Weird Family Stories

Well I have several weird relatives but the couple that stick out in my head are my Uncle Jerry and my ex-cousin Narissa.  I'll start off with my Uncle Jerry.  Everyone in my house dreads when he calls.  He can talk your ear off about anything and everything.  And as if that isn't enough, he clears his throat after every third word it seems.  Unfortunately most of the time I end up answering the phone when he calls and I get stuck talking to him for half an hour.  He doesn't even know me that well.  I'm also not brave enough to cut him off and give him to my mom.  He's one of my mom's brothers.  She is the youngest of 7 kids with her oldest sibling being 21 years older than her.  Jerry is the second oldest in her family so he is about 68 or 69.  He has three grown daughters, two of which are twins.  Talking to him is certainly a unique experience every time.  Sometimes before I even hand the phone to my mom, she knows it's him just by the expression on my face as I'm talking to him.  Once he talks to her, it could be 2 hours before she's done.

My other relative, Narissa, is a piece of work to say the least.  We are very glad she is not a part of our family anymore.  I always tend to think of her and what she did around the holidays b/c we get together with her family.  Narissa married my cousin Paul on a whim.  She claims she was pregnant so they decided to get married, but conveniently miscarried soon after they decided to marry.  They got married anyway and 9 months later my little cousin Aaron was born.  He was born in September and that next Christmas gathering, which happen to be in January that year, she sat on my couch and starting crying at the fact that she was pregnant again.  She has a son from a previous relationship so this would make child number 3 for her.  I didn't like her to begin with so this made me mad.  After Nathan was born, I would babysit for them occasionally.  Most of the time I would go to their house and then stay the night since they came back late.  One time, she wrote me a check for $25 and when I went to cash it, it bounced b/c she had cleaned out their checking account.  This charged my account the $25 plus the $7 bouncing fee.  I was beyond livid.  Long story short, a couple years later, she was caught for stealing chemicals to make meth from a farm near by.  She was making this with her neighbor who had two daughters of his own.  She got 6 months in jail and my cousin Paul divorced her while she was in there.  Coincidentally, the day she was arrested, she was supposed to sign off parental rights to her first son.  I'm not sure if she ever did that or not.  Once she was out of jail, she was living in a Woman's Shelter and not long after she became pregnant again, this time with a daughter.  Last I knew, she had moved back to Utah, leaving her daughter behind as well as my two cousins.

Structure of mini-ethnography

I will begin my mini-ethnography by discussing how I related to my topic at the beginning of the project.  I think I will separate paragraphs by different observations and information.  I think it will be most effective this way.  I will also talk about how my opinions or views of the subculture changed throughout the process.  I will conclude by giving my final opinion on the subculture and prove the stereotypes wrong.  I think this will work best because it covers all the information in a logical, sensical way.  It makes sense and will help the reader move along while reading the piece.

Glossary

There aren't a lot of general words that my subculture uses.  They are all specific to the type of job the person does.  People that work at the front desk will use terms like "buzz people in" or "do mail".  "Doing mail" consists of going through the mail that has come in for that day and checking each one to make sure that that person still lives at the dorm the mail was sent to.  This also includes checking in packages for people.  Checking in packages is a lot more work than checking mail.  When they do packages they have to write a number on the package and then fill out on a sheet of paper when the package arrived, the number, and the person who checked it in.  Then the person that received the package has to bring their package notice down and sign the paper and date it when they pick it up.  Other jobs, such as those that work in the library cafe, have many many terms that mainly they only know what means.  

American Tongues

Question #1: I'm not sure I would do anything differently.  I really liked how they have it set up and put together.  I liked how they asked people in the different regions about the words they use that no one else uses.  I also like how they compared the regions.  They asked people what they thought of other regions and how their region was better or worse.  They addressed a lot of stereotypes.  I also liked that because it brought that to other people's attention.

Question #2: I think that maybe the midwest (IN, OH, IL) was a little underrepresented.  I think they addressed the south and the east coast a lot more than the midwest and the west coast.  They are the more stereotyped people but I think it would've been interesting to hear what people think of the region I live in.

Question #3: I think language tells a lot about people before you even get to know them.  I think generally people from the south get pegged as "hillbillies" or "red necks" because of the way they talk.  They could be the most intelligent person but as soon as they start speaking in a southern accent, people tend to automatically think less of them.  They also pointed out that when you travel to different parts of the country, you should change the way you talk so people don't make assumptions.

Week 9

I think the hardest thing so far has been the research aspect.  I haven't had any trouble finding people to interview.  That has definitely been the easiest.  If I could start over, I would've decided on this topic from the beginning.  I had a hard time getting started with this project because my topic was too specific at the beginning.  If I had broadened it to what it is now, it wouldn't have been so hard.  Keeping a blog has kept my information fresh in my memory from week to week and has at some points helped me figure out different aspects of my project.  I will be able to look back and see what I had said earlier about different parts and it will remind me of things I had thought of earlier and possibly forgotten.

Mini ethnography

I think my readers will care about this issue because they may be in the same situation at some point during their college years.  By reading this, they may find out that working while going to school is a lot harder than they thought.  Students that are already working may find ways to organize their life differently than they currently are.  My readers may want to know what the best way to go about working is.  Some may find it easier to work on campus, and others may need more money and working on campus may not get enough for them.  There are regulations for the amount of hours a student can work on campus so some students go off campus so they can earn more money.  My readers will most likely already know the reasons behind most working college students.  Some work because they want extra money while others work simply so they can afford another semester.  Then there are those in between that want to help out their parents or begin saving or repaying loans so they don't have to deal with as much of it later in life.  I want my readers to learn the best way to combine working, school, and their social life.  Just because they decide to work, doesn't mean they have to give up their social life entirely.  They may have to make adjustments but it can be done.  They also need to know how to get their work done for school.  Some students choose to take an extra shift at work instead of going to class and this can hurt you in the long run.  The students that are doing that are most likely doing it so they can afford another semester of school, but if they flunk out of college all together, they won't have to worry about paying for another semester.  I think my readers will be fairly easily persuaded.  There are many pros and cons but none are terrible.  They will just have to find out what works best for them and go with that.  Some students can handle working a full-time job and going to school full-time.  Others won't be able to, some won't even be able to handle working all together.  It's just a matter or preference and how much you are willing to dedicate to it.

Observing

One theme i've seen is that working while in college either forces students to be more organized or becomes a bigger problem than it's worth.  Some students said that when they started working they noticed that their grades slipped a little bit.  Some of them figured out how to plan out their days so that they would be able to get everything done.  For those that didn't figure this out, they were forced to stop working because they would've continued getting bad grades and would've had the possibility of failing out of school.  I am still an outsider because I don't work while in school but I now know more about how to properly plan my day if I were to start working.  Nothing has changed about my position in the 8 weeks I have been doing this.  I have considered working somewhere off campus a couple times but I don't have a car here so I would have to rely on the MITS bus system and sometimes they aren't reliable.