3rdragon

So on the ride home from my grandparents' house tonight, my dad's girlfriend made this statement: We develop our sexualities before we are five years old.

This was not an assertion that I had heard made before, so I asked her where this was coming from.

Her argument mainly consisted of these points (none of which I disagree with):

- There is an incredible amount of information, both blatant and subtle, coded in the way society (specifically, our society), thinks about and reacts to ideas of sex, sexuality, gender, taboos, etc.

- Young children are incredibly good at picking up both verbal and nonverbal information.

-Young children are also very impressionable, and the signals they pick up in their early years have a huge effect on the people they grow into, often in ways that they don't remember and may not be able to articulate.

And we spent 45 minutes hashing over this, and examples thereof. She didn't say anything that I disagree with. She also didn't put together any of the information that I already believe into any form that I hadn't encountered before.

I'm not unwilling to believe this statement. But I'm not convinced, either.

So -- do any of you want to defend it/try to convince me? Do any of you disagree, and care to explain why?

Current Mood: unconvinced

( Cut for ginormousness )

Possibly there are other things that I was intending to put on this list, but I don't remember what they were.
I think what it boils down to is: I don't have any good reasons not to go to Zambia. There are valid concerns on the Cons list -- but I don't know that any of them are good reasons not to go.
And do I really want to be able to say, in ten years, "I could have gone to Zambia, but I decided to stay home in Philadelphia and be unemployed/work some boring job instead?" No, I don't really want to.
So I guess I'm going to say yes.

Somehow this feels a much more momentous decision than picking which college I was going to, or going to Spain.

Edited to add: I just sent the email telling her that I'll go.

I haven't decided-decided. But I think I'm leaning towards 'Yes' rather than 'No.'

Today has been a cut thrice sort of day. Luckily I was working with small pieces of cloth and paper in bookbinding, so I didn't ruin any giant sheets. But after I miscut my fifth piece this morning, I decided that it might be a good idea to leave this project until next class . . .
But in good news, I may have finished my first book. I'm not sure, sure, but it looks like a book to me. Mind you, it's the quick-and-easy kind of binding that I don't like so much, but I think that I'll be finishing the three that have been properly sewed pretty soon, too.

Last night I had an interesting discussion with Pepi. There was a movie about an Amish woman on tv, and so we started talking about the Amish. Over the course of the conversation, we covered:
-Amish as related to Mennonites
-Amish as closed religious community (living simply/worldliness, rumsprika and shunning, Pennsylvania Dutch, genetic problems and exchanges for young people)
-Mennonites \neq Amish
-My opinions on Amish life
-The greater Mennonite Church and GMC
-religious rules and norms in GMC, Lancaster County, and the wider Mennonite/Brethren in Christ community.
-free love (I think that we also touched upon the fact that Pepi does not consider sex to be The Original Sin, but the conversation was galloping rapidly and I we never got back to that point to clarify it)
-sex outside of marriage, my opinions thereon
-single parents
-my love life to date
-divorce
-the nature of homosexuality and homosexuals in the church
-gay marriage
-lesbian couples in Lancaster County, general lack thereof
-homosexual couples adopting and/or having babies, or adopting children of adolescents.
-the nature of family

We were managing pretty well until the last two. At that point, I think we encountered a fundamental rift in our understanding of what constitutes family. Pepi was worried about children being confused about parental roles, and I think that for her, a family is a mom, a dad, and some kids. Or possibly a single parent and some kids, if it's necessary. And I didn't know what to say to that.

Since I've already discussed differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, politics, war, abortion, bullfighting, and religious freedom in schools with Ana and/or Pepi, if I cover why I am a pacifist, LGBTQ people in church leadership, and transgenderness (what do you mean that's not a word? It should be), then I'll have covered something close to all of the Big Questions.

And completely unrelated, I have a wordcount!