Hi!My whole body is sore and I don't know why. It's very strange. I went to Midway (this stupid dinky little imitation of an amusement park) today. It was actually kinda fun. I rode the bumper boats and had a water war with Rene. Then I ate a snow cone. I would drive hours if I knew I could get a good snow cone. I like them that much... unfortunately Midway only has Cherry and Root beer flavored ones. (blech!) I'm more of an orange or grape kinda girl. I don't like cherry anything except for real fresh cherries. I throw out cherry life savers, and our refrigerator is usually full of cherry popsicles for months after I've eaten all the orange and grape ones. Luckily I can usually talk Henry into eating them. He doesn't like real cherries, but he likes cherry candy, the exact opposite of me. Of course our eating habits are completely opposite anyway. I don't eat meat and try to stay away from too many chemicals and fat. (For example I won't go any where near anything that has "Olestra" in it. I need at least 10 more years of research before I'll be convinced it doesn't have horrible side effects.) My whole family is kinda like that. My parents both eat meat, but not much, and they both watch what they eat... on the other hand the neighbors family (i.e. Henry's family) pretty much only eat foods we won't eat! Hot dogs, hamburgers, meatloaf, chicken wings, gallons of ice cream... and even when they make something potentially good, like fruit salad, they almost always ruin it somehow, --like completely covering the fruit salad with cool whip. (Yet another thing I won't eat- I just don't like the stuff, it covers up the real taste, and the real taste of stuff like fruit and Strawberry Shortcake is too good to cover up!)
I'm sure you wanted to know all this. :-)
I decided I'm going to start an archive page on here that'll have excerpts from my old "Christy" journals that I kept when I was 12-13. I have hundreds of pages sitting upstairs in my crawl space, and I thought it would be a good background thing... the problem with this idea is that it means I actually have to sit myself down and read through those journals, and that is not an easy thing to do! I started last night at the beginning.... and within a couple of months Jo Anne** was reading those journals, which was probably the only thing that kept me writing them... but the transition in them is amazing. I started out, when I was 12, writing this "my parents hate me" and "I met this cool guy online today, he said 'blahblahblah' and I said 'blahblahblah' and then he said 'blah blah blah'" and reading it now I it's almost painful for me to see how nieve I was. And then you get just a couple months down and you start getting "I'm really depressed" entries, in about a trillion variations... and you get further and furhter, and there's more and more pages torn out where I wrote the "What if I'm gay?" entires I just couldn't let Jo Anne read... and then you get further and furhter, and there are "What if I'm gay?" entries I let her read... and then you get even further and there's the "Does this mean we're gay?" entries... and it goes on and on, until finally I end up in the hospital and Jo Anne takes over my notebook because she was borrowing it overnight when I got committed... and then there's all these really sappy entries from her... and then that's it. I think the whole journal existed for the sole purpose of helping me work through the whole sexuality issue, and once I had I had no more reason to write. Because for several months after I stopped writing, Jo Anne was still in the position to be able to read it. It wasn't until a later that she got forbidden to see me.....
But anyway. :-) That still leaves me with a whole lot of stuff to sift through- I only got through the first two out of 15 notebooks, and they were two of the shortest ones. And I don't know how I'll find stuff I'm not totally embarassed to post here, although I think maybe I'll just post the embarassing stuff anyway, with a disclaimer "Please don't hold this against me! I was 12! No one should have to account for what they did when they were 12!" ...I really believe that by the way. When I hear about 12-13-14 year olds getting tried as adults, even for the most terrible crimes, I think it's just awful and it's obvious that the people making those decisions are either old with no kids, or they were lucky and their kids never showed it, but I am completely convinced that all teenagers go crazy at some point during those three years. Maybe a little earlier or later for some people, but we all go crazy. It's just more obvious with people like me and those kids who shoot up their schools. I don't know why people don't understand this. They think, "I taught my kid how to use guns safely, they would never hurt anyone!" ...and they're right. The kid they know would never hurt anyone. But when you're that age, at least for me and for everyone else I've been close to who's that age, there's a stage where there are at least three of you- one side you show to your parents, one to the people at school, and one that you only show yourself. And sometimes those sides leak over, but not always. There's no way a parent could know if their kid is about to kill someone if they're better than average at keeping their selves separate. And is it such a big deal to lock up your guns? Sure, if you're really dead set on doing it you can pull out a saw and break open the case, but don't you think that's a bit less likely? It's very stereotypical of me to say it, but I think almost all 13 year olds should get off on the insanity defense. They'd still end up locked up for years, but at least it wouldn't be forever. I mean, there was that one kid that was just given life in prison for a mistake he made when he was 14 or so, and I just think that is not fair.
Of course I am very biased on this issue. Had I gone the other way, it could easily be me there in jail now. Only I turned all my anger against myself- cutting up my wrists and stuff. I never considered hurting anyone else, because I was only angry at me. So maybe my opinion shouldn't count or something, but still. I know I made a whole lot of mistakes when I was that age (granted it wasn't long ago) and I am just very thankful the only lasting impact is a few faint scars on my arms and legs.
~Sarah