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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Push Continued

I have this book at the back of my mind all weekend and it has bothered me so much. I just can't help but think how horrible it was for her to be sexually abused by both her mother and her father. It also just sickens me to think about when she would discuss orgrasming when her father was raping her. I just couldn't imagine ever at any point how she must feel when that happens. She talks about it and it makes sense that she loves and hates the feeling at the same time and then it also doesn't make sense. I don't know how she will ever be in a relationship where she won't be haunted by what her father did. I could never even fathom how she could get live with someone else with those memories. I just don't see her ever having a successful relationship when everything in her life that would have been the basis of her understanding relationships was so twisted and abusive. I don't know how she could ever be in a relationship where she would feel safe. This bothers me on so many levels. I can't even go into everything I am feeling about it. Just reading what happened to her haunts me I wouldn't even want to think about living with it.

What makes me angry about what happened to her is that the hospital let Precious go back into that abusive household when she was pregnant the first time. If I was a nurse and was given that information I would have called social services immediately in order to get Precious and the baby into a safe home where they would be able to live abuse free. Social Services was created to protect children like Precious and still they did nothing. It just infuriates me. It was as though what happened to her was too horrible for anyone to want to deal with it just because they didn't want to have to hear about it. I kept thinking in my head through out the book what is wrong with people that they don't notice that this girl needs help? I can understand Precious being angry she has every right to be considering all of this happened to her. There were so many resources available for other people to take the initiative to remove her from the situation she was in and no one would help her. NO ONE... This just makes me sick to my stomach. I don't understand how people could stand idly by and think nothing of what was going on. Granted being confronted with a situation like that isn't easy to stomach, but life isn't easy and help to someone in need should not be denied. I just don't get it.... I really just don't get it...

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Push

Getting through this book took more sittings then I thought it would. It was technically a "quick read" but it was rough to get through. Every time I thought something wonderful was going to happen for Precious a memory from her childhood would come up. It just kept hitting me that there really was no escape for her from everything that had happened to her. She was going to always be reminded. I can only wonder how difficult it was for her to see her children and be a mother to them knowing that they were the product of rape. She mentions it a few times but she never dwells on it when it comes to Abdul. She truly wants Abdul to have a life that was nothing like hers. Its as though she doesn't want to think about Abdul as the product of rape so she can make sure to provide everything to him that she wasn't. If she could only remember the rape then I don't think she would have been able to be as a good a mother to him as she was.



That's another thing that gets to me. She tries to hard to be separated from the fact that she was raped and sexually abused by both parents and then at the same time she uses it as what defines who she has become. It's the idea of duality at the same time. She hurts and refuses to hurt. Its this that helps her to work hard to become someone else and not suffer the same fate of her mother and father. Precious wants so much to live a life that will be so completely different from the life she had previously lived.



What I don't get however is how when she is finally given a tool to help her sort through her emotional problems she immediately pushes it away. She is so sceptical of the counselor Ms. Weiss. She believes the only reason she is being helped is so the government can take her off of welfare and support. Granted this may have been part of the reason a counselor was supplied to her, but it could have been an opportunity for Precious to begin to openly discuss what had happened to her. She had already made the huge step in writing about what had happened to her in her journal. The counselor even asked her if she wanted to read aloud from her journal in order to easier discuss what had happened to her as a child.

The counselor was a bit of a idiot to not recognize that Precious's mother was also part of the sexual abuse that she had experienced as a child. Precious was so against wanting to have any interaction with her mother at that point. I do agree with how the counselor went about confronting Precious's mother with what happened, but it doesn't seem as though she gave Precious any tools that would help her deal with what she was hearing. Precious needed help in order to sort through what she had gone through and the counselor was only telling her to talk and write about it. She didn't at any point try to teach Precious to recognize that what had happened to her was not right,

No one at any point of the book made an attempt to help Precious realize that the color of your skin did not make you any better than anyone else. She was being helped in every other department but no one wanted to help her with her self confidence. Rather they influenced her to be angry about her position as a poor black woman. Everything was about her needing to be white and skinny. This truly bothered me. I know that there is a disperity between the poor black and white percentage, but the way she was being instructed about race was not conducive to her feeling as though she can succeed. Everything was about how the white man was trying to take everything away from her and that she needed to be white to be pretty and successful. This just bothers me so much.

There is so much more to say and at the moment I just can't put it into words... I am going to let the book sink in a bit more and write more later.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Continued

I have always found the songs by Nirvana to be the most convincing and true when it comes to referring to pain. Kurt Cobain was going through so much and his lyrics truly expressed the turmoil he was going through due to the pain his life was causing him. There isn't the shallow thoughts of just being broken hearted instead there is the raw emotion produced by true suffering. The fight he was having with his drug addiction and the lack of control he had over his life can be clearly heard in his lyrics. He doesn't dilute them with cliche thoughts or ideas. Instead he says it how it is. That is what draws me to his music. It isn't pretty. The emotions are dumbed down either. Despite Nirvana becoming widely popular the music did not conform to the social expectations of what music was supposed to be about.

I love the Eamon song and the Frankee song. When those songs were released it was one of the few times I actually listened to the radio. They just entertain me so much, and at the same time they left me feeling like some one was finally singing about the angry parts of a break up. For so long that was left to Alanis Morisette and it ended when she faded out of the spot light. I love how both songs remind people that break ups aren't just sad. These songs really bring out the ugly as well and I blast them every time I hear them. Nothing is left to the imagination in this song it goes from blow jobs to telling the girl and guy fuck you. It's great. Nothing nice or pretty about it.

Alanis Morisette I must say is in a league all by herself. Her music says everything and is the ultimate pay back to the guy that hurt her. She wanted to make sure that the guy knew just how much he hurt her and she wanted to humiliate him as much as he had humiliated her. It also brings into play all the cliche things that are said in a relationship that can make a person so happy and then in the end feel like nothing more than a slap in the face. She just keeps reminding guy that nothing he did is excusable. She like Kurt Cobain and Eamon do not censor the anger and hurt in anyway and it is just awesome. I am not going to lie this CD is definitely a constant in all of my playlists. Its angry and its devastating. Everyone can say they felt this way at some point in their life.

and so I've tried, everything but suicide but yes, its crossed my mind, but I'm fine (Gnarls Barkley, Just a Thought)

Alright, before I even get started I have to share this song with everyone. It is one of the more twisted songs I know and I thought it was appropriate after our last few classes concerning torture porn and now about music... That being said here is the link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEkCMqZ2RoA

I must say during the Taylor Swift song all I wanted to do was gouge my eyes out. I am sorry I know that having a hidden love for someone can be a bit painful but this girl acts as though its the end of the world. If we changed the guitar from acoustic to electric and made her sound a little more whiny and then slapped on some smudgy black eyeliner we would have a new female emo artist to follow... This song is so unbelievably typical 11-14 year old pop music when love is usually nothing more than a passing fancy. Unrequited love and unreturned love can be painful but at some point you need to move on before your love turns into some sort of obsessive sensation. I don't know I just can't take the girl seriously. She grew up in a small town and she is an attractive, skinny blonde she is the stereotypical hot chick and she doesn't seem to have much depth to me. So, I shouldn't be surprised by the lack of anything real in her song. I may be wrong about her, but how she portrays herself is just enough to make me want to dye my hair Wednesday Adams black and refuse to wear pink for the rest of my life. I guess I am just over the whole whiny girl broken hearted song that has flooded the radios. What gets me though is that people take this as how you should feel or react to a broken heart... Urgh. Running to class I will write more after

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Beautiful Boy

When I first started reading Beautiful Boy by David Sheff I thought it was going to be another cliche book about drug addiction and the pain it causes everyone and everything, and for the first 50 or so pages I thought I was right. After that however I was pleasantly surprised to see that David Sheff was doing his best to present what he and his family went through with his son Nic and his various drug addictions.

I really liked how David brought in Nic's half brother and sister to the story. The amount of pain and anguish Nic caused I thought was best seen in Jasper and Daisy. They are so young and have only the slightest grasp of what Nic is going through and yet their pain is so adult. It astonished me what those two went through at such young ages and I am truly intrigued to see how those two will address drugs and alcohol when they reach the age where it becomes prevalent. Through out the book David kept returning to Jasper and Daisy and how they were handling the situation and it was their story and reactions that I held on to the most. I was devastated for both Jasper and Daisy when Nic stole from them. I couldn't imagine what it felt like to have someone whom they admired and trusted so much violate some of their most important boundaries.

What David went through as a father also really stuck me. He tried everything possible to help Nic and every attempt he made failed. At some point I would have given up, but some how he managed to find more strength and more resources to fight back. Yet, despite my admiration for him I recognize how his son's addiction began to consume and pollute his life. He was becoming so detached from everything going on around him and he was refusing to recognize that his son's addiction was not something to pity his son for. At times I would get so frustrated when he would say things like "poor Nic". I wanted to scream at him that his son did this to himself. He was the catalyst to his own addiction. I just wish that David could have figured out so much earlier on in order to save himself from much of the pain and suffering he had put himself through. Yet, at the same time I can somewhat understand his desire to help and try to save his son.

It amazes me that the government isn't doing more in the research of how to treat an addiction to meth. It is becoming more and more of a prevalent drug in areas across the US and yet no one is making a valiant effort in trying to prevent and treat its addiction. It's as though it is some taboo topic that no one can talk about.

I found myself agreeing the David when he said he didn't know how to talk to other people about what was going on with his son. Society makes it so difficult for people who are family members of a drug addict to openly talk about it and get support. There is this whole idea that in some shape or form the family is responsible for their loved one's addiction. This idea drives me crazy. Everyone deserves support when going through some sort of crisis regardless of what it is. I was so angry that one of the few outlets that David had was AA meetings. It made me even angrier that there was nothing Jasper and Daisy. No one wants to talk about it, yet its happening all over to all sorts of people. Why is that some issues are made to be more important than others? Sorry for my rant but it doesn't make sense to me. David, Jasper and Daisy deserve all the support and help they need in order to aid them in moving through this difficult point in their life. They shouldn't have to keep their pain a secret because their loved one is doing drugs. It just irks me that some forms of pain are perfectly acceptable in society while others are not.