I.C.U.P. in Target

The Target bathroom scandal, have you heard of it? Of course you have! Don't you love times like these where it can properly show you the asshole divide on your Facebook friends list? Opportunities to clean out your friends list are presenting themselves quite frequently these days (gay marriage, pot legalization, the 2016 election), so hover your mouse over 'unfriend' and feel the sweet release. 

According to USA Today, more than 700,000 people have decided to boycott Target now and to that I say fuck them because I'd rather go into Target with less cluttered aisles, especially now that they will be minus all the douchebags. More better-than-Walmart cheap shit for me, thanks! The reasons for the boycott stem from the pearl-clutching fear mongers who think that this bathroom anarchy is finally the moment predators around the nation have been waiting for, the free-for-all in the porcelain palace!

Prior to this, these signs were the ultimate barriers that protected children from these pedophile monsters:

Source

These two signs created a forcefield preventing predators from entering- well, uh unless they were male predators preying on male children/men but that never happens or so I've heard.*

"A danger to wives and daughters!" the petition calls it. What a bullshit response. 

For one, wives, daughters, and any other women can be assaulted and molested regardless of time and place like...

The subway...**

School...

Home...

Two, if someone is hellbent on assaulting someone in a bathroom that little sign with a lady in a skirt isn't going to do shit to stop them.

Three, male children are sharing bathrooms with men everyday who could be potential predators but there is never a mention of that scenario because apparently only women can be victims (this stereotype is damaging to both sexes as it paints women as only victims and discredits men from ever being victims even when there is ample evidence to the contrary). 

The percentage of America that is transgender is 0.3 percent and yet we are in such an uproar over this issue. It's a public bathroom- the best scenario is that you spend less than two minutes in there and then you are gone. I try to think about the person in the stall next to me as least as possible.

It must be exhausting to be one of these petition people who are constantly living in fear- fear of having their guns taken, fear of gay people, fear of transgender people going to the bathroom, fear of black people, fear of Mexicans, fear of atheists, fear of abortion, and fear of anything different than them. As for me, I mind my own business shit and keep my thoughts on myself not only while in a public bathroom but in my daily life. I think that's a good call.

*That never happens, really it doesn't.

** I literally just Googled "man exposes himself on subway" and got 32,000 results. 

Getting Older Is...

I'm going to the 30 this year! I remember my mom telling me many times that time goes fast and before you know it, you blink and you're old. "Yeah, yeah, Mom," I'd think because clearly time goes sssslowwww because that's how I and everyone else all experience it as children.

"High School is like five seconds of your life," she'd also say whenever I complained about my friends, my classes, or having to go through something as debasing as high school. 

Getting older is... figuring out things your mom said is actually true. It's also realizing that saying that very sentence is not a bad thing, it's good that I had her to give me advice and perspective on things when my youth and ignorance was the only thing I was ruled by during adolescence. 

Getting older is... 

... walking into Hot Topic and the only t-shirts with bands you recognize is in one corner where all the "classic" shirts are. 
... realizing that teenagers are mostly assholes.
... realizing you have a biological clock which was something you thought only old people talked about.
... when all your Facebook friends link to nostalgic articles about the 90's and post about their babies.
... when your feet hurt when you wear unsupportive shoes like Converse All Stars that you've worn forever.
... when staying up late isn't as fun as it used to be.
... that random strand of white hair that didn't used to be there. 

I used to think that I wouldn't necessarily mind getting older but, that was before I started getting older. I know that 30 isn't really old but it's certainly the next phase of my life. My 20's are over and it's time to really grow up, improve, and plan more for our future. 

10 Things

Some are silly, some are serious but here are 10 Things I Believe:

Don't Quote Me On That

This is one of my favorite quotes and I'm not a "quotes" person. I don't subscribe to the power of positive thinking or that I need to feel inspired or cheered on 24/7. I never share any quotes on my Facebook or "Like" pages that are aimed at those needing hope or to be inspired. That being said, I really like this quote and it makes me feel grounded when I start to doubt myself.

We are living at a time where social media is a constant window into someone else's life- and a very small glimpse of their lives we get to see. If we know everyone is watching, we only put on our best selves to be seen. Because of that, it is so simple to compare ourselves with that small sliver of other's lives. I have fallen victim to this cycle many times and I always have to remind myself that we're not seeing the whole picture but the most cleaned up, prettiest version of our friend's experiences. 

I have been on a long road of self-doubt and self-discovery since I got married six years ago. It was 2010 and I graduated with my Bachelor's in Psychology, we got married the next month, and we were set up our brand new lives together in Virginia. In my perfect life dream I would of course start looking for work in my field, I'd end up working for Fleet & Family doing some sort of counseling, we'd have two incomes, everything would be perfect, and we'd be SO AWESOME at being adults!

Illusions were shattered after months of no responses from any jobs and we had one car which made my search even more difficult. I had a terrible resume and I was embarrassed to go anywhere and ask for help with it. I figured I'd get a whatever job for the time being and found myself cashiering at Walmart for the 2010 holiday season. It was miserable. Not only was the clientele at Walmart terrible, but I found myself feeling bitter every day that I clocked into work. "So glad I got my degree," I'd think everyday (which, is still my mantra every day coincidentally). 

On my breaks from being bombarded with a non-stop wave of abusive customers, I'd look at my Facebook feed and see snapshots of my friend's elaborate vacations, new houses, new cars, and their updated "grown up" workplaces- office jobs, seemingly important jobs. It was debilitating and made me feel pathetic and like a failure. I quit Walmart after four months of misery and remained jobless until we moved to Washington sixteen months later. I became a cake decorator and started my own business. I finally felt a sense of industry and pride in what I was doing. 

After moving back to Virginia, I'm nearly in the same boat that I was six years ago in this sad full circle. The only difference is I don't really look to my friends anymore as a gauge of how successful I am as an adult. I only compare myself to my own standards of where and what my life should be. Of course I fall short of that expectation usually but the difference is that I'm in charge of it. I've taken a hard look at my friend's lives and they are all in different places too- some are single in a big city, some are in a small city and are stay at home moms, some are depressed at their impressive grown up jobs, some love their simple jobs, some rent homes, and some own homes. 

Whenever I find myself distracted by my friends or fellow blogger's seemingly perfect, sparkling lives I think of this quote. Things aren't always what they seem and I am not them, they are not me. Our lives and aspirations are different so it does nothing to help me to compare myself to someone else. As lame as it sounds, we are all on our own path and it's not a race. 

They're Your Family

Is blood-family really important? It's a question my brother and I have been wondering about for a while now. While there are some successful and happy families out there, are dysfunctional families who spend time together while hating each other so common that we all just grin and bear it?

For my entire life my family experience has been rather limited. It's been Mom, Dad, me, and my brother for my entire life with the first thirteen years seeing my paternal grandparents on birthdays, holidays and occasionally. I've seen my maternal grandparents a handful of times during those years and then we moved away from everyone to Arizona, more than 2,000 miles away. 

When you get older, you become privy to all the things about your family that you were too young to know- the problems, the scandals, the skeletons. Maybe your family doesn't have that- count yourself among the lucky ones while the rest of us deal with all this crazy bullshit. 

This is just leading to my question: is this important? Why do we have to associate with people who we may completely detest because of some arbitrary belief that shared genetics makes us important one another?

Personally, my grandparents are the only part of my extended family I really care about, save one uncle. My other aunts, uncles, and cousins (one, I haven't even met that has been around for already 10 years) are so removed from me that I can barely count them among my close acquaintances and they don't seem bothered by this and rarely, if ever, reach out to me anyway. We have never gotten gifts for one another and on what handful of holidays we've spent together it feels awkward. I could probably walk into some random dining hall and feel the same amount of connection to anyone sitting there. 

Are we all just looking for permission that we don't have to do this? 

Dear Everyone Reading,

Here's your permission to not give a shit about members of your family. If you've tried to get along and they hate you or are abusive, annoying, and all around
terrible people- you don't have to fake it, move on and 
find people, friends you do love and care about who feel the same way about you. If you love most of your family and there's a select couple that unfortunately come around the people you do love, you don't have to like them. Don't bother trying anymore. Ignore their existence, move on, and that is perfectly okay. This is about self preservation and if you are allowed to cut toxic people out of your life. 

I always thought that "friends are chosen family" was sappy and trite but as I get older, I'm seeing the phrase's truthfulness. These are people you choose to love and choose to spend your time and shared experiences. Isn't that a stronger bond than just shared genetics? 

The Purge

When we moved from Washington back to Virginia last month, it gave me an opportunity to purge a lot of childhood things I thought I would keep forever. I had a big box full of old journals, bad teenage poems full of angst, every note I've ever received from middle through high school, and odd trinkets from my past that I kept for some reason. 

I've been wondering lately why I am keeping these things because I just watched one of my friends purge her life- her home, her belongings and move into a really nice RV to live a simpler and more pared down life. It's very inspiring and has prompted me into thinking about the things that I really need in life. While I'm not prepared to do anything quite so drastic, it motivated me to get rid of some things that I had been feeling tied down to. 

My younger self had put these items in a box because I thought that these puzzle pieces of my old life would be interesting to me as an adult. "When I'm thirty, it's going to be so fun to read this!"

As I sorted through the box I easily threw out a gallon ziplock bag full of notes- I no longer cared. I found a notebook my (then) best friend in high school had passed back and forth for months and tossed it out. We are no longer friends and thinking of her is more painful than happily nostalgic. It was a more difficult choice to get rid of my old journals because they had been prized possessions for a while like completed novels that I lined up on my bookshelf. I flipped through them and they were just full of childhood crushes and other embarrassing things that I'd be mortified for anyone to read and that I'd like to forget. 

The only journals I've bothered to keep are the ones I've written as an adult as they offer more introspection and soul-searching than the schoolgirl musings of the past. I also had to keep my very first journal from fourth grade that was a purple spiral-bound notebook with Winnie the Pooh smiling on the cover in which I wrote about who offended me in class and the dead bird my brother and I found. Very sensational stuff. 

I kept three small shoeboxes full of mementos from Sophomore through Senior year because I decorated them and they had some interesting stuff in it like my Prom corsage and my learner's permit.

It felt good to be free of so many things that tied me down and that embarrassed me to know they existed (those poems...man, so angsty and emo). I mostly kept the things that I would be happy to reflect on and show someone else. 

But why did I keep so many things? I can only guess that it was because I was afraid of growing up and of forgetting everything. It was hard for me then to imagine what 30 year old Ashley would be doing, what kind of person she would be, and what she would care about. My younger self thought that these memories were worth holding onto when they were such a minute snapshot of life. 

I guess that's a part of growing up though, right? Knowing what's important to hold onto and what you can let go.