Day 131

Hobbit bench.

Do girls just generally have a brighter view of the world?  Talking to my older students, I find that the girls are so much more positive than the boys, in their interests, their view of the world, their relationships with one another, just about everything.  While the boys like violent movies and heavy music, the girls are more drawn to dramas and more pleasant-sounding songs.  It makes you believe in stereotypes.

Evolutionary psychology, a relatively new field (30+ years) posits that play has an evolved biological basis.  Research with human children and vervet monkeys has yielded very similar results in terms of females choosing dolls and boys choosing trucks. You could extrapolate from that the progression from trucks to violent games and movies, and from dolls to quiet dramas.

Tim and I and the boys saw the trailer of a movie called Kickass together.  It looked like a spoof on superhero movies, with real kids trying to be superheroes.  So when it came out I suggested that we all go to see it.  My friend Karen told me that it had received very mixed reviews, mainly because it was incredibly violent, Quentin-Tarantino-violent.  Children are the main characters, including a little girl, who apparently kills grown men in the most graphically bloody way.  This very reason put me off ever having the faintest desire to see the movie, but sent the boys and Tim into enthusiastic anticipation of it!  It is so bizarre. 

And today on the radio I heard an interview with Sebastian Junger, who spent 15 months with an American platoon in a remote region of Afghanistan and then wrote a book about it called simply, War.  He said that when the men get home, they all miss the war terribly, they miss the excitement, the fighting, and most of all the "brotherhood".   It seems as though men always have to go through something together, like being in a war, or climbing a mountain, or running a marathon, or some kind of hardship, in order to be able to reach out to one another and talk about real things, like love, like family, like life, in order to feel part of this "brotherhood".  Women can just have a cup of tea together and they will soon tell each other their whole lives, they're part of the sisterhood before they even sit down.
 

Gerhard Richter did paintings which look like blurry photographs.  So I have done an actual blurry photograph for tonight.  A metaphor for confusion, everything not quite in focus.