I don't think I've told anyone this before.....

....Beyond a few psychology classmates and my family, anyway.

Have you ever wondered about female to male prejudice? We all know how men supposedly treat women across the board unfairly, but how many stop to think about the reverse? What is it that we women do to men that is stereotyping them? Do we assume they have shortcomings just because they are men?

I play a game called Second Life. I have two avatars. One is a female, and one is a male. I created the male character because I wanted to study these questions. I started out by asking men I knew in my personal life these questions. The answers convinced me that there was something to this idea. They invariably told me yes, but it was tough to get them to elaborate. So I figured that the closest I would ever get to being able to pass myself off as a male would be in Second Life. I actually found that it's still incredibly hard to do. I talk (type/use language) like a woman. I behave like a woman. So I got a male buddy of mine in the game to coach me. Once I got the basics down, I started off on my own to explore.

I discovered that men tend to avoid friendships with other men in the game unless it's over some kind of shared passion....competition, motorcycles, etc. Then when I finally got some women to talk to me, it all started becoming obvious quickly. Invariably, I was assumed to have no fashion sense, not be able to cook, etc. Just imagine the worst male stereotype you can, and that is exactly what I was assumed to be. I said hello to one woman, and she immediately fired off a ridiculously over-compensating put-down to keep me from hitting on her. I guess. She informed me that I must really enjoy blondes a lot, since that's what her avatar was, and she informed me in no-uncertain terms that she wasn't blonde in real life. She then proceeded to verbally bitch slap me into perceived submission, before stalking off and proclaiming to all within earshot that I was a complete jerk. All that from a simple 'hello' greeting.

So she was extreme, but the treatment I received from other women was quite interesting. I know it opened my eyes to subtle ways in which we treat men as inferior. I immediately apologized to my husband and now watch myself very carefully to avoid doing this. Men are not automatically incapable of taking care of children. They are not automatically on the prowl or incapable of cooking or dressing themselves.

All I can really say to my fellow women is 'SHAME!' This is not what women's liberation was supposed to do for us. Just as men haven't the right to treat us as inferior based upon our gender, we have just as little right to do the same to them.If we want to be treated equally, then shouldn't we do the same?

!!!

I learned the coolest thing today.

I was at the chiropractor due to a migraine. I woke up so miserable and unable to keep down even water. If you've ever had a migraine, you know what it was like. So I went in to get my head put on straight. We chatted briefly about different things, and he offered to set me up with certain clients of his for the next psychology paper I have to write. He said he'd hook me up with one of his bi-polar patients. I thought that was a weird offering, and said, "Oh, bi-polar disorder....yikes, I know people with that and think I get enough of that in my personal life." He laughed and said he meant he'd show me bi-polar disorder from the non-allopathic treatment view. (Non-traditional treatment)

After talking a bit more, I found out that many times bi-polar disorder is strictly structural. Nutrition doesn't come into play at all, which I would have thought. So I came home and decided to look up studies and information on this treatment method to see if there was efficacy or any credence to the idea given by the traditional medical establishment.

This DC (http://www.erinelster.com/ConditionsDetail.aspx?ConditionID=4) has been published in journals and has some good information on this. I'm so blown away - partly by the fact that I'd never really considered this before. I've apparently come close to the idea with another paper I've written on "Brain Gym' which is like cross-crawl. (I may have to describe that one later.) But I'd never really thought about the structural problem being implicated in bi-polar disorder, tourette's, depression...

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Maybe once I get all my neurons firing again (since the adjustment, I'm slowly becoming coherent again) then I can do a bit of research and it could be a topic for a paper in the future.

And maybe I can pass information along to those who are managing their disorder with medication...I know they hate it, and I know they'd love to get off of it.

Just flabbergasted....

It's 1 am...Can You Smell Your Pets?

Boy, I can! Well, really only one. We brought home a kitten and she's a doll. Even Eric likes her.

Problem is, she was fed something that apparently didn't agree with her, because it's 1 AM AND I'M CHASING HER AROUND THE HOUSE CLEANING UP DIARRHEA!

I'm giving this until Thursday. If I have to live in a house that smells like a litter pan, she's going back, because I won't do it. Normal dog smell is one thing, but cat crap is totally another.

Oh my god, even Pine-Sol isn't helping the smell in the room I have to sleep in tonight. I think I'm going to cry.

The Dark Knight

POSSIBLE SPOILERS OF THE DARK KNIGHT

So we took our son to The Dark Knight midnight showing. OK, really 12.05 am, but close enough.

This movie is a massive assault on the senses. I loved it. We even saw it at one of the older theaters in our city, so I can't imagine what it would have been like on IMAX.

The Rachel Dawes replacement wasn't a match for Katie Holmes, but everyone else was great. The new girl can act and all, but she looked like she'd lived an incredibly hard life....bags under her eyes, saggy jowls, etc. I know that's really critical, but I had a hard time looking at her and not wishing Miss Katie was still doing the role. Katie Holmes is a bit hard for me to hate, despite her poor taste in men.

Morgan Freeman and Micheal Caine as always are fantastic, and nearly any movie with either of them in it is worth watching just to watch them doing what they do so well.

My real reason for posting about this though is to laud Heath Ledger as Joker. I've read several reviews that pretty much tell Jack Nicholson to sit down and shut up because Heath's portrayal is the new standard by which all future performances will be judged. I thought it was a little much to say this, thinking that perhaps the reviews were due in part to his death earlier this year.

After seeing this movie, I'm convinced they were right. Ledger's performance was a little shy of the mark at the beginning of the movie, but as the character was developed, there was a depth and subtlety, lending themselves to the illusion of a very unstable anarchist. This Joker was scary, not silly.

However, one nitpick I definitely have about this movie is the 'social experiment' of the two boats Joker had rigged to explode. Each had the detonator for the other boat. Joker informed them the first one to push the button would live, and if neither pushed the button, both boats would be destroyed. Social psychology pretty much tells us what would happen in this circumstance. SOMEONE WOULD DIE. There is no way that a boat full of convicts and a boat full of civilians would refuse to kill each other. Even if they were sick of the corruption of Gotham, they would not be THAT noble.

It does make me sad to think that Heath Ledger will never reprise his role as Joker. It's my hope that the franchise will pay him respects by allowing the character to sit out for the next movie, and THEN find someone who can do the role justice Heath Ledger style.

White N Nerdy

Holy crap, I'm such a nerd.

I am starting a new class tonight in my bachelor's psychology program at Ottawa. It's History and Systems of Psychology. I was just looking through the book and got all kinds of excited. How nerdy is it to get excited over the history of psychology coming from ancient India and Buddha, from ancient Greek philosophers, from Rome and the Middle Ages? Of course, after that, I think the book gets rather boring, because then it's modern foundations of psychology, which I have thus far found uninteresting in previous classes. (The foundations, not current theories, mind you.)

And now I realize just what a nerd I am by reading what I've just written. Why can't I stop?!?

nice long break is over...

My grandfather passed away a day or two after my last post. It was way more difficult than I realized it would be. Those people who I was griping about before did not come to the funeral. I suppose it may have been for the best.

However, my husband did something absolutely amazing. He spent considerable money and time working up a slideshow for my grandfather's funeral. It's amazing. I watch it even now, and I'm doing ok until I see pictures of him holding me as a baby, then I just lose it. It was such an amazing thing to do, and other members of my family who never got to meet Eric before were amazed that he would take the time to do such a thing when 'he isn't a member of the family'. Of course, they just meant that he's not a blood relation, so they were surprised. My great uncle 'Chick' immediately requested a copy of the slideshow, and I was amazed at how many people stood around staring at the screen just watching the photos. Things like this that Eric pulls out of nowhere just serve to remind me of how much I love him and how incredible he is sometimes.

I took a nice long break from blogging because I was too full of emotion. I was physically and mentally exhausted. However, in the interest of getting back in the swing of things, here's my little story from the past two months...

I am now the mother of a teenager. He's only 9.

I was searching for images online of a specific stretch so I could email it to a client to show how to properly do it. I found a hilarious site that uses an articulated Spiderman figure to show how to do stretches. I called my son over to look.

"Shawn, you gotta see this!"

Shawn comes running over and looks at the page, getting a confused look on his face.

"What? The girl in the bikini?"

My turn to get confused. I scanned the page and way off to the side, was a weight loss ad with a girl in a bikini. Apparently women have suddenly become more interesting than superheroes, the travesty that was Spiderman 3 aside.

Poor kid has no idea why I was laughing so hard.

For Whom The Bell Tolls...

My grandfather is dying. He is doing very badly right now, and it's been touch-and-go for the last week. Just when things started to look better for him, it all failed again. He is 95 years old, so he's had a long life, but it's still kind of stressful. I remember the way he used to take me into his garden and show me how to weed his strawberries, and the koi tanks in his yard, the willow tree where I used to play. (To my cousins: I don't care what you remember, I DID get to help with his strawberries at least once!) Some of my family harbors only resentment toward him, and I understand they had a very different relationship with him.

The reason I even mention this is because a couple of years ago my grandmother on the other side of the family died, and I refused to go to her funeral. She made my life miserable by saying mean things to me, telling me I was just like my mother (whom she hated), and generally being a pain in my ass. She yelled at me a lot. Other people in my family grew up with her. Literally. Lived with her for a while. Me, on the other hand, she refused to speak to for several years prior to her death.

I was the target of a lot of angst when she died. I made a lot of people mad by not going.
Does that mean I get to return the bitchiness when they don't come to Grandpa's funeral? I suppose I would be entitled, but I'm trying very hard to be a little bigger than that. I guarantee though, that if one more word is ever said to me about my family loyalties, I am likely to explode and perhaps turn into a chainsaw-wielding crazy person.

Of course, if some of them show up, it will only make things more stressful, and I hope they don't. Honestly, I know each person will have to make a decision, but I wish they wouldn't say things to me about the old man 'croaking'. He may not know it's being said, but I do. I always had a good relationship with him when I was a kid, and no one should step on that.

All alone with my thoughts

There is nothing like sitting somewhere with nothing to do and no one to talk to when the person you’re with has plugs in his ears listening to his goddess Paula Abdul. Then it dawned on me, I could pull out my computer and start writing.

Nope, still bored.

Maybe this is why the electronic gadget-imposed isolation happened so rapidly. Everywhere you look, someone is playing electronic Sudoku, or poker, or reading e-books, or texting…does anyone talk to anyone else anymore?

I’m stuffy, I’ll admit. I said a few posts ago how I sounded like an old fart, and realized a few days later that’s because I AM. I’m only 30, but somehow teenagers annoy the crap out of me.

(OMG, he started headbanging. Must not be Paula anymore. Oh, Metallica. *rolls eyes*)

Anyway, teenagers. Most are okay. The ones that bug me are the ones who travel in packs like their survival depends on it, and their self-esteem actually does. The ones who give everyone else dark and threatening looks because you walked into a McDonald’s on a Friday night at 10.30 pm with your spouse, ordered chocolate shakes and fries, and then sat down. Nothing more than that.

Now, granted, the area I was in is generally crawling with Goths. These kids weren’t Goth, because what self-respecting Goth (oxymoron?) would be caught dead (haha, another pun) in McDonald’s of all places. These kids were more punk than anything, and a couple of the most outlandish were the most polite. Their appearance didn’t bother me, but I did decide that I’m planning to avoid places where I see groups of teenagers hanging out. Their vacuous babble and girly giggles make my head hurt.

Why do teens lose IQ points when around other teens? Is this why we send our kids to public school, so they can socialize with others their own age, and forget how to relate to anyone else? Forget relate, just behave politely around others.

Between the constant gadget attached the the hands of the yuppie kids, the murderous looks from the punk kids, and the grumbling and ‘poor me’s’ from the Goths and Emos, our entire societal norms of polite behavior are gone. It’s tough to change my thinking about acceptable behavior. But should I? Which norm should be the acceptable one? I guess it’s not for me to say. Old polite behavior is going by the wayside quickly.

I guess us old fuddy duddys have to learn to accept some of the new norms, but the younger generation should learn to accept some of the old norms as well. We all have to share breathing air, and just because they are the up and coming generation, doesn’t give them the right to dictate. Wait until we’re in nursing homes, at least.

My brother once told me that Madonna should get out of the music biz. Stop making any kind of music whatsoever. Why? Because she’s too old. He was 17 at the time, but that’s no excuse for giving such a crappy reason. I might have understood it more if he’d said he didn’t like her or her music, or some other reason, but only that she’s too old?

This is what I’m talking about. Someone who is older has not outlived their usefulness. The world doesn’t belong only to those 25 and under. The older people are the ones who’ve paved the way for the younger generations to enjoy some of the freedom of expression they take for granted. And where would music be without those who came before paving the way? Madonna broke new ground with her music, like her or not. Just like Chuck Berry, and many others before them.

So this old fart is happy to be an old fart as long as she has other old farts for company. At least the ones who are courteous enough to chat with you instead of burying themselves in their own electronic gadgets.

Wonder what he’s listening to now and if his ears are burning?

Damn you for stealing my sign

We used to live in an apartment building which had two apartments on each floor. My husband and I, with our son, lived across the hall from three young women who were very sweet. It was a fairly quiet apartment building, and we never heard our neighbors. There must have been some kind of soundproof firewall, because my DH loves to turn the volume on the television up so far it would rattle the dishes in the kitchen cabinet. Apparently there was no soundproofing between our bedroom and the bedroom of the couple who lived upstairs though. Loud and quick, thank goodness. I would have started banging on the ceiling a la Heckles from Friends otherwise.

When we lived in this place, I had this cute little sign on my door. It was very appropriate for any place I lived. My mother gave it to me. It said "My house was clean yesterday. Sorry you missed it!"

I went home one day, went inside, and stayed for a while. When I left, my sign was gone. My prettily lettered, small, cute sign was gone. I was firstly amazed at the sense of loss I felt, and then the anger hit. I seethed about it for days.

Eric came to my rescue, like the night in shining armor he so seldom channels. When I came home next I found a new, printed sign on the door.

"Thanks for stealing our sign. You can have this one, too."

City kids are seriously deprived

I almost hate to do this, but I'm about to write about someone else's kids. I love this person dearly, and her kids are good kids. This is nothing personal. Now that I've backtracked before I've even written anything, maybe I have room to move forward with my thoughts!

This family, who will remain nameless, lives in suburbia. They run around in a minivan to school, church, and grandma's. OK, I know minivans aren't designed to go off-road like SUVs, so no complaints there. However, this family went to visit friends who lived out of the city. They had to *gasp* drive down a dirt road. The kids got really upset and were nearly crying, freaking out, asking if they were supposed to be there. They are currently 5 and 7 years old.

This is how you know you've been in the city too long. This is how we get kids and adults who don't know where milk or eggs come from. To be fair, these kids do. But many others don't and never learn.

I'm always amazed at the world in which we live now. Kids intuitively know much of our technology, because they are raised around it. But get some of these same kids around animals and they haven't got a clue which ones are likely to hurt them and which are useful. Get them on a farm and they can't figure out how to entertain themselves without video games.

I know I sound like an old fart. I'm just nostalgic. I miss the simple life without the chaos of the city. Of course, when I'm away from the city too far, I miss being two seconds from entertainment. When I put them on a balance, however, my desire for country living far outweighs my need to be passively entertained.

In Memory

I never was a huge fan of Heath Ledger. Don't get me wrong, I didn't NOT like him. (Referencing my last post, yes I know it's a double negative.) I thought he was a good actor, and I like the fact that he shied away from pretty-boy roles in favor of roles that would force him to reach deeper into himself.

It was a surprise to me yesterday to hear that he had died. What I originally read was simply a preliminary story that siad he was found dead by his massage therapist (please - not masseuse as the New York Times called it) and housekeeper, surrounded by sleeping pills. I figured it was suicide. I mean, kind of sounded that way. As more information comes available, it sounds more like an accident. Apparently, he recently gave an interview in which he said he was not able to sleep, and even taking two Ambien only gave him an hour's sleep at a time. The role of the Joker was hard on him mentally and emotionally, also contributing to his sleeping troubles.

Either way, we've lost a great talent, and the world will be a little darker without his smile. It is sad that his little girl must now grow up without him in her life.