Like, OMG!

"Mother i can tell what you've been thinking
staring at the stars on your ceiling
thinking once there was a power that you were wielding"

-Passion Pit

Mujeres tontas. You see them everywhere. I live with them. The thing is, you know that they're not stupid. You know that if they wanted to, they could be capable of an intelligent thought. It's just that, in the world they live in, they have never been taught to ask the questions that really matter, or they've never been taught to care about the answers they might receive if they did. Maybe they're pretty, maybe they were (or weren't) daddy's girls. Whatever the case is, I'm perpetually confused, and frustrated, by these women. We've all seen 'em grocery shopping, driving, out with their friends at night, or ya know, stripping.

I'm not saying that I'm not proud to be a woman, I'm just saying that maybe for some reason, they're not. Take my mother for instance. There is literally no opportunity that I don't take to ask her questions that I think matter. Why she does the stupid shit she does for instance. Why she believes in God, why she votes the way she does, why she imposes the rules that she does, etc. And, as her child, as her daughter, I expect a well-thought out response. I mean for God's sake if you're gonna tell me to do something, or heaven forbid, give me rules that don't make sense to me, have enough respect for me to think about why you're doing it. You should also, as a woman in a world where our opinions don't always matter so much, have enough respect for yourself to defend your choices, defend your vote, defend yourself at all times. It's a responsibility that we have to our kind, the way I see it. Don't be just another mindless woman smiling in a douche commercial from the 70s, giving me advice about how to feel "fresh". What I need are the types of role-model women that teach me how to be strong, how to defend myself, how to be a respectable person, the kind of women that like to learn and impart wisdom. Which, through no fault of my mother's, is the kind of woman I strive to be every day, the kind of woman I think I might be...

Now let's face it folks, whether you're a man or a woman, you've at some point experienced the feeling of being thrown against the wind, defenseless and without the means to get through the tough parts of life. I know I have. And I know why. Because my mother wanted to get married, and have babies. And she's proud of it. If you ask her, she'll tell you something like, "oh yeah, of course. All I wanted to do was get married and have babies, why would I have gone to college." I love my mother, but I'm not quite sure at what point she decided that was a good idea. If all you're gonna do is have me, you better consider raising a PERSON, not a baby, a PERSON, your damn JOB. Everyone in this world, man or woman, must utilize the tools that they have been given to defend themselves, defend what's theirs by right: knowledge, a place to sleep, food, posterity. You cannot rely on anyone. You can trust people, but trusting is not the same thing as relying on someone to support you. I don't begrudge her the lesson she's learned, it's been a good one, and one she needed to learn.

But after all that, after all the shit that she (and I) have been through, I still see her acting like a complete ditz. It's utterly perplexing, it's flabbergasting, it's the ultimate enigma. How can a person with so much time to think, so much life experience, be willing to purposely degrade herself in front of other people?! And you know, it's not in any one act in particular. It's in the little flips of hair that they think are cute, the little questions they ask that they already know the answer to, that you know they know the answer to. It's these mannerisms which say to the world, "I need a man to answer these easy questions for me, because I can't do it by myself. I need someone to rescue me from the big bad questions!"

But damn, damn am I cute.