I confess I had been really bad at making time to do the blogs. The idea of these blogs should be the regular documentation of my thoughts, a summary of my periodical personal progress, and a space for me to dialogue with myself, so it’s definitely a worthy thing to hold on to.
It had been two intense weeks at school. Courses started, making new friends and grabbing beers really cost a lot of energy. But I do enjoy the time coming back to school. For one year and a half, I had been working at different places, even though it was also a good learning process in terms of professional skills and deeper knowledge in the working environment, but it was totally different compared with life at school.
Being a student gives you the privilege of enjoying the process of learning, it doesn’t have to serve a specific purpose (as most of the things I learned at school won’t apply to my work). Students at school are driven by the desire to learn, and that’s the most efficient encouragement. It’s almost like the incentive to have fun, but more profoundly positive.
So for this week, I will write down some progress I made in reading (still the same two books, should finish them in February) and also interesting topics I encountered in the classroom.
Commodified relationships: is true love just a fantasy in modern society?
In <sex work matters>, there’s a chapter dedicated to the relationship of strippers (mostly female). For those strippers who get themselves involved in a long-term relationship, they are facing peculiar problems.
I do find this chapter very educative and thought-provoking. From movies, we always have this image that strippers are always involved in miserable relationships with people who have similar occupations: DJs, bartenders, or drug dealers. It reflects the truth, as strippers found it easier to date someone from the “same world” as them, so they won’t feel judged and will be treated more equally in the relationship.
Being a stripper means they are more inferior in a relationship, as “stripping” is always stigmatized. Even strippers are not always providing sex services, their partners are still always feel offended by the fact that their female partners are displaying their bodies to please other male customers. In heterosexual relationships, “sexual ownership” means the female body becomes an object, and it was not owned by the woman herself, but by her partner. Once the body was used for commercial benefit, the “owner” will feel offended as he has to share that ownership with other male clients.
Most of the strippers that this research reached out to accepted the condemnation from their partners and perceive it as unavoidable. They accepted the fact that their occupation make them less worthy in a relationship.
Leave the research background and the special setting of “stripping ” aside, this chapter revealed some cold truth of “romantic relationships”. It always ends up with the feeling of “ownership”, and most of the time people are not loyal to each other, but more because they are committed to the ownership itself. But is the obsession of possessing another person really the healthy part of a relationship? Is it male-dominated psychology? (or both?)
Things I learned from climbing and squash.
Don’t look at the next block. This was the first sentence JD (super amazing climber) told me when I started on the first day. Focus on your legs, your strength, your breath, and don’t think about reaching the next block. Kept this in mind, I reached a lot more blocks.
Weirdly enough, it also works with squash. I always thought to catch the ball, you have to stare at the ball all the time. But that didn’t work, I miss the ball every single time. Until I forgot about the “goal” to catch and hit the ball, I can hit the ball more easily.
Guess it works in other parts of my life. I am one of those people who will get anxious really easily as I am always worrying about uncontrollable consequences. Paradoxically, the more worried I am, the more screw up I am. People can not perform well if all they care about is the outcome, that’s not easy to do, but I do need to stop thinking about the final destiny and pay more attention to the journey itself.
