Take Your Mama Out

Whenever I am not posting, which happens frequently, I wish I was. But as soon as I sit down in front of the screen I start to have problems. Its not that my mind goes blank, its that my mind is running so fast I cant get it to slow down enough to type anything. I think about all of the things I should be doing (homework), things I wish I was doing, and things that are coming up within the week. Maybe that is why I am having such a hard time in school, I have a hard time concentrating on one thing. Or maybe its because I spend so much time focusing on one thing that its a problem.

Life this past semester has been hectic, and I miss the lazy days of summer that I spent posting on my blog and working at the gym. Just thought I would give everyone an update on the craziness of my life.

School
Well there isnt much to say here other than the fact that it is hard and this is the worst part of the semester. I have no idea when most of my finals are, I dont have any study guides, and it gets to stressful that I just want to give up. I wont though, because I will not go back to Royal City again.
Anatomy is killer, I have my lab midterm next Thursday. Learning the Male and Female reproduction organs has been an interesting experience. Yesterday I taught 3 boys the male parts, something that always brings some akwardness with it. I tease my guy friends that I know more about them than they do.
Nutrition isnt that bad, I could have done better if I would have remembered moer throughout the semester. Everything that I didnt do well on was a result of forgetfulness on my part. I don't even know if I will get enough grade in the class for dietetics to be an option. Retaking the class does not appeal to me at all.
Womens studies is still good, I always skip and feel bad about it. I didnt turn in my last paper, and still havent written it. I am not feeling too bad about it because I just found out that I aced the last one I turned in (the one on breasts).
Intro to Allied Health and Latin are easy. Enough said.

Romance
There is none. Whatsoever. Zip. It looks like I am going to be winning $50 from Bob Murphy after all. If I make it about 6 more months, I win the bet between on us on whether I could go 2 years without getting engaged. I do have the hots for 2 boys in my ward, we will see if anything develops. I would like to be more specific, but I have heard too many horror stories about people who write about other people in their blogs and regret it later.

California
We leave on Friday for a 5 day trip to California. We includes my roommates, and apt 11. We will be in Disneyland on Saturday, having a bonfire on Sunday night, and attempting to get on the Price is Right on Monday. It should be the greatest time ever. I made shirts, and my parents sold me my car for $1 (to get rid of some of their liability). I don't think we realized what we were doing when we planned the trip, we will get back 5 days before finals and I hav ea final the day after we get back but we dont care. The thought of 5 days with nothing to worry about, with the coolest people I know is very liberating in and of itself.

I have no idea what I want to do with my life, and I dont know what to do about it. I guess I will just take GE's again next semester and apply for the Film minor. We will see how all of that goes.

Question of the Day:
What is your pet peeve?

My answer:
People who will not say what they think. I hate dragging it out of them.

Another paper-nutrition this time

Posting my papers is pretty easy, and most of them are about things that really interest me. This paper is concerning an article that I had to read for my nutrition class. It is about how to feed yoru children, soemthing that I think many parents struggle with, and its something that I will be reading when I have children of my own. I would have liked to make the paper longer, but there were restrictions concerning length and content. Let me know if you would like to know more about it, I thought the entire thing was very interesting.

There are many parents across the country that have the same questions you do. They want to know how to feed their children, when it should be done, and what is best for them to eat. This can be done through the “Division of Responsibility”, which clearly outlines the tasks that parents and children should each follow to make eating a positive experience for all.
Division of Responsibility
As a parent your responsibilities are going to be much easier than you might imagine. You are responsible for choosing what your children eat, where they eat it, and when they eat it. You should not “short order cook” for your children, but don’t make their task of eating impossible by serving a meal of lima beans and meatloaf and a bitter fruit. Children need at least one food that is negotiable and easy for them to recognize and like. Bread is your best bet for this, as it is soft and chewy, as well as having a taste that most everyone can love. Sit down as a family and eat your meals, don’t rush through them or eat in front of the television. Talk to your child, but don’t make him the subject of the entire meal. It is important to teach him how to eat but don’t pressure him about what he eats. Respectable table manners are a must for individuals of all ages, and it is important that children learn what is expected of them at a young age.
Before you can accept your own responsibilities you need to realize that your children will eat. We are all born with instinctive drives concerning food and eating. Your child has the ability within himself to eat the right amount of food today to account for what he ate on previous days. Offer him a variety of food; though it may take him some time to adjust his palate to the sensation of these new foods, over time he will accept and even come to appreciate this new source of nutrition. Many parents push or restrict their child concerning what is being consumed, but it is up to you as a parent to accept that your child’s body has a specific genetic code determining how fat, short, thin, or tall he is. Pushing a seemingly heavy child to eat will only cause them to reject the food when you serve it, and secretly make up for it at a later time. Young children should not be taught to take on the adult views of what is or what isn’t a healthy body, they do not have the maturity nor the capacity to understand the terms healthy or unhealthy and it is important to let their bodies tell them what is or isn’t right concerning eating. Let a child decide for himself how much he should eat at each meal, he is obeying those natural hunger signals that are built within each of us.
Basis for Recommendations
The Division of Responsibility was devised by Ellyn Satter, MS RD LCSW BCD. She is an internationally recognized authority with 40 years of experience behind her. Her methods emphasize an individuals own aptitude for proper food behavior to develop.
Personal Experience
I see the contrast of this method in two of my Aunts, both my mother’s sisters. One short-order cooked, fed her child whenever he desired, and bought high-fat or high-sugar foods. She is dealing with an overweight, always snacking, unhappy child. My other Aunt fed her kids regularly scheduled meals, always healthy yet familiar, and kept nutritious snacks on hand for her kids to find for themselves if they were hungry throughout the day. She also kept all of the “unhealthy” foods locked up in a cupboard reserved for special occasions. Her children today are very healthy and active, with a positive relationships towards food and its benefits.
Over time, though the changes may be slow, you will see your child start to take on a naturally healthy view towards nutrition and you will find it is easier to provide them with the food and let them decide what they want to eat when they want to eat it.

Main Page - Provopedia

Main Page - Provopedia: "Provopedia is like a pot-luck dinner: it's the sum-total of our contributions, except instead of food we're dealing with information (which apartment complexes are good, what auto shops to avoid, how to throw a sweet house-party, etc)."

Check this out!

BTW, I updated my Firefox and found out about this nifty little extension that lets me blog anything really quickly. I just highlighted that text and right cliked and a window opened up for me. Pretty sweet.

Another Women's Studies paper

My last post seemed to be so popular (5 comments is alot for me) I thought that I would post my last paper as well.

See Image Here ( I cannot get the link to work. It says the tag is wrong so I will have to work on that later)

This image brings to mind a song that was very popular during my high school years titled “Barbie Girl”, by a band called Aqua. Its lyrics included lines that said

I'm a barbie girl, in the barbie world
Life in plastic, it's fantastic!
you can brush my hair, undress me everywhere
Imagination, life is your creation

Almost every little girl grows up playing with Barbie’s. I read somewhere once that the percentage of girls ranging in age from 2-12 who played with Barbie’s was somewhere around 90%. Any young mind can spend hours imagining the different worlds of adventure that they can visit with their perfect, yet hardly realistic, plastic friend. By presenting this young model as a Barbie, the makers of Moschino Jeans have objectified a human being to the point that she actually becomes that unattainable shell of a toy that we all grow up playing with.

Objectification is to present or regard something as an object. This woman has lost everything that makes her a living breathing human being. Because of this we can almost allow ourselves to treat her as a “thing”, impersonally, without feeling. By turning her into an entity, the advertisers have made her into an unattainable shell that other woman idolize yet never become. Women will cut out this picture, hang it on their refrigerators, force themselves to compare their bodies to this woman’s as they forbid themselves that last bite of dinner for the night. This woman, like many other fashion models, does not represent 98% of the American female population. She represents what is the unhealthy, unrealistic goal of far too many women.

The woman in this picture is bound in an awkward position to the wall behind her. Her stance in wide with her feet and knees pointing inwards, making her look unbalanced and unsteady. If she is unable even to stand up straight and support her weight, how can she face the world around her? Her arms are bent at unnatural angles, not only making her look odd, but unwilling as well. As in many advertisements, there is an imbalance in the careful lighting of this photograph. Closer inspection reveals that the lightest part of her body is her pubic area and legs; her face is darkened and covered by shadows. Highlighting the sexual areas of her body, while hiding her face, gives us an excuse not to recognize her for the human being that she is. The advertisers hope that the viewers of this add will desire to buy their products in the same manner one might desire after the body of this young woman.

The position of this woman and the lighting of her body make her look powerless; anyone who wanted too could take control of not only her body, but her mind. Barbie’s can be molded to become anything that the imagination desires. Do the makers of this advertisement and this brand of clothing want to mold the women who buy their items into whatever they desire? If this ad had been truly been designed with a woman in mind, clothes would actually be sold, not sex. Avenues to accomplish this can involve stunning photography and amazing set design; there would never be any need to stoop to the degradation of the pornographic image above. It is the mind of a man that believes showing half-naked and submissive photos of women will sell clothing or products. Ads such as this one can considered the illustration of how men view and value women’s bodies. They would rather turn her into a defenseless doll, this woman is easy to manipulate and control, just as they would like to do with the women around them.

By using images of sexually stimulating young women in their ads, advertisers for major clothing brands across the world hope that they can convince women that buying their clothing will turn them into the young woman they see before them. Women are smart enough to realize that this woman has a physique that is very desirable, and may fall into the trap of thinking that if they do not look like this presently, buying this brand of clothing may help them become like this woman in the future. The marketers behind this ad for Moschino may also hope the women who do represent the ideal will identify with an ad featuring a girl who is bound and confined. Many beautiful women are just as unhappy as the other 99% of the female population who are not considered alluring by the world’s standards.

At first glance this ad may be considered slightly appealing. The color scheme is well thought out, and Barbie’s are thought of as the ideal toy as well as image. Just like a young girl molds her Barbie into what she wants it to be, so will the designers of this ad manipulate you into becoming what they want you to become. Just as they took advantage of this young woman, so will they take advantage of their consumers in an effort to make a little extra money.

Paper for Women's Studies

I wanted to post this paper that I wrote for my Women's Studies class. Kim it was inspired by your post on breast feeding in public. I never realized that I felt so strongly about Women's rights and the sexualization of women. Let me know what you guys think.

Breasts and the Sexualization of Women

If a child were to learn everything he knew about breasts from television and the media he would think that breasts are meant to be shameful, sexual, forbidden, big and upright, and existing solely for the pleasure of men. Exposure of breasts is considered indecent exposure in many places, and a man by the name of Joe Francis is now a millionaire from a home video series called Girls Gone Wild that features young women frequently baring their breasts to the world. Young girls who are exposed to the “fake and perfect” breasts of Hollywood develop a distorted view of their own bodies, eventually yearning for this perfection and attempting to realize it through plastic surgery. In all actuality, breasts are only reproductive organs because they produce milk. As a culture we must realize that though breasts are a part of what makes a woman female, they are not intended for a sexual purpose.

To understand how outrageous it is for breasts to be regarded in the way that they are, it is important to understand what other cultures value, as well how they view a woman’s bosom in their own culture. In our own culture during the 1920’s a flat chest was seen as the ideal. Bra’s were invented during this time to flatten a woman’s chest; strange to imagine in our society of push-up bra’s and implants. It is not just our culture that resorts to strange methods to changing the natural shape of a woman’s body. Padaung women in Burma are considered appealing if they have long necks, through the use of metal rings introduced around the age of five a young engaged girl can have a neck that is stretched up to 25 cm. In Vanuatu, Malakula a young child’s head is bound from the time that it is 1 month old. This process is continued for about 6 months to produce the desired, elongated shape of the head. A person with a finely elongated head is thought to be more intelligent, higher in status and closer to the world of spirits. Ironically, the women of the 1800’s worried about being too thin. In an advertisement from 1890 Professor Williams comes to the aid of women who would like to gain a few extra pounds.

Don't look like those poor unfortunates who, shorn of her artificial inflationary devices & pads, must, in the confines of her bedroom, through shame, try to cover her poor thin figure from the gaze of her beloved spouse.

"In four weeks Professor William's famed FAT-TEN-U Foods increased my weight by 39 pounds, gave me new womanly vigour and developed me finely."

Professor William's "Fat-Ten-U Foods are guaranteed to make the thin Plump & Rosy with an Honest Fleshiness of Form!

As we reflect on what we value as American’s today, it is easy to see that the things that makes a woman beautiful change extensively over time. Today when women are seen wearing leggings, extremely big hair, and gaudy makeup, they are termed to be “living in the past” or “living in the 80’s”. Yet, twenty years ago those things were the very height of fashion. Just as the view of what makes a woman’s overall appearance enticing has changed, so have the ideas about what is the ideal shape of a female chest. Not all men in the world have such a distorted view of the mammary glands however. Carolyn Latteier, the author of Breasts, The Women’s Perspective on American Obsession, relayed some of her views on the subject.

"Well, we do have a peculiar obsession with breasts in this culture. A lot of people think it's just the human nature to be fascinated with breasts but in many cultures, breasts aren't sexual at all. I interviewed a young anthropologist working with women in Mali, in a country in Africa where women go around with bare breasts. They're always feeding their babies. And when she told them that in our culture men are fascinated with breasts there was an instant of shock. The women burst out laughing. They laughed so hard, they fell on the floor. They said, "You mean, men act like babies?"

The women of the Mali culture were amazed to hear that men could have such a fascination with something that they had to deal with every day. The sexual attitude that the Western culture has developed concerning a women’s chest has classified them as sexual organs, another part of the female genitals. This assumption is incorrect; breasts have no part in producing a child, merely in nourishing one. The basic anatomy of the breast is the glands, fatty tissue, ducts, and nipple. Instead of honoring it for the miracle that it is, men have turned the breast into an obsession. It is interesting to note that it is the nipple itself that seems to be causing all of this stir. Some of the string bikini’s seen on music videos are nothing more than two tiny triangles on top, but as long as her nipple is covered the soft porn on display is allowed. The nation was shocked to see Janet Jackson bare her breast during the halftime show of the Superbowl game, yet they had know problem with the provocatively dressed dancers surrounding her who were bumping and grinding with everything they had.

Many women across our country, as well as countries much like ours have attempted to confront this backwards way of thinking. The Topfree Equal Rights Association was started to fight back against this view of breasts by emphasizing that fact that if a man is able to take his shirt off in a public facility, so should a woman. Many people will attempt to fight against movements such as these for varying reasons. Conservatives will simply not approve, but it would be the pornographic industry that would fight back the hardest against the de-sexualization of women. Without the mystery and forbidden nature of a woman’s chest the porn industry would lose billions of dollars each year. Arguments will also be given that defend the biological and chemical differences in men and women and in their brains. These arguments cannot hold their own, since it is not all cultures that feel this way about breasts.

Though the concept of women walking around topless equally with men is a bit extreme, as a culture we need to change our view about women and their bodies in general. Women should never be rebuked for breastfeeding in public, and young women across the country should not feel so extremely bad about their bodies that they would resort to methods as drastic as plastic surgery. It is unfortunate that the upcoming generations of children will be raised to think that the purpose of the breast is to sell beer, instead of providing the best possible nutrition for the baby.

Trivia Question

An examination of the 1989 issues of Sports Illustrated Magazine found that of the 644 photographs of females, only __% were of athletes, and these were concentrated in a very few sports, especially tennis.

Trivia Question

This has turned into "What can I do to stump Kim question"

What are the permeable capillaries that recieve the tissue fluid, but also allow any bacteria, viruses, or cancer cells in the loose connective tissue to travel throughout the body with ease?

Hello Everyone

I went home last weekend and it was so fun. Trevor Safford went with me, and we visited the pigs, picked some apples, visited my grandparents dairy and watched a calf be born, went to the homecoming game (Everyone is asking Shaylene who my boyfriend was), went to a hockey game, went to a haunted house, played some playstation, carved pumpkins. Basically did everything you could ever want in 2 days.

I have been running around like crazy for the past few weeks after I got involved with BYUSA (the student leadership association) as the Program Director for the Baby Pageant during Homecoming week. I dont think that I ever could have guessed how time consuming that job would be, but now that it is all over, I definitely think that it was worth it. I did skip a few too many classes and I havent seen my roommates for a long time, but I am stil really glad I did it, and I think that next year I would like to work in the offices Luckily I have awhile before I decide on that because it is such a big deal and such a large time commitment. I really like the people that I work with in the office, and it is a great feeling to know that I helped such a large group of people have a good time. Everyone I talked too said they walked away from the pageant with a really good experience. There were about 100 babies who particpated, and I was even in the Daily Universe (BYU's newspaper). Newsnet still does not have the article up on their website.

When I was getting the prizes ready for the baby pageant, I did something so cool. One of the categories had a football signed by the football team, and a volleyball signed by the volleyball team as a prize. When I took the volleyball and football down to be signed, I took an extra volleyball and an extra football down with me and has those signed as well. Now my aparment has the football on display, and I am going to give the volleyball to my sister for Christmas.

Things are going pretty good with my roommates, I hardly ever see them because I am so busy, but I dont regret living with them. We do have a few minor arguments (nothing verbal, girls never say anything to each other, they just vent to the other girls that they live with), but nothing too out of the ordinary for college life. We have cleaning checks on Tuesday, but we arent worried about that becaue I am friends with the girl that checks us off and I dont think that she will fail us.

School is hard, and I am basically failing every class that I am taking. I am going to have to devote my life to the lab this week, somethign which I am not excited about because spending time with dead bodies is anything but fun. I dont hate it as much as I did when I started, my TA taught me that sucking on Jolly Ranchers will keep me from getting sick, and it is pretty cool to learn about how the human body works. I have started looking into majoring in Dietetics, which I think I would love, but if I do I am going to have to try a little harder in nutrition. I dont think that they will appreciate an F on my transcript for the basic nutrition class. If I do go into Dietetics, I will reapply for Film, this time for the minor, which I think will be so perfect me, as well as a minor in women's studies.

When I right click and drag the mouse around in my Firefox browser it makes some red lines. Does anyone know why this happens?

Us and Apartment 11 are going to Disneyland the first week of December and we are so excited about it. Any suggestions on places we should visit in LA?

Questions of the Day (Feel free to post your answers as comments!)
1-If you were starting a rock band what would you name it?
2-Do you prefer Peanut butter on both slices or peanut butter on one slice, jam on the other?
3-Who is your favorite superhero?
4-If you could have one super power what would it be?
5-What scares you more than anything?