"It Was Christmas, Dammit" Collabrotive memoir

The earliest visits all blur together.  The car ride there was always the same.  Me and my sister in the back seat, my grandma in the front, and mom driving.  The cold air always pierced right through the car for the first little while, and even when it would get hot, I would occasionally press my face against the window for a cool-down.  For most of the way, I’d play my GameBoy.  First Advance, then Advance SP.  I still remember the dorky plug-in light I had for my original Advance.  I probably still have it somewhere.  But while that happened, my sister would mind her own business, doing homework, reading, listening to her walkman CD player, or any combination of the three.  The entire time, my mom and grandma would talk up a storm.  Sometimes I would catch bits of their conversation, but most of the time, I was too enraptured by beating Mechagodzilla or getting Spyro to make that one jump.  You know the one.  The one that the glide misses by this much.  But once we actually got downtown, the game would get paused, saved, and put away.  I’d look up at all the buildings, some rooftops covered in snow, others too high to tell, all with a sense of awe, the architecture and scope of it all capturing my imagination as much as any movie with giant monsters would.  The streets were lined with slush that would make wet gushing sounds as we drove over it.  At this point, I honestly couldn’t tell you if anyone was talking, let alone what they were saying.  I was entranced by my surroundings.  Not always present, but very prominent is a certain parking garage near Water Tower.  When you first drove into it, there was a long, spiraling ramp leading up to sections of individual levels.  The sections were like any other parking garage, but that spiraling ramp was my favorite part.  Especially on the way down.  This idea was a direct counterpoint to how my mother saw it.  I remember her wishing it didn’t exist.
    Marshall Field's was, in a way, the highlight.  Even though I would always hope I could find the KB Toys in Water Tower, Field’s was where the real magic happened.  Going to see Santa used to just put the line through the toy section, which was good enough for me.  They always had some really cool, old-timey toys there that my mom would never let me get, so I got as much of an eyeful of them as I could.  Specifically, I remember this one 1950’s-style tin robot.  I can’t recall how much of a fight I put up for it, but I know I didn’t come out of there with it.  Santa was a different story.  I was afraid of the Santa there. And really, all department store and mall Santas.  I never knew why, but it made taking a picture an ordeal.  I would mumble to him what I wanted for Christmas, then nervously smile for the camera, and get out of the room as fast as I could.  I got better with it over time, but never really got over the weird feeling I had about it until much later, ie: when I was too old to care. 
    In my first memories of the Walnut room, my family complained about the way the tree was decorated.  They said it was gaudy, stupid, not as cute as that one year.  That didn’t really matter to me.  I just liked seeing my uncle, talking to him, and having breakfast.  Or was it brunch?  Hard to say.  What really mattered was the dessert.  For two reasons: one, it was an ice-cream snowman with a marshmallow head and cookie arms, and two, it was the way my mom got a hold of the Santa Bear mug for that year.  That was another thing.  The Santa Bear mug and ornament.  I’m pretty sure there was a line at least twice to just get the goddamn ornament.  But we considered it worth it if it looked good enough, which, as time went on, it didn’t more often than not. 
    That’s actually another surprisingly  big part of going downtown.  My mom complaining.  I already mentioned the tree in the Walnut Room and the ramp to park in the garage, but there was also much bitching about the food, and it wasn’t uncommon for her to complain about the parking, the weather, pretty much anything that was any discomfort. 
    But I never cared.  It was a blast being there all the same.  Even during the boring parts, like when my family was shopping.  There was always something for me to look at, either to be taken by the thing itself or to make me mind start wandering to a much cooler place.  Typically, I didn’t get anything from the shopping part aside from a new nutcracker.  I had a thing for nutcrackers, getting a new one every year to add to my collection.  Yes, I was a nutcracker collector even before I considered myself a toy collector.  I just like collecting things, I suppose. 
    As time progressed, I went through a stage where I wanted to avoid spending time with my family as much as possible, but even at this time, I looked forward to the Christmas downtown trip.  Although, at this time, I was much more interested in taking in the environment of the city.  I started noticing things about the city that I never had before.  Certain subtleties in the atmosphere that, perhaps to other people, would be boring were somewhat comforting to me.  The specific color of the slush that lined the streets, the way light reflected off of the icy sidewalk.  They made me feel at home. 
    That’s truly how I feel about the city.  Even when I’m in a section of it I’ve never sen before, I feel like I’m home.  Like this is where I want to live.  Now, I could end up living there and be proven wrong, but for the time being, I’m very comfortable with the city at large.  And I’m damn proud of this city, too.  The culture, the architecture, even the somewhat touristy places like The Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum, or Sears Tower (not Willis Tower, dammit), they al feel so rich and rewarding.  I can’t say I’ve ever been truly proud to be an American, but I am beyond proud to be a Chicagoan. 
***
    In recent years, a new tradition has evolved for me and my family: the Kristkindlemarket.  A traditional Christmas festival from Germany revolving largely around socializing outside and shopping from private vendors.  The atmosphere is one of a family celebration, with the whole thing out in the open and just a warm vibe.  In particular what sticks out in my mind is the hot chocolate.  It has an intoxicating aroma that just blasts into your nostrils.  The consistency is much like chocolate milk, and it tastes very much like the best chocolate milk you can imagine, but nice and hot to counter the blistering cold.  When I went there with my German class on a feild trip, I tried some of the other food there, mostly sweets and the Bratwurst.  They, too, were excellent.  When I tried it, I instantly thought of the Sham-Wow guy “you know the Germans always make good stuff!”  And when I went there for that trip, it was a time when I was really stressed at school.  Even though, logically, I should have been totally unable to enjoy myself, I didn’t care about school or that one girl I liked, or any of that stuff.  It was Christmas God damn it, and I was going to get in the spirit.  It was Christmas and I was with nice people in my home away from home.  No way I’d let some stupid assignments or whatever get in the way of that. 

Why the World Needs Superheroes

Japanese Flavor- Circa 1978

American Flavor- Circa 1960

 

 Bruce Wayne.   Anung un Rama.  Minami Kotaro.  Clark Kent.  Kamina.  Mindy MacReedy.  Steve Rogers. **

If you've been living in a country that has television for more than a year, you recognize at least two of those names.  If you're a geek like me, you probably recognized all of them.  But weather or not you know who they are is irrelevant, what is is what they embody.
 

It's Your Job to Complain About Your Job

It seems Ehrenreich wants to show people just how rough it is for minimum wage workers to get by.  The long hours, low pay, and questionable at best working conditions all paint a picture of people who teeter on the edge of poverty if not outright fall into it.  It's something that I'm certain would shock many people... in the late 90's, when this was written. 

Since this piece was published, it seems, at least from my perspective, that awareness of the very dire conditions of minimum wage workers has become more widespread, and might have even been widespread before this was published.  However, that doesn't make it any less well-written or compelling.  It's still a damn good non-fiction story.  Easily as dramatic as anything P.T. Anderson could come up with.  It also makes me wonder how much conditions in these sorts of jobs have improved, if at all, as nowadays, it seems that most people who don't work in them just assume they suck and don't pay much attention to them outside of that.  I know that my mom had a lot of nasty things to say about Walgreens when she was working for them, but nothing this severe.   I'll probably look into it at some point.  

*Insert clever title here*

Two things stand out to me immediately as ways my family shaped my identity early on in my life.  First is my Uncle.  As I've said before, my father died when I was very young, so that sort of figure had to come from elsewhere in my life.  When we met, my Uncle would often give me a lot of advice, stories, and general tidbits that he felt would help me out later in life.  I can't recall many specifics, and anything that stuck with me has long since melded into my subconscious, so I can't say much else about it. 

The second is my mother.  A lot of ideals my mother has have been burned into my own mind, but the most prominent would probably be her feminism.  For the longest time, I didn't like girls.  I'm not sure why, and it seems stupid and embarrassing in retrospect, but I guess between her hammering those ideas into my head and my own intellectual awakenings, something clicked.  And now, here I am making visual rhetoric projects about female characters in cartoons. 

As for now, well, I tend to be myself around my family, the only real differences being that I'm a little more reserved around extended family and try not to swear in front of my mother, which is just a courtesy thing.  Really my interactions with my family are pretty boring, and as time goes on, I think less and less of what they think of me.

School, man. It's nuts.

There's no getting around the fact that this is late, and I can't say I have much of an excuse other than "Halloween," and if you know what I was doing for Halloween, you know that's not a particularly good excuse, so let's just get right into it.
It seems apparent that throughout the piece, Anyon is heavily implying that, depending on the average income of the area, schools have a tendency to train students in preparation for whatever jobs are most prevalent in that area.  They are conditioned to put the same level of thought into their schoolwork that their parents put into their jobs, so that they are more likely to go into those fields and not do their own thing.
The sentence quoted seems to basically be saying what I just said.  That the schools are training the kids to be carbon copies of their parents in relation to society.  And I think that yes, it is fairly accurate.  Of course there are exceptions (as always) but it is generally how it goes.

Overall, I felt like this article was fairly interesting, but didn't really capture my attention in any meaningful way.  I've left the public school system, and am trying my best to forget about it for the time being.  One of back-up careers is actually to be an English teacher, so obviously, I'm going to have to re-acquaint myself sometime, but for now, I just want to forget about it.  It was a time in my life that I look at with very little fondness in terms of the schools themselves, and I'm extraordinarily glad to be here now.  I understand how looking back on this time in our lives helps us understand how our identity was shaped, but for me, it was more the social aspect and things outside of school that shaped me, so even if I'm talking about school in those terms, I'm going to hit a wall in terms of things to talk about pretty fast.

Rambling about myself writing about myself

I've made mention on here that I don't particularly like writing about myself, and the memoir wasn't much of an exception.  While finally writing about the experiences I described was a great way to purge all of those old emotions, I still didn't really enjoy it.  It was more like a need than anything, and that may or may not come across in the final project.
Talking about what I like about my memoir, I can't say that there's anything that stands out.  I like to think I just did a solid job on it, though.  If anything, I think that talking about my dad dying, The Thermos Incident, and my time in the outpatient program helped the most with me purging those emotions further.  Talking about my latest episode and how I snapped out of it was somewhat less helpful, because the conflict and resolution of it was all internal, whereas the other two had more extraneous factors that I think led to a need for further purging.  If that makes any sense.
I think during a revision I might add more detail and possibly consult my mom for clarification of facts, but that's about it for straight-up revision.  I should note that if I could have an infinite amount of time, I would have done a video combining narration, talking head footage of me, and footage from Batman Begins and Gurren Lagann, because to me, the one thing I tried to convey to outsiders is just how much of an impact media can have on us and the way we see the world, and for Gurren Lagann especially, a text description doesn't do it justice.

"I wanna be the very best! Like no one ever was!"

Alrighty, it's late, I have to get up at 6AM, and I'm fucking pumped because that damn song from this post's title is stuck in my head. Let's do this.

Rose seems to be influenced heavily by his love of literature, which came about only after a teacher had presented the material in a way that interested him, which shows a direct relationship between his education and the development of his identity.  Similarly, while he initially perceived himself as not particularly intellectual, that was due to how his education presented itself.  When his education became more enjoyable, he started to embrace his intellectual side.

The term "cues" refers to behaviors that we see as children which clue us in to how to behave normally.  A good example would be the way kids' speech patterns have tendency to mimic their parents'.  I'd imagine that how this affects the development of identity is self-evident; that the more exposure we get to a particular cue, the more likely we are to adopt it for ourselves.  At least early in life.