On Fear

Posted: under Thinking.
Tags: , , , , ,

It’s time for a discussion post!

In my Personal Essay class, we’re working on our second paper, on fear. Part of this includes going to people we know and discussing it with them.

So what is fear? How does the media use fear? Are humans naturally fearful — is being afraid in our genes — or are we conditioned by society to be fearful? Where does it come from? How do we overcome it? And why are we afraid to face it?

A couple of questions/prompts he gave us to help with the though processes: Are you afraid of terrorism? Also, would you like to carry around a gun?

This is my initial input (though you can expect me to comment responses and whatnot to ya). There are two different kinds of fear. There’s the natural survival instinct that causes us to fear things that threaten our lives. The second kind of fear develops in response to a traumatic event. Like, for example, I’m afraid of trusting new people because of what happened back in high school. Things like that. Can it be overcome? It can, but it’s very hard to do. Facing something you fear is obviously not a pleasant thing to do.

Now, am I afraid of terrorism? Not particularly, but it pisses me off. Look, U.S., people hate us and are trying to kill us. Did you all ever stop to think WHY? Maybe we could DO SOMETHING about it, instead of trying to kill them in response.

Would I carry a gun? Nope. And I could care less. The NRA, according to my professor, has the notion, or something, that “the ONLY way to feel safe is to have a gun.”

So… NRA… My feeling safe more or less my entire life has been a delusion because I’m not armed? Um, here, I have a better question for ya; uh, are ya fucking stupid?

But anyway, that’s my two cents for now. Let’s make this an INTELLIGENT DISCUSSION please, for fuck’s sake. Aliens are irrelevant. Plus, this is for a class, damnit. I wouldn’t be making this blog post in the first place otherwise.

Comments (4) Sep 29 2009

1-Page Auto Bio that Wasn’t 1 Page

Posted: under My Educational Experience, Thinking.
Tags: , ,

So I bet you’re wondering what this is all about. Well, for Personal Essay, we have to write papers about, well, ourselves. In our style, by the end of this class, we have to write a paper; “Who am I?” And it’s more than just “19 year old bi-racial female,” if you couldn’t tell :3 In any event, I decided to take the papers I write in the class and put them up here. This is my first assignment in the class (turned it in today). A one page auto-biography (it wasn’t exactly one page, ahaha). Enjoy:

Well, where do I start, besides the painfully obvious? The name’s Regina Ann Baker, better known as Gina, G, Shorty, G Bakes, and several hundred other nicknames that I can’t remember and don’t feel like listing anyway. Born in the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, NY, 10:02am, November 21st, 1989. Weighed in at 7 lbs 12 oz., 21 cm long (because that actually matters in life for some stupid reason). I’m an arrogant, confident, bitchy nice girl with no self-esteem whatsoever. A procrastinating perfectionist (ironically; I’m a woman of many contradictions), and I’m surprised I haven’t given myself a stroke because it’s really that bad. I have a tendency to over-think things and I’m too serious for my health. I’m not all bad parts, I suppose. I have quite the sense of humor, and while I’ve never been tested for it, I’ve been told that I might be gifted in a few of the seven (or is it eight now?) intelligences. Plus I’m ridiculously musical and a sports freak; how much better can you get?

Me and my growing-up-to-be-an-eventual-6-person family lived in a 2-person apartment just around the corner from Brooklyn College, until I was around 8. Blame it on the kid who was set on fire for not trying crack down the street (this actually did happen too, no joke), but my parents decided that it was probably best for us to leave and move to a better neighborhood. So, we purposefully got ourselves evicted, and moved briefly to Philadelphia to stay with Great Aunt Doris, Aunt Karen and her three kids in a tiny 2 person row house (for the non-math majors, that’s 10 people, 11 when Dad came on weekends, since he was still working in Manhattan at the time). The following six months after that is relatively uneventful, so I’ll skip ahead to the part where we move to the house we currently reside in, up in Sidney, NY. A house that almost but not quite fits us all, but it’s certainly a lot better than that tiny apartment in the city.

At this point, I guess one would expect me to say “life has gotten much better now that we’re up here!” Well, ironically, the opposite happened, and no, it’s not because the town I live in is boring as hell, though it is boring as hell. A lot of things changed. Firstly, our finances changed; my dad went from making 60k a year to a fraction of that. Secondly, my dad changed. I’m not entirely sure how his little, screwed up head works, but he ended up clinically depressed. And in result, everything else has all gone down hill since then. I’m not going to get into the nitty and gritty right now, not to mention that I don’t particularly like pity. I find it highly annoying, just like stupid people.

I was re-enrolled into the public school system in 8th grade (prior to that, I had been pulled out of 2nd grade to be home-schooled by my mother), fumbling along and trying to learn how to have a social life. Needless to say, the first couple of years were bad. It got a little better going through high school, to a very slight degree. I can’t say the drama got any better. If anything, it was about 200 times worse. Unfortunately for me, I made it a habit to make friends with people who would take advantage of my unwavering loyalty, and walk all over me (not all of them, just a lot of them). And it was like that for a very long time. Soccer and chorus, both of which I was heavily involved in during those four years of Hell School, plus a small and select group of friends probably was what kept me from shooting my brains out. I don’t kid you when I say I went through a lot back then.

Senior year was when I finally started gaining my confidence. I applied to several different schools, getting into my top choice. I came in as a P.E. major, thinking I wanted to be a gym teacher. As time went on, however, and I’m not entirely sure how I got myself there, but I realized that my major interest was in sports medicine. I love sports medicine you see, it’s like my calling, and so now I’ve been going through the torturously slow process of switching into athletic training. I eventually want to go to med school and come out an orthopedic (doctor or surgeon, not sure which). I want to be a specialist that caters to athletes, since that’s the part of sports medicine that I really like the most.

One of the biggest contributors to my new-found confidence and just a healthier self-image was going to college. And I don’t even know what it was about it that matured me. Perhaps it was having to take care of myself, more or less with out the help of my mom or dad; maybe it was the fact that after I started going to college, the relationship between my Dad and I started to deteriorate more. Maybe it was the realization that I really wasn’t such a loser, that I was just as smart and capable as the next guy, some times more so, and that I was competent enough to lead an independent life. Starting my third year here, I think I can safely say that I’m glad I managed to get myself here, even though I have the extra year here and then basically the rest of my life in med school. Hopefully in the end it will all be worth it.

Comments (1) Sep 01 2009

@PeterSantilli

Posted: under On Politics, Rants and Raves, Thinking.
Tags: , , , , , ,

(I may or may not regret this later…) I was just going to silently fume about it and eventually get over it, but I really need to get this off of my chest. And the guy I’m writing about may or may not read this, I guess at this point I don’t really care.

Peter, I don’t care if you think my opinions are warped and insane. I don’t really care if you’re right and I’m wrong. What I do care about is when you call me stupid. Regardless of what my tweets earlier did to have an affect upon your opinion of my smarts, I’ll tell you right now, I’m far from stupid. And I particularly don’t appreciate you calling me that.

Twitter is awesome for talking about simple things, but you can’t have a real discussion on it, especially when you have a lot to say. 140 characters just doesn’t do it. So I’ll write down here what I was trying to say there. Read it, don’t read it. Change your mind about my opinion, or don’t, whatever. But, honestly, even though I don’t even know who you are, it hurt when you called me stupid.

This is what I think; this world is fucked over. Our nation is fucked. It has been for years. This recession isn’t the start of it, nor is it the ending. And we have, more or less, been digging this grave for ourselves for a great deal of time. It’s because the people that lead us are a pack of retards and the majority of people in this country are retarded. The way big corporations were, and still are, being retarded with their money, and the way the government kept turning what seemed like a permanent blind eye, the economy was doomed to fuck up. I look at it, and this all reminds me of the Gilded Age back in the early 1900’s, when corporations had the government more or less wrapped around their fingers. Nowadays, the gov’t cares about the big businesses, they don’t want to do anything that would hinder the big businesses, and they ignore us, let alone the small businesses and micro businesses. And even though it was clear that the corporations, and Wall st., needed regulation, the gov’t kept saying “lasseiz faire, lasseiz faire,” like they thought what they did a century ago would actually work this time around.

Of course, we all know how it ended at the end of the Roaring Twenties, with a depression that so far has yet to be beat. Until maybe now.

Now everyone’s saying “Oh, we need to regulate this and regulate that, and we’ll make sure that this never happens again.” It’s more than that, though. The higher ups need to acknowledge small businesses and how they play a major role in the economy. That’s what I was trying to say before when I said that they’re thinking is old-fashioned. Times are changing, things are changing, and in order to keep up with this change, we need to adapt our thoughts, and up until now (unless Obama indeed turns out to be full of shit like you say he is) no one has done that.

Concerning the New World Order… Our country, and pretty much every other country in the world, relies on everyone else to get by. A lot of our economy relies on the economies of the countries we do business with, essentially. Interdependence and all that; how countries depend on other countries. We’re more or less globalized to a tee. So, if the economies of other countries starts going down the shitter, and if the global economy in general is going down the shitter, then logically our economy will go down the shitter too. And unless we cut off all ties from the rest of the world and go back to our Pre-World War I, pre-internationalistic ways, I highly doubt that we’ll be able to make a comeback here on the homefront without doing something to repair the global economy.

The G20 conference may have seemed like a meet and greet and/or a waste of time, but for a long time, the United States has been more or less the world leader. And, well, looking back at what Bush put us through, and how things started fucking up, and especially considering how interdependent we are presently, I sort of feel like a balancing of powers was inevitable. China, Britain, etc, are becoming superpowers… actually it’s more like they’re superpowers already. And they more or less had to deal with whatever we did when we wanted to do it. The Iraq War (the biggest waste of time ever) was just one example of it. With the way Obama approached this conference, and promoted this NWO, everyone’s on the same level, and yea, they’re all trying to fix the “failed capitalism” and whatnot, but in a more broad sense, it’s better to have the countries collaborating than having one country boss the others around. That would eventually blow up in our face, I’m sure. That’s what I was trying to say when I meant that the NWO might not be such a bad thing.

And yes, I agree that our system of capitalism is retarded. But, it’s not capitalism as a whole that’s failed. We can still keep using it if we just cut out the pieces that are tripping us constantly.

I personally think that the real problem is credit. You give your debt to someone else in exchange for some more debt from some other person. It’s almost like we’re not even using money to buy things anymore; we’re using debt. The higher ups want us to keep borrowing and borrowing, and seriously, that’s the most stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. Borrowing? Why not use real money that we actually have. Because of everyone’s hyperactive borrowing, the economy for the longest time looked like it was going stellar (though in reality, out wallets were showing otherwise). And then the borrowing and debt caught up with us all, and look at were we are now. You want to eliminate this whole damn problem? Eliminate credit. Let’s make it so that we pay with our OWN money, that we KNOW we have, instead of paying with essentially nothing. (This was another thing I was talking about with the old-fashioned thinking; that the gov’t wants us to use credit, even though it blew up in our faces in the late 1920’s, and it’s obviously doing it again now).

That may have looked like rambling, and since I suck at transitions, it might as well be rambling, but this is the gist of what I wanted to say on Twitter. See what I meant when I said it’s hard to have a really good discussion? Sometimes, I have a lot to say — this happened to be one of those times.

You can still think my opinions are completely irrelevant to reality. And you can still be right about all of this. You may or may not read this post, and you may or may not comment and whatnot. But I wanted to just make something clear; I’m not a stupid person. Please don’t call me stupid. I don’t really appreciate being humiliated for trying to voice my opinion.

Comments (3) Apr 04 2009

A Vision of Students

Posted: under Thinking.

If these walls could talk, what would they say?
If students learn what they do, what are they learning sitting here? The Info is up here… follow along…

Of course, walls and desks cannot talk. But students can.

200 students made 367 edits to this document, and surveyed themselves to bring you the following message…

My average class size is 115.
18% of my teachers know my name.
I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me, 26% of which are relevant to my life.
I buy hundred dollar textbooks that I never open.
My neighbor paid for class, but never comes.
I will read 8 books this year, 2300 webpages and 1281 Facebook profiles.
I will write 42 pages for class this semester, and over 500 pages of email.
I get 7 hours of sleep each night.
I spend 1 1/2 hours watching TV each night.
I spend 3 1/2 hours a day online.
I listen to music 2 1/2 hours a day.
I spend 2 hours on my cellphone.
Spend 3 hours in class.
2 hours eating.
I work 2 hours every day.
3 hours studying.
That’s a total of 26.5 hours per day.
I am a multitasker (I have to be).
I will be $20,000 in debt after graduation.
I’m one of the lucky ones.
Over 1 billion people make less than $1 a day.
This laptop costs more than some people in the world make in a year.
When I graduate, I will proabably have a job that doesn’t exist today.
Filling this out won’t help me get there, or deal with…
War… poverty.. ethnic conflict…
I did not create the problems, but they are my problems.

Some have suggested that technology (alone) can save us…

I facebook through most of my classes.
I bring my laptop to class, but I’m not working on class stuff.

“The inventor of the system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not the greatest benefactors of mankind.”

… on the benefits of the chalkboard… to be continued…

Anyway, this video carries a message. And honestly, I had the hardest time trying to figure it out. I’m still not sure if I’m right either. But watch it and comment, giving an opinion if you have one.

Comments (2) Dec 06 2008

Thank you BScott!!!

Posted: under All About Me, Thinking.

THANK YOU! I’m so glad that I’m not the only one who thinks this!

A friend of mine once asked me, after I told them about me being bi-racial, what do I identify with; blacks or whites? I told her; I don’t identify with either. I’m Gina before I’m anything else. She had replied to that with; you realize that everyone else will look at you and automatically say you’re black. To that, I said; well that’s because they’re stupid and can only think in categories.

I don’t understand why people see me as a certain thing, or why they expect me to identify with a certain race. Why do I have to identify with anything? Even though I’m bi-racial, if I identify with whites, will that make me a white person? If I identify with blacks, does that make me a black person? Why can’t I just be me? Gina Baker is who you should be looking at, not the color of my skin. I’m not just white, or just black, or just anything. I’m made up of many different genes from many different places and races that traveled through generations and generations until creating the person that is physically me. But that shouldn’t be something to judge me with. You learn about my personality, intellect, and opinions before you even begin to come to any conclusions about me. Things that should actually matter when deciding whether or not I’m worthy or being your friend, not my fucking skin color!

Race/color shouldn’t define who a person is, nor should anyone else define that person. That person them self should define who they are. There is no real logical reason to be taking everyone and separating them into categories; blacks, whites, Asians, etc. We’re all human. Shouldn’t that be what counts?

So, who am I? I’m Regina Ann “Gina” Baker, who lived in the city but now in the country; a freshman in college who’s a little young amongst her peers because she was homeschooled and advanced further than her peers (I’m “supposed” to be a senior in high school now) and still finds it a little hard to fit in really well; a young adult who is still afraid of truly growing up and being on her own; A daughter and sister who loves to sing and dance and spend time with her family; a caring friend who is willing to do anything for her friends; someone who finds it hard to say no, but is willing to do just that and stand up for her self when everyone has turned their backs on her; and simply a girl who is living and loving life, who appreciates what she has even though there are things she wants and still doesn’t understand, who is fascinated by the world around her and is always curious and striving to learn more, who is blessed with what gifts she’s been given, and will eventually be ready to show her self off to the rest of the world.

Comments (2) Mar 28 2008