Thursday, July 2, 2009

Relationships

We watched a very interesting movie in class today. It's called Rain Man, and it is about a man who finds his long lost brother, and kidnaps him for money. He never knew of his brother because he was autistic and got sent away to an institution, but when their father passes away, Charlie tracks down the money to his brother Raymond. The movie goes on to show the two bonding. At first Charlie was in it for the money, but in the end he realized that Raymond was the only family he had left so he wanted to do everything in his ability to keep him around. The story was very touching and I'm grateful that I don't have to go through any of the emotions that Charlie felt.

In an article that I'm reading for homework it talks about teenagers hooking up, and how most teenagers don't want serious relationships in high school. I found the topic very interesting, because they openly discussed their private lives and what they did when they "hooked up". As said in the article, the term hooking up is very vague and can mean multiple different things. It's interesting to see how other teenagers around the nation go about in their private lives, in contrast to my life. I grew up learning the do's and don'ts of my culture. Hooking up would be a shameful thing to do; most of them hook up with strangers. I would never want to bring shame upon myself and my family. Topics like sex and relationships were not openly discussed with friends and family, so when I read the article I couldn't believe that these teenagers (some younger then me!) would spill secrets like this. You can definitely see the cultural differences between the "teenagers of suburban America" and people in my culture. Which is eccentric because you always assume that everybody acts similar until you read something like this, that can totally change your opinion.

1 comment:

Don Gosney said...

Gina,

Nice stuff.

I'm glad you were able to see the movie Rain Man and see a side to autism that contrasts some of what I was reading from yesterday's class.

I'm also interested in your response to the article you were studying about teenage hookups. I understand that some cultures are reticent to discuss such things but doesn't that cause other problems? Teenagers need the freedom to discuss things around them. How else are they to learn.

We have some cultures here in the US who feel that if you don't talk to teenagers about premarital sex, homosexuality and drugs then the problems will never be a part of their children's lives. Yet even in those cultures we see rampant sexuality, drug abuse and homosexuality so maybe silence really isn't the answer.

There is, however, a big difference between discussing these things and bragging about them.

Perhaps when our young adults feel they can openly discuss items of such importance we can break away from this cycle of ignorance.