Mr. Clean Ads are Gross

"I have an older sister and brother."
"Who's the middle child?"
"My brother, technically, but he was really 'the boy.'"
That's how I explain my siblings. Then I say how it's not as old-school Italian as one might think-- it's just that no one ever referred to Bobby as the middle child. He got jealous that I got a Jansport backpack in the first grade and an L.L. Bean backpack in sixth. That is about how middle child he got. One reason was because my siblings and I are so different -- the expectation for each of us were only the same for driving, schoolwork, and housework (Well, sort of on that last one. Bobby is a ninja when it comes to that). Another reason, no doubt, is people's needs to separate us by gender. While Bobby is like Ashley (my sister) as well as me personality-wise, Ashley and I are so different that our only acknowledged union by anyone is that we are "the girls."

On the research end, I always am taken back when surveys only have "gender" or "sex" available with only two options. It's such a limited scope-- how can one understand the issues with just two options?
I really enjoyed the Buzzfeed fragile masculinity article. Such a waste of money. And why do people think men want to feel like cars? On another note, lately logos have turned to sans-seriff (round) and lowercased logos (Walmart, Sears, Aramark) to give a friendlier, conversational feel. The softer logos also make me think they are becoming more feminized. I wonder how this plays at or am I being hyper-aware.

Competition

Growing up as a fat kid, I was like Emily V. Gordon because I saw myself as out of the competition. I also befriended boys and was a tomboy. However, that was when I was in elementary and sixth grade. Once middle school really started, the boys became too separate from the girls. I had to find a girl group.  I switched around quite a bit, but never because someone felt threatened by me. Even when I lost my baby weight, I always was going to be bigger and, in my mind. therefore never able to compete. So I didn’t-- and even more now do not-- for the most part. A little gossip here or there, but even I get annoyed at myself when I occasionally justify an ill-picked outfit or unfavorable tone of a girl my friends were talking about: “maybe she just had a bad day."

I’ve spent many years trying to be under the radar. I felt so out of the competition I feared it. Now that I think about it, this lack of experience with competition makes me feel a little ill-equipped. What if I really want something over someone else? How will I claim what I want?

Chapter 7

In Trauma to Writing, MacCurdy makes two arguments: trauma lasts with us and good writing is a sign of healing. First she gives information on studies about how people remember trauma vividly and how that reflects in students writing about it often in personal essay class, instead of analyzes a seemingly mundane detail or routine of life. She backs it up with experts' take on trauma: "traumatic memories can be distinguished from normal ones because 'they are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an on-going life story'" (165). Because it is not part of the linear narrative, many people remember trauma in snippets. These snippets provide need to write about them but also a challenge. Many early writers have trouble describing the event itself and instead rely on identifying feeling: "In order to cope with trauma and its aftermath, survivors often bury these images because they can get in the way of daily functioning. In those cases, the narratives of the experiences, when offered, often rely on clichés and the "story of the story," that is, the remembered tale which avoids the depth of feeling that clear images generate" (166). Good writing, and good healing, she argues, is when the writer can pass the "story of the story" and find clarity in delving into the traumatic event.

After reading, I looked to Humans of New York to find posts that explained instead of visualized. The most popular posts visualized. Even if there were some explanation in between, it was the conversational tone squeezed into the vivid story that mostly used descriptive, or cold, language. They seemed to have let it "spill out" like on page 176-177.