Facebook

               We all use it. Don’t lie; I know you do. Or, if you are stubborn, you use something like Twitter, Live Journal, a blog, Youtube, Reddit, Tumblr, or any other online forum site or social network (but never Myspace). I myself am guilty of a few of these things. I admit, I’m slightly addicted to Facebook, and this new blog thing promises to be pretty exciting. However, there are a few things I need to get out there before it’s too late:

                People – especially young people – need to learn that what they post online stays online forever. You may delete the post at the source but it will never, ever, be gone for good. This includes all sorts of posts, from videos and comments on videos, to status updates and blog posts. You know that rude tweet complaining about your job? It could get you fired for real. And that blog post or video ranting about the “B****” that goes to your school? Colleges that you apply to could see it and deny you simply because of it. And believe me; universities and employers will look you up online before they accept or hire you, especially prospective employers. They will Google you like nobody’s business.

                It’s also really annoying and offensive.

                As a specific message to younger people, please refrain from posting pictures of you at your last “ragger” or posting a status saying how much alcohol you had last night. Not only should you not be drinking in the first place but you’re making your case worse by bragging about it. And trust me, it doesn’t make you any cooler to be stoned or drunk every weekend. Also, talking about how much you love your ‘boyfriend’ after only dating for two weeks or so gets a little old, and it’s kind of gross, especially when you’re still in middle school. I mean really? Do you really love your boyfriend that much? Your rambling and obscure posts are getting on people’s nerves. Seriously.

And that’s just a chip off the ice block; people do so much crazy stuff online that I’m starting to believe that they actually do them in reality. For instance, grammatical and spelling errors. Yeah, yeah, I know I just posted on how I hate the English language, but if you’re going to speak it, at least speak it properly. And in some cases, spell things phonetically. Ghoti. But if you’re going to get anywhere in life, you need to learn how to use the language correctly; no more treating ‘there’, ‘they’re’, and ‘their’ as interchangeable, no more using letters to replace whole words, and definitely no more oF tHiS cRaP. Last time I checked, capital letters are only used at the start of sentences, in titles, and with proper nouns, not in every other letter of a word. Do you write like that in your English class? Sadly, I’ve seen papers written as such. Come on people; take your time and read over what you’ve written before you post it! It will improve your public image! And by the way, numbers do not work as letters in English like letters work as numbers in math.

                Also, would you mind putting in a little punctuation? Even a period would do some good. Or a question mark when you’re asking a question. And commas; commas are good. “Let’s eat, Grandma!” vs. “Let’s eat Grandma!” proves that grammar saves lives, so let’s use it. Use it often but use it wisely.

                Today’s is a short post because I have been super busy and could barely find time to write and/or edit anything. Please start using proper English guys! If not for me than for yourself; it makes you look so much better to the rest of the world!

                Maybe, if I have time, I will try condensing my immense list of things that bug me about people on Facebook and post it for – as they say on the Net – “teh lolz”. In the meantime, I suggest you go look at “Annoying Facebook Girl” memes; they make me laugh and cry at the same time because they are so sadly true. As always, thanks for reading!

                xoxo

Body Image

                First off, I would like to say that I do not think I am fat. Well, most of the time, anyway. Most of the time I have the confidence to think that I look great but there are days when I can't look at myself without having the urge to eat nothing but celery for the rest of the week. For instance, the other day I wore a cute black shirt with lace wing-sleeves and I could look into the mirror and think: "Woo! I'll turn heads for sure!". Right after I bought it, however, I had the sudden need to tear it to shreds and burn the scraps. I'm not quite sure why I get that way every now and then but it really pisses me off; I try so hard to be a role model for good self-confidence and yet I still have crappy days like that. I have a feeling - or rather, I know - that the rest of female-kind feels the same.

                If you're a guy reading this you are probably thinking I'm crazy. Not to rain on your parade but that means that most women in the world are insane too. The reason being is that most of us have a warped body image. Just as if you were to look into a carnival mirror, we have a tendency to see ourselves as fat, or ugly, or to see a flaw in our figure. We may be the most beautiful, Julia Roberts-esque girl you ever saw but there is probably something about our image that makes us uncomfortable and paranoid about the way people see us. Media and our social networks have big roles in this problem but a lot of it is internal. Personally, I don't really feel the need to dye my hair yellow and turn myself into an Umpa Lumpa, yet I can see why there are girls out there who do just that. Now, don't go all hipster on me and complain about how they're all posers and they try too hard and that it just makes them look ugly; it's just how some of us are. We feel the need to look like those getting attention and love, so we change our appearance in order to experience the same things. While being tan won't necessarily get you an acting contract, it makes you feel better. I understand! If it weren't for skin cancer and those distracting orange smear lines I'd be right with you!

                Now, I'm not here to bash on those of you women who tan, or wear make-up, or get lypo; I wear make-up all the time, I've been known to lay in the sun, and I have some spots on my body that I wish would just go away. I'm here to ask the rest of the world too stop expecting so much.

                Here's a shocker for you all. Are you ready? There are no perfect women.

                No amount of wishing, praying, cursing, dieting, surgery, exercise, tanning, make-up, dying, or bitching will create the ideal girl. There is just no way.

                I guess I’m just tired of listening to the radio and hearing about the newest “life-changing operation” and watching TV and seeing all of the diet pill commercials, especially when I look around and I see girls starving themselves to be thin. And some of these girls are still in elementary school. It’s just sad! And society pushes them to do it, which is the really disappointing part. And those little girl pageants? They make me sick. I chanced upon the show Toddlers in Tiaras while scrolling through the channels on my TV, and I just sat there, open-mouthed, at what these people were doing to their children. Some of these tiny girls – who were no more than seven years old – looked like mini versions of high schoolers! I mean really, people? Let your child have a childhood!

                There is something I would like to point out though; I know I stated that there aren’t perfect women in the world – more accurately, perfect people – but there is a point which I think is unhealthy to be at. Severely overweight people have serious health problems that accompany that weight, and that is something that should be cause for concern. However, though I definitely don’t weigh 120 pounds, I’m healthy on the inside, which is what really matters (plus, I stay extra toasty in the winter).

                My message this time is that I want people – women especially, given that I myself am a girl – to not judge themselves so harshly on what other people think about you. Public image may be to be thin and tan but it’s ok to be a healthy, normal sized pale girl. Or just healthy and normal sizes. Seriously! So go out there and be proud of who you are, and embrace your faults because they are what makes you unique. And being unique is the best way to get noticed.

                Xoxo

WORD

Words; the lifeblood of language, the main means of expressing oneself, communication. We all know what words are, what they do. Hell, you’re reading them right now. But what makes a word mean what it means? Why are they spelled the way they are? Who came up with some of the crazy shit you see in English?

Ah, the mysteries of life.

Here’s a question for you; what is your least favorite thing about the English language? There are lots of things that bug the poop out of me, like grammar, slang, and swear words, but none more so than the ridiculously convoluted spelling practices of our lovely language. For example: who in the world decided that the word “cough” would be spelled that way? I don’t know about you but they didn’t teach me that “gh” makes an “fff” sound when they taught me the alphabet. I’m pretty sure that makes no sense anyway. I mean, the letter G was clearly specified to have a guttural sound, like in “girl”. I can excuse using it for the word “giraffe” but only because when you sing the ABC’s, that’s what G sounds like, and spelling things phonetically makes me happy. But I’m still utterly confused as to why adding an H causes G to be mutated into a pseudo F. And that “ou” thing too; what is that? I thought O was doing just fine making that open mouth sound. Speaking of “ou”, how come “mouth” and “sound” are pronounced differently than “cough” when they have the same letters in the middle? Stupid. Why not just spell it “cof”? There is no reason to add an extra F! But no, English just has to be special and add pointless letters and make up random combinations to form a sound already covered by another letter. Way to go, English, way to go.

I was on the world wide interwebs the other night when I Stumbled upon something quite interesting (for those of you who are wondering why “Stumbled” is capitalized, please refer to stumbleupon.com). Did you know that you can technically spell “fish” completely different? Try spelling it “ghoti”. Yeah, I know. You’ll still be following the rules of English, don’t worry. Spell-check may not say you can but if you think about it, Spell-check says you can’t do a lot of things. Fragment sentence? HA! Who cares, Word, who really cares?? Anyway, back to “ghoti”: the reasons why you can spell it that way are several irregularities in the English language; “gh” as pronounced in “enough”, “o” as pronounced in “women”, and “ti” as pronounced in “nation”. Ghoti. I refuse to spell “fish” any other way now. Want to know why? Because if English can make no sense without anybody saying something, then so can I! I can see my English professor now: “You have way too many spelling errors for a college student! Go back and redo this.” And you know what? I think I’d have fun explaining to them why they’re not spelling errors and that in fact, I was only using phonetics. Excuse me; fonetiks.

I have also recently decided that the letter C is obsolete. I mean, the only two sounds it makes are already taken care of by S and K, so why even bother? And they told us learning Spanish would be hard. At least their alphabet stays the same!

Oh, and double letters can go to hell. Jeff Dunham’s Peanut clearly illustrates this when he says Jeff’s name: “Jef-f-fa!”. So true! Why do we bother? A double ‘o’ does the same thing for a word that the letter ‘u’ accomplishes. And a double ‘e’ can easily be replaced by a ‘y’! Or, if you’re going off what the alphabet says each letter sounds like, a singular ‘e’ will do the trick. “Coffee” need no longer be six letters long; let’s try four on for size! “cofy”. By God, we could spell it any way we wanted to, given that English has so many loopholes! “coughie”, “coughy”, “cafy”, etc. Thank the Lord that it’s spelled “café”, not “caffae”. Which you could do, if you wanted to. And you know what? I don’t even care that it’s underlined with a squiggly red mark. You don’t scare me, Word!

I hope that you have learned something new today by reading this. I look forward to seeing people write in a manner that makes sense. Hopefully. Please tell me some of your least favorite things about English! I love hearing other peoples’ rants! And just to make it fair, if you have something about English that you absolutely adore, please tell those to me as well, so I may understand why our language is the way it is.

Xoxo

p.s.

If you meet a kid named Fxrxexd, please inform him that you don’t like silent letters either.