Agreeing to Disagree

Is it just me, or is disagreeing with your parents one of the hardest things to do? (As an adult, of course. For some reason this was real easy when I was a teen).

Maybe my situation is a little different for two reasons- 1) My mom is my best friend and 2) My mom happens to be a fellow MPDG, which means our personalities work REALLY WELL together when we agree, but it's borderline NATIONAL DISASTER when we don't.

Wait a minute, I thought you said it was one of the hardest things to disagree with your parents. How do you know what it's like to not get along? Easy. We have tiffs. We argue and get mad at each other. Not a lot, but it happens, and it happens on a major scale. What I mean by disagreeing in THIS scenario- major situations. Like telling your father you want to move out, or telling your mother you want to study in Costa Rica, telling your father you're getting (read: got) a tattoo, or telling your mom that you disagree with her on a very specific (and equally big) decision/situation/event.

All of those are real scenarios for me, by the way. I survived them (all but the first- my mom did it for me. Hey, I was 16, give me a break), and I actually survived the last as well. Barely. Did I cry afterwards? No. Did I want to? Absolutely.

One of the unfortunate side effects (we really need to think more of the positive ones on this site, don't you think?) of being an MPDG is that you will have people in your life who disagree with you. You will have people in your life tell you that your ideas are unrealistic, unattainable, or just wrong. You're married now. You can't travel. or how about You can't quit your full time job to go back to school. How will you live?. I've heard both, although I have yet to do either, both are still on my list. Thankfully, however (here's the positive side!) as an MPDG we have some form of confidence, and therefore we can hopefully deal with these people without killing our dreams or ideas. It's just a matter of how to do it, and it is, unfortunately, rather frightening to do so at times.

So how do we do it, you ask? Depends on the situation. In my case, I just brought it up, mentioned that I had talked it over with someone whose opinion I knew she would consider, and told her that I was thinking ......... (enter completely specific decision here. I'd honestly explain it to you, but do you have a few hours? Because it would take that long.) Be gentle. It's almost always a good thing to have sources, have your reasons in order, and maybe even mention that you thought about certain points for the alternative and why they didn't sway your vote.

Life is tough, and this is not an advice collumn. This is just my brain thinking that maybe I'm not as alone in this as I think I am. Maybe someone who shares my pain doesn't know that they aren't alone. Does any of that make sense? I hope so.

Awesome Pop (Soda) Substitute

Here's a quick little post, inspired by some awesome people.

I don't normally drink pop, but I don't have the time to keep making tea (or coffee) or buy it, and water is just blah. Juice is supposed to be bad for you (sugar, anyone?), and milk is just not the best option if you have to be at work all day (yuck... no thanks).

So what's an MPDG to do?

Sparkling (Carbonated) water mixed with juice. You can choose all different varieties of water and juice to have an infinite amount of possibilities!!!!!

Personal favorite - peach mango orange juice with tropical fruit flavored sparkling water. Or maybe the papaya juice and... well, now I don't remember, but I'm thinking peach sparkling water. Either way, it's really good stuff. It tastes better than water, but doesn't have all the sugar that plain juice has. It has fruit (if you get the right juice), and for the soda kick- your carbonation (but not as much as pop). :)

You just can't go wrong with it. I promise.

PAX East, or Being a Girl Gamer

PAX East is a huge gaming convention. It is the East coast version of PAX. At PAX, everyone knows what PAX is. At PAX, pokewalkers are the must-have accessory and people dress up like this guy and people like Wesley Crusher deliver the keynote.

I've spent the last week lurking at the Enforcer forums- (I was an Enforcer, one of the volunteers)- lurking, harvesting pictures and videos, trying to relive it. I spent two days fully immersed in gamer culture, and the world outside of it is suddenly that much harder to take.

No matter what you liked, there was someone else there who liked it too, and probably was dressed up like them. You were not weird.

A lot of being a manic pixie dream girl is the fact that we are weird. Most of the world sees us as strange, buzzy, wonderful creatures, but strange. Always strange. So entertaining, so enlightening, in our strangeness. We are Other. We are not like Them.

Come to PAX. We are like them. We are all strange and wonderful.

I miss it.

I don't have much else to say, so I'll steal from Mr. Crusher:

"I was completely exhausted by the end of the day on Sunday - but not sick! HA! HA! I WIN AT NOT GETTING SICK AT PAX! - and as I sat on my bed in the hotel, zoning out at something stupid on television while my HP and Manna bars slowly climbed out of the red, I began to feel a familiar sense of ennui. I feel this way every time a PAX is over: a sense of sadness and loss that I've never really been able to identify more eloquently than "post-PAX blues." A fellow PAX attendee e-mailed me this morning, though, and summed up the feeling in one word: Homesickness. I'm home, yet I feel homesick. I know that may sound weird, but it perfectly sums up how I feel today."