Entry #35

Thought I’d do one entry for this post. In my defense, it is a long one, but feel free to think of me as lazy if you want.

Looking over my teenage years, it only makes this Laurie Halse Anderson quote feel all the more true:

I could go on for days about our disrespect and disregard for adolescence in American culture. Americans are all about loving kids when they’re small and portable, but for some reason … boy, do we abandon our teens. We abandon them in families, we abandon them as a culture, we don’t do a great job in most high schools of educating them properly. We disrespect them, and at the time when they are in most need of good, fun, loving, trustworthy relationships with good adults, we step away. And that’s really stupid and awful. So I try to write stories that tell the truth about hard things because kids need to know it; the world is hard and it will kick your ass if you’re not careful.

Because it is and remains so damn true. Our culture doesn’t know what to do with teens. At times, it takes what feels like a schizophrenic approach: using them as a major marketing demographic while simultaneously making fun of whatever they like. It says teenagers are supposed to rebel, but will come down like a ton of bricks over the slightest infraction.

I edited out a slur, which I deeply apologize for using. There’s no excuse; I should have known better.

Society creates no purpose and provides no support for teenagers then acts shocked when they fall by the wayside. Most will eventually straighten themselves up, but too many never recover.

Being a teenage girl is even worse because at an age when you’re the most uncomfortable with your body, you have to deal with the world sexualizing you, deal with creeps of all shapes and sizes.

Fun fact: if you were to talk to most women, most would say that they were catcalled more when they were in the 10-15 years old range, than they ever were as mature adults.

Transcript: Monday 10/29/01

Watching the previews for Riding in Cars with Boys got me thinking about the way teenage girls are treated in movies. We’re often shown as writhing little nymphets in skin tight leather just waiting for some horny guy to paw all over us. We’re often the object of desire, but rarely do they ever do a film about how we feel about being the objects of lust. Every girl is all too happy to jump into the sack with some guy she just met.

Three questions come to mind while listening to my teacher talk about functions:

Who invented this crap?

What were they smoking?

Where can I get some?

Transcript: (Back to previous discussion.) It seems we’re always bitches and hos.

That’s it. I’m not going onto a school of higher education. I sick of studying things I hate, getting up at unreasonable hours, and prostituting myself to get that grade. I’m sick of catty, unreasonable, and stupid [BLANKS] always prospering.

I so incredibly depressed. I am buried alive under mountains of schoolwork, homework, housework, and mortality. Information’s coming at me so fast my brain’s on overload. My wires are snapping, my fuses are blowing one by one. I try to escape but it body slams itself on top of me.

Take me now, Lord!

I like scars, they give a sense of character. I feel utterly sad and worthless but I can’t cry. I can’t cry when it matters. People think less of the weeper. It just isn’t cool.

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” William Butler Yeats

Transcript: “I lingered around them, under that benign sky; watched

I liked the guy at the assembly. For once someone who encourages us to rebel against author-ity, to question. Just because they put them on a pedestal doesn’t mean they’re right.

“La la la myteachersuckshegavemelotsofhomeworkIwenttothemallhadfundidyouseemynewdressRobertaissuchabitch’”

Tell me do these earthlings pause to breathe?