my new idea

Lately, I feel like writing is selfish. I feel like it's not enough to give back to the world. I think everyone should be a humanitarian. I need a BIG life change everyone. Don't be too shocked if I run off to Africa with a banjo echoing Kumbaya...

adults

My life in the adult world has only confirmed how truly mediocre most people are...

my disease

I waste a lot of time these days. I’ve always been successful at concealing my laziness, my knack for allowing time to drown in my presence. The main problem is that I revel, for quite a considerable amount of time, in the feeling of accomplishment for completing even the smallest task. It’s the time of digestion that is so stretched out, idly consuming past completions. This morning I went through some papers (which is the most abhorred task to me), wrote some checks and paid some bills. After that, I felt like I had completed enough mundane responsibilities, so the laundry and dishes piled up, and my computer screen was blank for the majority of the day.

It’s not as if I spend my “wasted’ time sitting around watching television, eating bon bon’s and gossiping. Nor do I spend a lot of time sleeping. In fact, it is just the opposite- and that is exactly why my laziness and procrastination hides under a mask. I’m openly hyper. I’m so hyper and easily distracted that I can’t focus on anything for a long period of time, even watching a movie is difficult these days.

I’m usually so mentally exhausted from thinking. I spend so much of my days contemplating everything, from the universe to the petty. Parts of the day are rationed for philosophical meanings and cerebral discoveries and the other half is spent on thinking about nonsense. I think about everyone I know in one entire day. People may think that I do this out of boredom, but that isn’t the case because no matter how busy I am, my mind will be running the rat wheel, paralyzing the rest of my being. I desperately want it to slow down, but it won’t.

I always made fun of ADHD, but what if I have it? It sounds like I do, it feels like I do.

What I dislike most about the prognosis of such a disorder is that it is “remedied” in such a careless fashion; swallow a pill.

I believe that when there is something wrong (and wrong being classified as a condition that debilitates normal healthy functioning of mind, body and soul) every resource should be thoroughly utilized before submitting to a pathetic pill that merely stalls a symptom. I say this because usually the “wrong” is derivative of an inner ailment. There is something wrong on the inside that needs to be worked out, perhaps something spiritual?

No, I am not about to run off to some man-built, holy rolling, bible-thumping church- that is not what I meant by “spiritual.” What I meant was something of the spirit.

Then, part of me wonders why there are so many modern psychological “conditions”. Perhaps we are part of such a society that embraces self obsession. Perhaps I spend too much time thinking because I what I should be doing is helping someone else. Why am I spending all of this time thinking about instinct vs. condition or fate vs. coincidence, when there are people in this world that have nothing to eat for dinner?

Escapism

Now I just feel guilty.

I’m so aware of my emotions that they have become magnified. It’s like staring at your pores, eventually they seem huge…and scatter through your once-decent face like a disease.

What was my point?

women

WOMAN

Whether it is due to my age or my recent entrance into the world of motherhood/marriage, the meaning,opinions and appraoches to the varying ideas of femininity have been presented to me more so than any other period of my life. I am constantly being drawn into conversations and even debates on what it means to be a woman. Even when the idea is not blatantly expressed, but hinted, the discrepancies on the subject of femininity and female roles in society become more and more apparent.

I have a few friends that are staunch feminists. This does not mean that they are hairy, man-hating lesbians or single, asexual, childless women with cats. They are mothers who stay at home with their kids, have professional careers on the side, which they persue from home, they breastfeed, and yes- they wear lipstick. They encompass the feminine ideal; the nurturing mother, the individual woman, the equal. They don't feel obligated to scrub toilet bowls or take full responsibiity for the children. They are married to men who know where the diapers are and which kid is allergic to nuts. That does not make a man masculine, btw, its wimpy...They are the arch-enemies of the chauvanism that saturated the 1950's.

I do think, however, that the majority of people have become extremists when it comes to feminism. It's rather unfortunate that mainstream feminism defies femininity. It's quite a paradox actually. Afterall, is it really "feminine" to put on a business suit in the morning, and hand your children over to hired caregivers who feed them chemically infused formula, while your breasts leak suffocated milk-flow through a blazer of corporate power? why is feminism so utterly contradictory to femininity?. Shouldn't we embrace, naturally, what makes us women? We don't have to fall to either extreme, because extremes are always the same. Women should not have to choose between supressing femininity to prove a point nor should they become so painted into a "role" of the frumpy housewife. Both extremes seem phony, pre-conceived, told...
Both extremes scream "slave slave slave" and whether you are a slave to corporations/money/power or to a gender-fied role that assumes subserviant quialities expected of you because you are a woman- they are both ridiculous ( that's the only word I can think of right now)

Thank God my husband is not a chauvanist...we wouldnt be married
I hate when people make remarks about cooking, cleaning or other tedious, tasks when refering to my marriage...it's condescending. Because I gave birth to our child, does not mean that I earned the "right" after 60 hours of labor to scrub toilet bowls and fold his boxers....is that what I want my daughters to do? no. Did my husband think, when he fell in love with me "wow, I want HER to be the one to scrub the bathroom" Does this mean that I have to be glamorous, sexy, and scrubbing bowls all at the same time? That's a bit too much for a gal! I feel sorry for women like that.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that women should go to the other extreme and refrain from any form of house-work just to prove that they are not slaves...What I do think is that they should not be EXPECTED based on gender. A woman should be feminine, but it's tiime for the ladies to truly learn and think about what being feminine really is....because I am starting to see how few people have a grasp on what it means to be a woman....
Any thoughts?

Thanksgiving

I must admit I am bit turned off toThanksgiving this year. Although I don't want to be a bitter cynic, I can't help my naseua as the materialism and gluttony saturates days we are told to celebrate.
Thanksgiving is mainly about food. Forget the "gratefulness and thankfulness" because we STUFF ourselves. I hate people who stuff themselves on Thanksgiving, it's respulsive. Actually there is nothing more unappealing than the fat American man, who spills over the couch, requesting more and more andmore stuffing from the kitchen as he watches stupid American Football and burps. Ew. I would probably wind up poisoning my husband at night or stangling him if he were like that. Yay, thank God for the Brits...whatever.
Anyway, back to my point- (I digress a lot, and probably have a lot of spelling errors- one thing Justin and I have in common;)
so, as I was saying...Thanksgiving. Children are starving to death in Africa, millions of Iraqis are being killed and torn from their homes, homelessness continues to be a significant problem, people are lonely, the world is deteriorating due to global warming and greed and here we are celebrating a holiday by stuffing ourselves...talk about denial and escapism.
I'm not saying that we should stop enjoying life because there is suffering in the word, but why does it have to be so extreme? It's sickening and fake that little American school children have no clue what is going on in the world and celebrate what they are thankful for on the basis of what???? Perhaps if they REALLY knew how bad it could be, they would have a more deeper understanding of "gratefulness and thankfulness."
So this year, I do hope that peope keep things in perspective when they stuff their faces and talk about being grateful...at least agknowledge the irony...

instinct

I am convinced that people, for the most part, either thrive completely on instinct or have absolutely no instinct at all. It's un-nerving.

A mother actually said to me, before she dropped off her child at daycare, that it was "important to let your child cry at night because the idea of 'self soothing' is a necessary part of development." Her dumb friend chirped in "yes and if they don't learn to 'self-soothe' they will have problems in college."
Thoroughly stunned at the pure stupidity of such ridiculousness, my inarticulate brain silenty said: What The Fuck. Hey, at least my reaction was real and not quoted from some mass market paperback.

I mean, seriously, are these people trying to trim the perfect bonsai or raise a human soul with nurturing and real emotion. What is going to happen to these experiment children raised in the same calcuated fashion as a fungi under a microscope. Are the Harvard professors going to scrutinze in years to come, trying to decipher which child was ignored in the right or wrong fashion. Before we know it, a parent who neglects his/her child will simply have to quote some callous Phd pod who self-published a shitty book and be let off the hook, backed by scientific termonology as a child cries in the corner.

The current obsession, yes OBSESSION, with trying to systematically create a 'perfect' child strikes me as unatural verging on the side of evil. Everything that these psuedo-intellectuals, who mask themselves in the marketable positions of 'child specialists', do is convince the parent to seperate from their child. Somehow, they have managed to make these easily persuaded parents believe that a happy and healthy child is one who is in daycare, cries at night and does not have to 'share' because they may be 'working on something.' Well, if anxiety, fear and narcassism are virtues then I guess I am wrong.

Two Worlds of Hijab

Draped in hijab from head to toe and through the bottom of the face, Muslim women are expected to exemplify modesty and respect for their femininity. To us westerners, this very notion of feminine evasiveness is less than respect, it seems forced and degrading to any sense of female pride. How does modesty get confused with shame? We may ask ourselves. I ask myself this question continuously. However, when I look around me at all of the Western women who rave about their female power and rant and scrutinize the suppression of Muslim women, I am encountered by another parallel universe, a world so far apart in theories but akin in concept.

Western women are obsessed, consumed and completely involved in the physical standards of society. Every woman I know is a victim, to some degree, of society’s perpetual pressure to look a certain way. As we follow the herd, and even subjugate ourselves to tummy tucks, fad diets, nose jobs, enhancers, reductions and all realms of this superficial circus, we still manage to look down our noses on women who are regarded as controlled or suppressed. There is something strangely paradoxical in this parallelism.

There is not much disparity in the pressures involved for both worlds of women. Western women poke and probe at their bodies, scrutinizing themselves as they are blind to the powerful influence imposed by society’s superficial, sexually driven prototype. Our feeling of control is fallacious, as we strive to fit the mold which deviates from our natural self. There is nothing more suppressive, it is merely masked in the glamorous representation of choice and self esteem.

Muslim women are physically masked and we are psychologically masked.
They feel humbled and we feel free, both striving for opposite goals-but both controlled. Yet, who are the forces behind these standards for both worlds of women? Not women.

Evidently women have not come as far as we need to. Extreme’s merely provide a temporary rationalization, but we are actually draped in a costume of our own, an invisible hijab.