Some Girls Are

You know, I wish I had something awful witty and hip to blog about (are the kids still saying 'hip' these days?).

As you can imagine by reading my opening line, no such luck. Incoming: I have two massive earaches, one in each ear. Stuffy, hurting, voila. Even as I write this, I wonder where it (said topic-less blog post) is going. Let it ruminate. This is dangerously becoming a rant about my ears, both of them, but if you look below to the stomach flu post, I've already filled my Why me, Why me! quota for the month. So, let me think s'more. Well, mostly, I've been reading a lot lately, trying to get to the finish line of my Goodreads challenge as quickly as I can. I just hit 25 out of 50 books for the year, which is sad, but last semester was a doozy - just not time for reading. Are the kids still saying 'doozy' these says? I digress.

Oh, but now that I think about it, something irked me in a book I read today called Nature of Jade by Deb Caletti. It was just okay, a little blah, a little boring. It was just okay; mixed feelings, really, and I had to slug through parts - at times, chipping the nail polish of my fingernails was more fetching. So one of the characters in this mediocre novel, Jenna, recently goes to Bible Camp and becomes a Christian. And, all of a sudden, she can't stand to be around anyone who uses the word God out of context or uses foul language. And I get it, I do, especially for a new Christian - it's like, "I AM ON FIRE!" for God and his causes. It's not so much that she does these things, per se, than the way Caletti writes Jenna. Jenna is a stick in the mud, chafes at anything that doesn't have WWJD scrawled across it. And I'm just like, I hate when people do this, assume because Jenna doesn't curse or party or drink that she's got to be written as an uncompromising shrewd.

And not even just the way religious girls are portrayed in media. But in another book I read yesterday, Some Girls Are, the Queen Bee of the bunch Anna is an unrelenting harpy out to ruin the lives of unpopular students. Life isn't cut-and-dry like that -- people are not cut-and-dry like that. They are not all they appear to be; on fire for Jesus or queen of the school. There's a story behind everything somebody does. They are not simply mean or simply nice. I don't like curse words or God out of context and I don't party, but, at the same time, I'm not the Christian Police, especially to people who believe other things. In a book spewing how misguided that stereotypes are, Caletti wrote Jenna as an extremely stereotypical Christian teenager. Pious, annoying. To be fair, she wrote that way about the cheerleader too. Come on, cheerleaders need love.

It wasn't about that Jenna was Christian or that Anna was popular. It was about that they were not given any kind of chance to show the reader that, yes, sometimes we can be like this, but, no, we are not who you think we are.

Toodle Pip.