Stereo

type

Stereotype. I love it when self proclaimed cultivated people start talking about stereotypes, exclusively categorizing them "for simple people". Stereotype= a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group, like "women are shoppers", "men like football and hate shopping", the pitzipoanca, the geek, the cowboy etc etc.
Even if the definition uses the term simplified that does not mean it is for simple people. Most of our knowledge is based on a stereotype. That is how the mind functions. The way a stereotype is formed is something like this: we gather some information about a thing A and store it and apply it to the similar things to thing A, thing A1, A2, A3....we don't rationalize much when we gather the information about thing A, as in "put a label on it" (we use other people's knowledge, mass media, advice or one single experience we had with that thing A), and we don't rationalize much when we think thing A1 is just like thing A. Of course we shouldn't judge people and base our actions on stereotypes, but stereotypes do not only refer to people and all that I am saying is the stereotype is more complicated by it's fantastic usage for our life than we can imagine.
I am saying that when the self proclaimed intellectuals consider themselves above the stereotype they are in fact one and they do not have a clue about what it means. If we were to start from zero about every single person, object, phenomenon, action, thought we would go crazy and our heads would explode. We use the stereotypes because, like the Chinese, we have found our "thought vocabulary" to be to complicated to be learned and used functionally and with some profit. We had to simplify our rationalizations of the world around us and thus we invented stereotypes. The fact that when we think of leaves and wood when we hear the word tree is also a stereotype. It's a shortened way from the word tree which have a million species and a million components to some simple features: leaves, wood, green, simple things we process in a blink of an instant (whatever Mr X., the instant exists in our perceptions even if not in physics).

And for God's sake...stereotype that women shop. I have spent 6 hours in a mall after a man today, and I got so fantastically bored out of my mind(and I like shopping). In fact most of the men I know are crazy about shopping and no...they are not gay. Yes yes...another stereotype. Hey, most of them are right. That's why it's so fun when you find a so called exception...I found 3.

Another exception. I don't like black eyed pees or whatever their name is at all. Usually their music is dull, commercial and simple(bit, bum, ah, olala, uhuu, bit, over). But this song I like, most of it. It keeps singing in my head :

Black Eyed Peas -Meet Me Halfway