Words 4 the Soul

How often do u feel a sudden twinge of sadness? Does it normally happen at a certain time of the day, or is it a repercussion of a memory? Well it happens to me sometimes but usually because I notice the sun setting and I realize that I’ve wasted another day being me…

…everything changes. I am not really sure what it is, but it took me the stark experience of actually letting time to fly to really understand just how it can build and damage things, especially relationships. When I first learned that lesson it was quite devastating for me. I was probably around eleven when the consequences of time quite literally hit me in the face. 

There was this guy, a friend who I was so close with. We were, and still are to a degree, mirrored personalities. We liked the same things, we always played together in school and after school, and over a few years we really formed a tight bond in elementary school. Sadly though, he had to move away and thus changed schools, so seeing him became rare. For me, at least in my mind, our relationship hadn’t changed. We were still BFF’s and would always be. 

Then when I saw him and I felt that same emotions of “yay my bestest friend is here to celebrate my birthday!” I was greeted with an enormous smack in the face. Obviously not literally, but it sure felt that way. 

We had gone to Disneyland for my birthday and all my closest friends were there. The slap in the face came when there was this awkwardness that made conversations between us, which use to be so easy, difficult. Though that was hard for me, I was mostly devastated that he didn’t want to do all the same things I wanted to do even if I did everything he wanted to do. 

Wow! That sounds childish, but seriously, that’s what is was like. 

I was super bummed and I prayed and hoped (and sometimes still do) that we were still super tight if only to give me a shoulder to cry on or a person my age to talk to. 

Similar things have happened with most if not all the friends who attended that disastrous birthday party, but hey, all I can say is…

Time certainly changes who we are by allowing us the opportunity to grow even if we may not particularly enjoy the consequences.

I learned from that and countless other experiences, so maybe next time I’ll put a stronger effort into keeping in touch so I’m not greeted with that same… smack-in-the-face awkwardness 

What I wrote on my Facebook and hope you all join in on:

As I freeze in my ice cold kitchen, sign my petition to stop drone attacks! If you have an issue that you think needs changing go to change.com make an account (you can even log in with Facebook) and start on your path to making a change. I am doing this as an alternative to writing a letter for my Sociology class and I think this is a great way to get your voice out there and be heard. Thanks! —  feeling cold.

Here is the link if you would like to sign the petition: https://www.change.org/petitions/president-obama-stop-drone-attacks-2

It’s like a reflex.
Dominoes.
I think of something, hear something.
Someone asks me question and all of those emotions I have been trying to suppress come bubbling, pouring out like a broken dam, and I am consumed with an ache that radiates through my heart and my kneecaps.
I don’t blame anyone.
I don’t feel I should have to do anymore.
But I drown in sorrow and anger, bathe in love and hate, and drink poison that only relieves my pain for a brief moment.
I write, inhaling the purple of my pen and hope I feel alright.
I do, I feel better to see the words on paper, out of me, remaining secret and unheard by people I refuse to trust.
The poison, the false hope, fades quickly and sooner rather than later, I am once again drowning in emotion, growing my hate as fast as bacteria multiplies.

Children are the victims of an ignorant world who teach them how to label and judge those around them base off of physical appearance. I read and article stating that children start to notice differences in their peers as young as 3, meaning that they understand that everyone is different. The problem comes when they open their mouth to point out these differences.

Children are like parrots, they repeat what they hear whether it comes from their parents or television or friends, they repeat. So when a child has become aware of the differences between people and they hear a parent make a negative comment about a person’s skin color, the child will not only repeat the comment but also associate that difference with what they heard thus passing on prejudice and discrimination.

This can be applied to more than just color, but all kinds of physical and social differences. Children are like sponges, so if placed in dirty water you cannot expect them to absorb good behavior, clean language, and pure thinking.

It saddens me that children are exposed to negative comments and such. And it only makes me more keen on teaching children, including my brother, that everyone is different due to the environment and millions of years of evolution. 

I got a baby stimulator the other day from school. When my brother came home from preschool, the first thing he said when he saw the baby was, “But Akka, you’re white.” He was confused as to how my baby could be of a darker skin color than me. So my mother pointed out how both her children are of lighter skin color than she. 

Recently he’s begun to ask if he was brown and I was white, so I came up with a plan to expose him to language (at home, at least) that would hopefully keep him from holding onto the same prejudices my mom and I have. When he asked me if I was white, I held up my Starbucks cup and said, “This is white. Am I white?”

He looked confused for a moment, but after I explained to him that everyone comes in different shades of brown, no matter how light or how dark, he seemed to understand better. I thought of this because of the terms I have been taught and so many before me have adopted into their vocabulary, to identify people by the color of their skin and their features. Terms like “black” and “white” are technically incorrect as there are no humans that I know of or have ever seen that have pure black skin or pure white skin. 

Though it may take many years to find a new way to refer to people without connecting the most obvious difference with incorrect terms I am hoping that by teaching the youngsters of today (and adopting it into our own lives) that everyone comes in different shades of brown but that doesn’t make anyone better than another, we can bring the end of discrimination and prejudice even closer. 

So from now on I challenge people to take responsibility for the words they use and teach the new and future generations that everyone is different and that’s how it’s meant to be.  

Monday, February 25 I missed school because I wasn’t feeling well, so when I came in the next day I was excited to get my very own baby stimulator because I was expecting to get a real parenting experience. After the first sleepless night where I had to wake up about five times to “tend” to the baby then write down the time and what it required to stop crying, I realized that this project was not going to be as fun as I had hoped. 

After two days with Aliyah (what I named the baby), I had decided that this project would be more beneficial if it were:

1. More realistic care

2. Only for a weekend (given on a Friday and returned on a Monday)

3. Showed more than only the tedious side of parenting.

When a mother gives birth to her baby(ies), most of the time, she falls instantly in love with it. She may find waking up in the middle of the night to feed the baby and change the baby’s diaper annoying due to lack of sleep, but she still loves the child. She gets to play with the child, sing to it, get reactions from it and bond with it on a whole new level. 

Yes, she must spend a lot of money and time on the baby (whether she has it or not), but at the end of the day, if you ask her if she wished she had not had the baby, she would say, “Absolutely Not!” 

It is not convenient to have a child when you are unprepared for it since this world is one that revolves around green paper. So in order to keep teenagers from having children, Baby Think It Over and Ready or Not Tot baby stimulators have taken center stage as an interactive birth control. 

Though it is a good idea to teach teens and to-be parents about the responsibility of parenting, I honestly believe that it should not be used as a form of “birth control”. 

Ready or Not Tot is a baby stimulator that has a few different programs (settings). It cries, you figure out which key to put into a slot in the back of the baby, and the baby becomes silent. Many times it will cry 10, 15, 20 minutes later at which point you must stick the same or a different key in to quite the baby. The head snaps back if not supported properly and it cries if held face down. It weighs what a typical baby would weigh (according to the makers) if a teen mom gave birth to it, which is about five pounds. 

RealCare Baby Think it Over baby stimulator is the more realistic of the two. The baby comes with a carseat, a diaper bag, two diapers (one with a green tag and one with a yellow tag), and a plastic bottle. The baby cries when it needs tending to at which point the student holds up his/her wrist band (which comes with the program) to the baby. The baby supposedly chimes indicating that the baby knows the student is there. The student must then physically tend to the baby by changing it’s diaper (if it is wearing the diaper with the green tag, the student switches it to the diaper with the yellow tag and vise versa), rocking it, or feeding it with the bottle. It knows when it’s being handled too roughly and starts to cry, it knows when the parent is not around and starts to cry, and it sometimes just cries and is unconsolable.

I got a Ready or Not Tot, and let me tell you, I was not ready for the amount of sleep I would lose. The last night I had the doll, it cried a total of ten times while I was sleeping, nearly bringing me to tears with how frustrated I was. My mom asked me if I wanted her to take the baby so I could sleep, but I declined partly out of guilt and partly out of exhaustion.

What baby cries 10 times at night?

To truly give a parenting experience, I think teachers and baby stimulator creators should come together and brainstorm. Here are a few thoughts I had while being cursed with the baby stimulator.

1. The program should not be used as a teen pregnancy prevention but rather to give teens an understanding of parenthood and should teach more than just infant care.

I thought long and hard about how the program affected me. It did not affect my feelings towards sex or parenthood as I knew that parenthood is nothing like what the program insinuates. Though I wasn’t always up with my brother when he was an infant, I did observe what my mother went through and how she dealt with it. Never did he wake her up ten times during a single night. 

Instead of scaring teens by setting the dolls to unrealistic settings, give them a chance to explore all parts of parenting, which leads me into my next idea concerning the program. 

Have it be a two week long program. During the first week (Monday through Thursday) the class will focus on the different aspects of parenting from budgeting for food, clothes, and diapers to actually changing a diaper and burping a baby. After learning and exploring these parts of parenting, the students will be assigned a doll on Friday. It will be programed and the students will learn how to tend to the dolls and begin parenting the child through the weekend. After the weekend, when they return the babies, they should talk about the effects of the baby on their view points concerning parenting. They should focus on what they learned, what they already knew, what happens after the baby is no longer an infant but a toddler and then a child, how that affects the parents, and so on. They should also discuss the bonds that are formed between the infant and his/her parents as to expose the students to the rewarding side of parenting. 

2. The doll should more sensibly resemble an actual infant to give a totally realistic parenting experience. 

The RealCare baby is pretty realistic as it needs to be rocked, feed, and changed periodically. But to create a baby stimulator that does more than play a recording of a baby crying and cooing would insure the students get a lifelike parenting experience. The baby should be soft like a real baby and should also move on it’s own. For example, instead of manually positioning the babies hands and legs, it should flail around whenever it’s crying. The eyes should blink and close while sleeping. It should make random noises throughout the day and cry more realistically. There are many things that can be done to ensure that the baby is more lifelike (and I am sure the technology exists out there somewhere) so that the student or the parent-to-be is ready for the every day tasks and responsibilities an infant inflicts.

But as for now, the best way to keep teens from reproducing is to decriminalize sex. By making it a forbidden fruit and shoving abstinence down the throats of young adults, they are more incline to want to taste it than if it was treated as every other normal subject taught in school. The days of abstinence being taught as the only right way should come to an end as this is a country that claims to separate religion from state. 

Anyway, I am just happy that I got to return my Ready or Not Tot as I am looking forward to sleeping in this Saturday and not having to wake up every few minutes/hours to stick a key into my fake child. I just hope that for my brother’s sake, the babies take on a whole new program that will prepare students for the future and possibility of parenthood while keeping it within realistic measures instead of trying to scare kids into not having sex.