But the babies need love!

I know, I know. Shut up, Alex, parenting is a touchy subject. But you know what? No, I will not. Kids need love and I am going to stand on this soapbox and tell you that until you all understand (or until dinnertime).

I blogged about this very issue before. And I'm not sure if anyone agreed with me but by the end of this, I hope that you will. Otherwise, I feel bad for your children, should you have them now or at any point in the future. Commence the Love Your Child argument.

In our culture, we have this weird idea that you can spoil a child by giving it too much attention, love and possessions*. The Princeton web definition of spoiled is: "Having the character or disposition harmed by pampering or oversolicitous attention." For some reason we think that you can give your child too much attention. That it can feel too cared for. And as a spoiled child, I want to say that I like it. I am so happy knowing that whenever I call out for help, my mom and dad will be there. Whether I'm crying in my room or stranded at a party, I can count on them. Why is that a bad thing?

Babies have basic needs. Yes, food and diapers, but that's not it. As well as physical needs they also have emotional ones. They need you. So if you've just sat down to have a cup of tea while they nap and then they start crying but when you go check on them they're not hungry and don't need to be changed maybe they just needed you. Maybe they were lonely, or scared or just wanted their parent and how could you ignore those needs just before you can't see them? How could you say that they're less important, irrelevant and worthy of being dismissed?

So anyway there's this pervasive idea that if you make a habit of going to your child every time it cries, it will become accustomed to that and start to cry just to see you. But what I'm asking is why is that a bad thing? It wants to see you. It needs you. Babies aren't manipulative or conniving. They don't lie there and think about how they can make their parents miserable. Or at least, I don't think they do. If your baby cries just to see you, maybe it's saying it wants to see you more.

Why do we think a child that feels loved is bad? Why is it if an infant can count on their parents to listen to it, we see that child as spoiled, harmed and overindulged?

I really don't know. What I do know is that whenever I hear a baby crying, I can't stand it. It's like listening to someone ask for help and be disregarded. And maybe I'm getting overly metaphorical here but wouldn't the world be a less sucky place if we all listened to each other's needs?

So yeah, when I was a baby, my mom came to see me whenever I cried. Did that harm my disposition? Technically, we can't know that it didn't, but I'm going to guess that I'm a healthier person because of it. Even as an infant, feeling cared for is important. And I love my parents. I trust them and yes, they irritate the shit out of me sometimes, but I know they'll never ignore me. So thanks for spoiling me, parents.

*And though I agree that you should not give a child everything it asks for, I do think you should give it everything it needs. So I'm not saying BUY YOUR KIDS LOTS OF TOYS AND CELL PHONES AND CARS OR ELSE. I'm saying GIVE YOUR CHILD A HUG. (Sorry for the CAPS)

Commandeered by a pro*

(*Who sometimes has trouble spelling inanely simple words and also some difficult ones.)

First of all, I have something to tell you: This is not Vita.

Now that we've got that out of the way, HELLOOOOO! All thorough today, I kept thinking Did I forget to blog yesterday? I totally forgot to blog yesterday. Then I would actually think about it and realize that I did write a blog yesterday. Refer to below this post.

I actually got so entrenched in the idea that I'd forgotten my normal Sunday routine that I opened up the blog homepage and was going to write an absurdly long comment on Vita's Monday post about how sorry I was that I'd forgotten after you were both just talking of blog quality of late and then I saw that Vita hadn't written a post today but I had indeed yesterday.

So I decided to commandeer Monday. Hello, Monday-ers. It's not going to be Monday anymore by the time you read this because I know that the regular readers of this both live in time zones that are at least two hours behind me and as it is 10:26 here, that would make it tomorrow there. Hi future, what's the weather like?**

This whole taking over your day thing reminds me of this idea I once had where for a week, we wouldn't write on our specific days but rather randomly pick a day if it hadn't been picked already and blog using the group admin (which I believe is called Realta) on whatever days we felt like it without saying who had written it and the readers would have to guess who had written it in the comments. To add to this, we could try to mimic each other's style so as to confuse the readers.***

I thought it would be incredibly entertaining. What do YOU think? Should we DO this? I LIKE it.

I'm becoming mj. Must stop unhealthy mimicking. Also, on the subject of mj, I am TOTALLY doing BEDA.

**Seriously? If I was going to ask a question of the future, it would be about the weather? Not likely.

***To clarify this, I will give an example: It's Wednesday so you go on the RP homepage and see that no one has written a blog today so you log onto Realta (I can tell you the username and password if you've forgotten) and write something, in theory trying to pretend to be the other bloggers of this blog (if you want to throw in some random foreign languages, use French for Vita and Spanish for Rena) (if you want to be Rena, tell hilarious excerpts from your childhood; if you want to be Vita, talk about Drama and gay rights) etc., etc., etc. Or you could just be yourself and half us think you're someone ELSE pretending to be you (it just got a whole lot more complicated)...

Puffy hair boy

Today, I was sitting in my friend's living room and playing Rock Band like a typical North American zombie when I started telling a story. It started like this: So there was this puffy hair boy.

And everyone laughed. Is this reasonable?

The story:

On Thursday, I went to a volunteer banquet (amazing food) as a prerequisite to volunteering today and sat down a seat away and across from these two boys, one of whom had eerily puffy hair and slightly weasel like look on his face*. The other one was better looking and farther away. In between me and my potential summer romances sat my mom. *facepalm*

Throughout dinner, I stared at them and looked away and they stared at me and looked away. We're teenagers; this is what we're good at. The point is that we didn't talk. I noticed puffy haired boy had a blue shirt and then we went home.

Yesterday, I went to a block party in the middle of town where there was this funny lunatic magician who said he was going to murder a small child but never did and when we were going to find a parking spot, I thought I saw puffy hair boy in an orange traffic vest but he was wearing a white volunteer tee shirt and a hat so I wasn't sure.

On the way home, I saw him again and then proceeded to stare out the window (as did everyone else in the car). And then he looked up and saw me. In the face. I looked away.

Today, I woke up before 9, walked to the beach and got a boring volunteer job at the table with my mom. And then there was puffy hair boy with his better looking cohort. And this time, he stared. Every couple seconds. I was afraid he had recognized me. And I know this because his back was turned to us and who turns and looks behind them multiple times per minute? Starers.

This is my non-story. There's also another part where a couple hours later I went looking for my free volunteer lunch and asked him for directions to the food. I was smooth, like lotion. "Where can I ascertain some food," I said to which he paused and then replied, "Back at the museum." And I said, "Really? After I just walked all this way?" and he stared at me. Hot.

I'm going to go watch a Hugh Dancy story now. And reflect on my non-experiences with the opposite sex.

*this could be considered rude and inappropriate but I'm simply telling it how it is.

We's Cool, Yo.

It is the time of blogging, peeps!

Like Vita said, I'm pretty sure the quality of my blogs dropped off somewhere. I should try and fix that, yes? Yes. But, in a way, it's because the pressure to blog well has gone down. When we started out with this group-blog, I felt the need (even if it was all in my head, like most things are) to keep up the façade that I have an interesting, bloggable life/endless ideas for thought-provoking blogs, because I saw that both of you did, and thus if I didn't I would be FAILING YOU. Now we've done this for over a year, I know it's okay to skip a day or blog about having nothing to blog about/daily life or whatever without being labeled an utter failure at the Internet. Not that I'm saying it's okay to give up on this*, but we're cool that way.** And, these types of blogs are more like everyday conversation (take that whichever way you will, whether standard communication has been reduced to mindless chatter, or whether we're familiar enough to carry on normally via-blog), rather than near-daily soliloquies of intelligence, wit, and observation.

Planning my blogs ahead of time would not only produce more readable and "deep" content so as to be more entertaining to the readers of this blog, but it would probably improve my writing skills as a whole. And they could stand some improvement. Ah, well. There's always BEDA.***

Footnotes

* Although I haven't. I don't know if it looks that way. My life has just been average and void of suitably bloggable thoughts as of late...

** I mean "cool" in the pseudo-gangsta "In my mind we are close enough to do this without it being stressful because others will still understand/accept it"-way. Or should I say we're jokes? Yeah.

*** Assuming you guys are participating? Shall we go back to the Ning? (Methinks MJ's been updating it or something.)

Bloggity Blog Blog

Today in chronological order:

1) A 3.6 earthquake literally jolted me out of my slumber at about 5:00 this morning. Talking with my friends, we realized that we all had the same reaction: "That feels like an earthquake... but it can't be; we're in Maryland. Maybe it's a really huge truck?" My biggest regret is that I was only half-awake for it and thus the entire experience feels somewhat dreamlike. I think it helped me go back to sleep, though. It was sort of relaxing. (I know that earthquakes can be massively destructive and I'm not making light of that, but c'mon. You have to admit that when they're not doing any damage, earthquakes are pretty damn cool.)

2) After handing in a potentially crappy essay and consuming two extremely greasy pieces of pizza (courtesy of the IB office), I finished my two-week IB "enrichment" program for the summer. To put it simply, it was basically a summer school that one attends not for lack of passing classes but to prep for IB next year (99.5% it was compromised of former MYP students entering IB). Unfortunately - but hardly surprisingly - it reinforced the fact that for the next two years I am going to be juggling a truckload of work. On the plus side, all of the teachers (whom I may not even have next year, but no matter) were really cool and despite the fact that it was mostly just review, I actually feel like I learned something.

3) I took a two hour nap. Sleeping is fun.

4) I changed my guitar strings for the first time and I think it was largely successful! I ought to have done this, like, a year ago... oh well. It's actually kind of fun after you get over the initial shock of "oh crap I'm taking my guitar apart."

5) I lied and once again did not post the extremely vague post that I said I would post in a post two posts ago. (Hehe.) I f'reals promise that I shall post it this upcoming Monday.

6) I start Driver's Ed on Monday. Not really looking forward to it, especially because my friend who was maybe going to do it with me never actually signed up for it... haha, but it'll be fine. I'll be getting it over with so that I can hopefully get my Provisional before the end of my Junior year. Speaking of, I still need to get my permit... but I'm going to do that after I finish these classroom lessons. Better to wait and pass the test the first time, right?

My goal from here on out is to, essentially, get better at blogging. Strangely, I feel like my blog posts a year ago were better than my blog posts now - you'd think I would have improved, but no, I've just been getting lazy. The problem is not that I don't have good ideas but that I procrastinate and then end up delivering you a blog post of similar quality to, er, this one.

I want a lot of things

It's bloggity blog blog time. Huzzah. Once more I am faced with a conundrum. Nothing to write about. Nothing is severe. I suppose I could talk about rice crackers or this one time when a guy in Prince Edward Island asked me for a massage (serious creepy times) but 1. rice crackers aren't extremely interesting, however crunchy and delicious they may be and 2. I don't really want to relive that scene and it's weird that I brought it up in the first place.

I don't want to bore you. I hate wasting people's time. Time is invaluable and we don't have unlimited resources. Allow me to pause for a moment and thing of something meaningful... okay, all else has failed and I've made up my mind. I'm showing you a piece of writing that I've been debating whether or not to share with anyone. Now the debate is closed and I'm hitting publish.

As a note before this piece, I'd like to say that I've been reading a lot lately and thinking (in syncronicity with my older sister) that I want to meet a boy and have a summer romance. And this is incredibly naive and somewhat shallow of me but that's what we both want. Experience in the field. So this is about that, sort of.

I want a lot of things

I want to fall in love.

I want to lie in the grass with my eyes closed as the sun kisses my fingers and I kiss you.

I want to wake up smiling and not open my eyes so that I can hold on to the dream of you that I can already feel myself forgetting.

I want to hold your hand and have you hold me back like a lifesaver in the ocean, your one chance for survival.

I want to taste your breath and feel your heart beating, as fast as mine, under my hand.

I want to sit cross legged on the sidewalk facing you, as people navigate around us, and stare into your eyes like they contain the secrets of the world, or, at the very least, a glimpse at you, behind the physical exterior.

I want to know you, not too much so that you can still surprise me but enough that I can feel like I'll never know enough.

I want to trace the lines on your feet as you lie on the couch watching actors on a screen play characters with emotions of love that don't feel remotely similar to ours.

I want to memorize your laugh and your smile and then realize that's impossible.

I want you to think I am beautiful, not just that I look it.

I want us to sit on the beach and watch the trains go by and not say a word because silence isn't always scary.

In short, I want a lot.

Probably more than I deserve.

I've always been selfish and greedy

but maybe if I had these things,

I wouldn't need to be anymore. Maybe if I had you,

I wouldn't want anything.

Poetry is subjective. I know this and I think Vita was trying to prove this point with her poem, or maybe she wasn't. I didn't find those last three lines to be the saddest I've ever read. I don't know what I thought of the poem exactly.

I have to go. Bedtime. Tense house. Need sleep. Catch you on the flip flop.