So we have to do this field research project for the folklore class. The final product will consist of a twenty minute presentation and 8-10 paged paper. Most people are doing their research on stuff we already know is folklore, like fairy tales, bathroom stalls (see previous post), and holidays.  I decided to do something different. I hope I can make the argument that it is folklore.

My folk project is going to be centered around Dance Dance Revolution and Pump It Up.  There are two video games where there are four (DDR) or five (PIU) arrows on a pad on the ground. There is a screen in front of you.  You pick a song and as it plays arrows rise on the screen in front of you.  When the arrows reach the top of the screen (let’s say it is a left arrow that rises first) you need to step on the correct arrow on the pad (in this case left).  Then more arrows come faster and faster until you feel like you are flying. Okay, the game isn’t folklore. Its pop culture. But I can prove that the events surrounding DDR and PIU are folklore.

I am focusing on is the folk culture that surrounds these games.  I think there is a lot of it. First, I will prove that people who are serious about the game from a serious folk group. We are defined primarily through outsiders. These people are always apparent. They are the groups of people staring at us while we play PIU in the arcade. They watch in awe as they see how nimbly we move or the shake their heads at how stupid we look. We usually draw a crowd. There are even people who want to take pictures of us as if we were some endangered species that they are lucky to see.

There are rituals like events that take place. For instance when a new person shows a sincere desire to learn how to play they are treated very kindly and given free games. Every ritual needs to have an important belief backing it. The belief in this case is that DDR or PIU will change your life.  It really does. It helps people lose weight, get active, and stay healthy. Once you are merged into the group that is where many friendships and romantic relationships are formed. As my one friend keeps saying, I changed her life and thank you very much. I introduced her to the game and she has gotten three boyfriends and a fiancé out of it.

Then there is the ritual when one person manages to severely wrong the group beyond repair.  The person who caused wrong always ends up leaving that particular machine. The remaining people take great joy in eliminating his old high scores from the machine.

There are legends that are told all but one of them are cautionary tales. There are traditions. There is, of course, the folk concept of competition. We have a schedule of when competitions take place and it is the same year after year, it is the tradition of competition.

Let’s see, like any folk group we have our own language/terms. Like we might shout at someone to Hong Kong it or grumble about bar rape.

We have naming practices. Everyone has a name other than the one they were born with. I’m TUS  because I didn’t know what to put down as a nickname when I got I high score for a song so S T U are right next to each other in the alphabet so it doesn’t take long to enter into the machine. I mixed the letters around so it read TUS so it looks like it might mean something. So everyone knows both I’m Tus and Lauren. Others lose their first names entirely. I know Kilroy and Sputnik but have no idea what their birth names are.

There are practices (I think this is folk something, I’m not sure what though) that change regionally. For instance in one location if you want to play a game of DDR and someone else is already playing, you put a coin on the side of the machine to show that you have a place in line. Other players use photo ids. And machines expect people to keep track of who goes next in their heads

So anyway, those are my thoughts so far. I hope there is enough to write ten pages on and to give a twenty-minute presentation.

FYI: I’m not going to be posting as frequently (as you may have already noticed). The last three weeks of school are rough so I won’t have so much time to post. I will still post though, just not every day.

I’ve got three views already for some of my little pictures! yay!

Response to Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo

by Lauren Correy

Bebe looked out the window. She was sitting in green recliner that had belonged to her mother. In her hand, forgotten, was the North Bath Weekly Journal. She had read the latest debates on what should be done about the snowplow strike.  The snowplowers believed that they didn’t get paid enough and the state did the bare minimum when paying for the maintenance of their vehicles. There were snowplows without working heaters. Other snowplowers complained bitterly that they could only work in the winter, leaving them jobless and income less for the rest of the year. It was not that they couldn’t find other jobs, some argued, only that they were too lazy to attempt to do anything else.

Lazy is what Bebe felt as she stared out the window watching the snow drift down along Main Street. She should have never agreed to take the grandkids, who were howling like banshees upstairs in the guest room. She had foolishly purchased some toys for room for the occasion when the kids came over. Well, even if the toys caused a riot, it still got them out of her hair for a little while when she could visit with her son and daughter in law. Of course, there were times like now that they seemed to be killing each other instead of playing. She supposed she should go up and separate them, but she didn’t have the energy to separate two screaming kids. Anyway, she thought she was done with parenting with her son. Never did she expect to be burdened with the children so frequently. Their parents found all sorts of excuses to drop the kids off:  they had appointments at the same time and the babysitter couldn’t make it, they had to stay late at work and the babysitter couldn’t stay, or Tommy had started a fire and they needed to clean up after it. Bebe was beginning to suspect that there was no babysitter but herself. She only hoped that the her daughter in law, Mandy would be back in precisely six minutes so Bebe could make it to her dentist appointment.

Bebe had always taken good care of her teeth and it was something she frequently recommended that her child and grand children do. At seventy-nine, she still had most of her own teeth, a few being lost to overcrowding in the mouth and a few to unpreventable rot due to the lack of fluoride in her early years. She still made regular appointments with the dentist even though she found the dentist’s chair most uncomfortable. Even though her teeth were yellowed with age and a bit crowded together she took immense pride in their appearance. She also got great satisfaction concerning her hearing. It’s true that she needed hearing aids, but she didn’t need to set them as high as some other people her age.

She cast a look at the old grandfather clock sitting by the couch. It read five past twelve.

“She’s late again,” Bebe muttered to herself.

She hauled herself out of her chair and went to the telephone, wondering if Mandy had even left yet.  Just as she dialed Mandy’s number, a small woman with long brown hair burst in through the door.

“Right on time,” Mandy declared triumphantly.

Bebe sighed. She had forgotten that Mandy thought being five minutes late was on time. And it was on time for her, or was as close as she got. Nearly everyone in Bath knew to tell Mandy to be ten minutes early and half the time she will be there on time. The other half she would be very early or very late. But the interesting thing was that Mandy was only early (sometimes showing up up to more than hour in advance) if someone would tell her the incorrect time of the gathering. Like the time Max Winsdor had a party and told Mandy she was to arrive at five o’clock. She showed up promptly at three forty five. There was great debate whether Mandy’s clock gave inconsistent times or whether her internal clock was broken or if she had ever had one at all.

“All right boys, time to go,” Mandy called up the stairs. There was no reply except for shrieks and howls.

“We’ll be out of your hair in just a sec,” Mandy promised before darting up the stairs to collect her little devils. There was banging and a crash before the shouting finally reduced to a murmur. The absolute silence suddenly reigning down seemed much worse than the screams and shouts previously coming from upstairs. At least she knew where they were when they were screaming. But Bebe was patient and it wasn’t long before Mandy came down with her two grumbling boys in tow. Bebe followed them out and locked the door behind her

She arrived late for the dentist. Her late arrivals were becoming more and more frequent due to her changes in driving habits. She realized her reflexes were getting slower so she drove more slowly, much to the annoyance of other drivers. She also became slightly confused along the way and made a left turn where she shouldn’t have and it took her a little while to get back on track. The driving conditions didn’t help either. With the snowplow drivers on strike, there was no one to plow the roads except Sully, an old friend. So the snow fell and was stacking up on the roads, making navigation very tricky. She arrived out of breath in the narrow waiting room. The young receptionist gave Bebe a bored look.

“Sign in,” was the only thing the receptionist said to her before turning back to her computer.

Bebe signed her name and time arriving under the last crossed out name as she wondered what was the point of such things? If she wasn’t there the receptionist only had to look out upon the empty waiting to see that she wasn’t there. It wasn’t as if she ever waited with anyone else in the room. All the receptionist would do after she signed and wrote down the time she arrived was cross it out again after she went in to see the dentist. It seemed rather futile to her.

Bebe picked up a beauty magazine and started flipping through it, paying mild attention to the pictures whizzing by her face. Every woman, she thought, must reach a point where she is no longer impressed by the beauty of models in a magazine. It would be different for men, she thought ruefully, who never seemed to get tired of making a fool of themselves in front of a beautiful woman. She, however, had already seen the standard of beauty change  repeatedly and was struck more by the faces that had unusual combinations of features. Then on the other hand, she considered, there were women like Thora Yeager who at the age of ninety something were still wearing bright pink lipstick and attempted to keep up with the latest fashion trends.

“Hi, Mrs. Fogel,” said dental assistant Tobi Myer as she beckoned Bebe into the dentist’s office and lead her to the farthest chair. Thatwas another inconsistency. The people living in Bath must not get their yearly checkup or they went to Schuyler Springs because in all of her years of coming here she had never seen any of the other chairs occupied.  What was the point of having three chairs when only one was needed? Was it poor planning or a dream of a day when business would be better?

She sat down on the chair which Tobi reclined and started scrapping away at her teeth with the fishing hook. Well, a fishing hook is what it looked like to Bebe. It wouldn’t take much for Tobi to give it a great accidental yank and have Bebe strung up like a fish. If that occurred Bebe could only hope that she maintained her dignity instead of flopping about like a fish.

Then Tobi, failing to hook Bebe, asked what flavor of toothpaste would Mrs. Fogel prefer. It was a question that still astounded Bebe. She could remember when, as a child, she wouldn’t have a choice because tooth powder didn’t come in any flavors. It made her grimace to remember the chalky flavor and sandy texture. Tobi gently reprimanded, “keep your mouth open Mrs. Fogel.”  Bebe obeyed as the brush continued to polish her teeth, wedging little bits of toothpaste into the cracks between her teeth.

Tobi asked the same questions that she always asked while working on Bebe’s teeth. She must have a script rehearsed, thought Bebe. The questions were predictable: What do you think of the weather, how are the kids (she never remembered that Bebe only had the one), how are you, what have you been doing with yourself since you retired, and on she went with poor Bebe trying to gurgle out responses through her open mouth.

Time for the dental floss. Tobi, of course, chattered away as she pushed much too hard with the floss. Bebe didn’t complain. The silk thread she had to floss with when she was growing up hit her gums with greater force than the modern dental floss ever could. She didn’t complain about that either when she was growing up. Her father had little patience for whining. He was waiting with a spanking if he felt the complaints too numerous. Is it necessary, speculated Bebe, for the assistant to do the flossing? It wouldn’t have bothered her one bit to do it herself, she did it every morning and night after all, and she did a better job.

Finally, the dentist, emerged replacing Tobi in peering into Bebe’s mouth and poking around with tools. Tobi took a seat on a worn leather stool to take notes.

“Twenty two, twenty three, twenty four are fine. Twenty five has eroded filling. ” he repeated mechanically.

Bebe occupied herself by wondering, how did they decide where to start when numbering teeth? Why not start counting on the lower leftmost tooth or was starting on the upper rightmost tooth so much better? There must be some explanation, but when she attempted to ask the dentist, he just grumbled something about not moving the mouth and went back to counting teeth.

“Fine,” thought Bebe grumpily, “if he wants to count my teeth all day than that’s what he shall do.” This immediately spurred thoughts on why someone would become a dentist. It must be for the pay or the love of numbers. Who else would want a career out of counting to forty multiple times a day? She didn’t understand how anyone could tolerate such boredom and figured that was why suicide rates were so high among dentists.

The dentist finished poking around in her mouth with his hook and she was free to go once the chair was returned to its upright position. Bebe struggled to her feet, back aching as it always did after lying down for too long. She hobbled to the enthusiastic receptionist who dutifully arranged a time when Bebe might once again enjoy the pleasure of going to the dentist, this time to have her filling refilled. As she left the building, she rolled her tongue over her nice smooth teeth.

It had gotten colder since she entered the dentist’s office and the slush had been buried under a pile of snow.  She made it to her car and carefully used an ice scrapper brush to wipe away the snow that had accumulated on her car. Then she got in, cranked up the heat letting the windows defrost before pulling out of her parking spot.  As she was pulling out of the parking lot the darndest thing happened. The snow had gotten so high that she was stuck, her wheels spinning uselessly with the snow piled up underneath her car. Bebe turned off her ignition and sat thinking until it started to get cold. There was only one thing to do. Call Sully to pull her out in his pickup and plow a path so she could get home, that is id his knee wasn’t bothering him too much. She exited her car and headed back into the dentist’s office for the second time and final time that day.

I can count the number of times I’ve worn make-up on one hand. I have two skirts. One skirt if for the very rare and very formal events in my life. The other is for the more common less formal occurrences. My older brother introduced me to his g/f as the toughest person he knows. My mother always told me that I didn’t have to be so stoic.I damned the day I grew breasts because they made it hard to squeeze in out of narrow passages and made it very difficult to do pull-ups (all the extra weight). Even the Ice Cream Man story I posted is an example. For some reason the professor had us switch stories (my ice cream story was one) with someone else in the class. They were then read aloud and the gender of the writer was guessed. Everyone guessed I was a guy. Someone said there was no way I was female. There are so many more examples and I don’t have time to list them right now.

There is a beautiful woman is making advances towards a guy at a bar. They leave and go to his apartment; they guy probably thinking it is the luckiest day in his life. They have beers before getting down to business. As they are starting the guy passes out—the woman spiked his drink. When he comes to he is sitting in his bathtub which is packed with ice. There is a note written on the mirror in red lipstick for him to dial 911. For some reason, he keeps a phone on the floor of his bathroom (this was pre cell phone days). So he calls 911. The operator picks up and listens to his predicament. The operator tells the man to check his back where he feels loose skin. The operator tells him to stay in the ice until help arrives. What happened was the woman took him to his home to harvest his kidney.  Moral of the story: If you think your getting lucky you better think twice.  This story also has a second versions. Guy takes the woman home, they have sex. When the morning comes the woman is gone, but written in the mirror with (once again) red lipstick, there is a message. I have HIV, enjoy the rest of your life. And the guy gets tested and he is HIV positive.

This basically functions as a revenge rape tale.  The women takes control over the man and uses her sexual prowess to take advantage of the men.

Then there were an number of food stories. Many more food stories than another. There are the famous ones like a mouse in coke bottle, Kentucky fried rat, finger in the chilly at Wendy’s,   McDonalds hamburgers contain worms, someone with AIDS jacked off in the mayonnaise at burger king and that is why you should never order a whopper, Bubble Yum is made from spider eggs and (how else would they get it so springy?).

Yet strange things start to happen with each story. The finger in the chilly really happened, but the woman eating there put it there herself. The tale spread until if you tried to follow the individual stories, someone found a finger in twenty eight states all around the same time with no evidence of another finder being found. Attempting to track down where the Kentucky Fried Rat originated was harder. This appeared in forty eight states and in over two hundred towns and cities. No one who actually discovered a rat was found. There is also a story about a snake being in a blanket purchases at either Target or Kmart  (which ever store is more popular at the time has the snake in the blanket story attached to it.)

This says something about our society. That food, of course,  is necessary for our survival . That we are so far removed from where we actually get the food from creates the fears. Think about it, even I supermarkets the most control we have over the products is picking slightly less bruised fruit. The fear that someone jacked in you mayonnaise is the fear that food prepared  for you is so out of your hands. That a rat could fall into a vat of  cooking chicken and nobody noticing until the rat is served is a horror that restraints are not as clean as should be.

Then there is the gerbil in the anus story that I’m not going to go into because, while interesting, it is just so stupid.

It starts in a circular reddish orange room with something like a retractable ramp in the middle which is closed for now. Other than that, the room floor is clear.  There are a few chairs and velvet covered benches along the walls. There are five rooms branching off of the circular room like spokes of a wheel.  Each room is a different dark color. One is blood red and another is a shadowy forest green. The third is a blue, an underwater blue right before the light fades away and everything becomes black. The n there is the gray room, bleached of color. Lastly there is the room painted an ill looking yellow.

The red room looks like a sitting room with antique furniture. The side tables are dark in color and have little curled feet, as does all of the furniture in this room. There are red velvet rapes across the barred windows. There are little flowered porcelain lamps on the side tables. There are three chairs and a sofa in a circle to make conversation easy. There is a single bench against the far wall. There are pictures with golden frames along the walls but I couldn’t make out what the pictures were .

The green room has one main feature. An antique writing desk with a quill and inkwell perched at the top. There is a three-legged wooden stool in front of the desk. This furniture seems to have been created for a giant three sizes larger than the average person.  The walls are blank except for a window on the far side.

The yellow room has a giant bed in it with a white canopy. There are two armchairs facing each other in one of the corners. There is a giant fireplace along one of the walls with soot still in the pit. The colors in this room look sickly, as if they are just barely holding on to life.

The  gray room has a metal table bolted to  the floor in the middle of the room. Steal knives hang above the table on racks. There are chrome counters and a steal chair in one corner. Everything is covered in a fine layer of dust.

The blue room is the hardest for me to remember. It is the largest of the five. It has many high small windows with bars on them all. I can’t remember what was in the room except for a fish tank occupying a lonely corner. The tank is filled with water and there are miniature human heads screaming silently as they swim around.

As for the ghosts, they are about three times the size of a normal person and three are obese. There is one phantom for each room. They don’t walk but glide everywhere. The two women look as if they were living in the19th century. They both have pearls draped around their necks. The woman from the red room is dressed in sort of a red colored (the ghosts are see though and mostly white although there is a slight hint of color) intricate gown. She looks as if she is going to the opera.  She carries with her a little handheld fan which she always keeps closed and a pair of binoculars. Her long brown hair is piled upon her head. The other woman is from the yellow room. She is as skinny as a stick. She has short colorless curled hair. Her dress is closer to a sun dress and a bonnet tied around her throat hangs on her back.

The skinny male ghost is from the gray room. He wears an old tuxedo and has round glasses perched on his sharp nose. The man from the green room is also in a tuxedo. He is balding, wears a mustache, and always has an unlit cigar tucked away in the left corner of his mouth. He has jolly eyes. The last ghost is from the blue room. He is even paler than the other ghosts and harder to see. He carries with him a paint brush. I can’t remember anymore about him.

The dream started in the round room. There were about twenty of us remaining. I think we had crashed or been abandoned there. We couldn’t leave. We had been there for a while because we knew how much trouble we were in. As mentioned before, each room (except for the center room, of course) had a ghost. The ghosts didn’t appear to notice our existence. They would float around doing things without rhyme or reason. Sometimes they would float through people. We couldn’t even see half of what they were doing. This made their movements hard to anticipate (this is very important).

The problem was that when a specific ghost passed over a person something unpleasant happened to the person. They would feel a damp chill pass over them before they lost control over their bodies. If the gray ghost passed over you, you would take one of the knives, stab yourself in the stomach (giving the knife a hard twist) then slit your writs, and ultimately die. The horrible thing was that your body would act on its own and your terrified mind would do everything try to stop the suicide but fail. In the yellow room if the ghost floated through you, you would go mad and tear at your skin until you bled to death. In the blue room you would stick your head into the tank of screaming heads and drown yourself. In the red room once the ghost has brushed against you, you would cover yourself in gasoline and set yourself on fire. In the last room, the green room, I saw a group of maybe ten people who had been touched by the green ghost stranding under an eerie green light.  They had exited the green room through the window and were now standing around a circular ledge holding hands. The ledge was surrounding a bottomless pit. Some were crying, some were pleading, and some wore the face of someone who has come to accept what is to come. As if they reached the end of some soundless count down, they all jumped at once into the pit. There were more than a few screams of horror.

So it would seem obvious at first to avoid the colored rooms and just stay in the center room to avoid the ghosts. However, this was an even worse choice. At random intervals, all of the ghosts would emerge from their rooms and float around the center room without any discernable pattern. All of those ghosts the room at the same time made them hard to dodge. Two or three ghosts could come at you at once where as in the colored rooms you only had to deal with one at a time. Also,  if you were in a specific room you would know how you were going to die if a ghost touched you and in this way could pick the death you preferred. If you were in the center room, there was not telling which ghost would get you first or how you would die.

Some people picked the yellow room deciding that at least you were mad when you died. There were others who picked the green room. They were somehow convinced that the fall did not kill the people. They hoped that maybe they fell into an ocean or a feather bed and would be laughing and joking about their escape in no time. Others picked the red, blue, or gray room convinced that the death in that room would be quicker. After touring all of the rooms, I picked the red room. Not because I thought burning to death was quicker, but because the room was more comfortable. I sat and kept a close eye on the red ghost who would sweep around the room in a carless manner. I watched helplessly as many of my companions died in screaming flames. There were close calls where I jumped out of the way just in time to feel the scorching air of the opera ghost as it passed by. Then there was the time when I ended up in a corner with the ghost heading straight at me. Only luck saved me when the ghost turned and went the other way.

I was there for a long time thinking each moment could be my last. But staying in one place seemed impossible to do, too much like patiently awaiting the executioner’s ax. So I began to explore. I went to the green room and saw someone fall sobbing to their death. I went to the gray room where everything was slick with blood and covered in guts. In the yellow room I saw someone screaming madly as they tore out their eyes and hung uselessly in their sockets. I saw someone with their head in the tank of water with bubbles bursting from his screaming and mouth mowing comically like a fish.
There was a little girl in a room who was about six years old. She had just seen her mother die and was in great distress. I sat with her (moving twice to let a ghost pass) until her tears had run dry. I knew I had to take her with me. Nauseated by my adventures I decided to return with the girl to the red room to rest. However, as I was passing through the round room something happened. The ramp opened downward and a strange brown car drove up. I understood at once that they had come to rescue us.
For some reason the car had to prepare itself to receive us. As I waited I went around room to room to gather the survivors (dancing around a few ghosts on the way). When I got back to the car it was still a long wait until the doors finally began to open.  A mob of people started cramming themselves into the car piling one on top of another. But something was wrong. The car was supposed to hold all of us, but there were too many of us. I found myself near the end of the line with the girl. The driver of the car was holding the door told me there was room for one more. I, of course, out the girl in the car and hugged her goodbye. The driver told me that another car would come for the rest of us (about five people). I went back to the red room to wait.

I waited and waited. Hours turned into day which turned into weeks and no car came. But I knew it was coming if I could stay alive long enough to reach it. After studying them, I learned that I was wrong about the ghosts moving in a completely random fashion. It turned out to be a matter of probabilities. There was a higher probability that my red ghost would turn one way instead of the other. There was a low probability that the red ghost would stop at that particular point. Etc. I knew the red ghosts movements the best and very rarely left the red room. I learned how to sleep even though I lived in fear for my life. I adapted. I slept shallowly so that I would awaken when the ghost was close. I found a warped sense of normality in my predicament with the ghosts. I had come to terms with the fact that I could die horribly at any time.

Then I woke up.

I have very pleasant dreams, don’t I?  I have a normal life with normal amounts of stress. It isn’t as if death is haunting me. Then why all of these weird bad dreams? I don’t think I want to know what this  dream means.

First, there was a great discussion yesterday in folklore about urban legends, how they spread, and how they are created.

Second, there was an interesting conversation in my construction of sexualities class about why lesbianism was okay in the 19th century and condemned later on and how homosexual sex was always condemned. Actually, on the other hand, I may not be able to talk about it. I want to keep my blog PG/PG13. Maybe if I found a way to keep penetration out of the discussion… Well I’ll have to think on it.

Moving on, I had another very strange dream that I want to write out before I forget it completely. It was so freaky. It involved five ghosts, five rooms, and five ways to loose your mind or die.

I was eating lunch in front of the UMC when a Transgender group formed behind me and started a mini demonstration. That gave me a bunch of ideas…. that will have to wait until later.

Lastly, I have decided to post another of my short stories but I’m not sure which one. I’m considering “The Shopping Escape” (about a grownup daycare), a story about a miniature cow (I might not be able to find that one though), the one about a ninja in the closet (which is not an action packed story despite the ninja character), “A Bad Day Mixed With Monkeys” (which isn’t a very good story in my opinion), “An Autobiography” (By a man named Thomas Edison [not THE Thomas Edison, A Thomas Edison] who wants to write an autobiography but who’s life is not interesting enough to write about, so he attempts to become a daredevil), “The Kegger Conspiracy,” or “Obsession.”  I haven’t decided which one yet. I might be a long time in deciding.

My other options for internships aren’t as exciting. I sent off an application for a copywriter internship. I never heard back from them though. I was hesitant about even applying for the job because it didn’t feel like a good fit unlike this magazine internship. However, if I don’t get to work for the magazine I guess I will focus on finding advertising internships with an eye towards editing. However, I doubt any other internship will spark the excitement in me as the Southwestern Art magazine did

By the way, I added pictures of me on my about page if your curious about what I look like.