And so it begins

Matt Now to work on my next production! It’s a one man show documenting the emotions, trials & tribulations, joy, & utter insanity of a lone student fighting against superior & overwhelming odds, entitled: The Paper I Didn’t Know Was Due Tomorrow! Starring me! Running tonight only in the UL! Tickets start at 1 Red Bull!

(Facebook status post)

It’s that time of year… finals!  Yay!  Please excuse me as I go crazy from a loss of sleep and from strings upon strings of projects and papers to be finished.

• 12/7 – LING 541 final paper due (10–12 pages)
• 12/9 – LING 520 presentation (10 minutes)
  • handout
  • Powerpoint
• 12/9 – MUSC 234 group presentation (20 minutes)
  • reading
  • handout
  • Powerpoint
• 12/11 – LING 520 project write-up due
  • second recording impossible
  • sound analysis – vowels
  • actual write-up
• 12/11 – LING 541 final (not cumulative)
• 12/11 – MUSC 234 final (cumulative)
• 12/11 – MUSC 234 two-page write-up due
• 12/14 – LING 520 final (cumulative)
• 12/14 – RELI 103 final (cumulative)
• 12/14 – SPHS 196 final paper due (5 pages)
  • reading
  • write-up
• 12/15 – Gamelan concert
• 12/15 – Gamelan reflection due (or 12/18 if schedule too tight)
• 12/16 – FLIGHT HOME!  Yay!

Now you understand why I’ll basically have no social life for the next week.  See you after winter break, hopefully with my sanity intact!

PS: I’ve uploaded a few essays I’ve written into the academic writing section of my blog, if you’re ever feeling as nerdy as me.  I’ve posted my English in Singapore essay on there.  Enjoy?

Belonging

My final paper for my sociolinguistics class is due in less than a week.  Over the past two or maybe three weeks, I’ve been collecting articles and books on Singapore English and Singlish: on its phonetics, phonology, morphology; on policies, governmental and popular attitudes; on its place in Singapore and its place in the world as a world English.  I currently have about 90 sources, and, of course, I won’t be able to get to all of them by next week.  I’d be more than satisfied if I managed to tackle even a quarter of them for my paper.

On Sunday, I went to Davis Library and checked out Language as commodity: Global structures, local marketplaces, edited by Peter K. W. Tan and Rani Rubdy (I definitely have a couple of articles by Rubdy sitting in my collection, and perhaps one by Tan).  I flipped through the book and checked out the Singapore articles and recognized two of the three names (Lionel Wee and Lubna Alsagoff), as I have a number of their articles on my computer.

A little while ago, I subscribed to the LINGUIST List listserv which, I think, is generally meant for actual linguists in the field and not undergraduates, although a few conferences here and there are open to undergraduates.  In any case, yesterday, I got in my inbox an e-mail detailing the table of contents for the latest issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics.  In the book reviews section?  A review for Language as commodity by Gregory P. Glasgow.  I literally did a double-take; I’d just checked out the book and read a few chapters from it.

But this feeling—recognizing names, recognizing titles, feeling integrated—is just really amazing.  It’s a whole new sense of fulfillment.  And I love it.  I feel like I could belong in this field, that I could really connect and do something.  A good chunk of the articles I’ve been collecting on Singapore English have been written by professors at the National University of Singapore, where I was during the summer; everything just feels so much within my reach when I realize that these professors are really only a step or two removed from me, that I can actually, potentially, have contact with people in this field.

It’s just a great feeling, knowing that I can accomplish things and that I can be part of something academic.  That, hey, academia isn’t as unknowable as I first thought it would be.

Desperate Housewives

The TV has been on almost nonstop lately.  Today, I caught the first episode of Desperate Housewives, which, apparently, is written by the same guy who wrote Golden Girls, which I’ve also come to love after watching a number of episodes.  (And who basically grew up next door to me in Fullerton, California.  Small world.)  Anyway, I… liked it, actually.  A lot.  I definitely saw parts of myself reflected in every one of the lead characters, so it was really easy to identify with them and get sucked into the story and truly care about what was going on with the characters.

And I did like one of the main messages in the episode: that, no matter how perfect a person’s life may seem on the outside, there’s always some kind of struggle, some kind of secret, and some kind of pain that they’re not showing to the outside world.  That’s very much how I feel a lot of the time—I know a number of people on campus, and interactions always seem to be frustratingly shallow.  “How are you?” “Oh, good.  Lots of work and stress.” “Yeah, me too.  Okay, I gotta run to class now; bye!” “Yeah, see you!”  Apparently, the greeting “Hey, how are you?” is meant to be replied to with only “Good; how are you?”  I learned that the hard way when I once replied with, “Not that great; I’ve got lots of things stressing me out—” only to hear “Whoa, I didn’t actually ask for all that; I’m just saying hi.”

“People’s personalities, like buildings, have various façades, some pleasant to view, some not.”

—François de La Rouchefoucauld

As all my friends know, this semester has been a really tough one for me.  I’ve had a number of stressors come in, the least of which being my physical health (I just recently got over a three-week throat infection of some sort that made eating, drinking, and talking painful and difficult); I’ve also had a number of tough emotional problems.  I’m starting to get over them, but it’s just been really hard to manage all that on top of schoolwork and everything else.  I have no idea how I’m still making it through this semester, and I’m just filled with dread at upcoming finals and wondering how I’m going to manage all that.

It’s also been disappointingly easy to fall back into old patterns of behavior that are nonetheless harmful.  I’m back in a relationship with my boyfriend and I’m trying to make sure that I don’t fall into the same pitfalls that caused a lot of tension before we broke up, but it’s been hard—I find myself reaching into that unwanted toolbox and pulling out things like guilt, pushing buttons, self-pity, everything.  I’ve been snapping again, being cranky, being negative.  I know I shouldn’t rely on them, and I’m really trying to change.  I want things to work out and I want to have a positive, healthy relationship, both with him and myself.

So here are some things that I’m going to do: Whenever I start to get upset, I need to really learn to step back and take a breather and compose myself.  I often end up arguing for the sake of arguing, which doesn’t help accomplish anything.  And I need to be more emotionally transparent, honest, and straightforward: If I’m expecting a certain kind of reaction or a certain response, maybe it’s best to just say that upfront instead of expecting him to be telepathic and intuitive and just pick up on that.  We often joke that we’re telepathic but, when it comes to emotional tension, we still very much don’t really understand how the other functions.

Unrelated (slightly), but I often don’t defend myself very well, either.  Whenever I have an opinion that I make public that someone challenges, I tend to get defensive, then accede to them, believing that they’re right, and recant my position.  I end up feeling embarrassed, even if my position was valid in the first place, which I can see from an objective standpoint.  Yet I still feel emotionally tied to my opinion.  I used to be good about taking constructive criticism and challenges, but it’s been harder lately, and I’m trying to make sure that I stand up for myself when my opinion’s challenged and I still feel that I have some kind of validity.  I’ve been trying to work on this by doing things like joining RELIC, the interfaith living learning community on campus, and expressing and defending my opinions and worldviews.  It’s hard, but these are skills that I really want to work on.  My boyfriend—I’ve yet to decide whether I’m going to call him by his not-so-serious nickname or by his real name on here—is definitely strong in those departments, although occasionally to the point of being headstrong.  Eh, nobody’s perfect.

And then there are, of course, the persistent issues of self-esteem, self-worth, self-respect, all those self- things.  I have a contradictory and unstable relationship with myself that often ends up being more negative than positive, and I’m trying to fix that.  It’s a hard journey, and, unlike other relationships, I can’t exactly break up if it’s not working out—well, not if I want to live a healthy life, at least.

So those are a few of the struggles that I’ve been hiding behind the façades that I have up.  It’s a simplification of all the emotions that play into it, and I’m omitting a lot of the details, but that’s what I’m comfortable with sharing with the world at the moment.  I’m coming to realize that “wanting to be a better person” is easy to say, but that nothing comes out of it if you’re not willing to truly work on it and own up to your mistakes.  So, please bear with me.  I’m a work in progress.

“Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.”

—François de La Rochefoucauld

Gender roles as reinforced by commercials

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So, I spent most of today fiddling with this WordPress blog and having the TV on in the background.  The Food Channel was on for an obnoxious amount of time, and then I switched to, I think, We TV, where there was, apparently, a Golden Girls marathon going on.  In the course of all this TV viewing, I caught a lot of commercials.  Most of these commercials were for household products (cleaning and cooking) and for baby products (diapers, formula, etc.).  And I noticed an interesting trend: The primary figures in the commercials are all women.

Methods and findings

So I decided to do some really informal research to see if this was indeed the case.  I’m focusing on just cleaning commercials and baby product commercials; I can leave the cooking commercials for another time.  Anyway, I went on Youtube and pulled up a number of Swiffer commercials, which you can find under the “Read more…” cut.  Of the eight commercials that I’ve included, none of them have men in a position where they are actively cleaning; in fact, if men are even involved in the commercials at all, they’re on the side of the brooms, mops, feather dusters, etc. that are portrayed as being obsolete as compared to the Swiffer, meaning that they aren’t cleaning.  The only instance where I could find a male in the active role of cleaning was on the Swiffer website, which includes an advice section from Patrick Brown on how to maintain wood furniture (which can be found here).

Clorox Wipes commercials can be a little harder to decipher.  The ones featuring a new design don’t have people using the product; however, the narrator is female, and the hands that pull out the wipes are feminine.  The commercial featuring kids also doesn’t explicitly show a woman cleaning as a central role, although the viewer can make out a feminine form cleaning up.  Additionally, the mermaid commercial (which has awesome music, by the way) doesn’t show any cleaning, but, again, narration is with a female voice and the only characters in the commercial are girls and women.  The Greenworks and toothbrush commercial, though, fall more into the pattern of the usual cleaning product commercial and show a woman wiping away at a mess.

Even Mr. Clean commercials don’t have a man scrubbing away hard at any messes, despite the male mascot.  Both commercials that I found on Youtube followed pretty much the same formula as the ones above.  I won’t inundate you with more cleaning commercials; I think it’s fairly clear from the ones I’ve gathered and from your own experience that the vast majority of them hardly even contain men, nevermind men actually cleaning something.

There are some occasional exceptions to this, though.  I did find a Windex commercial where a man was wiping at a window.  But that’s about it.

Now, onto baby product commercials.  The majority of these kinds of commercials have a mother lovingly bonding with her infant.  I’m pretty tired of watching commercials at this point, so I’m just going to include a few commercials by Huggies.  A lot of them are actually not from the US (for some reason, a user on Youtube compiled a playlist of Huggies commercials, so I drew from there—I didn’t include videos where the only characters were babies, as they weren’t relevant).  The first three ads (Cantonese, American English, and the first ad in Spanish) included typical mother-infant bonding.  I was very surprised to see a dad at all in the ad from New Zealand, although the “bonding” in that video isn’t quite the intimate bonding that’s typical of other commercials; same for the second ad in Spanish.  I also found it interesting that the Huggies commercials in Spanish had a male narrator, which I don’t think I’ve noticed in American commercials.  I also did find one Huggies commercial—the most famous one, apparently—where it was a man trying to control a baby who was just peeing geysers.  (Not even kidding; check the videos section.)  While the main character was a guy—very surprising—the commercial was still done in a light, humorous tone, absent of intimate bonding.

It’s a bit difficult to find commercials for baby products on Youtube, as Youtube is more geared towards amusing commercials, and the baby commercials are fairly straightforward.  Maybe somebody who wants to do more in-depth research can go and scout out the commercials I’m thinking of, where the mom is blowing raspberries on the baby’s stomach or doing some other close bonding activity.

Discussion and implications

Now, am I surprised by any of these findings?  Heck no.  I feel that the American social structure is still very much grounded in predefined gender roles, and these commercials are just confirming that.

But am I disappointed?  Yes.  (Now, the following comments are going to apply to the mainstream, heteronormative married/long-term cohabitating partnerships that are predominant in American culture and that these commercials appeal to.)  I’m disappointed that we don’t portray men cleaning in commercials and that these commercials reinforce the idea of cleaning and housework being the woman’s role when it could easily be shared between the spouses, especially when the trend nowadays is that men and women both work and both have equally as busy schedules; women don’t really have the time to devote to housekeeping 24/7, and, if both partners have tight schedules, then I’d find it only logical that the workload is shared equally.

I’m further disappointed that fathers aren’t portrayed as loving their children in the same way that mothers do.  Fathers are just as important as mothers, I feel, in the childrearing process, and fathers are just as capable of that kind of close, intimate love.  Reinforcing this idea that childrearing is women’s business seems, to me, to just distance fathers from the whole process when they’re actually integral.  And the same comments from the cleaning bit apply—mothers are starting to work more and to have tight schedules, and to expect a mom to both work a regular 9–5 job and spend hours upon hours caring for her kids (while the dad is just expected to work 9–5) seems to be demanding superhuman ability and to be unfair and unequal.  Why not show dads taking on some of that work and responsibility?

Why not portray to boys, teens, and men the image of men cleaning and caring for children as something normal and positive so that there’s less of a stigma on it?  (By which I mean, I’m sure there’s a segment of the male population that is very hesitant to do housework because they view it as the woman’s job and, therefore, a threat to their masculinity, should they be caught cleaning.)  Why not show men having healthy and positive relationships with infants and children instead of fostering this culture that says that a man in the company of children is immediately bad company, a pedophile?

Honestly, I see nothing but good coming out of having gender roles that are more lenient.  It would certainly be much more egalitarian, and it would really reduce a lot of stress on the woman’s behalf.  I really don’t see any real threats to masculinity or femininity from making gender roles less strict (and if a pair does want to stick to gender roles and it works for them and both parties are happy with the setup, then, by all means, go for it).

As I said, this was a really informal study that I did out of my own curiosity.  I’m not even properly citing the Youtube videos or anything, and Youtube’s not the best source, as it doesn’t catalogue all the commercials that are aired.  My commentary is just from my own speculation, and I don’t have much to ground it on, and it’s essentially an opinion.  But if anybody does have links to scholarly articles that have studied this, I’d definitely be interested in reading them.  Drop a link in the comments or something.

Thanks for reading this!  Click the “Read more…” link for the Youtube videos, which are embedded in the entry.

EDIT: My friend Sean has provided me with a link to a meta-analysis of a number of empirical studies on this exact topic: Eisend, Martin.  “A meta-analysis of gender roles in advertising.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science Online First (2009): n. pag.  Web.  26 Nov. 2009.  <http://www.springerlink.com/content/k760037878221477/fulltext.html>  Thanks so much!  I’m excited to read it.

page i

I’ve been struggling with deciding what to write about in this blog.  I already have online journals that have restricted access and are shared between me and a few friends and that I tend to keep separate from my main networks of interaction, such as Facebook.  Those journals are where I pour out my feelings, my problems, the issues that I’ve been dealing with, and where I can hope that my friends are listening and will provide me with some support.  And a lot of those struggles are things that I’m just not completely comfortable with airing out to the entire world, even if I do consider myself a fairly public person.

So what am I supposed to write about in a public blog?  I mean, at the moment, I don’t really have any exciting adventures to write about.  In the future, sure, maybe—I might try to do independent research in Singapore on Singaporean English as part of the SEAS program that I was in last summer, and I’m thinking about studying abroad in Spain next fall as part of a Burch seminar program to do sociolinguistic research in Madrid.  But, as of now?  Nothing really exciting, unless you consider your standard college routine of school-homework-extracurriculars-socializing-sleep (sometimes) to be exciting.

And the difficulty of a public blog, as opposed to a private journal, is juggling how much to share.  How much of my personality do I allow to come through in text that I know everybody, and anybody, can read?  How much of what I show around my closer friends should I share with strangers and with current and future supervisers?  How much of my heart can I wear on my sleeve?  How much of the real me—that I’m still trying to figure out, mind—is safe enough to share with any kind of depth?  Or am I just going to turn this blog into little blurbs about what I’m geeking out over—and is that who I am and totally legitimate, too?

I dunno.  I’ve been fussing over this blog for far too long, so I think I’ll just stop here, get some real work done, and leave you guys with a number of pictures I’ve taken over the semester.  I particularly like the rose in the rain ones.  I’ll figure out how to make the gallery prettier, eventually.  Enjoy; they’re after the “Read more…” link.