Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

High School Rec Room and Tabooistic Student Bet

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/4/2015
Primary Language: English

Informant (“A”) is a 19 year old, female from Rancho Santa Fe, California, and attends The University of Southern California. She is a Human Biology major.  She is of European descent and her family includes her mother, father, and older brother who attends college in Texas.  Informant has studied ballet for 17 years, including work in a professional company.

 

A: “So in my high school we have a senior rec room.  Honestly the place is absolutely disgusting and teachers avoid it like the plague.  That kinda means anything goes in there.  There’s stories about people having sex on the couches…and other stuff too.  There’s a story about this guy in the rec room, and honestly he wasn’t the smartest guy, but so there’s like this pool table in there, and he really overestimated how good he was at pool.

Anyway he made a bet and lost and the punishment was he had to shave his head bald, except for his eyebrow length bangs.  It was the stupidest looking thing I ever saw.  He kept it for a few days, but like he mostly wore a hat anyway, and then finally shaved it clean.  He was supposed to keep it for a week I guess.  And it took forever for his hair to grow back out too.

He didn’t learn though because the same guy made another pool bet, and of course lost again.  So like in the rec room there’s this big vacuum and it’s really powerful and it’s got a big hose on it.  When he lost he had to stick his dick inside the vacuum with it on.  I guess he didn’t know this, but another guy had coated the inside of the vacuum with icy hot.  I guess he didn’t find out about the icy hot until like 20 minutes later when he was sitting in class too.  I think he had to go home for the rest of the day.  He didn’t make anymore bets either”.

 

Analysis: The rec room described in this piece of Folklore appears to be a ‘no adults allowed’ sort of location, and thus legends of taboo teen activities are associated with the area. Sort of acting as an oasis where students could release any sort of tabooistic discourse they would normally hide from the administration. Legends of students having sex in the recreation room, as well as the student sticking his penis in a vacuum show these sorts of themes surrounding the room.

The student being punished for his hubris in betting could either act as a sort of morality tale, to be careful with overconfidence or it may act as a sort of representation of the themes represented by the recreation room. ‘A’ did confirm that the students cutting his bangs was recorded on video, and that that did in fact occur. She was more unsure of the ‘dick in the vacuum’ aspect.

Break a Leg!

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/03/15
Primary Language: English

Collector: So, you’re involved in theatre and also some film stuff.

Informant: Yes.

Collector: So, are there any tabooistic or initiation things involved in that world?

Friend: Don’t say “Macbeth” in a theatre setting. We call it “The Scottish Play.” Also, you’re not supposed to say “Good luck.” You’re supposed to say, “Break a leg.”

Collector: Oh, yeah I’m familiar with those. Do we know the story behind “Break a leg?”

Informant: In earlier centuries, people would bow. There are a couple of different stories. The way you bow included kneeling one leg and bending down, so you’re literally breaking the line.

Collector: Oh! That makes sense.

Informant: Yeah, and if you had a really good performance, you would bend really far down, so that’s why you really want to, like, “break” the leg.

Friend: And you’re also breaking a line by doing that, in a way. You’re creating a line by straightening the one leg, but you’re breaking the other potential line, a little bit, because you’re bending the knee.

Informant: So it’s like “Give a performance deserving of taking a bow that low.”

Collector’s Notes: Theatre has always been an area of a lot of tradition.  People chant things before performing, they’ll wear certain pairs of tights or shoes, or they’ll ceremoniously give each other gifts on opening night.  So, it doesn’t surprise me that the “Break a leg” saying is deep-rooted in tradition as well.  Although I’ve never heard it called “The Scottish Play” I think that’s really interesting.  I’m assuming that they call it this in a “He Who Will Not Be Named” sort of way.  Because it is a play about Scotland, I’m guessing that they call it this instead of using its actual name.  We see this a lot in studying folklore, because certain things that become “bad luck” are avoided like the plague.  I like this story, though, because it sort of gives a logical explanation to the meaning of the saying.  As if someone “breaking” the line of their leg gives the saying more validation than just being a bad omen.  People naturally like to have logical or scientific explanations for things, instead of saying that something is the way it is “just because that’s how it’s been done.”  An interesting hypothesis, is that maybe people started saying “break a leg,” then because more people started saying this, “good luck,” being heard less and less, was assumed to be bad luck just out of lack of use.

 

 

Tumblr Culture

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA/Chicago, IL
Performance Date: 4/29/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: I saw it on Tumblr. Cause you know they have text boxes and stuff.

Collector: I still can’t use Tumblr the right way. I try so hard. I think I just reinstalled it on my phone ‘cuz I’m gonna give it another go!

Informant: I like looking at it just for…You know, that’s how I got the inspiration for my room and stuff.

Collector: I just wanna learn how to use it correctly!

Informant: I can teach you!

Collector: Okay!

Informant: It’s like Pinterest, but there are no organized boards. You just read.

Collector: I just have a hard time finding people to follow.

Informant: What I usually do is, like if I’m going through my feed, the person that I reblog the picture from, whoever they got it from I’ll follow them, too. And then it kind of just becomes this whole thing.

Collector: It’s like Tumblr culture.

Informant: Yeah.

Collector’s Notes: Tumblr is a new craze that has really grown in the past couple of years.  I don’t know much about it, as made clear by the interview, but it seems like second nature to a lot of teenagers and young adults of today.  What it is, essentially, is a combination of all social media, but in a more raw form.  If someone likes a picture, recipe, or quote, they share it as a blog post on Tumblr, and then it gets passed around and commented on by all the other users in a person’s circle of followers.  While I think it’s great for passing around culture and bonding through a digital medium, I worry that it prolongs this idea of no longer using words as communication.  Why say what you’re thinking when you can just reblog someone else saying it for you?  Or a picture?  We’ve come a long way from unlimited prose in statuses on Facebook.

 

Lucky Number 8

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA/Chicago, IL
Performance Date: 4/29/15
Primary Language: English

Collector: Do you have any lucky numbers?

Informant: 8.

Collector: Why 8?

Informant: Because it’s a lucky number in China. That’s where I grew up. So, like, 88 is a really, really lucky number there.

Collector: That’s interesting!

Collector’s Notes: In class we talked about unlucky numbers in China, but I don’t think we mentioned any lucky numbers.  Here, in the United States, we have 3 and 7.  It weird how we learned that 4 is an unlucky number in Chinese culture, but they find 8, 4’s double, lucky!  I personally find 8 lucky because I like both the number 4 and 8 inherently.  Maybe because there are 4 people in my family, and possibly because I started dating and got engaged to my fiancé on August 8th, or 8/8.  I like how the Informant is still very in touch with the culture that they were exposed to in China.  Because that was such a fundamental time of their life (childhood) it makes sense that those beliefs stayed with them and they carried them with them here.

Athenaaaaa!

Nationality: US
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 28APR2015
Primary Language: English

Megan is a sophomore in my french class. I’ve known her for a year. She’s a sweet, very soft spoken intelligent girl. She loves horseback riding. She’s majoring in creative writing and wants to be a screenwriter for Pixar one day.

When I first introduced this project to her she got real excited because she loves mythology. Megan is not religious but spent a lot of time trying to figure out of she was when she was little. When I brought up examples to her, in explaining folklore more in depth, her ears sang when I mentioned “Greek Mythology”. She starting spewing out how much she loved taking basic latin in middle school.

When she was in middle school, her latin teacher assigned all the students new names for the few weeks they would be in the course. Each student was given a God or Goddesses’ name for the duration of class. Megan got assigned “Athena” goddess of War and Wisdom.

“I took this, and just…ran with it.” She laughed. She got very interested in greek history and mythology. She started looking up elements that were important to the gods. Sacrifice, prayer, and loyalty. So she started talking to friends and asked those that had religious affiliations or religious backgrounds what it is they did for sacrifice, prayer and loyalty. She took these influences and her own and came up with her own nightly ritual to her favorite goddess Athena.

She would lay in bed, hold her hands together and close her eyes. She would start off with “Dear Athena…”. Megan says that most of the time she would ask the goddess for superpowers or a letter from hogwarts. Very pre-teenage-ry thoughts. She then closed the prayer with “Amen.” then Megan would drink a glass of water. She drank the glass of water for three reasons. One, she wanted to prove her loyalty to the goddess. Water is as valuable as life itself. Ending the prayer with a sip of water let her know she truly believed in the goddess. Two, she thought it was most likely to make her “wish-prayer”come true. And lastly, she would drink water at night and not drink with her food in the morning as a way of sacrifice.

Analysis: It’s really interesting how she composed this Pagan-Christian-Harry potter religion. She took pieces from all the religions that she simply learned from some of the friends around her and came up with this new unique style of worship. A worship to a goddess that had a religion and had a way to worship her properly. I think it’s great that she took something taht everyone makes a large deal about in life – religion – and made it her own. Religion is a huge part of how cultures exist. By her transforming it she’s making it truly personal; between her and her goddess. Which is all that mattered in religion in the first place. That golden relationship between you and your God.