Week 9

Angel is down, so here I am blogging and actually not late!  HA!  I'll get this done since I can't take the quiz right now, which is what I'd really like to be doing.

Sooo, chapters 10 and 11.  I am really finding the discussion of labels and prejudice on Angel interesting!  I love the concept of the "fundamental attribution error" and the textbook's relation of it to how we view celebrities.  When I was a teenager I was a rabid fan of certain celebrities because I loved the characters they played.  Now I can tell the difference, and boy, some celebrities are nothing like their characters.  It's the characters I like and empathize with when I watch a show -- not the actors behind them.  I just don't know the actors!  I think many people forget that.

I have also felt stereotype threat in my life.  I worked hard to get rid of my southern accent because I know that southerners are perceived as dumb, slow, racist rednecks.  I am none of those!!  Now I wish I hadn't done that... I like my roots and have very warm associations with my grandmother, and so on.  (I do wish the south was not racist, but that's another post.)

I really hate labels.  They don't even begin to capture the entirety of a person -- and often they don't fit.  I wrote in my discussion post that I could fit many different stereotypes and labels, depending upon what activity I was involved in.  And sometimes they contradict each other, which is really entertaining to me when I watch someone else try to figure me out so they can put me in a neat little box.  Heh.

And, Chapter 10 talks about the Milgram experiments again.  Those disturb me, mostly because all the participants were presumably just average people.  It makes me wonder what anyone, including me, is really capable of if we feel pressured by an authority figure.  That's frightening, because I would like to think that I would refuse to continue at a certain point and walk out.  I think now I would have the strength to refuse, but when I was younger, I would have been much more likely to feel that I had to do what I was told -- I used to be really afraid of authority figures, though I've overcome that since I became an authority figure myself in my work.  But, I guess no one ever really knows what they'll do until they're confronted with it.

And Chapter 11 and STRESSSSS!!!!!!!  I always feel a lot of stress -- I'm pretty high strung.  If I don't have a lot of external stressors, I have plenty of internal ones. :-/  I love the fact that even positive events like marriage and vacation can be stressors -- I guess we get stressed at any change.  Holmes & Rahe's Social Readjustment Scale says I'm in a moderate life crisis -- geez, when am I not?  Things are always changing around here.  Guess I'd better meditate more and remember to take my vitamins. :P

I've written enough... time to go see if Angel is back up!