Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Seeing as how most my time on the ED is spent trying to get people to learn (I know, it's mostly futile. But if one person learns, it's worth it) I figure maybe I should put things up here that I learn. This will help me in the upcoming semester because I'm stepping into a couple classes I'm not sure I'm prepared for, and teaching others is a good way of teaching yourself. This will also help me track how I learn things, and give me the opportunity to look back later and see my progress.

In the ED yesterday, around all the spam and pointless one-posts that don't warrant any discussion, there was a bit of a theme. There was a lot of talk about not feeling the way that you are on the outside. Not something like transgendered issues or anything like that. Like vampires, otherkin, lycanthropes, and things like that. I need to pull up the post I put up, because I think it was nicely worded and I don't think I could do it again. = P

Here's one from the "wish you were another species" thread:
What you're feeling is generally a sense of no identity. Being "white" (a mutt mixture of caucasoid races) and in America generally means that you have no cultural identity, at least not one that's immediately apparent. People find many ways of dealing with this, but one of the ways is to find other, more esoteric ways to make yourself "special". Since there's probably not much in your background (except I bet there is if you look!) you look for something metaphysical. This leads people to believe in past lives, lycanthropy, or vampirism without being bitten ("awakenings" wink . These all have the same root cause.

And from the "wish you were another race" thread:
In a general American mixing pot that we have, we don't have a defined,overall structure. People tend to crave structure, and lots of Asian cultures offer that. People like what looks, from the outside, as a clean, efficient system that covers everything from business to social interaction, even philosophy.

The thing is, this is based on generalization,hun. I know you're not trying to be racist. You're trying to be the opposite, and that's a wonderful thing. Embracing a culture is great, and the immersion you've experienced so far is something you should really cling to if this is how you feel. But you have to be careful when going about the "race" discussion.

You're probably always going to crave being completely included in the culture. Asian cultures have a touch of ethnocentricity to them (like all cultures) because the culture wants to continue itself. You're going to be treated differently because of the color of your skin in almost all of your interactions within an asian culture. The best thing you can do, short of surgery to replace your epicanthic folds or something, is enjoy your time with your friends and asian family, and continue to be as immersed as possible.

Let me go ahead and put up the links to those threads:
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/extended-discussion/do-you-feel-like-you-should-be-another-species/t.36389261_1/
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/extended-discussion/do-you-feel-like-you-should-be-another-race/t.36387697/

The race one kind of breaks down, but at least it's still a discussion.

My point was that Americans don't have a "culture" as a whole. People don't have a structure they feel they belong in, nothing they can turn to for the problems in their lives. Religion doesn't do this much anymore, and white folks haven't been taught anything about their roots in a lot of cases. I know I personally had to find out about my heritage on my own. But some folks, when they look into their history (if they do) don't find much, or at least not much that interests them. There's no great stories about their ancestors, no inventions or discoveries. Creating an identity seems logical in that light.

I talked to Jon (my boyfriend) about it, and I'm even thinking about including gay pride parades in this kind of created identity. I don't mean your honest kinds of parades, I mean the ones established for their shock value and casual sex. The ones that give differently-sexuals a bad name. Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that sexuality is a created cultural state, but the way people handle sexuality is culturally defined.

I'm going to talk to my advisor about this when school starts up again. I wonder if anything's been written about this, if I might have a good research proposal here.



My classes coming up are primatology, which is a writing across the curriculum class (supposedly writing-intensive study that's required for my degree), French 2002, and microeconomics. I've taken case studies in physical anthropology from the same teacher last semester, and it covered some primatology. So I'm prepared for that a bit, but I'll still write about it if I can. Post the meat of my papers,etc. But economics and especially French(Which I'm out of touch with) I may need to pay extra attention to. I wonder if I could get some folks here on Gaia to help me with my French? That'll probably be general discussion gab... I mainly just need to work on my vocabulary, and brush up on my tenses.