I was a Poster Child

When I was in Jr. high and high school, I would decorate my room in posters  and other random things. My tastes changed of course as I grew up. I no longer had a huge crush on Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Elijah Wood. I had moved on to Leonardo DiCaprio and pretty much any good looking Abercrombie guy I could find.  I had every Romeo and Juliet Movie poster. I also had a John Elway poster. I even had a poster of The Grateful Dead. I was really in to the Dead in high school.  I have an afghan that I got for Christmas.  I would hang pictures on my wall too. When I think about hanging posters I think of my cousin Rosa and how when she was living with my Grandma she would use toothpaste to hang posters. I never did that, I always used push pins. If I was hanging photographs I would use tape.  My bedroom was pretty awesome. It was my own space to relax from the pressures of high school and the drama that it entailed.  I loved to decorate my room.  At one point I wanted to be an interior decorator.  I remember going to Karma Records and looking for new posters. Posters from Karma were awesome because they were scented. They weren't sold scented, the store just smelled so much like incense that everything you bought there would smell like incense for months if not years.  Noah has a couple posters in his room about fish and sea life. One of the posters Noah has is a Guy Harvey poster than he totally loves.  I am sure he will want more posters as he gets older. I will let him have them as long as they are appropriate.

What kind of posters did you have when you were younger?

High School Students using Craigslist for Fraud?

I occasionally browse Craigslist for writing jobs. I have never done one but I like to look and see what is potentially out there. I also look for social media jobs that would be interesting. I was browsing Craigslist as I normally do and I saw that a couple people were looking for someone to do school work for them. One person wanted to pay someone to do his online work and another one wanted someone to finish all of his friends high school course work.  This is so wrong! It is totally dishonest and bad. It reminds me of when tv shows would talk about people buying someone's old reports or even a kid doing a bully's homework. I didn't realize this was going on. If Noah ever tried that he would be in so much trouble. Is this a new trend? Why isn't Craigslist doing anything? This brings cheating to a whole new level. Who knows if the person who did online school or online college is really the person holding the degrees? Man, this is so sad.

This is a real Craigslist posting. I took the screenshot myself.

They are looking for someone smart. No way! You have to complete a really long and I mean really long list of things which all have a final exam. There are probably about 40 things on the list. You have to do it in five days but if you complete it in less than five then you get a $100 bonus. The best part of this ad... You have to keep it a secret. My dear sweet Craigslist user. You don't know about IP addresses do you? They know where you are. They can find out who you are. You want to scam some school and you publicly post about it on Craigslist.  You are not only breaking moral laws but I am sure there are some kind of fraud laws that you, your friend, and the person hired are breaking.   You are also defrauding the Florida Department of Education. Obviously  your friend has slacked off for who knows how long but then all the sudden has the urge to amount to something and gets everything done in five days or less. He will get a B average too.  That is not at suspicious, not one tiny bit.  

So, if you work for the online high school in Florida and someone gets all his work done in five days or less with a b average it might be worth taking a look at it.  My dear sweet Craigslist poster don't worry your friend can still get their high school diploma in prison. Don't give up hope.

What's Cool about Vampires?

I don’t understand the fascination with vampires these days.  Vampires scare me. I used to love watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie. I never watched the TV show. I had no interest.  I didn’t watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer because of the vampires. I loved that she was a total valley girl and it was funny.  I thought it was kind of scary the first few times I watched it.  I remember watching it at Atlantic Beach in North Carolina with my old best friend Jenny. I remember we got in a big fight once when we watched it, and Caboodles were flying, or maybe it was ice and Caboodles and doll carriages were another time.  I don’t understand the whole Twilight phenomenon. I don’t think that guys should twinkle or sparkle or whatever they do in that movie.  For the record, I am not a werewolf fan either if you were wondering.  I don’t know what the cool thing about pale creatures drinking blood is. I do absolutely love Count Duckula.  Yes, I own the first season of Count Duckula. How can you not love him and Nanny and Igor? It was one of the coolest shows ever.  I was so excited when I got that on DVD.  I totally was a dork when I watched it with my friend Ben and the Thames thing came up.  If you don’t know what I am talking about it, check it out on YouTube. If you remember you will have the same reaction we did. We both felt like we were transported to our childhoods together.  It was like mind blowing.

I admittedly love the movie My Best Friend is a Vampire, but that is also a comedy.  I know there are all kinds of movies and TV shows about vampires, not the funny nice ones but the carnal ones that are all about the gore and I don’t know, I just couldn’t get in to them. I didn’t really like Interview with a Vampire and you already know how I feel about Queen of the Damned.  If you missed that post, I can’t stand it.  Maybe if they had nice vampires like Count Duckula, who was a vegetarian, I would be more apt to liking them.  I think it is gross.  It is scary, and not for me.  One of my favorite foods is garlic, so I know I am safe from vampires.  I eat enough that I don’t think they would even come within 100 miles of me.

I just remembered this guy from high school named Jerry. He was a vampire. Not a real one obviously, but I remember being leery of him.  He had fangs. He was in my drama class and I heard stories of him trying to drink people’s blood, and maybe an animal or two.  He was also a grip so when I was in choir he was always lurking in the shadows behind the scenes of the auditorium.  There weren’t any creepy blood loss deaths when I was in school, but I wasn’t going to take my chances.

Do you like vampires? What is it that you like about them?

Online Mean Girls

I originally wrote this post in Summer or early Fall of 2011, I just hadn't posted it because I had the wrong year on my scheduled post.

Do you remember in high school all the cliques? There were jocks, nerds, Goths, skaters, gangtas etc. Then there were the mean girls. I don’t really remember there being a certain group of mean girls.  I mean there were people that were mean but they weren’t mean to everyone. High school is full of catty witches that cause all kinds of drama. There is a possibility there could have been, I went to a huge high school. I didn’t even know everyone in my class. There were over 4,000 kids in my school and over 800 in my class.  I bet you are wondering what I was.  I was me, I didn’t have a specific group, I was friends with all kinds of people. I didn’t discriminate. I would dress however I felt that day. It might have been something from Abercrombie, or a tie dyed shirt and corduroys ‘, or really baggy jeans. I really tried to just be myself.  I didn’t really care what anyone thought of me.  I was kind of weird I guess, but I have always been unique.

I had my moments where I was mean to others, I think we all do. I had been pretty mean in my past but it wasn’t a constant thing, I don’t think. Usually I was nice in school, for the most part; I am not going to say I was an angel because that would be a total lie. Now, that I am an adult, I decided not to be mean anymore, not to not like someone because someone else doesn’t and you feel that false sense of loyalty. I can definitely say that I have grown up, but then you have those cases where the meanness never really went away.

I want to tell you a story about a group of women I encountered.  I am not saying it was the whole group of them; I don’t want to label them all. I know that there are some really nice women in this group, but there are some that make me upset.  Many of the interactions with the select group were just like being in Jr. High again but with 30 and 40 year old women. Have you seen the Subway commercials where they have the adults with the kid voices, it was kind of like that. I originally joined the group because I started scrapbooking and I found it one night and decided to join. At first all the women were really nice, kind of maybe too nice.  I really enjoyed going there, until I started to notice the drama. Now I am not talking about drama where someone is “trolling” trying to start drama, but it seemed like if you didn’t really agree with the majority, it was a bad thing.  We are all entitled to our opinions you know.  It wasn’t even really anything major like world issues, it was like ridiculous things like things that didn’t even matter, something like fabric softener brands.  I can’t really remember a good example.  

Some of the moderators were horrible, and would say hurtful and mean things to the members. I was friends with a few of the moderators so I knew about what happened behind the scenes. I knew that they would talk crap about people on their super secret moderator board.  They shouldn’t be able to do that, it shouldn’t be allowed.  My understanding of a moderator is someone who is there to help and keep the peace, not add more fuel to the fire and egg the fights or arguments on.  I think that some of the moderators grossly abused their rights and responsibility.  Those who had issues, would private message one of the administrators, and no matter what the issue was they would always stand by their moderators, even if they said something like “if you don’t like it you can leave.”  I am not sure that is helpful or caring, or the way things should be run at all.

I felt like there were a lot of repeat discussions about topics that we already knew at least twice that it would start an argument.  It seemed like it was on a cycle for example, oh we haven’t talked about food stamps lately and so it’s time to do that and stir the pot.  It wasn’t as if it was a new member asking or bringing it up. It would be the moderators or the owner of the site.  If it were me I would try and nip things in the bud before it got bad, as it always had.  Another thing about the group is the moderators would talk about illegal activity, such as reusing stamps that were not properly canceled out off letters or packages.  Who steals stamps? It is ridiculous, and illegal and in my opinion wrong. Maybe that is why stamp prices keep going up.  Stamps are not that expensive, sure they might add up, but if you can’t afford to send something like scrapbooking supplies than it is ok to not participate.

I know with the scrapbooking, I felt like every other day they wanted money for something, which was weird for being a money saving group.  They called them “donations”. I am not sure if they pocketed most of the money and just gave out prizes of stuff they didn’t want from the clearance bin from the craft store. None of the prizes were ever anything really worth “winning”, it was usually just a few little items that were never useful.  I never donated. I didn’t know what would happen to my “donation.”  I didn’t really participate in the challenges though so, it doesn’t really matter. I would have preferred to take my $5 or $10 and buy some useful stuff instead of a couple paper flower cut outs and 6 inches of ribbon.

I know that there are some great women, that I am still friends with after leaving the group.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they were reprimanded by the leader of the group for it. I can be an outspoken person when it comes to issues that I believe in, if it involves children or anyone in general. I am known to speak my mind and not keep it to myself like a good little mindless drone.  I will express my feelings and say something, and if you didn’t fit in to that little cookie cutter, then well your opinions are not welcome. I actually had the co-admin tell me that my opinions were not welcome. I think the discussion was about welfare. I am sorry, but I have strong feelings that if someone is on welfare they are not lazy or on drugs and that their children deserve to be able to have an occasional treat.  You don’t know their situation.  I tried to ignore it. 

When I would talk to the leader I would normally receive an almost automated response: Thanks for your concern Sheila, I will look in to it. Thanks.  Even though, nothing was ever done. If it was someone who was a moderator or really good friends of the owner it was swept under the rug.  If it was someone else then they would get in “trouble.”  It was all such a headache and it reminded me of being in Jr. High school arguing about what boys you could like or who you can be friends with. I am so glad that I am not involved in that group anymore. There were so many toxic discussions on there.  Have you ever experienced anything like this?

No, I Will NOT Be Facebook Friends with You!

I have been thinking about high school or school in general. It has been 10 years since I was in school and really, not sure how it came up in my head but it just did. There are some pretty random thoughts in my head sometimes so why not blog about them. Two different things came to mind. The first one has to do with Facebook. It seems like almost everyone is on Facebook now. I like it, it is a great way to talk to family that I would normally not talk to. Not, because I don’t like them but because it is so easy to do on Facebook. I am sure I am not the first or the last to think about this but why do people add other people just because they went to school with them or they “knew” them in school. I can totally understand if it is like an old friend you lost contact with. That makes sense. I find it weird that people add people that they weren’t friends with or worse, people they never got a long with. That they hated for some stupid reason. I am all for putting the past behind me and not holding a grudge but really? I don’t really see the point. It definitely seems pretty hinky to me.

I don’t sit up late at night and wonder why so and so didn’t like me, but on the other hand I don’t search them out and friend them on Facebook, in hopes of some magical reunion to work out “our differences” from over 10 years ago. I guess if those people want to be “friends” with someone on Facebook more power to them. For example there is this girl I went to school with I will call her Bobby Sue for privacy reasons who added me as a friend on Facebook. I didn’t accept her request, for a few reasons. One being we were never friends and I couldn’t stand her. Now she just makes my skin crawl and I have no interest what so ever having anything to do with her. She makes my skin crawl because she worked at a brothel for a few years. I don’t want someone like that around my family or in my life. I have no desire to be “Facebook Friends” with someone I didn’t really talk to or wasn’t really friends with. I would much rather put it in my past and not deal with that person again. I totally understand that people change and all that but why even open up that potential Pandora’s Box?

It also leads to talking about being in school again and inquiring about or gossiping about other people. Things I rather not do with someone I wasn’t friends with in the first place. See, no matter how much you think someone has changed or how hard they convince you that catty high school girl comes back out. Of course I don’t mean everyone but more often than not it does. I am not sure if it is because you stir up old memories or feelings about then or what, but it happens. I’ll pass on being involved in all of that. I am not trying to sound like a cynic and I am sure some differences and new found friendships have blossomed on Facebook, it is just not for me.

Do you have any insights in to this? I look forward to hearing from my readers.