Don't Burst my Bubble

I live in a bubble. I think that it's safe to say that most of us do in CAP. This bubble includes all aspects of my life--my school community, my family, the neighborhood in which I live, my friends, my religious community, even my socialist summer camp. In this bubble, everyone believes pretty much the same thing.

That is not to say that people aren't opinionated, in fact, in bubble land, most people have extremely strong opinions, they're just all the same.

This weekend, I went on a trip with my Jewish community, a cooperative, parent run group, to a lodge on the Appalachian Trail. The professions of the adults present ranged from union organizers to a civil rights lawyer to a NASA scientist, to a professor of Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, to an education policy consultant, to an urban planner. These were adults from a huge variety of professional fields. On this trip, I attempted to work on my crystal ball assignment, researching the demographics of Pennsylvania and using the information to predict the result of the upcoming election in Pennsylvania. Upon my explanation of the assignment, the adults present launched into a long conversation about the Pennsylvania elections, from the talking points of the U.S. Senatorial election, to the union's position about president Obama, to their own experiences canvasing there.

After the conversation, which covered a lot of issues but was really a bunch of adults agreeing with each other about things, the adults turned back to me. One of them jokingly presented me with their predictions for Pennsylvania's elections. "Our conclusion is that the Cheder adults want Obama to win Pennsylvania." Accept for really, it wasn't  joke, it was a pretty good summary of both their conversation and the political views of almost everyone around me. I know only three republicans. Literally, three. Besides those three, anyone I know would tell me that they planned to vote for Obama in the upcoming election and that they hope that he wins.

Hey, I'm fine with that. I hope Obama wins just as much as any of them. But at the same time, it's important for me, even more than it would be otherwise, to educate myself about issues, try to find both sides of each story, and figure out what I believe personally.

On my Hebrew school trip that night, we were all sitting around the campfire, the adults singing songs from a Tom Lehrer album, including Pollution , National Brotherhood Week, and The MLF Lullaby . Not your traditional campfire songs, but hey, why not. You sing songs about fires burning bright, we sing political satire.

After somewhere around the fifth song, I commented on how strange we must seem, sitting around a campfire singing about politics. They responded with a comment about my bubble. Someone pointed out how strange the real world would seem after being raised constantly surrounded by people like them. I responded by saying that I wouldn't ever have to leave my bubble. And it's true. I could theoretically go from bubble to bubble, from liberal land to liberal land, for the rest of my life. The helpful people of Cheder even suggested colleges I could go to if that was my goal, Oberlin College, University of California, Berkeley and University of Texas at Austin.

But honestly, I don't really want to live in my bubble for the rest of my life. I appreciate the beliefs that surround me and largely agree with them, but at the same time, I feel like I can't possibly know what I believe until I've really been exposed to people who don't fit into my bubble, who disagree with everything that I'm used to hearing, and who can intelligently explain their position. Part of me wants to go to a conservative college, just to get the other side of the story. Odds are very low that I'm going to do that. I'd probably be miserable. After your childhood is spent in an all enveloping bubble, you can't break out of it all at once, even if your sure that you want to (and I'm not sure at all).

I have one last point. Almost everyone lives in some kind of bubble. Whether you live in political bubble, a religious bubble, a racial bubble, or another type of bubble, odds are good that you live in some kind of bubble. When people go out of one bubble, they don't generally spend the rest of their lives bubble free, they just move to a different bubble. Bubbles are often just another way that people separate themselves from others and build barriers between themselves and people with whom they disagree or don't understand.      

Bubble Picture

I hate shoes

I was going to talk about gender again, but I've had a hard week, and at this point, my brain is pretty dead, so I've decided to talk about shoe shopping instead.

I need new shoes. This happens about twice a year, once in fall near the beginning of school when my mom realizes that I have no shoes appropriate for cold weather except for tennis shoes, and once in spring, somewhere around spring break, when my mom realizes that I have no shoes appropriate for warm weather except for flip-flops or Crocs. My mom, as well as many other people are of the opinion that two pairs or extremely casual shoes are not enough to get a person through the year. I, respectfully disagree

Full disclosure here. I hate shoes. If I got my way, I would go barefoot or in just socks all year. Shoes hurt my feet and they're uncomfortable. Yes, all of them. This is why I loved Crocs so much, regardless of how ugly they might be. Really, Crocs aren't shoes they're light pieces of plastic which loosely encase your foot. For a while, I would wear Crocs all year round. But, eventually, Crocs became too hated by society, even for me, someone who's known to completely disregard styles and trends (and not necessarily in a good way).

Power struggles over shoe shopping have been part of my relationship with my mom for as long as I can remember. Since I decided that my then trademark patent leather shoes hurt my feet when I was five, there has been a perpetual struggle to find shoes that she deemed acceptable and I deemed comfortable. The Crocs were just a more recent part of the battle (my mom did not approve of my wearing Crocs everyday). Before that, we had reached a truce over Merrell Moccasins, a clog-esque shoe which was impossible to find in stores.

Really, what it comes down to is that there don't seem to be any shoes that fit my feet well. They make shoes that are wide, shoes that are narrow, shoes that have high heels, shoes without heels, shoes that are completely flat, shoes for flat feet, shoes for high arches, but they don't seem to make shoes for people with tall feet, as in from top to bottom of the foot, and although they do make shoes for people with ankles that collapse in on themselves, these shoes are expensive, clunky, and look like they should belong to an old, retired jogger. As you can see, my choices are rather limited.

So, this weekend, my mom decided that it was time for our biannual shoe shopping trip. Every year, twice a year, these trips happen, and every year twice a year, I buy a new pair of shoes and then refuse to wear them. This year was worse than usual. Not only was there nothing comfortable, but there wasn't even anything that I wanted to try on.

Because most of my clothing consists of loose jeans and loose t-shirts, nicer women's shoes and clogs would look weird, at least in my head. My mom clearly disagreed because most if the shoes that she suggested were block heeled clogs. After the third pair, one would think that she'd get the idea that those weren't what I was looking for. But she kept asking what type of shoe I did want to try on, and the truth was, I didn't want to be trying on any shoes, so I just kept trying her suggestions.

This time, I went home without any new shoes. My mom and I returned form the shopping trip exhausted, disgruntled, and seriously annoyed with each other. I'm betting that after that experience, fun though it was, I'll be off the hook for shoe shopping for another six months. It looks like I'm going back to the Merrell Moccasins. Maybe they'll work again. Who knows?

I'm going to close this post using the same format as my last one--my ideal world. In my ideal world, people would go barefoot. Either that, or there would be different types of socks which had the texture of socks but were thick enough to keep out worms, water and cold. That way, there wouldn't have to be shoes. It would save people a great deal of money on shoes and it would be much more comfortable. I mean, really, some scientists are finding that shoes aren't all that great for your feet anyway. Obviously, based on the amount of garbage on the ground today, what with broken glass and all sorts of other sharp objects, some forms of shoes are necessary to protect feet. Also, there is the issue of worms which enter the body through bare feet, but there are ways to prevent that, either through the aforementioned sock idea or by using a worm repellent medicines (if they have them for dogs, I have the utmost faith that something like that could be created for humans).

I'll just leave you with one final thought. Consider this: What if shoes are created in a way such that once you begin to wear them, your feet come to need them? What if the constricting shapes of shoes makes it increasingly harder for our feet to function without them? What if shoes are really just a mass commercial scheme to get us to all spend money on increasingly decadent coverings for our feet? What if the shoes are really controlling us?
 

Got Gender?

So, we're supposed to be writing about anything that interests us for these blog posts. Whenever I'm asked what interests me, I promptly forget all of my interests, so for this post, I figured that I would start with something very broad -- gender. I then realized that gender was in fact one of my interests and managed to narrow the topic down into something a bit less gigantic.

So, like I said, I'll start with the broad by defining gender. According to the American Psychological Association, gender is defined as, "the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a
person’s biological sex. Behavior that is compatible with cultural expectations is referred to as gender normative; behaviors that are viewed as incompatible with these expectations constitute gender non-conformity. " In case you still don't get it, gender is not defined based on your genitalia-- that's sex. Gender is what attributes are ascribed to a sex, traditionally male and female.

Next, I'd like to introduce the idea of the gender spectrum. The gender spectrum is the concept that instead of being binary, male and female, "gender occurs across a continuum of possibilities," (according to Gender Spectrum, an organization about gender). So based on the gender spectrum, not everyone fits into the traditional genders of male and female.

I also found a test online called the S.A.G.E or Sex and Gender Explorer test. This test is offered as a way to help people figure out where they fit on the gender spectrum, whether they are male, female or somewhere in between. This test is amazing, in that it professes to be able to tell you your gender (something extremely complicated and hard to understand by its very nature) in only 160 multiple choice questions. As I went through the test though, I noticed that there was a very, very obvious trend in the questions. For each question, there were two answers that were in fitting with female stereotypes about thought processing, physical attributes, or hobbies among other things, and two that were in fitting with male stereotypes. If you didn't fit in either of these two groups of stereotypes, you had one more option, one that according to this test implied that you were androgynous.

I guess that now would be a good time to explain what androgynous is. Androgynous is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "neither specifically feminine or masculine".

Personally, I feel that it's a bit presumptuous to assume that someone is neither specifically feminine or masculine just because they don't fit into limited stereotypes of the two genders. You can't tell all that much from a multiple choice test about gender because even within the most binary gender expectations, people are individuals who may not fit under one of four or even five statements. It is unhelpful to sort people into genders, even if they are not the traditional genders, as this only perpetrates stereotypes.

And that brings me to the main point of my post. It has recently dawned on me that gender is really nothing more than stereotypes put out by society about what a specific sex is expected to be like. Using male and female as a way to put people in gender boxes is really invalid because realistically, no one will ever be 100% "female" or 100% "male". At the same time, the gender spectrum, although enormous progress from the original binary way of thinking about gender, can be just as constricting. The gender spectrum, in saying that some people don't fit the societal ideal of male and female, is again perpetuating the idea that some people do fit the ideal of male and female and that gender ideals are an attainable thing to fit under.

To me, in an ideal world, there would not be labels to describe gender. Instead, each person could express themselves in whatever way felt comfortable to them, regardless of their genitalia. Now, would this be lovely? Yes. Is this going to happen anytime in the near future, based on where society is today? Very Probably not. Are we even going to get rid of the titles of male and female anytime in the near future? Doubtful. The world as we know it is too grounded on gender and even language would have to be redesigned if that were to happen. But hey, it's a nice idea.