December 1, 1992 – Journal Assignment 2

This journal entry comes from a Psychology 115 class I had in college. I mixed it in with my Thoughts papers because it represents my only thoughts from 1992. Each week, we were asked to write about specific aspects of our lives. For that reason, this is probably my most organized series of thoughts. I know it’s not as fun as my usual random thoughts, but it’s much more journal-like.

For most of my life, I’ve seen the connection between what goes into my body and the impact it has on me physically. About halfway through high school, I decided I was going to stop eating sugar. I did this because of both pimples and the harsh psychological effects I saw sugar having on my body. When I was a kid, I was quite a hyper child and psychologically high strung. As I realized, sugar was a major factor in my large mood swings. I decided I would eliminate the problem at the main source.

Slowly but surely, I weeded myself off of sugar until the only sugar I was getting was that found naturally in fruits, etc. It seems hard for some people to understand, especially when they offer me a piece of gum and I refuse. They can’t imagine giving up something they depend on. For me, the hardest part is not giving up the sugar, but having to just stand around drinking water at parties when everyone else is having sugary treats.

The biggest help to my non-sugar-eating habit was when my dad found out he had type 2 diabetes. He too had to eat like I was eating, but for a different reason. Now I would have to fight with him about buying cookies and ice cream because he couldn’t have them. My mom had no real problem with diabetes, but she gave in a little and cut down on her sugar eating – at least around my dad and me.

When people talk to me, not only can they not believe I don’t eat sugar, but they also can’t believe I was once a hyper child. They say that I look so calm and cool that I couldn’t have possibly been a hyper child, but I was. Actually, I have several broken toys and old furniture with holes in them to prove it. At this point, sugar is not something I need or desire in my life.

As far as exercise goes, I did used to work out regularly. In recent years, like most people’s excuse, I can’t find the time between working and school. I know that when I get my high-paying, creative job, I will take more time and care of my body. The one thing I do now is stretch every morning. It only takes about two minutes for me to do them, but I think they keep me flexible and somewhat in shape.

My personality is very B like. I know people who are A-type personalities, and I don’t like those people. They always seem like they’re running around like robots, but they never seem to get anywhere where they can be happy. Sometimes I would like more A-type personality traits in my life so that I could get more done. When I look at what they actually gain with all their rushing around, more and more headaches and rushing around, I’m glad I am who I am and not who they are.

 Week 2

Our house was always open to many wide topics. Sex was one of those topics. We didn’t openly talk about masturbation techniques or sexual positions in bed, but my parents were always open to questions we had concerning sex. There is always a great deal of embarrassment when you talk to your parents about sex because – well – they are your parents.

Most of the information I got about sex was from friends or on television and movies. I remember when we were kids, my parents took my sister and me a few times to R-rated drive-in movies. Most of them were rated R because of language or nudity and my parents knew these things would not turn either my sister or me into perverts when we grew up, so they let us watch them. When I’m a parent, I will raise my kids in the same manner. I think if more parents today worried less about sex in films and more about the violence, we’d have a much closer and freer society.

When sexuality comes up, I usually listen closely. At work (Redlands Recreation), when sex or learning about sex comes up, I always listen closely at how people answer. How they answer tells a great deal about their personalities. If they answer with great enthusiasm and vigor, they were probably brought up in a household where sex was discussed openly. If they answer with great hesitation and embarrassment, they were probably brought up in a home of many “taboos” – sex being one of them. The way people answer not only tells you about them sexually, but it also talks about them as people. Are they open to new things, to new experiences, to life? If they can’t talk about sex, what else can’t they talk about?

Masturbation as a subject is quite interesting. Only within the last 10 years has it been discussed openly. It has become of interest to me as of recent because I wrote a movie script in my script class with masturbation in it. Some people in the class, after they read my script, said that it was not in keeping with the humor of the rest of the script. It seemed to them a filthy thing to say. (These comments came especially from the older people in the class.) What they were referring to was the fact that masturbation is seen by many in society as a dirty, vulgar habit. They see it as having no place in a normal person’s life. Even if you’re married, there are going to be times that your spouse is away from you for a time. In this time, you either go without or serve yourself. In these times of aids and many other sexually transmitted diseases, I’d like to see masturbation right alongside the choices of using a condom and abstaining.

Homosexuality, like masturbation, is another taboo in our society. When I was younger, I took part in teasing those kids who didn’t fit, as far as society was concerned, in their “appropriate” positions in life. As I got older, I realized that the only reason I was teasing them was because I was afraid of them – that I might actually become like them just by being near them. Unfortunately, not everyone grows up as I did. Some people go their entire lives without ever growing up to the facts. It looks like things are changing, though, so we may someday come to where sexual preferences are just that – preferences.

Week 3

I suppose like most people I do have harmful amounts of self-doubt. Not having a date all throughout college has caused me to think more than once that it might be because I’m not desirable or that others wouldn’t want to date me. When I think about it, though, I realize the biggest barrier is the fact that I never ask girls out on dates. I always seem to have bigger problems than not having a date. It also scares me to death (or at least to pain) to think of walking up to a girl and asking her out on a date. I’ve never done it in the past and I can’t imagine doing it in the future.

I think I’m ready to love someone else, but it seems as if I don’t have the time to find that someone else. I know as I’m writing this that it’s completely false – about not having time to find someone else – but it helps me justify not having someone else in my mind, so I keep saying it. Actually, I mainly say it to other people when they probe into my life about why I don’t have a partner. It seems a simple thing to say, and it basically gets them off my back.

The only slightly intimate relations I have right now with other people are with my friends. Sometimes I probably feel that I have to entertain them more than I have to in order to keep them as friends. I’ve always used humor to get me through life and I feel it makes me interesting – whether or not it does. This probably stems from my only wanting friends who interest me.

Throughout my life, I have had several friends from other countries (Spain, Norway, China). I was always fascinated by things that were foreign to me. My interest in these friends was not really one of intimacy, but of curiosity. I wanted to find out about the parts of their cultures that weren’t in books. I was using them to find out about their countries. I have seen almost all my friends as more like employees than intimate relations. I think the only intimate relation I’m ever going to have will be with my wife. This may be a shallow view of intimacy, but it’s mine.

Week 4

The pressure I feel to stay in my sex role is quite real. I’m not saying that I always give in to that role, though. The pressure to always be “macho” or “cool” stems from a lack of intelligence to realize that these roles don’t really mean anything. They are merely the standards by which some will judge you. If you realize, though, that you probably don’t care what those people think of you anyway, you realize that following these roles is an idiotic pursuit taken on by idiots.

Not that I don’t follow any of the male roles society says are correct. I probably follow most of them without even realizing it. However, when I realize that I’m acting in one of the male roles, I usually do what feels right to me and no one else. If they can’t appreciate my independence as a person, then they can’t appreciate me.

As far as the book’s discussion on androgyny, I agree with the concept, but I don’t like the book’s choice of the word androgynous. If we were all androgynous, life would be boring. We’d all walk around in gray suits and short haircuts. Actually, I don’t think this will really happen, but it shows that the word androgynous has certain connotations that I don’t think the authors intended. In actuality, I don’t know if there is a word that would synopsize what they are trying to say. Even “equality” brings to mind the same picture that I mentioned before.

Both my parents took care of my sister and me when we were kids. My dad did work as my mom stayed home when we were little kids, but my mom later worked as well. My dad always had a good balance of “macho” and “feminine” qualities. He knew when and where to use both. My mom didn’t have too many “macho” qualities, but she had a great deal of authority in our house.

In recent years, my mom has become more of the breadwinner. My dad works as a substitute teaches now much of the time and my mom is a Systems Analyst for a growing computer company. I can see that it’s hard on my dad not to contribute more to the household. Sometimes he will break out in anger for seemingly no reason. Several times now he has not been hired back after his first year of teaching at a school. His main problem is his lack of self-esteem. The kids pick up on it and they use it against him to get what they want in the classroom. Unfortunately, the only way he can raise his self-esteem is to feel a sense of accomplishment which he can’t seem to find in the classroom. I find it frustrating at times to talk to him because of his low self-esteem. He’s not standing up for himself even when I kid him about small things. It’s hard for me to understand how my dad could be so weak when I always saw him as so strong.

Week 5

Dreams are interesting things. In our family, we always talked about our dreams and what we thought they meant. This helped us understand more and more over the years what our dreams were telling us about ourselves. One thing I’ve noticed about people’s dreams is that the more creative the person is, the more creative their dreams are. Some people have told me they have dreamed about being at work, at the supermarket, or many other places they are at in their daily lives. This tells me that these people are focused so heavily on their daily lives they are invading their dreams. They can’t ignore the real world long enough to escape to another place even in their dreams. These people were quite realistic and logical in their lives.

In my dreams, only rarely do glimpses of my actual life creep into the picture. My dreams are normally strange conglomerations of places from my past. The people or things in my dreams are also from different times in my past or they are merely fictional characters that I have made up in my mind seemingly to amuse myself in my dream. I’ve actually come up with full stories from very little editing of dreams I had the night before.

One dream I had involved an interracial couple from another planet who went to a deserted island to get away from the persecution they were getting from the other aliens. The dream was quite vivid, with many different locales and many memorable colors. People have talked about color in dreams as a sign of a creative mind. In my case, I have very definite and meaningful colors in my dreams.

Not all of my dreams have been purely creative. Some have been highly symbolic and frightening, with deep meaning in my life. These are dreams where I am being chased slowly by someone. I usually remember in my dreams that I can float within them. The ability to float and being chased had for a long time reoccurred in my dreams. When I look back on them, the floating was probably my escaping from adulthood by rising above it. The people chasing me, though not always, would be an adult of authority. I had to escape them because they wanted to keep me on the ground where I didn’t want to be.

One of the most bizarre and terrifying dreams I ever had was when I was in my house and there was a noise coming from somewhere in the house that I couldn’t place. As the noise persisted, I got more and more frustrated at hearing it. I thought it was the TV, so I did what any other normal person would do. I kicked the TV screen in with my feet. When that didn’t work, I destroyed other things in the house. Finally, I hurled myself out of the large window by our front door. The glass was everywhere around me, but so was the noise. When I eventually escaped the dream in complete terror by waking up, I realized that the noise was in reality coming from the fridge that was in my room because I was sleeping in what was going to be the garage. My body, even though I was awake, was frozen with terror. I couldn’t move almost as if I thought the noise was some kind of monster or person who was standing in the room ready to get me. I never heard that noise from the fridge again, but to this day, when I think about that dream, I get an eerie feeling. I get a cold shiver when I open a fridge. Then again, the same thing happened before I had the dream.