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6.09.2011

Peppermint Tea

I have recently found the most delicious thing in existence is peppermint tea.
And the only way it can get any better is if you ice it. Yes. Peppermint iced tea is God's gift to humanity. It's such a life saver on these hot days. It's really fresh and has zero calories. A nice change from water, for sure.

I use Tazo Refresh tea and just brew up a big batch and put it in the fridge. Yum!

It's been super hot here lately. I really want to go to the beach and just soak up some vitamin D, but my life is just not having it.

Well, that's all I've got for now. There's not terribly much interesting happening at the moment. So if it's as hot wherever you are as it is here, keep cool!

6.04.2011

"Books are, at their heart, dangerous."

I was, am, and always will be an avid reader. And as a teenager, I got my hands on some books that my parents would probably kill me for reading. There were books that used foul language and had sexually graphic scenes and violently graphic scenes. My parents would not have wanted me to read those. They probably wouldn't want me to read them now, even though I'm an adult.

So here's the thing: parents don't always know what's right for their children. Were the books I read risqué? Yes. Some of them. Did I suffer because I read them? Get horrible terrible ideas? Lose my innocence? NO.

There are many parents (always have been, always will be) who think that they are somehow doing their children a favor, sparing them, by denying them access to the most crucial of literature. No, I'm not talking Dickens or Chaucer--I'm talking about young-adult fiction.

I was, and still am, an avid reader of YA fiction. I love it. Can't get enough. Sometimes I have to read "grown-up" books for my literature classes and I find them boring, unrelateable. But hand me some Libba Bray, some Ann Brashares, and I'm in heaven. Not because they don't challenge me, but because they do.

I've recently read an article basically calling absolutely all YA fiction absolute garbage that promotes violence, sex, and vulgar language because YA fiction is starting to deal with hard-hitting topics that are affecting todays teens. Parents are saying that their children shouldn't read these books because they will get ideas and go have sex and become depressed and lose their innocence.

I'm saddened. I understand that parents want to protect their children. But at what point have you stopped protecting them and started harming them by not allowing them to see reality? How harmful is it to stop your child from reading a book about something they've experienced, telling them (through those actions), that their feelings aren't valid?

I went through a lot of things as a teenager that I wouldn't have dared to tell my parents about. They didn't know about the heartbreaks, the self-harming thoughts, and the voicelessness I felt. How could I have told them? The only place I ever found solace was in books. If my parents had taken my books away and replaced them with, I don't know, "Cindy Loo-Who Talks to God about Puppies and Kittens", I'd have been devastated.

Certainly parents have an obligation to watch what their child is doing (WITHIN REASON)--letting your 10 year-old read sexually explicit novels is probably not a good idea (though my parents once bought me a romance novel when I was 10 or 11 that had some pret-ty racy stuff in it, and it by no means did me any harm). But at a certain point, you have to TRUST YOUR CHILD to know what they can and cannot handle. You have to TRUST that they're making good decisions (even if they aren't ones that you agree with).

I can't sum it up any better than Libba Bray (one of my favorite authors):
"[...] I genuinely believe that these articles are hurtful, that they goad banners & keep much-needed books out of the hands of the teens who should be reading them. Books are, at their heart, dangerous. Yes, dangerous. Because they challenge us: our prejudices, our blind spots. They open us to new ideas, new ways of seeing. They make us hurt in all the right ways. They can push down the barricades of "them" & widen the circle of "us". And when one feels alone--say, because of a terrible burden of a secret, something that creates pain and isolation, books can heal, connect. That's what good books do. That's what hard books do. And we need them in the world."

If you're interested in the original article, you can find it here