As you have all likely noticed I have begun sewing. By myself I have made: a purse, psyduck, and a derpy pony. An with Granny Linda (greg's grandmother) I am finishing a skirt for my mother. I really enjoy sewing it's very fulfilling to struggle with and conquer a project, even if right now they are looking very shoddy. Yesterday I worked with Sky and Wren on making their own ponies. We took the pattern I used and enlarged it, because a big part of my problems came from the pattern being too small. Then we changed when we sewed on the mane, added hoof bottoms, and used buttons for eyes & cutie mark. Generation 2 pony came out a lot cuter and I'm very proud of the work that was accomplished.
The night was fun too :) our saying for the night was "I don't know what went wrong." in a derpy voice, while trying to figure out why such and such didn't work. There was also lots of jokes about My Little Pony, and a hilarious wondering at a pony vagina that was a hole in the stitching. We half machine sewed and half hand sewed which both have there pros and cons. Anyway it was so so much fun that we decided to do another sewing adventure on the 12th at 4. I am telling you the exact stuff, because if you want to come over and try your hand at sewing you are welcome too. If you or your parent has a sewing machine you can borrow then bring it, if not then that just means you will share mine. We are going to make T-shirt dresses next time and maybe a mini plushy. The t-shirt dresses we will do by machine, but while we wait you can use my extra felt to hand stitch a mini plushy heart or seahorse. If you want to come bring 10 dollars to grab clearance fabric from Joanna's for the dresses. I will have made one already so I will just assist anyone who wants to learn.
Anyway sorry if this sounds like an ad but I just love sharing my joys with you guys and teaching what I know to others.
Okay so my day consisted completely of babysitting and homework today. But I had one interesting thing happen in it. The little I babysit who is eleven years old and her friend who is likely ten were watching a movie called "Switched" about a guy best friend who switches his girl best friends sperm donor cup with his own sperm. So kind of awkward chick flick already to be watching with preteens and I'm just praying there is no nudity or sex scene because Mom hadn't seen it before and she was counting on me to be parental control. I was prepared for squeals of "gross" "yuck!" and such about the idea of sperm, but I was not ready for this question: "What is sperm?" that comes from the bff of my charge.
First off I was blown away a bit that she didn't know what it was, but then reminded myself that kids don't get the sex talk in school until 7th grade and that 5th graders only get the puberty talk. I got my first sex talk really early in life because I was confused by a friend's older sister who tried to give me the sex talk. An here I was trying not to have this talk with this little girl (not my place) and still answering her question. I think I said that it was "white stuff a guy gave to a girl to help her have a baby", in which her response was "They pee in you?" While trying not giggle I answered "no, it different stuff."
Luckily my charge who had not said a word since her friends question, interrupted us and asked if we wanted to play outside. Hugely relieved I said yes and we went outside, turning off the movie.
SOOO yeah, that was my day.
When do you think it is appropriate that kids get "the talk" ?
Okay I am going to split this post up into two subjects, the first being my sewing stuff and the second some philosophy stuff.
Alright then, well as some of you saw I constructed my first non-assisted sewing project, yeah! My mom had picked me up some fabric to just play around with and I ended up looking up easy sewing projects on Youtube and Bing Bang Boom, new little bag. It was fairly simple to make, but of course I had some screw ups. For starters I apparently cut fabric like a two year old cuts paper, "I want to go straight *cut cut cut* ....well at least I know I meant to go straight...." this is also how it goes when I try to keep my fabric aligned within the same inches.... My other big mistakes ended up being with one of the straps, I sewed it to the inside of the bag instead of the outside because in the video I couldn't tell which way she wanted it. It works though and besides the frayed funky straps is pretty cute. I am also working on a tiered skirt, but I am doing that with Greg's Grandmother who I would be significantly lost without. Speaking of lost Sonoma is the most difficult place to get out of, I gave myself an hour to get from Sonoma to Rohnert Park to make it to my Astronomy class, and ended up severely lost. It took me an hour to simply find my way out of Sonoma!!!
Anyway on to some of my thoughts in some philosophy stuff.
The first one I thought I would address was a question that my teacher brought up in class. Why can a classy magazine like National Geographic take nude photos of women in Africa doing chores or whatever, but it would be unheard of to take pictures of a American women naked.
At first the class argued that it was a different in the settling, if these African women wore clothes then we would take pictures of them in clothes. But he argued that it was a way of creating an uncivilized view of Africans, because clothing is associated with civilization, and that photos of these women could be taken in positions where at least there breast/lower parts were hidden from view, but because we put these people on a lower class we think it's okay to display pictures of them full frontal.
Off topic my brain started to wonder later about the effect of place in tastefulness. Such as if we took a picture of a European women topless on a beach we wouldn't think much of it, because topless beaches are allowed in Europe. But, if you photochopped this women into the bedroom the women would suddenly be erotic. It kind of like that weird thing about underwear not being okay to be seen, but swimwear is totally fine. So it's really not the thing/act itself that is distasteful it is the attitude society puts on these things, thus why they can have a "time and a place". I know this is all very duh, but I this is the thought I was chewing on later as I was driving around town..
Okay and even though I haven't yet had class on my nature vs. nurture yet, I thought I might share my thoughts with you and we will see if they change after the class is done.
Alrighty so my thoughts like most of you is that both nature and nurture come into play in creating our personalities. My thoughts though are on how much of us is nature. My personal theory is that we all start out with a base line personality or better defined as "perception and reaction to events within our lives" and that this grows and changes as we do. My idea behind all of this has a lot to do with twins because they provide a constant. I have often heard it said that babies are different, some babies seem to always be fussy, others happy, clingy, ect. But this could be due to a various amount of environmental factors. Yet when you have a set of identical twins who have different reactions to life it makes you wonder why. Why is one of the twins always needing to be held why the other just wants to sit back and blow bubbles. I figure this must be the nature part of us. Like Jung states that we all have different personality and what this really means is that some of us will react differently to events. Mom puts you down, one baby is confused by absence and cries, the other just relaxes. This is then there base personality, which helps to structure how they perceive the world, though I'm sure with enough focus even this baseline could be pushed out of you by your environmental factors. I just like to look at the nature side of think this is the harder one to look at and find prove for of the two. Anyway this is just my thoughts and I can't really back them up, it's just what I think from what I see/hear.
Well I will leave you with a question. Greg's birthday is coming up on the 7th and I was thinking of two things for gifts I can either crochet him a scarf or I could maybe sew him a little Psyduck plushy.....or scrap both ideas all together. What do you guys think?
(nonedited, I'm tired.)
So today has been long, but not too bad. I have class late on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I was able to sleep until eight which felt great. But as soon as I woke up it was go time. >.< I immediately showered and ate so that I could work on my essay, which isn't coming along in a hurry because I'm nervous to write it and also I keep having to put it aside for more immediate homework.
After that I went to the JC to visit Greg and have lunch with him, we haven't been able to see each a lot since we started school. In fact I think we have seen each other a total of four times and at least half of those times we just had sex and passed out from being exhausted from our day. So I felt like I really needed to make the effort to see him during the small break I had. It was very nice, I have to say that my love for him has only grown over the years. There is still no one I love to see and talk to more then him, and I still get giddy every time I look at him and he is smiling at me. It was a small visit were we grabbed a burrito for lunch and we talked about classes, different kinds of physics, the differences in definition of childhood throughout time. We often have talks like this, but not always. Sometimes of course we don't know what to talk about and about yearly we panic that we have nothing in common, but it always passes. It's true we don't have a lot in common when it comes to interest, but we have larger things in commons like humor, values, and ideas, so I usually don't worry.
Next I went to Astronomy where I vaguely remember learning about poles, perceived movement, and the tilted axis in relation to the seasons. The class barely exists to me and I will likely only worry about it before tests, because that is the way I am with large lecture classes. I got an hour or so break afterwards to go see my friends ( I should of written more, but I miss them) which was awesome because its been a long while since I have been able to stop by. I said hello to everyone and went on errands with Chelsea and Moe who have convinced me to come to fananime with them.
When four o'clock does finally come around I have to go off to Childhood Development and Phy. it's a pretty interesting class I just wish that it wasn't so late in the day ( I owe Moe coffee!) and that the teacher used some sot of visuals when he talked, any visual would be good. Today's class was fairly chaotic because half of us couldn't do the online reading and the other half didn't have a book yet for the other reading, so the teacher was a little lost on how to handle class today. The first half of the class was on where we might find places to work with kids (btw anyone who is interested in stuff for their resume or just like tutoring "studybuddies" through JUMP is the best one to try.) Then we discussed how children and childhood was viewed in the Middle Ages, which is fairly interesting because a child became an adult at much earlier ages some even as early as seven so it was discussed where the ideas of childrearing might have come from: the first idea of children as weak instinctual beings that need guidance comes from the Catholic Church and the idea of children as naturally good until corrupted by society (thus a handsoff approach was used) came from Rousseau and Marxist. Next week we will dip a little into the long debated subject of nurture vs nature. I already have a opinion on that, but I will leave that for next Tuesdays blog.
Anyway came home at 7 and haven't stopped doing homework until now: 11. This is my break, lol. Oddly enough I think I will be adding more to my schedule and sign up for tutoring and classroom work, because I want to remain plugged into schools and children.
So what do you think about nature vs. nurture in its effects on children?
Today I spent a lot of time on Pandora listening to music based off of Lily Allen and Fine Frenzy, which are two of my favorite artist instead of forcing myself to write my paper or do productive things I'm scared of doing. So I thought I would list up some songs that I liked and see if you guys enjoy any of them. Keep in mind I like pretty mellow music and after a bit some of them might sound alike.
To start with this this is Lily Allen's song "Fuck You" which she wrote about George Bush. Not all of her songs have this much cussing, but I thought I would put one of her more upbeat songs before I drown you in soft sounds.
The Hush Sound performing "Wine Red", recommended to me by Sky Simard.
This is Kate Nash who has a very similar sound to Lily Allen. She was also discovered on myspace, like Lily Allen and they help prompt each other on their web pages.
Fine Frenzy is another band I enjoy a great deal since Greg got me the CD for Christmas this year. Hopefully the quality of this video is okay. This is her song Almost Lover which is a favorite of mine along with Hope for the Hopeless.
This is a VERY awesome song by Regina Spektor called Calculation, that I just discovered on Pandora and I already like a great deal. More upbeat then some of the other songs I have chosen.
This is Jem singing Come on Closer. She is a welsh singer with a bit of a electronic pop feel to her music.
This is a song I'm sure you have all heard "Way I am", by Ingrid Michaelson. I have always loved this song,but never knew who sang it. I looked up some of her other stuff and it is just as awesome so I recommend you give it a look.
Amanda Seyfried “Little House” from Dear John Soundtrack. I haven't seen this movie, but I stumbled upon this song from the soundtrack and I really enjoyed it. The song is actually sung by the actress so I say she is pretty multi-talented, in fact I might go buy a song of hers faster then a movie.
Anyway that is the last video I will put up, and congrats to you if you actually listened to all of them.
Some other people I recommend thus far are:
Artist/Song Leslie Feist/ 1 2 3 4 Frou Frou/ Let Go (Another song I loved and never knew the artist to)
The Gabe Dixon Band/And the World Turned
Jaymay: Sycamore Down
Brooke Fraser/What to
do with daylight
Ting Tings/ Shut up and
Let me Go Landen Pigg/Falling in Love in a Coffeeshop
Norah Jones/ I think it’s
gonna rain today DEV/Dancing Shoes Lenka/The Show Alex Parks/Mad World Priscilla Ahn/Dream Natalie Imbruglia/Shiver Karmin/Crash Your Party Emeli Sande
Plain White Tees/ Rhyme
of Love
Adele19/ Daydreamer
Florence + the Machine/
Dog days are over
Kate Bush/Wuthering Heights (don't watch video's b/c they will make you laugh)
Okay, before I tell you about my dream I have to back up a bit and tell you a little about myself. A couple of years ago my boyfriend Greg moved to Denmark for a year of foreign exchange. Since then I have become a bit of a crybaby. I don't mean that I cry every time someone hurts my feelings or I fall down, but I do cry A LOT now during movies. Whenever a character gets emotional about missing their family or loved one, big hot tears begin to gush from my eyes and slowly fall down my face. It can even happen when a happy point in the movie has come and everyone is finally together at last. Movies I can remember crying over: UP, The Crucible, episodes of Biggest Loser, Robin Hood, Titanic(duh!), this end of world movie that I never knew the name of, and the list goes on and on. So as you may have figured out loosing a loved one goes up there with some of my other biggest fears (Rats, Not Finishing College, ect). This of course means that I have a lot of dreams about this particular subject. So that gets us back to the original topic of this blog: My Dream.
In my dream all of my friends and some adults we know are going on a camping trip to a lodge with a lake. This trip is very long and nobody has any privacy until we get to the cabin. So along the way, Greg and I sneak off a private place during one of the restroom stops and makeup, maybe even have sex; I'm not quite sure. Anyway when we get back some people on the trip that I don't really know come over to me and start teasing me that I am a slut and that I am clingy, ect. For some reason I let this get to me and spend the rest of the trip doing other things and letting Greg do his own thing. We are perfectly capable of handling being apart and after a while I am completely unaware of anything he is doing. When we get to the cabin I am out with everyone else playing in the lake and getting everything ready. When the night has begun to fall someone asks me where Greg is, and I begin to panic because I have not seen him in a long time. Everyone looks around for him and he is no where to be found. It is nightfall and the adults tell everyone to go to bed because that is all we can do right now. I'm so upset though that I run out of the cabin anyway, jumping into the dark murky lake convinced that he might have drowned and that I need to find him. My whole body is underwater and I can not tell which may is up or down, nor see if my love is lying in the water. I relax my body and allow it to float upward so that I might find air. I come up out of the water, sobbing my eyes out, almost in a crazed state. I begin to search all around the forest for him, crying heavily barely able to see. Later I am crawling out of the forest and I run into this ghost that says he lives in the cabin where we are staying. He and I comfort each other about death and we lie on the ground staring into the night sky, and I ask him if he remember who he was when he was alive, but he doesn't know. This causes night to begin to rain in response to my sadness that if Greg is dead he doesn't remember me. I realize that I have a knife in my pocket and I spend the rest of the night lying in the rain with the ghost, wondering about where I could stab myself most effectively. (I would never commit suicide, but this is a dream after all.) The dream gets really fuzzy after this point and I ended up dreaming two ending. In one of the ending the ghost is Greg and he did drown in the lake, so even though the ghost did not want me to, I ran my knife through my neck to die with him. The other is that he didn't get on the bus at our last rest stop and he calls us to let us know that we left him. I like the second ending better, I think that was my brain telling me to stop being so morbid. But at one point in this hazy part of this dream I look into a moving picture of Greg and I have to say I'm astounded at how well my memory remembered what he looked like a few years ago, the way he used to do his hair and how his eyes look when they are looking at me, to my conscious self it was amazing, because I have a terrible memory. I woke up with a couple tears in my eyes, but I think because of the alternative ending I was able to convince myself that Greg was alive in my dreams.
Last thoughts, in my dream I remember contemplating suicide and think how people would berate me for dying because of the lose of someone else, because our culture is so individualistic that they understand the lose, but do not condone the morning of loss for long periods of time, or going to extremes. We don't believe it is honorable to live for someone else and them for us, but I don't think I would agree. Although I don't think I would ever kill myself, if I lost Greg I would morn him for years and wold never feel truly done.
Anyway I know that was kind of a sad post, but it was what I dreamnt last night, and instead of calling Greg to make sure he was still alive and tell him this story, I thought I would post it instead. After all this is my blog and I can write sad stuff here if I feel like it.
So last Friday my class talked about the novel we had just read: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It a very good book that I highly recommend, especially if you like 1984. It a book about a a future where everyone is content. People no longer have sadness, fear, loss, or pain. The world has taken after Henry Ford's idea of assembly line mass production and applied it to human society. Children are now created in factories through extracted uterus, where they are then separated into class systems, the two high groups are incubated until birth and the lower groups go through a "twin" process where they made sixty four twins and then give them varying diseases to keep them low in the class system. But, everyone is brain washed as a baby to believe they are in the best class. "I'm glad i'm not a Alpha, alpha's have to work so hard." ect so that everyone is happy with what they do and who they are, even if quality is lacking. They are then brain washed all sorts of things like to always keep buying more things and never save, or that everybody belongs to everybody else so sex is free to give to everyone. The world runs very very smoothly, but there is no family, no true love, no real art, no real movies, or all other things, because they cause pain or come out of pain. Then there is an outsider who comes in and is completely disgusted with the world, because everyone has shallow thinking and everyone would rather take "soma" (a coping drug) or get rid of a problem then face it or learn from it. But, he really is the only one who is unhappy because everyone else is trained to be content and just get whatever they want. They are kind of like babies.
So the big debates within our class were "Freewill and individualism versus contentedness and stability" This question is hard to answer actually, because as an outsider who comes from a world of depth through pain and joy, we want to immediately say that everything is wrong with this society. But if you really were a citizen of it nothing would be wrong to you because you had everything you ever wanted. Our world is much more dangerous then theirs and yet I'm sure all of us would rather live in a world that is 75% unpleasant and 35% unpleasant (statistics I'm making up), rather then be in a world were we don't feel anything of value, everything is mild and pleasant without ever having highs or lows. Sometimes though when I see things happening I wonder if our world is rushing to become this fictional one because we try to nullify ourselves in so many ways, and I don't just mean media, but also the fact that a lot of us have stopped pushing ourselves through the painful things. There is a lot of good that comes from self resistant and pain, people who have learn to take these things and move with them are wise people. That is why the older we become the wiser and stronger we get, if we were allowed to experience the pains of life in our youth. An yet, if you were in their world you would choose to stay in it because everyone is conditioned to believe in what they already have. An example of this is that we believe we are free, but we are not free because we can not break away from our background that creates so much of us, the ideas they came with. Do you really choose who your going to marry on chemistry alone, the answer is most often No, because you also need to be "compatible" which means that your conditioning in a way narrows down the choices you have in partners. This is likely why the phrase "every girl marries her Father" is around. Still though we like our downs because they make you feel and they create greater ups, so I would still like to live her.
Anyway I'm going to leave you with this quote and stop my incoherent rambling. See Yah!
“But I don’t want
comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want
goodness, I want real love, I want sin.”
“In fact then you’re
claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then I’m
claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the
right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer,
the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to be
anxious, or to tortured by unspeakable pain.”
