I’ve seen a lot of talk on the internet lately – especially within the past few days – about food. Where we get our food, how the animals that give us our meat and eggs are treated, whether or not it makes sense to buy organic. It pulls at my heart a little bit.

Food is a miraculous, wonderful, beautiful thing. It has the power to sustain life, to cure ailments, to send us spinning in to a frenzy after a wonderful dish. And yet as a society – at least in America – we’re more than willing to keep shoveling things in to our bodies that barely constitute food. Beyond the McDonalds cheeseburger and the Burger King chicken nuggets – the food on the shelf at the grocery store. Everything we buy, sold to us by the labels and the brands and the marketing, and not by what it actually does for our bodies.

It’s no secret that I’m completely on board the “yuppie” bandwagon, as so many people love to call it. I’ve even blogged about it before, and I stood by my word – I have not bought beef at a grocery store since. Now that we’ve moved to Madison and have access to an awesome grocery co-operative, we shop there. I know where my meat comes from – not just that it’s local, but what farm it came from. How the animals were treated. There was an article about the farm my eggs are from in a recent newsletter from the co-op; the chickens were fed a soy-free diet, allowed to roam free, and didn’t have their beaks clipped. Chickens living how chickens were meant to live, and eggs cooking up in my pan that taste the way eggs were meant to taste.

By buying our food this way – fresh, local, organic – we don’t have to worry about recalls. I don’t have to bring home a cantaloupe from the store and wonder if I’m going to be subjected to salmonella, or if I’m going to get ecoli. These things have become too normal to us as a people now that we disregard it - why does no one stop to wonder where these things are coming from? They come from poor farming ethics, they come from animals being made to stand in their own feces all day. Sure, we’re outraged at beef being pumped with “pink slime” – but why is no one outraged at the fact that these cows are being fed things that shouldn’t even naturally be in their diet? We aren’t eating beef. We’re eating a beef like substance that’s been pre-packaged.

Mostly I see people posting articles that “organic isn’t better for you!” and “it only contains 30% less chemicals!” and “just suck it up and eat what the rest of people do” and “you must have a lot of money if you buy that crap.”

I don’t. I don’t have a lot of money. That’s why I buy that “crap.” Because I don’t have health insurance and can’t afford to go to the doctor – I need real nutrients in my body. Not additives, not filler. Real, wholesome food that was engineered in the dirt and not in a science lab. You need that, too. We all do.

Today I saw an article in particular circulating that called out Walmart on it’s treatment of pigs at the farms that sell the meat to the stores. People were suddenly outraged that the pigs were kept in tiny cages and treated poorly and then slaughtered for sale. I have a newsflash for you: this is not an outrage, this is typical factory farm behavior. It isn’t even just Walmart – most grocery stores and other big box stores do not even have their own farms. They purchase the meat from farms that are just following the standard, normal factory farm practices. It is perfectly normal to pack in so many animals to one area so that they can’t even stand and can barely breathe. It is perfectly normal to pump them full of antibiotics so they won’t get sick from the inhumane conditions they’re in. If you want to boycott this treatment, don’t just stop at Walmart – try buying your food fresh and local.

I don’t care if it makes me a yuppie. I don’t care if people think I’m throwing my money away. I’m putting that money back in to our local economy in exchange for putting fresh, nutrient rich food in to my body. On top of that, I’m not funding the inhumane treatment of animals.

Think what you will, but the only way to solve this problem is to vote with our wallets. This isn’t about becoming a vegetarian or a vegan or standing up for some great and noble cause or a statement of religious fervor: I just want to eat my food the way it was intended to be eaten. 

So share your articles, speak your mind, boycott who you wish – but the problem won’t stop with a boycott of one place or one farm. If we buy local, if we buy fresh, people will know that’s what we want. The stores will be forced to carry more to compete, the farms will have to hire more people and create more jobs.

The only way this can go is up. Sure, it requires a sacrifice – the best things often do.

I’ll see you at the meat counter. Grass-fed, free range cows only, please.

Well, okay, if you’re here you probably are thinking “Well duh, Manda, you have a series of problems. You are an encyclopedia of problems.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it.

Today – well, all the time, but I’m just talking about it today – the problem is that I have to multitask or I can’t focus. I’m not sure what my deal is, but I can’t just sit and work on the same thing for hours at a time. I have to work on two things, or alternate 20 minutes at a time between several things. Often this multitasking can cause me to spend entirely too long on sites like Facebook or Google+ or Imgur or When Parents Text or anything that can capture my attention when I’m procrastinating.

So instead of forcing myself off of those sites (in the past I’ve seriously used an app that blocked Facebook for 2 hours at a time) I decided to harness them. They are mine now. I use them for the powers of good. Well, sometimes evil, but you get the picture.

So let’s talk about Cafe World. It’s this little cooking game by our hellish overlord Zynga that lets you cook little dishes and things and it’s all on timers. The timers are supposed to keep you coming back to the game, but for me they’re my secret weapon to maximizing productivity and staying off Facebook.

In the game you choose to cook things in your cafe. One of the first dishes you learn is Chips and Guacamole. It takes three minutes to cook. Three real-world minutes. So you start it cooking and you watch the little meter go down and that’s how they suck you in because you’re like “Look, it’s almost done!” and you sit around and wait.

Eventually you get some dishes that take 30 minutes to cook, or an hour, or even days. There’s a few that take like 72 hours or more to cook. And you think to yourself “This takes too long, why would I ever cook this?! I want to play RIGHT NOW.” So you cook the Chips and Guacamole until the cows come home and that’s all you serve and you don’t really level up.

But the 2-6 hour dishes…these are the real prize winners.

Generally speaking, when I start my “work day,” I line up a few different dishes. I have like 20 stoves now so I can do this, even though you start with just two. I add a couple that take a full day to cook, a couple that take 8 hours, a couple that take 6, etc. The shortest one is usually 2 hours.

Once it’s all set up, I log out of Facebook. I make a note on the clock of how long the two hour dish takes to cook and what time it will be done, and don’t return to Facebook in that time period. Each time I think I might wander over there, I tell myself “No, you can’t. Your food isn’t done cooking, so don’t go there.” So not only am I avoiding the game, but I’m also avoiding the endless black hole of links and funny pictures and status updates with it.

Throughout the evening while I work, I take breaks every 2 hours or so to check on my dishes. The 8-10 hour dish timers let me know how much time I have left in my day as a whole, and the shorter dishes tell me how long until my next break. Essentially, I’ve turned the game in to a time clock.

I know this doesn’t work for everybody, but for me it’s honestly helped increase my productivity tenfold. I no longer waste time playing stupid games and I’ve figured out how to enjoy the time I spend playing rather than hovering over pixelated food like a crack addict. Not to mention it helps remind me that I need to get up from the computer now and then, stop working, and refresh my brain a little bit.

So, that’s my dirty little secret of how I get work done. I’m a slave to Zynga games. Don’t look at me like that – I know you all have similar tricks.

Anyone care to share them?

Anyway, I have documented my message to the lovely people at Skintimate as follows, and at some prodding have decided to share it here with you all. Please to enjoy.

To the fantastic people behind the Skintimate Skin Therapy Baby Soft Shave Cream -

I wish this was a note to tell you how much I love your product. Actually, you know, it kind of is. I LOVE Skintimate shave gel. I have been using it for a Very Long Time and generally have been delighted by the product. It smells good, it feels good, and even people with dry skin like me can look as close as you can get to magazine cover models without using photoshop. When I buy shaving cream, I buy Skintimate.

Except, see, this time I decided to branch out from my usual…is it Dry Skin type? It comes in the pink bottle. Naturally, I was attracted to it because it was pink. I can’t speak for every woman becuase I know many, many women do not like being pidgeonholed with color-based gender marketing, but pink is my favorite color and I have dry skin, so it was a perfect fit.

Anyway, back to the point – for whatever reason that I cannot remember now (maybe it was the only color left and I was having some sort of Shaving Emergency?) I purchased the Baby Soft shave gel. I liked the promise of having Baby Soft skin and when it came out of the can it was the same usual shade of pink that I was accustomed to, except the SMELL. The aroma, my dear friend, was less than pleasant.

Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. It was a quite pleasant smell, it just…well, I’ll be blunt with you. I thought I had accidentally picked up a jar of Men’s Shaving Cream.

It still worked fine and felt fine and as usual my legs are looking fantastic (thank you for that, by the way) but I can’t help but notice that I smell like I just exited an Axe commercial or an Old Spice demonstration or, perhaps, a high school basketball locker room (pre-game).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are dozens – if not hundreds – of women who would love this smell, but I am not that lady. I am, in fact, one of those “typical” women that you expect would purchase your product. I like expensive things. I like pink shaving cream. And I like smelling like a bouquet of roses or a pile of kittens or unicorn poo or other delightful fancy, frilly things that we women are supposed to be smelling like.

I do NOT appreciate smelling like a man.

At any rate, I will absolutely continue to purchase Skintimate Skin Therapy Shave Cream in the future, but will likely not be purchasing the Baby Soft variety anymore. If it were at all possible to infuse the delightful scent from the Sensitive Skin formula into the Baby Soft formula, that would be much better. Or perhaps you could release a new Baby Soft variety that smells like cupcakes or daisies or anything on the opposite end of the spectrum from that Trademark Dude-Bro Man Musk scent that the current Baby Soft smell so closely resembles.

I thank you very much for your time, and thank you for creating an otherwise fabulous product, even if you do miss the mark on the scent testing once and a while.

Yours,
Manda Collis

Of course you do.

He started this thing, recently – well, not so recently I guess. It started with a television show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution where he came into American schools and attempted to get them to feed our kids better stuff. Now it’s at a new level – today, May 19, is Food Revolution Day.

I’m going to admit that I was excited to see that this was a “thing.” I’ve been trying to eat more fresh foods and more organic and more locally grown for awhile, but just didn’t have much of a grasp on it. Often times I found that those sorts of things were “too expensive” compared to “normal stuff.” It’s cheaper to buy ramen than it is to make your own pasta. That sort of thing.

So here’s something you may not know about me: I love documentaries. Love them. I like to watch them while I work, and over the past few months I’m pretty sure I’ve watched every single food-related documentary that Netflix can throw at me. And all of them said the same thing:

What we are eating is not food.

Let’s flash back a little bit. When I lived on the island, I ate a lot of Local and Fresh. I remember going to the local vegetable stand with my mom as a kid to get the veggies we would need for the week, I remember going to pick fresh strawberries. I’ve killed my own meal, pulling the fish out of the ocean and then watching my dad cook it up within hours. I worked at a restaurant that grew lots of it’s own vegetables and herbs out back. I ate fresh.

I was also slender, fit, and healthy.

Since moving up north, a lot of that has changed. I no longer need to ride my bicycle everywhere, so I drive. We have fast food restaurants and fresh fish is too hard to find and we certainly don’t have room for a garden. And I’m feeling it. I’ve gained weight, I’m sick more often, and climbing on my bicyle feels more like a chore than a reward. That isn’t how it should be.

So after watching documentary after documentary and feeling sicker and sicker all the time, knowing something had to change, I made two pledges: one, now that I’m working full time as a freelancer, I’m going to spend more time cooking. Cooking real food. No more frozen pizzas, I’m going to make my own pizza. No more hamburger helper, I’m going to cook up my own stuff.

Two, I am going to try buying more “real” food. Fresh food. Local food.

A few weeks ago, the Janesville Farmer’s Market had it’s first day of the season. And I went.

I bought asparagus first – it was big and looked so delicious, unlike the shriveled stalks at the grocery store. I bought mushrooms, fat and bright and white and they looked so good that I ate one right out of the box without cooking it. Then two more. They were amazing. A bag of spinach that I did the same thing with – ate it straight out of the bag. Like candy. I found freshly made donuts made with all local ingredients. The best donuts I’ve ever eaten.

And then I found beef.

It was by accident, a woman near me was asking for steak while I was looking at honey at the same booth. I didn’t realize they’d had ground beef, but I wanted to try it. The man sold me a pound for $6.00 – twice what we pay at Walmart – and suggested we throw a little olive oil in the pan while we cook it.

It sat in our freezer for about a week. We had other things to make, had fast food, other frozen meats from the grocery store, we just didn’t get around to it. A few days ago, we thawed it out and cooked it up.

Before we put seasoning in it to make tacos, Nick and I each tried a bite. Unseasoned, no-additives, just a half a teaspoon of olive oil to help it cook up. We both had the same reaction:

“When did I forget what beef tasted like?”

That was the eye-opening moment for me. You hear all these stories of “pink slime” in beef and watch the documentaries of all the awful things that go on at factory farms, but you don’t really think it could happen to you. You don’t really think about it. You just go to the store, you buy your meat, and you come home and cook it under a heavy helping of salt and pepper, and that’s life. You don’t need to know anything different.

I love couponing. I love saving money. But I also love being healthy, and I miss what it felt like to wake up early in the morning and ride my bike for an hour then go for a swim. I don’t want to do that anymore, and it hurts. I don’t eat fresh food. It’s taking a toll.

I’m still going to be a couponer. You can’t coupon for fresh fruits and vegetables anyway, but you can use them to get things like pasta, condiments, seasoning, whatever. Sure, some of those things might not be completely 100% super organic, but you know what? I can eat comfortably knowing that at the core of my meal is real food.

I bought three pounds of beef at the same stall at the farmer’s market today. Next week, I’ll probably buy more.  Hear me now – I will never buy beef at the grocery store again. Sure, it cost me near about $20 for three things of beef – but that beef was some of the greatest I’ve ever tasted, and maybe, just maybe, if we stop buying the crap and start buying the real stuff, the grocery stores will wake up again.

I’m happy to back Food Revolution Day. I want real food on my table, and I don’t care who knows it.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I suppose my pride started on the internet. I’m from North Carolina – more specifically, from a chain of islands off the coast of North Carolina. If you’ve been here awhile, you know this. If not, well, now you know. At any rate – I never often found other people from North Carolina on the internet. It just didn’t happen. In recent years I’ve heard of quite a few more people who live there, but still not nearly as many as I’ve met who live…say, up north. I guess because most people were too busy out working the farm or surfing or being hippies to use the internet. I don’t know.

A few months ago, Hurricane Irene hit. I lost contact with my family for 24 hours completely because a crucial strip of road that carried the electricity and phone lines to my parents island – which is only accessible by ferry – got washed out. No…this wasn’t a normal road wash out. A new inlet was cut through the sand. It took roads, electric poles, and parts of homes with it. For 24 hours, I was paralyzed with fear that I would never talk to my parents again.

When the lines came back up and the photos came in, it was terrible. Friends of mine were cleaning out their entire lives from their homes that had been flooded. Places I had played as a child were completely destroyed. My family was fine, of course, but one thing struck me – while all this was happening, the news was focused on New York. New Jersey. When they did get back to North Carolina, they skimmed over it and didn’t mention them at all. I begged, pleaded, sobbed at the television to show me something familiar. To show me home. To show people what had happened.

But they didn’t.

Now, it’s all eyes on us.

I still don’t consider myself a Wisconsin resident. I don’t know if I ever will. I’ve lived here for nearly two years and still carry my North Carolina ID, and it’s going to break my heart to turn it in when we move in a few weeks to get a Wisconsin license. I’ll probably be here for years more telling people “no, I’m from North Carolina.” They have my heart. My family is there. It’s Where I’m From.

Yesterday this amendment passed that…to be honest, I’m not surprised that it did so much as disappointed. It was being publicized as the “gay marriage amendment” – basically, that it would officially once-and-for-all state that marriage is between a man and a woman. Except it did worse.

It also took away the rights of long-term couples who aren’t married. Any kind of civil union or domestic partnership. It’s going to make life dangerous and uncomfortable for a lot of women in abusive relationships with men who are not their husband. It’s a very scary bill.

And it sucks, yes. But here’s what sucks more – the hate that followed.

It’s been very hard for me to be online since last night. The hatred, the animosity that’s been flowing in. People constantly talking about how bad North Carolina is as a whole, and how bad everyone there must be. Making jokes about how redneck and backwards our state is. And worse – threatening to boycott the state by not coming to vacation there.

Let me tell you a few things.

First and foremost – I have traveled the entire state of North Carolina. I know many people can’t say that about where they live, but I have. I’ve been up and down the whole coast, to the built-up city beaches of Emerald Isle to the homes built in the sand accessible only by 4-wheel drive in Carova. I’ve been so far west, through the mountains and the Nanthahalla Pass, that you could throw a stone and it’d land in Tennessee. I’ve been to the rolling hills of the Piedmont, to the wealthy cities (and less fortunate suburbs) of the Triangle, to Greensboro, to Charlotte, to Greenville, to Boone, to Ahoskie, to Kinston – I have seen North Carolina.

And, yes – we can be a little old school.

What saddens me is that when people stop to say how backwards our state is and how redneck or boondocks they don’t look at the larger problem. I have met a lot of people who genuinely believe that everything they see on the news is True. That means that if the news tells them that this amendment is going to protect families and if it isn’t passed that everyone is going to hell, yes, a lot of people are going to believe that. But that isn’t their fault. That doesn’t make them bigots. That makes them ill informed, and we need to work to inform these people better.

I will say it here and now: I did not realize that the news could lie to you until I moved to Wisconsin.

I didn’t. I just didn’t. I didn’t know why people hated Fox News so much, I didn’t know why the news was bad. Then I moved up here. I took part in a protest. And I watched them tear us apart on the news and straight up lie.

Meanwhile, people back home didn’t understand why I was at the protest  - because they genuinely believed everything they saw on TV.

That is the real problem here. North Carolina is full of a lot of really great, really genuinely nice people. Many of them – maybe not the full 60% of voters who voted in favor of amendment one, but I’m going to guess a huge chunk – are just ill informed. I’m willing to bet that a ton of common law married couples or civil unions with straight folks voted to take away their own rights on top of gay marriage rights, without even realizing what they did.

We need to EDUCATE, not hate.

Lastly – to those of you that wish to boycott, STOP. Please. Yes, the North Carolina government relies heavily on tourism tax dollars. But you know who else does?

My parents, who work for vacation rental homes. If you don’t come on vacation, they are out of work. They cannot pay their bills. They cannot feed my cat, which would make me really sad.

My friends Ruth and Bob who own a restaurant on the tiny island of Ocracoke. The restaurant is only open from March to October. If you don’t come, they cannot survive for the winter.

If the rental homes do not get business, the restaurants will suffer. If the restaurants suffer, the local fishermen suffer. Eventually they’ll all have to pack up and move up somewhere else – bringing the pacifists, the hippies, the bigots, the liberals, the republicans, the democrats - EVERYBODY with them.

You aren’t going to be telling the government that they suck. The governmetn didn’t do this. A bunch of ill-informed people did this. A bunch of people who can be educated, who can be brought to see the light, who can be talked to and encouraged.

But you won’t be hurting the government. You’ll be hurting my parents. My friends. My cat. People who did nothing wrong – and many, many people who were even against Amendment One. In the days leading up to the vote on Facebook, I saw nothing but “VOTE AGAINST” messages from my friends. Good people are out there – they just didn’t win this time.

Think before you speak. This is my home. A lot of people made a really bad decision –  I said it before, and I’ll say it again: Say what you want about the bad decisions, the politicians, the people who are genuinely bigots – but please don’t hate on my home state. North Carolina will always have my heart, and if I know North Carolinians the way I do – I can tell you that they aren’t going to take this laying down. We aren’t going to settle without a fight.

Vault 713  is an un-official Harry Potter role playing game that has been running since 2001. It is hosted on a phpBB3 forum and allows players to create unique characters to explore the wizarding world.

Manda has been the chief administrator of the site since 2003 and is responsible for it’s development and marketing. Manda also created it’s unique phpBB3 style as a custom design for the forum.

Charisma Bonus  is geek-centric, female-written blog dedicated to discussing and reviewing role playing games and other traditional gaming activities, as well as industry interviews.

Manda is the primary writer for this site and also developed the concept and Charisma Bonus logo. She is solely responsible for marketing the website via social media and monitoring it’s internet presence.

Three Pixel Pushers is a blog dedicated to reporting the wits, advice, and design-driven sanity of three young women working in the design industry: Bri the Web Designer & Developer, Nda the Graphic Designer, and Manda the Freelancer & Social Media Consultant.

Manda developed the concept for this site and also participates as a regular writer on the three-woman team. She also is largely responsible for establishing 3PP’s internet presence through social media.

Growing up on the Outer Banks, you couldn’t help but hear about the Ash Wednesday Storm. Sure, there have been lots of storms over the years worth shaking a stick at, but that one stood out among the rest. It’s the one people remember. The one they warn you about. The cautionary tale.

The other thing that people don’t know about coastal living is that not every bad storm is a hurricane, and not every hurricane is a bad storm. They don’t know how bad it can get on just a normal day.

“You’re not going out,” my dad might tell me. Or he might warn me against staying at a friend’s house on one of the neighboring islands, places where they’d block off the bridges if the wind got too bad.

“There’s a nor’easter comin’.”

Nor’easter. Most people up here, I’ve found, don’t even know what that is.

Sure, okay, the concept is easy enough. A storm from the North-East! Oooh! Spooky!

No. It’s more than that.

If I’m talking with friends up here and I mention I’ve been through hurricanes, the first thing anyone goes to is Katrina. They either think that nothing I have gone through could ever be as bad as that terrible, tragic storm, or they assume that’s normal for hurricanes. An astonishing number of people don’t realize just how frequent hurricanes are.

When Irene hit, I talked with a friend of mine who was scared that it was going to come her way. She lived up north. She was also scared that behind it was another storm forming. She was suddenly enlightened to the turmoil of the mid-Atlantic. I grew up tracking hurricanes, I know to expect four or five every year, more on a bad season. She had no idea. No idea that the average per year is eleven, though of course not all of those make landfall.

So when I talk to people about hurricanes, they’re terrified. When I tell them we worry more about Nor’Easters than hurricanes, they laugh. Nothing is worse than a hurricane, I’ve been told. Did a nor’easter cause Katrina? 

Well, no. But nothing caused Katrina. Katrina caused damage. It doesn’t work like that.

Back home if you mention hurricanes everyone laughs and asks which one and will tell you an anecdote from their favorite party or that time they had to bunker down with a neighbor.

If you ask about Nor’Easters, it’s solemn faces.

Then they mention the Ash Wednesday Storm.

You have probably never heard of the Ash Wednesday Storm. That’s okay. The problem with oral history is that it is lost to people who can never hear it. I mean, it’s recorded, it’s been written down, and it only happened in 1962 so it wasn’t a dark era of media blackout or something, but most people just haven’t heard of it.

Which means that most people have never heard of the crazy amounts of damage and flooding that occurred. They’ve never heard that there were 40 fatalities across several states. They’ve never seen the pictures like this one or this one.

And, of course, they have never heard of a Nor’Easter.

A local news website from back home described the storm as a “yardstick against which all other storms are measured.” It’s true. Hurricanes, Nor’Easters, it makes no difference. It was one of the most devastating storms in Outer Banks history, of course we’d remember it. Even since moving up here I’ve seen photographs of things that have happened during other hurricanes and muttered to someone “Well it’s not as bad as the Ash Wednesday storm, that one was bad.”

I wasn’t there. My family wasn’t there. None of my friends were.

But the people who were have passed down these stories. They have saved the photographs, they have written books, they have told us. They have warned us. We are still able to know what happened because of the word of those who were there.

The sea is a strange, powerful, beautiful, dangerous thing. It can create where there was nothing, it can destroy everything. And it can be a beautiful scene. It creates stories.

If it interests you, I suggest you read up about the Ash Wednesday Storm. Learn a story that you, yourself can tell someone one day. To some, it’s almost an old wives tale or a folk story – but I assure you, it was very, very real.

A storm can be devastating without being a hurricane – and a story can be powerful without being wide spread or etched in stone. These stories are a part of me. Without being there, without my family being there, without ever having to cower in fear or wonder if my home would make it through the night – they are a part of me.

Your stories make you. The stories of those around you make you.

It’s up to you to pass them on.

Admittedly, a lot of those things have gone over my head.

Until recent years, a concept that I am still having trouble grasping never really occurred to me an refused to make sense in my head: the idea that I am different because I am female.

As a younger child, I lived on a farm. I had an older half-brother and half-sister who occasionally were around in short bursts, but a lot of my childhood playtime was spent solo. We had pigs and sheep and goats and I would run around outdoors playing with the animals, getting dirty. We also didn’t have a lot of money,  so I might have fortunately missed out on being overloaded with “girly” toys, and though I’d love watching the Disney princesses it never occurred to me that I was supposed to be “getting something” out of those movies. I never wanted to be a princess. I recall very distinctly my parents leaving me at home alone when I was probably a bit too young to be home alone and they’d plopped me in front of the TV and the VHS player. I could operate it on my own at this point and they’d put Cinderella in for me and told me “We’ll be back before the movie is over.”

As soon as they left, I popped the tape out, and wrote what I thought at the time was “DISNEY WORLD” on the tape’s label in hopes to change the movie into a video of the most magical place on earth, rather than some boring princess.⁽¹⁾

My brother liked to build things and take things apart and as he got older he worked on cars. When he visited we would go fishing in the pond out back or play Duck Hunt on his Nintendo. My sister loved horses so when we visited her at her moms, that’s what I did. If I ever played dress-up as a kid and it didn’t involve some elaborate theatrical outfit, I don’t remember it.  When McDonalds asked me if I wanted a girl toy or a boy toy, my mom would lie and say “boy toy” and I loved it. I preferred the Hot Wheels to the Barbies, anyway.

I learned to read at a young age. My mother would fall asleep reading books to me as a kid and I’d have to finish the story on my own, and we only had so many books to read in the first place so I may have had them all memorized at some point. From my sister I received a ton of hand-me-down chapter books and poured over those as soon as I could understand them. A lot of them were Sweet Valley High. The ones I actually read were the Baby Sitter’s Club. I loved Kristy and Claudia and Mary Anne and Dawn and as far as strong female role models go, I think they were pretty good ones.

We didn’t live on the farm long. I moved away from there at the end of the First Grade, leaving behind my two best friends. One was a boy, one was a girl. We moved to the beach in North Carolina and I had to make new friends all over again and do new things and have new hobbies. I hated it.

The thing about the beach is that our culture exists a little bit in a bubble. I’ve been living up north for a few years now and am still having a hard time grasping the concept of Midwest fashion, because the things that we used to laugh at people for wearing back home are actually considered stylish here. You don’t go out in an oversized surf brand hoodie, that would just be wrong.

My childhood best friends lived on the edge of a wood, a place where the trees are all torn down now and the houses are built and the last hurricane wiped out the dock we used to run on. Their mother always made us go play outside. My mother hated me playing outside. At home, I would read books and make arts and crafts and watch Disney movies, and while I was at my friends we would build elaborate forts for our barbies outside or pretend like we were cheerleaders outside or run and get dirty in the mud outside. No summer was complete without at least one big water gun fight, usually against the boys down the street. Often we would come in covered in mud or dirt from whatever the day’s adventures had been.

When you have all this beautiful nature at your disposal….you don’t just ignore it. Even as we were running and jumping in the woods, we weren’t the only girls getting dirty. We would ride our bikes around the neighborhood and see our friends doing the same thing. Girls just like us were across the island learning to surf, swimming, rolling down hills of sand, exploring. The popular girls in our school weren’t popular just because they were the prettiest – they also were strong surfers, loved camping, loved hiking. The homecoming dance was never a big thing in high school, maybe because the girls back home just didn’t enjoy getting dolled up as much as they do up here in the Midwest. Who knows.

My best friends in High School were, by and large, boys. I would hang out with a group of boys and eventually end up dating one of them and we’d all have been friends to begin with, so often I was the only girl. Whenever we dressed up in costume for spirit days, I often chose boy’s costumes. One year I dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean (at this point there was only the one film out) but my costume was entirely in the school’s colors. I walked at the very front of the homecoming parade. I was the captain of our school’s Quiz Bowl team, an activity that – aside from our school’s largely female team – usually featured a squad of mostly males.

When I graduated and finally moved out of my parent’s house, I moved in with some of those same high school friends. Six boys in one house, and then me. I got the biggest bedroom.  One of the jobs I held was as a delivery driver where most of the employees were male, and I was female.

Maybe it’s because of this, because I grew up with boys and doing what boys did and nobody ever told me that I couldn’t do those things because I was a girl. I have been told I could not do things because I was white⁽²⁾ or because I was short or too old or too young or because I wear glasses, but I have never been told I cannot do something because I am female. I have never been told that I will have to have special treatment because I am a woman or that I won’t be able to fully receive all the things due me because I am a girl.

And yet, I realize this is not the case for every woman, it’s just something that I personally have never dealt with, so I have a hard time with it. I’m not going to lie to you. The concept of people tearing down others or denying others privileges or whatever because of their gender is something I have a very hard time grasping because I’ve never dealt with it personally. I grew up in a gender-neutral bubble. Somehow, in the deep south, where we didn’t have many LGBT folks running around openly and women are often still expected to do housewife-y things, I was in a bubble where nobody cared if I was male or female. And it was awesome.

The thing is, I have never been proud to be a woman. I have never been ashamed to be a woman. To me, for my whole life, my gender has been little more than a box I check on a form. 

I regret that more girls couldn’t grow up the way I did. That more women couldn’t be readily considered “one of the guys” like I was. If it were up to me, it would be a bubble that encompassed the whole world, not just a select few. Because up in till recently – and this is the honest truth – I didn’t realize that not all girls were like me. I didn’t realize that many women are still being treated unjustly or other people still believe that women don’t have the right to choose for themselves.

So, to the women who I may have offended or spoken too lightly to or not leveled with in the past – this is my humble apology. Not everyone is one of the lucky ones, and these issues that we are facing as a group, as a gender, these are issues we all face. You have probably had it worse than me, and for that, I wish I could do everything in the world to fix it. I wish we could have been friends as children and I could let you in to my group, I wish you could meet the men in my life who have been nothing but kind to me. Because not all men are terrible and not everyone is out to oppress us. Okay, sure, it may feel that way sometimes – but they aren’t.

There is light out there. I did not share this story to brag or to boast or to say that there are no wrongs in this world – I shared this story so that it may give you a sense of hope. If I can go 24 years without anyone personally telling me I cannot do something because I am a female, then there is hope yet that we have a future as a society that looks past gender norms and bullying.

To the ladies out there who are struggling, who are going through the hard stuff that I never had to – I raise my Nerf gun in salute. I am at your side, for better or worse – we are fighting this together.

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^{1. As I would learn later on in life, the label actually had a squiggle that looked something like “~” on it. No wonder this didn’t work.}

2. I attended an all-black college for a brief period of time. This was also my only period of time living in an all-girl housing arrangement, incidentally, and I hated it. Anyway, I was told I couldn’t participate int he school play because I was white – it was a play about black women.