Bulletin Board of Bad Behavior

The boy is talking to his mommy about taking out a loan to buy me an engagement ring. Totally what the hell.

I'd marry him - it's not that but as much as I want the big sparkly ... I am seriously uncomfortable with allowing someone to spend THAT much money on me. Do I just have issues?
I worry on one hand as a feminist because often (as he and a few other people) have pointed out act like it's because deep down I don't think I'm worth it. Which is some fucking bullshit I should take care of... On the other hand that's a loooooooooooot of money ...

I am going to buy myself a big sparkly for my 21st birthday tho'. So ... I dunno ... *grumbles*
Why can't I just be stupid and elope? Why do I have to think about things before I do them?

Well I guess it's every girl's dream to get married, but Jesus that sounds like a bad idea at 20. I'd question the motives of any boy age 20 who wants to buy you a ring.

He should be taking out a loan to buy pot, beer, and video games and thinking about whether he wants to study next semester or start a rock band and tour China.

You need to study abroad. I was your age when I left America and moved to France for 4 years. My only regret was coming back so soon.

That's my $.02

As if I didn't have enough things to worry about. Young lady, we need to talk.

In the meantime don't waste your money on an engagement ring. Such a complete waste of money. Me and Mrs Tommy never bothered. She did get a really nice wedding band - she lost it. She got a replacement - she never wears it.

Mmmm... our getting married would definately help our financial aid actually. And if I don't get more aid I'll never study abroad anyway.

But the problem is I've already done a lot of stuff abroad anyway - and yeah, I never want to come back but since my parents aren't supporting me.

And I'm a materalistic bitch - I want an engagement ring. If I were to be actually engaged. It would also make my family shut the fuck up.

They are afraid I'll never get married ... heaven forbid we can't have that.

Actually as for my dream of getting married - I wanna elope in Rio. In a red dress. I'm strange. We realise this will cause more problems than we already have.

are you 20? i don't know if asking that's rude, but i got married at twenty-four, had been to europe blah blah blah etc, etc, thought i was doing the love thing . . .

but in my experience a guy who keeps trying to buy you a ring doesn't really want to love you, he wants to own you

i can not tell you how many guys have said to me, but you make me happy, how can you leave me, you make me so happy, i'm like grow up, if you don't know how to find happiness on your own, i'm not interested and i don't want that responsibility; it's not fair.

you're a pretty girl, you're smart and funny -- and guys want that, they want to show you off, you're the big sparkly

it makes me think of golem from lotr -- remember how he was like MY PRECIOUS over the ring, there's a lot of weird truth in that.

pixie, i've just been thinking about what you're family is telling you, and i've got to say that's exactly the opposite of how my mom and my professors acted when i told them i was going to get married.

my mom was like have you really done everything that you want to do?

my professors were like aren't you going to get your masters?

these of course were ladies who'd spent a lot longer time thinking about things like marriage and non-marriage.

here's a story about my mom and her best friend, the professor, who never got married, still single and loving it, no regrets.

my parents anniversary was a few weeks ago so i got to hear this one. my mom was living near dc when she met my dad, she has great legs, that's in fact how they met, she was outside painting a table in short shorts and my dad saw her legs and was like, wow, got to meet that girl. so she was living with her friend and my dad strolls in all buck toothed and goofy and somehow managed to sweep her off her sexy legs.

well, they'd been married for a few months when her best friend comes up to dc to spend the weekend with them. it was summer time, around the fourth, and my dad was going off in to town to work. he tells my mom and her best friend, you girls have fun, don't go into dc, it's going to be too dangerous today, so he leaves, my mom and her friend hop in the car head street for dc, park outside it, hop on the train and head to the mall where they do whatever weird artsy thing they do and watch fireworks.

the point is, my dad, god love him, was trying to protect my mom, and my mom and her best friend were like from what, life? we don't need protection from that. it's going to happen.

sometimes my mom says that the professor has all these neat friends and she's like i don't have friends like that. i'm like no mom, you've got children and a husband, and you did a damn good job with both of them. and you spent your life doing things for kids and poor people, so no you don't have snazy friends, you've got kids and a legacy of teaching.

the professor is always saying little things about my mom and families that shows me how much she admires her.

so you make your own choices, but make them for yourself.

this mess calls for some reasoning and some clear thinking.

when you say "And I'm a materalistic bitch - I want an engagement ring" what do you actually mean? to me it sounds like a weak argument that is trying to sound stronger by hijacking a dose of synthetic self-loathing. are you a slave to your love of material things? is this a maxim of your life? if it isn't, why follow it if it may well be against your own grain, your own interests? are you really a bitch? do you want to be one?

"If I were to be actually engaged. It would also make my family shut the fuck up", now that is just baloney. your family will never shut up; families never do. all you can do is find a healthy way of dealing with them.

No, really, I DO want the big sparkly thing. As much as I tell myself I don't - because on principal I don't. Too bad there's too much cultural indoctrination for it not to be something I know years later I'd be upset about it.
And it actually would make my family shut up. The reason they dislike him is because I pay for things. I don't pay for everything - but we do split everything equally. To my parents that means he's a bad guy and taking advantage of me - and must of course be poor, because why else would he let some loudmouth girl usurp his manhood like that?
I didn't say it made sense or was good reasoning - it's just really what's there.

We both have realised though that getting married would do wonders for our finances. If you are married - or 24 and over (and with tution going up next year to $26,550 something I certainly can't hang around here that long) - then I would be allowed more aid. As it stands I have to file using my parents taxes - which would be fine, assuming that my parents were going to pay for some of it and that they were going to support me outside school as well. But they aren't - because I'm a girl and when they were 20 they were married and on their own ... something like I should grow up and that means if I'm starving it's my fault.

And I love him. He does make me want to do stupid things like have babies (but not any time soon but in general). It might be really nice to be able to travel a lot after graduating and know that I can get an okay job and take some time off before going back to school and he can get a nice job so we don't really have this huge worry about money - as in the well, really I have a shitty student job and you have a shitty part time job ... so what are we gonna buy for dinner? Oh, yeah, we're broke until next Friday ... umm... sort of way.

hey, it's me again. he doesn't sound like a bad guy; moreover it doesn't matter if he is the world's greatest guy. ring aside, do you want to marry him?

because here's the thing, if you're having financial problems a big ring is probably the last thing either of you need or can afford -- financial problems end more marriages than anything else

if your parents are not supporting you now, i can only imagine how bad this is going to get later, for all of you.

it's your choice. you are twenty. you are an adult. so it does not matter what your parents think at this point, but it is nice if they support you and your decision to be with hubby -- they are a confusing pair from what you've said, they don't approve of him if he's poor, yet if he stupidly goes into debt for a big ring they will because this is being a man? yes, i see the lack of reasoning skills

and, imo, being a man is saying, honey, we can't afford that because if we rack up huge debts our credit will be shit and it'll be hard on us a little later down the road.

however, what matters is that you are going to make a decision and you are going to have to live with the consequences of it, and that's all there is to it.

and you can xyz the possibilities and cuts of diamonds, rubies, or what have you, you can talk about white gold, yellow and plantinium, i think there is even titanium for the really big spender, but still you're going to end up with one of two outcomes, married or single

and it's a hell of a lot easier, if you change your mind, to end a relationship than a marriage, trust me.

umm his mum wants to buy me the ring. (She wants to get us married cause ... apparently she likes me .. wtf?) And she wants grandbabies from him. Now. All that aside, she knows my family - both of our families are from around the same area - and is stressing things should be done the "right way."

He's not perfect but ... I mean, seriously neither am I.

Didn't I afterall end my last realtionship by meeting and fucking a random (well kind of random) raver boy? (Who is one of my good friends now)... and we didn't have sex. But that is what my roommate said to bf at the time. We were just cuddling and had a nap and I was having serious cramping problems and couldn't stand up - so he ran me a hot bath and sat in it with me. Then we went to Toronto together.
We didn't have sex until the realtionship I was in was good and over and he took me home with him ... but THAT'S another story.
Said boy is J (My boy's) best friend tho' and I also briefly dated one of their mutual good friends ... it's not as if I'm perfect.
Haha I do afterall do stupid shit like go to raves in other countries when I can't afford it - and buy myself sparklies, and regularly procrastinate on here when I ought to be doing reading, and make a habit of running at 3am and worrying the crap out of the boy because a girlie alone in a notably bad neighbourhood late at night is worrying ...
Oh yes - and I get drunk and do things like get in a fight with my roomie that ends with me laughing and calling her a stupid slut and saying "you think you're all that and a bag of chips - well I'm all that and a bag of skittles so taste my rainbow, bitch" and throwing a drink at her ...
uhhhh ... I have found that if your cheerleading (male) coworker witnessed this because it took place in the lobby of your building you MIGHT never live it down.
Just like the time your ex girlfriend got drunk freshman year, called him a douchebag fat boy and puked all over his apartment.

I really might have to leave this university - I could go further into debt for tuition hikes but I am not sure if I can deal with this kind of social embarassment. Usually my social faux pas consit of hugging or being overly emphatic and can be cleared up with claiming I was rollin' and therefore it is okay that I hugged you and said I love you missed you - tho' I am known to do this when I am not cause I am ... unfortunately ... a natural e-tard. But so is the boy so it's all good!

well, i'm procrastinating with you -- i have five pages left to finish before my deadline and i could finish them in about an hour and yet, they sit.

and that is the funniest comeback i've ever heard:

"you think you're all that and a bag of chips - well I'm all that and a bag of skittles so taste my rainbow, bitch"

honestly, i've never uttered anything remotely close to that ~ and i'm not encouraging you to do that again, really, but it is extremely funny -- i would write it down, it could be the world's funniest rainbow brite candy girl poem or something (my students will say things all the time and i have to go to the back of the room and turn around and pretend i'm sneezing-- really, if you ever catch a teacher doing this, just know they are trying not to laugh their asses off.)

look if i had two families like that to contend with i'd be confused as hell, and who isn't like you said, really.

so you know you, you know him. you do what you want to do.

it's tough, you've got all these people telling you what they want from you, of you, for you, etc.

aww, about your natural behavior. it's good, sweet. i hope college doesn't change that about you.

what are you supposed to be reading?

i'm going to guess -- let's see how much college has changed:

kate chopin
jean rhys
colette
emma goldman
julia alverez
sandra cisneros
mary crow dog
yoshido uchida
amy tan
anzia yezierska
louisa may
fay weldon (oh, my god this woman is so evilly funny!!)
abigail adams
mary wollstonecraft
margaret fuller
susan b. anthony
elizabeth cady stanton
margaret sanger
jane addams
simone de beauvoir
katherine anne porter
joyce carol oates
nikki giovanni
s.sanchez

and one of my very favorites that i didn't get in college, eve merriam, the inner city mother goose. fabulous!

here's a sample of a personal favorite:

take-a-tour
take-a-tour
congressman

take a tour
take a tour
congressman

cover the ghetto
as fast as
you can:

whisk through
tsk-tsk through
and file under P:

now you're
an expert
on poverty.

(i'm like yeah, you tell him, bitch!)

TP. If we collected your musings this past year and placed them end to end we would have a ticker tape that describes and individual in a constant state of flux. The only repeatable pattern is one of contradiction. This is all well and good for one of your years and habits. It is not the template for a trip down the aisle. Finish school. Make that trip round the world. Get bored with drugs and those that take them. Marriage is a routine. You're not ready for routine yet.

On average a marriage is roughly ten million times harder to get out of than a dating relationship. As far as I can work out, your previous dating record is 17 seconds. Do you really want to be paying those lawyers? Do you really want to be a divorced student?

Take your situation for what it is, a drunken dizzy love affair that pisses off parents. I ask you, what could be better than that? (What I would give to drink from that cup)

Don't get married.

Awww I liked the poem and no I've never read any like it. Maybe one of these days.

My currant issue for class is how to print an envelope. I'm not computer illerater by any means but I can't manage to make it work. If my parents allowed me to make a student-debit account then I could take it to ITS and make the people who are paid for being computer nerds on campus print it - but since that would mean I could buy stuff on campus and credit it to my parents - I can't cause my parents made sure I couldn't do that. Unfortunately that means I can't print anywhere on campus since it all runs off the campus-money thingie and is $.05 a page.
Proof of my problem solving skills - sit and cry because I don't have a car and it's raining so I don't want to walk the two blocks to Walgreens and buy more envelopes then the five miles to Kinko's. <insert Dante Hicks of Clerks whine> I'm not even supposed to be walking anyway!

I really really don't know what came over me - except to prove this was so junoir high I don't really care anymore. I'm sure I didn't really convey that message and just suprised everyone by reverting to a 15 year old. But my coworker has informed me it was possibly the cutest thing in the world since I did look like I was probably 12.
(I really don't know why it is but when I put on phat pants and a t-shirt and braclets and put my hair up people say I look like I'm 12. Maybe I do I dunno - but when I was 12 no one would believe I was anything under 16!)

I'm not sure I'd call e-tarded sweet but ... it's special all right. That compared with my natural bubbly-ness (as my grandma puts it to be nice ... I'd say I'm hyper and easily amused) makes it easy at any time say I'm on something when something comes up that could be questionable. That and my pupils are really large sooo ... umm... yup, I always look like I'm on something.
Speaking of the 12 year old girls and being on something - has anyone looked at those Bratz dolls? Their pupils are huge and they dress like ravers. You can't tell me we're not encouraging kids to go to raves and do the ecstasy!
(yeah, yeah I WAS in the toy isle of the store the other night looking at my little pony's. Not to buy any but just to look - I ended up buying one of those LED spinny ball things though and candy necklaces. Tsk, tsk.)

I am supposed to be reading (at the moment/for the rest of the week)
Williams Carlos Williams (Am. 20th Cen. poetry class.)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Marilyn Frye
Lord Byron
Deborah King
some book on Mary Magdalen (for a theology class)
Jaroslav Pelikan's Mary Through the Centruies
bell hooks
Trebilcot's "Dyke Methods"
Gunn Allen's "Kochinnenako in Academe"
Hill Collins, "The Politics of Black Feminist Thought"
Narayan "Cross-Cultural Connections..." (from what I read at work the other night talking about connections between domestic violence in US and partners murdering wives and Indian bride burnings)
Alcoff "The Problem of Speaking for Others"

For the rest of the semster a quick glance at syllibuses:
Susan Okin's Gender, Justice, and the Family
Nancy Fraser
Anne Fausto-Stearling
Kathy Davis
Haslanger
Truth's "Ain't I a Woman"
de Beauvoir
Caorl Gilligan
Alice Walker
Katherin MacKinnon
Susan Bordo
Gandhi
Ann Russo
Maria Lugones
Marianne Moore
Wallace Stevens
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Thomas Hood
Elizabeth Barret Browning
Robert Browning
Matthrew Arnold
Dickens' Hard Times
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Christina Rossett
William Morris
Gerard Manlgy Hopkins
Oscar Wilde
Ernest Dawson
Rudyard Kipling,
Thomas Hardy
Yeats,
George Bernard Shaw
DH Lawrence
Virginia Woolf
TS Eliot
... and a few other essays that just have titles oh yes - and I have some readings from the Bible for tomorrow to do as well. urgh.

and I have read something by most of the people on your list lol but not for class (mostly - I think I read Amy Tan in AP English in highschool)

Of course - if I were to be engaged it would be a long engagement and honestly just enough to shut my parents up.

I wouldn't be married - and I wouldn't be completely single with no hope (this is exactly how my parents see it now)

And I could just live with him and not get shit for it from my family - and his family might be a little more comfortable with our planned arangements for next year. Since I can't afford the $3,250 it'll cost for my room and $1,500 for my meal plan (which you have to have on campus) and probably close to another $300 in random fees.

But in order for my parents to get over it and whatnot - there needs to be a ring. It's not like I'll ever hear the end of living in sin or anything but their social fears will at least be a little lessened.

I really am NOT trying to give my parents a heartattack. Or spend all their money - I'd just like at least $20 a week to eat off of; because I really hate having to use a credit card for the $1 baked potatoe at Wendy's (which is down the street) It is amazingly hard to be a vegetarian and survive off a college meal plan.
there is a cafetaria here - and then a few food places that take either meal plan money or real money - a bakery type place, two starbucks coffee places (and I am so sick of starfuckers right now you wouldn't believe it), subway (which is insterestingly enough more expensive than the not-on-campus subway a few blocks away), KFC, PizzaHut, a smoothie and ice cream place, and a burger place. There is a mexican place but it's too expenseive and really bad.

oh wow, i've got the most beautiful book of illustrated poems by christina rossetti.

i was really into her when i was in school and did a comparative lit paper on her with the biblical allusions. she was so absolutely different from her brother, i thought. it was in one of my favorite classes. it was actually the year i switched my majory from environmental to english.

i love amy tan. i think there's something great about the mother daughter relationships in her books.

now these sound really interesting and i haven't read or heard of them -- let me know if they're worth it or not:
Jaroslav Pelikan's Mary Through the Centruies
Hill Collins, "The Politics of Black Feminist Thought"

(okay, i've got a great question for you to ask your religion professor tom or whenever, this i've been wanting to know for a while, btw my religion professor looked like moses, no shit. why is seth the most important of the three sons in the third version of the creation story -- is he seth from the egyption gods? could he be and wouldn't that makes sense considering the hebrews were in captivity and worshiped egyptians gods, and if so what are the implications of that in the christian bible and jewish torah?)