My Blog: A Platitude

My blog is sorta boring. Well to be quite honest it's vapid, arid, and at times irksome.  I swear having to reread all of these posts again in their entirety made me a more lethargic person then I was before I read them. They are just so boring.

I have to admit that the award for the biggest humdrum goes to my blog about racial tokenism. The topic itself can be quite fascinating, it's just that I had absolutely no spark in it. The topic does not hold my interest and therefore my personal dullness of the subject was transfered over into the post. My lack of interest in many of my blog topics has made my writing less then satisfactory.

Also, my posts seem really long. To be earnest (after all there is special Importance of Being Earnest) no one really wants to read a long blog post. Blogs are suppose to be a way to express your thoughts enjoyably to other readers, not a tedious task. For example in "Statues of Our Past" it took me half way through the post to get to my idea. What I should do is cut straight to the point. It would make reading my posts less of a drag.

Something I have noticed reoccur in my newer entries is this vain obsession with myself. Okay, maybe not an obsession, but I am mentioned a lot. In my three most recent posts the word "I" or "Me" is in at least the second sentence. I know that this blog is about me, after all it is my blog, but no one wants to hear about other people (well, unless they are a celebrity).
So I guess to sum this sucker up, I just need to make my entries more readable. What I really need to do to is write about stuff that I actually care about versus just writing a blog because it is my assignment. Then, I think, I will really start to excel.

Oh, by the way, Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor you may grade this entry: To Have Faith in Education

Statues of Our Past

I must admit, I am a little bit of a history nerd. It’s just so… captivating. For this reason my favorite museum in all of Chicago is The Field Museum of Natural History. All around the museum they house many statues of people and animals. A large amount of these works of art are of African peoples. And I don’t mean modern Africans, but of pre-westernized Africans.

            I have never given these statues much thought. They were just old works of art that could have dated back to 1893 when the museum was founded as a part of the worlds fair. But in class on Friday we talked about how African people use to be depicted as more primitive then those of lighter skin.

We looked at picture artist drew comparing and contrasting those of the chocolate complexion verses those of the sugar complexion. Usually the black people were drawn too look more like a monkey or a gorilla then a human while the white people looked normal.

            It then hit me, the statues in the Field museum seemed to depict the Africans of looking like a primate. For example, a statue of a woman and her child. The mother in the picture is carrying her child on her back, a pose more famous for how a gorilla carries a baby.

            Another statue is that of a man holding a chicken. They way that that a human would normally sit is to be cross-legged or to at least have their feet sprawled out in front of them. Well apparently not this guy. His stance is more similar to how a gorilla would sit.

            I am not saying that the Field Museum is racist in anyway. After all they do have a permanent exhibit on modern-day Africa that is extremely insightful for person who has never left North America. I am actually saying that displaying these statues is kinda cool. These statues represent a dark part of our history that we can’t neglect, therefore we shouldn’t neglect.  Having these statues shows us that there was a point in time when our white ancestors were so dimwitted that they thought that our black ancestors were less evolved. Knowing this is just as important as knowing that people use to believe the world was flat.

            By knowing now that we all are one in the same shows that we are slowly evolving into a more excepting, less cocky, and intelligent species.

Society Really Revs my Engine!

Ever since I was a little girl I always knew exactly what kind of car I wanted. A British racing green BMW Z4 with tan seats and a mahogany interior. For those of you do not speak car this is a two-seater BMW convertible in a forest green. I remember expressing my enthusiasm of this automobile to my mother. She just looked at me and said, “Where are your kids going to sit?”

A Sketch of my Dram Car

            This question has always baffled me. Why can’t my future husband own the reasonable car and I get the awesome sports car? It seems to me that more often then not, the husband gets to have his dream car while the wife get’s stuck with the honker of a car called a minivan. Sure, it may be that the female just doesn’t care so much about the type of car she drives. But I can’t be the only girl in the world who wants a expensive convertible when she grows up.

            Talking about female and male roles during class really made me think about how society has installed in us the “rules of the sexes” since a young age, even when it comes to fantasy cars. When you ask most young girls what car they want when they grow up they’ll say a prius or an SUV, both reasonably sized and have room for company. Boys will go all out saying a Ferrari, a Lamborghini and the crazy ones will say the bat mobile.

It seems just part of American society to have the stereotypical caretaker, the female, to have the more child friendly car and the stereotypical breadwinner, the male, to have the flashy car. But now, these stereotypes are not the case. Women can be the breadwinners and the men can be the caretakers of the children. If roles have been switched, I think cars can be too. So let me say, I will have my Z4 someday! (Ha! That rhymed!)