The Collyer Clutter

There's nothing quite like a clean and orderly household.  No clutter on the floor.  Pictures of the family and paintings are hung up on the walls with absolute balance.  An intricate center-piece of a giraffe sticking its head into a wooden bowl is placed neatly at the center of the dinner table.  Everything seems to have its unique place in the house, where only necessary items are kept for their visual "use."  This is in stark contrast with the description of the Collyers' mansion home, which included all sorts of junk ranging from mantel clocks to newspaper bundles (Herring 173-174).

Talk about clutter...

The Collyers' mansion is the nightmare for people with OCD.  Absolutely no organization, things piled up to the ceiling, complete chaos.  Where is the "use" in these items if they are not placed in their appropriate location, such as a mantel clock placed on, oh I don't know...a mantel!  It's this seeming irrationality towards the "use" in the everyday objects that the Collyer brothers collected that may give support for the claim that hoarding is a mental disorder, which is appropriately named Collyer Brothers Syndrome (Herring).

However, it is difficult to have absolute evidence to whether the behavior of hoarding is a mental disability.  It just could be an effect of environmental factors or the person's state of mind in the moment.  I've personally experienced periods of hoarding in times of stress.  When I feel my mind all cluttered, my room ends up being an extension of my mind.  It becomes hard for me to organize my things or to throw away items that have no use because I suddenly believe that it may have some future use.  In the case of the Collyer brothers, their clutter may have been a result of the environment around them - Harlem.  The "social disorder" around them imbued itself into their minds and their house became an extension of the social disorder that they saw on the streets of Harlem.

Got Friends?

Everyone's friends situation is different.  Some people may be very popular, having a plethora of friends in all different aspects of their lives.  Others may only have a few dependable friends.  Depending on how many friends and the types of friends that they may have will determine if they have friend groups.  Take an average college student.  They may have a close-knit friends circle that they spend most of their time with and feel the closest to.  Then, there are the classmate friends; those who are in the same classes as our average college student.  It's a very casual relationship, without much of the deep connection that goes along with the close-knit friends group and mostly exists due to the common cause of class.  You could say that this type of friendship is built on utility according to Aristotle on Friendship.

Moving further along, the average college student may be involved in campus clubs, which involve another set of friends.  This group may have a differing level of connection to the classmates group due to the nature of the commonality between people in this case.  For example, if our average college student is part of UNCC Puppet Club, their common interest of puppets with the other members may be more of a personal connection than to their classmates in their anatomy class.

Of course every college student had to pass through high school, which means that there may be a high school friends group.  This type of friends group might be group that is slowly dying off for our college student as he/she makes new friends in college.  The physical distance between these friends if they all go to different colleges or are on different paths in life lead to this disconnection.  The commonality of interests and personality goes away due to the personal growth that each person experiences at their respective colleges.

There is a common theme to what categorizes a friends group and that is commonality.  Commonality is the thing that everyone within this group has an interest in or is something that they all participate in together.  Without the glue of commonality, a friends group can easily dissolve and lose its identity.  

The Big Bad Wolf Suffers from COPD

While I was in the gym one morning, a commercial for Symbicort came onto one of the television screens.  Symbicort is a medication that was created to treat Chronic Obstructive Pulminary Disease (COPD).  What was striking about this particular commercial was that it utilized a cartoon of the Big Bad Wolf from the Little Red Riding Hood story.  Here's the video of the commercial below:

http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7CM2/symbicort-wolf

This isn't the only instance of a medication commercial using animation.  The drug, Abilify, also includes animation in its ads:

http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7oAZ/abilify-add-abilify

It is an interesting approach away from the traditional medication commercial that would include a typical user and their story.  The Symbicort commerical is clever in using the Big Bad Wolf as a victim of COPD and advertising their medicine through that story.  However, what is the deal with the use of animation in the Abilify commercial?  Usually when I see a cartoon, I expect it to be visually happy or funny.  A woman suffering from depression is not something that you would usually see in a cartoon.  So what is the benefit or advertising power that comes from using animation such as what is seen in these two examples?

Categorizing the Disordered

The art of classifying does not seem to be wholly objective as I am quickly learning through this week's reading.  Social influences, geographical locations, and technology all play a role in how we classify everything from animals to mental disorders.  Social influences and pressures play a particularly significant role when it comes to classify people.  Many times, these classifications come at the cost of offending groups that are classified unfavorably due to how the persons completing the classification perceive those who are being classified.  For example, homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in the DSM-II in the early 1970's (Pomeroy & Parrish, 196).  It's fairly apparent that those who identified as homosexual were upset with the APA on this classification, as evidenced by their "protests toward APA for its perceived stigmatization of homosexuals (Pomeroy & Parrish, 196)."

The key may lie in how we distinguish between what is different and normal in society.  In my last blog post, titled "1.2 Million and Counting," I delved into the classification of monsters, including humans with strange physical attributes.  Our discussion in class on this also got me thinking of how we do not take the feelings of those who are being classified into account.  These categories have the potential of identifying someone in a very negative light and they would be stuck in that category throughout human history.  How does a woman, who has the fate of growing a full beard feel about being categorized among history's bearded women?  Furthermore, how does she feel when her defined role as a bearded woman belongs with a circus freakshow?  It is translatable to this case with homosexuality.  The APA, whether intentionally or unintentionally, grouped them with those who are "different" from the rest.

According to Bowker and Star in "Sorting Things Out," there are traces "of bureaucratic struggles, different in world-view and systematic erasures do remain in the written classification system...(55)."  Take this homosexuality issue in a geographic context.  Different areas of the United States will have different ways of displaying their city or town.  Some place like Fargo, North Dakota would probably be a very unlikely place for a gay parade, whereas Los Angeles would be a more likely location.  Furthermore, the perception of the classification of homosexuality may be vastly different between the local populaces of these two cities.  So is there any benefit or use to these types of classifications?  It seems to do more harm than good to those who are being categorized as such.  How do the social institutions that govern these classifications modify them as to avoid any potential subjectivity?  Is it even possible that a list can be categorized in a universally accepted method?

1.2 Million and Counting

I remember when the visually stunning Planet Earth documentary came out, that I was absolutely mesmerized by the plethora of different animal species on our planet.  Everything from land creatures to deep sea fish, the visual diversity was endless.  There are also many ways of categorizing all of these species, such as whether they walk on legs or swim, stay in packs or travel alone, have fur or leathery skin, and so on.  There are many of these descriptive categories that can be used to classify all of the known animals of the animal kingdom.  Currently, there are 1.2 million known species of animals on planet Earth, but there are an estimated 8.7 million species in all that currently or may exist (nature.com).  Attached to all these species are various forms of categorizing based on criteria such as what was stated above.

There is a unique nature to taxonomies, which is best described by Aristotle's Categories.  In it, he says that after the "primary substance" follows the "secondary substances."  We can think of the primary substance as being the kingdom and secondary substances as the genus or species.  Secondary substances are more descriptive and specific than primary substances.  Continuing, Aristotle states that, " For only they [secondary substances], of things predicated, reveal the primary substance."  This means that if I were to pick out a species, let's say lions, then I can trace the species of lions up through the other 6 levels of the taxonomy tree until I reach the animal kingdom.  This is the general case for other forms of categorizing.  

Another example would be monsters and other disfigured or abnormal beings.  The Platypus and the Mermaid by Harriet Ritvo delves into the more imaginative forms of classifications.  Monsters seem like an odd entity to classify.  In the cases of animals, foods, plants, and clothes, they seem to make sense and allow society to become more organized and functional.  However, what is the point of classifying monsters?  Why are we so engrossed in disfigured human beings and animals to the point of categorizing them as single monsters, dicephalous monsters, pyopagus monsters (Ritvo, p. 40)?  Although the monster categorizing is referenced to the 18th and 19th century in Ritvo's work, this form of categorizing and fascination continues today.  We categorize dwarf-sized people into cultural genre of its own, which resonates throughout reality TV shows and comedy.  Another question that I would like to pose is if this form of categorizing abnormalities extends to the mentally abnormal people?  If it exists, then how are these people categorized and how does it affect these people in terms of their health care or social treatment?

Additional reference:  1. Lee Sweetlove, “Number of species on Earth tagged at 8.7 million,” Nature, August 23rd, 2011, http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110823/full/news.2011.498.html.  

Your Timeline is Your Storyline

Look back to all the exciting and unexciting times in your life.  Did it not seem that those times that were exciting and fun flew by as a fleeting moment.  On the other hand, those of the more unexciting times such as waiting in line at the DMV or sitting through a tedious lecture seem to drag on forever.  Also, think about when you become cognizant of the time, looking at the clock often in an attempt to accelerate the passing time, but always to no avail.  Then, as you look back to all those times, you realize all the years that have passed in your life and wonder where all the time went, all those memories feel like vague dreams.

Time seems to be a cruel force in our lives.  It knocks us around and does not give us anytime for relief.  Bad times always seem to last much longer than good times.  One hour to a person having the time of their life would seem a lot shorter to them in comparison to another person looking at paint dry for an hour, yet they both experience an hour of time.  As Bryan Mendez asks in his article, "Time Travel:  There's no Time Like Yesterday": "We have a belief that time exists independent of us, but is it perhaps only something that is measured by our minds' and bodies' perceptions?"  Time is a topic of human obsession.  It permeates our mathematics - as seen in Einstein's theories of special and general relativity (Mendez) - our society, and our personal lives.  We love to reminisce about the past and anticipate the future, but the past and future do not exist as is discussed in the podcast, "Hugh Mellor On Time."  

The tenses that we use in our language - past, present and future - are not actually part of time (Mellor).  We use these tenses as a means of categorizing what has happened, is happening and will be happening to us.  Time is actually comprised of events that have occurred earlier than what is happening in this instance as well as those events that happen after this moment (Mellor).  We feel that we need to organize the sequence of time in order to understand the sequence of our lives.  If I simply stated that I ate a salad earlier than the moment I am currently in, then that leaves a lot of context out.  Instead, I would say I ate a salad for lunch around noon today.  There is more detail in the latter description.  Then, let's say I had pasta for dinner in the evening.  Now I have an order to how my day is going.  It is becoming a sequence of events, a timeline on which my life is following.  This timeline is particular to me and no one else, so when I feel time going faster or slower in certain situations, I am perceiving the pace of my timeline.  It is individual to everyone and it is the basis for everyone's storyline, of how they sequence their life from birth until the current moment that they are describing their life to you when you first meet.