Follow the Yellow Brick Road!

Where Am I Going? Where Did I Come From? How Will I get There?

These are the three questions Mark Lipton says will be the most important ones that we want to know in life. As far as I am concerned, things aren't written in stone; Dorothy didn't know how to find Oz without being told to follow the yellow brick road. No offense to Dorothy, but she had it easy. The people of Munchkinland told her where to go, where as I have to follow my own path.

I know that my ancestors came from China, moved to the Philippines where my parents met, and then to Canada where I was born and raised. That covers where I came from.

The direction I would like to go is obviously a media dominated field. I am specializing in public relations, where I would hopefully like to promote companies to the public. I am comfortable with talking to strangers on just about anything, so I hope to achieve a career where my position has me socially interacting with people. That is as far as I hope to be going.

On the concept of how I will get there, I am currently taking the steps to achieving my goals by attending university. I stayed back a year at high school for a “victory lap” because I was unsure of whether or not I wanted to go into Theatre Arts (my previous choice one year ago). As I attended school, I realized I wanted to go into the media field to fulfill my need to be happy in life. I believe in order to get to a career I will be satisfied with, I have to receive an education and make my contacts as I go along. University was the giant leap I took in order to go into the direction of my choice. Although my journey has just begun, I am still having fun as I go. To be honest, my mother was not too happy with my choice of going to Guelph Humber rather than other popular school names. I told her in order for me to specify into what I like, I needed to go to Guelph Humber to obtain a better learning experience. A month and a half into the semester, my mother still believes I am ‘wasting my time’, but I decided in order to get to a destination I want, I have to follow my own yellow brick road.

I can also say I finally have a gist of semiotics! I don’t think I ever laughed so hard in class as I did yesterday with my classmate Erin. After Mark Lipton mentioned Missy Elliot “crawling out of a back door hole behind the scenes,” Erin and I burst with laughter at the very image. In all seriousness though, Mark Lipton did touch upon a serious topic on how the attractive, Anglo-Saxon female dominates the African-American female figure. I decided to do my own personal research and searched the GAP jeans commercial on YouTube. After watching and analyzing the points Mark Lipton told us to pay attention to, I typed in a new search in YouTube. This time, I searched ‘Madonna, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Missy Elliot performance’. I got 2 links on the famous Britney-Madonna kiss and 3 links on the actual performance as a whole. What I noticed in the performance is a mirror image of what was seen in the GAP jeans commercial, only with two additional Anglo-Saxon women to the performance. Madonna wore a chain on the side of her leg and dressed as the groom in this wedding-themed performance. As soon as they were done with Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” they then introduce Missy Elliot for her rap solo. What I carefully analyzed about this bit was Britney, Christina, and

Madonna each rose from the very top of the wedding cake respectively. As soon as the ladies were upfront on stage, the cake was gone and half a gazebo frame was placed in the center of the stage; Missy Elliot opened the door and crawled out just like it was rehearsed in the GAP commercial. Her clothes were also out of uniform and not in a traditional sense as they were a mixture of white, black, and sparkling glitter (definitely not what you wear to a traditional wedding). ANother similarity I found was when either Britney or Christina would dance separately with Missy Elliot, they danced as equals. Whenever they would dance with Madonna, Madonna would be the dominant dancer leading. The same situation occured in the GAP jeans commercial when Missy Elliot's dancers would dance as equals, whereas Madonna's dancers would have her as the dominant figure.

I was shocked that even on public television, the producers decided to have the white women appear on top as the superior and the African American woman appear beneath them with not her clothes not as decent and singing speech nowhere near an equivalent amount to the other three ladies.

It just goes to show that racism definitely exists today through subliminal messages in the media.