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Wednesday 29 January 2014

"I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands And Kids And I'm Not Sorry." GETS A RESPONSE

There was an article with the above quoted worded, written by Amy Glass that went viral,  mena's blog published a version..well this housewife had a few choice words.....




 
By now I'm sure a lot of you have seen that ridiculous post circulating around your Facebook/twitter/news feeds written by a woman named Amy Glass titled "I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands And Kids And I'm Not Sorry." The title, let alone the article, is so absurd and nonsensical that I wasn't even going to read it, let alone waste my time writing a post about it here.


However, curiosity got the cat and I read it, and my first reaction wasn't outrage or anger...no, quite the opposite. I laughed, put down the iPad, rolled over and cuddled up to my three year old who had slept in my bed last night because he hadn't been feeling well the day before. I stared at his perfect little face for a bit and reveled in the fact that I was his secure and comfortable place. I noticed his little hand that was resting on my shoulder. He always has to have some body part touching me at any given point while sleeping, whether it's a leg across mine, a hand on my shoulder or my favorite, interlocked fingers. I assume he does so because he feels safe with me and if this is what Mrs. Glass considers "common, average and stupid," well, sign me up.


I've seen a lot of articles in the past 24 hours rebutting this woman's "piece" and doing so angrily. It's not that I don't agree with the opposers, it's just that indignation isn't what I felt when I read Mrs. Glass's article. After the initial shock of thinking "this cannot be real," I became sad for the author. So sad, in fact, that I decided to pen her a open letter…

**********

Dear Amy Glass,

First let me start by saying I am not here to bash you and call you names. I think we both know name calling gets you nowhere and makes your argument less valid. I will forgive you for calling me "stupid" if you promise to forgive me for what I am about to say.

I'm sorry my decision to be a stay at home mom makes you want to vomit. I've never come across anyone with that reaction before. Maybe there are anti-naseau pills you can take? Personally, cottage cheese and sweet potatoes make me want to spew but that's just me.

I know I don't have to defend my position or my decisions to "do nothing" and be a stay at home mom, nor do I have high hopes you will suddenly become respectful and decent, but your opinion piece somehow went viral and a lot of young women read it. I am here in hopes that some of those same young women might read this and see how utterly senseless what you wrote was.

When you ask "do people really think that a stay at home mom is really on equal footing with a woman who works and takes care of herself," are you looking for a serious answer? Because (raises hand, pick me! pick me!) if so, I can answer that for you. I have done both. At 21, I bought my own home. With all my own money. I worked as a waitress for two years to support myself, and if you know anything about waitressing, it takes a lot of hours working on your feet to make enough to be able to pay all your bills. However I'm sure with your standard of thinking, being a waitress is beneath you and also makes you want to vomit. (By the way, I've cleaned up a strangers vomit before. It wasn't pleasant but just a part of the job. You know, the job I was working to support myself.)

My next job was working for a magazine publishing company. I should mention my dad was my boss. I've had people throw that in before as in "oh, you worked for your dad? Like that's a real job. Please." As if working for my father somehow made me immune to doing actual work or making sure deadlines were met on time. Because I can promise you, my dad's boss? The head of the publishing company? He couldn't give a damn if I was someone's daughter. Deadlines are deadlines, clients demand stellar service and if I didn't do my job, I would be fired. My dad may be my dad but he's not about to give up his golfing trips to Arizona.

I worked at the publishing company right until I gave birth to my first son. I must warn you, what comes next might give you a gag reflex, so grab a barf bucket and hold on.

After I had my first child, I became a full time stay at home mom.

Trust me Amy, trust me…I have questioned my decision more than a few times since quitting my "real" job and staying home to raise living, breathing humans who depend on me for their every need aka "doing nothing." But something you said gave me a major what the f*ck moment.

It was when you said choosing to be stay at home mom was choosing the path of least resistance.

HAHAHAHA. Ha. ha.

Oh girlfriend. My dear, sweet Amy. How much you still have to learn. Have you ever gone grocery shopping with three stage 2 clingers, all fighting over who gets to sit at the front of the cart? Have you been flying on a plane with a sick child who can't for the life of him make it into the emergency barf bag? Have you ever felt so overwhelmed knowing that it was only noon and you still had a good eight more hours of running kids to practices, recitals, more practices and making sure they had a proper dinner? Or what about being up all night, for three nights in a row, tending to a sick child? I'm sure you have pulled an all-nighter before related to work issues, but chances are since you are childless you were able to take a nap the next day or go to bed relatively early.

Of course I'm sure all of that is silly, trivial, meaningless stuff to you. And no, Amy, I'm not pointing all of this out to prove how "hard" is it to raise children. I don't go around complaining to anyone who will listen how horrible my life is. I chose this life and I love this life. But you know what else I don't do? I don't bash women like you who choose not to have kids and call you "stupid" for your decision.

It seems to me, Amy, that you have chosen the path of least resistance. You can get in and out of the grocery store with no distractions. You get to put on some headphones and read an entire five chapters with no interruptions except for what beverage you would like on your comfy business class flight.

After a long day of (really, really important) work, you get to come home to an empty house. No kids to feed, bathe, do homework with, read to, tuck into bed. No husband to tend to, third party mess to clean up or "stupid" household to manage.

Oh and also, it's really easy to mock housework and "managing a household" when you run a household of a grande total of one.

In other words, you get to come home and relax. Pop in a microwave dinner and watch as much trash tv as your heart desires. That or you can go out and get drinks with friends at your leisure. No husband to check in with and no babysitters to line up. You can stay out as late as you want on weekends because you know there won't be two fresh faced little firecrackers up in your grill at the crack of dawn.

You, my friend, have it easy.

You also say that "doing laundry will never be as important as being a doctor or an engineer or building a business." Yet isn't it of utmost importance for a mother to raise their sons and daughters with the values, morals and ethics it takes to become a doctor, engineer or business owner? I'm sure I don't have to remind you that the youth of today are drastically showing signs of unearned entitlement and laziness. Why do you think that is? It couldn't possibly be because of attitudes towards motherhood like your own...

Oh and ps. Aspiring doctors and engineers need clean laundry just like the rest of us.

At the end of all this, I am truly sad for you. Someone lied to you. Someone told you that being a mother and wife is not important. Not worthy. I feel sorry for you that you will never know what it feels like to have a part of you look into your eyes and say "I love you mom." To know what it feels like when your child wraps his arms around you and squeezes so tight because he hasn't seen you since nap time. To know what it feels like to put your feet up after a long, hard day, right next to your husband, your partner in crime, and look at each other without saying a word knowing that you guys are doing alright together. Going through this rough and tough life as allies.

Because I don't care what anyone else in your professional life tells you…your boss, your mentor, your employees…you are disposable. You may be damn good at what you do, but you can always be replaced. In a heartbeat.

I don't think my kids would feel the same about me.

(My husband is a different story.)

Tuesday 28 January 2014

JACK GLEESON GOT KING JOFFREY






 









I am new to Game of Thrones, and have found this King Joffrey character sooo annoying! So I went online to see if there were people who felt the same way, lo and behold,  King Joffrey is one of the most despised television characters, with his mum, Cersei and (to my amazement) SKYLAR of Breaking Bad Series?? Anyway back to Joffrey.
I also found that the 21 yr old actor,  Jack Gleeson, is actually quitting the noble acting profession altogether. I found this rant of his very funny. Jack Gleeson, King Joffrey from 'Game of Thrones,' rants about celebrity culture and its vapidity......

When Jack Gleeson announced in November 2013 that he would be retiring from acting after concluding his role on "Game of Thrones," it didn't come as much of a surprise. He's made no secret of his preference to avoid interviews and other events to promote the HBO fantasy series, and also has made it clear he wants to focus his efforts on being a scholar.

For a character like Joffrey Baratheon, who is played by a relatively unknown star like Gleeson, the intersection of reality and fiction often become muddled. Instances of Gleeson being harassed by people on the street because they so hate his "Game of Thrones" character make it pretty clear why Gleeson would want to leave the Hollywood scene as soon as he is able.

The 21-year-old was invited to speak at Oxford Union in England on Nov. 27, and video from the event has only now been uploaded online. In a rant of an essay about celebrity culture, Gleeson -- often humorously -- makes it very clearly why he despises the "brittle pedestal one inch off the ground" he seemingly unwittingly has found himself on.

The 30-minute-long speech is quite long, and Gleeson delves into the history and theories of what he thinks made celebrity such an integral part of society in the present day. He also explains why he opts not to do interviews and steers clear of the public eye. It is very lengthy, so here is a partial transcription of his rant:

    "All I've done is act in a TV show and pretend to be mean for money, essentially. Worst comes to worst, I thought to myself, I can at least bring along my trusty crossbow and sexually threaten some unsuspecting students with impalement, but we discussed that and that didn't fly with the board.

    "From your invitation, it returned my thoughts to an all too similar event I participated in a few weeks previous during which 20 minutes into a rather long hour-long Q&A session both qs and as respectively dried up very quickly. So with 40 minutes left of the event and apparently all value sucked from it like a tropical mini CapriSun, my blood froze as I gazed out at the sea of awkwardly shifting faces.

    "The silence was finally broken by a strained question about what I had consumed for breakfast that morning. It was at that point I realized that after a mere 21 years of a relatively uneventful life, one can not simply expect to talk about oneself for an hour, especially without either sliding into kind of irrelevant or the babbling. I literally just don't have enough to talk about for an hour.

    "So in a bid to kind of avoid the inevitable drought of questions tonight, before we come to the forthcoming Q&A, I decided I would kind of try to waste as much time as possible talking about something that kind of won't preemptively answer any questions -- because every answer is golden in terms of time -- but will perhaps hopefully be interesting and relevant to my life and kind of 'Game of Thrones.'

    "So basically, since the show has aired -- and apologies for the kind of length and boring nature of this. I did it all last night and it's very rambling and please feel free to switch off at any point during it, but I'm just going to try and read it in an interesting way, because it's not interesting.

    "Since the show has aired, I feel I've been given an insider look into an ever-pervasive and yet often mysterious aspect of society; namely, our culture of celebrity. Strangers on the street now call me 'Jack,' and my public image is democratized by fans and public institutions alike on the Internet. I'm also given opportunities, like this one tonight, which I see as truly once in a lifetime.

    "So feeling somewhat within but also very much abstracted from modern 'celebrity culture,' if you want to call it that, that kind of feeling has provoked a lot of reflection within me about my position within the thing, so I kind of wanted to take this opportunity to perhaps talk about those reflections. But I do appreciate the irony about talking about kind of celebrity in this context. I hope the irony is taken with a pinch of salt.

    "I feel like some of these reflections are perhaps somewhat unique in the sense that I'm in a unique position straddling kind of cigarettes and books of a student simultaneously with the cocaine and prostitutes of a celebrity.

    "Ever since my mother sent me to Saturday morning grammar classes when I was 7, I wanted to become a famous actor. I loved the idea of captivating an audience and moving them truly through performance, but more importantly being recognized and heavily lauded for that talent.

    "Early on, I just performed in some small films and short plays and the like, most notably giving my Joseph in a school nativity at age 8. Critics hailed my Joseph as being 'raw' and 'entrancing' and having a 'profound insight into the character that will never be matched by anyone ever again.'

    "It was thrilling. Indeed, I drew a great deal upon my Joseph when I played 'little boy' in 'Batman Begins' in 2005. 'Little boy' had the same passion and drive I'd seen in Joseph, the same resilience, but most importantly the same love for his pregnant wife Mary.

    "However, despite only being a minute role, my appearance in 'Batman Begins' presented me with my first encounter with 'celebrity.' After the film came out, I was always forever 'the kid from 'Batman.'' Amongst my peers, my now defining feature being brought up as an ice breaker; a vaguely memorable tidbit on certain social occasions.

    "The labeling didn't bother me, but I didn't necessarily enjoy it. However, little did I know that a far more concentrated form of that slight societal abstraction was going to be placed in my lap five years later when I would, as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 17-year-old, step into an audition for some HBO show called 'Game of Thrones.'

    "Chapter Two [laughs]. If I'm being honest, upon hearing the joyous news that I'd received the role of Joffrey, I really did not expect all the subsidiary things that come from ... being an actor on a successful television program. I had no predictions or expectations of all the attention, invitation to events, and of course all the cocaine and prostitutes that awaited me around every corner. I was literally just excited to act in a cool show.

    "Perhaps that was naivety or perhaps -- like everyone else involved in the show -- I just simply didn't anticipate the success of it. In any case, whatever the reason was, what it led to was a sharp shock when I realized I had, unbeknownst to me, signed an invisible contract which required me to enter into a strange new echelon of society.

    "People suddenly wanted to take pictures of me on the street, and journalists were interested in what kind of socks I preferred. Among certain groups of my peers, my jokes seemed to become a lot funnier, which perhaps was all the comedy books I was reading at the time or perhaps it was sycophancy, I don't know.

    "It was an atmosphere from which I instantly wanted to retreat. I detested the superficial elevation and commodification of it all, juxtaposed with the grotesque self-involvement it would sometimes draw out of me. Being a faceless member of a mob, I soon realized, is far more comforting than teetering on a brittle pedestal one inch off the ground.

    "The exclusion and subtle differentiation that comes with even a rather diluted form of celebrity that I had embarrasses me. But what shook me as most odd, however, about the whole thing was how I odd I indeed found it all. Celebrity is seen by a huge amount of people and certainly myself for a while as the pinnacle of society, of success. It is revered almost religiously, both the institution and its quickly growing member base.

    "Indeed, these days the apotheosis of celebrity is not just combined to the worship of movie idols, pop stars, sports heroes or even reality TV stars. We have bloody celebrity chefs, authors, comedians, politicians, intellectuals, scientists, business people, cheesemongers or something, milliners -- hat makers, for those of you who didn't get that -- who constantly stick out their faces at us on advertisements and talk shows, magazines covers. But this reverence and invasion is often welcomed and indeed fostered by a great percentage of the public.

    "I started to wonder why that was and whether there was any harm in that reverence. They're just people, after all. So whilst one can trace the origins of kind of celebrity or whatever you want to call it back to the Romantic era, and people like Samuel Johnson, or even before -- Beckett -- it was truly in the 20th century -- proliferation of photography, radio, television and finally mass media -- that finally a fecund ground could be laid for, in particular, sports stars, movie stars and singers to be massified as recognizable, influential public figures.

    "This kind of fostered a culture dominated by what [Jean] Baudrillard called the 'simulacra,' which are images that contain no reference to the real world. For upon being able to, for the first time, see and also hear the well-known figures of the time -- people like Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson -- the public began to kind of, perhaps unconsciously, reduce them down to their image alone, leading to a perhaps irreparable commodification of these photogenic celebrities.

    "... So what are the dangers, then, involved in being a celebrity? On the one hand, in some ways, there's the true loss of the self by virtue of being over-democratized, over-saturated -- over-loved, perhaps. Without an internally directed compass, an ego can drown in its own fascination, leaving the bearer unable to posit or hang anything actual onto themselves.

    "... Celebrities become excluded from every day life, kind of in exile in an echelon that is deemed better anyway: Life of celebrity, all the fame and glamor. However, no matter how much we can lust after this exile, wanting to be a celebrity is a manifestation of a dehumanization, essentially. One becomes easier to fictionalize when removed from any self-likeness of the perceiver, and thus easier to judge and also consume.

    "And lastly, of course, there's the issue of privacy. That comes up a lot. We've seen ... why we become fascinated by the banal, mundanity of celebrity life. You know, what kind of bananas they like, and stuff. They are the prescribed role models of our time, representing some form of ideal in apparently every aspect of life, be it in their professional success, cheese preference or even drug preference.

    "Perhaps the desire to simultaneously position celebrities on both planes -- the ordinary and the abstracted -- is a bid to retrieve some of the immortality we have given them. By empathizing with them and humanizing them to an extent, we for a brief moment share in 'the glory of celebrity life' -- or perhaps at least remind ourselves that if they can do it, I can do it.

    "In conclusion -- thankfully -- it seems that celebrities have become vessels of either, as I say, an economic, revolutionary or sociological instinct to consume and imitate certain extraordinary members of society. We've seen how this reverence can have profound effects on both parties, oftentimes more negative than positive.

    "I believe that communal admiration of individuals is healthy for society. It facilitates, in one way, the base of our universal standard, morals, but also publicly espouses the virtue of certain practices that are kind of like 'inherently good' in some kind of ideas of what the good is.

    "However, this kind of celebritization is only a positive one if the individual represents values that should be imitated by, say, a reasonable, moral person. We need to be choosier with our celebrities, or else we may find ourselves again in that situation where we just find ourselves acting out the role of the town drunk constantly.

    "And we also need to temper the concentration with which we love to celebritize; primarily for the sake of the celebrities themselves and their self-evaluation, but also for ourselves. Just as the object of our attention can become rendered hollow and externally directed with too much worship, so too I feel can the worshipers sacrifice their own individual self or autonomy in favor of giving it up to a higher power.

    "We need to fight against our human instinct to deify our role models, but also fight against our instinct to subjugate our own individuality in the process. Star gazing is one of the most profoundly human things one can do. But perhaps we must more frequently tear ourselves away from the mystery and beauty of the starry heavens above, and rather inspect, admire and foster the moral law within."

Article by: By Terri Schwartz

MENA: I absolutely love and agree with his rants!!!



Monday 27 January 2014

INTERESTING MESSAGE FOR WOMEN *AND MAYBE DAD'S WITH DAUGHTERS;)* ----> Do people really think that a HOUSEWIFE is really on EQUAL FOOTING with a woman who works and takes care of herself?



Hello

So I found this article that reflects on choices women have to make sometime in their lives, the author defiantly takes a very strong position, what is your opinion on this?

I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands And Kids And I’m Not Sorry 

Do people really think that a stay at home mom is really on equal footing with a woman who works and takes care of herself? There’s no way those two things are the same. It’s hard for me to believe it’s not just verbally placating these people so they don’t get in trouble with the mommy bloggers.
Having kids and getting married are considered life milestones. We have baby showers and wedding parties as if it’s a huge accomplishment and cause for celebration to be able to get knocked up or find someone to walk down the aisle with. These aren’t accomplishments, they are actually super easy tasks, literally anyone can do them. They are the most common thing, ever, in the history of the world. They are, by definition, average. And here’s the thing, why on earth are we settling for average?

If women can do anything, why are we still content with applauding them for doing nothing?
I want to have a shower for a woman when she backpacks on her own through Asia, gets a promotion, or lands a dream job not when she stays inside the box and does the house and kids thing which is the path of least resistance. The dominate cultural voice will tell you these are things you can do with a husband and kids, but as I’ve written before, that’s a lie. It’s just not reality.
You will never have the time, energy, freedom or mobility to be exceptional if you have a husband and kids.

I hear women talk about how “hard” it is to raise kids and manage a household all the time. I never hear men talk about this. It’s because women secretly like to talk about how hard managing a household is so they don’t have to explain their lack of real accomplishments. Men don’t care to “manage a household.” They aren’t conditioned to think stupid things like that are “important.”
Women will be equal with men when we stop demanding that it be considered equally important to do housework and real work. They are not equal. Doing laundry will never be as important as being a doctor or an engineer or building a business. This word play is holding us back.

Article By Amy Glass

 

 


Thursday 16 January 2014

Sad? Lonely? Depressed? This is for someone going through a bleak period




Hi

How has been January so far? I hope very well.  For me now new resolutions,  I havent fulfilled my old ones, plus I have decided to take things one day at a time.

So enjoy this one; I hope it brightens up your day

I GOT DIVORCED BECAUSE I COULDNT HAVE A BABY

I Met my ex-husband in 1993 when i was 18 and we loved each other . And in 1994 we got married. He travelled abroad in 1996. i waited for him for 9 years before i joined him abroad by then i was 29 years . After i joined him, he got irritated, saying i should hurry up and have children . He started making caricature of me making references to me as barren . I started training as a nurse and after i got a job in the same hospital as him. Before i knew it , he began having affairs with people in our work place.Even when i was a student.,It wasn’t easy , cos my home was hell. i had abuses on my childlessness. How i passed my school exams ,till today i don’t know. He started dating my manager at work cos we were both in the same industry. Even when i confronted him , he didn’t deny it .
I had issues with irregular periods so we tried IVF and it failed . All hell was let loose .Then he called me that someone was pregnant for him and that someone was my manager at work. I Begged him to still stay with me even though there was a child on the way. He said he wasn’t interested and that i should leave his house. I cried and cried but God told me that he will give me a child. By then i was 38 years. He was insulting my parents everyone that spoke to him , he picked a fight with,. later he moved out of the house to live with my manager. He also got me a divorce just to get rid of me. I still refused to leave cos i loved him and i remembered how far we had come .
Finally i moved in with my sister and we divorced in July 2011. Then I started seeking God more than ever.


March 2012 i saw this guy at the station awaiting for a bus who happens to know my sis. And we got talking , and after chatting with him, he asked suddenly if i was married and i said no. He took my no and said he would want his bro to marry me . May 2012 his brother called to say has heard a lot about me and that hes interested in me. Even when i told him i was divorced he didn’t mind. We got married. Between Jan – Feb i began taking fertility medication 2013. In Feb i missed my period. And that was when i tested and found out i was pregnant. And in Nov 2013 i had my pretty daughter at 41years.

The joy in my heart when i see my daughter has caused me to forget the pain i went through as well as forgive my ex-husband. God is so good . He has wiped my tears . I don’t know what you are going through ,but keep trusting God and he will surprise you . And to the men , as much as its in your power do not abuse your wife because of any circumstance that she cannot change. Support her , go through that journey with her. I am in a happy place now.My husband is a gift from God . I encourage everyone to hold on to God he knows how to change your story .
God bless you


Mena: Very encouraging story, God bless to you too, and to everyone just longing for something, hold on!