Pitcairn

There are some places you can't escape. Places that keep coming back no matter how hard you try to leave them. We called it the slums, the projects, the poor neighborhood. It had a real name but if I told it to you it wouldn't matter anyway. Some of you know where I'm talking about and some of you don't. If you know, you understand, if not, who the hell cares?
We called it home because we lived there. Anyone who didn't live there called it by its name because they were being sensitive or called it what it was in an attempt to anger us, it didn't.
It was the kind of place no one even tried to better. Living in the shadow of a wealthy neighborhood, our parents paid for shit housing, no bus stops, two Quik-e-Marts and a strip of just bars. That was home.
Even after I moved out, it came back. It always came back.

The one pleasant memory of mine was still early after moving into the area, 20 years ago now, before things felt as gritty. Me, my sister and two of the other boys on my block all got hold of some fishing rods, nothing fancy. And we just went fishing in this pond. I couldn't tell you how natural that pond was, it was small compared to a lake but bigger than a backyard pool. Almost the size of a baseball field with a mound in the middle that stuck up far out of the water. We set up our sticks on the sides of that little island in the pond and waited. Then we got impatient and just swam and played in the water. If we'd caught a fish I hate to think what we'd have done with it.

Body

I was born into this body. I can feel it breathing, hormones skyrocketing and plunging. I'm only human. Born into a world of touch and sensation. You must feel like God, creating and molding me. Trying to make me perfect but I'm only human and somewhere along the way I became me.

My Family

Born and raised in the United States.  The truth about my family is this; I don't know enough about my father to know whether or not he loves me. My sister always hated me and treated me like an idiot, four years her younger. My cousin was a bully. My family is just my mother's generation and mine, a sister and a cousin. We didn't talk to the men in my family for a long time not including my dad who had every other weekend but I never got to know him. I felt like I spent a long time not even talking because no one seemed to like me.
Today as an adult I can finally put my foot down and refuse to be treated like a lesser being by a family I didn't choose. Constantly ridiculed and pushed aside and ignored. I don't have to have a family at all.
How selfish, you must think I am. Just desperate to regain some of the self respect I grew up without. If I want to live in this world I need to break away from the memories of hate I grew up inside of.

Comedy and Stereotypes and Is It Really Funny?

Today a great point was made in class. More than once now in my favorite class, "Family Guy" has been brought up as a point-maker in whether or not certain kinds of comedy are really getting across the point they were intending. When it comes to "Family Guy" I have always been torn on the subject of their intentions. Today though, Professor Glover gave me insight and understanding on something I had long since forgotten I cared about.
He said that; when a joke is made about a stereotype, on TV, it's intention (hopefully) is to point to the stereotype. To make you feel icky about it so you think about it, so you care about it and reexamine it. "Family Guy," however, perpetuates its own jokes in an awful two miles over the line kind of style. Heavily repetitive, taking something funny for five seconds and thinking it can be funny for five minutes. Later, in a few years, they take that joke and try to make it funny for thirty minutes. Over many years the other characters have been fleshed out while the main character stays exactly the same himself. It's very popular for shows to recall on their own jokes. Even Futurama did it before they went off the air.
What I always felt about Family Guy was that people weren't laughing at the ironic pointed jokes they were making but that they were laughing at the joke because it was real to them. Well I couldn't watch "Family Guy," thinking that people were stupid enough to laugh at it for real. No offense if you liked its fart jokes and general disgustingness. We have a different taste in humor. Please don't laugh at a pointed stereotype because you think it's ok if "Family Guy" says it.
I'm not someone who asks you to be 'politically correct.' I grew up under the harsh reign of my upright sister. I will never ask you to be anything but smart and humane. Too many children are being allowed to watch "Family Guy" while when I was a kid I wasn't allowed to watch "South Park" until I was about a teenager. There's going to be a different outcome for children being perpetuated these stereotypes that we're trying to get away from without the understanding that "Family Guy" is a horrible show about how you shouldn't think or act.
Stereotypes are a hard topic to cover altogether. I like to think that most everyone knows the phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" and how to relate that to not stereotyping people. We're a pretty smart peoples. But, stereotypes exist because they're perpetuated not just by TV but by the people being stereotyped. Some of them can be discredited like, I don't know a person anywhere that doesn't love fried chicken, others are harder to discredit.
Making jokes about a person's differences from you; race, gender, sexuality, slurrs. All of these things are a way to offend because if you still find it funny to be derogatory towards someone else then you're attempting to gain a power over them. I've found more than once over the years that woman jokes make me very angry. Logically I should laugh it off and ignore the person but why is it so unacceptable for me to be angry? Because you're attempting to put me into a hole because of who I was born. A joke about my gender is the same as a joke about someone's temperament or driving abilities.
Just stop making these jokes whether they're meant to educate or not. Come up with something fresh and tasteful and the world will thank you.
B-dog OUT

Two Weeks' Notice

Torn down and there’s nothing left to tell who she was before. She carries her head low, mumbles the answers to questions and smiles without soul. She’s lost something and everyone can tell. She’s different and silent and still.

She glides across the floor in small blue shoes, taking orders and delivering food. Her tips reflect a real loss of personality. People who used to pay for a smile or a laugh now pocket an extra dollar almost sadly. Her trips to the kitchen are short, in one door and out the other just long enough to place the order. No one asks her questions or tells her jokes, not like they used to. She doesn't laugh anymore, she doesn't know how to.

Tell her you need a coffee and she pours you a cup. Tell her you’re bored and she sighs. Her feet are sore from standing, her eyes are deeply red, her tongue is swollen from disuse and her mind is ready for bed. It’s been a long week and the year is longer still. If she just makes it through today, she thinks tomorrow will be the same. If she makes it through the month her mind will be made. She isn't staying long she decides, not long enough to be noticed. Everyone here will forget me after I put in my two weeks’ notice.

Postmodernism

Today, Postmodernism is defined by Google as, "a late 20th century style and concept in the arts, architecture and criticism that represents a departure from modernism and has at its heart a general distrust of grand theories and ideologies as well as a problematic relationship with any notion of "art."" Now, what does that mean?
My interest came from a reading I did for my Pop Culture class today, at the University of Pittsburgh taught by Professor Glover, a great lecturer. The reading was "Stam, "The Poetics and Politics of Postmodernism." I don't have a first name to give you but I'm giving credit where due as best I can. Stam calls postmodernism, "the decline of the radicalism of the 1960s" in such a way that we are more interested in a representation of something than its reality. How much time do you spend reading your friends' opinions on issues, how much time do you spend reading about those issues yourself? Media has become so biased and controlled that it's no longer a trusted source for real news. Even the word real has taken on a new meaning.

Because I'm a struggling college student I can't afford cable. I read articles online but most often I miss major issues as they hit breaking news. When I do see them it's at work on the televisions at the bar as I'm bussing tables or taking orders. When there's a lull at work we all sit around and watch tv, talk and generally pass the time. So often we say to each other, "I can't watch the news, it's too depressing." For years I would agree. The news is so depressing that we skip it in every form whether it's on tv or in the paper or on the internet. We shouldn't! It's been too bad for too long to let it go any further. My generation is not alone when we look around and say, I can't possibly do anything about the problems because no one is doing anything. It's too hard, so I choose to not care.

We don't know where to get the facts anymore. We don't trust the biased media. We don't like being pushed around and told things are getting better without seeing the facts for ourselves. We simply can't keep up. News that was relevant and important today will be old news next week, not because it isn't still relevant but because we got tired of it. Global climate change, world hunger, wildlife preservation, just three examples of things that are still problems that we just don't hear enough about anymore. We push it to the back of the pile and hope someone else will take care of it.

If you can do one thing to help this world become a little bit more real just search out the facts and don't blindly read what someone else thinks. This is just my opinion piece, you go read about postmodernism and tell me what you think.