#2 Research Paper

First of all, I have to share that past couple of days I realized that I am not a huge fan of this persistent and exponentially increasing kind of flu which makes me sleepy all the time! After 3 days of taking what I come to call “pill cocktail“s it is still alive and making me miserable. I'm thankful though, for it created me the free time to look at many articles both related and unrelated to my topic:)
Well, I've decided to write the paper on stereotyping, specifically stereotyping of women in different countries and how it affects their lives, positive and negative. My reasons are: first, I was able to find a numerous intriguing articles that I would like to look further into and secondly, and more important for me, this subject relates to my life. My very two best friends are boys. I adore them and they have been in my life for 5 years now, through the best and worst. Although they are great people that do not approach people with prejudices, through 5 years I had to deal with many different situations in which they unconsciously stereotyped me. They thought I don't like soccer, I love it. They thought I needed to be protected all the time, I could take care of myself better than they mostly did. They thought I'm so fragile and to be handled in excruciating gentleness. They thought I was moody because girls are like that. They thought I'd nag all the time. They even tried to pay the bills at restaurants or other places because that's what a man should do. Come on! I am as equal in dealing with life as you are. But with time, they grew out of this subconscious attitude towards me and I hope with this research I'm going to understand the reasons behind this stereotyping.
Hopefully, I'm going to get well and be in class for thursday.

#1 This is Benjamin. He's a little worried about his future.

This saturday night, as in case of most idle saturday nights, I found myself in the middle of loud music, glittering dresses, eye-piercing lights and excessive amount of booze (some beautifully colored, others with a happy piece of lemon on side and all in all sorts of glasses). Everyone seemed delighted that the music could so easily drown their thoughts as well as their voices. I really welcome weekends with open arms and don't mind blowing off some steam after a week at Tuzla, yet something was off that night. And I seriously blame Benjamin for that. The Graduate-induced ennui is what I call my situation. I felt like the air in the room was being sucked up by those neon gods and left the place immediately saying no goodbyes what-so-ever. As I felt the fresh air outside, I thought about my future and it suddenly downed on me: whether its 1960s and USA or 2010 and Turkey, the youth is eternally doomed to be confused and trapped in social expectations. Even for the ones who have the freedom to act according to their fanciful impulses -those who have their family's support or enough money- most young people cannot break free and just be different. Well, in my case, I want to become a well-known writer, travel around the world and be educated by the gurus of literature. I couldn't care less about maths or chemistry. Yet, here I am stuck in a university, postponing my dreams. Maybe I'll never have the chance to do my soul-searching journey around the world because there is always the problem of graduate school, internships, earning money, starting a conventional life etc. Its so much easier when you lead the "socially acceptable" road. There is a novel that I've read years ago, called The Awakening by Kate Chopin. After I watched the Graduate, the ending becomes not so pointless now. The protagonist of the book, Edna Pontellier is a wealthy woman who is raised according to her social environment. She is married, has children as required in her social circumstance, often acts in a prudish manner and represses her emotions or desires because this is unacceptable in her society. Throughout the novel, she meets people from different backgrounds and realizes her own repressed wish of becoming an artist and leading a different life from others. At the end of the novel, we see Edna swimming far away in the sea and after a while exhaustion overtakes her. Maybe her suicide is not a suicide, and on some metaphorical level, it is a beginning of a new life and finally breaking free from the society.
As for me, from Sunday morning on, the quest for finding a way to be different began. Fingers crossed!