Life's Soundtracks

“Fifteen”- Taylor Swift. I really like this song because I feel that it relates to a lot of young girls as it did for me during my high school years. This song reminds me a lot of my first day of school every time a new school year would start because even though I knew my classmates well, I always felt nervous going to school on the first day and not knowing what to expect. As the day starts, it would always be exciting for me to see everyone and how they have changed, yet nerve wrecking in ways of not knowing how others will react when they would see me. I also felt that everything was nerve wrecking because I wanted to fit in and “liked” by everyone, so I would try my best to make a new good first impression. The lyrics that really relate to me are when: “You take a deep breath and you walk through the doors/It's the morning of your very first day/And you say hi to your friends you ain't seen in a while/Try and stay out of everybody's way/It's your freshman year and you're gonna be here/For the next four years in this town/Hoping one of those senior boys will wink at you and say/"You know, I haven't seen you around before"”

“Mistletoe”- Justin Bieber. My first time hearing this song was at the beginning of the school year this year and I instantly fell in love with it before it became popular or well known. Even though Christmas was such a long ways away, I still always listened to the song because Christmas is my favorite holiday. I also felt that it wasn't to early to listen to the song over and over again, and sometimes put it on replay because I feel like it's never to early to listen to Christmas music. The verse that I really like in the song is when he says, “Aye, it's the most beautiful time of the year/Lights fill the streets spreading so much cheer/I should be playing in the winter snow/But Ima be under the mistletoe/I don't wanna miss out on the holiday/But I can't stop staring at your face/I should be playing in the winter snow/But Ima be under the mistletoe” I feel like this relates to me because I love Christmas and, like Justin, I am not just looking forward to the holiday, but I am looking forward to spending it with someone that means a lot to me.

“Young Forever”- Jay-Z. This song strikes me every time knowing that I am get older by each given day instead of getting younger, so I always tell myself to live life and not let my faults in life bring me down but to learn from them. “Forever young I wanna be/Forever young/Do you really want to live forever/Forever and ever/Forever young I wanna be/Forever young” are the words that go through my time each time I listen to this song, and I wish that it were possible because life is to short.  

RESEARCH PAPER

"Changing gender roles and relationships in later life and the challenges to masculinity with advancing age are newly emerging areas in the study of gender and ageing." (Arber, Davidson & Ginn, 2003)

Arber, S., Davidson, K., & Ginn, J. (2003). Gender and ageing: Changing roles and relationships. Philadelphia: Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Yl77-wFZ1f4C&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=gender roles in relationships&ots=PUeLP_NJ67&sig=6ql1V7u2lw4iaGBHvUf7S0mGdZg


This source includes information on how gender role has changed over time and that society also has an impact on these changes.  I feel that this source is very reliable because it is a book and includes a lot of information that is relevant to what I am searching for my essay.  I am going to use this source to back up my opinion on gender roles, being that it has changed a lot over time and that gender roles also happen during sex, not just during everyday living.



"Popular culture has embraced the idea that women and men are different. Self-help books, talk shows, and magazine articles routinely acknowledge large gender differences, identify how these differences interfere with intimacy, and offer solutions about how individuals may overcome these differences in order to develop more fulfilling romantic relationships." (Vogel, Wester & Heesacker, 2003)

Vogel, D., Wester, S., Heesacker, M., & Madon, S. (2003). Confirming gender stereotypes: A social role perspective. 48, Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/docview/225371640/fulltextPDF?source=fedsrch&accountid=465

This article includes information about how there is such a large difference in gender roles and how these difference in roles influence their sexual behavior. I feel that this source is very reliable because it includes research on heterosexual dating couples and what their roles are.  So this information is great in backing up my essay with actual studies. I am going to use this article to include research information on different genders and how it has changed over time.

Chapter 9: Aiming a bit High

The chapter starts off talking about how Bob Hare is trying to broaden his PCL-R and teaching people how to use it by traveling from place to place around the country.  John Ronson then meets up with Bob at his hotel at Heathrow.  During their meet, Bob shares his travel experiences with Ronson and how he thinks that people can misuse the PCL-R checklist because there are many different ways to interpret the checklist in determining if someone is a psychopath or not.  Also, Bob shares that others can misuse the checklist because during his travel and teaching others how to use it, people kind of doze off and did their own think as he was teaching them how to interpret it.  After his meet with Bob, Ronson then meets up with Paul Britton, who is a man who seeks out ill-fated psychopaths and became famous from his ability to catch sexual psychopaths, at the Premier Inn.  Britton shares with Ronson an experience of how he caught a sexual psychopath who murdered a 23 year old woman, Rachel Nickell.  The person that he thought killed Nickell was wrongly concluded as a man named Colin Stagg.  It turned out that the man who was sketched looked a lot like an actual murderer named Robert Napper, but Stagg was considered the murder because he had fit Britton's profile.  After Napper had then been caught as the official killer of Nickell because of his many killings after Stagg was arrested, Britton's reputation was ruined because he had caught the wrong killer.

After reading chapter 8: The Madness of David Shayler and chapter 9: Aiming a bit High, I felt that the two chapters had really shown how crazy the world is and you never know what information is true or false and made up by crazy people in our society.  For chapter 8, it introduces a man named David Shayler, who is into the conspiracy theories of what actually happened when the north was on the tube in London the day the July 7th attacks. I liked this chapter because I am into conspiracy theories and learning about how others feel about a major event that cause a lot of trauma in others' lives.  For chapter 9, I like that Ronson had really shown that maybe people who are thought to be crazy on the Bob Hare checklist are maybe not crazy because there are other things that have triggered why the person acts a certain way.  Although the two chapters had shown me how crazy the world is, I feel that society expects that kind of crazy to fulfill our desires.  In saying this, it is like watching a scary or grotesque movie, although we say that things are scary or nasty, we are prone to those things and we expect those things from movies and want more of it.  So in some ways, I feel that there are a little bit of crazy in everyone to want those desires and to trigger our interests in things that are obviously judged my society and by us as something that is abnormally wrong.