This Is Going To Be A Self-Centered Post. For A Good Reason.

Sorry for the radio silence for a week, but I've really only had one thing to post about since last Friday, and had been unable to due to communication issues...the point is:

WE'RE ENGAGED!

:D

It happened on Friday, and it's been hell ever since. I've worked every night since, including that one, and he's been sick to the point that he called out three days in a row. We actually won't have a corresponding day off to sit down and plan and celebrate until next Friday...not that we have anything we can solidly plan yet.

The tentative date is October eleventh of next year....or 10/11/12 :D That was totally his idea, but I love it. Of course, it is a Thursday, and it'll probably be a popular date which means venues will book early and blah blah blah.

I promise I'll do my best not to make this blog all about wedding stuff from now on. It shouldn't be too hard since, again, it's a year and a half away...still, I'm dying to plan!!

But for now, I must make dinner for the hungry man. More tomorrow!

Where I Am Right Now.

I was raised by, in a community of, hippies and feminists and liberals. From the moment I took breath, I was taught and told and shown that I could do and be anything. President? No problem. World traveler? Fantastic! Literary legend? Of course! Genius artiste? Duh!

The fact that I was a girl was never part of the lesson, except perhaps for the lesson of They Might Try To Say You Can't Because You're A Girl, But That Just Means They're Dumb. The words "housewife" and "secretary" weren't exactly dirty, but...

Gender, age, money, none of these things mattered, what mattered is that I put my mind and heart and soul into it and I can go anywhere, I can do and be anything.

...is it wrong, then, that I want to stay home? That I want to be a homemaker, to literally spend my time making a home for my family?

I spent my mini-vacation being domestic. I cleaned, I neatened, I laundered, I cooked, I washed, I rearranged, I organized, I grocery shopped, I planned, I outlined, I budgeted. I neatened my boyfriend's desk, cleaned up his dishes, refilled his drink, made him breakfast and dinner, helped him cook and get ready for work.

I loved every single second of it. Even the frustrating seconds, the seconds where I looked at our money situation and wanted to throw up my hands, the seconds where I got to the laundry room after hauling down an overflowing basket only to discover that I had forgotten the quarters, the seconds where the pancakes burned and the cupcake batter turned to cement and I got sauce on the bottom of my sock and Ryan spilled melted chocolate on the white shirt I just washed yesterday.

I loved taking care of my man. There it is. I gave him shit and sassed him while doing it, I never once did anything because I thought it was "my place" to do so, I helped him when he asked and got his help when I needed it. He never once just assumed I would do something because I'm a girl, he never waved off what I was doing as a given, and all references to my being domestic were either ironic or completely appreciative.

I didn't spend every moment focusing on the house, of course. I also worked on my photography, spending hours taking, editing and uploading pictures. I even hacked at my writing a bit, although that's been quite sticky. As much as I focused on making up our home, I also focused on my own personal and artistic endeavors.

Part of the plan in moving to Indiana was to figure ourselves out, to work and live and get by and think on what we missed from what we were doing in Connecticut. Specifically for me, I hoped to dabble in all my interests--photography, graphic design, marketing/advertising, writing, editing--and see which ones stuck, which ones I made time for because I wanted to, which ones I wanted to invest my time and money in, in terms of potential college degrees.

I have a full time job where I am on my feet all day, I spend a good deal of time taking care of the house, and I still make sure I find time to read, write, do art photography, and be with my friends and boyfriend. These are the things I find important: words, art, people.

I realized, months ago, that I don't want to back to school. In fact, the thought gives me the willies--spending thousands to sit in a room and learn crap I don't need so I can get a piece of paper? I'd rather spend a fraction of the money to get good lenses and materials, I'd rather spend the time concentrating on an outline or learning what exactly each button and dial on my camera does or having a movie & crafting night with my friends or cooking dinner with my love.

The things I care about, the things I want to do, the person I want to be...I don't need college for that. I just need to get the hell out of my own way.

Okay, so I don't just want to be a homemaker. I also want to be an artist and a writer. I know my hippie parents will be overjoyed that I'm finally realizing the last part. I guess I'm just worried about the first part. I was raised in the woods, in workshops, at period faires and drum circles and Pagan gatherings...and I want to be a housewife? A stereotype?

For me, the real stereotype is the woman who is only at home because she's been taught, from the moment she took breath, that it is her destiny, that her brain doesn't matter. The woman who has never had a choice. So no, I don't want to be a stereotype. I just want to be me.

And that happens to mean that I stay at home and take care of my children, my spouse, and our home. I'd even be happy staying a barista part-time to help with bills--not a shift supervisor, not a manager, but a barista, because I happen to love it.

I guess that's what it comes down to--I happen to love my life where I "just" serve people, "just" keep house, "just" write and take pictures.

I'm losing that frantic feeling that I NEED to Do Something, to Have A Career or at least a Real Job, because without one I'm wallowing in the rut that so many people fought for me to be able to leave. I'm losing the self-imposed of cloud of Should, of What Am I Going To Do With My Life, the guilt that's more from myself than anybody else. I'm gaining self-respect, fulfillment, peace and contentment with who I am and what I want to do.

And hell, I'm not even there yet! I'm still in the part where we have to work our asses off to get by, where I can only get myself to write once or twice a week, where I have a small window for photography each day that I miss as often as I hit, where most nights I'm so tired that even reading sounds too taxing. I'm still at the part where the house and the family and the life that I crave is far enough away to seem impossible.

But I know I'll get there, I know we'll get there. And I know now what I want it to look like.

I love that picture. I'm proud of that picture.
And that's all that matters.

Wish Me Luck.

Thinking about what I wanted to change in/for 2011, I thought of a lot of things: eating habits, exercise habits, daily habits, writing habits, etc. The usual New Years Resolutions stuff.

The one thing that kept popping up, however, was Honesty.

I want to be a more honest person. I'm not exactly a dishonest person now, I don't lie or cheat or steal. I do, however, partake in some gossip (something I'm not proud of), and I keep things to myself that hide the whole picture of how I feel about a person or a situation, the whole picture of who I am. I've been thinking on how I'd like to change these, and other, things.

Then, as always, Free Will Astrology decided to play with my head.

Can you finally escape the pain you got imprinted with during adolescence? Is it a realistic possibility that you could triumph over the conditioning you absorbed before you knew how to talk? Do you have the power to do what few of us have done, which is to get out from under the weight of the past, shed the inertia of your memories, and live brave and free in the raw truth of NOW? If there will ever in your life be a time when you can accomplish at least some of this noble quest, Gemini, it will be in 2011.

The raw truth of Now. That is exactly what I want, and what I need.

I'm going to spend the next month concentrating on purging myself of the Bad and Not Good For Me Secrets, on being upfront with people and not being fake, on telling the whole truth to the world and myself.

I won't give away all my secrets, because some are Good, or are secret for a reason, or aren't mine to give away. I won't stop being fake by brandishing when I'm unhappy or disapproving or downright cranky, but by highlighting the honest good moods and feelings instead of squashing them when I think it'd be more "popular" to do so.

I want to do what the horoscope suggests: get out from under the weight of my past and shed the inertia of my memories. I have spent most of my life hunched over under the burden of the guilt and shame I've either put on myself, or let others put on me. Neither is right. Neither has ever been okay, but I refuse to let it be okay anymore.

I want to say "I renounce it all from this moment!" but it's so much harder than that. Just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes. I know that many of you reading this can understand this feeling, understand the desire, the fear, and the difficulty of which I speak.

I want to live in the raw truth of now. The raw truth of now can be beautiful and ugly, can be easy and hard, can be exactly what I want and exactly what I fear. But it is not what the terrified 12-year-old that still hides in my brain thinks it is, nor is it what the anxious 18-year-old thinks it is, or even the mired 24-year-old. It is not what I've been taught by years of conditioning done by others and myself. It is not what has happened before, good or bad.

The raw truth of now is only what is in front of me. I can draw on experience, on what wisdom I've gained in my 25 years, on lessons I've been taught and told by the people in my life. But I need to learn that drawing on those things is not the same as looking into a crystal ball and knowing what will happen.

I can never know what will happen. That's terrifying and exhilarating.

Honesty, and the raw truth of now. That is what I want to grow in myself in the year 2011. I know I can do it.

I Love It When These Things Match My Life...

This week's horoscope from Free Will Astrology:

How well have you been attending to 2010's major themes, Gemini? Since we're midway through the year, let's do a check-in. I hope that by now you are at least 15 percent sturdier, stronger, and braver than you've ever been in your entire life, and at least 20 percent better organized and disciplined. I hope that you have outgrown one of your amateur approaches and claimed a new professional privilege. Now write the following questions on a slip of paper that you will leave taped to your mirror for the next six months. "1. How can I get closer to making my job and my vocation be the same thing? 2. What am I doing to become an even more robust and confident version of myself?"


Let's see:
[o] sturdier--check
[o] stronger--check
[o] braver--check
[o] better organized--check
[o] better disciplined--check
[o] outgrown one amateur approach--hmm...not sure about that one...
[o] claimed new professional privilege--I POUR COFFEE GOOD!

I was going to add little notes after each "check," but all but the last two ended up being one thing: out of necessity. Not only necessity because of the move, but necessity causing the move. If I hadn't been strong, brave, or well organized, I would not be doing as well as I am; I would still be working barely part-time, half-assing my education, not doing anything real with my life, and not trying out of fear.

I am indeed going to write those questions on a slip of paper, although they'll be going on my computer monitor instead of my mirror, as (a) I look at the former more often, and (b) the latter is shared with the house and it'd be...odd. They are good questions, and I think they'll help me focus on Diplomatic Solutions and my art, as well as being a good worker at Starbucks. :)

Achtung! Again!

This post led to this post, where I answered the first of these three questions:

1. What is the quality of experience I want to have as I earn a living?
2. What gifts do I want to give to life as I toil at challenging tasks that are interesting to me?
3. What capacities do I want to develop in myself while doing my work?

In this post, I’ll answer the second question.

What gifts do I want to give to life as I toil at challenging tasks that are interesting to me?

I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I’d like to give the world a Coke…

Okay, no, not really.

Seeing as my top priority for a job that I covered in the last post was creativity, it seems fairly obvious what I want to put out into life, the world, and the universe in general. I want to create.

I’m not a musician, and I’m not a physical artist—I don’t want to add sound to the world, or a painting or sculpture. As much as my father might want it, that’s just not what I want to do. I do love to write, and I love to be creative with concepts and ideas.

I’d like to give originality. I’d like to make someone stop and think—wether it’s about a product or about a concept. I’d like to make people react in pleasant surprise, laughing or smiling or even just glazing over as they’re startled into rethinking something.

I’d like to give stories. I love stories, I’ll read just about anything with a plot, and I would love to put more stories into the world. This ties into wanting people to think—the biggest story on my plate right now is about how one man deals with his Christian identity while in a relationship with another man, and a project that’s been on my mind for years is the story of a guy who falls in love with someone online, with no clue as to their gender. I’m not writing them as GLBT stories—they’re just stories about people. In one, the main characters happen to be bi or gay; in the other, while the main character does struggle with what it means for his orientation that he’s fallen for someone who he can’t identify as female, it’s more about his struggle than it is about the possibility of a same-sex relationship. If I do it right, I could really make people think about the messages behind my stories, and even see things from a new perspective.

And both of those things are interesting to me—taking old concepts and turning them on their heads; creating new concepts; developing characters and plots that people can identify with even as they’re scratching their head and saying “Huh, what would I do in that situation?”

There is another answer to the question, if looked at from a different perspective: I want to have kids, and have them also be my gift to life and the world. I want to raise them with good hearts and good values, so there are more good people in the world. Doing so will be interesting, challenging, and, from what I hear, the most fun and awesome experience in the universe. And it will also be work, which I think qualifies it for that question.

To sum up this whole thing: What do I want to give to life? The things I love in it. Originality, good stories, and good people. Easy.

Next question.

Achtung! Revisited

See? I told you I’d get back to you.

1. What is the quality of experience I want to have as I earn a living?
2. What gifts do I want to give to life as I toil at challenging tasks that are interesting to me?
3. What capacities do I want to develop in myself while doing my work?

One question at a time, one post at a time.

What is the quality of experience I want to have as I earn a living?

This is the hardest question to answer. How do you qualify quality? Number of hours you work at something? What gets done in those hours? How much money you make? What kind of projects you work on? Who you work for? Who you don’t work for? It’s a highly subjective question.

Let’s start with the basic priorities of what I want in a job, and go through those.

Creativity
I want to be able to play with the problem or objective, look at it from different angles, analyze it, take it apart and put it back together. Brainstorm in a group, brainstorm by myself. My favorite assignments in school, ever, were those from Advertising class, where we took a campaign or slogan or advertisement and took it apart to analyze, critique, and possibly correct it.

If my job consists of doing the same thing, over and over again, with no input from my brain, no chance to be fun or different or creative at all, I might as well be a robot. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have that much problem with a job like that—I’d just settle into a groove and let my mind wander and let the hours go by. But I’d also stagnate, and I wouldn’t have fun. I know everyone says they wants a fun job…but is that such a bad thing to want? To not just be happy about work, but be excited about it, be gleeful about it?

I want a job where I take my work with me wherever I go—in a good way. Not because I can’t let things “stay at the office” or because there’s a looming deadline that’s stressing me out, but because the problem is so interesting, so fun to think about, that I just want to keep turning it over in my head and finding new ways to go about it.

Freedom
This priority may actually be the most important. It also got me laughed at at work. Someone asked me what I wanted to do “later” (as in after college), and I said I wanted to work from home. They laughed at me. Not in a straight-on mean way, but in a condescending “That is too funny, you’re joking, right?” way. I’m still a little bitter about it, especially it’s just not as outrageous as an idea as it used to be.

In this world, working from is growing less unusual, and less impossible. The technology that exists is astounding—you can conference from home via phone, conference call, instant messenger, or video chat. You can access work files from home, updating them from home within seconds so your coworkers can run with your changes, either from the office or from their own home. Anyone can buy a combination printer, scanner, copier and fax and have all those capabilities in their office at home, without even taking up that much space. Wifi is becoming more abundant and cellular signals more widely available, while laptops and even printers are growing smaller, so you can access files and work on projects from home, from Starbucks, from the park, from your hotel, from almost anywhere. You can go down to Staples or Kinkos and get your brochures, presentations, or booklets printed out and put together in record time.

The physical office is becoming less and less necessary as time goes by, technology improves, and priorities change.

You know why I want to work from home? It’s not because I hate driving, it’s not because I don’t like people, it’s not because the idea of a cubicle makes me sick. None of those things are true. I want to work from home because I plan on having a home that I love, that is comfortable and beautiful and home. I find the idea that we have to spend so many hours away from our homes in order to afford our homes positively absurd. I plan on working hard, on saving and scrimping and budgeting, on busting my butt in order to have a house that is as close to my dream home as is fiscally possible. And after working so hard for it, I want to spend time in it. Because dammit, that’s the point.

So. I want freedom to do work at my own pace, in my own space. To go at projects or problems in the manner that works best for me, whatever that means. I don’t want someone breathing down my neck, I don’t want insane deadlines that only insane people can meet (normal deadlines are okay, even if I’m not normal), I don’t want to be forced to work with people I can’t stand, who I just don’t jive with. I want to be able to start work when I’m actually awake, not when I have to be at the office, and work until I’m done, not until the office closes up for the day.

I don’t mean I want to sleep until noon, read e-mails and idly type up some bullshit in my pajamas from the kitchen table, ignore the directions or ideas from my superiors or coworkers and do whatever the hell I feel like instead, or wait until 3 a.m. before a major presentation to rush and get everything done. I would get “dressed on purpose” every morning, get up and officially start the day at a reasonable time, have a home office that was dedicated to work and not play, do what I was directed to do and get things done on time.

My own space, my own pace, my own hours, my own way of going about my job. Give me all of these, and I will be a very loyal employee. I will work my ass off for you, I will respect rules and directions and deadlines, I will put in however long it takes to get the problem solved or the project done. I just want the freedom to do my job as is best for me.

Salary
I wish this didn’t have to be a priority, that I could just have a job I love without worrying or caring if it makes enough to cover the bills. Don’t we all wish for that? So, when looking for a job, one of the possible deal breakers will be salary, and if it’s enough to cover rent/mortgage, utilities, groceries, gas, etc. That is, until I sell a dozen novels and become a millionaire who can do whatever she damn well pleases.


So, what is the quality of experience I want to have as I earn a living? I want a job that involves being creative, that lets me work from home (or anywhere else), that pays well enough to cover the bills. That’s the best I can come to answering that question, I think. A quality of experience that lets me do what I love, in a place I love, while making enough to have the things I love.

Answer to question two coming soon!

Achtung!

Again with the freaky horoscope.

This is what Free Will Astrology gave to Geminis for this week:

During this phase of your cycle, you'll generate good fortune if you brainstorm and meditate about your relationship with work. I urge you to empty your mind of everything you think you know about the subject. Adopt a fresh and innocent perspective. Here are some questions to prime your investigations. 1. What's the quality of the experience you want to have as you earn a living? 2. What gifts do you want to give to life as you toil at challenging tasks that are interesting to you? 3. What capacities do you want to develop in yourself while doing your work? (P.S. For your Halloween costume, why not pretend you're doing your dream job?)


...BUH.

The biggest Identity Crisis I've been dealing with lately is figuring out What The Furk I Want To Do. Just today I was thinking about it. For a friend's Halloween party this past weekend, I was tempted to dress up as a Marketing Executive, so that last line is especially Buh-Worthy. I read that and pointed a finger at the screen, all "Oh, I see what you're doing there, and it is NOT COOL."

The thing is, I love Marketing. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was an Accounting major when I took a Principles of Marketing class, and just fell head over heels for it. True, I was already falling out of love with Accounting, and, yeah, maybe I was looking for a way out, keeping my eyes open, and yeah, maybe I could have been clearer about what I wanted out of the relationship from the beginning, but that's not what this is about, so let's not get into the past, okay?

The point is, from my first day of Marketing, I was hooked. The analysis, the creativity, the strategy, my GOD it was exhilarating. Principles of Management was also a favorite class, for basically the same reason: all the reasoning behind all the decisions. The psychology, the emotional intelligence, the behavior analysis, etc etc. Finally, Advertising, which was analyzing existing commercials and campaigns and making up our own. Those homework assignments were some of my favorites in my entire school career, from kindergarten till now, and I could that from now till I was 500 years old.

(Doesn't hurt that all three classes were taught by the same teacher, who could make Tax Accounting interesting, I'm quite sure.)

But all my other business classes made me twitch. The classes on economics, the legal sides of things (torts, libel, etc), business basics, etc. And Sales may have been the worst class experience of my life, if only because the idea of being a sales person makes me nauseous with terror.

I am not a salesperson. I am not a leader. I am not a manager. What I love about Marketing is not the sales, the manipulation, the idea of being better than the other team. I love the analysis, the strategy, the psychology behind it all--I love the creativity. If I could just analyze commercials or campaigns for the rest of my life and be paid for it, that would be hunky fucking dory. Seriously.

But being a team member in an agency where it's Pressure and Crunch Time and Stress and Throwing Together A Campaign Fix At The Eleventh Hour? Count me out. Please. I'll ruin your carpet.

So there's that.

As I had mentioned in another previous post, I'm a writer. Except I hate to say that. Because I don't write...not nearly as much as I want to, need to. When the feeling hits me, when I get in the groove, when the celestial beings get together in a conga line, I can write for hours, and well.

When the juice isn't flowing, when the celestial beings have had too much to drink and couldn't stand up let alone conga, nothing comes out. And then it's work. Hard, horrible, frustrating, debilitating work that I just can't force myself to do. I'll gaze at the page, I'll pull my hair, I'll stare into space, waiting for SOMETHING. ANYTHING. PLEASE.

I would love to be a writer, the way I see it in my mind. Working at home, tapping away for hours in an office. No, not the Perfect Life, a mansion earned with my best sellers, only working eight hours a week and doing cross-country book tours. Just a small room, messy but well-lit, with a computer, being able to sit or sprawl or whatever and work out the stories in my head. Maybe go down to the local coffee place for a change of scenery. Not rich from it, by any means, but Doing Well Enough, thank you very much.

Except I hit these blocks, and they stop my in my tracks, and it takes me months to recover. And I can't discipline myself to save my own life, can't say "Okay, x time on x day every week, I go to this spot, and I write, and I don't care what comes out, but by god, something will be written." I suck at it.

I don't have the flow, and I don't have the will power.

So there's that.

As I have mentioned in no previous posts, I love to edit. This stems from the same sapling as my love for writing, but was realized because of my boyfriend, Ryan. He finished up his Bachelors in Psychology in December 2008, and let me tell you, he's brilliant at Psychology. He is both articulate and passionate when it comes to this subject.

However, he's not the greatest when it comes to English. His grammar and spelling can leave something to be desired, and that's where I stepped in for the last year of his degree. After he slammed out another research paper--and, in case you didn't know, Psychology students write A LOT OF FUCKING RESEARCH PAPERS--I would lovingly attack it with a red pen, marking up the errors and inconsistencies. I ate it up, I would hand him back the first draft and eagerly await the second draft, or the next paper that was due.

That Halloween party I went to? I ended up going as a Grammar Nazi. Suit, red arm band with a "G" on it, ruler, red pens, copy of Strunk & White in my pocket. There you go.

This past spring, I got a little more serious about this fairly-newfound love for editing, and looked into what might happen so I could earn a living doing it. From what I found, it seemed there are two avenues for such a thing: find a job at a publishing house, or freelance. The second option brought to mind the same image as being a writer--namely, that of being able to work from home, doing what I loved from the place I love.

Except there's one thing freelancers lack: structure. There is no office, there is no time clock, there is no payroll department, there is no manager to give you work to do. There is just you, and your talent, and your willingness to promote yourself up the wazoo. If Real Estate is about location, location, location, then freelancing is about promotion, promotion, promotion.

Here's the part where you scroll back up and read about what I am not: a salesperson. I couldn't sell someone else's products, how am I supposed to sell my own? When it's not even tangible and all anyone has is my word that I don't suck?

So there's that.

Marketing. Writing. Editing. Three areas that make me happy, that I could do for days on end and be quite content. Three areas that have a list of cons just as long, if not longer, than the pros.

Reading that horoscope was like receiving a slap in the face. I know that all I've just written doesn't exactly address the horoscope. What all these many paragraphs are is background to what's going on in my head before I even start thinking about those three questions:

1. What is the quality of experience I want to have as I earn a living?
2. What gifts do I want to give to life as I toil at challenging tasks that are interesting to me?
3. What capacities do I want to develop in myself while doing my work?

I'll get back to you.

And Marie Claire can go fuck herself.

I informed Ryan this past week that if there is only one thing that will be outlawed in our house when we have kids, that one thing will be fashion magazines. Alcohol, cocaine, rat poison, AK-47, fine. Cosmo, HELL NO.

Any magazine that even subtly insinuates that you must have a certain weight, height, size, shape, hair color, eye color, skin color, sexual preference, diet, wardrobe, exercise routine, pet, car, job, personal life, etc or else suffer the social consequences of being Weird is just not allowed in a 1/2-mile radius of my impressionable child, especially if that child is a girl. I refuse to allow any literature that portrays "weird" as anything other than "not mainstream". Weird is not bad, it's just different, and different isn't bad either, dammit.

Watch almost any TV show or advertisement, any movie, open up almost any magazine, and you'll see Beautiful People doing Cool Things. I'm in my twenties, and I still want to be that Beautiful Person playing with that Cool Toy; young children have no chance. Everywhere you look, you're being shown that if you don't look like This, you're just plain Doing It Wrong.

Just yesterday, I saw a Benefiber commercial on TV featuring a Beautiful Person. She was tall, blonde, slender, with big boobs and a teeny waist, with perfect skin and teeth. She was dressed in a white outfit that only covered her breasts and legs, and that just barely. For a FIBER SUPPLEMENT. If you need sex to sell your fiber supplement, then YOU'RE just plain Doing It Wrong.

Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Elle, Seventeen, even "health/fitness" magazines like Shape are all about one thing: selling a product, which means selling an image, which means selling the idea that you're ugly and stupid unless you fit that image. If you go to Cosmo right now, one of the first things you'll see is a big box with "Want a Guy To Follow You Anywhere?", "Fierce Footwear", and "Why Stop at One Orgasm?", plus boxes with "Guess the Sex Position!" and "Sex Position of the Day!" and a man with his shirt off. Even with the aforementioned Shape, a relatively safe magazine focusing on fitness, health and exercise, the first thing you'll see is an advertisement for an appetite suppressant--because healthy women don't have appetites, right?

And every single magazine has tons of pictures of women--in the articles, in the ads, on the covers--that fit into the mold: big breasts, teeny waist, perfect skin and teeth, toned everything. Nowhere do you see a stretch mark, a pimple, a split end, a mis-matched pair of breasts, a gray hair (unless it's an ad marketed to the Mature demographic), a broken fingernail, or anyone above a size 6. And that's just unrealistic, dammit.

Real People have boobs ranging Honkin' to Non-Existent, and that's fine. Real People have skin that's smooth as satin or pocked with scars and blemishes, and that's fine. Real People have blonde hair, brown hair, black hair, red hair, silver hair, white hair, pink hair, blue hair, no hair, soft hair, kinky hair, hair with split ends, and that's fine. Real People are shaped like hourglasses, pears, upside-down pears, triangles, upside-down triangles, sticks, squares, and circles, and THAT'S fine.

You want to see a perfect body? A perfect person? Look in the mirror. You are who you are, you are WHAT you are. Some people just aren't born to have six-pack abs, or smooth hair, or porcelain skin, or an hourglass figure. And there is absofuckinglutely NOTHING wrong with that, there is nothing wrong with YOU if that's how you are. Walk down the street, and you won't see supermodels--you'll see real fucking people, with real fucking bodies.

These magazines insist that the only things that matter in life are (a) fashionable clothes, (b) hot guys, (c) sex, and (d) obtaining all of the above by looking "hot". I'm not apologizing for refusing to let that shit in the same house as impressionable children, and let's face it, we're impressionable children right up until we're 30. Then we become insecure adults, and that's a whole new set of problems.

If my daughter whines and complains and wants to read fashion magazines, fine. She can buy them herself when she's 18. The only way she's allowed to before then is if she shows that she knows herself well enough, and is confident enough, to not be influenced by them (plus saves up her allowance to pay for it herself). I want my child to figure herself out in her own time, through her own experiences, using her own powers of deduction and reasoning and no one else's, not even mine.

I know: I say that now, but just wait until the time comes and little Lucy is being SUCH a whiney little bitch about how all my friends get to read Cosmo, MOTHER, why can't I, you suck SO MUCH, I hate you FOREVER, and then we'll see how well I can stand my ground against the raw power of Teenage Girl Angst.

Bring it.