kindness trumpts all.

Julio Diaz's response to the mugger was different than the normal response meaning that his kindness and offering to take the mugger out for a dinner and to just talk to him instead of judging him and reacting in a such a way of screaming and running away. He treated his mugger like a human and when they were confronted with the problem, they acted civilized and talked things out over dinner which resulted in a positive impact on the mugger. My act of a positive deviance was making my family dinner without mentioning that I was going to. I surpirsed them to a hearty meal of spagetti and meatballs. This is qualified as an act of positive deviance becasue I never make dinner and always rely on my parents to feed me when infact they have just as busy days as I do and don't necessarily have time to plan dinner. They walked into a set table with a great meal. I sweetened the act by doing all the dishes as well. My family was extremely pleased in fact my mom cried tears of joy because she has been so stressed lately and the fact that someone besides herself thought ahead and prepared something for the family took a chunk out of her day to relax. I felt really happy afterwards. To make me family so happy and to allow my mom to relax for a small portion of the night was satisfying for myself. This experience has influenced my thinking about norms in the culture by realizing that sometimes norms are safety nets and if we pushed the boundries with kindness we can really affect peoples lifes in a postive way.

saint vs roughneck

This week in class we had an assingment that included us reading an article about the difference in two groups of guys and how they get treated differently due to there appearance and social standing even when the two groups of guys acted equally as bad outside of school.
One group, the saints, were upper middle class and acted polite and dressed a certain way and had to live up to a standard. They got viewed as being well behaved kids when in reality they did worse things then the roughnecks who were lower class an appeared a certain way to the community. The saints were deviant and used their social structure as a means to go out and drink and vandalize and cause dangerous situations. While the roughnecks weren't "saints" themselves they kind of lived up to the potential that society gave them and were accused of things sometimes they didnt do because the community was biased toward them. I see myself doing this even tho it is wrong. For example, when we get into a wrong part of chicago considered dangerous or a part i am unfamilar with i tend to assume the worst and put these people into a social structure. My actions define the way roughnecks will  behave because of the status and lower potential i give to them. Its ironic to see that even some polite kids who get good grades and come from good families act just as unjustly as the roughnecks who come from totally different backgrounds.

gender role questions !

1. The most challenging part of the gender role given to teens through the media is appearance. We see ads everyday of these stick figures that truthfully not even those models look like. It hard being an average girl in a world of media of "gorgeous" models. It is hard to live up to an potenital that can never be achieved. When comparing yourself to others you just learn to critize yourself instead of prasing yourself. We nit pick everything about our bodies and images which then expand to an even larger problem. We started finding flaws and faults in everything we do. Trying to fit the ideal image of a teen girl is impossible when the ideal image is unheathy.

2. The message I do like about females is our mother instinct. I know no women can be the number one mom and some women don't even wants kids but this message alludes to so much more about our characters. We get seen as caring, compassionate, loving, kind, helpful. All these qualities I want to be associated with now and in the future and most messages about moms shows the nurturing side of a women.

3. The media normallly projects the ideal relationship to be a women and a man. This relationship tends to have the man being the dominate person and the women falling at his everyword. We see women as being dependent on a man and while she tries to live her own life she always goes back to the man for ultimate support. In the media I see women as being needy and men as being jerks. I know that in reality this isn't always true but the media has an interesting way of making man superior when it comes to relationships. Although the norm is a man/woman relationship, lately there has been more tolerance of man/man and woman/woman relationships. I think this is due to the increasing number of people who have spoken out about these kinds of relationships.