Hardball

When reading Jane Juffer's book the Single Mother, more specifically her chapter Mothers and Sons, I was reminded of the movie Hardball. In this movie Keanu Reeves is given a community service job coaching a baseball team in the ghetto. I was reminded of this movie because Juffer was talking about her goal to make sure her son grew up properly and safe from joining a gang. In this movie, Keanu Reeves, is trying to get young school kids off the streets and on the field. He struggle though the movie (spoiler alert) because one of the kids gets kicked off the team and then joins a gang.  Keanu realizes that he can't help everyone but he will do what he can to help some of them.
In one scene, Reeves is walking one of the kids home and he asks where all the fathers were. The kid responds with, "they're in jail." Keanu Reeves then realizes that he needs to start taking his job a lot more seriously because he was the only father figure many of these kids had. Juffer talks about how the absence of father figures is largely what draws young kids to the gang life.  Young kids want and need a father figure to learn how they are supposed to act when they grow up. These kids who don't have that father figure are drawn into the gang life because there are older guys who they are drawn too. Life for single mothers is very difficult because they need to both be a mother and a father. They need to raise their kids and support them. While trying to relate what Jane Juffer and a movie staring Keanu Reeves is hard (no offense to Keanu Reeves) the main point is still valid. Single mothers in bad neighborhoods have a much harder time trying to raise their kids because of the gangs and their attraction to younger males.

Wings

We all like to be defined but what we wear. In many situations we don't care about the quality of the product, or even if we like what we are purchasing, we are simply buying a brand. Slowly we are becoming slaves to consumption as we will purchase the brand product over the no-name one despite the fact that there are no differences. It won't matter if there is a price differences in most cases simply because we want the comfort of having that brand.

Naomi Klein talks about this in her book, No Logo, which talks about consumerism and how companies know that we but brands and logos, not products. Because of this, that is exactly what companies started selling. I notices ads all the time but rarely do I put value on them, mostly because i'm ignorant of their value. For instance, i've never really cared what brand of shoes im wearing. When ever I walk into a show store I simply walk up and the isle until something catches my eye and then i purchase it. Since we were discussing No Logo in my Lit. Theory class I decided to pay more attention to the brands as i got new shoes the other week. For the longest time I thought I had been walking around in K-Swiss shoes. This time however I found the exact same that I had gotten 2 years ago and that were no burned out. They were Adidas. It then hit me that I haven't work K-Swiss since sophomore year of high school.

People's attention to what shoes they wear can come up often. I was particularly drawn to Mackelmore's song Wings, a song about a young boy buying a pair of Air Maxes. The song addresses consumerism today in a new creative way. The song opens positive with Mackelmore telling a story of how he believed the hype that Nike was spilling about the "Air bubble" in the heel allowing you to jump higher. The story then evolves to Mackelmore being at school and how it didn't matter if he couldn't play basketball as long as he had the shoes that the pros had. This transference of targets for sales shows how corrupted our society has become. Nike used to target athletes, now though, it doesn't matter, kids want the shoes just to have the logo on the tongue.

Mackelmore, then starts to question his world after his friend Carlos' brother was murdered and his Jordan IV's were stolen. Mackelmore then realized that he had hoped the shoes would make him great and he would never need to work for it. Making the shoes the source of being a good player not hard work and determination. The irony here being that Nike's tag line, "Just do it" didn't kick in because the Nike symbol and promises made Mackelmore lazy. Mackelmore again says in the song that after growing older he's stare in the mirror and think about how Phil Knight (co-founder of Nike) had tricked everyone with his advertisement and product promises that gave the shoes a false worth.
 Mackelmore addresses blind consumerism in his closing line,

" They started out, with what I wear to school
That first day, like these are what make you cool
And this pair, this would be my parachute
So much more than just a pair of shoes
Nah, this is what I am
What I wore, this is the source of my youth
This dream that they sold to you
For a hundred dollars and some change
Consumption is in the veins
And now I see it’s just another pair of shoes."

Here Mackelmore states that the shoes at first were just about what made him cool. Slowly he became dependent on it. Mackelmore realizes the folly in paying a hundred dollars for a pair of shoes when they are no different then any other shoe out there, it doesn't matter if they were made by Nike, K-swiss, or Adidas.

The Single Father

Jane Juffer speaks often about the hard life of single mothers. Now this blog isn't going to bash any single mothers so please don't get the wrong idea. The reason I am writing is because I want to question if life is any harder if the rolls were reversed and this book was about the lives of single fathers.

When I try to look at these two different lifestyles, my mind first jumps to the conclusion that the two are not that different, with some degree of difference. In this way I am choosing to look at both situations as the same one: a single parent.

Quick! Picture a single mother. What did you think about? In most cases, myself included, we picture a young, hardworking, underpaid, overworked beautiful and unappreciated women. Now, picture a single dad. Like the single mother, we have preset beliefs about this stereotype. Did you think of a panicking man in a backwards apron pouring sausage, pancakes, and syrup into his sons lunchbox? Maybe the kid is wearing mismatching clothes, his shoes are untied, and his hair is all over the place.
We get these preset images of single parents due to popular media. Single mother's, more often then not, are glorified e.g. Gilmore Girls, Friends, Reba, Bewitched, Charmed, Sabrina the Teenage Witch (two mothers but same point) or 8 Simple Rules (became a single mother after the real life actor who portrayed the husband was killed) and for fathers: Full House, Two and a Half Men, Supernatural, Hannah Montana (didn't want to reference this but it is true)

NOW ONCE AGAIN! I AM NOT BASHING BEING A TEENAGE MOTHER!

I am simple trying to state that there is a prejudice against single fathers. I asked my sisters about this and I asked her which stereotype is worse. She told me immediately that women had it worse. I asked her why and she said, "When you see a single dad, you think that he had a wife and she died. When you see a single mom, SHE had a one night stand and SHE has to carry the baby with her for the rest of her life." I could see where she is coming from but I was curious to find some actual statistics.

Looking at updated statistics we can see that:

Of the mothers who are custodial parents:

• 45% are currently divorced or separated
• 34.2% have never been married
• 19% are married (In most cases, these numbers represent women who have remarried.)
• 1.7% were widowed

 Of the fathers who are custodial parents:

• 57.8% are divorced or separated
• 20.9% have never married
• 20% are currently married (In most cases, these numbers represent men who have remarried.)
• Fewer than 1% were widowed

Now this puts a crack in a lot of prejudice both against single moms and dads.

seeing that 34.2% of single mothers have never married and that 45% are divorced or separated. This paints a different picture than the young, impressionable hardworking mother. Granted 34.2% is huge and there are a lot of single mothers that for one reasons or another are single parents. There are many possible reasons for this though. There shouldn't be this image that it is because she had a one night stand and now has to bare the pain or humiliation.

The statistics are similar for single fathers. almost 21% of all single fathers have never been married, and only 1% are single fathers because their spouse died. This means that the image we get of a single father whose wife died is also very false stereotype. 

Essentially what I'm driving at is that we need to take a hard look at the images thrown at us in TV and movies. Media has made a bias towards single mother versus single fathers. This bias isn't even backed by actual statics but it focus on "what sells."People would be more interested in watching a tv series about a mother who is single because of a one night stand then a mother who is single because she and her husband separated or divorced. This helps explain why TV shows like "16 and pregnant" or "Teen Mom" are so popular.

The way I see it, life is just as hard for single fathers. Looking at a teenage level, when a young guy gets a girl pregnant his life is just as shook up as hers is. She gets full rights in deciding if the baby aborted, kept, or adopted. The father has to live with her decision. He then also has to live with the consequences or paying for the baby's care and supporting the mother (excluding incidents where the mother wants nothing to do with the father or the father ran away).

In older examples men have it just as hard. Men do not have the natural nurturing instinct in them. Men can't here a baby cry and know that that specific cry means the baby is hungry, tired, needs a diaper change, et cetera.  In incidents where the child is older the single dad has just as many problems. for male children, the father and child will start budding heads as they strive for control of the house. in female children Men will have a harder time since they wouldn't be able to help girls understand the changes they are both physically and mentally going through.

What I'm striving at is that I believe single dads have it just as rough as single mothers and that this social idea that women have it much worse off is simply an illusion provided by media.

Signs

I was watching The Da Vinci Code last week and I found the opening scene to be rather interesting. Robert Langdon is introduced as an expert in symbols and their meanings. He opens up a conference by showing a small part of a picture having people yell out guesses as to what it's meaning is, and then he expands the picture to reveal a bigger meaning. For example he is zoomed in a picture of a trident, people shouted, words like "hatred" "devil" satanism" Robert Langdon responds by revealing that the picture is of Poseidon and instead of the devil's pitchfork it was a trident.

This reminded me of our discussion on the Minister's Black Vail and Lacan. We've discussed how often times the referent stays the same yet the signified changes based on different social structures or often times the meaning can change over time. In the case of The Da Vinci Code, a metal rod with three sharp points at the end of it stays the same physical object through all these different interpretations, yet the signified changes, image of power used by a Greek God or the weapon of a fallen angel.

This happens all the time with symbols when someone else uses them and over time different groups of people see their meaning as something drastically different. An example of this is the pentagram. This symbol's earliest meaning was in reference to the goddess Venus. This symbol's signified changes in different cultures. In the Chinese culture the pentagram is used in explaining how the 5 main elements either strengthen or destroy another element.

Now with the rise of rock and metal music, the pentagram's meaning took on a darker meaning. The pentagram was flipped upside down, and the image of a goat head was posted over it. Then people started claiming that the pentagram was a symbol of devil worship. While it always interesting to see how symbols change in different cultures or over time, it is sad to see when symbols that are meant to be of peace are turned to mean evil or have negative connotations,

Words Words Words

Words. Squiggles on a page that, through years of being told they have meaning…have meaning. In literature theory, we talked about how words are broken down into 3 parts, the signifier, signified, and the indexical. Now, I love language and learning about origins of the word. This is one of the reasons I enjoyed taking Latin as a language in high school. 

Now, when we were being taught about the 3 different parts we used the word Pen as our subject. We talked about how there was the signifier, the three letters P,E, and N standing next to each other with a space on both sides of them. Then there is the signified, which is the meaning of the word “pen” you think about using it to take notes in class, write a letter, maybe spin around your fingers if the lecture is particularly boring. Finally there is the indexical, the physical object that we call a “pen.”

            This immediately brought me back to my grade school days when I read the book Frindle, by Andrew Clements. For those of you who don’t know about this book I will give a quick summary.  Nick is a 5^th grader with a very disliked English teacher. To make time pass at the end of class one day he asks her where the origin of words comes from. She tells him to write a paper on it. After he does this he comes up with a new word, frindle.  A frindle is what Nick started calling pens. This soon caught on not only in his class, but also across the nation. His teacher hated the word frindle because she thought it was insulting to the history that the word “pen” has. (In French penne means bird’s feather or quill, which was an early form of a pen.) This book showed that how we place meaning is extremely powerful. Had Nick’s friends not jumped in and said ‘a pen is a frindle and a frindle is a pen” then the word would have died out.

            I learned this first hand when last year I had just gone for a run and my legs were killing me, I then had to climb two flights of stairs. While slowly walking up the stairs I was complaining to a friend about how I hate stairs, hated them so much that I was going to call them “stecs” cause that word seemed to me at the time, better suited.  This caught on with my friends for about a week but died out. Now when I complain about stairs, my friends ask me if I mean “stecs”

            Now moving onto a new topic entirely. I started thinking about how we use abbreviations. I also realized that abbreviations could, in a way, be broken down into the 3 parts.  Bare with me for a sec. Let’s take the example, “etc.” We have the signifier, “etc” we have the signified, the meaning placed on the letters, “and all the other things” then we have the Indexical, “et cetera.” Now I know the words “et cetera” isn’t a physical thing. But let’s pretend that words are a physical thing, just so that my theory works out.

            I then realized how over years this style of abbreviating word first started to strengthen the English language, and in recent years, regressed back to the Stone Age.  Now I’m sure you’re wondering, “whooh what? Tell me how? That can’t be true can it?” Yes, it’s true. Now calm down and let me explain. Abbreviations are often used when you need to say a long word but need to say it quickly. This is most often used my doctors, using EKG instead of the German word Elektrokardiogramm. Slowly, however, this concept bled into pop culture and teenage word play. Best friends became BF, and as social networking picked up and people started texting. “See you later” became “C U later”, “I love you” became “I luv you” Oh my God became “OMG” and %$#@ you became F U” Now, in this case, I become a lot like Mrs. Grangers from Frindle, I hate that we are butchering language to such an extreme.

            This is why I enjoy going to websites like failbook.com or happyface.com and reading people correcting spelling on facebook statuses. I do this simply because it remind me that there are people just like me out there that actually care about the words they use.  Here is an example of one.  In one of my favorite ones, the status says “how do u make wknds longer? “ the first comment was “spell it properly and you get ‘weekends’ is that long enough for you?”

Facebook spelling corrections 

Now I'm not saying that misspelling a word is the worst thing in the word. I'm an English major and I have to admit that I slip up when I'm not paying attention. But please, don't willingly butcher the English language.

Now I’ve been ranting for a while now so I’m going to end it by saying please uses proper English.  Words have a lot of power and they get that power by how we use them. Let’s end the stereotype that American only know one language and don’t even know that one well.

Things That Describe Things You Don't Want to Out Right Say.

As an English major I love using metaphors when ever I don't want to outright say something. Be it in poetry or in describing situations my friends or I find ourselves in metaphors can come in handy.

Let's stop and take a look at the two major uses of Metaphors though, poetry and music (There is a lot of overlap here I know!) Anyway, I'm not sure why, but there is a great schism between those who love metaphors, and those who think they are pointless, English and non-English majors alike. I found myself on the side of those who love and hate them.

When it comes to reading poetry is where I am on the fence about my feelings of metaphors. This is mostly because when it comes to metaphors I prefer them to be easy to catch and clever, not deep winded and leaving you searching for what they were trying to say. I know that can be asking a lot but at times I don't think it's that hard. An example of this is Sylvia Plath's poem, oddly enough called, Metaphors. Now this poem is a 9 line poem with 9 metaphors in 9 syllables each one describing what it is like to be pregnant. Now I found this poem very interesting because of how she was able to use metaphors (A nine letter word, probably not related to the other 9's but interesting none the less) to describe so many different ways at looking at pregnancy. Had she not used metaphors the poem would have just been "I am fat, I am fat, Oh dear God I am fat" 9 times in a row, and let's face it this poem most likely would have been awful.

Now on the flip side, there are times in poetry when people put too much meaning in a metaphor, this causes me not to have any clue what the poet is talking about. This happened when I read T.S. Eliot's, The Waste Land. Now I know this is considered to be one of the better poems of the Modern Era (after World War I) but when I first read the poem, sometime while in High School, I didn't have the slightest idea what the poem was talking about, and thought to myself "Do I really want to be a writer if it means dealing with people that think this is what a great work is" Now that I am taking Modern Literature, with Sister Mara Faulkner, and have read about the time period and how the Waste Land refers to the state of being in America, post-war, and how everyone is "wasted" spiritually, and left empty. This put a whole new spin on everything I knew about the poem. Now this does bring back the whole Barthes and Foucault theory about what does it matter what the author says the metaphor is about but seriously, had I not known what Eliot lived through I would have been left in the dark for a long time.

Now on to music. Music is the one place where I absolutely love Metaphors. It's the place where you can bring a very creative side to important messages by not out right screaming at the microphone. Now, the message doesn't always need to be political like Green Day's American Idiot. One of my favorite songs is one huge metaphor, American Pie, by Don McLean.

Now the main line of this song that resonates the most is "The Day the Music Died" this line is a methaphor refers to February 3rd 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash. Now the song goes on from one metaphor to the next using a play on words to describe the state the U.S. is in after the death of these three young musicians and where music progressed to. Don Mclean could have easily just stated all these events but then it would have been a news bulletin in Rolling Stone magazine, not a truly amazing song.

I believe metaphor are an essential part to music and poetry. It keeps things lively and interesting. If you strip music and poetry the world becomes extremely ordinary and similar, and that is a world I would hate to live in.

Fishes and Valentines

Hello Internet it’s me again.  And today I am addressing an interesting topic. Meaning. As an English major with an emphasis in Creative Writing trying to find meaning in a work of poetry is something I battle with a regular basis, both as a writer and a reader.

            With Valentine’s Day being a big day and all I decided to attempt my year’s challenge of writing a love poem in honor of the Saint who was martyred for marrying couples when it was made illegal by Emperor Claudius the II.  After completing the poem I realized how I could incorporate it to Stanley Fish.

            Looking at the poem and talking to some friends I found three different ways groups of people would see my poem. There is the way I look at it, as the author. It’s meaning up to my interpretation, as simply a funny Valentine’s Day poem. My friends on the other hand, who know me fairly well and know my historical tendencies, saw it only as me trying to a girl that I like her.  I then began to wonder what would happen if I were to put the poem on a social networking sight such as Likealittle.com. Like a little is a website where you can go and post “flirts” about people you see and whatnot. The reason I thought about this scenario was when a friend of mine asked me if the poem was about her. This reminded me of how she would spend hours on LikeALittle, trying to convince herself that every post was about her. She would go as far as to convince herself she was in places when a post said she was when she was at the wrong campus or what not. 

Now, bringing Stanley Fish back into everything. Stanley Fish, states in his essay, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” that groups of people interpret poems based on the social situation they find themselves in.  Here we have three different interpretation based on three different “Interpretive communities,” one of the author, one of the not so critical critique, and of the dreamer. Each of us making meaning based on our own experiences, mine as a joke, my friends looking for gossip, and the social networker hoping to find a reason for spending hours on sites like Likealittle.com.

Now I am not a very pick writer. I have my own intentions and meaning but I am not one to deny others from looking for meaning themselves. After all that is what got me into writing in the first place.  Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion and interpretations of poetry. You CAN if you so choose to look at it with authorial intent, or knowing the author look at it with the historical mind, or as a New Critic and taking the poetry at face value without any care for what the author intended. It’s all up to you I guess. 

Oh and if you want to read the poem that inspired this post here ya go
 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/81603838/Tongue-Tied-Valentines