The Meanings of Cars

Our society values cars on so many levels. First of all, we see them as a necessity for transportation. Most of us don’t live in walking distance of everywhere that we need to go and public transportation is not always considered. When we think of transportation the first thought we have is a car, it is the easiest and fastest way to get anywhere. This is not what I thought of when writing this blog. The first thing I thought of was how the car represents a right of passage. In our culture a car represents freedom. We look at it as a separation from our parents, that we are able to go wherever we want whenever we want. Of course this is regulated by laws and parental rules, but we don’t think of that when we get our first car. A car is important in our lives, we always remember our first car. We see this right of passage as a symbol of independence. Since you can begin to drive at the age of 16 but cannot be completely independent from your parents till you are 18, having a car and driving is a way of establishing some sort of independence and responsibility without having the full experience.
Not only are cars a right of passage, but they are a status symbol in our culture. Everyone knows which cars are expensive and which are not, and judge the person driving the car by that price tag. Everyone is always trying to buy a more expensive car, and I understand the quality of the car is better, but when you get up to the $100,000, that’s ridiculous. This shows that people are willing to spend that much money on a car, because they know it will gain them respect, whether it be from themselves or others. Some people spend hours on their cars making sure they look perfect, because they feel it is a reflection of themselves.
Cars also relate to space in our culture. Many people extend their personal space to their car, as I described in my earlier blog “Personal Space”. We decide who we let in our car, what we put in it, and design it to look exactly how we want it. I wouldn’t let a stranger get inside of my car, I try to keep my car clean, and I generally only have certain things inside of my car. I get embarrassed when my car is dirty, I feel like it reflects on myself. My car, this thing on wheels for TRANSPORTATION, has so many other meanings in my life.

My Real Kinship Chart

After making my kinship charts in class I thought about who I actually consider my family. My charts are very small, and I don’t even know my mom’s brothers. If I were to draw another kinship chart of who I really considered family it would look like:

I believe most people in the class would have had a different kinship chart if we didn’t have to do it by blood. I have not met anyone who has a friend that they consider family. I believe our culture values blood ties to identify who we are and where we came from, but in everyday life our culture needs other ties than just blood to survive. This reminded me of a book I read in my Intro to Sociology class called “All Our Kin” by Carol Stack. Their family would have starved to death without help from friends around them. The support structure that this family living in poverty had did not just come from the blood tie of the family unit itself. I think family is a support structure, and I know many “families” that don’t support each other, they just live under the same roof. It was really depressing looking at my kinship chart because it was so small. The new version is full of people that support me and do love me. I don’t think blood kinship charts are a good representation of the family at all.

Delaney Ch.6 Excersise #2

I can think of several times that I tried to make my body conform to the cultural norm or standard. It all started in middle school when bodies started to matter, when the word “fat” was a word worse than any other. It was ridiculous, I went to a very small middle school so as my body changed everyone noticed it whether they wanted to or not. This put pressure on all of the girls in my class to try and control our changing bodies, some of us gained weight while others lost it. I noticed this created a clique between the two groups, those of us that gained it were so jealous of the ones that lost it that we were willing to speak badly about them even though we probably didn’t mean everything we said.
So what did I do? I joined a gym. LA Fitness had just opened by my house and my friend and I joined, we thought we were so cool going to the gym. We went everyday for the whole summer, and we did lose some weight, but we quit going once we lost it. We thought our weight loss was complete, we weren’t going to the gym to become healthy or change our life style, and we were doing it for the momentary satisfaction. I am glad I went to the gym instead of developing an eating disorder. When I got into high school I began to see the many ways that people would conform their bodies to society standards. Girls would wear makeup everyday religiously and it seemed like everyone had something to complain about their body. I watched girls starve themselves, binge eat and purge, I actually had a girl on my basket ball team who only joined to lose weight and then passed out on the court from de hydration and she hadn’t eaten in a couple days.
Most of these girls did lose weight, and even though most of them looked sick, people would tell them “oh you look so good”. This disgusted me, and after thinking about the culture of our beauty, I realized that our culture doesn’t care if we are healthy, our culture cares if we are a certain size, where certain clothes, and look a certain way. Everybody is going for that momentary satisfaction and not thinking about making healthy life choices. Society has an impossible image of the perfect women, not a lot of women are a size 2. Our society should stop putting so much pressure on women. I love the comparison that this chapter makes of the expectations society has for us and the product they give us. There are fast food restaurants on every corner but we have to be a size two. Our culture has a horrible and unfair view of the body.

Iroquois System of Kinship