Kym

I am honestly surprised and frustrated with myself. I haven't said a word about the election, which is TODAY! The polls close here in Ohio in about half an hour, and I'm itching to see which way this historically red state will vote.

Voting.

Show me the justice in this scenario: a teenager who has been active in a wide variety of political organizations since the age of 12, and has volunteered many hours for various campaigns, and is, honestly, better informed on many of the issues being voted on today in Ohio than many of her peers with whom she has discussed politics with, cannot vote because she is 17.

So my ex left for the Air Force on Tuesday. Hard enough in and of itself, to see someone who holds such an important part of my life and heart, leave, knowing that I will probably never see him again. But, try adding on that for the past eight months he has been dating someone who was my friend for fifteen years.

Needless to say, she has decided that it is too uncomfortable to talk to me. I think she hates the fact that I was there first. I was his first for so many things, and she can never replace replace me in that regard. I think it makes her jealous. So she has said a handful of words to me on twice as many occasions, which has effectively ruined the friendship that endured most of our lives. I have tried to talk to her, I really have. I've sent emails, tried to get her alone at school. She just turns red and leaves or ignores me.

Stumbling never felt so dangerous

I have recently become addicted (in a good way) to this website/ search engine-type web page called StumbleUpon. I don’t know how many of you have been Stumbling, but I guarantee that it is worth a look. You never know what kind of site will be sent your way for you to Stumble across. Which brings me to the purpose of this blog. I tried posting it once already, but my laptop decided it was going to overreact to a momentary lapse of wi-fi action and kick me offline completely, taking my blog along with it. And of course, as I was writing it in between Ethics and Anthropology, I didn’t think it would be a big deal if I typed directly into the blog-posting page rather than on a word document.

So this summer, rather than pulling my shoulder length hair into a ponytail and getting on with my life, I decided to try a little experiment. I cut off all but two inches of my hair, which I styled into the common men's hairstyle of a faux-hawk, you know, that fake mohawk that it seems like every guy in my neighborhood is sporting?

It was the shortest my hair has ever been. I mean, I've had short hair before, but I've always had it longer in the front to frame my face and make it look distinctly feminine. So why the extremely short, extremely male 'do? I wanted to see how many people I could fool into looking twice to see if I was male or female.

I don't know about you, but I am getting sick of the media. Television in particular. But not just television. Commercials.

I recently saw two commercials in a row that deeply disturbed me. True, I was watching reruns of CSI on a channel that is geared towards older men, but still. Businesses and television stations alike need to learn when to draw the line.

Commercial One: It's advertising a summer sale at a local matress store. Rather than images of beds and lots of graphics and emphasis on prices and things like that, every time the commercial mentions the summer's "HOT" deal, the commercial flashes to a woman with huge breasts getting out of a pool, dripping wet, in a red one-piece. I was just happy she wasn't naked.

"Your feet may leave home, but your heart never will." That was the theme of this year's graduation at my high school-- the graduation I was supposed to be taking part in but wasn't allowed because one of my parents refused to allow me to graduate early.

But not being allowed to graduate doesn't stop me from going to the commencement ceremony and seeing all of my friends, some old and some new, enter a new phase in their lives, some of them leaving forever.

My friends Steph and Brandon, as well as my infamous ex TJ, are all leaving for the military extremely soon. TJ leaves in September, Steph with him, for the Air Force training base in Texas. Brandon gets shipped out in less than a month for Marine Corps basic training. He enlisted as active, so as soon as he's done, they're shipping him out to parts unknown, ready to be used as a pawn and most likely die for a tumultuous and hypocritical cause.

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, also known as “Wombfest” or simply “Michigan,” has been held annually in early August in a northern Michigan forest since 1976 (“General… Information”).The festival’s central goal has been to create a woman-centered atmosphere where women can celebrate being women in an area free of male presence and patriarchy (“Out and About“). Although Michigan is not the first festival to celebrate women (“A… History“) , it is the longest running, looking to celebrate its thirty-second anniversary in August 2008 (“Rebuttal… Straight”).

I don't know how many of you know about this, but the House of Representatives here in the US introduced a bill on December 18th that will designate the first week in may as "American Religious History Week." Here's what they're hoping to accomplish:

"Resolved, That the United States House of Representatives----

(1) affirms the rich spiritual and diverse religious history of our Nation's founding and subsequent history, including up to the current day;

(2) recognizes that the religious foundations of faith on which America was built are critical underpinnings of our Nation's most valuable institutions and form the inseparable foundation for America's representative processes, legal systems, and societal structures;

I've been researching the controversy between Michfest and Camp Trans lately, because I read somewhere that Bitch and Animal weren't going to be allowed to perform because Animal is transgendered. This really upset me.

Michfest holds that it is open to only "womyn-born-womyn" who have lived their whole lives as womyn. I get what they're aiming for with the principle of creating a solely womyn oriented space, but by not allowing transgendered people to attend... it's a little too exclusionary for my taste. I was planning on attending Michfest this year, but when I read about all of this controversy, I was totally turned off. I was looking forward to a womyn only space as an exhilerating and life-changing experience... I still would like to experience it, but I'm turned off by the fact that they won't allow womyn to attend if they haven't been womyn their whole lives.

There are several terms that come to mind when I think of how I define myself as a person: activist, woman, and believer. Yes, I could label myself as a teenager, a vegetarian, or an atheist, but they only describe what I am, not what I believe in. These labels, in their own right, are both more complex and simpler than they would appear.

The most defining of these labels is my identity as a woman, which impacts my life on a daily basis. Being a woman may only mean that I do not have a penis and that, yes, I bleed, but it is also so much more than that. Being a woman means that I have seen and can identify with the oppression that women around the world face by dint of being women. Being a woman means that I have to deal with the conception that women are weaker physically and mentally. Being a woman means that, historically, I must do things twice as well to be considered half as good as a man. There is nothing more empowering or limiting than identifying yourself as a woman. In accepting the label of femininity, I have accepted the challenges that my gender faces in the search for equality in today’s society. In the past, women were almost universally perceived as being the weaker of the two genders, which led to the assertion of “male dominance.” These conventional stereotypes make it difficult to identify as a woman in that they project the historical view of the female and do not celebrate the individual strengths and weaknesses that each woman possesses.

Pardon the language in this girls, but I just listened to this song for the first time in a long time, and I just felt the need to post the lyrics. It may be crude sometimes, but it certainly gets me going, makes me feel powerful and comfortable in my own skin.

Bitch and Animal: Pussy Manifesto

"Manifest this motherf****** #1:
Every living thing comes from and returns to (get it?)

Manifest this motherf****** #2:
Let Pussy speak to me through every living thing.
As all creatures move and grow,
let them bring forth the open ness and warm ness
that flows in the energy of Pussy...

"Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths."
Lois Wyse

"Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive."
Marya Mannes

If there's one thing that history has "taught" us, it's that men are supposed to be strong and women are supposed to be weak. Yeah right. Men are not "supposed" to cry, or express their feelings, or take pride in their appearance (well, they can if it's that Paul Bunyan macho-man look). They're not supposed to do "women's work" or help out around the house, raise children. Women are "supposed" to be meek, demure, quiet little creatures, seen and not heard, ornaments. Women are supposed to look beautiful, fall in love with men, have lots of babies, and be a stay-at-home mom.

It's good to know that I can count on you all, my family away from my own family.

I really wish I could be as open as I want to be here. The sad part is I can't, because my family can't know some of the things I need to talk about. Which means I'm limited on what I can say. If it was possible to create another account, which I'm not sure I can do, just to talk about the things I need to without my family knowing then I would. Because I really need to talk. There are so many things in my life that I need help with right now, and I have no one else to turn to. I need to talk about what is going on in my life but I have no one. Select few people know anything of what has happened to me, and what IS happening. I need a support system, but with the limitations imposed by money, lack of trust from my family, not knowing what I can tell my friends or not, and just being as stubborn as I am, I don't have the one I need. I'm admitting that I need help.

*This was too long to fit into a response comment.

"It sounds like you have a lot of stressful things all happening at once. Are you getting any support anywhere? I think a strong support system is indispensable but you said you were having problems both at home and at school. Do you have anywhere you can go even to relax and be your wonderfully individual self for a few hours?"- Jill

That's one of my problems, finding somewhere to be where I can just BE. At home, it's "Do this, do that. Don't do what you want, do what I tell you that will keep you busy all night." It doesn't seem to matter that I have homework, or that I have to work. I recently started a part time job, and I need another one to pay to get to and from school and work. Two jobs on top of a full day at school, college courses next semester, National Honor Society, a honors club at my school, and Academic Quiz Team (which takes up three afternoons a week) I don't have time to relax when I actually am alone at home. The only times I have really relaxed in the past month I can count on one hand.

I feel like I have disappeared from the world recently. I started my junior year in high school a month and a half ago. It's been at least that long since I've posted anything, except for the blog I deleted at the end of August. Simply speaking, life's been hell.

I'm not used to not getting good grades. And now that I'm struggling to get things done in several of my classes, I'm feeling extremely stressed out.

Sometimes I wonder if I have a strange case of bipolar disorder. I'm not manic-depressive per se, but one day I'll be so tense and high strung that I'm on the verge of tears all day... even if nothing has happened. And then other days, even when my life seems to falling down around me, I'm as cool as a cucumber, though slightly less edible. It's strange, but it's happening. I don't understand it. I know it's probably just stress, nerves, puberty, whatever, but it's still disconcerting. It's no fun.