A snoop into Mo

Most of us spend our lives staring through a "glass" whether it’s a Iphone screen or your suburban house window—acting exactly like the moth in Virginia Woolf’s essay, just banging our heads against a barrier we didn’t even realize was there.  Like the moth, we’ve become un-conscientiously fluttering against these invisible boundaries, desperately trying to reconnect with a nature that we’ve accidentally engineered ourselves away from.     Most urban — and especially sub-urban — cities and townships such as our own are  incredibly deprived of nature,  creating a massive wall between us and the actual world. We have traded real ecosystems for manicured lawns and strip malls.  we have taken environments where viberant nature used to exist and terraformed it into our own “backdrops”. The grass on our lawns is may look lush, but it is lifeless ecosystem with no biodiversity and completely separated from reality that Woolf’s moth sought to reach. We no longer wa...

Imagine you’re walking or driving down a street where every house looks like a Beverly Hills MacMansion. The lawns are thick & green, with flowerbeds that are perfectly trimmed, and the front doors are painted in high-gloss colors. In real estate, this is called Curb Appeal. It’s the art of making the exterior look so flawless that you don't even think to check if the pipes are leaking or the basement is flooding. This effect is based of your own intuition and expections, no one would assume of Beverly Hills mansion extoiroir would look like a crack house in the interior. But this effect isn’t only limited to real estate, but it has very real world carryovers into language, specifically with informal speech as we have seen in class with ‘words don't mean what they mean. If you were asked, which of the 2 homes do you think would contains a nicer family?      If you’re like majority of people, you picked the bottom photo. But why? Mathematically, it’s the same square fo...

 for those unfamiliar with the term, Think of socio-linguistics as the study of how "who you are" and "where you are" changes "how you talk." essentially, it is the intersection of sociology (the study of groups and power) and linguistics (the study of language). In a more broader and anthropological sense, language separates us into ‘tribes’ of different social groups, As seen in ‘the F word’ with Dumas highlights the generational gap with how her parents kept their names, but she felt the need to change hers.  Research from the UCLA found that immigrant parents are significantly more likely to give daughters "native-sounding" or English names than sons, to shield them from the extra judgment that many women face in school and hiring with more ‘exotic’ names.       As stated by Christina Sue and Edward Telles in their sociology research paper: ‘Assimilation and Gender in Naming’, they state that "for immigrants and their descendants, first ...

A people group inhabits the cold, unyielding forest of concrete and cement, in a valley between two decrepit stone paths by the name of  14th Mile  and the  Southern Boulevard . Inside this perimeter, an undisclosed tribe of the  Yort-Hgh —a tribe of  Sleep-Deprived Alchemists —dedicates life to one purpose: to maintain their  Four-Point Oracle  in order to break free from the bounds of the forest. These Alchemists wake up against their own will at the dawn of the day, where they dress and present themselves in a manner to uphold their social hierarchy status. Once the process is complete, the younger Alchemists are jailed in the bounds of a  yellow enclosure  and shipped off, again against their own will. The older Alchemists, who come from nurturers of more abundant lucre, are able to ship themselves in their own capsules. They arrive at sunrise in a zombified state to  The Great Concrete Incubation-Chamber , where they must rush throu...

As a bit of s sequel to my ‘fashion and portrayal’ blog, i want to dedicate this write to how the car you drive influences how you are marked within Society or at-least within Troy.      With a rough estimate, I’d say there’s about a 40/60 (maybe closer to 50/50?) split of Junior's at Troy who drive or get driven to school in contrast to taking the bus, so probably not everyone reading this may relate directly. But theres a fundamental truth that whatever mode of transportation and individual chooses shapes how they perceive themselves psychologically, and how others perceive them anthropologically. For those among us who drive (or get driven), looking around the parking lot or the drop off area, we can clearly mark who is more or less wealthy with their families socioeconomic standing. The parking lot, for example, will have a varying level of contrast with what people, with people driving in with Audi, BMWs and some in Teslas parked next to people with beat up Toyo...

What are you wearing right know? The Anwser to this maybe be anything, ranging to pajamas to suit, and the way you dress has many implications on psychology varying through consumption, symbolism, self-perception, social signaling, and even cognitive performance, overall portraying how you are marked within society.  Beyond our internal mindset, fashion and clothing choices serves as our primary tool for navigating  "markedness."  In sociology and psychology, to be "unmarked" is to blend into the what the  majority considers norms, whereas to be  "marked"  is to stand out—whether intentionally or not. You can see this with the attire choices of every day Troy students, not to be insensitive, but leggings, Ugg's, and a hoody for girls or sweatpants & hoodies for guys — in a way — are set as the norm in this school, informally “basic”.  This creates a psychological tension in consumption: people buy clothing to express our unique identity (in other w...