Transgender, oh boy.

I've been listening to a lot of talk radio lately. Conservative talk radio (bum-bum-BUM!). I heard a story on the radio about a 5 year old boy who believed he wanted to be a girl. ACCEPTABLE! I have nothing wrong with anyone who truly believes they are the wrong gender. Now that I've said that, I can say this. The kids parents are giving him hormone procedures to prevent puberty. When I was 5 years old I wanted to be a robot. My parents loved me, so they didn't replace any of my limbs with cyborg parts.

Children make a lot of bad decisions in their younger years. I have a new invention. You take two older people (Male and female, or Male and Male, or Female and Female, doesn't FUCKING matter) and you charge these two people with the upkeep of the child. Feed him, Cloth him, House him. But above all, the most important job of these guardians, to teach the child and make sure his young decisions don't effect his entire life.  Don't just shove him full of hormone altering chemicals at the youngest age possible. I would call this new invention, parents.

Now a few people are probably saying "But Alex, Transgender is a real psychological condition, why are you such a dick." To those people I say this "I can't hear you, you're reading a blog and talking to the computer. If you want to contact me write a reply or e-mail. Don't just speak at your computer monitor. Come on, your better then that"

So I'm a boy, but I don't like my lot in life. I don't like working hard labor, holding doors open, sports, or pretty much anything else about being a guy. I dislike the place society expects me to be due to my gender. SO I'M GUNNA CUT OFF THE TIP OF MY DICK AND TURN IT INSIDE-OUT. Wow, Wow, wow. Calm down here for just a moment, put down the knife. What you are saying is "I don't like what society expects, so I'm going to change myself." when you should just be rebelling against society. You think skirts are cute: wear a skirt. You like football: play football. Don't go around acting like you're not free to do what ever the fuck you want because of your gender. 

The parents from the aforementioned article are melodramatic. I assume they are the kind of people that see every little thing in their lives in its most dramatic light. They are shitty for diagnosing a 5 year old before his mind has fully developed. Only slightly less shitty are all of the 16 year old girls out there.

In my life I've met 5 girls ages 14-20 who claimed to be Transgender. Some of them dressed like boys, Most didn't. My biggest problem with them, was they wanted the best of both worlds. They wanted be come off like tough boys, but they wore make-up and took pictures of themselves in girly poses on the internet. Hell, a lot of them said they believed they were "Gay girly boys, trapped in a girls body." I have two diagnosis for these girls. 1) Melodramatic Attention Whore: When a person needs to make their lives come off as interesting and dramatic as possible to garder the attention of their peers. and 2) Penis Envy: Freud was a fucked up dude, and I don't like his stages of  psychosexual development, But penis envy is still a good term: Wanting the power and control that come with being male in our society. Even though we are more gender-equal now then ever, there is still a sense of power with being male. But these girls just need to learn that they are strong and powerful people as girls, to believe they need to change just perpetuates the idea that being male is better.

In closing: If you are over the age of 24 you can accept that you are transgender, if you are any younger, just chill out and give it time.

How to find affection in a hollow relationship.

People crave affection. It's a base social need that we all strive for. Generally that's supposed to be the idea of dating each other. You express your love, you feel loved, It's the greatest thing in the world. But people like to put this crazy stigma on relationships. I come from a divorced household, so that might be why I feel this way. But relationships have a beginning and an end. If you arn't completely fulfilled with that relationship, you leave.

People don't do that as much as they should. I pity these girls who can't stand to be alone for a week before they need to find another suitor. What a co-dependent waste of carbon and air. How can you pretend to be happy if you can't be happy with yourself, solo.

So people get into relationships, and act like it's impossible to stop. They let the negative aspects of their relationship add up and add up and add up.

So you find yourself in a relationship that you arn't getting anything out of. But your fear of change and independence keep you locked in. What to do?

Find some person who obviously is head-over heels for you. Flirt, make them know you are interested. But be withholding with your affections, keep him on lock.Congrats, now you have a pretty girlfriend (or boyfriend) with a hollow relationship, and your own little bitch whos feelings and emotions don't matter. And whenever your done with this guy, just call him a creep so none of you friends will think your unloyal.

Fear

Warning/Disclaimer: I have NO formal training or certification in any form of psychology. Everything I say is speculation or intuition based off of my own logic.

First let me explain that the reason I put off writing this post on fear, is because it terrified me.

Evolutionary Psychology is the idea of looking at our mental functions and trying to figure them out from the perspective of evolution. Example: The reason people smell differently when they are sweaty is because different people have different bacteria living on their skin. So the smell of a person is actually full of information on what their immune system and can't fight off. Evolutionary speaking, if two people with wildly different immune systems do the horizontal monster mash and squirt out a baby, that baby will have a better immune system, survive longer, and presumably spread his/her seed. Evolution... So humans are attracted to other humans that smell different. Evolutionary psychology.

So it makes sense why evolution would favor fear. Creatures who run away from predators tend to live longer then those who run up to become friends with the hungry lion. Scared of heights, probably because all of the humans who were not scared of heights all fell off cliffs. and died. This is why human males have an intense fear of having their balls cut off. Yet they still get married, how odd.

I've been studying Anxiety for 18 years now. Whenever I personally have an anxiety attack I hit a Fight-Flight-Freeze response. From here you can categorize the anxiety attack into 3 sections.

Fight: A feeling of intense adrenalin fills me, I instantly feel the need to use the muscles in my arms. I become super confrontation and defensive, not really listening to what people say, yet still responding with aggression.

• Worst way of dealing with this state: Give in: hurt someone or yourself. once you've caused enough pain the feeling of control will make you less scared and more confident. 
• The better way of dealing with this state is crying. Yeah, thats right: cry. When you cry a lot more then salt water is coming out of your tear ducts. It's actually one of the many ways your body flushes unwanted chemicals. Sometimes the only thing you can do is wait for your body to deal with the overflow of chemicals.

Flight: I instantly want to physically distance myself from the problem, or ignore it. This comes with more adrenaline, but this time all of the tenseness and energy are in the legs. Sometimes I can even feel myself saying 'just run away'. Escapism also falls into this category. It's essentially an urge to do anything aside from face the problem.

• Worst way of dealing: Give in, play videogames and ignore the problem. Enjoy having an even bigger anxiety attack tomorrow.
• Best way of dealing: Distance yourself physically, but keep thinking about the problem. You wont be able to solve the problem without confronting it, but you can't accomplish shit while having an anxiety attack. So do something to put yourself at ease, but don't just forget about your problem.

Freeze (Catatonia): This usually happens when I can't run, or I know fighting is pointless. I just give up, cry, and hope someone else will come save me.

• Worst way of dealing: Waiting for help
• Best way of dealing: Asking for help

Whelp this topic is scaring the shit out of me, so I think I'll take my own advice and distance myself. I'll continue on this topic another day.

Excuses

Recently I heard someone talking about how they were a kleptomaniac. And his friends all agree’d. Now, I’m no true psychiatrist, so I can’t confirm nor deny her disorder. I do have to say, though, you should not call a kleptomaniac a kleptomaniac; you should call them a dirty thief. Everyone is looking to shirk responsibility for their own actions, and by calling a thief a clepto, you are handing them an excuse on a silk pillow. Will has profound effects on mental disabilities, but people are so quick to put their problems on a disorder and say “its impossible for me to fix.” So when you call a Kleptomaniac a dirty thief, you are telling them that there is no excuse for their behavior, and hopefully putting them in a position where they want to help themselves. No one wants to make anyone feel bad, so people forget that negative reinforcement is how we learn. (My step-dad did not forget that negative reinforcement is how we learn)

Look at commercials that sell gum and pills to help stop smokers. They are filled with messages about how it’s so hard to quit, and how it’s impossible. Now, when someone is trying to quit cold turkey, they get that craving. And they say to themselves “I shouldn't be ashamed, after all, it’s SO hard to quit smoking” and then buy a pack of cigarettes.

I’ve had Clinical Anxiety disorder for most of my life. When I was younger my way of dealing with it was to avoid any stressful situation. When I was confronted about my avoidance, I’d just claim I can’t do it because of anxiety. Or when I had an anxiety attack I triggered my flight response and I did everything I could to get out of the situation. Then I got my first REAL job and I got my first REAL anxiety attack. I left crying two or three times before I realized. “If I keep running away, they are going to fire me.”/

Let me tell you this, nothing feels harder then confronting a task, while you are having anxiety over that vary task. It feels like you’ve got molasses in your vains, and your joints are rusted and un-oiled. You grit your teeth and every instinct is telling you to hit/hurt something or run away. It hurts, it’s hard, it’s hellish. But it is necessary… (Continued in my next blog: Fear.)

Show and Tell

When I was younger I remembered show and tell. I never had anything to show, and I rarely had anything to tell. But my class-mates always had some nice little thing, and it didn't bother me. I was always a clumsy and absent minded kid (As I am a clumsy and absent minded 'adult') so all of my cool toys were broken or last.

When you go to a friend’s house for the first time, what is it like? You get a tour and the opportunity to see their big TV, what ever collectibles they might have, and the furniture of their house. But is the purpose of this little tour for you to see neet things and be enlightened, or does your friend merely want you to tell them how cool they are for having nice things?

Here's a fun game. Give them 0 praise on their nice things. See how hard they will try just to get your praise.

How about this, Do you own something on display in your house? How many hours of solitary entertainment has that given you? Do you just sit in a chair and stare at your display case for hours?

And then of course there's Accolades.

Dictionary.com defines Accolade as "any award, honor, or laudatory notice". In the ceremony of knighting someone, a blade is placed on their shoulder by its flat end. This act was called an Accolade. It has come to mean a reward or public notice of approval. An Accolade is not something given in private between two people. It is a public display. A trophy, A news Article, Gamer Score, High Score list, and so on.

So why do we need to have nice things to show our friends, and why do we need accolades to represent our strengths. I have no fucking clue, but that's never stopped me from blindly speculating before.

I'd have to say the answers are two fold.

1) People lie. Any douche-bag with gages and tattoos can walk up to a girl and say he's in a great band. (I don't know why he had to have gages and tattoos for this analogy, I also don't know why you need to keep judging my analogies. But I digress.) You can't trust what people say, so we've come to require some physical representation of their success.

2) People are rarely secure in their own personality. Most people are secure in their abilities to do things. But people are rarely as secure in their ability to entertain other people. Everyone has a friend who feels the need to bring a 6-pack to every gathering, or provide food and drink for everyone. Maybe that friend is just a very nice guy, and maybe I'm secretly a midget wearing stilts and arm extensions. Does that friend every tell an interesting story, or provide input on a debate?

This is a sort of Catch 22. Little Jessica at age 6 walks around a party and everyone says to her "Oh look how cute you are" and compliments her appearance. As Jessica grows up, she gets more compliments on her appearance. She starts to get fat. No one ever told her how smart or witty, or charming she was. So She sees that all she has is her appearance, and it drivers her insane. This disorder is commonly diagnosed as: Being a Vapid slut. Young children are still trying to figure out what is 'right' and 'wrong'. What do you think is going to happen when you praise them on their physical appearance? People look to others to understand themselves, especially children. Show and Tell sounds to me like a contest of who has the nicer stuff.

Just so you know, any time I ever refer to a douche-bag he will have gages and tattoos. But that is for another day.

Competitive nerd culture.

When the human mind is at its most developmental and impressionable state we throw all the kids together in school. I personally believe that this environment, where we spent 60% of our developmental years, is far from the environment which our brains were evolutionary designed to deal with. But our culture dictates it, and we continue the cycle.

I digress. Let's talk about Gym Class and Nerds. Gym class serves two purposes. The first is simple: No school administration trusts parents. So they take it upon themselves to Do away with child obesity, one embarrassing chin-up at  time. The second is where it fails miserable. Gym class is supposed to teach teamwork and give people confidence. In reality it teaches us that some people are just born physical better then others. And if you don't have physical prowess, you should be left out and ignored.

Through sports teams, and gym class most school kids get a taste of winning. Anyone who has little interest in sports, might never get that taste. It's not like the person with the highest test grade gets to flaunt it around, and the person with the lowest grade gets left out.

Wizards of the Coast is a genius company. Because they, along with Bungee, Nintendo, Marvel, Capcom, and Activion found a way to profit.

That nerd who felt left out and defeated from gym class can go home, pick up his X-box controller and see his name cresting the leader-boards of the Halo 2 universe. Suddenly he has found the thrill of victory. But there is no coach for the videogame player to tell him to be a good winner. 

Then that nerd picks up his first Deck of Magic The Gathering. And suddenly he found a game that rewards intellect over physicality. So he goes to a card shop to play and gets defeated hard. In time he learns, just throwing money at the game will make it so you can win easier. So he does, and he wins, and he feels that victory that he has lusted for. Imagine a man lost in the desert for days and days. Finally he finds an oasis. He is going to drink until it kills him, because of his fear of being thirsty again.

I've been to drunken frat parties, and I've been to the videogame room at anime conventions. More often then not the drunken parties are full of bros being friends, where they VG room is full of people with solid looks on there faces, staring stressful at a game of Super Smash Brothers. I've seen baseball players line up to shake hands, and I've seen M:TG player gloat about screwing someone over in a trade.