Answer a daily question: written or mentally

what beliefs do we say we have but our actions show that we don’t?
Well I “believe” that i can do anything i set my mind to but until recently they were just words. I lacked self-discipline and motivation to achieve my goals.

What makes people feel infinite? For me sometimes it’s listening to certain music, or finding some sort of inspiration that puts things into perspective, and living in the moment, like today. I saw a yeklow flower, picked it up and smelled it. I took a picture of the turtles sunbathing on campus, and just relaxed.

I am taking an anthropological theories class, and a couple of days i was wondering about my own theories. I know i have many. I love when something makes you question another aspect of your life. The theory i am particular drawn to is that of agency ( an individual’s ability to determine their own social and economic interests, bridging the gap between free will and evolutionism). I love things that are out of the ordinary. It gives me hope that people have agency and create subcultures because it means we are not at the hands of our culture and society. Understanding my own theories about how the world works will be very interesting.

How does society generally listen to music? Is our relationship to the music we listen passive, maybe that’s why we drown out the lyrics and tune into only the visuals and beats.

This morning as i was making breakfast a quote i once read, I think it’s by Maya Angelou, but i may be wrong. The quote said something like “Take a day to recover from the lies you tell yourself and the ones others tell you.” What lies have i told myself and what lies have others told me. I think there are lies and there are white lies. White lies are the thing parents say to their kids, typical social lies. And I don’t mean lies as in they are completely false, but lies as in the people telling them don’t believe the lies themselves. For example telling your children that they can do anything or be anything they want. Horrible social lie. It’s not that they can’t. It’s what the parents really mean and how their actions don’t show that they believe the lie. Everyone’s always telling you what to think or believe, but not telling you the limitations. Yesterday i wa thinking about validation. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing or a universal thing, but it seems like many individuals in society are not taught to validate themselves. In fact i think most people are taught, indirectly, that to validate themselves is narcissistic or meaningless, that your value must come from other people. In a way i understand this thinking,i mean how can you call yourself lovable if no one loves you, or how can you say that you’re beautiful when you know you don’t fit the standards. To a degree it makes sense. But the problem,i think, is that we never fully appreciate these concepts of love, beauty,etc and then we’re bound to some standard someone created because we mindlessly bought into it. I can appreciate someone else’s standard without measuring myself up to it. Last night I was with my little sister and her friends at a 4th of July block party. they’re 15 so they were rating each other and my sister’s friend gave her a 6.5 out of 10, I asked my sister’s friend what her criteria was or who she thought deserved a 10 and she mentioned Megan Fox. She actually said on a scale of Missy Elliot(whom I’m assuming she’s giving a 1) to Megan Fox( the 10), my sister was a 6.5. For some reason everytime people bring up celebrities in this way i think of life imitating art, or art imitating life whichever one it is. What kind of standard is that? Where are people getting their ideas of beauty from? Do they realize that they are constantly seeing someone else’s definition of beauty that it’s an option and not the rule? My mind goes all over the place sometimes, and i started thinking about the documentary i watched a few nights ago called “Before the Music Dies.” It’s basically the same thing happening in the music industry, where the only thing you hear on the radio are the same songs, because they appeal to the majority. You don’t hear anything else or know about any other type of music because all they really play is rap, pop, and r&b. You don’t know about the independent soul artists, or electronic music, or anything else. Because of this you don’t even realize that you’re only listening to a SMALL portion of the music that’s out there, and because of that you don’t realize that you’re mindlessly listening to music because of the image of the artist and not really because of the merit of their craft. I found myself doing the same thing the documentary talked about. They said that radio stations use “focus groups” that decide what music should be played or not, based on whether or not they like the song in 30 seconds or less. I found myself not really listening to music and appreciating the music and lyrics but just wanting to hear something repetitive with a good beat. Now I am going to actually listen to the lyrics and analyze the music. Real musicians spend too much time making their music and writing their lyrics for it not to be appreciated properly by consumers.

Indepedence Day I spent at a neighborhood block party of my sister’s friend. Appropriately, I started thinking about the concept of freedom. I had just started reading the introduction of Ayn Rand’s “The Virtue of Selfishness” and thought about the neutrality and subjectiveness of words, like the word selfish, which Rand points out has the dictionary definition of “concern with one’s own interest.” The word has no innate moral implications, but we (society) decide that acting in our own interest is amoral, and it’s actually an insult if someone calls you selfish!I started writing about neutral words or words that have no real measurable definition. Think of the word “pretty” for example, or even “ugly”, all they mean is either aesthetically pleasing or not aesthetically pleasing, respectively. We give them “real” meaning by labeling things pretty or ugly, but it really is immeasurable and subjective. I guess my question would be “How and why do we give neutral words immense, and usually, negative meanings?”