Every Sunday Morning, a place where various things get thrown out, shot at, cut open, and dissected. Topics of interest: psychological, and medical anthropology, privatization, globalization, excess, language, humor, hip-hop culture, jazz, brain and mind, memory, urban space development, Los Angeles, the Chicago Bulls, UCLA Bruins, FC Barcelona, and mankind.
Title of the News Story: "Miami Ranks Lowest in Volunteering"
Leads off with...
"MIAMI (July 27) - Blame it on the traffic. Or the number of new immigrants. Or the allure of the beach. Whatever the reason, Miami has secured the bottom spot -- No. 50 among major U.S. cities -- in new rankings of the percentage of adults who volunteer."
Blame it on...the number of new immigrants for low marks in volunteering. It's interesting how you can blame a whole swath of people tagged "immigrants" in the same way you can blame inanimate things like traffic and your desire to go to the beach.
Then expecting only the finest of scholarly thought, I looked over at the comments section to see how they would receive this article, and sure enough the Rhodes Scholars came out for this...
"No suprise here. The fact that people in Miami do not volunteer is a preview of what the United States is rapidly becoming. Not a unified nation but a collection of a few major immigrant groups interested in enjoying our economy not giving anything back to the culture. And it isn't just Miami that's the problem. Nor is it just Hispanic immigrants. Many recent immigrant groups from Asia are equally self-centered. Kiss the U.S. good bye and welcome the new two class economic system."
"Florida might as well be a different country now. It has a different culture, language, and mind-set than the rest of the U.S. Hispanic organizations have said they intend to take back the lands once controlled by Spain. The Reconquista Movement. It's working. California has a record budget deficit due to social services granted to all people in CA. The burden of recent undocumented immigrations is bankrupting them. They'll have no choice but legalize them and bring them into the tax base. One way or the other they will regain political control."
"South FL is basically a different country and different world. On the outside it's money dripping - huge yachts, fancy restaurants, expensive exotic cars, expensive stores, but there is a huge underworld non English speaking people. When we've been down there I feel like I'm in a foreign country with very little English being spoken and if it is, is usually spoken with a Hispanic or Caribbean accent. It is a fun place to visit, but would NEVER want to live there!!
"Okay..here's the deal in Miami...they're are alot of young kids running around trying to live above their means cus that's what most of them do there. They are too damn self absorbed to think of others in need.Then you can add in the immigration situation. Those that come to Miami...typically from Cuba...are too busy trying to find work and make enough money to help their familes that are still in Cuba.The organizations that need volunteers should use a gorilla warfare type of advertising. Mostly at night at the clubs, or outside the clubs...you might actually get a bunch of kids that moved from the higher states in ratings and convince them there are stilll people in need there."
There's nothing at all in the content of the report regarding immigrants, but that won't stop people from using it as a platform to vent their racism! Those who write up this wire report tell us that we have their permission to blame them anyway! Nope, we don't need to have a reason to blame groups of people whom you don't understand, you can just sort of...do it. Pretty cool, huh?
Peculiar is even the images to hammer this not-so-subtle racism either.
Another brown illegal hanging his head in shame for taking an American job.
Compared to images from cities with the most volunteers.
Good ole Austin Texas with the 'Murrican flag.
The nice old white families in Portland Oregon.
Surely, you won't find immigrants tainting the American spirit in Austin, TX or Portland, OR.
What's interesting is the fact that economic and city infrastructure is not targeted for questioning at all, and probably has more to do with volunteering than anything else.
The city of Vice, a city of vices, and a city built on Disney World, NY. They all seem to be built on corporation-operated, thrill-seeking tourist attractions. The first three especially don't strike me as cities with tight communal, familial, and spatial networks, and therefore, they aren't afforded the opportunity to volunteer as much. I would think people volunteer mostly through opportunity and strong personal networks and communities.
What was interesting was that after that quote, he was talking about how the kids would be easier to control. You could make kids more obedient. You can flip a switch that would turn off the gay button.
I'm not sure how parents are reacting or if they actually are overmedicating their children, but I do know that all these chemical psycho-social "solutions" are more readily available than they ever were. I have to wonder how the human race has made it so far presumably without its help for over 2 million years.
Every and anything in this age of microbiological-pharmaceutical corporation growth can be defined as a "sickness" or weakness and then "fixed." But fixed seems to mean acting "normal". "Normal" in our context seems to mean "controllable." Oddly enough though, it's only the people in the extremes who we ever seem to acknowledge or talk about.
What is Psychogeography? "Psychogeography consists of the representation of developmental time and the playing out of its vicissitudes on the stage of space. Space is often used as metaphor—sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally—for time. Time becomes space's drama; space becomes time's stage."
"The study of psychogeography begins with the still radical Kantian assumption that reality is not neutral, not simply “there” for the seeing. Psychogeography is a study of how and why we mediate reality with the contents of our psyches. Culture is not automatically adaptive to or even accurately perceptive of the real social and physical world. Spatial “otherness” is largely projective (La Barre, 1972; Devereux, 1980; DeMause, 1982)"
"Fantasies about the body and the family are transmuted into descriptions of one's own group, other groups, into shapes and features of the world."
"Psychogeography begins with the vicissitudes of selfhood in a human body within a family context, and proceeds outward to encompass the world."
Example: "We animate other peoples and places with aspects of ourselves. Often more literally than figurative, nations become mother- and fatherlands and fusions of the two. We speak of a “family” of nations or of mankind. Enemies become “cancers” which threaten to invade or corrupt the “body” politic. People experience the integrity of the body as coextensive with the integrity of group (e.g., national) boundaries."
"Psychogeography is a study of (a) the role of unconscious factors in the perception of natural and social reality, and (b) the consequences of that perception, i.e., how attributes of the psyche, once projected onto the world, become the basis for action in the world." Fascinating Tidbits and Reflections:
1) This is a discipline bound up in borders, boundaries, lines, either-ors, rules, standards, insides, outsides, familiarities, and others. The sense of "Self" is defined partly based on who we think we are NOT.
"One's personal boundaries come to be felt as coextensive with and bound up with the fate of the geopolitical boundaries of one's group. Aggression is mobilized in defense of the self (Rochlin, 1973), in the service of keeping a sense of goodness and completeness and safety inside, repudiating in oneself disavowed parts and impulses, putting these disavowed aspects into the enemy, intensifying them in the enemy, engaging them through the enemy, combatting them in the enemy, and restoring what the enemy is seen to have taken away."
2) Despite borders and walls being constantly drawn, we seem to always believe that we can be infiltrated upon and imperiled by that enemy.
"The hallucination that governs the military realm is that the enemy is threateningly close to you, even if he is in reality thousands of miles away. His psychic proximity overrides all mere geographical facts. He attracts your attention and obsesses your unreasoning process just like the “loved one” who is wall-to-wall Breast."
3) There are shared bounaries and fantasies, which hold things for a group together.
"Myths and related phenomena are group-accepted images which serve as further screening devices in the defensive and adaptive functions of the ego. They reinforce the suppression and repression of individual fantasies and personal myths. A shared daydream is a step toward group formation and solidarity and leads to a sense of mutual identification on the basis of common needs."
Myths and these images essentially act as the social memory for a group. In popular discourse, TV sitcoms and movies act as the models and images, from which people negotiate boundaries and form fantasies.
4) The definition of the enemy makes things in our world much easier to define.
"The ability to focus one's anxiety also makes one feel safer; as a group solution to the free-floating anxiety of everyday life, the availability of a common enemy not only allows one to know where to look for danger but prescribes precisely where one should look."
In the same way that numbers are used to model the world, defining our enemies are used to model our world. And just the way numbers seem definite, they are in actuality achieved imperfectly, just as the way enemies seem definite, but they are defined imperfectly.
5) Essentially, we like to project the worse traits we see in ourselves onto our enemies. Apparently our enemies have a monopoly on those terrible traits, while we don't.
A Nazarene physician interviewed by the author said of the countryside in relation to the urban form.
'You're in God's Country here. Peaceful, quiet, decent. None of that crazy stuff you find Back East [a common phrase] or on the West Coast. God's Country is right here in the center; Back East and everything to the West is the Devil's Country. Broken families, drugs, hippies, wierdos of all kinds. Here you have some space to yourself, some privacy, not wall-to-wall people. I wouldn't want to go there. I wouldn't want my children to grow up there; it's not healthy.'
"In this psychogeographic depiction of the official division of labor between regions, respondents never utter a word about the high rates of alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, homicide, incest, and the like within the region; instead, the group myth of safety, freedom, and piety becomes a reality more compelling than reality itself, and what cannot be accepted about that reality magically becomes the distinguishing feature of the outgroups to the East and West."
The country's good traits are emphasized, and exaggerated while the urban side's good are de-emphasized and underplayed.
6) With us defining our enemies to be these people with all the bad traits, it seems that no matter what they do, barring a dramatic shift towards "our" ideology they will almost always remain the static, unchanging enemy.
"Much as we wish the Soviets to change, we depend upon them not to change. For the prospect of peace would eliminate their availability as the externalized focus and (symbolic) object or target of anxiety."
This ideology is this conservative cousin of the mushroom-dropping folks who like to explore the "exotic, unchanging other." The premise is still that we still have the good traits in abundance while they have all the bad ones.
"To take the point further: Americans prize “freedom,” a freedom which the Soviets are perceived as menacingly and unremittingly trying to take away. The U.S.S.R. serves as the image of what might be called The Great Depriver. Surely religiously devout Americans do not possess rebellious, irreverent impulses: it is those atheist Russian Communists (who are contending with resurgent Orthodoxy at home) who are bent upon taking away American religion. While Americans look longingly at the putative paternalism and maternalism of Japanese corporations, and reinstate religious fundamentalism and political authoritarianism at home, we keep our illusion of precious freedom by accusing the Soviets all the more of seeking to take it away."
This applies to today's popular discourse on China, North Korea, Cuba, etc.
7) "Scholars, not unlike political and military strategists, spend entirely too much time and effort divining the nature and characteristics of the adversary, and devote virtually no time or effort into exploring the relationship between adversaries, together with the investment of each (and all) participant in that relationship."
Reservations:
1) I'm not sure that I like the definition and implications of the "ethnic group." In fact, it's kind of a nuisance, especially done by a bunch of white guys, people who have never been considered "outsiders" to the degree that racial and ethnic "groups" experience.
"George DeVos (1975, p. 9) defines an ethnic group as “a self-perceived group of people who hold in common a set of traditions not shared by the others with whom they are in contact.”
"Max Weber introduced the concept of ethnic honor: “belief in a specific ‘honor’ of their members, not shared by outsiders, i.e., the sense of ethnic honor” (1961, p. 307)."
While there is some type of "pride" that some people do engage in, it's not some empty-ass "honor" to just be part of a racial or ethnic group. Being part of a group is not something people celebrate as an honor or achievement.
As a message boarder once put it in the context of relating Jewish performances of ethnic pride after the Holocaust to current performances of ethnic pride in the context of the United States, celebrating the ethnicity is like saying a fuck-you back to an imagined otherized but centralized dominant, oppressive people. It's saying that no matter what "you" did to my ancestors, we've survived, I'm here and fuck you again. It's mostly imaginary-broad enemy-driven rather than "self-driven".
Just as its definitions and gradual proliferations were for purposes of violence, there is still violence inherent in it, only in this age of globalizing interconnectedness, the power and violence has seemingly transferred from the enemy group to that ethnic and racial group.
Summing up...
There is definitely a lot more to the article.
However, the discourse seems to be bound up in bordership and boundaries. There are definitely implications for international and domestic studies and conflict resolution. I was hoping to find something about spatiality or space and psychology within the urban form, as I am interested in those ambiguous open spaces, garbage, and graff, and hopefully within this discipline I can eventually happen across it. I like the quip about the proximities of enemies because it never seems like they are too far away from you.
Before making our way to the strip mall city that is called Burbank, we were watching T2. I don't ever remember finishing the film, but the first hour to hour and half where that white cop is chasing Johnny, where the Terminator incites random violence on people, where Johnny's mom plots her escape are classic moments, is forever burnt in my memory, with new proteins synthesized in my brain specifically for those moments and everything.
So with my memory fully emblazoned with classic action film imagery and flow, I was initially really feeling this movie.
The cast of characters seemed to have a deeper story to tell. I thought Angelina would be like this T2-like protector of the overanxious protagonist. I thought Morgan Freeman would be some old wise guy with great stories and lessons to teach.
I thought there was going to be a revelation about how all these assassins came to be associated with each other, which spoke to the working classes or something. Assassins killed who they killed because it was "fate." Fate was a textile machine that determined who these assassings would target. They were assigned the kills and did them without any questioning. One interesting thing Angelina said in justification was "kill one, save one thousand." I definitely don't agree, but I kept thinking that they were going to have a better point that would explain that quote.
One theme I liked was considering their handling of the protagonist's "sickness." Here's an overanious guy in a cubicle who can't speak up at all and is prone to panic attacks. He absolutely needs his pills to stop what is defined in our society as a "panic attack." However, not so anymore, he absolutely needs these "panic attacks" to shoot the wings off a fly, curve a bullet, or grab a pendulum. The protagnoist's "sickness" was effectively harnessed into a "strength." From a blood-pumping bedwetter to an intensely focused, assassin.
The effects department of the movie did quite a job of bringing the viewer into the experience of an anxiety attack...the mounting and increasingly suffocating pressure, the lack of memory. The extra blood pressure ended up being the energy needed to refine his super-human abilities.
Aside from this theme, turns out there wasn't much of a story to tell.
The story broke down when it turns out that this assassin fraternity turns out to be a faux, or at least run by a superficial faux. Its as if we shouldn't have bothered following anything till the end of the film. I just don't like that it appears there's no nuance or any character development.
The culmination of the movie happens when this assassin fraternity ultimately kills itself because of fate. They seem to accept this 'fate' from Morgan Freeman's character with no questions asked. They do not think to question a guy who has been lying all along...and they end up killing themselves...in honor of the fraternity code.
The message this movie ultimately ended up saying is something I take issue with.
With a great cast of celebrities whom I consider somewhat respectable people, I thought there was going to be deeper themes than the ones of revenge and "taking control."
The big take-home message was about taking control of your life. However, the huge irony the size of the elephant in the back of the room, is that Morgan Freeman's character is similar to the protagonist's in that he too is tring to take control of his fate. The only difference is that he gets killed because he's defined as "bad", or "not the protagonist" a very slippery slope.
Seemed like the movie that the mid-20s, recent college grad, office cubicle bro-ski demographic would enjoy. Plenty of unwarranted violence with a hip Office-Dr. Phil/psuedo-scientologist type of fatalistic view on life. New clothes, same bullshit.
by B.J. on 5/23/2008 09:02:00 PM
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I was just websurfing on a Friday night. Happened upon a newly wedded old Muslim friend's xanga site. Then happened upon her friend's site. This friend of a friend directed a PCN, a Pilipino Cultural Night, that I had watched at SD and even let me crash at her place for the night.
She posted something interesting about consumerism that I had been wanting to post, but I never really quite put it all together. I've wanted to talk even more about the consumer culture we live in, and explain how I try and live outside of it as much as possible. These notes she wrote about are a good springboard for me.
This is what caught my eye...particularly because Dom wrote that on my shirt, and the song by Kanye is on heavy repeat.
""American Dream": ownership, family first, white picket fence, "2.5 kids," inward focused life = protective, exclusion, money for vacations, social status, financial stability, disposable income, productivity, time equals money, focus on what you have, shopping as recreation, if you want something you should have it, more cars than drivers, having the latest of everything, kids are involved in everything and attend private/prestigious schools"
Redefinition: perhaps involving redefining what is "best," outward focused = good life for everyone (redistributing) considering all of humanity, living sustainably, rich relationships (spend time, not money), cultivate talents, stronger connection to the earth, peace of mind/contentment, self-reflection/awareness, community involvement, balance of work, play, health, conscious consuming, quality time, shared resources, freedom to pursue dreams/passions, access to nature, freedom from financial fears, quality food with friends, time for creativity, value shift out from under the burden of productivity, slowing down, living by the rhythms of life and the cycles of the seasons
Where do you get caught up? · Self-comparison · When you are at the end of your rope and need a quick fix/act of desperation
I guess this is fine cause we all fall, but not too much.
· Community reinforcement · Traditions, gifts, souvenirs · Convenience · Laziness · Wastefulness · Unconscious consuming · Societal expectations · Have to "own" otherwise your not fiscally responsible/successful
This is something I've just discovered: you don't have to own something to utilize it. I "own" lots of books, but what it's ultimately useless if those books and knowledge don't even end up being circulated in my consciousness and used by me.
· Earning more money to keep up same lifestyle
The old saying about teaching a man to fish. I'm sick of paying people to do things for me. To cut up, fry, and cook my food.
It makes me think what the hell I've really learned in 24 years. All I've learned is how to pay for things, that I'm really too dependent on others, that I'm blessed, and damn, I need to do something.
· Over-commitments/ energy spread too thin · Impulse buys
How do you break the cycle? · Setting boundaries: · Budget/limit
When you're breaking any cycle, it's important at first to set boundaries and reach goals, just to give you a bit of confidence that you can get through something. Then once you meet those goals, just slowly cut back and cut down.
For instance, Facebook and I. I made a goal to not be in it for a year. I really wanted to stop wishing, hoping, and clinging on to these fantasy people that I barely even knew. I needed to stop stalking. Goddamn it was pathetic.
I didn't reach the 1-year goal as I've joined back, but given that I initially set hard boundaries and have made it less a part of my life, it's become exactly just that: less a part of my life. I've discovered that there are a lot more interesting things outside of that reality...
· Creative ways of giving out gifts · Breaking traditions or redefining · Small steps/changes · Pulling people alongside with similar values · Being a voice to others · Curbing Media Intake!
Speaking of reality...
Reality is what you take into your world. And if all you take in is crap, your reality is crap.
· Spread awareness · Sharing: possessions, housing · Intentional community · Become an educated consumer · When you do something you love, you feel full and need less · Periodically do an internal values check to make sure your actions are line with values · Move somewhere simpler/slower · List where your time is going to see what your priorities are · Cut out things that are unnecessary · Intentionally decrease your means so that you are forced to be more intentional with what you spend (make a financial commitment, start saving, work less)
When I say I'm thankful and gracious for all that I have, having all 5 senses working is usually what comes to mind first.
A former co-worker of mine once posed the question if I would rather be blind or deaf.
Another co-worker and I "chose" to be deaf. The question-poser chose to be blind.
Our reasons for being deaf rather than losing our vision --- "we want to be able to see things." On a quality of life level, I would want to see if my wife is hot. I wouldn't need to hear other people's crap. But the dealbreaker for me is, on a survival level, if someone/something were to attack me, (because everyone knows of those vicious gangs of people who like to attack the deaf) well, I'd like to know where I'm going to strike or maim the punk-ass. It seems like you're less likely to be ripped off because you can be more independent.
The question-poser chose to save her hearing over her vision because she wanted to hear music. It occurred to me that even though we are a visually-inclined society, the primary way we make and establish meanings is through sound and spoken language. Me, I haven't listen to a lot of what people say, and I haven't had many systems of meaning to follow. When you hear something, you feel intensity, tone, and rhythm more intensely, and you can establish meaning from that. They say that music is the universal language...that is unless you're deaf.
When I watched a documentary about the deaf community, I saw how tightly knit a community they were. The discourse surrounding them sounded like the same discourse you'd hear/read about a minority community. They have their own language, they communicate to each other in a unique way that is not understood by the larger society. They feel disrespected, misunderstood, and most of all they hate it when someone tries to label or leave their community.
The one thing they especially hated was when parents of a deaf child would consult a doctor for cochlear implants. Parents, usually with hearing, reasoned that they wanted their children to have a "fuller experience." Deaf folks on the counterattack said that they already had a "full" experience. One of them talked about how he was the editor of the NY Times as a deaf person, managing hearing people. It appears that the parents with hearing thought that the deaf world was just lacking in meaning. And they were dead wrong.
The deaf do have their own systems of meaning, but it remained and probably still remains unacknowledged by those who have the hearing, the arbitors of meaning and communication.
Anthropology has a history of leading the charge in chastizing "other" cultures for breeding "undesirable" attitudes.
When I say this, I have in mind Oscar Lewis' "Culture of Poverty" in which he uses the same judgmental terms as the "dominant" society uses to characterize low-income folks. He only defines these low-income folks based on what they do NOT have in comparison to the non-impoverished classes. He calls their living conditions "marginal", and makes the conclusion that they do not have a "cosmopolitan world view."
This paper probably touched off a chain reaction or chain web of events. It contributed to the Moynihan Report, a report by the liberal senator Moynihan whose report put a focus on the deterioration of the black-American family. This focus on the division and disintegration turn was something that Ronald Reagan seized upon in his campaign ads. Born was the stirring image of the welfare queen and its partner-in-crime, the self-help, pull-yourself-by-the-bootstraps discourse. I really wish someone would vandalize or burn that man's library in Simi Valley. LA Graffiti and gang violence...talk about your complete misplacement of energy and efforts. Crips, Bloods, Truchas, Mafia, Mobsters, 18th Street, Triggs, Wa-Chings, Maravillas there's a property on 40 Presidential Drive, Simi Valley, CA that needs some claiming.
But I digress.
The point is that once "poverty" became a "culture", as if it was a way of life people "chose", it became easy for regular people to say that those low-income people should simply "not choose" that way of life. As a result, anything associated with the black family just became lumped and interrelated with each other in popular discourse. Blacks in poverty? Easy, you can blame that on the fact that most of them are lazy and don't have a father figure.
People outside of academia have generally failed to look at root causes or look further into to why they've made the observations they've made. Unless they have been in the culture and/or they can understand or even make an attempt to understand, people did not and generally still do not take the extra step to look into what makes so many of them lazy and/or even better, what supplants laziness, what they are not lazy in, and/or why it appears they are lazy.
If anthropology can criticize "others", the field of anthropology can lead the charge in chastizing "this" culture for breeding "undesirable" attitudes.
My first course in Psychological anthropology asked the question of whether or not "culture" can make someone "sick." Even though I had been an anthropology major for 2 years to that point and not having been a fan of the perceived dominant tenets of American culture since a high school history class, I had never thought of this question.
And so now in an era of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds using steroids, Olympics stars like Marion Jones going to jail for using drugs, and the sport of cycling being dented every year because of some kind of drug scandal, what does this say about us and our most prominent cultures of excess and poverty?
However not to be completely mudslinging at these dominant cultures, and to differ a bit from their approach, maybe we should also ask, what are the root causes, and what gives people so much opportunity and space to consume what it does in excess?
Another question separate from focusing on the culture of excess but rather the culture surrounding "enhancement" is why there is such a moral code and imperative ascribed to sports as opposed to none whatsoever in the fields of academia or medicine? We don't care at all that a seizable chunk of them take brain enhancers. No one would call that "cheating." The Onion makes fun of that fact.
"The point of innovation is to make actual money." - says actor reading a line from IBM's marketing department.
I've had a problem with that statement for a while. I couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with it, but I know that something didn't feel right and/or true with that statement. I doubt that truly innovative people do creative things specifically for the specific purpose of making money.
I can't believe that great thinkers were motivated too much by something as temporary and transient as money.
Innovation is more spontaneous and less purposeful. It seems to be a synthesis when experiences are combined rather randomly than something people aim to do.
Could anyone picture great philosophers, thinkers, and truth-seekers like Ike Newton, Albert Einstein, Percy Julian, or Stephen Hawking doing what they did just to get rich?
...a physiological state when what you do socially (other than yak up a carpet or break anything) is acknowledged by watchers that there isn't any meaning to what you are doing.
Almost everything is dismissed by the fact that you are drunk/high. We use it in everyday talk to dismiss anything we do that is considered "stupid".
In a society with so much information and by implication so many meanings for everything said and done, getting high or drunk is more of an impetus for people to drop all those meanings as quickly as possible.
One way to act on your instinct, your subconscious without anyone really challenging you. A passive-aggressive response.
This reminds me of an observation in this book I read in intro to Anthro Linguistics called "Constructing Panic." The book is about a woman with agoraphobia, which is a fear of being in a place or situation where it may be difficult to escape or obtain help. The observation was about how this woman would always accept what her husband told her. She would always accept what he said and do what he asked of her.
However, whenever she felt a panic attack coming, she would suddenly become a dominant figure. Her panic attacks would take priority, and she would ask her way out of anything. For instance, a family vacation that she didn't want to take. She was passive and complicit in the trip, until they were on the road, and she experienced a panic attack. She kept emphasizing how she needed to get away. End result, they need to go home, see a doctor, she gets her way. It takes almost a medical "condition" for her to get her way, but in the end, she gets her way.
Getting high, getting drunk, one way to get your way, least in the short-term. You get your way. In this state, no one will be able to challenge you because it's sort of a physiological state, meaning it's kind of "natural" and that no one can do anything about you acting like that.
I'm just thinking, it wouldn't be bad to have a kid some day. But there was something I gleaned out out of all this watching.
The video speaks a bit to the human follies and challenges in the development of our abilities to communicate with one other.
Here's the video:
Stop at 55 seconds.
The second his father stops laughing, he thinks he's finally gotten his father's attention to an urgent situation. Just for confirmation that his father knows the situation, he blurts out a throwaway but final "buh-lud". However, it turns out that his father's actually holding it and this sends him into a very thunderous burst of laughter.
The Buhlud kid isn't sure for a split second of what to do. At about 55 seconds, for a split second, it actually looks like he's going to start laughing. He doesn't expect his dad to laugh anymore, he's supposed to understand!
After a split-second of indecision he finally decides the correct emotion to show: he's mad. And by god will he show it. He won't be taken seriously by dad? Fine. So he yells, prepares us with a mad face, and stomps down the definitive, conclusive "Not Funny!"
Its interesting that the kid can already sense that he's being not taken seriously. This speaks to an expectation he's developed that he would be taken seriously if he just kept yelling out a word he's associated with "urgency." I wonder when he began to form this set of expectations that make him believe his father's supposed to listen to him?
With his yelling of buhlud, he obviously expected that his father would pay attention to him and act urgently.
I also have to wonder when and where that association of "urgency" with "buhlud" came from and how often it was reinforced before he was able to finally use the word in a way that we all understood. I wonder the correlations are to memory.
I also wonder what this means for us as adults who can already understand the language and have already learned what to get mad at. We usually don't have these split-second about-to-laugh moments, or at least we hide them better than the child. I wonder if the more automatic anger it becomes, the more related to your physiology it is.
Add me to your reading list.
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