There is one more personal anecdote I would like to add to my last post.
I have a daughter who is thirteen. Last year, while she was still twelve, we went to the grocery store and were picking out a salad dressing. Now, dressing is not a particularly healthy thing to consume. Anyone who can read a label knows this, whether they acknowledge it or not. So, we were picking what kind of dressing we wanted and comparing nutrition labels. You know; calories per serving, grams of fat. My mom has had issues with high cholesterol and high blood pressure in the past. Nothing to write home about, but enough to where I feel like I can teach my daughter what those things are and what they mean nutritionally, so we were looking at cholesterol and sodium as well. I thought we were having an interesting conversation; organic vs synthetic, local vs big brand, less expensive vs more expensive. Then this woman slams down a bottle of dressing in her cart. I turn to look. She makes direct eye contact, cocks her head, scoffs and stomps off. I look at my daughter. Anyone who knows me knows she’s tiny, and anyone who knows her knows she’s athletic. I can no longer give my friends my daughter’s old clothes, even to the seven-year-olds, because my thirteen-year-old is smaller than they are. She is not now, nor has she ever been, failure to thrive. She just came from a family of really tiny people and, as such, is really tiny. Her mother, at a massive 5’5” and 115 is taller than her father, though not by much. So, the kid’s small. BFD. Her entire life I’ve had random strangers in stores tell me I’m mistreating my child because she’s always looked younger than she is. Here I am trying to teach her how to read food labels, a skill everyone should have and that a twelve-year-old is mature enough to begin learning about, and this bitch is passing judgment like I’m a pageant mom trying to make sure my eight-year-old doesn’t eat salad dressing that’s too high in fat content. So, you can’t win for losing, sometimes. At least someone out there gave a shit whether she knew what she was thinking or not.
I, personally, believe that more parents should be teaching their children how to read nutrition labels and to make smart food choices, but what the hell do I know?? To some, I’m a skinny liberal bitch teaching her eight-year-old to shun calories.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Apparently There IS No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.
I’m still pretty uneducated on the whole school lunch ideas that the Obama administration is pushing around, I admit, but from what I’ve read I don’t understand why so many people are so pissed off. I really don’t. And to be honest, most of the people I’ve sat and listened to bitch and moan are a) wealthy as fuck and b) would hate the president if he deigned to say that the sky was blue or that puppies are cute. Suffice to say, if you are wealthy enough to feed your children and smart enough to not overload them with junk food, then this new law is not directed at you. Okay?? So back the fuck off, because there are people out there who need what’s being offered them. I know how much y’all jus’ love to make sure that the have-nots remain the have-nots, but seriously. What is your damage, Heather?? Healthier lunches made available to low-income school children?? That’s a fuckin’ problem?? Oil your knees, grow a heart, obtain a brain and STFU because if you think this is a bad thing then you have no soul.
I’ve worked and socialized with children and families who come from all kinds of backgrounds. Or, as we’re supposed to say, “socioeconomic status.” At one point I was teaching preschool full-time at an establishment in Seattle which accepted a large number of DSHS children while working part-time teaching athletics at a private facility that is not known for being inexpensive, if you smell what I’m cookin’. It was an interesting time for me, especially as a broke single mom who had chosen poorly at her career (teaching), who lived well below the poverty level for both the city and the nation, had a baby daddy whose family wiped their asses with $100 bills while I was still taking classes part time at the community college.
I observed some interesting behavior when it came to food and parenting. The wealthy gave all: hot dogs, chips, milkshakes, French fries, pastries. No matter the circumstances or the time of day, child gets what child wants. For example, my own daughter was fortunate enough to be granted ice skating lessons by her grandmother, which meant sitting at the arena with her grandmother’s friends and their competitive skater children who inhaled pizza and doughnuts immediately before practice and considered me a food tyrant for giving my daughter fruit, crackers or veggies with peanut butter and water or juice before skating and allowing her to have pizza after. I heard what people said behind my back: I’d been a gymnast and that obviously made me an anorexic and therefore I could not possibly know how to feed myself, let alone a child. My mind railed against these stupid bitches!! When had they ever been athletes?? When had they ever eaten McDonald’s right before practice and went the whole afternoon with a stomach ache because of it?? They looked like all they ate was pizza and doughnuts. And who died and made them the food police?? If my kid is going to be an athlete, she should learn to eat like one. That did not and does not mean no pizza and doughnuts ever; it meant no pizza and doughnuts until after practice. What’s so mean about that I’m not sure I’ll ever understand, save for the fact that it’s not how the older, richer in-vitro moms fed their children.
When I began more full-time work with children again, I saw things that were even more disturbing. One week I would be working at the preschool, where one family was so poor they sent their two children to school with a lunch in one brown bag: two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on not dog buns. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, as a single mom there were times I’ve had to be creative with my daughter’s lunch, and times when I’ve had to send her to school without a lunch knowing that the school has an emergency lunch program that isn’t going to allow her to starve. Of course, they send you a bill at the end of the year, but I digress. So, on one hand it was sweet that this mother made the effort. That is not, however, a sufficient meal for children in full-time preschool. So, the food that had meant to be used exclusively for snack time was used to feed the really poor kids. Which, of course, meant less for the kids who threw away half of their lunches because they didn’t feel like eating pears that day, but really. In all fairness, it is the right of families to purchase food and have kids throw it away. Even at a low-income-friendly school. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s true. Obviously no school subsidized lunch program was offered, but when one child wastes while another child wants (or needs), it’s difficult to watch.
In the wealthier of the two environments, I would spend a week coaching athletic camps, fun camps, and almost every child signed up had a food allergy. (Care to wager how many of the low-income kids at the preschool had food allergies??) Half the kids had access to their parents’ member accounts and would purchase food the camp leaders had been told not to give them. Celiac disease?? My auntie. The kid who’s supposedly allergic to gluten just downed three hot dogs with buns, a bowl of mac and cheese and tried to sneak Mountain Dew from the fountain after the other leaders and I had restricted them to lemonade, water along with one paper cup of sprite each. Fortunately, no one got sick, no one told their parents about the crap they sneaked and charged to their parents’ accounts, and no one got in trouble. However, my astonishment at the lengths I’ve seen these kids go to just to have the junk food that they want remains, and I see very few adults saying no to these kids. I thought I was being the food police; making sure no one ate anything they were “allergic” to or didn’t have at least some nutritional benefit, or had beverages that had too much sugar or caffeine. And the longer I’ve worked at this establishment I’ve seen how indulged some of these kids really are. Every time I see them eat, they’re eating junk food. These are children whose parents can (and likely do) buy local and organic, which is something that low-income people can’t always afford to do because it’s so damned expensive, and their kids are scarfing hot dogs and Pepsi and no one is saying anything to the kids. For a time I thought that kids who are shitty food were from families who couldn’t afford healthy food, because let’s face it, healthy food is hella more expensive, but they’re not. They’re from families with educated parents, who should know better, who want their children to be athletes and serve them muy burgers and fries just as often as they are from lower-income families.
So the poor are too poor to feed their kids, which has a lot to do with the rate of childhood obesity in America. Yet, the wealthy don’t seem to give much of a damn what their kids eat. Do they think it’s all gravy (pardon the pun)?? That they’ll be able to afford dieticians and fat farms for their kids when they don’t know how to control or regulate their food intake then they’re older?? Who is teaching the rich kids that three hot dogs is not the correct portion, and who is sharing one with the poor kid who doesn’t have one??
At no point would I presume to say that all parents, of any income bracket, do not know how to feed their children. That is not the point I’m trying to make at all, and if you think it is then you haven’t been paying attention. Kids out there need guidance they are evidently not getting from their parents. Not all kids, but kids. Teachers talk about good nutritional habits, but not everyone in the world can afford them. We are adults, and our job as adults and as parents is to stand up for these kids and do what’s right for them even if it may not be right for us. It’s called being an adult, being a parent, and participating in the health and growth of the society in which you live.
And no, I’m not a socialist, but the more right wing, conservative, tea party propaganda I read about and hear makes me beg for Emma Goldman to rise from the great beyond and start kicking some ass.
Working with older kids, I’ve had the displeasure of hearing the horror stories of what the public schools offer to middle and high schoolers for lunch. One local middle school had a coffee cart, but they had to limit the consumption of coffee drinks to the cafeteria because children were buying coffees, taking them into the hallways and dumping them around; making messes and vandalizing the lockers of kids they didn’t like. Yeah. Middle school kids. Being served lattes and cappuccinos and mochas at school. Please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks that’s fucked up and actually sees the problem here?? Other kids admitted to me that their parents packed them lunches that they threw away and used money to buy chips, soft drinks, doughnuts, coffee, fries. I knew these kids parents. Some of them were not allowed to have Gatorade at gymnastics class, yet they were tossing out their lunches in favor of crap.
So, yeah. Something needs to be done. Whether you feel like you’re teaching you children good habits or not, if they have the option to pitch their lunch in a trash can and mow down burritos so unhealthy even Taco Bell would say “hey, that’s just fucked up,” then they’re going to take it. These vending and a la carte options must be scrapped, and that’s something that this new law is trying to make happen. Why is that bad?? What would you rather have your kid be offered as a snack when they’re away from you: an apple or a bag of chips??
While I understand that some people feel like their intelligence is being insulted and their parenting methods undermined, fuckin’ deal!! As Americans, we embarrass ourselves every damn day and pretty much deserve to have our intelligence insulted. But this is for our kids: ALL of them, not just yours, you bourgeois geek. If you pulled your head out of your ass long enough to read something other than the GOP website, perhaps you’d understand that.
Anyway.
At ease.
Bill O’Reilly is on line one.
I’ve worked and socialized with children and families who come from all kinds of backgrounds. Or, as we’re supposed to say, “socioeconomic status.” At one point I was teaching preschool full-time at an establishment in Seattle which accepted a large number of DSHS children while working part-time teaching athletics at a private facility that is not known for being inexpensive, if you smell what I’m cookin’. It was an interesting time for me, especially as a broke single mom who had chosen poorly at her career (teaching), who lived well below the poverty level for both the city and the nation, had a baby daddy whose family wiped their asses with $100 bills while I was still taking classes part time at the community college.
I observed some interesting behavior when it came to food and parenting. The wealthy gave all: hot dogs, chips, milkshakes, French fries, pastries. No matter the circumstances or the time of day, child gets what child wants. For example, my own daughter was fortunate enough to be granted ice skating lessons by her grandmother, which meant sitting at the arena with her grandmother’s friends and their competitive skater children who inhaled pizza and doughnuts immediately before practice and considered me a food tyrant for giving my daughter fruit, crackers or veggies with peanut butter and water or juice before skating and allowing her to have pizza after. I heard what people said behind my back: I’d been a gymnast and that obviously made me an anorexic and therefore I could not possibly know how to feed myself, let alone a child. My mind railed against these stupid bitches!! When had they ever been athletes?? When had they ever eaten McDonald’s right before practice and went the whole afternoon with a stomach ache because of it?? They looked like all they ate was pizza and doughnuts. And who died and made them the food police?? If my kid is going to be an athlete, she should learn to eat like one. That did not and does not mean no pizza and doughnuts ever; it meant no pizza and doughnuts until after practice. What’s so mean about that I’m not sure I’ll ever understand, save for the fact that it’s not how the older, richer in-vitro moms fed their children.
When I began more full-time work with children again, I saw things that were even more disturbing. One week I would be working at the preschool, where one family was so poor they sent their two children to school with a lunch in one brown bag: two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on not dog buns. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, as a single mom there were times I’ve had to be creative with my daughter’s lunch, and times when I’ve had to send her to school without a lunch knowing that the school has an emergency lunch program that isn’t going to allow her to starve. Of course, they send you a bill at the end of the year, but I digress. So, on one hand it was sweet that this mother made the effort. That is not, however, a sufficient meal for children in full-time preschool. So, the food that had meant to be used exclusively for snack time was used to feed the really poor kids. Which, of course, meant less for the kids who threw away half of their lunches because they didn’t feel like eating pears that day, but really. In all fairness, it is the right of families to purchase food and have kids throw it away. Even at a low-income-friendly school. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s true. Obviously no school subsidized lunch program was offered, but when one child wastes while another child wants (or needs), it’s difficult to watch.
In the wealthier of the two environments, I would spend a week coaching athletic camps, fun camps, and almost every child signed up had a food allergy. (Care to wager how many of the low-income kids at the preschool had food allergies??) Half the kids had access to their parents’ member accounts and would purchase food the camp leaders had been told not to give them. Celiac disease?? My auntie. The kid who’s supposedly allergic to gluten just downed three hot dogs with buns, a bowl of mac and cheese and tried to sneak Mountain Dew from the fountain after the other leaders and I had restricted them to lemonade, water along with one paper cup of sprite each. Fortunately, no one got sick, no one told their parents about the crap they sneaked and charged to their parents’ accounts, and no one got in trouble. However, my astonishment at the lengths I’ve seen these kids go to just to have the junk food that they want remains, and I see very few adults saying no to these kids. I thought I was being the food police; making sure no one ate anything they were “allergic” to or didn’t have at least some nutritional benefit, or had beverages that had too much sugar or caffeine. And the longer I’ve worked at this establishment I’ve seen how indulged some of these kids really are. Every time I see them eat, they’re eating junk food. These are children whose parents can (and likely do) buy local and organic, which is something that low-income people can’t always afford to do because it’s so damned expensive, and their kids are scarfing hot dogs and Pepsi and no one is saying anything to the kids. For a time I thought that kids who are shitty food were from families who couldn’t afford healthy food, because let’s face it, healthy food is hella more expensive, but they’re not. They’re from families with educated parents, who should know better, who want their children to be athletes and serve them muy burgers and fries just as often as they are from lower-income families.
So the poor are too poor to feed their kids, which has a lot to do with the rate of childhood obesity in America. Yet, the wealthy don’t seem to give much of a damn what their kids eat. Do they think it’s all gravy (pardon the pun)?? That they’ll be able to afford dieticians and fat farms for their kids when they don’t know how to control or regulate their food intake then they’re older?? Who is teaching the rich kids that three hot dogs is not the correct portion, and who is sharing one with the poor kid who doesn’t have one??
At no point would I presume to say that all parents, of any income bracket, do not know how to feed their children. That is not the point I’m trying to make at all, and if you think it is then you haven’t been paying attention. Kids out there need guidance they are evidently not getting from their parents. Not all kids, but kids. Teachers talk about good nutritional habits, but not everyone in the world can afford them. We are adults, and our job as adults and as parents is to stand up for these kids and do what’s right for them even if it may not be right for us. It’s called being an adult, being a parent, and participating in the health and growth of the society in which you live.
And no, I’m not a socialist, but the more right wing, conservative, tea party propaganda I read about and hear makes me beg for Emma Goldman to rise from the great beyond and start kicking some ass.
Working with older kids, I’ve had the displeasure of hearing the horror stories of what the public schools offer to middle and high schoolers for lunch. One local middle school had a coffee cart, but they had to limit the consumption of coffee drinks to the cafeteria because children were buying coffees, taking them into the hallways and dumping them around; making messes and vandalizing the lockers of kids they didn’t like. Yeah. Middle school kids. Being served lattes and cappuccinos and mochas at school. Please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks that’s fucked up and actually sees the problem here?? Other kids admitted to me that their parents packed them lunches that they threw away and used money to buy chips, soft drinks, doughnuts, coffee, fries. I knew these kids parents. Some of them were not allowed to have Gatorade at gymnastics class, yet they were tossing out their lunches in favor of crap.
So, yeah. Something needs to be done. Whether you feel like you’re teaching you children good habits or not, if they have the option to pitch their lunch in a trash can and mow down burritos so unhealthy even Taco Bell would say “hey, that’s just fucked up,” then they’re going to take it. These vending and a la carte options must be scrapped, and that’s something that this new law is trying to make happen. Why is that bad?? What would you rather have your kid be offered as a snack when they’re away from you: an apple or a bag of chips??
While I understand that some people feel like their intelligence is being insulted and their parenting methods undermined, fuckin’ deal!! As Americans, we embarrass ourselves every damn day and pretty much deserve to have our intelligence insulted. But this is for our kids: ALL of them, not just yours, you bourgeois geek. If you pulled your head out of your ass long enough to read something other than the GOP website, perhaps you’d understand that.
Anyway.
At ease.
Bill O’Reilly is on line one.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Why The Palins are the Most Dangerous and Fucked-Up Family in America.*
I have had approximately enough of the Palin family in all its fame-whoring capacity. I feel sorry for Todd Palin who has, smartly, stayed out of the limelight, for the most part. I feel badly for him that he married an idiot and produced more little idiots, all of whom seem to want to be as famous as their mommy by any means necessary and without actually having to work ever.
Sarah Palin had a job in public service and the quit to be a tv star. And now she’s thinking about running for president?? Pardon my proverbial French, but fuck that shit!! I know I’m not alone in feeling like she abandoned the public whom she was sworn to serve as a governor; so why is she a qualified, adequate candidate for the presidency?? People don’t become president so that they can have their own t-shirts, bitch. Get that through your pageant-queen thick head. I’d rather vote for Vinny from Jersey Shore. He has a college degree and is good-looking. Like, aren’t those the qualifications??
This bitch is so dense she unapologetically makes up words when at a loss for one that actually exists. Okay, so we all make typos, we have all been at a loss for words and said the wrong thing, but to repeatedly, that means “over and over, on more than one occasion,” use the word “refudiate,” which carries whatever definition she wants it to at the time, and when called on the fact that no such word exists compares herself to Shakespeare, stating gleefully that she’s adding to the living language. Actually, Rain Woman, that’s why we have linguists and Jay-Z. AND, as of 2 days ago, Sarah Palin’s new idiot word, “refudiate,” has been awarded Word of the Year for 2010 by the New Oxford English Dictionary. Please, please, please stop talking, Mrs. Palin. You’re ruining the language for everyone else. Has anyone checked on Noam Chomsky?? Made sure her now-infamous babbling nonsense hasn’t caused him to put a gun in his mouth??
I feel sorry for Todd Palin that his grandson has half of Levi Johnston’s chromosomes because his daughter is not only a boyfriend-stealing, back-stabbing uber-wench who should have gotten her ass handed to her by that former friend of hers who had him first, and that she was too fuckin’ stupid to a) use birth control or b) abstain, like her supposedly-staunch Republican family told her to do. Her mother, as then-governor and one-time really-embarrassing-vice-presidential-candidate had a reputation to uphold. Had Mrs. Palin ever been at home to ingrain that in her child’s fat head, then perhaps we wouldn’t have little Twat, or whatever ridiculous knuckle-dragging hick name Bristol and Levi selected for their son.
Oh, and Levi; poor, long-suffering Levi. His mother and sister make the Clampetts look like the Royal Tenenbaums. Good lord, that boy never had a chance. I’m not even going to go there except to say that Kathy Griffin was the best thing that ever happened to that fuckup. Now he wants to be the mayor of Wasilla?? My ass. On Foursquare, perhaps.
I’m going to take a little aside, here, and acknowledge that just because Bristol Palin is a teen mom does not make her a bad person, in-and-of itself. I got knocked up when I was seventeen and chose to be a teen mom. What chaps my ass about her is that she’s never had a real job, and most likely never will. She won’t experience what it’s like to go on an interview for a position she’s grossly overqualified for just to have money for groceries and gasoline. What are the chances she’ll one day be selling her old shit on eBay so she’ll have money to buy her kid Christmas presents?? She’s completely out of touch with what it’s like to be a teen mom, or any kind of mom, in the real world having been supported by her rich-ass family the entire time her child has been alive. That is, until recently when she began giving “do as I say, not as I do” abstinence advocacy speeches to young people for $30,000 a pop. That’s someone’s annual salary. I’m sure that’s difficult for Miss Palin to grasp, since she’s never been asked to live for an entire year on that amount, and probably doesn’t even know what an annual salary is since she’s hired goons to do all her math for her. A real teen parent has to struggle, even if he or she does have the support of a family. Most people get jobs and toil for years to get through college. Most of us didn’t have a rich, famous family name to ride upon the coattails of so we could sit back and smile for the covers of magazines and tell everyone what a blessing everything is.
Honestly, if I were one of the Teen Moms of MTV I would be pissed that The Candies Foundation even placed them in the same category for their “The Harsh Truth: Teen Moms Tell All” special. I’m flabbergasted that anyone had the unmitigated gall to think that what Bristol Palin goes through on a daily basis is anything compared to what Maci, Amber, Farrah and Catelynn go through. Anyone with the audacity to even compare them does not know what they’re talking about, and frankly it’s insulting to all the hard work that the Teen Moms do. Yes, they get paid for being stars on MTV, but they don’t have rich mommies and daddies or come from famous families. They’re tv stars to raise awareness that teen pregnancy can happen to normal girls (which Bristol is far from) and to keep themselves from having to stand in line for government cheese, like the rest of us had to do. They’re making an investment in their futures and their children’s futures, and their lives are being improved by the money they get from MTV. When has Bristol Palin ever been hurting for money?? I beg you.
I’ve asked a few of my Rethuglican friends what it is about Sarah Palin, and thus far no one has been able to give me an answer that made any dang-ola sense. “She’s just a breath of fresh air” is an ambiguous statement that tells me nothing of why a person would jump on her political bandwagon. One especially disturbing individual said “um, she’s hot.” Yes. That is a good reason to vote for someone who will be representing the public and / or the nation. Some people think Jenna Jameson’s hot; don’t see why this might make her a qualified presidential candidate. However, she did beauty pageants when she was younger, too, and she runs her own business, which Sarah Palin has not, to my knowledge, ever done. So it could be argued that Jenna Jameson, who eats out, sucks off, fucks and fondles people (as well as herself) for a living, is more intelligent than Sarah Palin. Yet, still, I have not received an answer regarding why Mrs. Palin is a qualified candidate to be the PTA president at her kids’ elementary school, let alone the President of the United States. What gives??
I do feel strongly, however, that the mumbling muttonhead who told me he’d vote for Sarah Palin because she’s hot is onto something, because no one would give a damn about her if she were an ugly woman. If she weren’t attractive, no one would want her as the face of anything. Hillary Rodham Clinton is far more qualified to run this country than Sarah Palin is, yet so much of what people say about her is being critical of her looks. Frankly, I think that says a lot about our nation and how shallow we are as a people. The vast majority of Americans would rather have someone pretty to look at to distract us from the fact that our country is being flushed and going swirling in the wake of the second Bush Administration.
Let’s move on, shall we?? Now that Sarah and Bristol are reality tv stars and they have all the fame their little hearts could desire, we have the opportunity to hear from Willow Palin, the high-school sister who has yet to become famous for getting pregnant, shooting animals, being pretty or dancing on tv. This week she emerged from her mother and sister’s large shadow with a string of insults lobbed at a classmate who denounced her mother’s new television show on his own Facebook status. Willow jumped all over him, calling him “fat” and a “faggot” on her own update, calling him out by name. This would, in every other school in America, be called cyber-bullying and the person responsible for the slanderous verbal abuse would be in trouble with their school, but I digress. While I don’t know what action, if any, Willow’s school is taking, Bristol soon got her licks in calling him a “douchebag” and a “shit-talker.” Most normal parents would be embarrassed if their children were caught launching a direct, public verbal attack on someone, especially over something so trivial. The Palins, however, have come to the young ladies’ assist, adamantly maintaining that their girls don’t normally talk like that. Of course their parents think that. They’re too busy being rich and famous to know how their kids talk when they’re not around, which appears to be often. Anyone who thinks their high school kid doesn’t swear has their head so far up their ass they could talk out of their bellybutton.
While Willow is very young, and young people make mistakes and say the wrong thing, she should be held accountable for the way she chose to respond to this boy’s criticism. Bristol, on the other hand, is a grown woman and a mom, and she has no problem smack-talking a high school boy for not liking her mother’s tv show?? All he said was call it a “fail” and the Palin girls unleashed the fury. Why should they be allowed to behave like that?? If any of the rest of us went around verbally assaulting others just for being critical, especially if one perpetrator is an adult and the target is a child, we’d all be on probation right now. Then again, our last names aren’t all Palin, so we don’t get to just do whatever we want.
“Sorry that all you guys are jealous of my families success and you guys aren’t goin to go anywhere with your lives,” Miss Willow issues by way of apology, as if that weren’t the most narcissistic thing she could have possibly said. Spelling and grammatical errors aside, this child is so spoiled, so indulged and so egotistical that she honestly thinks that all the people in the world who don’t like her or her family are jealous. Isn’t constantly thinking that others are jealous of you a symptom of Narcissistic Personality Disorder?? In this case it might just be a symptom of spoiled brat syndrome. Perhaps if the children heard the word “no” once or twice in their lives, or had been taught that other people are entitled to their opinions, too, then this kind of bitchy, inane childish outburst could have been avoided altogether. I do not understand why people who are in the public eye, who have chosen to be there (or in this case have had it chosen for them by a fame-mongering parent), get so upset when someone criticizes them at all. Here this gal is, getting upset over one person saying that her mom’s tv show was “a fail.” You’d think he called Mrs. Palin the devil’s personal harlot by the way she and Bristol reacted. You want to be famous, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that not everyone is going to like you, and that when you choose to put yourself in the spotlight you open yourself up to appraisal by others and that not all of what people think will be positive. If you only want to hear how fabulous you and your ego are, stay home and talk into your mirrors, because it’s a big world out there and not everyone is going to like you, or your family, or what you have to say, and no one can change that because we all are free to think whatever we want and say whatever we want to say. That is until we start reaming some random kid a new asshole for not like our mommy’s show. Then we’re crossing a line. However, the children of entitlement wouldn’t know a line if they tripped and fell down the rabbit hole crossing it. And that’s just bad parenting. My kid may act like a mewling brat sometimes, and so might I, but I refuse to stand back and make her excuses for her, or for myself. If she were to choose to run her mouth in such a fashion online, for all and sundry, I think I would have her back and try to help her learn better ways of handling such a situation in the future, but rest assured she would be expected to face the consequences for her actions. Alas, this is not about what I would do. It’s about what the Palins aren’t going to do, which is discipline the children.
This, dear reader, is why I believe that the Palin family are both dangerous and fucked up. They put on pretty smiles and pose for pictures, they talk a good game about love of family and God when, upon closer inspection they appear to have more love for fame and guns. They’re a pack of wild Alaskan hillbillies with the collective intelligence of a wolverine wearing lipstick, or whatever the idiotic allegory Sarah Palin made a few years ago was. It frightens me that people trust this family and believe that they are genuine, decent people. They scare the shit out of me, and not just because they have guns. If they were my neighbors, I’d move. It’s a popular maxim on reality tv shows for one person who doesn’t like another to call that person fake. Well, who’s more fake than the Palins?? And audiences eat it up with a spoon. Why are so many Americans too dense to see through the veneer of down-home appeal to see what they really are: silly, thoughtless, unintelligent fame-whores. Are we that stupid, or are we just too scared to think about how damaged our political system is that we’d rather watch pseudo-politicians do whatever it is Sarah Palin does and, their daughters dancing on tv??
* Alright, so I haven’t met every family in America, therefore it’s possible that there is a more fucked up and dangerous family out there somewhere. At least the ones who beat their babies to death for distracting them from FarmVille, or who kill and maim one another in fits of meth-induced rage are generally not famous and eventually caught and sent to jail where they belong. Meanwhile, the Palins are free to roam, to be abusive and tactless, to be dim and obtuse and have people applaud them for being a close family unit when they’re just as dysfunctional as Tonya Harding’s mother. If you’re not worried about them, then you’re not paying attention.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/30/levi-johnston-ex-lanesia_n_664897.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theticket/20101115/pl_yblog_theticket/almost-5-million-people-watched-sarah-palins-alaska
http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/d2JPq3CEm89/Harsh+Truth+Teen+Moms+Tell+Sposored+Candie/TdoOiq2EejW
http://www.politicususa.com/en/willow-palins-facebook-propaganda?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+politicususa%2FfJAl+%28Politicus+USA+%29&utm_content=Twitter
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/sarah_palin/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/11/17/willow_palin_facebook_rant
http://www.comedycentral.com/tosh.0/2010/11/17/palin-daughters-defend-moms-show-on-facebook/
Sarah Palin had a job in public service and the quit to be a tv star. And now she’s thinking about running for president?? Pardon my proverbial French, but fuck that shit!! I know I’m not alone in feeling like she abandoned the public whom she was sworn to serve as a governor; so why is she a qualified, adequate candidate for the presidency?? People don’t become president so that they can have their own t-shirts, bitch. Get that through your pageant-queen thick head. I’d rather vote for Vinny from Jersey Shore. He has a college degree and is good-looking. Like, aren’t those the qualifications??
This bitch is so dense she unapologetically makes up words when at a loss for one that actually exists. Okay, so we all make typos, we have all been at a loss for words and said the wrong thing, but to repeatedly, that means “over and over, on more than one occasion,” use the word “refudiate,” which carries whatever definition she wants it to at the time, and when called on the fact that no such word exists compares herself to Shakespeare, stating gleefully that she’s adding to the living language. Actually, Rain Woman, that’s why we have linguists and Jay-Z. AND, as of 2 days ago, Sarah Palin’s new idiot word, “refudiate,” has been awarded Word of the Year for 2010 by the New Oxford English Dictionary. Please, please, please stop talking, Mrs. Palin. You’re ruining the language for everyone else. Has anyone checked on Noam Chomsky?? Made sure her now-infamous babbling nonsense hasn’t caused him to put a gun in his mouth??
I feel sorry for Todd Palin that his grandson has half of Levi Johnston’s chromosomes because his daughter is not only a boyfriend-stealing, back-stabbing uber-wench who should have gotten her ass handed to her by that former friend of hers who had him first, and that she was too fuckin’ stupid to a) use birth control or b) abstain, like her supposedly-staunch Republican family told her to do. Her mother, as then-governor and one-time really-embarrassing-vice-presidential-candidate had a reputation to uphold. Had Mrs. Palin ever been at home to ingrain that in her child’s fat head, then perhaps we wouldn’t have little Twat, or whatever ridiculous knuckle-dragging hick name Bristol and Levi selected for their son.
Oh, and Levi; poor, long-suffering Levi. His mother and sister make the Clampetts look like the Royal Tenenbaums. Good lord, that boy never had a chance. I’m not even going to go there except to say that Kathy Griffin was the best thing that ever happened to that fuckup. Now he wants to be the mayor of Wasilla?? My ass. On Foursquare, perhaps.
I’m going to take a little aside, here, and acknowledge that just because Bristol Palin is a teen mom does not make her a bad person, in-and-of itself. I got knocked up when I was seventeen and chose to be a teen mom. What chaps my ass about her is that she’s never had a real job, and most likely never will. She won’t experience what it’s like to go on an interview for a position she’s grossly overqualified for just to have money for groceries and gasoline. What are the chances she’ll one day be selling her old shit on eBay so she’ll have money to buy her kid Christmas presents?? She’s completely out of touch with what it’s like to be a teen mom, or any kind of mom, in the real world having been supported by her rich-ass family the entire time her child has been alive. That is, until recently when she began giving “do as I say, not as I do” abstinence advocacy speeches to young people for $30,000 a pop. That’s someone’s annual salary. I’m sure that’s difficult for Miss Palin to grasp, since she’s never been asked to live for an entire year on that amount, and probably doesn’t even know what an annual salary is since she’s hired goons to do all her math for her. A real teen parent has to struggle, even if he or she does have the support of a family. Most people get jobs and toil for years to get through college. Most of us didn’t have a rich, famous family name to ride upon the coattails of so we could sit back and smile for the covers of magazines and tell everyone what a blessing everything is.
Honestly, if I were one of the Teen Moms of MTV I would be pissed that The Candies Foundation even placed them in the same category for their “The Harsh Truth: Teen Moms Tell All” special. I’m flabbergasted that anyone had the unmitigated gall to think that what Bristol Palin goes through on a daily basis is anything compared to what Maci, Amber, Farrah and Catelynn go through. Anyone with the audacity to even compare them does not know what they’re talking about, and frankly it’s insulting to all the hard work that the Teen Moms do. Yes, they get paid for being stars on MTV, but they don’t have rich mommies and daddies or come from famous families. They’re tv stars to raise awareness that teen pregnancy can happen to normal girls (which Bristol is far from) and to keep themselves from having to stand in line for government cheese, like the rest of us had to do. They’re making an investment in their futures and their children’s futures, and their lives are being improved by the money they get from MTV. When has Bristol Palin ever been hurting for money?? I beg you.
I’ve asked a few of my Rethuglican friends what it is about Sarah Palin, and thus far no one has been able to give me an answer that made any dang-ola sense. “She’s just a breath of fresh air” is an ambiguous statement that tells me nothing of why a person would jump on her political bandwagon. One especially disturbing individual said “um, she’s hot.” Yes. That is a good reason to vote for someone who will be representing the public and / or the nation. Some people think Jenna Jameson’s hot; don’t see why this might make her a qualified presidential candidate. However, she did beauty pageants when she was younger, too, and she runs her own business, which Sarah Palin has not, to my knowledge, ever done. So it could be argued that Jenna Jameson, who eats out, sucks off, fucks and fondles people (as well as herself) for a living, is more intelligent than Sarah Palin. Yet, still, I have not received an answer regarding why Mrs. Palin is a qualified candidate to be the PTA president at her kids’ elementary school, let alone the President of the United States. What gives??
I do feel strongly, however, that the mumbling muttonhead who told me he’d vote for Sarah Palin because she’s hot is onto something, because no one would give a damn about her if she were an ugly woman. If she weren’t attractive, no one would want her as the face of anything. Hillary Rodham Clinton is far more qualified to run this country than Sarah Palin is, yet so much of what people say about her is being critical of her looks. Frankly, I think that says a lot about our nation and how shallow we are as a people. The vast majority of Americans would rather have someone pretty to look at to distract us from the fact that our country is being flushed and going swirling in the wake of the second Bush Administration.
Let’s move on, shall we?? Now that Sarah and Bristol are reality tv stars and they have all the fame their little hearts could desire, we have the opportunity to hear from Willow Palin, the high-school sister who has yet to become famous for getting pregnant, shooting animals, being pretty or dancing on tv. This week she emerged from her mother and sister’s large shadow with a string of insults lobbed at a classmate who denounced her mother’s new television show on his own Facebook status. Willow jumped all over him, calling him “fat” and a “faggot” on her own update, calling him out by name. This would, in every other school in America, be called cyber-bullying and the person responsible for the slanderous verbal abuse would be in trouble with their school, but I digress. While I don’t know what action, if any, Willow’s school is taking, Bristol soon got her licks in calling him a “douchebag” and a “shit-talker.” Most normal parents would be embarrassed if their children were caught launching a direct, public verbal attack on someone, especially over something so trivial. The Palins, however, have come to the young ladies’ assist, adamantly maintaining that their girls don’t normally talk like that. Of course their parents think that. They’re too busy being rich and famous to know how their kids talk when they’re not around, which appears to be often. Anyone who thinks their high school kid doesn’t swear has their head so far up their ass they could talk out of their bellybutton.
While Willow is very young, and young people make mistakes and say the wrong thing, she should be held accountable for the way she chose to respond to this boy’s criticism. Bristol, on the other hand, is a grown woman and a mom, and she has no problem smack-talking a high school boy for not liking her mother’s tv show?? All he said was call it a “fail” and the Palin girls unleashed the fury. Why should they be allowed to behave like that?? If any of the rest of us went around verbally assaulting others just for being critical, especially if one perpetrator is an adult and the target is a child, we’d all be on probation right now. Then again, our last names aren’t all Palin, so we don’t get to just do whatever we want.
“Sorry that all you guys are jealous of my families success and you guys aren’t goin to go anywhere with your lives,” Miss Willow issues by way of apology, as if that weren’t the most narcissistic thing she could have possibly said. Spelling and grammatical errors aside, this child is so spoiled, so indulged and so egotistical that she honestly thinks that all the people in the world who don’t like her or her family are jealous. Isn’t constantly thinking that others are jealous of you a symptom of Narcissistic Personality Disorder?? In this case it might just be a symptom of spoiled brat syndrome. Perhaps if the children heard the word “no” once or twice in their lives, or had been taught that other people are entitled to their opinions, too, then this kind of bitchy, inane childish outburst could have been avoided altogether. I do not understand why people who are in the public eye, who have chosen to be there (or in this case have had it chosen for them by a fame-mongering parent), get so upset when someone criticizes them at all. Here this gal is, getting upset over one person saying that her mom’s tv show was “a fail.” You’d think he called Mrs. Palin the devil’s personal harlot by the way she and Bristol reacted. You want to be famous, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that not everyone is going to like you, and that when you choose to put yourself in the spotlight you open yourself up to appraisal by others and that not all of what people think will be positive. If you only want to hear how fabulous you and your ego are, stay home and talk into your mirrors, because it’s a big world out there and not everyone is going to like you, or your family, or what you have to say, and no one can change that because we all are free to think whatever we want and say whatever we want to say. That is until we start reaming some random kid a new asshole for not like our mommy’s show. Then we’re crossing a line. However, the children of entitlement wouldn’t know a line if they tripped and fell down the rabbit hole crossing it. And that’s just bad parenting. My kid may act like a mewling brat sometimes, and so might I, but I refuse to stand back and make her excuses for her, or for myself. If she were to choose to run her mouth in such a fashion online, for all and sundry, I think I would have her back and try to help her learn better ways of handling such a situation in the future, but rest assured she would be expected to face the consequences for her actions. Alas, this is not about what I would do. It’s about what the Palins aren’t going to do, which is discipline the children.
This, dear reader, is why I believe that the Palin family are both dangerous and fucked up. They put on pretty smiles and pose for pictures, they talk a good game about love of family and God when, upon closer inspection they appear to have more love for fame and guns. They’re a pack of wild Alaskan hillbillies with the collective intelligence of a wolverine wearing lipstick, or whatever the idiotic allegory Sarah Palin made a few years ago was. It frightens me that people trust this family and believe that they are genuine, decent people. They scare the shit out of me, and not just because they have guns. If they were my neighbors, I’d move. It’s a popular maxim on reality tv shows for one person who doesn’t like another to call that person fake. Well, who’s more fake than the Palins?? And audiences eat it up with a spoon. Why are so many Americans too dense to see through the veneer of down-home appeal to see what they really are: silly, thoughtless, unintelligent fame-whores. Are we that stupid, or are we just too scared to think about how damaged our political system is that we’d rather watch pseudo-politicians do whatever it is Sarah Palin does and, their daughters dancing on tv??
* Alright, so I haven’t met every family in America, therefore it’s possible that there is a more fucked up and dangerous family out there somewhere. At least the ones who beat their babies to death for distracting them from FarmVille, or who kill and maim one another in fits of meth-induced rage are generally not famous and eventually caught and sent to jail where they belong. Meanwhile, the Palins are free to roam, to be abusive and tactless, to be dim and obtuse and have people applaud them for being a close family unit when they’re just as dysfunctional as Tonya Harding’s mother. If you’re not worried about them, then you’re not paying attention.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/30/levi-johnston-ex-lanesia_n_664897.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theticket/20101115/pl_yblog_theticket/almost-5-million-people-watched-sarah-palins-alaska
http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/d2JPq3CEm89/Harsh+Truth+Teen+Moms+Tell+Sposored+Candie/TdoOiq2EejW
http://www.politicususa.com/en/willow-palins-facebook-propaganda?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+politicususa%2FfJAl+%28Politicus+USA+%29&utm_content=Twitter
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/sarah_palin/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/11/17/willow_palin_facebook_rant
http://www.comedycentral.com/tosh.0/2010/11/17/palin-daughters-defend-moms-show-on-facebook/
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Or Forever Hold My Peace?? No. My Review of Taylor Swift's "Speak Now"
Alright, y’all. So, I done the unthinkable. I sat and listened to all the samples of the new songs by Taylor Swift from her upcoming album on iTunes. Hey, I’m not an official music writer anymore. I take what I can get, mmmkay?? At any rate, I was hoping this time I would understand what the fuss is all about. Unfortunately for the rest of you, I don’t.
Manalive, is that thing getting some heavy-handed advertising!! I’m just going to go there and say this, because it’s unreal how viral this catalogue has become without even having been officially released: the girl may play a virgin, but she’s a media whore. The damn thing’s already so pervasive it’s taken over my entertainment magazines, my iTunes, my OnDemand. Sell, sell, sell.
I know I’ve said this before, and you know I’ll say it again, but I do not like Taylor Swift’s voice. I’m sure she’s a very nice girl, but for whatever reason, when she “sings” it hits a register that causes my muscles to lock and my brain stem to numb and turn cold in a way I’ve only experienced on rare occasions of unmitigated frustration that I shall choose not to expound upon at this time for personal reasons. It makes me want to skewer my own eardrums. Her voice scratches against my auditory palette like the time I accidentally sliced my knuckle on a cheese grater; it was painful, messy and the irritation stayed with me for days. You know that bit Dane Cook does about that sound that makes you want to punch a baby?? Well, for me it’s Taylor Swift’s voice.
But I digress.
I was hoping that her music had matured into something more than yet another opus about nothing but love and loss, boyfriends and break-ups, high-school pseudo-romance and all its unheavenly consequences. Well, some of them anyway. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Swift has stayed true to the formula that made her a household name and penned more love, love, love, love, love, peppered with some loss, some disenchantment and some slightly biting cattiness and pseudo-rebellion, which is hilarious coming from a child-woman who wouldn’t know rebellion if it stepped on the other side of her face. Though she makes reference to marriage this time around, she still hasn’t seemed to have received the memo that she’s no longer fifteen. I look forward to the day when her bland, boring, whiny genre of counterfeit country music no longer squats upon the Top 40 in the back of Rolling Stone for years at a time and makes its way to the bargain bin at the used CD store where it belongs. Just because her childlike innocence sells tunes does not mean that Swift is relevant or has talent for anything other than choosing a top-notch marketing team. The music industry should implicate a statute of limitations regarding how long an individual can play on girlhood dreams of romance and roses before they’re required to write a hit song about waiting in line at the bank, and their childhood career be euthanized.
Taylor Swift’s third album, as I’ve heard it so far, plays out like a junior in high school wishing she were older; nothing more, nothing less. It’s as sweet as a fried Twinkie, and just as bad for you.
Manalive, is that thing getting some heavy-handed advertising!! I’m just going to go there and say this, because it’s unreal how viral this catalogue has become without even having been officially released: the girl may play a virgin, but she’s a media whore. The damn thing’s already so pervasive it’s taken over my entertainment magazines, my iTunes, my OnDemand. Sell, sell, sell.
I know I’ve said this before, and you know I’ll say it again, but I do not like Taylor Swift’s voice. I’m sure she’s a very nice girl, but for whatever reason, when she “sings” it hits a register that causes my muscles to lock and my brain stem to numb and turn cold in a way I’ve only experienced on rare occasions of unmitigated frustration that I shall choose not to expound upon at this time for personal reasons. It makes me want to skewer my own eardrums. Her voice scratches against my auditory palette like the time I accidentally sliced my knuckle on a cheese grater; it was painful, messy and the irritation stayed with me for days. You know that bit Dane Cook does about that sound that makes you want to punch a baby?? Well, for me it’s Taylor Swift’s voice.
But I digress.
I was hoping that her music had matured into something more than yet another opus about nothing but love and loss, boyfriends and break-ups, high-school pseudo-romance and all its unheavenly consequences. Well, some of them anyway. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Swift has stayed true to the formula that made her a household name and penned more love, love, love, love, love, peppered with some loss, some disenchantment and some slightly biting cattiness and pseudo-rebellion, which is hilarious coming from a child-woman who wouldn’t know rebellion if it stepped on the other side of her face. Though she makes reference to marriage this time around, she still hasn’t seemed to have received the memo that she’s no longer fifteen. I look forward to the day when her bland, boring, whiny genre of counterfeit country music no longer squats upon the Top 40 in the back of Rolling Stone for years at a time and makes its way to the bargain bin at the used CD store where it belongs. Just because her childlike innocence sells tunes does not mean that Swift is relevant or has talent for anything other than choosing a top-notch marketing team. The music industry should implicate a statute of limitations regarding how long an individual can play on girlhood dreams of romance and roses before they’re required to write a hit song about waiting in line at the bank, and their childhood career be euthanized.
Taylor Swift’s third album, as I’ve heard it so far, plays out like a junior in high school wishing she were older; nothing more, nothing less. It’s as sweet as a fried Twinkie, and just as bad for you.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
Teen Mom; The Dirty Thirties Edition
MTV’s Teen Mom is everywhere these days. Frankly, I couldn’t be happier to see a show that chronicles what life is like for young mamas that don’t fit into some silly demarcated high-school stereotype of “slut” or “bad kid” or “rebel” or any other negative and derogatory idea society has concocted around young women who get pregnant. Even though, I admit, I’ve cried at more than one episode. Not exactly a gleeful response, I know, but an honest one. Until recently, I hadn’t understood “reality tv” having anything to do with actual reality. You know, the one in which many of us live. Not The Hills or Jersey Shore.
The issue of teen pregnancy and single parenthood have been around since before we had names for them, yet here we are, in the Age of Information, acting like it’s some sort of new phenomenon; a plague upon the civilized population. Young people’s bodies have been telling them to bring forth new life since time out of mind, and there’s really nothing wrong with it, in-and-of itself. Sex and sexuality and procreation are biological, even if you are a teenager. This is how the human species survives, after all. Ideas such as what age a person should be, how much money a person should make, or whether a person should be married before starting a family are all societal constructs. These are young women taking responsibility for their actions and their choices, and managing to do so under intense public scrutiny, and for that my hat is off. The grace under pressure that these women exhibit and the fact that they are willing to be so open and honest about the sometimes-lack of grace, displays a maturity far beyond that of many grown women.
So, it’s not that young women can’t be mature, it is perhaps more that most of the time they’re not expected to be and so they get away with being mindless bims most of the time?? If we mollycoddle our girls they’ll stay innocent and won’t have to be mature “before their time,” like who’s to say when their time is??
Their stories are not unlike my own, but thirteen years ago there was no Sixteen & Pregnant. There was no Juno. There was nothing out there that even vaguely resembled my life as a teen mom. In fact, it was so controversial, if not completely verboten, on most mainstream television networks to show a pregnant teenager, and if there were one or two who cropped up now and then they were usually asinine hood rats that even I wouldn’t have hung out with had they existed in real life.
And, just so we’re square, I don’t give a rip about Bristol Palin. I’m going to go there and then I’m going to drop it, because she will never be a true Teen Mom to me. To see Bristol being photographed with Maci Bookout and Farrah Abraham is a disgrace to the hard work these two women do every day, because they might have help from their families and from MTV and from other sources unknown, but they struggle for what they have. They don’t give $30,000 lectures on the virtues of abstinence, making a solid living off of a “do as I say, not as I do” platform. They might have come from comfortable homes which had comfortable incomes (with the possible exception of Catelynn Lowell, who is dang-ola a sight more put together than her mother), but they weren’t raised with the proverbial silver spoon of having what the Palins have. These women work regular jobs, where they don’t make someone’s annual salary in one day, and go to school, and deal with extended family issues and family court, without the help of a team of celebrity attorneys and a virtuous right-wing spin protecting their fragile, first-daughter reputations. So to me there’s no comparison. The moms of MTV are far more real, more genuine and set a much better precedent for what a teen mom can be than Princess Palin.
I said it. It needed to be said. Moving on . . .
I’ve addressed the topic of the movie Juno before, and how much I enjoyed the fact that there was a story about a smart, self-aware, non-"slutty" (for lack of a better description) girl who discovers that her reproductive organs work (surprise!!) and has to live out the consequences, good times and rough times. I know that without Diablo Cody’s opus we would not have a show like Teen Mom. It amazes me that someone like Diablo Cody, a person whose work I enjoy but listening to her when she opens her fat mouth I do not, could be the catalyst for young moms to come out of the closet, so to speak, as regular people with regular problems rather than as women ruined before the age of consent both surprises and delights me. This is how it really is, folks. I understand that it may come as a shock to many of you out there, but not all teen moms are crackwhores, or anything else even remotely sinister. And I am madly lovin’ the fact that we’re finally beginning to understand that as a society, al beit slowly. I never thought I’d say this, but thank you Diablo Cody and MTV!!
So, is parenting in one’s teens easier than parenting in one’s twenties or thirties?? Are older young moms really any more savvy or mature than Maci, Farrah, Amber and Catelynn, or are we just older?? Frankly, I think we’re just older. Perhaps we have some tidbits of wisdom to pass on down, but a struggling parent is a struggling parent no matter what age, and unless you’re financially secure, married or not, chances are you’re experiencing struggles not unlike the ones seen on Teen Mom. Shoot, I haven’t been a teen since the 1990s, but I was a teen mom. There were times I was a great mom and there were times I was a shitty mom. There still are. I’m still broke, I’m still trying to finish college. I’m living with my mother on a part-time teacher’s salary. My life is no J.Lo movie. Perhaps if I’d married one of the losers who’ve asked things would be different, like I’d be on Xanax or in therapy or have had a nervous breakdown by now, but when it comes to parenting age ain’t nothing but a number. I gave up a great deal of my young adult life, which in some ways has made me mature and in others, immature. Now that my daughter can brew coffee, turn on the news, wash her own face and pack her own lunch, I don’t have to get up with her every morning and supervise. Some days I wish I had, but whatev. Some days I wish I hadn’t. In either case, I now have the option of staying in bed (on days when I don’t work) until she needs me to drive her to school. I have the option of being lazy from time to time, and I take it, and I’ve been called lazy and immature for it. And guess what?? I don’t care. You come on up in here and live my life, walk a mile in my silver spiked heels or my smelly Chuck Taylors and then perhaps we can talk. Until then, shut up.
I feel a sense of solidarity with these four young women I’ve never met. Our lives are different and yet so much the same. I’m confident that by the time they’re my age they’ll be much more established, more successful, more directed and more mature than I am, but for the time being I feel certain parts of their lives running parallel to how mine was back when I was a younger mom, and my compliments to their moxie.
In closing, I would like to throw out there that I often think that part of the reason young parents catch so much flack is not from the mistakes they make, or their age, or their income (or lack thereof), and more that so many parents who fall into the other end of the high-rick pregnancy spectrum, who have to go have in-vitro fertilization to conceive are pissed off that these young women don’t have to try; they have to try not to. I rarely like to drop the jealousy bomb, because I think it’s kind of a cop-out as far as reasons to be upset go. Any time one person doesn’t like another person, someone assumes it’s a jealousy issue. News flash: sometimes people just don’t like other people. That being said, I think there are a lot of moms age 36+ who are seething that these young women don’t even have to try to have the thing that they think they want most, and that chaps their asses so hard they can’t even see straight. Never-we-mind that perhaps their bodies are telling them that it’s time to slow down, and that if they wanted kids they should’ve done it back when their bodies were screaming for them to do it. But, no. These Baby Boomers and early Gen-X yuppies have to have it their way, and when someone else gets what they want they get upset and take it out on the person who has what they want.
Anyway, all that being said, I think I might not actually be done. The rest is going to have to wait, however.
Good night, y’all.
The issue of teen pregnancy and single parenthood have been around since before we had names for them, yet here we are, in the Age of Information, acting like it’s some sort of new phenomenon; a plague upon the civilized population. Young people’s bodies have been telling them to bring forth new life since time out of mind, and there’s really nothing wrong with it, in-and-of itself. Sex and sexuality and procreation are biological, even if you are a teenager. This is how the human species survives, after all. Ideas such as what age a person should be, how much money a person should make, or whether a person should be married before starting a family are all societal constructs. These are young women taking responsibility for their actions and their choices, and managing to do so under intense public scrutiny, and for that my hat is off. The grace under pressure that these women exhibit and the fact that they are willing to be so open and honest about the sometimes-lack of grace, displays a maturity far beyond that of many grown women.
So, it’s not that young women can’t be mature, it is perhaps more that most of the time they’re not expected to be and so they get away with being mindless bims most of the time?? If we mollycoddle our girls they’ll stay innocent and won’t have to be mature “before their time,” like who’s to say when their time is??
Their stories are not unlike my own, but thirteen years ago there was no Sixteen & Pregnant. There was no Juno. There was nothing out there that even vaguely resembled my life as a teen mom. In fact, it was so controversial, if not completely verboten, on most mainstream television networks to show a pregnant teenager, and if there were one or two who cropped up now and then they were usually asinine hood rats that even I wouldn’t have hung out with had they existed in real life.
And, just so we’re square, I don’t give a rip about Bristol Palin. I’m going to go there and then I’m going to drop it, because she will never be a true Teen Mom to me. To see Bristol being photographed with Maci Bookout and Farrah Abraham is a disgrace to the hard work these two women do every day, because they might have help from their families and from MTV and from other sources unknown, but they struggle for what they have. They don’t give $30,000 lectures on the virtues of abstinence, making a solid living off of a “do as I say, not as I do” platform. They might have come from comfortable homes which had comfortable incomes (with the possible exception of Catelynn Lowell, who is dang-ola a sight more put together than her mother), but they weren’t raised with the proverbial silver spoon of having what the Palins have. These women work regular jobs, where they don’t make someone’s annual salary in one day, and go to school, and deal with extended family issues and family court, without the help of a team of celebrity attorneys and a virtuous right-wing spin protecting their fragile, first-daughter reputations. So to me there’s no comparison. The moms of MTV are far more real, more genuine and set a much better precedent for what a teen mom can be than Princess Palin.
I said it. It needed to be said. Moving on . . .
I’ve addressed the topic of the movie Juno before, and how much I enjoyed the fact that there was a story about a smart, self-aware, non-"slutty" (for lack of a better description) girl who discovers that her reproductive organs work (surprise!!) and has to live out the consequences, good times and rough times. I know that without Diablo Cody’s opus we would not have a show like Teen Mom. It amazes me that someone like Diablo Cody, a person whose work I enjoy but listening to her when she opens her fat mouth I do not, could be the catalyst for young moms to come out of the closet, so to speak, as regular people with regular problems rather than as women ruined before the age of consent both surprises and delights me. This is how it really is, folks. I understand that it may come as a shock to many of you out there, but not all teen moms are crackwhores, or anything else even remotely sinister. And I am madly lovin’ the fact that we’re finally beginning to understand that as a society, al beit slowly. I never thought I’d say this, but thank you Diablo Cody and MTV!!
So, is parenting in one’s teens easier than parenting in one’s twenties or thirties?? Are older young moms really any more savvy or mature than Maci, Farrah, Amber and Catelynn, or are we just older?? Frankly, I think we’re just older. Perhaps we have some tidbits of wisdom to pass on down, but a struggling parent is a struggling parent no matter what age, and unless you’re financially secure, married or not, chances are you’re experiencing struggles not unlike the ones seen on Teen Mom. Shoot, I haven’t been a teen since the 1990s, but I was a teen mom. There were times I was a great mom and there were times I was a shitty mom. There still are. I’m still broke, I’m still trying to finish college. I’m living with my mother on a part-time teacher’s salary. My life is no J.Lo movie. Perhaps if I’d married one of the losers who’ve asked things would be different, like I’d be on Xanax or in therapy or have had a nervous breakdown by now, but when it comes to parenting age ain’t nothing but a number. I gave up a great deal of my young adult life, which in some ways has made me mature and in others, immature. Now that my daughter can brew coffee, turn on the news, wash her own face and pack her own lunch, I don’t have to get up with her every morning and supervise. Some days I wish I had, but whatev. Some days I wish I hadn’t. In either case, I now have the option of staying in bed (on days when I don’t work) until she needs me to drive her to school. I have the option of being lazy from time to time, and I take it, and I’ve been called lazy and immature for it. And guess what?? I don’t care. You come on up in here and live my life, walk a mile in my silver spiked heels or my smelly Chuck Taylors and then perhaps we can talk. Until then, shut up.
I feel a sense of solidarity with these four young women I’ve never met. Our lives are different and yet so much the same. I’m confident that by the time they’re my age they’ll be much more established, more successful, more directed and more mature than I am, but for the time being I feel certain parts of their lives running parallel to how mine was back when I was a younger mom, and my compliments to their moxie.
In closing, I would like to throw out there that I often think that part of the reason young parents catch so much flack is not from the mistakes they make, or their age, or their income (or lack thereof), and more that so many parents who fall into the other end of the high-rick pregnancy spectrum, who have to go have in-vitro fertilization to conceive are pissed off that these young women don’t have to try; they have to try not to. I rarely like to drop the jealousy bomb, because I think it’s kind of a cop-out as far as reasons to be upset go. Any time one person doesn’t like another person, someone assumes it’s a jealousy issue. News flash: sometimes people just don’t like other people. That being said, I think there are a lot of moms age 36+ who are seething that these young women don’t even have to try to have the thing that they think they want most, and that chaps their asses so hard they can’t even see straight. Never-we-mind that perhaps their bodies are telling them that it’s time to slow down, and that if they wanted kids they should’ve done it back when their bodies were screaming for them to do it. But, no. These Baby Boomers and early Gen-X yuppies have to have it their way, and when someone else gets what they want they get upset and take it out on the person who has what they want.
Anyway, all that being said, I think I might not actually be done. The rest is going to have to wait, however.
Good night, y’all.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Further Adventures with Super Glue
If you haven’t known me long, or don’t know me at all, then you might not understand the volatile history I have with Super Glue. I once missed a poli sci class because I Super Glued my finger to my thumb. I’d been trying to fix a painted pot my daughter had given me. How innocuous is that?? Next thing I know, the pot is in one piece again and I’ve temporarily lost nearly all dexterity in my left hand. I once spilled Super Glue on my jeans and had to sit very still holding my pants leg away from my skin in order to avoid making them a more or less permanent part of my personhood. If you’ve ever done this before, you know that Super Glue on fabric touching skin feels extraordinarily hot, as well. And let us not forget the time I glued the glue container to my hand rather than gluing the item I was attempting to repair. This took several hours, three family members and what little was left of my dignity at the time to detach without taking a pound of flesh with it.
My daughter would probably be really mad if I told you about the time she Super Glued a tiny nutcracker arm to her finger when she was six. In any case, we probably shouldn’t even be allowed to have the stuff in the house. If a license were required to own and operate Super Glue, I’d have to buy mine on the black market.
In any case, my headphones needed a temporary fix. You know the words temporary fix, meaning “I’m too broke to buy new ones right now, so if I glue them perhaps they’ll stay in one piece long enough for me to find a full-time job and finance the purchase of new ones.”
So I Super Glue the rubbery-plastic-whatever-material-it-is that goes in your ear part and went along with my day, getting ready for my workout. I get to the track, pop my earphones in and have a nice time.
You can sense where I’m going with this, can’t you, dear reader??
Then, when I go to pull the left one out, it’s stuck. I mean, I pull on it and it comes out relatively easily and with no pain, but when I touch my ear it’s still sticky and there’s a layer of Super Glue around my very outer part of my inner ear. Nothing dangerous, mind you. No blockage, no damage. It didn’t even affect my tragus piercing. Although a little bit did get on it initially, it didn’t stay long.
Sometimes when things like this happen to me, I feel the need to share. Maybe it’s because I don’t know other people to whom shit like this happens?? I don’t know anyone else who got locked in their bedroom one night, behind a door that doesn’t even have a lock on it, and had to escape by jumping from a second-story window. I don’t know anyone who accidentally glues their earphone to their ear while working out. I don’t know these other people, but I know they’re out there somewhere. I’ve read Laurie Notaro. I know I’m not the only “Idiot Girl” in the world. So I publicize my idiocy in hopes that somewhere out there, another cluck like myself exists and maybe will read this and be able to relate.
Wherever you may be, please be exercise caution when using Super Glue.
Love,
Sasa
My daughter would probably be really mad if I told you about the time she Super Glued a tiny nutcracker arm to her finger when she was six. In any case, we probably shouldn’t even be allowed to have the stuff in the house. If a license were required to own and operate Super Glue, I’d have to buy mine on the black market.
In any case, my headphones needed a temporary fix. You know the words temporary fix, meaning “I’m too broke to buy new ones right now, so if I glue them perhaps they’ll stay in one piece long enough for me to find a full-time job and finance the purchase of new ones.”
So I Super Glue the rubbery-plastic-whatever-material-it-is that goes in your ear part and went along with my day, getting ready for my workout. I get to the track, pop my earphones in and have a nice time.
You can sense where I’m going with this, can’t you, dear reader??
Then, when I go to pull the left one out, it’s stuck. I mean, I pull on it and it comes out relatively easily and with no pain, but when I touch my ear it’s still sticky and there’s a layer of Super Glue around my very outer part of my inner ear. Nothing dangerous, mind you. No blockage, no damage. It didn’t even affect my tragus piercing. Although a little bit did get on it initially, it didn’t stay long.
Sometimes when things like this happen to me, I feel the need to share. Maybe it’s because I don’t know other people to whom shit like this happens?? I don’t know anyone else who got locked in their bedroom one night, behind a door that doesn’t even have a lock on it, and had to escape by jumping from a second-story window. I don’t know anyone who accidentally glues their earphone to their ear while working out. I don’t know these other people, but I know they’re out there somewhere. I’ve read Laurie Notaro. I know I’m not the only “Idiot Girl” in the world. So I publicize my idiocy in hopes that somewhere out there, another cluck like myself exists and maybe will read this and be able to relate.
Wherever you may be, please be exercise caution when using Super Glue.
Love,
Sasa
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