Freedom of Self Expression

Kids these days! What can you do with them??

Self expression has become a passion near and dear to the hear of almost every teenager I know. But how much is healthy and where should we, as parents, draw the line until they are old enough to make their own decisions.

Simple stuff like odd colored hair and wild makeup are, in most respects, not a problem. Unless of course they happen to be looking for a job somewhere. I don't know about some of you, but I live in a small southern town where blue or green hair is going to be a major NO-GO factor for landing a job. Teenagers say, "Bunch of stuck up old foggies." and strike out for bigger parts when they get a refusal for employment.

But how much of that are we contributing to that attitude by allowing them to experiment on their hair and makeup without restraint?

I for one, think it's great that my daughter likes to dye her hair different colors. The blue and pink streaks she puts in it looks great on her and I don't see anything wrong with it. However, in her search for a job, she's found out that not everyone is as accepting as she'd have hoped. In fact, I think the major blow to her ego came and a wedding just recently where she was told that her hair in all it's blue glory was 'ugly and looked like shit'.

I was pissed. It hurt her feelings, it was uncalled for at the time, and the woman that said it had no regard for how she made my child feel. The rebel in me at the time almost went home and had her dye MY OWN hair blue just to make a point and dare her to say something to ME abou it. There would have been a fight and that would have been unwanted drama, so I stuffed down my ego and let it go. That didn't stop the fact that she was being an ass about the whole thing. I regret that I didn't, but I didn't. And I'll leave it at that.

But hair dye and makeup aside, when is it time for the parent to put their foot down and say no? And when does 'no' actually MEAN anything these days anyways? Odds are if you tell your kids no, you won't do it for them, then they're just going to go out and get an older friend or sibling to do it for them anyway, so it's a lose lose situation there. For the most part, my kids respect what I say and realize that there's usually a reason behind what I tell them I don't want them to do.

Granted sometimes I have to explain it and break it down into the basics. Compromise has been a wonderful thing in dealing with my kids though. I made a deal with them and I think it's something that most parents should think about. Piercings are ok, and if they get tired of them, they simply let them grow up. Gauging piercings is not because that, like a tattoo is going to be there forever. Hair grows back, grows out and can be recolored when it does, so hair dye is a non issue. Makeup washes off.

What brought this on you wonder? Well, a friend of my daughter's just came over to the house and she dyed his hair blond. It looked GREAT on him! And then they dyed it blue which would also look great on him. However, this kid, wonderful and smart as he is also lives with the woman that made the derogatory comment about my daughter's blue hair. It's not his mother, but she's taken him in and given him a home when he felt he had nowhere else to go.

I wondered what would happen when he went home with blue hair since she hated my daughter's hair so much that color. None of them had thought of that, so now they are in the process of removing the blue from his hair and once again making it blonde. Why? Just so he will still have a place to live and he doesn't have to hear her bitch.

I hate it for him because his self expression is now limited by the narrowmindedness of someone else. I guess though, since he's living in her house, she still has a right to tell him how to live. I regret that she's not more open minded about it though because all it's doing is driving a wedge between them that doesn't HAVE to be there.

But whatever, he's not my son or I'd let him have whatever color hair he wanted, as long as he was happy with it. But that's just me... I guess I'm the 'bad' parent in her book.

Whatever!

DragonLady

Absolutely TERRIFIED!!!!

Ever seen a spider so big that you seriously thought that it could eat a small bird?

I can HONESTLY say that I have now seen one. And to beat it all, it was SITTING IN THE MIDDLE OF MY BATHTUB!! NO, I am NOT kidding. I don't know where the thing came from and I don't care as long as the portal that brought Spiderzilla to this planet closed behind it!

Now don't get me wrong, regardless of how afraid of spiders you are, if you live anywhere in a rural area, you have to deal with them. Especially when the weather starts to cool off and they start looking for warmer places (usually inside the house) to spin a web to spend the winter in. I am absolutely terrified of the smallest of spiders. I can handle snakes (literally) and worms and things that are slimy and it doesn't bother me, but if it has six legs or more and skitters around making me THINK it's a spider... uh uh... no way... not this chick... watch my dust, I'm outta here! And if you're in my way, you're either going with me or moving real quick out of my way before I run you down. I've been known to mow down a 6'3" man built like a brick ... well, you know what I mean. I'm not sticking around to conversate with it!

Anyway, back to my unwelcome bathroom guest. To say that this was a big spider is an understatement, and I'm not just talking from fear here. I have seen wolf spiders who's legs can span a 4" door jamb with ease in the house. Yes, they scare the crap out of me. But this one... I swear it was the genetic mutation of one of those! Someone gave it some damn growth hormones or something. Maybe it ate a pesticide treated tomato or two... I don't know, but it had to span at LEAST 6 inches from leg tip to leg tip and that wasn't with it laying flat on its underside like they do when they're resting.

Yes, I know a little about arachnids. I always think it best to know your enemy as well as you can just in case they try some of their tricks to sneak up on you. and after learning about them, I like them even less. Some have eight eyes! One for each leg and THAT, my friends, is just unnatural! It ain't right!

Anyway, I was going to dye my hair to cover up the grey. Yeah, that nasty thing us older women have to deal with every six weeks or so, lol. Thank GOD I hadn't opened the dye yet, when I pushed back the curtain or Mister Spiderzilla would have likely gotten dye, activator, conditioner and gloves for his own personal use.

Instead, I screamed! The neighbors heard me, but no one else did. One kid had her headphones on, hubby was alseep, the other one had her nose stuck in a book and the third prodigeny was sleeping the day away after a late night last night. NO ONE HEARD ME!

Now I've been told that my decible level is illegal in a lot of the European countries when I hit full volumn. At least that's what a dear friend from Belgium told me once.

And no one heard me....

It would do me no good to pull the one from her headphones, she's as afraid of spiders as I am, and that includes all things 'icky'. The sleeping one... well, if she slept through my scream, I can now see how she sleeps through her alarm clock and is perpetually late. Hubby? ditto.

So I go and tap on my reader's door. She didn't hear the scream, but she heard my tap?? (Maybe the scream was supersonic? I mean the dogs did bark! But no one heard THAT either!)

After convincing her that she needed a big pan to hit it with, or maybe the rolling pin from the kitchen so she could use it as a cudgel in case she missed with the frying pan, we made our way (her in front of course) to the bathroom where it lurked.

And it was gone... just like the damn RAT the other morning... Spiderzilla was no longer in my tub.

The only explanation I can come up with is that it must have went into the crack between the baseboard and my tub and went under the house.

I'm setting off bug bombs in and under my house tomorrow. Mister Spider, if you're listening, you'd better pack your shit and get out cause Mama's coming and she's not a happy camper!

Dragon Lady

Mood: Frustrated

Ever have one of those days were everything you attempt to do is tied to a dozen other things that have to be done first? My goal today was to clean my house. Not an impossible goal you say... HAH... that's what YOU think.

My family, and I love them dearly, come from a long line of packrats. We save everything. My mother was raised in the depression era. (Yes, I was a late in life baby!) And there was never a thing that would go to waste when I was a kid. Old and broken toys could be fixed, pants could have rips and tears mended and there was never any need to throw away clothes that you might have outgrown because surely to GOD you would hear of someone having a housefire and those poor little kids would be JUST the right size to wear what you'd saved from last year.

And what makes it worse, I married a man from another family of packrats. He saves everything too! But he's not alone, I swear to the heaven's that saving things are in both of our genetics. I have a walk in closet that you cannot walk into because of 'stuff'. My biggest thing, I would have to say is computer parts.

No, I'm not talking about printers and the accessories. I'm talking about the guts... hard drives, cd drives, cabled, network cards, video cards, extra memory, motherboards... I had this great idea that I could build my own computer. And I did... and then people realized that I could 'do things' with computers, so I end up getting everyone's handme down computers or the one's that are too slow for what they want them for, or the one's that they simply got tired of and replaced.

In my living room alone, I have three working laptops, and two desktop computers. Which is great when hubby and I are gaming online and one of the kids needs to use a computer for homework and such. Only, we have only one kid in school now, so that kind of limits the rest of them. OH... and I forgot about the old perfectly working Windows95 Pony sitting under the desk that does ... erm... nothing? Collect dust? And they're all pretty good at that.

I'm no Martha Stewart and I never claimed to be, but lately my house has fallen into a state beyond even my satisfaction. You can't even SEE the top of my dining room table because of the amounts of collected dragon statues (my collection) and my daughter's pottery that she made in pottery class last year. It used to sit on a bookshelf until I moved the bookshelf to the hallway with the intention of getting the books into a more out of the way location. HAH.

Yes, the book shelf is in the hallway, but now it collects anything and everything that someone has in their hand as they walk by. The books are still on the one in the living room, never having been moved... because it's the one in the hallways is waiting to be anchored to the wall, which is waiting on my husband to find his 'Bullseye' level/studfinder thingy to find the right place to anchor it. And the Bullseye is....somewhere in the living room? Or maybe it's on the porch? Lord knows it's not in the tool bag where it's SUPPOSED to be!

I need a storage shed. I have been to Lowes three times to look at one and every time I think I will get it, I talk myself out of it. Why? Because I know as well as I am sitting here typing it that the storage shed will be filled to the roof and I STILL won't have room in my house to move! See, that's what happened with mom and dad too.

They have two houses. One is an old log cabin built around the turn of the century (last century, not this one) and it has three bedrooms. The upstairs has is about 40 feet by 15 feet... so there's a LOT of room up there... and it has a 12 by 12 bedroom on the back... all the rooms are so full that you can walk up the stairs and step onto the landing. Forget about going INTO the upstairs bedrooms because you can't, there are too many boxes. And downstairs there's room for the back bedroom door to open... that's it.

So they have that house full. And the house that dad lives in (mom passed away in 2005) is still almost as crowded as it was before she passed. (He collects stuff too, only his is 'useful' stuff! Go figure!)

Dad built a 'barn' storage shed for his outdoors equipment like mowers and rototillers and such, and then they got a horse and a cow, so the storage area turned into a barn. Well, they were only going to use half the attic for hay and the rest for storage. Then the barn nearly fell down. So they build another 'workshop' for my dad... now it's so full of stuff that you can't run the radial arm saw without moving two truckloads of lumber to get to it. And then he built a 'woodshed' so we'd stop storing wood in his workshop. Now it's full of who knows what.

Are you seeing the pattern here? See why I hesitate to buy a storage building? Dad keeps saying that we can build one cheaper and he has the materials, but he's also been saying that for three years at least and none of us have had either the motivation or the desire to put for the effort to gather everything and build it.

*sighs*

So... frustration aside, what did I do this morning? Grab a cup of coffee and sit down at the computer. Think my house will get cleaned?

Yeah, right!!

Dragon Lady

I am FURIOUS!!!!

Horribly enough, this is something that hits close to home and it pisses me off. Just like I think it should piss of every other human being on the planet that has a consciousness! It's a touchy subject, and no one likes to talk about it because when it hits close to home is it infuriating and frustrating that nothing will be done.

Rape.

Yeah, I said it. And before you ask, no I'm not going to tell you the details.

However, this is the situation. There are different kinds of rape. There's everything from violent assault to peer pressure (also called date rape). But not one of these are less traumatic for the victim in any way.

The fact of the matter that pisses me off is this... unless it's a violent assault where the victim fought back and there's a TON of physical evidence, there's little to no chance that there will be a conviction. It sucks, but it's a fact of our judicial system.

If the district attorney doesn't feel that they can win the case, they simply drop it. It doesn't mean that the rape didn't happen. It doesn't mean that the victim is no longer traumatized by the incident. There is no closure, not that closure can do much to aid how a victim feels about the situation.

But what it DOES do... and this is the pisser... is make the victim feel like the rape was their fault. Should they have fought back harder? Should they have screamed a little louder? Should they have been more careful about the position they put themselves in? ..... Should they have even bothered to report it?

Should they have even bothered....

The investigation of a rape is, in itself, a demoralizing and demeaning process.

At first you wonder if anyone believes you. You're look on with indifference at the initial report, and it often feels like they don't believe what you're saying. But investigators MUST distance themselves from the emotional aspect of the crime to have an objective view in order to gather all the evidence. It's understandable because we are all ruled by human emotions, and it can sometimes cloud our judgement.

Fine, I get that...

The physical examination for evidence is no cakewalk either. Any of you women that have ever had a pap smear know what I'm talking about. Only it doesn't stop at that. They must take pictures of all bruises, cuts, lascerations, etc. Ever had your whole body examined and photographed? It's embarassing!!! But, it has to be done, and we survive it. And no amount of justification makes it any less demeaning!

So we manage to survive the interrogation and physical examination. Then comes the waiting game. We give them our clothes we wore for evidence and anything else we can think of. They talk to the first person we speak with after the event just to verify our story.

If there's enough evidence, we get a call to talk to the district attorney and he/she explains exactly how the judical process will take place. Odds are if the district attorney meets with you, there's enough evidence to take the case, and they think they can win it and get a conviction.

However, the flip side of the coin is what is the real issue we need to examine. We've gone through the investigation, we've gone through the physical exam... but there's not enough evidence to support the case.

So now what?

Nothing... no recourse except to go through counselling or possibly self-defense classes. An even stronger confirmation that it was 'your fault' this happened. 'Your fault' because you didn't know how to protect yourself.

And given that whole scenario turning to crap in the proverbial basket... the victim now feel that it's 'her fault' and she put herself through all the embarassing and demeaning investigation onto to be told "sorry, there's not enough evidence to press the case. The district attorney said so."

Does anyone really think that after going through that HELL, any woman is going to risk reporting a rape again? Do you think they will feel any type of trust in our judicial system anymore because of this?

Who's fault is it really? Not the victim's. Not the police investigators, they did their job. Not the doctors, if they did the correct examinations and documentations.

The rapist? The one who gets away with the violent crime and pays no price for it?

Yeah, right! Kinda makes you wish for the good old days where old fashioned, wild west justice could at least make you feel like SOMETHING was done about the situation!

Furious in the Mountains

Dragon Lady