for Wonderland to be saved. In fact, in the end, when Alice kills the Jabberwock, I felt like she was not only going against Carrolls original idea for her, which was supposed to make her sympathetic to all animals, but also against her original convictions in the movie, where she keeps repeating that she will not kill anything. I really, honestly did not think that she was going to go through with it: I thought that there would be some revelation that would save her from having to commit this act. But, alas, the Jabberwock died at her hand. And because of this, I was not only disappointed with the movie (although there were other instances, such as the Mad Hatters random break into dance at the end, that also contributed to my low opinion of the movie) but also less sympathetic to Alice as a character, and less impressed by the way she stood up to societies expectation of her by not marrying the obviously ill-suited man chosen for her and instead taking over the family business.
Basically, I was looking for something in this movie, some snippet of the things that I loved about Alice in Wonderland, and mostly, I was disappointed. The Mad Hatter was the closest thing I saw in the movie to how I sort of imagined him in the book, and in this case I may be blinded by my love for Johnny Depp.
http://iconsoffright.com/news/AIW_DeppHatter.jpg
People were a little vague about what to wear to Holi. Some people said white. Others said whatever color you wanted. Some said definitely not white, because water balloons were to be involved, and white and water balloons don't mix well. All of them however, seemed to agree that what you wore to Holi should be something you weren't going to be heart broken about losing, breaking, or (most likely of all) staining. After experiencing the festivities for myself, my advice would be to wear whatever you want but not to plan on wearing it ever again.
All of your clothes will end up looking like this but not as organized (more splotchy).
This is Holi, UT style: You stand out in the middle of the 6 pack in your never-t-be-worn-again clothes. The day is beautiful, the weather is perfect, and you're about to be attacked by the rainbow, powder edition. It was this sort of mad rush to get the raaj too. They passed it out in rounds, and people basically pounced on the little plastic baggies to make sure they had something to throw at the friends (and strangers, actually) around them. I, personally, had a connection (thanks Samyu!) who hooked me up with my own little bag of orange, which I promptly used to UT-ify the unsuspecting people around me. But there was really no need to aim at anyone. There were SO MANY people there, brown and otherwise, that you could basically hit people just by throwing the powder in the air.
I was talking to Samyu about it later, and she was explaining how for each Hindu Student Council's events, they have a different set of the population that they target, and a different way of advertising for it. For the big festivals, like Holi and Navratri, the downplay the religious aspect and up-play the festivities. For Navratri, it was "Come see the fireworks!", and for Holi it was "Come throw colored powder at your friends!", targeted at anyone and everyone. However there was a concert that night (completely separate from Holi) in which and Indian band had been invited to sing, that had only really been advertised to the Indian UT population, mostly because they are the only ones who would know of the band.
So, I was trying to figure out how I felt about this whole concept of select advertising, and what the implications of it were. Is it practical? Heck to the yes. The group gets maximum attendance and conserves its resources by strategically advertising to people who will actually come in ways that make them feel comfortable coming. Basically what this means is that here at UT, its very easy to get a taste of other cultures, However, to really experience them at a deeper level, I think you need to go out of your way and literally seek out what cultural activities this campus has to offer, as well as make a huge effort to understand what is behind these activities. Navratri isn’t just about fireworks, and Holi isn’t just about colored powder. And I really do believe that seeking out these activities can make you a more well-rounded, accepting person. Its kind of how we meditate in P3, we had the option to use our sympathetic imagination and see the world through another’s eyes. I feel like being exposed to and participating in other culture’s activities can be compared to that act of sympathetic imagination. In both instances, you’re sort of putting yourself out of your comfort zone and trying to experience how others view and live in this world, something I think is very rewarding.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Some would say this is a story about failure. Black Elk hints at this idea, suggesting that it is because of his failure, because the visions that were supposed to save his nation came to "a pitiful old man who [could] do nothing" (xxi) that, in the end, "a people's dream died" (xxv). I, however, disagree with this idea. And don't go getting your panty's in a wad thinking that I disagree because I want to disney-fy the story. I'm not saying that Black Elk was succesful. I might even agree that he, in many ways, failed his people. However, when I read this story, I didn't feel like it was about failure.
What I felt, instead, was this deep, aching sense of loss.
It started with Black Elk's description of lamenting, at the beginning of the section. He says that as he wept, he " thought of the days when my relatives, now dead, were living and young, and of Crazy Horse who was our strength and would never come back to help us any more" (xxiii). Loss. I could feel it oozing out of this section, and I kind of imagined him trying to find the words to describe what he felt like at that moment. A lot of this selection, for me, was written in a very matter a fact manner. His sentences lack flowery language, vivid descrptions, Its more the story itself that is vivid, unbelievable, the story itself that gives the words beauty. and here, in thsi section, I felt like he was baring up a little piece of his soul. And it reminded me of when I would go to my grandmothers house in Puerto Rico and we would look at old pictures of my mom and her three brothers. She would always tell these hilarious stories, and my mom would periodically chip in a detail, or (more frequently) assure me that every not-so- honorable story told about her was 100% false. It was hilarious, actually, and one of the best part about visiting. But there was also this sense of loss in the stories, of how together the family was and how spread out they are now, one brother in Florida, another in North Carolina, the last in New Jersey, my mother in Texas, all of them with their own, separate lives, and my grandmother, divorced, living alone with her new husband in a tiny, wooden pink house on a tiny, tropical island. I remember that as I got older, I would get this... this ache, sort of, as we drove away from her house when christmas vacation was over and it was time to head back to the lone star state. I would look back, and she would be standing there on the porch, leaning against the door frame of the house she had finally finished paying off, waving, smiling, and I would ache.
I sort of got this same feeling when I was reading Black Elk Speaks. And I know why it was loss that I saw in this story, Now that I've compared it to my grandmother, I know. I felt that Black Elk, with the death of his peoples dream, was losing his place in the world, and he was going to have to relocate, to find a new place, and the only way he was going to be able to do this was if he confronted what he felt was his failure and transformed it into something that would bring good things to the world, whether they were the good things he was originally aiming for or not. I think that the reason I felt that ache at the end of my visits to my grandmother was because she too, had sort of lost her place in the world. Every parent does, I guess. I feel like when you have kids, they're such a big part of your life that once they leave you have to sort of readjust, figure out what to do with yourself. It's possible I would never have recognized that loss in my grandmother if we hadn't spent so much time looking at the bajillion photo albums lying around her house. But since I'd gotten a sense of what life was like, back when, I sort of understood how she'd had to reinvent herself once they went off to become parents themselves.
Black Elk says that "the Power of the World works in circles" (xxvi), and I do agree. I feel like anyone who's heard the explanation of the circular food that Mufasa gives Simba in The Lion King, with lions turning into grass once they die and being eaten by antelope, can at least aquiece that the circular theory of the world has at least a little bit of merit. But how does this configure into my "loss with life" theory I've described above, with loss being acquired and transformations required throughout life? I've sort of described it in a linear way, it seems.
The first 30 second of so of this is Mufasa's explanation for the circle of life.
Except it's NOT linear. Black Elk lived this story, this line story, from Point A to Point B. And then what did he do? He told the story, he circled around to the beginning so that others would know what had happened to him. And my grandmother? Yes, Points A and B were involved in her life was well. But didn't she also, through the stories she told me, also circle around? Obviously, stories aren't the only things that make life circular. But I feel like they're a big part of the circle. And I also feel like they help point out to us the other parts of life that are circular. When my grandmother would tell stories about my mother as a kid, I was always surprised at how similar she seemed to have been to me, and how now, her parenting style was SO similar to what my grandmothers had been. I dunno. I saw circles in those stories, and I'm pretty sure that as I get older, I'm going to see a lot of circles in my own life.
In my architecture class, we just finished reading a book called Thermal Delight in Architecture about how temperature effects how we experience architecture. The author, Lisa Heschong, is, to put it lightly, very anti-artificial climate creators (also known as air conditioners, heaters etc.). She talks about human and animals bodies, and how they have adapted over millions of years to deal with a variety of climates, and how we actually crave that climate change, how it helps keep us in touch with the Earth. Then, she proceeds to mercilessly bashing the unskilled, fabricated climates experienced in modern day buildings. She's quite adamant about the value of simply designing architecture so that it reflects natural fluctuations in temperature while still keeping a building reasonably warm or cool.
When I read this book, I was a little put off by Heschong's tone. She was being very angry and negative about air conditioning, and living in Texas, I have to say that I am extraordinarily grateful for my 72 degrees Fahrenheit home in the summer. Obviously Heschong has never lived in a place where you could get a third degree burn from walking barefoot on the sidewalk. But as I was reading Black Elks memiors, I had this flashback to Heschong's somewhat romanticized vision of a world where the boundary between being indoors, in civilization, and outdoors, close to the wild and Mother Earth , is blurred, where our connection with living things not of our species is highlighted, where we can feel that we are "like a relative to the birds" (anthology, 368).
Let's be honest: Texas is pretty but ridiculously hot.
And I kind of kept going with this feeling, trying to figure out if feeling this connection with nature was something that humans craved. The conclusion I came to was basically HECK TO THE YES. Examples, you ask? Why is it that when we go to Kinsolving after class we sit outside when it's sunny? Why is it that we jump in puddles? Why do we try to catch snowflakes on our tongues? Why are we so fascinated by the hearbeat of another animal?
Gardens. Gardens are a great example of how we crave affirmation of our connection with nature. Think about it. The fact that flower die when we bring them inside is symbolic, I think, of what happens to us when we separate ourselves from our connection to nature. Our souls die. In a garden, though, where our connection is at its peak as we nurture not only the plants but also our bond with them, the flowers bloom.
In Black Elk's Great Vision, there are all these animals transformations. For example, what begins as dancing horses :[changes] into animals of eery kind and into all the fowls there are" (anthology, 362), and the blue man he kills is "suddenly... only a harmless turtle" (anthology, 366). There seems to be, in his vision, a blurred line between species, on that highlights the connection every living thing has, much like there is a blurred line between nature and the "civilized living" of humans in Heschong's ideal world. And in the end, this connection makes Black Elk a more empathetic person, causing him to "feel queer" when other boys "[try] to hit swallows with stones" (anthology, 370) and not engage in the activity himself.
So, I'm thinking that being in touch with out connection to nature and our ability to empathize. Avatar seems to hint at something similar to this idea when Neytiri calls the death of a dog-like creature she killed in order to save Jake Sully safe sad, while Jake rationalizes that it was necessary to keep him alive. Because Neytiri, at this point in the movie, is more closely in tune with her connection to nature, she is better able to empathize with the deceased dog. Jake nurtures his connection to nature by living like the Na'vi. We nurture that connection in our class whenever we have our discussions in the architecture courtyard or meditate outside. And I have to say, nurturing this connection seems like it's good for the soul.
Neytiri teaching Jake so he can become more empathetic and understanding of his connection to nature.
As a psychology major, I’ve been fed a fair number of theories about how a person develops. There is, of course, Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst whose “stages of psychosexual development” continue to influence psychology as well as disturb unsuspecting college students. As an veteran psych 101 student, I can tell you: learning that Freud believed 6 year olds, well into the throes of their phallic stage, have “gratification focused on and around the genitals” (Cherry) was a bit of an unpleasant shock. Watson, Pavlov, Skinner, and their behavioral theories of child development were almost as disconcerting as Freud’s- the idea that my moral convictions were traceable to being rewarded for “good” behavior as a child didn’t exactly do wonders for my self esteem. However, through the dark hours I spent pouring over my Psychology book, alternately being horrified at how these psychologist could have come up with these ideas and worrying that the answer to the caterpillar’s “Who are you” (Carroll, 47) was that I was a pathetic product of punishment and reward, there were a few bright lights of insight that I could comfortably believe in, namely those of Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget. Erikson, whose stages of development all revolve around overcoming conflict. A central element of his theories on development is the ego identity, which Erikson says evolves “through social interaction” and is “constantly changing due to new experience and information we acquire in our daily interactions with others” (Cherry). Piaget, on the other hand, focused his analysis of self-development on cognitive processes, deciding that “early cognitive development involves processes based upon actions and later progresses into changes in mental operations" (Cherry).
Why would these last two theories appeal to me more then the first couple? Other than the obvious reasons- for example, the absence of unsettling childhood sexual awakenings-, the conjectures made by Piaget and Erikson were attractive to me because I could easily relate them to my own personal growth, and because they fit with ideas I’d already been harboring on personal development.
I will go ahead and grudgingly admit that I could relate to Erikson’s theoriesbecause of something my mother repeated to me my entire childhood that is, though it’s like pulling teeth to admit it, completely true. “Friends rub off on you, Lauren” she used to say, from the stove before I left for elementary school, her face severe and a greasy, scalding hot spatula held up threateningly in her right hand. “Not just the good- the bad too,” she’d warn while I rolled my 13 year old eyes and scurried outside to catch a ride with my friends to the 8th grade dance. “That’s why you have to surround yourself with good people,” she’d call from the front door, hair sleep tousled and slippers on askew, wanting to get in one last word of advice as I slammed my car door shut and zoomed off to my 6:30 AM high school track practice.
And she was right. Totally, completely and irrefutably spot on, something I couldn’t fathom but a fact that Erikson, with his theory that our daily interactions with others greatly affect our personal development, would have known in a heartbeat. I think the realization of her accuracy in this claim was gradual, but just last week, over spring break, perhaps because I’m out of the house and ready to admit that mothers can, occasionally, make wise assertions, the truth of this idea came fully to light. I spent this break in New York, living the life of a friend who moved to Austin from New Jersey for the last year of high school and is now attending her NYU. Amie is quite a character, and I love her dearly, but she has this habit of taking pictures at random intervals throughout inconsequential meetings. These are not the posed, picturesque photographs of most spring break vacations. These are candid, artistic shots that sometimes end up beautiful and most of the time catch you while your mouth is wide open and your eyes are mid-blink (see below). Anyhow, I’m not a fan of having my photo taken, but since it’s only Amie taking the pictures, I can usually dodge the camera when I’m with her in a big group, which is why when she suggested on Friday afternoon that we go meet our New Jersey friends for dinner, I jumped at the chance for Amie to have a larger number of subjects to fill her digital lens. Not such luck. Guess where Amie got her picture-taking obsession?That’s right. I spent an entire evening unsuccessfully dodging not one trigger-happy photographer but four. By the end of the night, I’m pretty sure there were 500 photos of me, 498 of them too hideous to see daylight and the last two only alright because they were pictures of the back of my head.
So we have self development tip #1, inspired by my mother, Amie, and Erik Erikson: Surround yourself with people who you exemplify the traits that you value.
Piaget’s theory on development, with its emphasis on mental processes, immediately brought school to my mind. It makes sense, actually, since the studies he used to come to this conclusion were a series of tests administered to school age children. It makes sense, except for I wasn’t thinking about algebra, or biology, or AP English 4. I was, instead, thinking of the best teacher and most prominent role model I’ve ever had: Mr. B.
There’s an episode of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air where Will signs up for a difficult class in an attempt to woo a girl. He drops the class but, in typical comedic style, realizes as soon as he is excused from the class that it could actually be a life-changing experience. After Will explains his predicament to his Uncle Phil, his uncle explains that he believes that “everyone in college has one teacher that gives them an insight, a glimpse into who they really are.” Will is uncomfortable with his Uncles obvious disapproval and tries to justify his decision, saying that it was only one class. Uncle Phill disagrees, saying that “[it is] not once class... [it is his] life.”
For me, Mr. B was that teacher. If you ever get to North Austin, make a stop at the prison-like high school in North Austin called Westwood. Step inside, and ask any student about Mr. B. Maybe, after the 80 pound freshman you ask gives a 20 minute rant about how angry she is she'll never be in his history class (Mr. B is at Harvard now), or after the sleepy-eyed senior assures you Mr. B's amazing day- before-the-midterm lecture was the only reason he passed junior year, you'll understand how incredible he was.
I went into sophomore year positive that it would be better then freshman year. I was thoroughly unflinching, doggedly determined, and, I soon realized, utterly unprepared. So, when I walked into what was rumored to be the hardest class offered at Westwood, A.P. U.S. History, despite the fact that I had a teacher known to be one of the best in the school, I was not exactly feeling what could be described as confident. Actually, the word terrified comes to mind…
But, as I said before: I was determined to make that year a good one. So, I sat in the corner desk, reading the various obscenities gratified on it by past students and trying to keep my shaking hands hidden beneath it. Two minutes later, the bell rang. A tall man in his early 30's walked into the room.
Life screeched to a halt and swerved in different direction.
Mr. B gave a quizzical look around the class, then said matter-of-factly "You are on the boat, and it's leaving the harbor. Welcome to APUSH."
My, how incredibly NOT comforting that statement was. I wondered, in a resigned sort of way, if it was too late to abandon ship and swim back to land. Meanwhile, the boat ignored my thoughts and chugged steadily into open water.
Before I continue, let me explain something to you. I was not a slacker. I didn't procrastinate (usually). I didn't cut corners. I didn't siphon my work off on other people. I did what I had to do.
I was however, a minimalist.
I just didn't care enough to put in extra effort. It was all the same, same, same. Math, English, history, science. Who cared? I was just serving my time before I could get out of school and start my real life, which would probably be about as happy as my parents lives. I mean, they were reasonably happy but, let's face: They hadn't felt passion since they saw Grease on the big screen.
So Mr. B's class? It was a surprise. He wanted things like participation, and deep thought, and original analysis. I remember thinking isn't talking his job? Isn't he just supposed to give us the info we need to pass our AP exam and then send us on our merry way?
I started out just struggling to do the work, to pass the tests, to turn in my assignments on time. And then…I sort of lost myself in it. Because it was interesting. Because I was interested. Because I wanted to know more. Because it was impossible to be in Mr. B's class, and listen to his lectures, and watch him dance across the front of the room writing random words on the chalkboard, and not feel inspired. My action focus on the workload of the class transformed into passion, just as Piaget said it should.
And it wasn’t just Mr. B’s class that roused my spirits. It was his whole story. He was a former Kohl’s catalogue model turned investor who made it big. He drove the fanciest car in the faculty parking lot. It was rumored that he could have retired on the money he made. Instead, he decided to teach. And you could just tell, you know? You could tell that he really wanted to be there, that he wanted to share his love for history with the rest of the world.
People seem to have this mind-frame nowadays that passion for what you're involved in is optional. Guess what? It’s not. As Mr. B demonstrated every day in his class, passion is 150% necessary. And after that year in APUSH, I have it. Never again will I let life carry me where it may. Never again will I let someone else decide what I should be doing. Never again will I live my life according to someone else's idea of what is right.
And there is self development tip #2: Be passionate.
I’m sitting here, a freshman psychology major in college, trying to hold tight to the example that Mr. B set. And I have to admit, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies in my academic world right now. I know what I want to do with this degree. I wrote an entire essay on how I’m going to take what psychology teaches me to help those with eating disorders. But there’s this disjunction between the classes I’m taking and my ultimate goals. In my seventh grade math class, there was a poster on the wall entitled “When Am I Ever Going to Use This” which listed all the different things we learned in the class and situations in which this knowledge would come in handy. I think that, to make it through classes like statistics and physics, I’m going to have to make (if not a physical at least a mental) poster similar to this. And it’s not just going to include the educational aspect of the classes. Sometimes, the most important things you learn in school have nothing to do with school at all. Yeah, kindergarten is where you learn to read. But you also learn how to share, be away from home, and try new things. Classes at UT are the same: they have more to off then just what the tests cover.
To be honest, the DB’s we do in this class have helped a lot in making me aware of how I can use the wholistic education that UT is in effect forcing me to take in situations I hadn’t realized it would be useful. I mean, I would NEVER have thought it possible to relate Stargirl, one of my favorite books of all time and probably one of the most childish I still reread, to Siddhartha, a classic and controversial text. But there it is, in writing, a clear connection between the two. And as I notice myself getting into the habit of making these sorts of unlikely connections more and more, I feel more confident that, however painful certain classes might be for me now, I’m not working my butt off in them just so UT will graduate me and I can get on with my life. They will help me, somehow, someway, when I’m a psychologist working to bring people back to optimum happiness.
But I’m not just taking what the university has to offer, academic and otherwise, in a willy-nilly manner. There are specific things I’m trying to develop within myself during my time here at UT, as well as specific goals I want to accomplish once I leave the university. Firstly, I’d like to see through others eyes more easily. I’ve never had an eating disorder, just watched others suffer from them, so I know this is going to be very important if I want to help my patients. I want to stop hesitating when people ask me for help because I’m afraid I won’t have enough time to both help them and get my work done. It’s not about time management, in this case. What I need to learn is how to more readily make time for others. As a psychologist, I think it’s going to be important for me to be there for my patients whenever they need me, not only when it is convenient for me. Lastly, I think it’s important for me to learn how to be more open and honest about my own problems with other people. How can I expect others to confide and me when I can’t do the same? My mom believes that everyone should see a therapist, regardless of whether they think they need it or not. I kind of agree, and I’m thinking that I need to make sure everything’s OK in my noodle before I go messing around with the heads of my patients. Outside of my character oriented goals, I obviously need to graduate. Then I need to go to graduate school, so I can specialize in eating disorders and actually practice the clinical psychology I’m aiming for. Then I need to find an appropriate rehab to work at. And if I want to really make the greatest number of people happy possible, if I’m sticking to the goal I set in P3, I need to write a story, one that will touch, comfort, and inspire others as the works of fiction sitting on my shelf have done to me.
Now… how to go about these stretch and manageable goals? A central part of seeing the world through others eyes is being exposed to the viewpoints of others. Just by being at this diverse university, I’m starting to do this more easily because I’m encountering people and ideas I might never have been exposed to otherwise. However, these are still all college students, and many of the people in my classes and dorm are honors students. To be exposed to an even wider array of people, I need to join more extracurricular activities affiliated with UT. I’m already in a sorority. I think that next year I want to join one more organization on campus. However, I also think it’s important to meet people who are not college students, or even of college age. I’m work at El Buen Samaritano with children of immigrants once a week, so this is helping me branch out from the college scene and understand the viewpoints of younger, non-college students. I’d also like to work with people at the other end of the spectrum. There is a nursing home by my house, and over the summer I’m going to try to volunteer there as well. In addition, this class has taught me the importance of empathizing not only with humans but also with non-humans. I think that the idea of meditating to connect with nature will help me in this aspect, for now. But I’d also like to take this a step further, maybe doing short writing exercises after meditating so I can record my progress in empathizing with animals and plants, not just passively meditating. To learn to make time for others more easily, I think I need to ignore any selfish hesitation I might have when asked for help and just say yes. I feel like once I realize how much time I really do have, I’ll be less nervous about taking time our of my schedule for others, and the simple act of saying a hesitant yes can evolve, by the end of my four years here at UT, into an emphatic affirmation that I’m never to busy to help others. In the character development category of my goals, being more open and honest about my own problems is probably going to be the hardest. I think that my reluctance to talk to others about my problems stems from trying to spare them the burden that comes with this knowledge. However, there’s a difference between being honest about problems and forcing others to carry your burden. I’m going to begin developing this trait of honesty about myself by answering the question “How are you,” when it’s asked by close friends, in a less vague manner. Instead of saying that I’m fine, I’ll add why it is that my life isn’t going superbly at the moment. Then I’ll try doing the same with people I’m not as close with. After I get comfortable with this, hopefully by my junior year, I’ll try my mom’s therapist idea. I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of baring my soul to a stranger, but I’ll be asking others to do it once I become a psychologist, so it’s important I be willing to do the same. And throughout this all, I need to keep in mind my self development tips, being careful to surround myself with open, empathetic, unconditionally helpful people and working hard to keep my passion for developing these characteristics at a maximum level.
As for my stretch goals of becoming a psychologist and publishing a life-changing work of fiction, I’ll have to focus on my more manageable goals first. I need to graduate from this school. I already talked about tools I’ll be using to get through the less interesting parts of my classes, and these are tools I’m hoping I won’t have to use in grad school but am prepared to use if necessary. I’d like to graduate in four years and attend graduate school at a university known for its work on eating disorders. This is something I’ll have to research most likely, so I think I’d like to do that this summer and come up withlist of schools I’m interested in, checking up on them every six months to see what new work as come from them or other universities. I’m guessing grad school will take me another 4 years, during which I think it’s important I be interning at rehabs I’d like to work at once I’m finished with school. Once I get a job, I want to treat each patient as a goal in itself. I don’t want my job as a psychologist to just be “helping as many people as possible.” I know that each patient will have a different set of issues to work out, and I want to treat them accordingly. Simultaneously with these stretch and manageable goals, I’d like to be working on the stretch goal of publishing something. I’m taking a class on fairy tales this semester, and it’s made me realize how much these seemingly cheesy and old-fashioned stories have to teach us. I’m not doing an internship or anything this summer, so I’ve decided to spend it writing a modern day fairy-tale. I’m won’t sit here and tell you it’s going to be the next Jane Eyre, or anything, but I’m hoping that I can convey within it something true and heartfelt. If I like the way it turns out, I want to have it ready to send out to publishers by Christmas. This is obviously a stretch goal comparable to Elastigirl from The Incredibles, but there’s so much truth in fiction, and I have so much I want to say, that it doesn’t feel as ridiculous as it sounds when I write it out on paper.
And now, how am I going to close this essay- no, this plan I’ve created for my life? It’s really not appropriate to close it at all. This essay isn’t an end: it’s a beginning, and should end not with the shutting of a curtain, or the presentment of a rose, or the rolling of credits, but with the popping of a starting gun.
