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.