Let's just sing along to lyrics that promote abuse...

So, this will have to be a short post, but has anyone really listened to the lyrics of Matchbox 20's "Push"?

It came on Pandora at work the other day, and I sat there singing along to the song that I had heard for years on a family-friendly radio station, and then it dawned on me: This song is a big, vicious cycle of emotional abuse! Both parties have been in bad, emotionally abusive relationships, and the girl is trying to hold on to their relationship.

If Good Guy Greg were to step in having the same feelings as the guy (what I take from it-- he's been hurt and he thinks she's kind of nonsense for trying to start things up), he would just tell the girl that he's sorry she feels hurt in the relationship, but he thinks she could find happiness elsewhere. She would feel hurt, but maybe both of them could find their way out of emotional abuse and away from their addiction to it.

On the contrary, Scumbag Steve appears here, and he starts talking about how he wants to push the girl around, push the girl down, and take her for granted, and then states a verbal commitment to follow through. Are you kidding me? Fighting emotional abuse with physical and more emotional abuse is a horrible idea! I don't care how much hurt you are in-- you do not commit to perpetuate hurt.

I know we all have times where we feel like we want to get back at someone for this, that, or the other, but when you border on abuse is where a line must be drawn as a strict, "NO." Looking at Wikipedia now, according to Rob Thomas (when fending off feminist groups when the song came out in 1997) it was the guy being abused the whole time, which, when you look closely, this could be the case (if you stick with him narrating for the girl the entire song), but I don't think that was widely known. If we stick with the latter idea of it, we still see an emotionally confused and abused man who won't get away from this abuse, and there is no resolution of the abuse stopping.

When we had our music lecture in my media class, we talked about how lyrics have more of an affect than we think on our lives. I didn't think I had heard enough songs about abuse to really say that that was true, but now I'm realizing just how much I don't know what lyrics I'm singing half the time. I can sing the lyrics to many songs, but I have no idea what kind of meaning is behind the words most of the time (as evident.) How does the music industry get away with this? Isn't this a blatant stance saying that physical and emotional abuse is culturally accepted, creating more personal fables and false realities for abusers and abuse-es?  How do we sing along with this song, as well as "Pumped Up Kicks" (a bright-sounding song about someone threatening to shoot kids who have nice things), and "Eyes on Fire" (a techno song sung by a girl with a soothing voice singing "I'll seek you out, flay you alive, one more word and you won't survive")? Why are we addicted to whatever has a catchy beat and a happy tone? Does this disconcert anyone else?

Social Science Perspective on Les Mis

Amongst the craziness of life, the universe, and everything (specifically a 25 point project taking 10 hours to do right (see this video) and the ups and downs of midterms) I was able to finally see Les Misérables a couple weeks ago when a friend invited a group of people to go. This means I am somewhat qualified (at least capable) of giving an opinion about the movie. On BYU Memes, there was a meme/comment thread that described reasons why certain people didn't like Les Misérables for several different reasons. Being an admin for the page, I felt like I needed to watch the movie to truly understand why the movie was or was not the greatest thing since Wicked to adequately give an opinion. Among the sea of opinions about why or why not Les Misérables is a good musical or a good movie, mine is of the positive, and (because it is me) comes from a perspective of a social scientist.

I think the reason why we generally like Les Misérables so much is because we can connect to each character emotionally in some way, whether we have experienced similar emotions or we know someone who has. We develop a deep connection with the characters, and when they lead intertwining lives where one good or bad intention affects the others around them for good or for bad (and, in most cases, it is for the worse), it is heart-wrenching. The musical or movie does a really good job at making you deeply study the characters' lives for yourself and see the complexity of each individual human's thoughts and how much interdependence is portrayed with actions. In a nutshell, here are some examples:

• You can't see Cosette and Eponine fully happy at the same time because they like the same man (and what girl has not been on both sides of that coin, I ask you.) 
• The good intentions of Jean Valjean get besmirched by a complicated mess of gossip, pride, lust, resentment of rejection, Javert's insatiable sense of false justice and mistrust of full repentance (because of the cynicism that has grown inside him from criminals not changing), and the context of government hostility and economic depression. 
• The girl saved from hard labor and child abuse (Cosette) grows up isolated and horribly naïve and somewhat resents her rescuer and only father she's really known who has only tried to keep her safe the best way he knew how. Perhaps he was a helicopter parent, but perhaps a little paranoia, considering Javert's history, was what was needed.
• All of these events (and more) happen while Jean Valjean has a horrible guilt complex and build up of anxiety about being a changed man, and he is encouraged to have low self-esteem until his dying day, by Javert's false sense of justice. 
• Ironically enough, the battle scenes at the bunkers, where half of the people worth noting die, have some of the least amount of effect on the interdependence of individual story lines we see in the whole movie (at least if we compare the on-screen time of different events.) We see the end of a lot of people, but the only one the deaths really affect is Marius (and, perhaps, Javert, depending on your perspective, but it is more psychological warfare with Jean Valjean to me, and somewhat detached to the battle scene at hand.) I guess I'm also not including the audience being affected, as we bawled through the innocent deaths that were for naught, but you must remember that we aren't really in the movie, even though it may seem like that emotionally.

In the end, the more I think of it tonight, I think we can also see our daily conundrums and faults embodied within the characters. We know the difficulty of making hard decisions in our lives, and know that agony. We see ourselves in Javert's battle with what is justice and mercy, and knowing who to trust, what things are going with the letter and spirit of the law, and how much we fully believe in repentance for others and ourselves. I'm going to generalize this next bit to everyone, though I'm not sure how far the reach of this is, so bear with me.  We also can see ourselves through Jean Valjean, as much as we hate to admit it, because we also can't let our former actions go sometimes when evaluating ourselves as a person. We see ourselves as broken, even if we say we believe in entire repentance. When people tell us that we are wonderful, we can't accept that because of our glaring past, present faults, and we hold on to negative opinions of ourselves like a pair of old duct-taped, tattered, and ill-functioning shoes instead of letting ourselves break-in the nice ones because we're afraid of dirtying them. We believe the man saying he's fighting for justice is telling the truth; perhaps because he personally believes that is what is happening helps convince ourselves, even if we know that he won't win in the end. We need to realize that the conviction of negative forces does not make them right, and our self doubts and secret stashes of self-resentment can be taken away by hope and trust in the atonement of Christ. He bore all things (not just our sins), and he did it so we could change for good, not just erase our mistakes or duct tape the holes. Believe it as much as He does: let's all learn a lesson or two from some of the unnecessary self-deprecation and let's be a little more whole.

"The Thing About Love" and justificaton

I believe it was two weekends ago that my roommates and I went to the BYU Contemporary Dance team's performance of "The Thing About Love." It was a great performance, and had more emotional pull than I had previously imagined. I'm not sure what I was expecting completely from the start-- part of me thought and secretly hoped it would be romantic notions throughout, and I'd come from it as if I just watched a chick flick. Yes, there would be some sense of loss, but true love would win out in the end. Another part of me was apprehensive to the possibility of feeling a sense of longing-- knowing that I had felt that loss, but I have not obtained, as of yet, that climax resolution of finding someone for me.

Now, by this point, some of you might be thinking, "Oh great, this is a post about another lonely single at BYU," but stay with me. Watching this performance led me down a completely set of thoughts, despite Valentine's Day on the horizon. While some of the performances didn't give me a sense of connection and understanding of the dancers, many of the performances did. There were performances of puppy love, but the most powerful ones for me were ones about the complicated emotions that come with love. One that particularly affected me was one that, to me, symbolized an abusive relationship. This was unlike the previous encounters where flirting was not received well because feelings were not mutual. This was one where a couple danced together, but in their repeated movements and idiosyncrasies there arose a roughness as the girl tried to have a firmer connection with her partner. He would brush off her hand forcefully from his back, and as the dance and song progressed, it was apparent that she would reach and out and he would ignore. He would redeem himself for brief moments of closeness, winning back her heart, and quickly return to his habits of rough or emotionally disconnected behavior. Near the end, in the girl's sense of pleading gently by poking his shoulder, then insistently, he was emotionally silent, and finally redeemed himself again, briefly. She finally decided she had enough, and broke away from the relationship as he tried to use his sway on her emotions. 

I guess this was so powerful to me because, in a sense, many of us have a tendency to let this happen. Abuse is not simply defined as not getting hurt physically. It has much to do with emotions. Someone doesn't have to be yelling at you for this to happen, either. Someone can become emotionally disconnected from you and from the world gradually, until it isn't just a few small instances but a pattern of apathy. Sometimes this happens because the person places something that is more important in their lives than everything else, and sometimes they might have real problems that they are having a hard time dealing with. I know I will make excuses for others' behavior, saying to myself, "Oh, I'm sure they're just going through a hard time. They care for me, and I know this cannot possibly be the real them, so I know that things will change for the better if I'm just patient." I say this over and over again, encouraged by the small redemptions made, until I realize that they are no longer anything like what God wants for me in my life, and what He feels like I should accept. I've been so willing to please and lacked criticism so much that I let them become someone who they themselves probably don't want to be. I'll say, "Don't worry about it." I'll justify to them, "It's no big deal, it's kind of funny [that you have that 'idiosyncrasy'], actually." This is not helpful. I'm not saying we shouldn't be charitable or kind. On the contrary, sometimes the most charitable thing to do is to not allow this. You can be kind and supportive while letting the person know that their behavior is unacceptable and you do not like it (including not justifying the action in your mind.) I just took the READY questionnaire (see http://www.relate-institute.org/) for my SFL Marriage Prep class, and the results back this up. Confidence and openness are components of your emotional readiness score. 

In short, I have new goals to work on both confidence and openness. As I work on that now, hopefully I'll be more ready the next prince charming that comes my way. After all, every prince has their imperfections, and finding one that can work with you and God to lift each other up is a priceless quest.

Deaf relations

So, one of my other favorite shows is also on ABC Family is Switched at Birth. (I warned you this was a media blog, right? There are all sorts of types of media, including books, church materials, youtube videos, facebook memes, etc. Sometimes sitting through a show is the easiest to consciously contemplate the effects and messages sent through the media for me, though.) Most people know the basic premise of the show from the title, but besides the obvious, one daughter, Daphne, that was switched is Deaf (she does sign and oral) from a poor neighborhood and her family comes and lives with the other switched daughter, Bay, who comes from a very well-to-do family. (Oh, and just for a culture reference necessary for this post, "Deaf" usually refers to the culture or someone that has grown up in the unique culture of signing as a lingual and expressive basis. When saying "deaf" (lowercase) it refers to the hearing loss itself, or someone that has lost their hearing due to age, who identifies with hearing culture instead of Deaf culture.) Now back to my thoughts on Switched at Birth:

Switched at Birth family: Daphne is the left daughter, Bay is the right daughter

So, here's my opinion on how they portray Deaf culture. In previous seasons, there was some insight into Deaf culture, but it wasn't a regular thing, and with Daphne being oral (able to read lips and has gone through speech therapy to learn how to speak), the relations did not surface much. There was a time where Emmett (Daphne's Deaf friend that ended up dating Bay for a while) struggled with liking anyone hearing, a discrimination picked up from his mother (who does not like people outside of Deaf culture in general) and a time where he tried to go through speech therapy to communicate better with Bay, but both seemed to be from a perspective of empowering Deaf through assimilating in the hearing world. This is a little bit opposite of Deaf culture. It is true that Deaf culture has an emphasis of "we'll figure out a way to do it" (as is the case with Daphne being given a job in a kitchen (yet only through the help of Bay's mom)), but being oral, it seemed like the show was saying, "You have to be oral to have a real job, or you have to work in a Deaf school (in the case of Emmett's mom)." While there is a Deaf boy, Travis, who has a job and he isn't oral, it is washing cars for Bay's dad, so it seems very menial and, again, through someone getting the job for them.

This season seems to be doing a better job from the start, and by the looks of it, this season should be good. Bay is accused of cheating at her prep school, and so, because she's already learned a little ASL from signing with Emmett and Daphne, she decides she wants to do the pilot program at Carlton School for the Deaf for hearing students with Deaf family members (where Emmett and Daphne go to school, and where Emmett's mom works.) This infuses us into an environment that has a 98% majority being Deaf. This is a good thing to see the rich friendships, the day-to-day issues, and different people's ideas and upbringings in Deaf culture. It is also a good reality check to see that, although there are many who want an interdependence with hearing (viewing each other on the same field, just in different environmental and cultural circumstances and communities), there are also a good number of Deaf that are very strong in Deaf Power movements and see hearing people as ignorant as some hearing people view those that are Deaf (audists.) It is an interesting viewpoint put into play.

Bay gets put into every ASL student's nightmare of being engulfed in Deaf culture but being hated for not knowing enough and slowing down classes for others (which, if you had one place that you could be yourself, and someone else came in and changed it even a little, you might be a little frustrated or upset, too.) Having taken through ASL 202, I can tell you, I struggle significantly getting up the courage to sign with a native signer at any Deaf event, even though I've been assured by many that I won't be ruining anyone's night for trying. I feel like I'm back in first grade, standing on the sidelines, waiting to get invited to play because I might be breaking a social norm or coming across as impolite to go up and strike up a conversation. Luckily, especially around this area, there are many that want to bridge the understanding gap between Deaf and hearing, and will be patient with me because I'm trying to rid myself of any unintentional audist tendencies that are given through the general hearing culture. One of the biggest unknown barriers we create as as the hearing is the feeling of pity and needing to be the hand that lifts the Deaf up. We are engrained with a sense of superiority in this way, not only with Deaf culture which has its own communities and social guidelines, but many people that have different circumstances than our own. It could be someone who uses a wheelchair,  someone who has an emotional or mental disorder or disability, or even those that just might be poorer than we are. Until we see each person, no matter circumstance, as a person equal and like unto ourselves that we can be interdependent with, there will be serious misunderstandings and lack of true empathy (not sympathy) for one another. As for ABC Family, I'm sure they are learning step-by-step with responses to each show, but they are doing a good job involving actual Deaf people in acting and advising in the show. They even have an episode coming up where it is all through ASL, and closed captions for hearing.

In short, I'm looking forward to this season. :)

Bunheads, not related to hot-cross-buns

So, this will just be a quick post tonight. I got to catch up on my favorite shows on ABC Family's website this weekend, and thought it would be good material for a post.

The show Bunheads is one of my favorites, with the same creators as Gilmore Girls. No, it isn't a show about people that have bread on their heads, though most people think of that first off. The buns refer to hair buns, because many of the main characters are dancers. Exhibit A (from abcfamily.com):

The premise is that she was a showgirl in Vegas with her life leading nowhere fast. A nice but slightly awkward man, Hubble, keeps trying to vie for her attention every time he is in town, having watched dozens of her shows. After a bad audition, she finally accepts a date with him. In a drunken state, she accepts Hubble's offer to marry him. She wakes up being driven to Paradise, CA, herself full of a mixture of regret and confusion. She meets the disapproving town and her new mother-in-law (same actress and similar personality from Gilmore Girls), and discovers herself wanting, and somewhat succeeding, to fall in love with her new husband. Then tragedy strikes, and Hubble dies in a car accident, not even 48 hours after they were married. In this time period, though, he managed to transfer everything in his will over to Michelle, and she finds herself obligated to stay in the small town that hates her. Her mother-in-law is a little forceful in manipulative ways, and gets Michelle into teaching dance classes in her backyard ballet studio.

Okay, so things great about this show: I love being kept on my toes with Michelle trying to find her identity in the small town of Paradise, CA. I love that after all Michelle does and all the mistakes she makes, even though many in the town still don't admittedly like her, the teenage ballet dancers start to look up to her. Even after she accidentally maced them at their biggest performance of the year and she is basically driven out of town by angry parents, after a summer away the teenagers and even her mother-in-law want her back. Michelle is convinced when the mother-in-law brings a recently discovered wedding video made by Hubble. I love how, even though Michelle isn't the best role model, Hubble knew that she could do great things. When she doesn't have faith in herself to be special, the video shows how much he cared for her, and wanted nothing more to make her realize she is a wonderful person. She makes plenty of mistakes, but she realizes how she is missed by those in town despite what they say. I think I like the show so much because I've been on both Michelle's side of not believing people about my potential (which I think we all do), and also on Hubble's side of knowing how wonderful someone you care about is, and you know that they don't know it yet, but you want to to all that is within your power to help them start taking that passive potential and making it active. Besides that, I like that it stays pretty clean, and I'm enchanted by dance, so it is a pretty perfect show for me.

The nature of over-analyzing and Isaiah

There is a quote by Neal A. Maxwell that says, "Moments are the molecules that make up Eternity." He is basically saying that the quotidian actions of our lives matter. This is a key principle of the family sciences. While the big moments of our lives, like graduation, getting a car, getting married, etc. matters in their significance, if you think about it, each of those events might last a day, or perhaps a weekend in festivities. It is the daily mundane tasks in preparation that make the difference. One part of my over-analyzing tendencies want to talk about how I use this phrase to go overboard on decision making, anywhere from being a little girl, spending an hour or more picking out the right Barbie doll (deciding whether I wanted the one that looked like me, or if I wanted one that would give us a more culturally-diverse collection of Barbies) to picking my path, pace, and step home from classes now. I wanted to post about this:

Another part of those tendencies wanted to write and make the rest of this instead, so I did.

I wonder why there are so many big events in the scriptures, and not the little day-to-day decisions shown that everyone had to go through. Then, I think again. Yes, the bigger events are definitely in there, but perhaps the scriptures have a lot more to do with daily decisions than at first thought. I've been reading the part of 2 Nephi that quotes scriptures from Isaiah lately. Here's the basic premise (stay with me): Israel (meaning all the tribes besides Judah and Benjamin) has decided to make an alliance with Syria, and provoke Judah to come to battle with them. The king of Judah, in fear, wants to make an alliance with a much bigger ally, Assyria, for protection. Isaiah comes to warn Judah that this is not a good idea. Isaiah proceeds to tell what will (and, eventually, does) happen to Judah if the king does not listen to Isaiah's prophesies from the Lord.

For the visually oriented, here's an animation I made to help (warning, the clip is set to auto-repeat):
There is too much. To sum up...

Judah, in the end, decides not to listen to Isaiah, and ultimately, the Lord. We see that the consequences were dire, but in the moment, the king was just like you and I. Sure, we say now, "If a prophet told me what to do, I would definitely do it!" Think about it though, do we always have the courage to leave a bad movie that will destroy us a little spiritually? In a large part, we all have our social constraint weaknesses. The king of Judah had 120,000 troops die in one day in the war against Israel and Syria (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syro-Ephraimite_War and Chronicles II.) Do you think he didn't have social pressure to join with the biggest empire known to man at the time for protection? Yeah, that was the wrong decision. The king of Judah went with logic over faith. He ended up having Judah go into centuries of captivity and letting idols come into the land. It was bad. I would love to be at a spiritual state where I could just let complete trust in the Lord work, but I don't know if I'm there yet, either.

I was looking through my phone pictures tonight, and I had taken one of a quote by N. Eldon Tanner. It says, "We must learn that sacrifice is a vital part of our eternal discipline." I think one of the biggest things we can sacrifice for the Lord to become better disciples is our insecurity and fear. It could be our insecurity that the Lord knows something better for our time, or that we will have friends in our faith, or we will find romantic relationships in which we don't have to sacrifice our deepest desires to marry someone ready to make eternally-binding covenants. I've got a long way to go, but the Lord even promises Judah that "his hand is stretched out still," meaning he's there for them, even if they have to live with the consequences of their actions.

My new hipster child?

I didn't think I would turn back to blogging again. My livejournal feels like a neglected child that I dressed in hipster clothing before it was cool, still with the connotation of following those I admired, hoping for geeky acceptance among my peers. Nevertheless, here I am, on a blog that I set out to be neglected in the first place back in 2004, just so that I could personally comment on a friend's blog (because that's what was required in the early days of blogger/blogspot.) The poor thing; if blogs were my children, I would call social services on myself.

Anyway, to get to the bulk of why I resolved to start up again: I am taking a class this semester entitled, "Media, Family, and Human Development," and we are required to blog twice a week about our media experiences and our analysis of those experiences. I almost have a feeling of guilt, that I was "compelled to" blog. Blogging is in no way a commandment, so by all accounts a feeling of guilt really doesn't make sense. Well, there is one reason. I had drafted a post over break, and debated whether I would post it. Since it was 2 a.m. and I was confined to my own thoughts for too long in an abandoned, snowy Provo, I decided not to post it. Nevertheless, knowing that I could have started again upon my own volition, knowing that I could have brought out my bag of thoughts to share with no one in particular on no particular evening but did not, upset me slightly. Apparently I'm more of a closet hipster than I ever thought possible.

In thinking about popular opinion, peer acceptance, and the desirability to be cool before cool, cool, or not cool for the sake of being unique, I thought about class today. In Preparation for Marriage (SFL 223, not the religion course), my teacher stated something interesting today. He said that there are two types of people at BYU. Upon hearing the beginnings of a marriage discussion, there are those who smile (perhaps giggle, and take out paper and pen for notes), and there are those that are "eye-rollers" (perhaps accompanied by scoffs and mocking.) He asked us to evaluate ourselves on which we were, and, if we were "eye-rollers," to think about why we allowed ourselves to be enrolled in the class. I must admit, I've been on both sides of the fence. I probably consider myself more of a closet-smiler, fearing that if I actually admitted that I liked marriage talks, I would be admitting also that I actually want to be a stay-at-home mom and think that's the best and most important job in the world. You would think that BYU students would commonly hold that opinion, but we are no strangers from feeling like we can't want to be that anymore. We have to want to be defined as something else first, and then a mother second, because it's just not cool. It seems like it is stereotypical, and you are less-desired in dating if that is your ultimate priority. Sure, we all have different interests, but no matter how noble they are, is it so bad that that's not our first priority? Is it so bad to admit being a part of the stereotypical mainstream here? I want to work with non-profit organizations, hospitals, or the military in helping families. That is a worthy goal, but I would sacrifice not being in that profession for a great deal of time (years) if I had my own future family, no matter when I became a wife and a mother.

Over the weekend I saw A Walk to Remember and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Thinking back on those movies, no matter how much of a good or bad girl the female lead is, a common theme to them and many chick flick movies is that the girl has to be obstinately against wanting to be in a relationship and reject the guy in some way. She has to be abrasive. The guy has to act like a hot-shot jerk. They have to both mislead or lie. They have to fight, cry, and realize they had made horrible mistakes before they can have their happily ever after. Does Hollywood really believe this process has to happen for successful relationships to happen? The characters had different personality traits, but the same process happened. Perhaps regular relationships would be considered boring from a Hollywood standpoint, but as someone that watched too much TV growing up, could others like me be slightly ingrained with the notion that we have to act in opposition to what we want because it is too mainstream, not cool, or not exciting enough?