The Merchants of Cool

Today in Sociology, we watched a film by PBS about marketing to teens. It was called "The Merchants of Cool." Man alive, I am so much more cynical now... I'm scarred for life. One of the sections talked about 7th heaven, the WB show that was marketed as "family-friendly." The executives of WB wwere sitting there, and they said something to the effect of "For about a year there, we were 'family friendly.' What was our ad campaign?" "'We're the station that families can watch together.'" (laughter). They LAUGHED about how they were family friendly. My delusion that they actually cared was SHATTERED. These guys are straight up evil. They'll do anything for money. ANYTHING.

Also, we moved in our lecture from talking about "solid modernity" which is like a 1984 style society... CREEPY, to talking about a more BNW style society, called "liquid modernity." I'm excessively freaked out now. In the 1984 discussion, this concept of a jail called a Panopticon was discussed. The idea is that if prisoners THINK they're being watched, they won't even try to escape. We then discussed the fact that many of the camera bubbles you see are actually just that... BUBBLES. There's no camera inside. The important thing isn't watching you, it's making you think that you're being watched.

In our discussion of liquid modernity, the teacher showed the video mentioned above, The Mercahnts of Cool. In the video, the reporter asks whether our culture of getting what we "want" from corporations is really a good thing. He defines two groups invented by the media, a male that has never grown up, and is forever 13, and a female "midriff," a girl who flaunts her sexuality because it's "cool." These two figures are always on MTV, according to the correspondent.

I then went to lunch in the Cougareat, and... I was terribly frightened, because I noticed that that food court IS an advertisement. I could sit down and see over 30 distinct brand symbols without turning my head. THEN, I looked at myself. I'm wearing my East swimming sweater, which makes me a walking advertisement for Disney. AHHH!!! They're everywhere!!!!! NO!!!

Anywho, that's my sociology-induced freakout for today. In other news, I'm not going to get an A in my calc class. That so yearned-for 4.0? DOWN THE TUBES. I'm going to go burn some advertisements now. It won't change anything about our society... but it may make me feel better.

"This is my boyfriend, Ben."

So.... apparently Hinckley Hall lobby is a place where couples go to hook up. Man alive was last night awkward. I go in there, and it was empty, so I'm studying with Clarissa, and then... about an hour later my "wife" (Home evening assitant group leader) comes in with her boy, and they just start going at it. We're sitting there doing our homework, and we just thought... awkward. My "wife" has been blaming the dysfunctionality of our family on me.... but... man. We decided to pull out my camera and we got a video.... wow. There were like a dozen people in the room. PDA? I think so. I may post the video that we took. It was RIDICULOUS. 20 minutes later... another TWO couples came in and started having fun too. man alive. There were other people in the room that did NOT appreciate the ridiculous habits of these people. I just... wow. WOW.

We decided that it was time to leave, so we went outside, wandered around for a bit, and then sat down on the warm vent outside, and watched the stars. We prolly saw a good 8 shooting stars, two of which were at the same time, HUGE, and lasted forever. IT WAS AMAZING.

In other news, I spent 3 hours today in the Cannon center. Eating food, listening to a girl tell me all about her awkward date stories, one of which happened in the lobby last night... whatever. I now have dirt on her. And... she totally just spilled her guts... with me only pestering her a little bit. (Edit 2/2/10: For the information of anyone reading this significantly after the fact, this girl was Whitney).

Going back a few days, I went to the Synthesis concert on Wednesday night with the FA people on my floor, and met their professor. Man was that weird. We went up to his house afterwards, and had some good times. hehe.

You want to know what's weird? Having a girlfriend. Or... actually, being introduced as "my boyfriend." Man alive, at that concert, we sit down, and Clarissa turns around, says hello to her professor, and says, "This is my boyfriend, Ben." I was so confused. I'm just sitting there thinking... is she talking about me? weird... I'd never thought about that... huh... whatever... sounds good to me.

anywho... the concert was fun... and Hinckley lobby is awkward.

Happiness

"All things considered, I'm doing just fine." I've decided that... my life is excellent. I really have no grounds to complain about anything. I'm at college, surrounded by friends, learning new stuff. I'm well fed, I have a nice dorm room, I can go home and visit my family any time I want. I've been very blessed. I love my life. sure, there are things that I'd like to go better, and sure, I'm not perfect, but... my life is pretty darn good. I feel like since I've been so blessed, I need to help other people to be happier. I'm excited to go on a mission. I haven't even started my papers yet, but... the mission is creeping up, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. I kinda want to be better than I am now, though. I feel like I should live up to how blessed I am. I kinda feel like I don't deserve it. I dunno.

On an entirely different note... I have a hilarious story. I was prank calling some people last night, and decided it'd be funny to leave an insulting message on this guy's phone in a foreign language. Anywho, a couple of hours later, I got a text message from him that said, "Um, whoever this is, please don't call me when you're druuk. Thanks, night" This guy was a friend my friend who was prank calling with me. Good times.

I've gotten a lot of people saying to me recently, "So Ben, I hear you have a girlfriend." I'm just going to tell y'all now, this is true. Her name is Clarissa. Two posts back, I kinda explained that situation. I don't feel like telling any details here, but if you call me or text me, I'll probably tell you.

I love Russell.

Wow. Yesterday, I had an awkward call. I pick up the phone, and I hear Russell on the other end. He goes straight to the point. "Ben, Have you kissed her yet?" I started laughing. I was thinking "Wow. Seriously? Did Russell just call me to ask that?" I then realized that I was talking to RUSSELL. He did this kind of thing to Alec and Tyler and Nick etc. ALL the time. Of course he would ask me something like that. "Oh, Ok. Have a good night with your lady friend then, Ben." Honestly, Russell is one of the boldest characters I know. That's why I love him.

Battle for Rights

The following is a paper written for my Sociology 111 class in response to the film Battle of Algiers. It is an excellent film, and I suggest it highly. Be warned, however, it is in french, so subtitles will be necessary.

Benjamin

11/11/08 Battle of Algiers

The film Battle of Algiers dramatizes the actions of a group of freedom fighters/terrorists in Algiers, and the acts of the French government to stop them. The actions of the freedom fighters, and their stated goals are very telling. They state that they wish to establish a new government with Islamic ideals, but maintaining rights for all regardless of religion.

The acts of the French government to prevent these goals from being realized demand that we consider means and ends. We cannot allow a good end to justify horrible means, and vice versa. The goal of equality and freedom for all is a good one, when it is considered a two way street, as the FLN did in this movie. The acts they committed were terrible, but as one of the leaders said, “You can have our women’s hand baskets when we can have your bombers.” The potential for terrible acts by the government in power is orders of magnitude greater than the potential of the freedom fighters.

Equality and tolerance are two way streets. When we consider the acts of today’s freedom fighters and terrorists and civil liberties groups, we must consider what their ends are. Is it equality for them, but not for others? Or is it equality for all? If it is the second, the policy of the United States government to “not negotiate with terrorists” is futile and stupid. If it is the first, however, this policy makes perfect sense. This past week in California, groups of LGBT rights activists clearly demonstrated their ends as they vandalized the LDS temple in LA with bitter hate-filled remarks. Equality is a fine goal, but it should not and cannot be achieved by limiting the rights of other minorities. If the LGBT community wants equal rights, they should grant the same to other minorities, such as the LDS church. The actions of these protestors have clearly limited the 1^st amendment rights of many LDS faithful in the area to worship as they choose. We must consider the acts of terrorist organizations such as Al-qaeda in the same manner. They want rights. Do they want them at the expense of other groups? Listening to their leaders, the answer is a resounding yes. They want to rule the world, with disregard for all international law, sovereignty and other peoples. They clearly fall into the second group, and therefore must be prevented from achieving their goals. However, we must be sure that we do not act as the French government did in the Battle of Algiers, and let preventing acts of terrorism destroy our ethics.

Tell me what you think. I'm turning it in in a couple of hours.

um... I haven't updated in over a week now.

well... Would y'all like to hear something ridiculously awesome? I found out recently that my blog has been visited by people in Germany. And people in the UK. that's pretty cool. Thank you Google Analytics. I'm updating because apparently I should. That's what Sara's friend thinks.

Anyways, on to more interesting things. This past week has been... uh... not the most productive. Specifically, this weekend was troublesome. I was supposed to watch a movie for my Sociology class (which I didn't), do my Calculus journal (which I did most of), and read like 400+ pages of my books for Book of Mormon and Sociology (of which I read about... 20). Most of the last week has been fun, however. I'm doing really well in my physics class, despite my teacher's still troublesome accent, mostly thanks to Kevin and Jeff. Doing homework for that class is always fun. After thursday's hour of physics after class, I went over to Suzanne's to watch The Office, which was, as usual, excellent. This was followed by watching Get Smart at some other guy's apartment... That movie is amazing. "AAAAH!! AAAHH!! oh, I'm glad you heard me!" hilarious. I hadn't seen it before.

let's see... Uh... Sociology is an amazing class. I'm just going to say that the teacher's ridiculous/eccentric style is amazing. He comes to class wearing the most bizarre outfits (he came to class one day wearing an ill-fitting Boy Scouts of America uniform), and just is generally hilarious. He'll be talking about Nieztche, or Hitler or what have you, and it will be funny. "We make depression FUN!" Actually, that class is not really a sociology class, it's more of a philosophy class. I mean, we started out talking about Plato and Aristotle. The class is also pretty darn easy for me, as all we have to do is watch 4 movies, read 6 books, write one page papers on each, and take a midterm and final. That's it. If I thought Sociology would always be like this, I would consider doing it as a major... despite the career choices related to it.

I CAN'T DANCE TO SAVE MY LIFE. I think I'm going to fail my Ballroom Dance class. How ridiculous would that be? I'm considering posting the two videos of me dancing our routines just to show how terrible I am. It'd certainly be worth a good couple of laughs, but my self-esteem would be forever crushed if anyone other than me and my teacher saw them. Because... I'm terrible at dancing. I try and I FAIL!

To finish this up... I went to one of the Preference dances on friday night. For those of you not at the Y, Preference is a collection of girl's choice dances. Anyone from Utah, think of any girl's choice high school dance you went to. I went to the informal one, Don't Break the Ice. (all of the dances were based on games. Battleship, Don't Break the Ice, Chess, and Twister). We started off the date by going to The Brick Oven... which was extremely tasty. We had root beer (which was pretty good), garlic cheese bread (also tasty), All-meat pizza, and Artichoke chicken pizza (with only half of it having chicken because one of the girls is vegetarian). I totally forgot to mention who I went with. My date was Clarissa, and we doubled with Zach and Ariana. Ok... now that that's out of the way.... After dinner, we went to JoAnne's Craft store to buy fabric for matching scarves, because apparently dates are supposed to have matching outfits (This turned out to be only slightly true). We walked in 30 minutes before closing, and ran up and down the fleece aisles deciding which ones to get. We then walked to the back, got the fabric cut to proper sizes (after asking if we could have any scraps... we couldn't :( ) and borrowed scissors to fringe them.

Anyways, we then drove to the dance at the Seven Peaks Ice Arena, checked in, got our tickets for ice skates and wristbands for getting into the rink, and we skated for about 40 minutes before our feet/ankles hurt too much, which led to a 20 minute dancing break. We went skating some more, which was fun, then turned our skates in and dancing for another hour. Now, understand, I can ice skate pretty well, thanks to going to bonneville and having those parties where we'd go ice skating and do "snowball" and stuff. However, my date had NO idea what she was doing. Thankfully, she's a quick learner and was skating at about 5x as fast at the end of the night (which was still about half as fast as I would normally skate). I stayed with her, because I wanted her to have a good time. I don't think skating around at one revolution an hour is all that fun, so I helped her out. For those of you who understand what it means, there was a good deal of "snowballing" involved. (LOL. memories of Taylor being a "player" in 6th grade just came swarming back).

After skating for a while, the dancing was hilarious, because the same songs that were played at every east dance were played. EXACTLY THE SAME SONGS! Low, Soulja Boy, Sandstorm, etc. It was ridiculous. but... Low was hilarious. Clarissa was wearing boots with fur. uh... yeah. that's the dance part.

After the dance was the fun part. We drove back to the dorms to pick up blankets (the drive was hilarious... somehow X96 got onto the radio, and the "Radio from Hell" advertisement came on, while at the same time the display said something to the effect of "Sex on." The whole car freaked out, and the station was quickly changed). We then drove up the canyon for like 10 minutes where we found a random park, and we were stargazing there for about 2 hours. It was awesome. There were over a dozen shooting stars, and some REALLY big ones. It was pretty darn amazing. We got back to the dorms at 2, and like 20 guys on my floor were still awake and running through the halls. weird.

That was my friday night. Saturday consisted of me doing homework and playing video games with some of the guys down the hall (biggest waste of time EVER). Sunday was church, food, more homework, and helping Clarissa get her paper edited. Apparently her teacher doesn't like BE verbs just like Lake. So... I read through her paper, checked for good transitions, showed her how to find all of the be verbs in a document, and helped her edit out a goodly number. On the 8 page paper, there were 85. I think there are now something like 50. Thank you Mrs. Lake for teaching me how to eliminate Passive Voice.

Uh... this post was a little jumbled I know, but If you read through to this point, Congratulations. Feel free to comment.

Today. It was Amazing.

Alright people... I've had an amazing day today. The amazingness of today was primarily in the past 20 minutes, but that's not the point. I woke up, took a shower, ate breakfast (I love Fruit Loops) and went to dance, where I was actually able to understand the dance we learned. It's called Quickstep. It's been tough for me, but I think I've got it down now. Then I went over to Calculus, and learned about improper integrals whilst falling asleep.

After Calculus, though, is where my day just be'd amazing. I walked out of the Talmage Building, and started walking towards the library, when I saw one of the most amazing sights ever, and... just stopped dead in my tracks. I stood there, in the chill morning air of early November, just staring at the Y-mount. As I stood there, literally hundreds of people walked by, missing the inescapably beautiful sight of the mountain covered with fog. Honestly, I was depressed when I saw so many people so intent on getting where they were going to take time to look at the mountains. However, two people did stop, talk to me for a bit, take a picture (I didn't have a camera on me, so I can't put up a picture here) and carry on. The conversation went something like this. "WOW!!! I've never seen anything like that before in my life!" "Yeah, me neither." "I'm going to just stare at this for a bit." ... "Well, I've got to go to class, bye." The guy had a strong Spanish accent, which was fun to hear. I love Spanish accents.

Next, I got a text message from my mom (I have unlimited, now that my sister Camille is home) saying that my sister's surgery went well. That, on top of the wonderful feeling I had from looking at that beautiful mountain, just made me... giddy.

Oh, and I had other reasons for being happy. Last night being one of them. I was on a walk... and... I don't want to jinx it. I'll probably say more later.