So, humans have a tendency to remember the better parts of a situation and forget the worse. To me this seems good because all we have are our memories of it, for the most part--I admit that this is probably becoming less and less true--and I would certainly rather look back on a rose-tinted life in my old age than not; however, the problem arises when the realities of the present clash with idealistic representations of the past to create a wistful nostalgia that yearns for "the old days" or "simpler times." I think Americans are as prone to that nostalgia as everyone else and no holiday represents it moreso than the good ol' Fourth of July.

The United States was founded on idealism. I don't think that it was any more purely implemented then than now. Politicians were still politicians, and many historians have worked to peel back the godlike image that Americans have constructed around their founding fathers. Yet our national folklore relies on the morality of the Revolutionary War, or else why does the country exist at all? Thus all men involved are converted to saints because perhaps we are afraid we would have nothing left, otherwise.

Today is the day when we celebrate all of that. People gather up their families and have cookouts and watch fireworks and think about patriotism and freedom and all those wonderful things. And that is not a facetious statement: I truly believe that patriotism and freedom are wonderful things, or at least they can be. I wear red, white, and blue today not because I think America is the best country there is or that it can't make mistakes, but because I have hope that we can achieve change and a better future. To do that, however, we cannot cling blindly to the ideals of the past. We have to let go of some of that nostalgia and face the world with a fresh perspective.

Listen to me, speaking in nothing but generalities. I sound like a politician.

But honestly, I feel like so much of American folklore yearns for the benefits of yesteryear, when everyone knew everyone and there weren't the gritty, agonizing issues that we have today. To a certain extent, people just have to get over it. Maybe I'll never really know my next-door neighbors, but I can do something to help the environment, to try and engage the problems of today.

... but I didn't realize how much of one it really is until I read this book, Overachievers, by Alexandra Robbins. It follows the specific cases of a few driven students as well as examining the trials of high school students nation-wide. There are some really fascinating and deeply scary statistics in there.

I'm only about halfway through the book at the moment, but my understanding of the problem is something like this: high school students feel pressured to do well, therefore they overreach themselves. That sounds like a pretty simple problem basically rooted in the students' own inability to judge how much they can actually handle. Robbins, however, paints a completely different picture. From her statistics and first-hand experience with the problem, high school overachieving is actually a social epidemic. The fault may lie with teenagers themselves, but no more than it lies with teacher, parents, college officials, or any of the other myriad of individuals who contribute to the frenzy. Students face insane pressure from all of these sources to get into top-tier schools and are subjected to SAT-prep course, sessions with college counselors, and even applications to elite preschools as a result.

So students work themselves to the point of exhaustion to reach the all-important goal: the Ivy League. Yes, the name-recognition is a boon in the professional world and they are good schools, but they have been held up as the ideal for every academically competent student. That is what is hopelessly flawed about this whole thing. Students who get into Ivy League schools are just thought to be on a whole other level from students who don't, but with around 16 students competing for every spot (that was the statistic that Brown gave me, anyway), how can you really be sure that one student is better than others? It can probably get kind of arbitrary, but now I'm just speculating, so let's get back to some hard facts.

What I do know is that (according to Robbins, anyway) college ranking systems are weighted so that Ivy Leaguers come out on top. That's just the way it is, and other colleges pull all sorts of tricks even up to the point of fabricating data in order to ensure a top placement. This leaves a student with an insane sense of competitive pressure to get into a school which may or may not be good for him or her. Of course, when I started talking about this in school, one of my classmates accused me of being a conspiracy theorist, so maybe I'm getting too worked up about this.

But isn't this something worth getting worked up over? I only started worrying about colleges my senior year in high school, so I'm not really a part of this overachiever culture. I do what I do because I like to learn and don't mind school, but some parents are directing their children's entire lives towards getting into Harvard, or some such. Even if they do get in, the question still remains:

Then what?

Hey, it's Monday!

So, Greek creation myth. This week, instead of posting a giant block of bold text, I'll merely summarize.

In the beginning there may have been several different things, depending on whom you ask. Some say that there was merely void and Nyx, a great black bird, some say that there was Erebus, place where the souls of the dead dwell. We'll go with Nyx, since I like that one better. Nyx laid an egg in which Love was hidden, and he made the two halves of the egg in to Uranus and Gaea, the heaven and the earth. They fell in love and produced many children: three Cyclopes, the three Hecatoncheires, and twelve Titans. However, Uranus was a bad father and banished all except the Titans to the furthest regions of the earth. Gaea, angered by this treatment of her children, asked the Titans to kill their father, but the only one willing to do it was the youngest, Chronos.

Uranus was either killed or exiled, and it doesn't really matter which because not Chronos was on top! He was, however, a little paranoid and not much of a better father than his good old dad, because when he heard he would be overthrown by one of his children, can you guess what he did? That's right, kids, he swallowed his own children! Rhea, his wife and sister, (yes, ew, but this is Greek mythology, here, so get over it) decided after four or five that she had had just about enough of this, so when she was about to deliver her youngest child she went to visit some nymphs. She left her newborn son with them and fooled her husband, who was apparently not able to distinguish between a baby and a stone (maybe all his children were hard and lumpy?) into swallowing a rock instead of Zeus.

Meanwhile, back in nymph land, Zeus was raised into a strong young man and was given a potion that could make his father throw up his older siblings. Delightful! So he tricked his father into drinking it (probably by disguising it as a baby, or something) and hooray, all the gods were back! However, Chronos was not going down without a fight, and enlisted his Titan brethren (Except for Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Oceanus, who knew well enough to stay well out of it) into making war on the gods! Atlas was their military leader and almost won. Then Zeus banished the Titans into Tartarus, except for Atlas, to whom he gave the extra special duty of holding up the earth for the rest of eternity.

Zeus, deciding that the earth looked a little empty, had Prometheus (forethought) and Epimetheus (afterthought) create man and animals, and give them each gifts to help them survive. Prometheus sat down to make man in the image of the gods, and Epimetheus gleefully started making animals. When Prometheus was done, he turned to his brother who blushingly admitted that he had given all of the gifts away. So Prometheus rolled his eyes and gave man fire, even though that was supposed to be for the gods only. It was supposed to be on the down low, but apparently Zeus found out and chained him to a wall where he was doomed to have his liver eaten out by a vulture every day. F o r e v e r. Tasty!

To Epimetheus Zeus gave the extremely clever Pandora and her lovely box, whose story I'm sure you know. Otherwise, look it up on Wikipedia, or something.

Mostly I like this story because all of the animals used up the special gifts. :P

Silly me, I forgot that my life is nuts and I'm bad at this sort of thing. But what can you do?

I feel like my Psychology class is slowly dismantling all hopes that I had for human objectivity. First it was hindsight bias and false memories, now we're starting in on the way we perceive the world. Reliable? Mostly. Accurate? Maybe. But then again, there's change blindness, when a man who asks a stranger for directions can be switched with an Asian woman and the direction-giver may not notice. Admittedly, this is because all of our senses are picking up an amazing amount of information at any given time, and we can only consciously focus on a very small fraction of it (think a ratio of 1:2,750,000). Thus, our senses are keen enough to get us by through most of everyday life, but the holes that scientists have uncovered–in the form of various optical and auditory illusions–worry me because as we build an increasingly complex society, there will be an increasing burden on our senses. There may be a time when our basic senses become inadequate for everyday life, and what then? Just something to think about.

Well, now I've looked at some more sources and come up with two separate Australian creation myths. Go figure. Both involve an all-powerful patriarchal god and a female Mother Sun to a certain extent. In one, the Great Father sends the sun down to the earth to give form to the sleeping spirits. In another he goes down himself and awakens the water snake to create rivers and shapes the spirits into plants and animals.

Gotta say, I really have no idea which if these three is the most authentic, if any. That would require a bit more research which I may well get to at some point. I'm kind of disappointed with these new versions, though. I was excited by the idea of individuals spontaneously shaping the world around them, cutting order into the disordered bundles of animals and plants. These latest two seem like more typical creation stories based on a father figure already established as being at the top of the spiritual hierarchy.

However, I do appreciate the appearance of a female sun god. All of the sun gods I've seen before (in my admittedly incomplete personal experience) have been male, aligning with the interpretation of fire as a male element. However, these myths seem to emphasize the nurturing aspects of the sun, and therefore label it as a woman, a mother.

I guess the moral is that I should do some more research before next Monday. :)

As some of the religion part of this blog, I've decided to post and reflect on a new creation myth every Monday. I figured it's appropriate, being the "first day" of the Christian creation story and the first day of the school week. Today's myth comes from the Australian Aboriginal People.

In the beginning the earth was a bare plain. All was dark. There was no life, no death. The sun, the moon, and the stars slept beneath the earth. All the eternal ancestors slept there, too, until at last they woke themselves out of their own eternity and broke through to the surface.

When the eternal ancestors arose, in the Dreamtime, they wandered the earth, sometimes in animal form -- as kangaroos, or emus, or lizards -- sometimes in human shape, sometimes part animal and human, sometimes as part human and plant.

Two such beings, self-created out of nothing, were the Ungambikula. Wandering the world, they found half-made human beings. They were made of animals and plants, but were shapeless bundles, lying higgledy-piggledy, near where water holes and salt lakes could be created. The people were all doubled over into balls, vague and unfinished, without limbs or features.

With their great stone knives, the Ungambikula carved heads, bodies, legs, and arms out of the bundles. They made the faces, and the hands and feet. At last the human beings were finished.

Thus every man and woman was transformed from nature and owes allegiance to the totem of the animal or the plant that made the bundle they were created from -- such as the plum tree, the grass seed, the large and small lizards, the parakeet, or the rat.

This work done, the ancestors went back to sleep. Some of them returned to underground homes, others became rocks and trees. The trails the ancestors walked in the Dreamtime are holy trails. Everywhere the ancestors went, they left sacred traces of their presence -- a rock, a waterhole, a tree.

For the Dreamtime does not merely lie in the distant past, the Dreamtime is the eternal Now. Between heartbeat and heartbeat, the Dreamtime can come again.

So that's interesting, isn't it? The materials for human beings were just lying around, and it never really says who made them.

I like, however, the element of self-creation. The Ungambikula created themselves, woke themselves from their eternal slumber, and went out and themselves created the world, the people the plants. The people were originally helpless themselves, but they in turn went out to shape the world. Yet they always needed to remember their origins, the creatures that made up their original bundle. That's definitely a different idea of a totem animal than what I'm used to.

Sorry this is so short, I need to get going to school. Maybe more later.

That is the first and last time I will make that pun on this blog, I swear.

Before I entered my Psychology class, I–like most people, probably–didn't really know how the brain works. I had a general idea that neurons fire and stuff happens (heck, I've already taken biology, so I learned about stuff on a cellular level in MORE DETAIL THAN YOU WANT TO HEAR ABOUT), but that is the most general of generalities. Now I'm a month into my AP Psychology course and... Well, I still only have a general idea about how the brain works (how much does anybody know, really?) but what I do know is so cool!

For instance, you have a blind spot in each eye where your optic nerve connects to your retina (check it out for yourself here). It doesn't affect you in every day life because one eye can generally cover for the blind spot of the other, but it's the kind of useless trivia that I really like.

And babies are born with a ton of reflexes. I also cherish this knowledge, however it makes me want to go up to strangers and poke their babies. I feel that this is a less than desirable compulsion.

And... Well, I could go on, but if you really wanted to know a list of cool facts, you'd look up a Psychology website, or something. Bottom line, Psychology is really cool, but it's also really controversial. You may have heard of the Milgram experiment. Although it sounds really terrible, it's also stuff like that that makes Psychology interesting to learn about, because it's so inextricably tied up in ethics.

However, I will make sure not to use my knowledge for evil. I promise. :)