Cultural Factors: Generation

     I read the book Tuesdays with Morrie, and it was about a guy named Mitch who loses contact with his favorite college professor Morrie Schwartz.  Mitch gets back into contact with Morrie when he sees him in an interview on TV and finds out that he's deathly ill from a disease called ALS.  So every Tuesday, Mitch goes to meet with Morrie and talk to him about life and philosophy.  Mitch feels very happy to be able to spend time with his former professor again, and considers these meetings his "final class" with Morrie as the professor.  Eventually, Morrie is consumed and falls victim to ALS, slowly becoming a shell of his former self and dies. 
     This book is a memoir written in first person from Mitch's point of view.  It affects the way we understand the book because Mitch is from a newer generation than, say, Morrie, so he talks about more modern problems that he struggles with besides his former professor dying.  He seems to be much more concerned about his job and making money, which seems to be more of an issue now than in the past.  He apparently was concerned about his job enough to end up not having children with his wife.
     As I've said before, some of the issues Mitch faced are different than some of the issues Morrie faced because of the generational differences.  An example would be that when Morrie was young, his father tried to get him a job at a factory to help support the family, despite his young age.  Mitch never faced this, not only because his generation wouldn't allow them to work at a factory at such a young age, but also because of a difference in social class.  Morrie's family growing up was very poor, struggling to make ends meet, while Mitch's was likely somewhere in the middle class.       

Informal Narrative: Race

     As a caucasian male, I have a certain privelege over some of the minority races in the United States.  For example, I never had to ride the city bus to get where I needed to go.  I never had problems with getting my hair cut.  I've never experienced discrimination or prejudice because of my race firsthand.  To tell you the truth, white people have it pretty good compared to some of the minorities.

Informal Narrative: Social Class

     My social class is pretty average, I suppose.  We don't have a ton of extra money to throw around, but we've got enough to hold us for a while.  Although it's outside our Christmas budget to get a fancy new gaming system, we have a fair amount to spend for the holiday.  We have plenty of money for new clothes and shoes once we outgrow the old ones, so that's shows that we aren't too low in our social class.        

Informal Narrative: Gender

     Being an aspiring artist, I don't find it necessary to be as active or fit.  I usually spend more time inside reading or drawing, so I was never as fit as the other guys in my class, and was therefore not as active in gym class.  I couldn't lift as much, wasn't as coordinated, didn't have as much stamina, etc.  But that's okay; the majority of my gender can be fit if they want, I am an artist and I like it that way.

Informal Narrative: Religion

     I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm an atheist.  I don't believe in any sort of deity, and I don't think that I ever will; not in the forseeable future, anyway.  I've been openly atheist for nearly three years, but, looking back, I think I have been one all along. 
    I remember when my parents finally realized.  It was Easter in the year 2010, and my parents gave me the liberty of choosing for myself when I go to church since my Confirmation.  I told them that I wasn't going to go to church with them, even though both my sisters were going (and at the time, my older sister didn't go to church very often).  When my parents asked me why I didn't want to go, I simply stated that I don't believe in God.  They seemed sort of mad, and my mom even said, "Why should I bother buying you Christmas presents this year?"  And then my family left, and I was in the house all alone.  I felt a little betrayed, because my parents said at my Confirmation that they would support me no matter what I believed, and here they were mad at me because I stopped practicing religion altogether. 
     Now, they offer to bring me to church every once in a while, but I still decline respectfully and they don't seem to have so much of a problem with it.  Most of my friends know and have no problem with it, but no one in my family other than those in my house know.  I drop very subtle hints sometimes, but some of my extended family is pretty religious, so I'm going to hold off on flat out telling them for now. 

Predictably Irrational

    The chapter that I read was called "the Fallacy of Supply and Demand".  It started by telling the story of someone that made a ton of money from selling Japanese pearls and then trying to sell black pearls.  He set an extremely high price on them and, since people didn't normally buy black pearls, went for it.  It then goes into detail about "anchoring", which is described as basing what you're willing to pay for a given item based on the price of when you bought it the first time.  For example, when you buy your first house, you may tend to base your future house purchases based on that first house.
     I suppose anchoring applies to me in a few ways.  For example, I tend to base my video game pricing based on the price of my first gaming system.  If it is more, it seems expensive to me.  If it is less, then it seems cheap to me.

Blink

      I read Chapter Six: Seven Seconds in the Bronx: the Delicate Art of Mind Reading.  This chapter is all about how we can "read someone's mind" by closely reading their facial expressions.  It goes into the research of two scientists, Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman, and how they discovered that there are over ten thousand different facial configurations.  The two of them also researched people from all over the world and discovered that facial expressions remain the same in different cultures; so the faces, like the "choking signal", are basically a universal sign of whichever emotion that particular face would normally represent.  It also talks about a man that the police shot down because he "looked suspicious."  If they had read his face, the police would have realized he was afraid and not hostile.  This connects to the first chapter because it shows how the people looking at the tape of the married couple could tell exactly how they were feeling at a given point in time.
     My family and I frequently babysit a four year old girl by the name of Mya.  She's a really an interesting individual who at times says very weird and funny things.  There was a time a few months ago where she would, completely randomly, ask someone from my family: "You mad?"  We were almost never mad at the time she asked us, so it was really strange.  Perhaps a misreading of our facial expressions?  Perhaps a joke of some sort?  Or just plain randomness?  If this indeed was a misreading of facial expressions, what could she have seen in our faces to think that we were angry?  These are questions that connect to Blink and also need to be answered because it sort of confuses me what she could have been thinking.