Mischief Night

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It’s mischief night- the night before Halloween.  This is a new concept to me.  Where I’m from, there is no mischief night.  I love the idea of it though and am seriously miffed that it wasn’t a thing in my community growing up.  I could have had some serious fun.  Instead we biscuited friends and strangers’ cars in drive bys and had no name for these pre-Halloween mischievous outings.

Biscuiting,by the way, is when you buy cans of biscuits and throw raw dough at oncoming vehicles or place them all over someone’s car windows and let them dry on. We typically cruised around looking for our friends to peg with the raw dough, but occasionally got bored and went after a stranger’s vehicle.  We were chased on more than one occasion, which made the hooliganism that much more exhilarating.

One of my second favorite mischievous things to do was stealing security signs.  You know, the little signs in people’s gardens that says the house is protected by such and such home security system.  We’d pull up and every one would get out and run up to the houses, each grabbing a sign and running back to the car.  We quit only when we ran out of space for all of us and the signs in the car.

We did our share of TPing.  It wasn’t our caper of choice, but a memorable outing was when we TP’d one of my buddy’s ex-girlfriend’s house.  She lived at the end of a long driveway.  We were decorating nicely when I hear someone yell, “run!”, and hear an angry man yelling obscenities before I see him.  We were all track and cross country runners, so we made it to the car in time, though I felt like I was running in one of those dreams where your legs are heavy and you can hardly move.  Unfortunately, one of the other girls had a bad angle and it looked like she and the dad were going to hit the car at the same time.  She made it first, but just barely, and the dad was grabbing the door handle as we pulled her in.  Ah, good times!

I guess we didn’t need a mischief night, but it would have added to the fun.  What were your most mischievious outings as a teen? I’d love to hear them! Leave a comment and tell us all about it!

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

I remember my mom laughing when my big sister decided to get nice leather furniture when two of her kids were under the age of five. I remember her laughing, loudly, mockingly.

I know why now. My mom had five girls and anything nice that made it into the house, never made it out alive. I remember strategically placing a cabbage patch stamp right in the middle of one of her pictures, and being very proud of it. I remember falling through the glass door of the high tech stereo system. Yes, her laughing was well informed.

I have just purchased a new living room suit and am super nervous. I have a six month old and a 3 year old. What was I thinking?

I purchased the protection plan at an additional sum, it alone exceeding the amount I have ever spent on all the furniture I’ve ever owned. Is that going to be enough to keep from allowing my kids to be kids around my nice things?

I guess that’s my biggest fear.

What if having nice things makes me a high strung screaming banshee of a mom, protecting my precious things form the heathens running amok in my home?

It’s almost not worth it. Well, almost.

I have a mountain bike that sits in a trainer in prime real estate in my small house. It has to be in a climate controlled area. My kids are not allowed to touch it (really I’d prefer they not even look at it), and my husband has made the mistake of throwing a pair of pants on the handle bars once. I mean, is having a nice couch and chair much different?

I refuse the idea that my kids can’t be expected to learn to behave in a manner that refrains from the destruction of personal property

Do they have to be allowed to destroy everything to enable their delicate brains to develop to well adjusted maturation? That would be a no. Not in my house anyway.  I have few rules that prevent my kids from getting to be kids.  I think a couch, chair, ottoman and a bicycle are not too much to ask to not destroy.

Sorry, kids. We are about to get a lot of learning experiences and opportunities to grow in to productive citizens, cause momma’s getting a new couch. I can hear my mom cackling somewhere.

 

Love and Tomboys

Love and Basketball. This movie is the tomboy’s love manifesto. This movie is what every tomboy wants the world to know about them.  But this is a movie.  In real life, it’s hard to see past a tomboy’s competitive nature and low maintenance coifing, to see the awesomeness that is dating a tomboy. You can check out a blog post summarizing the movie here.

Everything about this movie, from the inability to identify well with mom, to the marginalization in school, to the double standard of a tomboy dedicated to her sport versus a boy dedicated to his, it’s all there. But the love story is what gets us.

The crux that resonates with tomboys is the love story.  Oh how desperately we want to be loved for who we are.  We have so many crushes but for the sole reason of our tomboy natures, we are overlooked.  Sure, we make great buddies, one of the guys, but we’re not girlfriend material.  So often we are expected to be guys.

We don’t want to be guys, we want to be girls with the same opportunities as the guys.

I want to go out without make-up, like the guys.  I want to be accepted for my natural face.  I want hair that is conducive to my active lifestyle, whether that’s short or always back in a ponytail.  I want to be passionate about expressing myself through physical endevours that require I train constantly to obtain.  I want to express my competitiveness through appropriate channels of sport, rather than through snarky relationships with other women.  I want to be interested in a guy that likes the things that I like, a built-in training partner for running, mountain biking, playing catch or any number of other physical activities.

But that’s not what most guys want, and that’s ok.  I’m not putting the responsibility on the guys.  We want the love story in Love and Basketball.  The idea that someone could love us just how we are is overwhelming.  We want that so badly.  Doesn’t everybody want that so badly?

I can remember crying my eyes out in my early twenties, because I wanted that so badly.

I was so sick of being passed over for the sole reason of being a tomboy.

I was cuter, more compatible, fun to be with, but I wasn’t girlfriend material.

Their loss, right? BS.  It was my loss over and over again.  Being a tomboy  can be heart breaking.  The beauty of it though?  We’re resilient.  We’re strong.  We are not easily beaten.  We wipe our tears off, get back up, and get back out there.

We don’t always get our Hollywood ending like in Love and Basketball, but we do get our happily ever after.  We find that someone that loves us for us and that we love for them, because we are trained from the beginning to never give up on ourselves.  There are some lonely years, and tears that we cry in private, but our love story is out there.

Love & Basketball

But let me add this, fellow tomboys. You know there is a guy or two out there who liked you for you, but you didn’t like him for him. He might not have been the jock, maybe he was a little dorky, but he liked you and you wouldn’t go out with him. When we grow up, the older jocks whose life and other women have kicked around a little, see our potential, but we’ve grown up too, and see that guy who had the maturity and self-esteem to like us back in the day. Give “that guy” a shot and see what happens. I think you’ll be surprised.

The thing is, we are a little competitive in love. Let’s not pretend that we are victims, we don’t play that part well, as tomboys. We want to control the odds by working harder, by practicing, by pushing. Love and tomboys need time to develop into their happy endings. In the meantime, Love and Basketball is our Notebook, our chick-flick.

Self-Defense, Part I

Today I am doing a podcast on self-defense.  This is the first part of a series I am doing, addressing self-defense for women, and how it doesn’t have to be that complicated to learn a few simple moves.  Often I see intricate videos with multiple techniques, produced as self-defense tutorials for women to view online and thus protect themselves from attackers.  The problem is, the people making the videos are skilled martial artists who have thousands of hours of training these techniques and are presenting them to untrained women in the most complicated way possible.  Seriously, I watch most of these videos and can come up with ridiculously easier escape techniques, and I know they know them too.  It’s irresponsible to show off when you can give a much more basic and probably more effective escape to the people watching your video.

So here’s my intro to self-defense.  I will post videos with the next parts and please, leave questions in the comments section if you want to know more about self-defense.