Letter To 15 Year Old Frank: It Gets Better

I was inspired by the recent "It Gets Better Project" (and a writing prompt from my special Cali friend); it's not just for LGBT crowd anymore.  Even the president of the United States has gotten in on the project.





Having said that, due respect goes out to all members of the LGBT communities for the layer of complexity added to their lives by simply being who they are; and admiration to the young generation who are brave enough to open the closet door and step out.


In the spirit of recognizing that youth and young adulthood, whether LGBT or not, is packed with pain, rejection and hardships, I have prepared a message to myself as an example of "It Gets Better".

Dear "Future Frank",

Guess what?  You're gonna need to brace yourself for the next 10 years of your life. But before I let you in on some highlights I want to tell you this: Don't change a thing, even with the knowledge you are about to partake.   

Why, you ask? (I know you're asking why, you always have and you'll always be a questions asker) 

You need to experience everything you are about to experience to become the strong, independent, dynamic, nutty woman you will become (because you will, trust me, you have no idea!)

I'd love to tell you the next 10 years will be easy.  They won't; however, they'll be fun, exciting, frustrating, sad, challenging...physically and mentally painful even; these are all requirements of growth.

I know your thinking you've already experienced enough pain in the past 15 years.  I know the pain, I also know that that pain was also essential in your growth.

So, what's up for the next 10 years you ask?   

Well... 

- To start, that guy you have a mad crush on right now.  Let him go.  (You will and you do).  Be aware he will reappear in your life many years later and be the catalyst to making a difficult life decision, and be a huge inspiration in the revival of your writing. Even though he'll remain a complete arse.

- You're gonna live in lot's of different places (even Canada one day!), at many different addresses, with all sorts of different people.  You'll learn from every single one of them. You'll lose contact with many. It's what happens.

- One day you'll find a place you love, full of people you love, and you'll never want to leave them - but first you must follow your wandering heart to wherever it takes you. You'll make it here. They're waiting. P.S. Your best friend (Ninja Princess)is going to be a rockin', strong and independent female influence who will be an essential guide to fashion, dating and what it means to be a best friend.

- You're going to have no money...for a really long time, don't think of this as bad.  Without the lack of money you'll have no real appreciation for what's coming your way. (You're gonna be able to travel for vacations one day. You're gonna see beaches! You're even gonna make it to Europe and Africa!!)

- Your going to marry a man you know is wrong for you. You will cry on your wedding day when you say "I do" and it won't be because you know you've made a right decision. You'll learn that even wrong decisions can turn out to be the right ones, if only for the learning experiences that will become important to becoming the future you (you'll also learn stuff about wrong ones.) Don't worry, you won't be married long.

- You'll have some crazy jobs, like assembling snowmobiles, being a janitor in a porn store, selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door-to-door and operating rides in an amusement park - you'll even own your own business. That's just a short list.  Like places of residency, you will have many many jobs. One day you will find your passion in a surprising and accidental way, and you will have the career you never knew you wanted, and work with people you never imagined. You'll meet and work with people who are fantastic, kind and keep you centered. You're gonna love it.

- You'll meet a man who will shape your idea of people, communication, relationships and sexuality.  He will teach you patience, he will teach you that you are fabulous, he will love you for the part of you that will never change. You'll have to let him go.  It will be painful for awhile but he will be in your life in some facet for many years after. He will be the single most life changing person you will meet in the next 10 years.

- You're gonna get fatter (but let's precurse this by saying, currently, at 15, YOU ARE NOT FAT - I know you think you are).  A lot fatter.  But then you'll lose it all.  Fast.  And it will change life as you know it. You will become more beautiful, inside and out, than you can imagine.  You will love yourself, more than you can imagine you could. Don't let it go to your head to much though. You'll have problems with that sometimes. Stay grounded.

- You'll be in a psychologically and physiologically changing car accident. I'll be honest, you're gonna break stuff (for the first time in your life). It will impact the rest of your life, in good ways and in bad ways.  This accident will be the event that turns you into "Frank"; you'll learn that life is too short, that it can literally be taken from you in the blink of an eye; you'll have a near uncontrollable urge to be unabashedly you, to be honest with people whenever and however you can be. This may cause problems sometimes, but mostly it's good and it's going to be what makes you happiest.

Once you turn 25 life get's a little better and keeps getting better. I'm not saying it's all parades and roses now though, but It Gets Better - keep that close to your heart. Stay true to yourself, "Future Frank.  And don't forget, your family will always be there for you, the blood family and the one you create when your heart finds home.

Love, Yourself 

P.S. Your motto as a 31 year old female? No Regrets.  

And now for something completely different or ... a blog of a different colour.

As I stood in the shower contemplating the political "warfare" waging over House and Senate control in the States last night as the days poles were closing, and weighing the implecations of Republican control, I was struck my an analogy that I just had to share. It's a pretty loose analogy, so hang on.


I have not been paying much attention to the election and it's candidates, not since BP plugged the oil geyser in the Gulf this past summer. The shift from that disaster to the mid-term election disaster, with it's constant back-talking, back-stabbing, back-stroking, propaganda-pumping, paranoia-feeding media spew of the opposing political parties, got to be too much; I also canceled my cable. Turns out I got a lot of my news and current events from cable, mostly John Stewart's The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report, and though I still maintain my level of Rachel Maddow worship, I've been too busy, even for Rachel:(

People (okay, Americans) complain about Obama, about what he has or hasn't accomplished, whether those things are good accomplishments or bad; and so this midterm election they were hell bent on calling in the reinforcements (a.k.a. Republicans) to save the proverbial day.


When it comes down to it they gave Obama 2 years, of his 4 year term, to turn things on it's head, and if we're honest they didn't even give him 6 months until they started vomiting their crap through the airwaves. Meanwhile they afforded Bush 8 years of destruction, and I bet they'd love to have him back, but I digress.


The funniest part about this is I am going to provide a sports analogy. Seeing as how I have a slight (Ha!) detest for sports, this amazed me last night as I shampooed my hair, that I would use sports concepts for anything. I guess constant exposure leads to osmosis.


Anyway, the panic that most Americans appear to be expressing (at least from what I've gleaned from FB, Twitter and a very short list of articles over the past few months) is akin to panicking halfway through the 2nd quarter of "the big game", when your coach (your country), who has no confidence in your ability to "win the game", therefore sends in re-enforcements. By the way, my mental picture of these re-enforcements are like flying monkeys being sent out the castle tower by the Wicked Witch of The West in the Wizard of Oz, but that's just me.  And never mind the implications of the Wicked West. What?

The sport analogy makes no sense on certain levels, I'll poke it with a stick till it's dead because the implication that Americans are a team at all seems laughable to me. After all, are Republicans and Democrats really on the same team?  I mean they may be on the same team as a country, but it's a country divided.  Pretty much always has been as far as I can tell. That's why I don't live there anymore...well, one of them anyway.


The problem is that they'll never know what the outcome of the game could have been, if they'd just given Obama a chance to play till the end.  I have a strong feeling that now that there is some (okay, a lot of) Republican pull, anything that happens, regardless if it was on Obamas agenda in the first place, regardless if the outcome had been the same with a Democratic controlled House and Senate, as opposed to a new Republican-heavy rule, will just end up in the credit of the Republicans.  Much like Bushes fuck-ups ended up in the lap of the Democrats at the end of his eight year tyranny.  Don't think it's tyranny?  You clearly weren't paying attention or don't know the meaning of 'tyrant".


My main point?  Do I have one? Oh yeah. People yell for change, but they can't handle the change (or is that the truth?).  They get to half-time and freak right out, calling for the monkeys to fly in to save the day, but in the end the monkeys were what shit all over everything anyway.  But that's my opinion.


P.S. For those of you following my blog for the juicy "man-hating" (I don't hate men), single-girl, on-line dating stories; I apologize.  A girl needs to broaden her horizons...AND needs a date. :)

Does Effort = Reward?

As I was reading my first blog/opinion piece of the day, written by William Galston - a blogger at The New Republic; I stumbled across a sentence near the end that got me thinking. The piece was about President Obama and the job market, but the portion of the sentence in the article that caught my attention was how he thinks the President should be: ”restoring the belief that there is some relation between effort and reward”[1]. When lifted from the actual context of the article I began to think of how unrealistic this idea is.


While beautiful and flowery on the outside, when I opened up the effort=reward box on a few topic points I began to realize it only works for a percentage of people from topic to topic.


Malcolm Gladwell might well refer to this percentage as ‘outliers’, a statistical measurement of phenomenon that lies outside the norm. Externally an ‘outlier’ looks like effort=reward, Gladwell claims[2]; but when studied it’s clear (and frusterating) to see that effort=reward is only part of the dream.


Effort=Reward Points. Certainly there are more categories that can be discussed but I chose these as my top four.


Education – this hardly needs to be explained. The effort=reward falls flat when you look at the employment rates among educated peoples throughout history, and while certainly education helps one get a job, it’s not necessarily the job they got educated/trained for. Many MANY of those people put effort into an education in order to receive an expected reward – a reward that sometimes goes to the bosses sons best friend. It’s all who you know. There are countless stories about losing out on a job because the employer went with someone-that-someone knows.


Employment - certainly I will leave this topic to you. Read the news – particularly the piece I read as my first blog/opinion piece of the day. That one is clearly not hard to figure out. These days just having a job can be viewed as a reward. Even ON the job, effort does not always equal reward. Some of the hardest working people are the lowest paid. How does that equal a reward?


Sports – think about all the effort that athletic children put into sports. Dedicating their young lives, in some cases, to nothing more than sports. First, all the effort in the world isn’t going to equal squat if the person has no real skills at the sport. But let’s say they do have skill – how many high schools are there in the world? How many top athletes? How many make it big because of sports? How many Canadian boys are raised breathing, eating and sleeping hockey and can actually turn that effort into the reward of being a pro player?


Relationships – does putting effort into a relationship equal reward? In a time when 40% of marriages end in divorce [3] it’s not really hard to figure out. Despite the combined effort of forming a relationship that theoretically lasts a lifetime, the reward is only temporarily tangible in nearly 50% of the cases. For a couple, reward lays heavily on both persons effort, but what about when one of them decides the efforts not worth it anymore? The person who is still exerting the effort loses the reward.


This is not to say one shouldn’t put in the effort but maybe, in some cases, lower the expectations for reward; it would make for a happier world if we were realistic. Or redefine the idea of reward, as my friend [name removed for privacy] says:

“I think it’s best to expect nothing from effort – except the lessons learned from the results, whatever they may be. These lessons then become rewards in themselves. Anything else achieved is a bonus”

People are raised to believe that the United States is the place to achieve the American Dream, certainly the ideal American Dream is where effort=reward every time. That’s the dream. You work hard enough and you’ll have the world in your hands.


So, all this from me because I don’t agree with William Galston of the New Republic that President Obama should be “restoring the belief that there is some relation between effort and reward”; certainly there is “some” but being realistic should be more important, false hope is not needed. And it’s really not his responsibility.


I’d love to hear opinions: Is expecting a relation between effort and reward realistic, or idealistic?
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References:
1. Galston, William. How Bad Is It Really for the Unemployed? My ‘Aha’ Moment. The New Republic. 25 May 2010.
2. Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers. 18 November 2008.
3. Sratling, Cassandra. Blended families can overcome daunting odds. Burlington, Vermont: Burlington Free Press. pp. 9A. 9 June 2009.