horseflies of unusual size? i don’t believe they exist.

it really drives me insane the way people view phobias. the common ones like acrophobia (fear of heights) and agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) are accepted–albeit grudgingly–because so many people have them. however, other phobias, such as entomophobia (fear of insects) and thalassophobia (fear of the ocean), are looked down upon by “normal” people because they’re “silly.” this is something that has long irritated me, but i am writing about it today because of an experience i had last night.

i had finally convinced myself to get off msn and go to sleep, around midnight, when i heard a  horrifying buzzing sound. okay, now i know that normally, buzzing sounds aren’t exactly horrifying. but when you have lived your whole life with entomophobia, you know which buzzing sounds are bugs, and hence, which ones to fear. this was the kind to fear.

so i jumped out of bed, snapped the light on, and scrambled out of the room to get my mother. naturally, she wasn’t too happy to be woken up over something as “stupid” as me having a crisis over an insect in my room. but she laid down on the floor on a blanket and told me to wake her up again if i heard it, which i did, and she caught it for me. it turned out to be an enormous horsefly. as she was walking out of my room, she turned back to me, laughed, and said, “it was almost worth you waking me up at midnight to see you scream and run away from something the size of your thumb.”

excuse me?

how is that any funnier than someone having a panic attack in an elevator? or on a plane?

i’ll tell you: it isn’t. phobias are not fun, and people who have them don’t choose to have them because they think they’ll be fun. i don’t exactly know why i’m afraid of insects or the ocean, but i am, and i can’t help it. i wish i could just crush roaches without flinching, but i can’t. and i wish my mother knew that by making me feel ridiculous about my fear, she is driving a wedge between us that i will still remember when i’m eighty or ninety or a hundred and ten.

so my message is this. if you know someone with a phobia that you find absurd, keep your ridicule to yourself. it doesn’t help anyone and it doesn’t change anything. all it does is make you look like an asshole.

here i am, perfect as i’m ever going to be.

i’m sick of compromising myself to fit in. my recent experience with jarhead taught me that it usually doesn’t work anyway–i should’ve learned this lesson long ago from watching 90s sitcoms, instead of waiting for a stupid boy to hurt me, but then, i’ve always done things the hard way.

but before i elaborate on my new philosophy on the individual, let me explain what happened with jarhead (obviously that’s not his real name): i didn’t even really notice him, other than to think he was attractive, until i found out he thought i was cute and wanted to take me to prom. he’s not a junior or a senior, so he couldn’t ask me. i asked him. he said yes, and that he “couldn’t be happier about who he was going with.” after an awkward few days where neither of us really knew what to do, he made it pretty obvious that he liked me. at a track meet, for example, i pretended to be offended by something he said and he pulled me back into his arms and hugged me for twenty minutes, holding my hands in his.

and then, after prom (which was amazing) he suddenly stopped texting me, even though he still came to talk to me before track practice every day just like before. i invited him to a movie night i was planning, with my best friend and her boy. he said he’d ask his parents. and he didn’t ask them. i cleaned the house for about 7 hours, and put a lot of effort into planning this movie night, and he still didn’t ask. then finally, the day of, i find out that he didn’t even want to go and that was why he hadn’t asked. i dragged out of him that he had been acting like he liked me to “make my senior prom more memorable” and that he just liked me as a friend. the reason he didn’t want to come to my movie night is that he didn’t want to perpetuate the rumors currently circulating that said he and i would be in a relationship soon. he “wanted no part in that.”

now, just wait a minute.

is he fucking stupid? how brain-damaged do you have to be to think that leading a girl on for weeks just to make sure she enjoys prom night with you is a good idea?!

and he still doesn’t see anything wrong with what he did.

so i changed his name to Asshole in my phone, and we don’t speak anymore. he’s just a stupid little boy, and unworthy of my affections. and what’s really ironic is that i didn’t even like him until i found out he liked me.

now to get to my point. i compromised the integrity of my personality for him. he’s a conservative and a christian, and i am neither, so i toned down my beliefs to ensure that i didn’t alienate him or start an argument or something. he’s younger, so i didn’t make jokes about stupid little kids (freshmen and sophomores). he’s pretty mainstream, so i didn’t play screamo or techno in my car or wear anything excessively emo to school. i buried myself under some happy, ditzy little girl that i am not, and i knew exactly what i was doing when i did it.

the way things turned out has helped me remember who i am. i listen to la roux. i paint my nails black sometimes. i was a huge supporter of obama during the election. i’m agnostic. and in the long run, you can’t build a future on who someone else wants you to be, whether it’s your fiance or your boyfriend or just a group of friends you think will like you more if you tweak this or that fact about yourself. life doesn’t work that way.

things fall apart, everything comes out in the end. you can lose yourself that way, and i think if jarhead had actually liked me and i had continued the way i was, i would’ve been in danger of doing exactly that.

for sale.

we all live in empty houses.

i’ve always feared living in a huge house with nobody else in it. how the floors might creak, and the roof might leak, and only i would ever know. how when a light bulb flickered and died, my neighbors would neither notice nor care. there would be no one to help dust the shelves. no one to protect me from intruders. no one to check the locks when i was too afraid to do it myself.

then one day, i realised: i was already living alone.

we all are.

you have to live alone in your head, and your heart, and your body. no matter what you do, who you love, where you go, you stay alone inside you.

you can wear yourself down to nothing screaming, but you can’t get out and nobody else can get in.

we all live in empty houses.

i won’t tear your heart out.

the world is a scary place. my biggest fear, or one of my biggest fears, is being abandoned. it’s almost always at the back of my mind. today i had a realisation that shook me to the core, and that realisation was that everyone has to leave sometime. my best friend since first grade will be leaving next year, when we both go off to college in different states. my parents will eventually leave, when they die.

everyone you love leaves, whether they want to or not. i don’t want to be alone in the world, but i’m always alone in my own head. there’s some quote about how you should never think you’re alone even when you’re by yourself, because god and your conscience are always there? but i don’t even believe in god, so there goes that little comfort. all i’ve ever really, truly, deeply wanted is someone to love me and never leave me, but that’s not possible. people can’t help leaving sometimes, and sometimes you need them to even when you don’t want them to and they don’t want to.

i’ve often wondered if the reason i want someone to love me so much is because i don’t love myself that much. it is a real possibility. if that is the case, i just need to learn to love myself, and i don’t even know where to begin on that one.

to start, what are the reasons i don’t love myself? when i look in a mirror, all i see are flaws. i hate my own voice, at least half the time. i’m too sensitive and too emotional, and i’m inclined to histrionics. i let my passions get the better of me. i’m afraid of people. and i’m a hypocrite because i judge everyone–and yes, i refuse to say out loud half of what crosses my mind, but the thoughts are still there and they still count, no matter how bad i feel about having had them.

i can’t correct all my flaws. i think i want someone to love my flaws and convince me that they’re not as horrible as i think they are, so that i can love myself for them instead of in spite of them. not that i even love myself in spite of them. i’m a bit like one of those neglectful mothers–example, edna pontellier–who sporadically has affection for her child but for the most part wants to keep it out of her sight.

when is it right to NOT help someone when you could?

the other day, on a forum i frequent, i read a post about how we “just can’t afford” to help haiti when we have so many debts to our own people. the poster said we have to deal with healthcare in america and paying for the wars in iraq and afghanistan before we can give $100 million in aid to haiti.

and i mean, really, i can see where he’s coming from, but that’s is such a selfish point of view. the government always over-spends. if the wealthy upper-class would quit whining and just submit to paying higher taxes, which we all know they can afford, we could afford healthcare and we could afford to help haiti.

haiti is a third-world country, and we are a superpower. we’ve been one of the most prosperous nations in the world for quite some time, and i’m not sure that’s not still true even with our current economic crisis. it just aggravates me that people think money is a justifiable reason to let thousands of people die from starvation, dehydration, and grievous injuries because they were caught in an earthquake in a country that was already struggling.

god, people can be so selfish. i think this situation is a great argument in favor of socialism.

love isn’t ownership.

i am at this moment almost done watching “breakfast at tiffany’s,” and paul varjak (aka fred) keeps saying “i love you! you belong to me!” to holly golightly. and as i’m sitting here, watching this movie, i’m wondering why he thinks that. it doesn’t make sense. he says at one point, “people do belong to each other. love does exist,” or something like that.

but the truth is, that’s not how love is. nobody belongs to anybody. you can belong with someone, but you can’t belong to someone. people belong with each other. love isn’t ownership, and it isn’t a cage. it kind of reminds me of that old saying about how if you love something you have to set it free. it doesn’t mean you should break up with the love of your life right away and hope they come back to prove they love you too. it means you should always be in that mindset, the mindset where you can bear to let someone go because you love them and you know that’s what’s best for them if they want it or need it.

i just can’t get over this idea that fred had, that if you love someone they belong to you. the way he said it, it was just like he couldn’t possibly imagine anyone not agreeing with that! their conversation was like, fred: “but holly, I LOVE YOU!” holly: “i don’t belong to you, fred!” fred: “YES! YOU DO!”

i was like… wait… what?

i thought that kind of ruined the movie. otherwise it would’ve been a fantastic love story. it just made fred seem less grounded, less down-to-earth, which of course is what they were aiming for. he was supposed to be the logical, rational, calm man who tames the free spirit girl who’s afraid of love. and they almost pulled it off. it would be even better if they had just left that whole part out.

because of course, you can’t own someone just because you love them. you can never own anyone. that’s not how it works.

the internet.

a lot of people think it’s weird to have online friends. they ask questions such as, “how can you talk to people you don’t know?” which makes sense, if you don’t think about it too much. but there’s another side to it. i speak as someone who has quite a few friends all over the world, all met online–mostly on a support website for people with social anxiety disorder.

i know my international friends much better than the “friends” that live around me and speak to me every day. the anonymity is wonderful, it makes it easier to open up. and it’s not like they’d be total strangers, even if we didn’t confide in each other, because most of them i’ve spoken to on skype, and a lot of them i talk to through text messaging on my cell phone. they’re real people, just like the people i see every day, except they don’t live near me.

this brings me to the issue that really led me to write this post. i am currently involved with someone i met online. we’ve spoken on skype, but can’t text because he lives outside the US. he’s my exact opposite–he smokes pot and drinks too much when he goes out and loves rollercoasters and black metal music–but he’s great and he makes me laugh and he sticks up for me. he’s coming to visit me, but not until next year because i still live with my parents and we’re both unsure about how my parents would react to meeting him, and i can’t go see him because i don’t have money.

is our relationship pointless? maybe it is. i thought writing this would help me decide, but it really hasn’t.

this is one of those sexist phrases that really bothers me.

i hate when guys refer to taking a girl’s virginity as “popping her cherry.” that’s a sick metaphor. it’s a disgusting, graphic reference to the blood that usually results from a girl’s hymen being broken, and its usage is limited to crude, sexist pigs. and yet… people still use it.

http://www.scarleteen.com/article/advice/can_a_girl_pop_her_cherry_if_a_guy_fingers_her

see, i thought authors just used it to give male characters a more sexist feel, but clearly it’s still a regularly used term. i can’t believe anyone thinks it’s okay to say “i popped her cherry” in a conversation with anyone, even a frat boy at a party school. it’s classless and tasteless and horrible.

and no, i’m not a feminazi. i just have respect for my gender. you don’t “pop a girl’s cherry.” you take her virginity. and don’t you ever forget it.

revisions to the animal welfare act have been proposed.

according to an e-mail i recently  from the ASPCA, there might soon be revisions to the animal welfare act to eliminate class B dealers–people who sell cats and dogs which have been obtained in a questionable manner to research facilities. as a result of these changes, only pet owners, publicly owned shelters, and dealers/breeders could sell cats and dogs to research facilities. when i read this message, i was shocked at the ASPCA. they’re supposed to advocate pet welfare. how can they see this as pet welfare? allowing ANYONE to sell animals (even rats, mice, and monkeys) to research facilities seems like it would go against ASPCA values.

and yes, i know that animal psychology studies have to be done somewhere, and medical research has to be conducted somehow, but i have two arguments against allowing people to sell their pets to research facilities or to breed domesticated animals especially to sell for research.

the first is that animals do have feelings, and they usually become emotionally attached to their owners. selling them that way breaks that attachment painfully. even if the animal care specialists with the research facilities love the animals, the animals will miss their original owners. the idea that anyone could sell their pet for medical research makes my eyes sting, to be honest. this may sound idealistic, but people shouldn’t own pets if they don’t love them and can’t commit to take care of them their whole lives. if research facilities want animals to test makeup and heart medication on, they can raise them themselves. having to potty train their own puppies for testing might make them think twice about the practice, and surely people would protest against such a practice in any case.

the second argument is that any testing that they are willing to subject defenseless animals to, they should be willing to subject themselves or other humans to. after all, the products and techniques they’re testing are usually things that will eventually be used on humans as well. if you can give a puppy untested chemicals, you should be willing to give them to a human as well. just because puppies can’t speak, that doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings.

and after reading all this, if you think i’m an idealist or a PETA nut or an immature idiot, don’t comment. only comment on this post if you have something insightful to say, please.

a typical outcast’s view of the famous american pep rally tradition.

i meant to write this more than a week ago, after my school’s last pep rally, but then my computer got a nasty virus and i had to take it to a computing store so their IT guys could reformat it for me. luckily they salvaged most of my data. anyway, that’s not the point of this post.

pep rallies are a huge deal at my school, because football games are a huge deal, and that’s because i live in the Deep South. on game days, the student government association comes up with a dress-up theme relating to the other school or their mascot, and everybody comes to school looking almost as ridiculous as is humanly possible. on the day of our last pep rally, the theme was “blackout bryant” i think, which basically just means we were all supposed to wear solid black. i dressed up partly because i’m trying to loosen up more and partly because i wear black everyday anyway.

so just like every other pep rally, we all stood in the bleachers and the marching band played in front of the stage, and the dance line danced their stupid little routines. and then the football team came in and sat at the back in folding chairs. the cheerleaders all ran out and were introduced by doing handsprings down the center of the gym. it was about the tackiest thing i’ve ever seen. there was some cheer performance choreographed to catchy, empty music, and the principal took a pie in the face. it actually kind of reminded me of the opening scene of “bring it on,” except without the naked cheer captain part. or of basically every other remotely humorous movie there is about an american high school.

i think pep rallies represent just about everything i hate about america. they’re obnoxious and short-sighted and aggressive and noisy. i mean, who cares about a high school football game? the pep rally is just an excuse to scream and dance like a whore, if you’re a girl, or watch girls dance like whores, if you’re a guy. even being at a pep rally, whether i participate or not, is embarrassing for me. i’m ashamed of my country and the materialism, the obnoxious self-centered aggressiveness, the go-get-’em attitude that has led us to jump into wars, interfere in foreign affairs, offend the leaders and citizens of other countries, and build a reputation as the rowdiest, most irritating nation on earth. i can’t wait to be an adult, so i can leave this place.

rereading that last paragraph, i realise that i have absolutely zero national pride, and maybe i’m okay with that. i see no point in patriotism. your place of birth is nothing to be proud of, you have no control over it and it shouldn’t define you. i think a lot of people forget that.