(no subject)

I'm having a somewhat interesting experience with looking at ads for my anthro paper. Approximately, it's about women's bodies in advertising, and the effect the lack of respect for women that this engenders has on the relationship between men and women. The ones for Dove's Campaign For Real Beauty are interesting, because the campaign is trying to deliberately flout some advertising norms.

I'm finding myself looking at ads like the one in this article, and thinking that they look pretty damn skinny. And then I have to remind myself that yes, skinny, but in most ads? Skinnier. I mean, these women are not stretching the bounds of what sorts of bodies are socially acceptable by a whole lot, but they are stretching it some. That's why this Dove campaign was such a big deal.

This is probably a good thing for life, that women who are somewhat less airbrushed look normal and attractive to me. Less a good thing for this paper, though -- it's harder to write about things that are common to advertising without having a mental picture of what it is.

(no subject)

Compared to my brother, I'm kind of ridiculously straight-edge. Considering that my brother is pretty straight-edge, this is sad.

His flight was about an hour late, so we got back to campus around 1:15. Picked up a couple of DOS movie tickets and dropped off the DOS van binder, then tossed a frisbee around for a while. Having nothing better to do, we went to Von's. Groceries obtained: two liters of Cactus Cooler, one box of Nilla wafters, six pack of raspberry Smirnoff, one bottle whiskey. Awesome. We did Thai in the Village for dinner; in theory, we were going to hang out there until Star Trek, but he forgot the tickets, so we headed back up to Mudd. Plan B was to head back down for 21 Choices and movie later in the evening, but I got four hours of sleep last night because I'm bad at essay and my brain seems to think that sleep dep is a good way of breaking writing blocks, and he was up at 4:00 EST to catch his flight here so he was exhausted. I ended up napping on the couch for a bit. When I woke up to see what he was up to, I found him sacked out on my floor. Aw. Needless to say, we did not go to the movie. I offered movie here; he said that he'd rather just go to bed. So I watched last night's episode of SYTYCD, and he's sleeping.

My brother is really cool. We haven't interacted a whole lot in the past while, because we've both been doing our own things. It turns out that we're actually a lot alike, in the ways that we think and interact with each other, except that he's super more laid-back than I am. He's all grown up -- he's going to graduate a semester after I do, and is applying to med school. The thing he brought to entertain himself is an MCAT study book. He'll all, like, interesting and stuff, and he's working on cool bio research that he's exciting about, and he thought ahead to bringing CDs for driving!

I'm really proud of him, and I'm really glad he's here visiting. Shh, don't tell. :D