Blog Makeover :)

I know this might be a little irrelevant..nothing to do with being a teenager in California at all but..
           
                      Ive been feeling like a little (that's me-language for really really) down, maybe even a bit depressed, The only thing that makes me feel better when Im depressed, is a major shopping spree and a complete makeover followed by a very serious bathroom selfie photo shoot with my besties :)
   
                 Considering that's no longer possible...I decided to give my blog a makeover and you know what? Ive never had so much fun on a computer before! (okay at times it got a bit annoying, I mean working with HTML is like writing broken up English all over the place..but I survived, the only that HAS gone wrong is my twitter timeline, which is at the bottom of the page and my Instagram which is right next to my twitter timeline...it was a disaster :)

                 So I'm just going to give you a guide to my new-and-improved-version of my blog :)

• Well on the top of the page, Ive got 2 new pages! One is a simple "About Me" page and the other links to my Twitter  (i had to put that Twitter page in following the disaster of my Twitter widget, which still wont come off the bottom of my blog...if you think Im kidding you should scroll down and see for yourselves)
• I changed the template, that's only because I thought the my old one distracted too many people, I used to get comments like "I love the background!" or "Your blog is really pretty!" I was starting to think no one actually read it..

Ok Ive got nothing else....I felt really accomplished because these 2 minor changes actually took me almost half of a lazy Saturday morning..

Also, me and my friend Misha (check out her google plus, shes an amazing blogger!)are going to do collaboration posts on her blog The Weirdo Chronicles (it even sounds fun doesn't it?) We're going to be reviewing chick flicks and actually digging them up deeper than any English teacher could ever go :p, Please check them out :)

*image theres a funny caption here*

            

Act your age!

The Oxford Dictionary defines Coming of Age as-
                                        A young persons transition from childhood to adulthood.

That is pretty simple, but I'd like to elaborate, I think that this"transition" from childhood to adulthood occurs through a number of stereotyped problems...or rites of passage. The problems which everyone of us teenagers go through...    
                     To experience these rites of passage are a part of growing up, these experiences are what make our life, are they not? So I watched a movie today- Girl In Progress, well when I saw the poster, I expected to be a chick-flick (or a rom-com) just my kinda movie...but turns out it was one of those movies which made me think..

       
                 The movie introduced me to "Coming of Age" literature and made me recognize it as a separate genre. To make its very long and extremely complicated story short..See the little girl in the picture? She decided that shes gonna speed up growing up and made a list of all the rites of passage for growing up [which she got from movies like Mean Girls, Uptown Girls, Nanny Diaries etc. etc. (or as my brother calls them "girl movies"- for being dreamy and beautiful but also fake)]

Her list went something like this--

1.  Steal money for makeover
2. Be a bitch and impress popular girls
3. Have a teacher as a mentor, making sure that she notices my untapped talents
4. Hang with popular girls and let down mentor so that she calls my mom
5. Let down mom by playing "loud music"
6. Get invited to coolest party and loose virginity to the stupidest, most insensitive douchebag in the school.
7. Move to New York and start a new life

I know I make it sound really bad, I know I make it sound crazy...but I still think shes got the right idea, I mean no one CAN grow up without actually going through the rites of passage...
I've thought about them, and here they are-

• Want independence... that's why there are so many tantrums, parents don't want to let go and kids feel trapped.
• Rebellion...i think this is aftermath of the sudden feeling of being caged at home..We're just bursting out of those houses. (Hence the punk clothes and the douchey attitude)
• Losing Control...I may sound like an adult when I say this and I do feel like a bit of traitor when I type this out but, after some time, teenagers loose sight of the end goal, the whle idea of annoying the parents and going with the flow blinds everything out. The stage of never being sober is here!
• Realizing your mistakes and cleaning up....just in time for graduation :)

I know that sounded like I was criticizing the teenage ways or whatever, but what I actually was doing was appreciating them, you learn valuable lessons from all of this!
                 When parents don't let us out of the house we jump the fence!...There's that feeling of invincibility, the ceiling cant hold us can it? How are we going to ever learn if we don't make those mistakes? Going through those rites of passage are super important...maybe our parents think they can "protect" us from them, the parties, the drugs and the alcohol but we all know that the overprotective parents produce the sneakiest kids..

I know its cliche for me to now say that its all parents fault, but it isn't. They just gotta know when to let go and when to be there for us, which can be tough considering how moody I am most of the time.(So Im automatically going to assume that most people having swinging moods too :)
                  What I think is, you have to be a teenager, make those mistakes without completely letting go of that safety bar. On the other hand you can't just hold onto that bar and think about your future..that's not living.
                        I don't want to live the teenage life my parents want me to live, but hey! its my life I'll live it just the way I want to..
                     But remember we're all going to learn a lesson, because we are all going to make mistakes...That's what being a teenager is all about, its about making mistakes but learning from them.
                    So that's what it is...your gonna learn something, but right now lets have some fun!

Im just me....what about you?

I suddenly realize I'm running...as fast as I can (secretly cursing myself for not running this fast during my PE final) and I don't know where or for what, I'm just running..

              When I finally do stop, I realize what I had been doing, I wasn't running TO anything, I was running away...away from society and away from none other than my conscience.. let me explain....before you conclude that I'm crazy.

Philosophical Me says:

                     I don't know whether anyone else has felt that way before, but suddenly I really don't care..(its quite a different matter to say that you dont care than to actually not care) but I feel like EVERYTHING, literally everything i do or say or wear or judge or feel ashamed of is dictated by my society...

Every word I say is judged by my own conscience which beats me up when I think that I have hurt someone.

Everything I do is judged by me, my family or everyone else....I don't get to tell complainers to just shut up, I dont get to say that some people have it much harder than them.

Everything I wear is (has to be) picture perfect (supposedly)...I dont get to shop at the boys department or at Walmart because Im going to be judged and ostracized by the "in" group

You can ask whos stopping me from doing all those things (shutting people up, shopping at the department store etc. etc.) and the answer is ME! Im the one whos stopping myself from doing all those things, Im the one who hurts myself when I tell someone that I dont care about their life...its all me!

Thats what makes it all the worse, I want to be free of society and free of me. I want to stop picturing this ideal me and pressurizing myself to be that "ideal me"...In my previous posts I refered to her as Anya 2.0 (in case ur interested click here if u want to know abt Anya 2.0 :) Thats just the point....Anya 2.0 isn't what the real me wants, its what the society-minded me wants...

Anya 2.0 would be the girl perfect for the world around me, she is that social butterfly, that popular girl. But is Anya 2.0 really me? No...not really. Anya 2.0 is what everyone else would like me to be, shes what I have be unconsciously trying to be... the question is whether I really want to be her

So this is what I screamed out to the busy freeway from my building top yesterday.. "Who am I??"  The wind answered for the freeway---"You're you"

My view + my hideous feet :)

So thats it, thats exactly what it is, Im me and Im going to be exactly that, Im not going to let society dictate what I think about me or about others...Its going to be hard, but Im going to trust my OWN instincts..

Teenage me says:

no comment on this one, Im pretty sure Im right :)

Im Cleaning Up (Finally!)

Okay I think the title was a bit too dramatic, or maybe its because too many people use these simple words in a very dramatic way...

If you know what I'm talking about, I am not sobering down after a brief stint of alchoholicism (is that even a a word?) and i am NOT realizing my mistakes of skankiness or drug abuse (i was gonna say stoner-ism but that would be too many made up words in one sentence :p) because I have never actually been that drunken/stoned/slutty bitch. (I have been JUST that bitch, which is fine)

For those of you who dont know what I'm talking about, never mind (or would you like me to explain it? its not that long.... *watches petrified readers run away* okay, it wasn't that important anyway)

By Cleaning Up, I mean that I am removing all the nasty ads and shit that have been plaguing (is THAT a word? well it doesn't have a red line under it... #SeemsLegit) my blog lately.

I think the reason I have all these advertisements and pop-ups on my blog is that after a while (a really short while actually) of legitimate blogging, which actually meant something and which people did read, i got obsessed with like my pageviews, I was really disappointed with the number of views I was getting so I decided to do the ultimate....my secret weapon for supposed "success"--

I Googled "How to get more pageviews on my blog?" I don't know if I am crazy or whether every other blogger in the world does that too (I'm guessing they don't...but whatever, I am the person who freaked out at puberty because i thought I was turning into an alien freak)

What came up was this whole bunch of sites that promise to give you a booming traffic if I simply added some sort of widget from their site onto my blog.....That made me go "Dang! That sounds easy!!" I was all for it, I registered on ALL of those sites...(yeah, it was one looong afternoon of repeatedly putting in my name and DOB and other shit..)

I must admit that these sites did give me a "booming" traffic, I did get a lot more pageviews and yes, I WAS happier...... for a time (does this sound like a story, because it feels like I'm telling a story WITH  a moral)

But all these sites give you are a number of people who click on some random add by mistake and get redirected to my blog when they dont want to visit, so i guess they just go back to what they were doing before.

I don't think that they are "traffic" exactly.....after a while even I didnt want to visit my site because everytime i clicked on the link i kept getting redirected to some sort of porn website... (the day-yesterday- i decided enough is enough was the day i saw a women close to my mothers age in Victoria's secret winking at me from a screen that was supposed to be displaying my blog!)

Okay to make a long story short I deleted all the ads and put a poll in the empty space instead (though that was a bit of a....ok not a bit,, it was an epic failure, actually it IS an epic failure because i dont think its done yet)

Well since I think i have been rambling on and on, I should cut the crap and get to the moral which is: "Write for yourself, to make YOU feel better not for praise or attention from others because that (the second type) is not real writing"
It may not have been the best moral but hey! I don't want it to be too cheesy.