3/17/11

I hope the that never happens to me ever again...............       Am I old?
    Today at my job, this kids took some weird games and they were playing with it all afternoon. The kids seemed to have been having a lot of fun with the games, so I approach them ( I regret doing that ). When I asked the kids what they were playing, they quickly gave me a weird look and hesitated to tell me what they were doing, eventually they told ( it sounded a bit complicated.) The game seemed complicated but fun, I asked one of the kids if I could play, he said yeah. Not even three minutes had gone by when I had lost, I was surprise, I thought that I had the hang of it but apparently not. After losing about three times, the kid got mad and told me that should stop playing because I was to old to understand the game. I was shocked, a little kid was dissing me. The comment made me sad, it made me realize that maybe I was getting a bit old ;( .
    In this depressing moment in my old life  ;( , made me different from everyone else. In this example, I think that I was a member of the outgroup A.K.A the old group. I was one of the old kids in the room and they were the ingroup or the cool kids. Overall today was not a good day at work.

Anywayssssssssssss.
     This week, we had to break a folkway and I can honestly say that breaking a folkway was fun and awkward at the same time. The folkway that I decided to break was related to clothing.  People in America judge one another by the clothes that they are wearing. If someone saw a person wearing a lot of silk and flashy accessories, one might think that person was rich, compared to someone wearing old rags of clothes with dirt marks. What I decided to do was wear my underwear on top of my jeans. I went to the store and bought  a  boxer decorated with smiley face . When I got home, I rubbed it against the dirt so that it would get some uniqueness and I played tug of war with my dog ( poor dog, didn't know what she was doing). The idea of making the appearance of the underwear look bad was to try and change the peoples view towards my appearance more realistic ( people would notice that the boxer was new). At first I was scared the response that I would get from the people would be exaggerated and I could get in serious trouble ( lucky me nothing bad happened :)). My hypothesis was the people would start to walk away as soon as they saw me, and try to avoid any sort of contact with me. At first, the people weren't responding the way that I hoped. People instead gave me a dirty, disapproving look that made me a bit uncomfortable. I than thought that maybe people weren't doing anything because they were under the influence of groupthink. Maybe people weren't doing anything like telling the manager, or someone in authority because they thought that someone else was going to do it or the people just didn't want to be members of an outgroup that could arouse at any moment ( members  of the outgroup could include people that made contact with me whether it was directly or indirectly ). So instead of changing my underwear lol, I decided to change the location and try to go somewhere else where the people would be different and surely the response should be too. I went to ALDI, La Tampico, Burger King and Jewel, and yet not many people responded the way the I was expecting. It seemed as though woman were the ones that did most of the moving and evil look thing. The males seemed to have been the ones that didn't take much notice to the fact that I was wearing my underwear over my jeans ( that worried me a bit I was thinking that maybe they had also done it so they weren't surprise).

Overall breaking a folkway was really fun and interesting. I found out that people will just try to give you a vibe that will make you uncomfortable than actually doing something about it. I wonder if people would change their respond if I would have changed my underwear.

After the whole experiment, I threw away my new boxers, I kind of wanted to keep them as a memory of what I did, but my mom made me throw them away, she said that it was disgusting, which I don't see how but ok.

Hope that we get to do something more like that, it was really fun and interesting.