Brian's World

Corn Fields

I recently charged up the stairs with a fork feeling adventuresome.  As I predicted, there was no adventure atop the stairs for me and my fork to experience.  I lay it in the sink, to be recycled for another escapade.

Tonight I had the pleasure of viewing The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which really doesn’t describe the show very well at all.  In the show, everyone is having intercourse and everyone knows it.  In addition, just about everyone in the show who has intercourse gets pregnant.  I am not sure what is  the “secret” in this show, since all of the characters know whats going on, but maybe this “secret” will be developed later… unlike 24, where there are over 9000 secrets within the first hour.

The Secret Life (as I believe its commonly reduced to) seemingly portrays a growing trend among teenagers that certain behaviors are common in a high school setting, which I’m not sure is accurate.  One might cite the chiken-and-the-egg argument here, but I could see shows like The Secret Life serving to only increase the behavior amongst teens.  While the show doesn’t represent everything as the super coolest thing ever, I found that negative consequences were commonly downplayed in the show, likely because sad, depressing, and frustrating plots are not popular amonst the target audience.  I’m lead to believe this show, in addition to others on air (I can cite half of MTV’s lineup), serves not as an inspiration, exposure, or a motivator like people tend to associate violent video games with kids shooting people, but more as a catalyst; increasing the rate at which something that was statistically likely to happen anyways does occur.  I dislike this.  While I’ve graduated high school three years ago, I think some of my work still holds true.  The behavior of “impressionables” (aka some teenagers) is heavily effected by those older than them, and those more popular for them.  Fundamentally, I’ve used this to explain why things like curse words are becoming popular at younger and younger ages, and I suspect we’ll unfortunately see the chest fabric density continue to decrease over time.  As a television show, “The Secret Life” suffiently qualifies as popular, despite the lack of Hannah Montanna or Jamie Spears or the Jonas Brothern.  Strangely enough, I found little references to the age or grade of chacters in tonights episode.  New viewers, or people like myself who just have no clue, are left to pick a number for their age,  complimented with the shows plot that builds a high level of presented maturity for most characters, one could easily have replaced reference to school with college and visa-versa.

I think someone out there is thinking they are doing everyone a favor by showing people the potential pitfalls of actions using this show,  but I remember as a teenager I was only motivated more to do better when I had seen that others failed to turn lemons into lemonade.  Luckily, most of my shows which return in the fall have a minimal number of children under 7 and rarely is someone pregnant.  If someone is pregnant on House, NCIS, or Jack Baurer’s distant but young relatives come into play I am going to be tres unhappy.

I hoped to speak about issues more relavent to myself in this post, so let me see if I can get back on track.

Sometimes I find myself conflicted.  Conflicted between what I want to do, what I should do, what I should do for others, and what I should try and get others to want to do.  Together I think those 4 options cover all of my bases very accurately.  Regularly things are requested of me or others effecting me which I’m not very comfortable with, yet I bother not to speak try and do differently.  For example, my mom believes that doing the laundry in the evening/night is a foolish concept… and so it doing laundry on a Sunday, despite the good alignment that presents with my clothes rotation and the decreased load on the electrical grid and the potential cost savings (I doubt SHEL has time of day meters).  I have simply avoided trying to change anyones ways on this, not because I don’t care about it (today Monday I wore Tuesday’s backup shirt…. and that is tres frustrating) but because I’m not very interested in the process by which change can occur.

When I’m on my own, I pretty much control my own process by which change occurs.  Most of the time I like to change things slowly, but when I want to I can change quickly… the important part is that things are up to me.  In some instances where I feel like I should be able to effect some sort of process as a leader/experienced person/alike, I’m finding myself more and more stifled.  Those changes I do see occuring aren’t bad, but they aren’t always what I had in mind, and it would be nice for that to be taken into account once.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts:

1. The average of negative infinity and a high number less than infinity is still negative infinity.
2. I dislike being placed on peoples “creeps” list, and I will pretend to not notice and not take it personally even though it clearly is

Good night moon.