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?