English class went pretty well this morning. We brainstormed some ideas for persuasive essays (My topic to freewrite questions for under "subjects I know" was Wolbachia pipientis- ha. I'm such a weird person). We'll be writing about this topic for twelve weeks, so it needs to be something we're passionate, and my teacher gave us a list of issues we weren't allowed to write about because they're hot issues we're likely to already have strong opinions for or probably can't add much to the conversation to, and topics she's read too many essays about.
One of these "no" topics was whether Disney princesses are damaging to young girls and their image. I stayed after class to ask if I could write something discussing the phenomenon of nice girl characters in media (namely cartoons and TV) getting flak for being Mary Sues (due to niceness) while in TV, girls who are better than the boys at beating up all the bad guys and are super athletic and usually edgy get a free pass despite by definition being Sueish (Someone please name me Wyld Style's faults, because my list is painfully short and contains "grumpiness that Emmet lied to her", which shouldn't even count). The old idea was that "awesome athletic girl" broke stereotypes. Now, it is the stereotype.
I understand the thought that we want girls to have good role models, but I'm sick of seeing this same pattern. I want more characters like WordGirl, who was awesome and had both weaknesses and strengths:
- She was very word smart, but her social skills were sometimes lacking. She's very awkward when put on the spot, and she's incredibly stubborn and hates compromising. She always has to get her way, to the point of getting distracted in the middle of episodes and arguing with the narrator every time he reads something that implies she has faults.
- My favorite fault of WordGirl's was how entitled she felt. About everything. She has 41 keys to the city at one point (even telling Mr. Big one time that, "Really? You just wanted the key? They're not hard to get, I have like forty of them). But there's an episode where the 42nd key was supposed to go to someone else, and she ABSOLUTELY could not handle it, and spent the entire episode trying to prove that this person didn't deserve the key. To be fair, I think that person actually was Mr. Big, under the pretense that he'd turned over a new leaf. Or something. Either way, the episode didn't pretend that this entitlement of hers was good, and I really appreciated that. Unfortunately this episode isn't on KissCartoon, so I need to see if I can find it or the script or something elsewhere.
- Bonus: I headcanoned Chloe as feeling equally entitled when it comes to contests, to the point where, hypothetically, if she lost a science fair against someone as capable as Jimmy Neutron, she would be honestly shocked (This doubly funny because Butch Hartman has his YouTube channel and did a video where he introduced us to an animator who worked on WordGirl before coming to work for "Fairly OddParents"). Turns out, this "I will always win" mentality became canon in "The Hungry Games", which I only watched later (and one of my friends, apparently, really REALLY wanted to tell me this when I first explained my thoughts to him last month, but held his mouth shut until now). I know my kiddos, son.
- But Becky LOVES unicorns. At least one episode is strictly about her wanting time for herself to watch her unicorn show and getting increasingly annoyed when she gets called away. In another, she hits her snapping point because Lady Redundant Woman knocked broke one of her figurines (which was funny, because the figure belonged to her secret identity and she was in WordGirl form and couldn't mourn the way she wanted to). One of her most easily-exploitable weaknesses is that she loves this unicorn cartoon of hers, and the villains can market mind-controlling merchandise knowing that she'll buy it, and all sorts of stuff. There's a cool episode where virtual reality was in play. That one's hilarious. Becky is book smart, of course, but she's a huge nerd for girly things. And she still beats up the bad guys.
- Becky/WordGirl also had traits such as being a terrible dancer, which seems like a lame weakness, but it was really fascinating in one episode because her dad desperately wanted to enter a dancing contest with her like all his ancestors had, and at the end of the episode, rather than having an "I don't care if I'm embarrassed, I'll do it because it's important to you" moment, she instead found someone else (her pet monkey) to take her place, and sat the contest out. THAT is the kind of problem solving I want to see promoted- The idea that it's okay if you're uncomfortable, and your voice has the right to be heard.
Basically, my point is that just because she has feminine traits like this, it doesn't make her bad from either a writing or a watching perspective. There's no need to make female characters and suggest that "girls who like girly things are stereotypical are bad" like so much media does today. I mean, media shouldn't say that "girls who fight bad guys are bad" either, but I'm really tired of seeing fight scenes where all the boys beat maybe one or two enemies after they get surrounded, but the girl beats all of them with her unrealistic fighting powers. I liked Mabel from "Gravity Falls", who was another good blend of
I gave a shortened version of this to my teacher and she approved, even saying she'd love to read that essay. Tonight my friends had a chat going, and I ran the idea by them and they approved immensely too. I'm not 100% sure yet what I want to say about it or even if this is the topic I want to devote myself to for twelve weeks, but I do need to have a topic by Monday, and if I really want to, I CAN change it later. It's just not advisable. We have twelve weeks to work through it and I assume we'll be doing so in class (i.e. "Today, write in defense of your position", "Today opposing", "Find articles that relate to certain things", et cetera).
I dunno. To me, it's weird that people say "Girls have low self-esteem because of the way girls are portrayed on TV". Like. Have you ever watched a cartoon? Ever? Do you even know Smurfette at all, who regularly snaps at the boys for protecting her from imps who want to marry her because she can take care of herself? Who in her debut disguised herself as a mystery warrior and saved the day? Who stands up for herself and her beliefs constantly? With most cartoons that I know, the typical dynamic is "goofy boy and smart girl". I could name "SpongeBob", "ChalkZone", "Danny Phantom", "Fairly OddParents", I've heard that "T.U.F.F. Puppy" qualifies even though I've never seen it, then there's "Jimmy Neutron" where Jimmy and Cindy were both portrayed as brilliant and were rivals, and this isn't even counting shows like "Lilo and Stitch", "WordGirl", "Steven Universe", "My Life As a Teenage Robot" and "Star vs. The Forces of Evil" where the girls are the main characters, so you would think girls would have higher self-esteem if they've ever watched a cartoon... I dunno, man.
Anyway, it would be an interesting topic to pursue, but I need to figure out exactly what I want to say about it, since it's supposed to be a persuasive essay. My teacher made it sound like she meant argumentative, but she kept saying persuasive, so we'll see what happens there. I guess they are kind of the same thing.
After English, I went to the Emma Eccles Jones building to meet up with Jeff. I spent the time before we were supposed to meet working on my take-home stats exam. After awhile, a boy asked if he could sit with me and eat his breakfast. I let him. After awhile, I asked him for his advice on one of the questions. Turns out, I guess we're in the same class. He didn't have his exam with him, but we bounced questions off one another.
The funny thing was, I had my answers right on some of the questions, but he convinced me they were wrong. Luckily, Jeff showed up after awhile and put them straight. We compared answers in the computer lab while I talked this new boy, Kyle, through the process of working through SPSS (He just needed a review on a few buttons to click and where they were located).
Most of the time Jeff and I disagreed, the problem was in a miscalculation he had made, so he was pretty glad he had me to talk things through with. We agreed to work together (or at least compare answers for) the next take-home exam too. At one point he said, "Yeah, I'll have to check this one with my roommate who's a TA, who by the way is way too shy to ask you out even though he really wants to." I said, "Is this the same roommate I did the rat lab with?" and when he confirmed it, I told him to tell his roommate I would be totally okay with that.
I really liked all the boys in my group back when we did the rat lab. They stayed on task and that's a good way to win my favor. I had all the boys in the entire lab during that hour and it was nice not to have any girls go wandering off to talk with the other groups, like a few of the other groups I observed did. So we'll see if that goes anywhere. And I'll have to slip Jeff my number tomorrow so we can meet up again to compare answers in the future.
After that, it was time for my psychology as a career class, which fortunately was in the same building. It was pretty quick and easy- we talked about APA format. This class is not going to be fun in a few more days when we have to write resumes, cover letters, and start working on essays, I think. Right now, it's been pretty low-key. At least we don't have any big tests.
Then I went to the cafeteria at the end of the TSC (I need to learn what that cafeteria is called) and worked on online Aplia assignments for an hour until it was time for interior design. I didn't eat a big meal or anything, but I had some muffins to hold me over. Interior design was pretty painless today, and after that I went to the Aggie Marketplace to have more food. I had a grilled cheese, fries, and a roll, as well as just one scoop of vanilla ice cream (They didn't even have the vegetable bar up today, for some reason), but I might have eaten something that disagreed with me, because my stomach hurt for awhile after. At least I was able to push through it. I don't know if I ate too much or what. I didn't feel like I ate too much. It was nice to be able to work on my interior design homework too- I collected all 20 Pinterest pins I need for Friday. I think I even found 22, because I wanted to cover myself in case some of them weren't quite right.
I found out that I missed two questions on my abnormal psych test. I scored a 94%. Still an A. We're only graded on tests in this class, so if I can continue scoring high, I should be able to pull an A (and this isn't even counting extra credit). Ha! Take that, teacher who said were likely to get Bs! ... He might trip us up on future tests, though. This one wasn't too hard, but I won't let my guard down.
At 5:00, I had Institute. The class can be long, but I do enjoy the class much more than last semester's. I enjoy talking about culture and stuff, like the Jewish belief about thirteen being the age a boy becomes a man in their society, and comparing that to the story of Jesus teaching in the temple when he was twelve. We also briefly mentioned the Messiah Ben-Joseph (spelling?), which was interesting because I'd never heard about this. I think it's more of a Jewish belief, because we kind of skimmed over it. It's interesting to actually be learning something about church again instead of listening to the same concepts beaten into my head over and over. It's been awhile.
We got out of Institute at 7:03. My plan had been to walk home, because I knew I'd miss the new "Fairly OddParents" episode if I waited for the bus, but since it usually takes me ten minutes to walk down the hill to Blue Square, I thought I could make it back by 7:15. Unfortunately, I checked my phone and the evening bus was supposed to be here in one minute. So I waited. I waited about ten minutes, because the thing kept saying it was just a minute away. I made it back to Blue Square at 7:30 on the dot, episodes over but not terribly disappointed, because I figured I'd find it eventually and this wasn't one of the ones I'd gotten pumped for.
And like I said, I briefly got in touch with my online friends tonight. I didn't if anyone had the link to today's episode, but they uploaded it on some site and sent it to me because they knew I'd probably miss it and had me covered. They're cool that way. Timmy and Chloe have now made their friendship official, and Chloe's hippie parents continue to be super close-minded and overprotective, proving again that Chloe deserves fairy godparents because her real parents are so... bad at parenting. It's funny to watch Chloe's choices shift into the more questionable zone the longer she spends with Timmy (tormenting Mr. Crocker by sneaking into his house at night and fixing some of his furniture to the ceiling, in this case). No one will ever be able to insist she's a Mary Sue again, that's for sure!
So all in all, this Wednesday wasn't so overwhelming, just long. Having the laptop lifts a huge weight off my shoulders, I think, because I can be working on online assignments even when I'm in the lunchroom or waiting for the bus, or whatever. Now my math assignments, math exam, and interior design work are done. On to tomorrow!
