I Don't Usually Write Stuff Like This...Or Post Terrifyingly Bad Pictures...

     I don't usually think much about when celebrities die, but Davy Jones has me choked up a little. When I was around ten or eleven years old, I went through this weird phase where I was obsessed with The Monkees, especially Davy. I had a couple of episodes of the tv show on an old VHS tape, and I think the second or third CD I ever bought was The Monkees' Greatest Hits. I can still picture being in front of the huge stereo in the living room playing it. I still watch the show when I catch it on Antenna TV.
     When I broke my arm rollerskating and I just got my cast put on, I remember my mom ordering out food (I had chicken fingers..big surprise) and I watched the Monkees reunion show on tv. I remember being really excited and happy because I had my chicken and I got to watch Davy Jones!
     I even have a school picture that has a little Davy tribute in it. Before I describe this sad excuse for of a picture, I want to tell you guys that I am the QUEEN of terrible school photos. Anybody reading this who's my brother or sister, or my best friends from grade school will attest. Anyway, in this particular picture I had my red and white Seuss-hat looking striped sweater on...and I was holding one of those cheap ass tambourines that you used to see in the toys section of the grocery store. (Do they even still have that section???) It was an orange plastic tambourine, and I was sitting with it and grinning stupidly into those blinding lights they use on Picture Days.
      It might be weird, but despite the fact that I was born decades after their heyday, I have really vivid memories of The Monkees from when I was little. I walked down Chestnut Street singing along to "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" tonight on the way home from school. And you know, just like I was happy being a kid with that cheesy tambourine, I did not care that people were looking at me weird.
       RIP Davy.


(PS...just to show you how serious I am about my awful school pictures...here's two of the BETTER ones. I'll see if I can find the tambourine one sometime soon.)

Ever have times you feel like THIS?

Student Life. Not sure if I'm showing my age or if I'm just really, really neurotic.

            I really have not decided on what it is I actually want to do. I’ve always know that whatever I ended up doing for a living would have something to do with communication, law, or education. After my disastrous experiences with my high school counselor and psychiatrist’s office, I started to think about working with at-risk teens and young adults. I don’t know how I want to do that just yet, but I really look back on my own experiences and I can’t help but wish somebody competent was actually there to help me get to the very root about what was going on with me. I had a lackluster counselor who really only had one urge: to satisfy my father and push her one solution on me. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
I have felt very much brushed aside by the school system from that moment on. I tried (twice) to go back to classes when I was in high school, after screwing around for a while.  I got really discouraged the first time I came back, and the second time I was told that 1) I could never finish on time because I was undercredited and overage, and 2) That I shouldn’t even bother trying to get into another option…that I should just drop out. (Yes…that is almost a word-for-word quote.)
             I’ve been toying around with the idea of either Psychology or Law for a few months. When I first started at CCP my major was Education, but I realized that being a teacher wasn’t exactly what I envisioned when I thought about what I really wanted to do. Right now, I’m a Social Sciences major. I’m considering taking my BA in Psychology after this, probably by doing a dual BA/MA program at Drexel or another Philadelphia-area college. After that…I don’t really know. I know that I’m going to end up with a graduate degree, but I’m not sure if I want to get a license to practice law or become a shrink. I guess that’s going to be a bridge that I’ll cross once I come upon it. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up in a job I like once I’m done my master’s and I won’t feel a need to go to go further at all.
            I’m getting the feeling like looking at the big picture right now is making me overly anxious. I still have a healthy four to five years between here and grad school. I think part of me is being impatient because I started college so much later than everyone around me. There’s probably some self-consciousness lingering around in my crazy little head because of that. It feels really weird to watch everyone else LEAVE while I’m just finishing my freshman year.  I know that really shouldn’t matter, but it’s a nagging thought.

It's funny how movies can make you think sometimes, isn't it?

     I actually don’t have anything particularly gay to talk about today, except for mentioning that I watched Kissing Jessica Stein last night. If you’ve never seen it, the rundown is pretty simple. Girl journalist has awful luck with men, and gets called out on being ‘too picky’ by her ex/boss. There’s a personals ad that her friend comes across in the paper with a quote that miss journalist had just read…only…it’s in the WFW section. On a crazy, bicurious whim she answers it. The women awkwardly traipse through a lesbian relationship; complete with the journalist covering up their relationship by saying her girl is her “friend”, etc… The pair go through the relationship, the relationship dies of lesbian bed death, and they remain friends afterwards. The journalist is kind of left ambiguous, because they set her up with her ex /boss again, and her girlfriend is seen with another woman.
     Now that’s all very gay, but the driving point of this movie has a lot more to do with how we view ourselves when it comes to human relationships. The delightfully bisexual characters in this movie really were pretty spot on when it comes to figuring out that you’re bi.
     Watching this pretty much got me thinking about my own dynamic in relationships, my types, and all that. Everybody has their preferences, and bisexual people are no exception. There are a lot of jokes out there that we’ll pretty much boink anything human that moves, but that’s never ever been true for me.  Obviously, like any responsible person of ANY orientation I steer way clear of any kind of disease I can catch, and I’m a real stickler for getting all parties involved screened for HIV before anything remotely physical happens.  The phrase “herpes is forever” should be mentioned here, too.
     All that being said, I think there’s a difference between “picky” and “careful”. Everybody has their preferred type, sure. That’s normal. For me, if the in question potential partner is a guy, he’s always older than I am (usually by enough to be noticeable) and always has dark hair. Most of the time, they’re either Italians or Nikki Sixx wannabes. For girls, I cannot get into butch chicks. Being bisexual, I don’t see the point. It’s not my thing. The other weird thing is that I don’t usually like white women. Normally we look like birds and it’s just not attractive to me. Usually.
     Having a type is not what I’d consider picky. Picky would be having this ideal person who’s absolutely perfect in every single way in your eyes and expecting every single date you go on to be “that” person. Picky would be those people who go on and on like Jack Black’s character in Shallow Hal. I think picky is also a front for self esteem issues a lot of times too. There seems to be this very real issue for people in deciphering what they admire and want for themselves, and what they want in another person. For example,  Girl A thinks that she wants to be ‘with’ Girl B because Girl B  has an outgoing, shiny personality.  The girls would date for a while, and then the traits that Girl A thought she liked about Girl B get annoying. They split, and Girl A blames the entire scenario on Girl B not being “enough”. What really happened there was that Girl A saw things in another person that she wanted to be/have for herself, and was not aware that the problem was really with herself and her self-image, not  with her “crappy” partners. I’ve had mad girl crushes like that, especially when I was 17 or so years old. It was easy to confuse what I “wanted” with” what I wanted for myself”.
That was pretty much the realization that miss journalist was given in Kissing Jessica Stein. It was pretty thought provoking because when you apply thoughts like that to all of your failed relationships, you sometimes look back and see that it really WAS you, not them.

Posting sooner than I thought!

YES!
I got a new laptop today, from a screwup from Dell. So sweet!!! Not only does this mean that I can post on the blog more often, but I can work on my research paper.

So not only do I fall under the categories of "LGBT" and "Catholic", I fall into the categories of "German-American" and "French-American" as well. My research paper is about how the visual media reinforces stereotypes and ethnic profiling of Germans/the German American community. During my research, I've found about a trillion great sources. My favorite by far was this video right here, which pretty much sums up my entire thesis: Stereotypes on German People
(Like literally, some of my examples are featured here. It's freaky.)

So yeah...I'm so excited to be able to work on both of these writing projects. It is a GOOD day!

Media Spin & NoH8 Congress!

Hey!

     I know, I've been gone again. Not having a computer to work on makes writing this thing kind of difficult. I could have written this yesterday, but I was racing around between home, classes, and Mass for Ash Wednesday that I had no time.
     While I was on the el yesterday, I was reading the news and came across this article. I read through it a few times, and I still can't totally decide how I feel about it. On one hand, I give the guy props for sticking to his guns. But on the other, I can't help but feel like this is small-time and cliche. That feeling may be what the author of this piece was going for, considering that the sentence:"Time will tell if this the first salvo in a larger hairstylist revolt or, simply, an isolated incident." closes this article.
     I know that there are a lot of pro-grassroots people and groups when it comes to issues such as lgbt rights. There are countless amounts of people who do small things every day to open minds and advance their cause. Some of these people mean well but trivialize the argument, like the "Occupy" gays that "glitterbomb" people they disagree with at events. The hairstylist in question may be meaning to open up the mind of his client, and it may well work, but the way this situation was presented to the mass public will probably have an impact on deciding whether it was attention-seeking or cause advancing.
      In other news, it was pretty awesome to see ten members of Congress participate in the No H8 Campaign. I'm not surprised at the lack of Republicans in that mix, but I am disappointed about it. There are pro-equality Reds on the Hill, believe it or not. They need to speak their support about those opinions to balance out the hateful people (and stereotype of) the Republican party.

The "b" and the "t" in LGBT.

    This is Andrej Pejic, a model from Bosnia. He also happens to be an androgynous man, who's been named a lot of things and is sometimes called a gender-bender. Today, CNN headlined their article about him by labeling him a "transgender" model. I read the article, and it didn't necessarily scream "Trans" to me. They have the definition of Transgender that GLAAD uses in the article, and I have to admit that it's not what I always heard the 'T' in LGBT defined as.
     GLAAD includes cross-dressers and genderf*ck individuals as "Transgender". I don't know if I agree with that definition. To me, trans generally means people who are physically born one sex, but their brainwaves and person have the identity of the opposite gender. Pretty much, your physical sex and gender identity don't match. (Sex is physical, gender identity is defined as how your mind/emotional system is wired, or what you perceive yourself as.)
     I'm not really sure how the trans community is going to respond to this article. It is nice to see high fashion embracing alternative presentations of gender, yes. But is the novelty of this model insulting to the people who struggle everyday to live as who they are? I can't begin to fathom the response I'd have if I were transgendered, because frankly I'm incapable of fully stepping into those shoes. I could never fully understand.
      One of the most insulting things I have ever heard, and one of the nastiest things I have ever regretted saying, is that Bisexuals should be happy that Transgendered people exist because we can have "the best of both worlds in one person". If you look in the back of the CityPaper on any given day, there are tons of ads for TG escorts for "guys on the DL" and "questioning" guys. Some people who are into TG pornography talk about how they aren't queer because the T Girl stars "look too much like women".
     To me, both seeking out TG escorts and checking out TG themed porn is both dehumanizing and self hating. Dehumanizing because the people being made into fetish objects are just that- people. TG individuals aren't freaks of nature and don't deserve to be treated like a sideshow or fetish toy, especially when just living a normal life feels damn near impossible sometimes. It's self-hating biphobia at the same time. I'd go so far as to say a lot of the guys who are into TG as a fetish are probably in denial about their attraction to certain..aspects...of their escorts. Otherwise, why would they be watching explicit scenes that are rather phallic-focused? That "little bit of both to check out" mentality is extremely bisexual! But yet, they'll go ahead and say something like: "It's not gay! It's the uber-feminitity that attracts me!" I'm sorry, but that's a crock if I ever heard one. That sounds like denial to me. That sounds like the guys who buy the huge trucks and try too hard to be super masculine because they're trying to chase away their thoughts about Matt Damon.
     Seriously, all these DL bi guys should just come out already. They've got that famous self-loathing down to an art.