EM: People... why I hate them

In all honesty, I have to question sometimes whether or not there's such a thing as a "good person" at all. I mean, not everyone is a "bad person", but we ALL do bad things. But it's when you truly poor your heart into something and involve those around you that you realize who can be pegged as a good person. Honestly, I devoted a solid three years of my life to a certain department that I loved quite dearly. I spent every waking hour of my free time doing things that would benefit that department and revolved my whole life around it. I lived and breathed for it and it honestly made me happier than anything else in the world. Now that this part of my life is over, and I'm pursuing other things as an adult, I find myself needing more and more help from those I love, those I need, THOSE I'VE HELPED. In what realm does it become at all mature or appropriate for a GROWN ADULT to rat our two teenagers selling cookies? After the years or work we did for you, the tears we cried and the BULLSHIT we put up with, you can't throw us a bone? You really have the gall to report us to the man and send us packing? It's times like this when you really know where people's priorities are. It all comes down to what they consider important; selling candy bars, or allowing to struggling kids to raise money for something they've invested all of themselves in and DESPERATELY need. It's ridiculous honestly, because they were still doing 10 times better than us anyway, so it's not even like we were stealing their thunder. So congrats those of you who did this, because you've shown your true colors and now you never need to worry about dealing with me, because I'm done with you. I'm done with the department, I'm done with the friendly visits, I'm done with the HELPING, and I'm done with the fake plastered smile on my face. You're no longer my superiors, I don't have to impress any of you, I don't need you, and I never did. You can all just FUCK OFF because when this is all done, it will put you so called "adults" to shame. It will be amazing, and it will be because of EMILY HURTIN and DREW CARTER. Don't forget those names later when you're getting your diaper changed at the retirement home my some guy named Molly, because we'll have moved on to bigger and better things, and you'll be able to say "wow, I really should have been an adult, got a life, and moved on too." And then, I'LL LAUGH. Because I'm a respectful person, yeah, sure, BUT MESS WITH ME AND YOU'RE FUCKED FOR LIFE

THE JU: The Greatest thing Ever

So this is an essay that I read in my English 101 textbook "The Writers Way" and I think it's safe to say that it's one of the funniest things ever written/ is totally true. I have long thought about blogging about the horrors of Libby Lu but nobody says it better than Neve Chonin, so I'll leave it to her

NOTIN' BUT A TWEEN THANG

NEVA CHONIN

I live in a blessed bubble. My local cafes have free wireless, two green grocers gracet the neighborhood, my landlords babysit my pet mouse, and I have never seen a Club Libby Lu.

If you like me, knew nothing of Club Libby Lu until recently lemme tell ya, they're all the rage. Club Libbly Lu is a chain of more that 80 stores targeting girls ages 5 to 12, konwn by marketers as the "tween" demographic. This is the age where girls grow tired of toddling but haven't yet decided to hate their parents.

According to http://www.clublibbylu.com/, their stores aren't just retail outlets, but "something special!" They offer "a fun funky place to hang out" where grls can "dress up like a princess, rock star or drama queen" in a "famous Style Studio". They can get a manicure. They can "sing and dance to the latest club beat" with Libby's "inspiring Club Counselors". At Libby Lu "every girl is treated like a VIP--Very Important Princess! It's totally a girl thing!"

Totally! Libby Lu is one reason I'll never have children. The thought of sharing my home with a preening little monster in drama queen drag is enough to make me...oh, do something that would qualify me as an unfit mother. Like engaging said child in endless games of "Make the Princess Cry" and "Destroy the Drama Queen's Self Esteem--Forever". Besides encouraging kids to be egotistical brats, Libby Lu and other kiddie stores like Monkey Dooz reinforce annoying stereotypes --as opposed to legitimate sexual differences--and transform children into tiny grotesques destined for an adulthood as gender-polarized as their parents'. Do all little girls long to be pretty in pink? Really? Because by age 6, I was eating dirt and wanting to be a Japanese robot. I pulled my Barbie dolls apart limb by limb and reassembled them into hybrid monsters. I did the usual sick stuff all kids, regardless of sex, love to do as they explore their world's boundries.

There are no Japanese robots at Club Libby lu. Instead, tweenies are treated to makeovers--hair extensions, makeup, the whole shebang--and then according to a March Washington Post article, led in a dance by club counselors who urge them to "shimmy down" and "shake it" while a soundtrack instructs "Wet your lips/ And smile to the camera".

That done, the tots visit the Pooch Parlor to selcet a miniature stuffed dog, complete with couture carrier and a doggie T-shirt sloganed with something like "They Royal Heiress".

I'm sorry, did my projectile vomit just splash your coffee mug? Such is the risk of freading me in the morning. Because, I mean, dude. Just...dude. I'll say it plainly: LIBBY LU IS BREEDING MONSTERS. GOD HELP US. GRAB THE KIDS. TAKE THE DOG AND HEAD FOR THE BOMB SHELTER. GO NOW. Does the world need more vapid idiots? Does it? Look at the White House. Look at Britney Spears and K-Fed. And it gets worse! From the Post, a description of Libby Lu's interior:

The store is pink. There are pink ruffles around the light fixtures. The walls and stools

are blue and pink. The staff wears pink. There are pink cowboy hats for sale, pink

Ugg-like boots, pink phones decorated with pink feathers. There are rings with huge

diamonds, like J.Lo might wear (only fake), with pink packaging that reads "Bling!

Bling!"

Bling. Bling. Pass me an airsickness bag, cover your cup and tell me what you think of this: Libby Lu is all the rage for birthday parties. So what if a little girl's circle of friends includes little boys? Are little boys allowed to explore their inner drama queens too? The question is rhetorical. Of course their not. Libby Lu likes to keep the sexes segregated, Taliban-style. Libby Lu isn't reggressive, it's revolutionary, proposing a level of male-female isolation that this country hasn't seen since Puritanism waned four centuries ago. Sayonara, childhood friendship between the sexes. Hello, tween-boy frat parties with ginger-ale kegs. This is what really irks me, but what bothers many anti-Libby parents the most is something hinted at in yet another Post outtake (hey I enjoy my newspapers). "Sometimes people walking through the mall gather by the windows at Club Libby Lu to watch the spectacle of little girls, "with all that pink and glitter. All that flesh too."

Mmmmm. All that little girl flesh. Tastes like chicken. Now, while my thoughts turn to cannibalism, others have less savory minds. For many moms, the thought of adults watching kids parade in skimpy outfits raises the specter of--what else?--pedophilia. Yow! Perverts in the mall!

To that, I say, hush. I do think it's wretched for Libby Lu to train tots for lives as gold-digging sex-bots, but I don't think it necessarily inspires men in trench coats to abscond with the foul little princesses. Some mothers disagree. They disagree to the point where they're ready to picket, say, Kenneth Cole for dressing kids in any kind of adult attire, even suits and ties.

Where does this leave us?

On one side the pink vaccum of Libb Lu; on the other, the repressive hysteria of neo-Puritans. Stuck in between on an ever-shrinking field of sanity, the rest of us,

I've said it before, so I might as well say it again: Procreation is vastly overrated.

(San Fransisco Chronicle, Datebooks, July 23, 2006)

EM: It's important to me, therefor it's something to think about...

So this is important, It's occurring, and it's effecting many more kids than you'd think it is. 

Transgender Children and “Gender Identity Disorder”
Recently, I sat down to watch my favorite TV show “Law and Order: SVU” much like I usually do. The episode was called ‘Transitions’ and I was extremely surprised at the subject matter of the show; transgender children and what is called ‘Gender Identity Disorder’. I had heard of this before of course, transgender men and women that work to become what they believe they truly are, but I had heard very little about how much this has been affecting some children. The episode addressed a problem with a mother and father fighting for custody of their transgender son Henry, who was fighting to become the girl he was on the inside. The mother, although it was difficult on her, supported her ‘daughter’s’ decision, while the father was in complete denial of it all, forcing his child to become suicidal. The father refused to allow hormone blockers to be taken to stop puberty and start transitioning into a female, which caused massive issues amongst the family. This brought me to my question, “Should parents really have a say in whether or not their transgender child can begin their transition?”
To be transgender, it means that you feel that you were born into the wrong body; your brain is telling you your female, but your body is make, or vice versa. It is something that many people go through and it’s becoming much more common today for those people to do something about it. Recently, there was a report about the transgender man who gave birth to a baby, because he hadn’t fully transitioned into the male form surgically. But now, people are starting to discover this at younger and younger ages. In many ways, this is easier on them, but it causes much emotional difficulty on others, particularly the parents.
In 2007, an article was printed about a transgender six-year-old girl whose parents supported her transition into the female identity. Born a boy, Jazz Jennings had insisted since the moment she could talk that she was a girl. Jazz is one of the “youngest known cases of an early transition from male to female” (Goldberg/Adriano 1). Jazz’s parents have also discussed Hormone Therapy. This will stop her from growing body hair and everything else that’s masculine. Once she starts taking estrogen, this will help her body start taking a turn for female. Her fat will start to go to her hips and she will develop breasts.
Eventually, all transgender people come across a difficult decision; do they want to take the step towards Gender Reassignment Surgery? Most people in this situation are older when they make the decision, but often, for children, the surgery is all they want. For children like Jazz, it isn’t something that has been thought about as much as wearing dresses and decorating her room with mermaids. At the tender age of six, she’s taking the steps toward becoming a little girl and not needing to worry about becoming a woman. For kids like Riley Grant, a transgender ten-year-old girl, it’s all they can think about.
Riley Grant was born a boy, but always knew he was a girl. As a child, he was quiet, passive, and quite clingy. “His mother knew that he wouldn't become a macho little boy,” Says Alan Goldberg of ABC News. Her mother, is very supportive of Riley’s decision, and is quite understanding of her situation. “She has a birth defect, and we call it that. I can't think of a worse birth defect, as a woman to have, than to have a penis," Riley's mother, Stephanie, told Barbara Walters. "She talks about the day she'll have a baby. That's not in her future. But she sees herself as growing up to be a woman" (Goldberg 1). Riley has always been quite emotional and passionate about insisting that she was a girl. This all become quite clear one day when his mother was giving she and her sister a bath. Riley, out of the tub, held a pair of nail clippers against his penis and said that it wasn’t supposed to be there, that “God made a mistake”, breaking his mother’s heart. His mother began to buy him feminine things in secret, making sure that her father wouldn’t find out. This went on for a few months, then her father found out. He was extremely upset; it wasn’t something he at all believed in. Seeing his son wear a dress was almost too much for him to bear. This caused so much tension in the Grant’s marriage, and they almost ended up separating over it.
This has to make you wonder, if you were in this situation to, as a parent, could you really say that you’d rather have a dead son than a happy, loving daughter? This could be misconstrued as an unfair question, and an unfair one it is, but it’s definitely one to think about. When doctors perform the Gender Reassignment Surgery, they always make sure that they are at the age of consent, eighteen. But is this really right? Is it really worth it to make these children suffer and live in such depression, knowing that they’re in the wrong body, that they were born physically into this world the exact opposite of how they’re brain is developing? In the womb, at the beginning, all fetus brains start out as female until the testosterone began to effect the brain and body development. But what if during this time, something went wrong? This is the theory many scientists have made; that as a fetus, the brain was affected and the body was not, or vice versa, causing the brain to develop feminine and the body to develop masculine, or the brain to develop masculine and the body to develop feminine. Should this really be the choice of the parents for their child when in all honesty, they have no idea what their child is going through? Also, should the parents have any say in whether or not their children should be able to stop taking the hormone blockers? Just because a father wants his son to remain his son, simply because his little boy playing with dolls makes him uncomfortable, is it really worth risking the depression or even the suicide of his child? Many people are fighting for this today, to put the decision ultimately in the hands of those who are transgender, at any age over ten.
To some, this seems outrageous and far too young an age, but too others, they know that a child can tell immediately if something isn’t right, and want it fixed. Children are much more perceptive than we think they are, much more aware of what’s going on with their bodies than we’d like to think. It’s actually been proven in a study done by Barbara Walters, that children who start their transition early see massive improvement in their personality and even their grades in school. One transgender boy, after taking testosterone and hormone blockers in order to start his transition from female to male, went from D and C grades to A and B grades once he felt he was in the ‘right body’, and is happy now, very happy.
What I hope to learn from this project his this; I want to better understand the reason this happens to so many children. Also, I would like to know why it seems that younger and younger children are making this discovery known and taking action. This is something that many people don’t think about in everyday life, but the fact of the matter is that it is a real issue and it’s affecting younger and younger people everyday. These children, who only want to feel like they were born in the right body, are being made miserable because people are so closed-minded and don’t want to hear about anything out of the norm. Parents of these children are putting more and more stress on these children because they want to avoid embarrassment and heartache. This is of course understandable, but also, people need to realize sometimes that what’s best for their children isn’t always what you as a parent want, no matter how outlandish and hard it may seem. I also hope to explore more of these types of cases and what there outcomes are; whether or not these people ever got what they truly wanted.