The Problem with Reality Shows

Ah, reality shows. I don't know most of you, and my surprise is beginning to dwindle at that fact. There are reality shows about everything and everyone these days. It seems everyone can be, or has been, famous. There once was a time when reality shows were novel, and they were kinda cool because if nothing else you got to watch them (or hear about them) and then feel immensely better about yourself and your life because, hey, at least you don't act like/ have the problems of that loser.

But then.

Reality shows have officially taken off. And let's be honest with yourself, Kati, this probably happened years ago while you were busy noticing other things. But right now, you're noticing reality shows and a terrible thought has struck you. You know the problem with reality shows, me. Oh, you know.

Back in the day, there was a smug feeling you got when comparing yourself to these nouveau riche, I mean 'nouveau famous' people. We as Americans sat back and watched these reality show "stars" with high levels of satisfaction, coupled with low levels of embarrassment that, because these guys are on TV and we're not, THESE GUYS are part of the standard by which the rest of the world views us, and not us.

The Problem, Part I is that back then there was this WHOLE OTHER section of America watching the same shows and thinking, Ah, here's my chance. This whole other section of America went right out and got their own show, leading us to

The Problem, Part II. Back in the day reality shows were full of young, poor-ish, drunk 20 somethings acting like damn fools for various reasons. These days, reality shows are full of everyone-- rich, poor, posh, gansta, all genres of "stars", all backgrounds, all motives, all styles, all ages. Reality shows these days actually do represent a pretty fair cross section of America. This is a problem, and I'll tell you why.

Marketing. Advertisements, television, movies, media in general. They have a long history in this country of simulating reality in such a way as to usurp what is real and what is good with something that seems like it's real and good but is slightly cooler and also makes some people a lot of money. These media are part of our culture, and they guide is in what we want/buy/do.

Enter into this cultural norm Reality Shows, in which so much of America is very nearly represented. The difference between them and us is that on Reality TV the goal is to be as outlandish, loud, attention-drawing, trashy, and self-involved as possible so that everyone is looking directly at you all the time. Reality TV is a warped version of real reality. Unfortunately, because it so nearly represents so many of us, Reality TV has become normalized. People begin to think that in real reality, they're supposed to act like they do in Reality Shows.

It's not quite so standard to sit back and watch, all smug and embarrassed. Instead we look to Reality Shows the way we look to the rest of the marketing machine to find out what we ought to do and think and buy.

Personally, I'm hoping that in a few weeks, I'll stop feeling so shocked and sad and bitter at this normalizing effect of reality shows on real people. I'm hoping I'll forget how many, many reality shows there are because they will no longer be nearly representing pieces of my world. I'm hoping that I'll find myself less focused on people who want a piece of that action, and refocused on people who bask in smugness and embarrassment.

You know. Real people.

Recovering/Brushing

So, I've had the flu (or a flu-like illness) this past week. Good news is that it seems mostly to be over. Bad news is I'm weak as hell after spending six days in bed, and not really being able to eat three of those days. :( It's gonna take awhile to get my strength back up so I don't feel I need to go lay down after doing... well, anything.

Bleh. This stuff sucks.

The upshot is that a week in bed was possibly good for my aching back-- we'll see after I've stopped taking flu-painkillers and start moving around again. Also I've started a six week back-pain-be-gone system, which, with continued use over the years, took away my adviser's wife's back pain for these past couple decades. I'm hopeful.

But the important thing to note today is that my hair is long. Yes, officially, my hair is long. I got out of the shower and looked into the mirror as it dripped down my back and I thought briefly, 'I'm never going to be able to brush this by myself. I'm way too weak.'

The thing was, that's an old thought resurfacing unexpectedly from the last time my hair was long back in Chicago. When I wasn't feeling well or when I'd had a tiring day or something, my arms would wear out trying to brush out the tangles after a wash-- that, even with the two handfuls of conditioner slathered through. And when I say my arms would wear out, I mean that sometimes I would get about halfway through and ask Michael to do the rest because he would just have to reach forward and brush, whereas I would have to spend extended periods of times contorted into strange hair brushing positions in order to run the brush through the full length of it. It was tiring.

But that was then.

I've been doing the baking soda rinse wash / vinegar rinse condition now for about a year and a half. My hair was chin length when I started this. But now, now it is long. And now that it is long, here are the problems with the baking soda/vinegar thing:

1) My hair loses its body if I wash too many consecutive times with too much baking soda and vinegar. A couple times yields no change in the light curly bounce, but four or five times and it starts to get flat.

2)

No, it's really just the one thing. And that can be rectified by either waiting a couple days to wash again (ponytail days) (but let's be frank, most days are ponytail days anyway) or by just being careful not to use too much during the next few washes.

When I had short hair and started using baking soda and vinegar instead of shampoo and conditioner, it started taking only six brush strokes to brush out my hair after a shower rather than then [many] that it took before. Now that I have long hair, it still only takes six brush strokes to brush out my hair after a shower.

So when I looked in the mirror today and saw all that wet hair, and the thought of brushing it filled me with dread for the enormous amount of strength it would take to accomplish that feat, it was only momentary. Because then I realized that my hair doesn't knot the way it used to when I used shampoo. And even in my post-flu weakened state, I could still brush my hair all on my own.

And that made me happy. Just wanted to share.

Academically speaking,

One of the cool things about being in a field that I love and am continuously more interested in is that I get to meet lots of people who are really neat. Most every time a new class begins, we go around and introduce ourselves, our lives, our studies, and I think, "Wow, these people are all really interesting. I'm looking forward to sharing this class with them."

I started my first class toward becoming certified in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance (DMHA) a couple weeks back, and as we went around the room, my thoughts were more along the lines of, "Holy shit, every single person in this class is waaaay cooler than me!" It's a large class, and as such there hasn't yet been much discussion around the table, but I am really, really, really looking forward to it when it does happen.

We have the lady who worked with Bosnian refugees. We have the guy who directed a disaster refugee program in Indonesia. We have the lady who studies lava flow on the moon. No, really. That's what she does.

This class also promises to be cool (outside of its own right of being really cool because I'm interested in learning more on the subject) in two ways:

1) the professors are pretty awesome, and except for being from an Urban Planning background as opposed to a psychology/social sciences background, my research and life interests are pretty well entangled with the research and careers of these two professors. I can't wait to learn everything from both of them.

2) the Urban Planning department was just named a national center for disaster management training (the official title is very similar to those words, but I don't remember them exactly or else I'd have capitalized). I mean, it was very very recently named a national center for training. So our final project in this class was changed from research paper to... create a training program that will address a need in DMHA. Dr. Kim said, "So, this project is exploitative in nature because we're using you all for ideas for training programs, but on the other side is that if you have a really good idea we might be able to hire you in the spring to further develop and implement it."

Of course, in that moment my goal became to create a project that they'll want to develop and implement. I honestly have no idea how reasonable a goal that is, given that this is my first foray into the field, but no point not shooting for it, right?

I also don't know how exactly all of this fits together for my long-term plans, although it seems as though it could come together quite cohesively.

My Plan As It Stands Now:

1) Get a Masters in December. This entails revising and defending my thesis before October ends, which I believe is doable. I finished my first draft a couple weeks back, did some edits, sent it off to my adviser, and just received it back yesterday. He had some really good suggestions, including two things that I knew I had left out and needed to figure out how to add but hadn't figured out how to add, and some other things that I agree will greatly improve the overall work. And a whole bunch of grammar and APA stuff.

2) Start my DMHA certificate. I figured now was a good time, because I want to be developing my dissertation proposal over the next year, and knowledge from this certificate will really help me in that. My Cultural Community Psychology adviser agreed that was a good idea, and my brand spanking new DMHA Certificate adviser (Dr. Kim) also agreed and seemed to think my interests aligned well into the program.

3) Complete my major comprehensive exams in the spring. I've been scared of these for awhile, but I've had the great fortune of watching Andrew, who is also in Cliff's lab, go through Comps last semester. He gave me great tips for survival, explained to me how it works and what it's like, and generally gave me a realistic point of view. I can do Comps in the spring. I'm pretty confident of this.

4) Complete my minor comprehensive papers in the spring and summer of 2010. They're designed, it turns out, so that you can use them as building blocks for your dissertation research, I guess in many if not all cases. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to use my minor papers as research opportunities and dissertation-building opportunities.

5) Also use my classes as dissertation-building opportunities. Over the next year, I'm going to try and take classes that I'll be able to use toward that goal.

I feel much more directed now. There's room in that plan for things/times/research/goals to change, but at least I have a good idea what to shoot for. Also, I don't know what all will happen with work. I've pretty well decided that unless I'm able to get in on a grant that is directly related to my dissertation research, I'm going to stick with the job I have. Because I'm invested in it. I'd be really sad to not see it through, although if I have the opportunity to have a job that will pay me to do my dissertation research, well. That would be pretty awesome.

But for now, I'm gonna have breakfast. Because it's closing in on 11am and I haven't done that yet. The rest of my plans can wait.

one last goodbye.

Hello,

So, blog, it's not that I've been avoiding you per se. I just didn't know what to write about. Well, I take that back. I did know what to write about. So many things have been happening, and any one of them are blog worthy. All of them, in fact. But by writing about them, I'm not writing about the thing that, well, I didn't know how to write about.

But it's gone on long enough. I can't keep avoiding this. Life is passing me by and none of it is getting recorded for posterity and friends' amusement. So let's do this thing. Let's do this.

I had a great dream the other night. And I woke up sad. I fell back to sleep and had another great dream. And again I woke up sad. The alarm was going off this time, and so I whispered to the world, "Goodbye, Duke," and I got out of bed and rejoined reality.

In reality, Duke killed himself last month. In my dream, he had faked his death. He was still intending to do himself in, but that time was faked. He came to Hawaii, just showed up in our lives, still alive, and said it wasn't for good, he was still going to kill himself, but he wanted to come say goodbye first. And so we got to say goodbye.

In my first dream, we talked, all of us. People from every part of my life were there, drifting in an out. I sat with Duke and we talked of childhood trauma that we have in common, him worseso than me, but I get it. And we talked about that. And he said he never knew, and he was glad to know there was someone else out there who got it.

In reality, Duke's villain was his dad. We had talked about it once. His dad had, apropos nothing, decided that he had done Duke a great favor by being a sick psychotic bastard asshole fuckface to Duke; had done well by his son by doing what he'd done. Because Duke suffered. And he understood life. And he became an artist.

In reality, one of my villains was Ed, my ex, who had also come to a similar conclusion that he had done well by me by doing what he'd done. Because I'm not so naive anymore. Because I came out of our relationship worse for wear, but became stronger eventually, and that was all because of him.

It's like that song by one of those blond girls (I get them all confused), where she thanks her abuser because now she's stronger, now she's a fighter.

But that's all bullshit, and I hate that song because it's all bullshit. Blond girl's abuser didn't make her a fighter. Ed didn't make me stronger. Duke's dad didn't make him an artist. They only made us hurt. We're the ones who made us who we are. We're the ones who took the shit others gave us and figured out a way not to be trampled entirely. Those bastards deserve no credit for doing what they've done. They shouldn't have done it.

I told Duke this, in reality, at the time of our conversation. But in my dream, we talked about the abuse. We didn't talk about prevailing, about become strong artist fighters. We talked about surviving. In my dream, we sat together and understood each other. In my dream, he and Michael walked off together to talk alone, and I sat there for a long time, wondering when they would come back, what they were talking about, and if Duke was still going to die.

And I woke up, and he was still dead. And I missed him entirely. And I never got to say goodbye.

Duke was our best man. He was there that night I swallowed my fear and called the green-haired boy at Taco Bell and asked him out. He was there with us as we fell in love. He and Michael went on that night, and Duke told Michael that I was the one who would save him. Duke was there at the Red Rose coffee shop that first night of early labor before Ian was born. He stood with us in the park where we got married. He stayed with us before we left Murfreesboro for Chicago, glad we were going but not really willing to let Michael go. He came to us in Chicago. I always thought he would appear in Hawaii one day, just show up on our doorstep and be here.

The day before our 8th anniversary, we found out. His friends held a memorial for him at the park where we got married. And we stood there and remembered.

So goodbye, Duke. I'm so sorry that life wasn't better to you. And I'm sorry if you needed someone to be there and I wasn't. And I'm sorry that I'm saying this to my blog, and not to you. We miss you a lot. So many of us do. Rest, now that the pain is over. Be well, my friend.

"Social Services" if you can call it that

I was having a beer with a German lady, and we talked of many things. And because I was I and she was she, we wound up on the topic of the poor, and she included in her sentence the fragment:

German lady: ...and your "social services", if you can call it that...

Which made me smile. And I noted how I liked that she made sure to put finger quotes around "social services", and that I liked it because it is rare that I get to talk to someone who thinks that we, in fact, do not go above and beyond in taking care of our people.

She said, "Yeah, like, there is a lady in a van who came and parked outside of my house. And she has six cats. And it's not very sanitary because the litter box is in the van, and she lives there with the cats. She's been there for about two months."

And I, with my American brain, kept waiting for her to get to the point in the story in which she called the police but they never came to remove her, and then I would say how sad it was that that was her only option, to live in a van with her cats... because that's the way these conversations usually go when I talk to people about such things.

But that point about calling the police never came. The point was that the lady lived in a van with her cats.

My friend continued, "And I wonder about what brought her to living that way, and it's hard to believe that there's nobody to help her." No social services, sans finger quotes, to help this lady have a better life than living in a van with six cats.

"But you all," Americans, she means, "Are used to it because it is what you see all the time."

And she shook her head, because she is not used to it at all.

on Reverse Fall and Slow Bruising

We find ourselves in the earlier stages of Reverse Fall. Reverse Fall is that time in Hawai`i, beginning around my birthday, in which the weather becomes so hot and dry that all of the greenery shrivels and dies. Grass dries out to brittle crunchy shards. Leaves drop and litter my driveway in inches thick carpet. Diamond Head changes color in entirety from luscious green to tumbleweed brown. And plus it becomes 90 in parts of Honolulu, including my part. Today's Weather is wrong!

What I have to look forward to is Reverse Spring. Sometime around Halloween and Thanksgiving, the temps begin to cool, the rains begin to fall, and everything becomes green again. Winter here is rainy and sometimes stormy, and now that I've been here two years -- cold.

I like them both in ways, the hot and the cold. The hot because I don't have to wear so much clothes, the cold because my laptop doesn't overheat, and plus sunscreen is less an immediate necessity.

I carry an umbrella year round, protecting from sun after Reverse Fall begins and protecting from rain after Reverse Spring. Summer also mean sunscreen if I go outside for anything, even to walk to the grocery store. When I decorated my Wonder Woman Filing Cabinet:





(Previously, it was a rusted out metal filing cabinet a la Mimi's office at St. Paul Elementary which my adviser had had in his basement storage for upwards of three centuries, but kindly dedicated to the cause of my organization.)

I put sunscreen on my shoulders and face, but failed to anticipate that the back of my shirt would ride up a little bit as I bent over the 70sriffic tank of office furniture on my lanai, and now I have a stripe of brown across my lower back. I had gotten a touch of pink on my shoulders, and complained to Michael that the sunscreen hadn't done much. Then I showered and saw the gash of lobster red at my shirt line, and took it all back.

Go sunscreen.

This week I've mostly been indoors. Work was quite busy at the beginning as I finished a report on what we learned from the interviews and focus groups we did with the teachers. Since that finished, I've been working hard on thesising.

I have "slow bruised" my elbows from sitting such long hours in front of my computer this week. There was no impact, no blow, just a gradual bruising from near-constant desk-elbow action. I have cloths underneath them now, padding them from the genuine wood grain appearance of my desktop.

I have two more days of this stage of my thesis. The coding will finish tomorrow if I just keep with it, coming in four days early from my scheduled goal. Next stage is analysis, which I've never done before, but I'm hoping I can finish by July.

In my spare time, I'm reading a history book covering the struggle between Cromwell and Charles I for the people's control of government or the government's control of people. It's about a young Lady forced into marriage with a dashing, but severe Lord who is a close adviser to Cromwell. Is there love in her future and will The People succeed in enforcing their rights? Who can say -- there's no way anyone could determine the outcome of this one. But ah, what a ride!

Back to Culture and Values

So here's this thing I've been thinking on, followed possibly by a personal update on all my activities while I've been MIA these last weeks.

Between work and thesis research, I've had an opportunity to talk to a bunch of locals (Native Hawaiian, Part Hawaiian, and other locals) about Hawaiian values. Even when not talking specifically about what the values are, I've been observing the way people talk, the way they connect or don't connect information or stories, the way that pieces of information and meaning come together to create a whole concept. I've been watching the way strangers interact when they run into each other. I've gotten to interview teachers about teaching styles and strategies-- the way they purposefully impart their knowledge to others. And I've come up with this theory, and I feel very strongly about the rightness of this theory. The problem is that every time I try to put it into words, in return I get the blank stare of 'whatthehellareyoutalkingabout?'

So I'm going to try and suss it out here, so that next time I say it aloud, I can manage to phrase it in a meaningful and comprehensible way.

Native Hawaiians and other locals tend to place a high value on connections between people. When you run into someone you haven't seen in a long time, or if you are meeting someone for the first time, you begin to talk story. You establish:

1) place. Where are you from?, or, Do you still live there? A common line of questions here regards which high school you went to. Hawaii is very place-based in that where you are from says a lot about who you are and what you do. This goes back to the Kingdom in which people typically stayed in their community of birth throughout their lifetime, goes back to the plantation days which furthered that insular idea of 'this place is ours, we belong to this place', but also has relevance in a modern society that is divided by class among other things. Mainland people tend to ignore the relevance of place, but we all know that it's different if you come from Manhattan or the Bronx.

2) family and 3) friends. Who are you related to?, or, How are your relatives? Who do you know? and How are they doing? These questions come from place, or from last name -- if you're from this place or this family, maybe you know these people. These questions go into specifics of a long line of individual family members and friends, or even vague acquaintances. Have you ever met or seen or heard of this person? I've heard newly met strangers go over twenty or thirty names looking for people they both know, and then swap stories about those people they know, even before getting into any sort of personal conversation that has to do with the two people who are talking, or sometimes if there's a purpose for the meeting, before they get to that purpose. One lady I talked to joked that "We use that long introduction to figure out if we even want to bother giving our time to talk to you."

In these ways, Hawaiians make a connection between themselves and a stranger, and that opens doors between them. I personally get left out of this, because I didn't go to any of the high schools here, because I know very few people here. So I talk story about growing up in Memphis, about working in Chicago, or even about my ideas behind my thesis research with the Superferry-- a lot of people have some very strong notions about the Superferry. But even this, a stranger coming in with no previous connection, I can establish that connection by giving of myself and my stories. This is not an entirely appropriate behavior in a lot of mainland cultures. You don't typically tell childhood stories to strangers in your first 10 minutes of conversation. But I do that here sometimes, especially outside of the 'university' and 'city' contexts. And it seems to put people at ease, because then they know who they're dealing with.

Another thing I've noticed, in terms of connection, is that when I talk to locals about anything, I usually wind up having conversations in metaphor. For example, "The Superferry is just like [insert any one of a dozen events or stories about how people have interacted in some way in the past]." Also, I've heard, "When you rub this plant it closes off, the leaves snap shut together for about five minutes before it reopens. So I tell the men that come out here that it's just like them. If they get angry, if somebody is rubbing them wrong, they should close and step away. Then after a few minutes when they feel calm, they can open back up to the world and deal with the problem." People are compared to the land, and the land to people. Hawaiians are kama`aina, people of the land. The `aina is their ancestor. The connection of people to land is ubiquitous, and often comes up in metaphor. Other metaphors-- any new information or idea or person is compared to what is already known. The connection is everything.

The next question, for me, becomes, How does this relate to education?

This is my next question because with my job we're trying to figure out the best way to infuse Native Hawaiian culture into a Western classroom setting, particularly into math and reading classes because those are the Standards by which all school kids are tested and judged. Like most minorities in this country, Native Hawaiians and Part Hawaiians are severely overrepresented in SpEd referral and school failure.

I read a great article recently that debunked the myth that poverty or FAS or whatever other social ill actually causes various minorities to be overrepresented in SpEd and school failure because a much larger percentage of them have some sort of mental or cognitive issue that hinders schooling. That's the myth. The reality is that in Special Education classes nation-wide, minorities are overrepresented in referrals that deal with judgmental diagnoses, but not for nonjudgmental diagnoses. In other words, SpEd for mental retardation? Same numbers/levels of minority and non-minority kids. SpEd for emotional, behavioral, psychological issues? That's where the overrepresentation lies. Why? Because a lot of times minority kids think, behave, value, expect, and strive for different things than their white middle class counterparts. And if a majority of teachers and counselors who are making referrals and diagnoses are white middle class, then maybe they're expecting the kids to have different ways of thinking, behaving, valuing, and different expectations and goals to strive for. So when these things don't match up, the teacher/counselor/other person in charge thinks there's something wrong with the kid OR decide that they, the teacher, are unequipped to deal with [whatever differences] within their classroom with their resources and knowledge, and so the kid gets referred out.

This is not necessarily indicative of ill intent by those in charge. I think a lot of it has to do with a misunderstanding of the way cultural norms influence EVERYTHING. Another article I recently read discussed taking some childhood developmental level tests to Mayan children. These are the conservation of mass tests and puzzles that Piaget and other developmental Psychologists have used to determine when it is that kids reach the age of reason. Not surprisingly, when you give Mayan children puzzles that are made from American items they've never seen before, they had trouble figuring out what to do even at a much older age than their American counterparts. But when you made similar tests with Mayan items (weaving looms, for example), the kids had no problem, though their American counterparts who had never seen a weaving loom had more issues figuring it out.

The kicker to me, and the point of me mentioning that story, is that the unschooled Mayan kids were still confused as to Why in the World would you sit down and figure out these puzzles for no reason? You don't just sit down and problem solve when you don't actually have a problem. American kids are used to this, because that's a big part of our education. The teacher asks us to add these numbers. The teacher asks us to answer these questions about this story. The teacher asks us to arrange these things in alphabetical order. We learn from an early age to problem solve for the sake of problem solving. The unschooled Mayan children on the other hand had only ever learned to problem solve for the sake of solving a problem that was real and present in their lives. Presenting these puzzles to assess their developmental level was... doable. They had the cognitive ability to solve the puzzles. But it was still a weird thing to ask them to do. (The Mayan children who had been schooled in the Western-style schools nearby did not experience this same confusion.)

Going back to Hawaiian children in Western public school classrooms. It occurs to me that in my own education, I spent a great deal of time learning independent, unrelated pieces of information. Even information that was related-- the math that built on last year's math, the science that required previous knowledge, the reading that got more complex as time went on -- SEEMED unrelated to me, because I wasn't blessed with the Big Picture Overview of Education and Life that the teachers all had (and probably took for granted, much like I do now that I'm a grown up).

But again, Western schooling reflects Western values. We value intelligence (and I won't discuss here, but believe me when I tell you not everyone on Earth thinks of intelligence in the same way we do), and we value knowledge for knowledge's sake. Unrelated information? No problem. We know all sorts of useless things -- "useless" because they don't actually apply to our lives in any way. But that's okay for us, and it's okay for our schooling to demand that of us. It fits into our value system and cultural norms.

I think that even the most culturally-steeped traditional Hawaiian children are perfectly capable of learning a long series of unrelated facts as they wind their way through American public school. But ask them to do this for 12 years, and then ask yourself if you're really surprised that they find this whole process to be bizarre and foreign and irrelevant to their lives. If connection is everything, then maybe one thing we ought to focus on as we try to make Western education more culturally relevant is how to connect information to other information, how to connect information to these kids.

One way is through actual projects regarding Hawaiian culture or values or practices. Another way is to introduce chants or an ohana (family) atmosphere to the classroom. But the grant I'm working on is focused on math and reading, is focused on imparting core curriculum knowledge to students. And I think the lesson here is to find a way to explicitly connect new information to past information, or new information to the kids lives, or both. The connection of information in Western schooling is oftentimes implicit, or missed entirely. I think one of the keys we'll find with my grant is to make the connections explicit, just like Hawaiians make their connections explicit. I think adding this into the *process* of imparting information will be an important infusion of culture into the Western classroom.

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking on. And I don't guess I'll update on my life right here, but I'll try to do that soon. Maybe even later today. Maybe not. But I'll try to get it in this weekend, since I have four days of it this time. Peace.