Am I doing something wrong?

Sometimes life scares me a bit. Not the growing up, finding a partner, getting a good job, earning enough money to stay alive and having kids bit, but the prospect of how understatedly huge life is. I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I'm quite confused about what I'm actually supposed to be doing in my life. I'm worried that I almost throw my days away by doing nothing, or the same thing over and over. I always just listen to music after always doing my homework and I always just sit around on my laptop doing nothing. I always just do the same thing, and it intimidates me that I will most likely do a lot of my current routine for the rest of my life.

I don't know if I'm supposed to be feeling excited and young and awake all the time because I'm a teenager or whether feeling like falling a sleep 70% of the time is how I should be spending my days of youth. Sometimes I even feel outside of myself at things I've been really excited to be doing, as if I'm evaluating how I am feeling to how I get the impression I should be feeling instead. And then, when I come home I wonder if I can't remember everything properly because I was too busy daydreaming about what I was and wasn't supposed to be doing. I can't just get in there and really let go because I'll start to think about how I should remember this moment because it will be symbolic of your youth. But then I can't actually fully remember the moment because again I was too locked inside my own thoughts to really notice my surroundings.

I'm not saying that every exciting thing in my life is lost because I'm so vacant a lot of the time, but I'm often worried about how I feel and remember certain situations. I feel almost pressured by stories of being young to embrace this time of my life with all I've got. But I think I need to stop worrying about how I will remember this in my adult years and try to focus on now. Stop worrying about sitting around and being unproductive and just enjoy it whilst I still can. I think that, even when I think I'm meant to be thinking about my future, what I really need to think about is my present. I just need to be in my present.

Talkin' about my generation.

There are things that my generation of teenagers should be allowed to do, and should embrace, for the sake of celebrating our own era. There are things that we will look back on and cringe, just as our parents did, and there are things that we will have great nostalgia for and wish for the time to come again.

Things like staying up all night talking to each other through a variety of different messaging devices or websites. And enjoying the conversation so much that you can justify two in the morning as a very acceptable time to feel wide awake. Not remembering the zombie like boy or girl that will emerge from their bedroom at noon the next day only able to communicate by grunting.

Things like spending the rest of that day talking to the exact same person and keeping the conversation alive by listing everything you're doing, so as not to lose that person's virtual companionship and be left with a constant refresh of one's newsfeed to fill vast vacuums of time when nothing else in the world could possibly be done. Mum's suggestion of tidying your room was not as interesting as reading the same tweet over and over again.

Things like joining huge fan clubs with and abundance of fan-fiction and Tumblr gifs with one single character from a nerdy show and making it even more nerdy by doing so. Just becoming one massive nerd who only lives for Saturday's with Doctor Who on the telly and the rest just living on Tumblr or Youtube will be a common factor of our late childhood.

We don't have goths or punks, we have nerds squealing over Benedict Cumberbatch and wearing Pokemon hats.

Things like setting a reputation for ourselves as the Internet generation, the babes born into a world where touch screen devices is part of everyday life. A generation where not a lot concerning technology developments can surprise them and who often take it for granted. A generation who mark the first load of teenagers to have grown up in a world that to them has always had Internet, has always had the Web, who have always had a computer.

It is no bad thing, we're just the first to have ever done this before. Like any generation preceding us, we're just trying to figure out what's going on. But making a wonderful, historical stamp on the world too. I will remember staying up all night talking to certain someones like my parents remember making a very long, very expensive phone bill. They will be cherished memories, and symbols of the ways we made our own generations.

I am the only girl in the world.

As a fifteen year old girl I often feel as if my life is the single most important and interesting thing the world has ever seen. As if my little bubble of school friends is as big as the world gets and that the things I do in my life are groundbreaking and one of a kind. None of this is true. Obviously. I don't know if it is to do with my age, that as I discover things for the first time it feels as if I really am the first person to ever do such a thing. I know that my life is enormously insignificant but I feel that everyone really cares what I do. Some times I feel as if wanting to become a writer is unique and unusual, but just about every other person wants to be or is a writer and isn't any different from the next.

I want to be groundbreaking, I want to be admired, I want my life to mean something to people, I want to make an impact. And as a teenager I feel as if this has already happened, when really nobody cares. It's not as sad as I'm making it out to be but I just hope I learn someday that my existence isn't on the large important scale that I think it is. I'll have to do a lot more work to make that happen.

Let them eat cake.

There is just about every single magazine out there telling me what I should and shouldn't be eating right now. And to be perfectly frank I couldn't care less. I honestly don't give a rat's arse as to whether I should cut back on the cake or the chocolate or what new fad diet I should be on because it doesn't matter. I'm not fat, I'm not underweight, I'm just right and so are most other girls and boys my age too. However, they're being told that they're not healthy enough. They don't go outside anymore, they sit around too much, they eat too much crap, they're not sociable, they're too fat, they're too skinny, they all have eating disorders etc, etc. Well maybe, just possibly, this is all because it's thrown in our faces that we're basically a disgrace to the older generations. That we just don't know how easy we have it, how lucky we are.

What if we hadn't had such an obsession in the media about what we eat and how our bodies look? Would we be more like the other generations before us? Would less girls be sticking fingers down their throats to get a slimmer figure? Would more teenagers just eat cake because their metabolisms are wonderfully fast?

Why aren't kids told that? That would make a happier world, right? "Hey, kids, eat everything you want at this time in your lives because later on that stomach won't hold. You can eat six Milky Ways and probably not put any weight on right now so spend this time wisely. Go wild." I'm pretty sure if that message was sent out to teenagers, apart from possibly now fearing reaching 40 even more, there would probably be less cases of eating disorders.

So if the media would kindly like to leave us alone and create our own generation instead of being encouraged to starve ourselves instead of going down to the chippy whilst we still can, that would be wonderful.

Zooey Deschanel, she's not just a pretty face.

Many women as bloggers, journalists, or critics have recently been labelling actress and musician Zooey Deschanel as "too girly", behaving and dressing as if she is still a little girl and complying to the idea of a perfect woman by being flirty and pretty and a human connotation of cupcakes and rainbows. However, I am in complete disagreement with this rather unfair judgement of a talented and intelligent young woman who is no way deserving of the type of criticism she's beginning to receive from fellow females. Women writing for feminist publications have argued that she simply isn't helping with the fight for equality, that she just plays the same sweet and innocent characters in every movie and continues to like sparkles and unicorns even in her early 30s. Zooey is often criticised for being 'type cast' into roles that closely resemble the archetypical 1950s woman. They must have been watching different films to me because I certainly haven't ever noticed this.

I admit Deschanel often plays a quirky part, especially in new sitcom New Girl, but I don't believe this is any reflection of her acting ability and in fact I view it in quite the opposite way. I believe she has acted incredibly well in a lot of her work and, whilst many of her characters tend to be quirky and adorable, I find it hard to find comparisons between each one. I don't watch '500 Days of Summer' and recognise Summer as being irritatingly similar to Jess Day in New Girl because they're not, and I think this is almost solely down to Zooey's acting talent.

I find it odd that so many women dislike her for being cooky and cute and judge her quite unjustly for being apparently different to them. Why do they care if she's seen wearing floaty skirts and girly dresses  quite often? I could wear floaty skirts all day and just float around all over the place, I often do, it doesn't make me "less feminist" it just makes me me. Because feminism is all about choice, and if women who slag off Zooey claim they believe this then why are they condemning her choices? They don't know her. I don't know her but at least I don't judge her for being, well, for being who she decides to portray herself as.

I don't think she's even close to this "girly and flirty and pathetic" persona she's been labelled with. I believe from interviews and from her own work that she's as talented and as intelligent and as aware of feminism as these women are and still chooses to look "adorable" too. She's never struck me as being arrogant with the fame she has risen to from her work, or that she promotes herself purely on her looks. Are we now attacking women who are beautiful because being that way is antifeminist? Who is anyone to judge a woman who is clearly very smart and talented for her image? In fact, Zooey recently told Glamour magazine something that has become a quote doing the rounds of the Internet as an inspirational message. She said, "I want to be a fucking feminist and wear a fucking Peter Pan collar. So fucking what?" which I think beautifully sums up my point. She proves that she's not the woman everyone thought they could mess with, that she doesn't care how she dresses and that she knows it doesn't somehow effect her beliefs of feminism and equality. Why should it?

Zooey co-founded an entertainment website/blog for women to share creative, funny and independent pieces where they weren't going to be pushed behind blokey men who laugh when the word 'boobies' is said like on LadBible. The website is http://hellogiggles.com/, would you judge a woman's mental capacity and involvement in feminism for that?

I don't understand why feminism has actually started to take on a new stereotype, a group of elitists who create this image for themselves that makes them look kind of obnoxious. They appear to have this snobbery about how other women who call themselves feminists behave when it's not the same as their middle class fashion adorned group. Going back to a previous blog post of mine about playing with Barbies and baby dolls didn't effect who I am today, why should women who cut of Barbie's head and flushed it down the toilet be considered more feminist than me? Just like wearing a Peter Pan collar doesn't make Zooey Deschanel any less of a feminist than the women who are criticising her.

If feminism is defined by being about choice, then we should try to refrain from condemning any man or woman's choices for how their image is portrayed by the public. I think arguing against Zooey Deschanel is a very poor and weak argument to make, and it isn't going to get us anywhere. There are far more important and real issues to be dealing with than to be slagging off another woman's dress sense. I don't see Zooey Deschanel as stupid and ignorant and just a silly little woman who doesn't know any better, I see her as a very talented, very clever, unbelievably beautiful woman who I wouldn't be exaggerating when I said she was one of my idols. Because I do believe that she is. She's badass and ridiculously adorable, why shouldn't I look up to her for being completely who she wants to be? Isn't that what I'm supposed to be doing?

Poem: To cease to write.

Should I ever cease to put my pen on paper
and write
then I will have come down with the flu
or have lost my sight.

For when words cannot flow like water
in streams
then I must have amnesia and have forgotten
my dreams.

Because, I only dream of words
and of writing
and it would be an awful shame to stop
like a bird unable to sing.

If I ever cease to put my pen on paper
and write
then I must have fallen to eternal sleep
and lost life's fight.

Guns. And why I hate them.

When I think of guns I don't think of safety or of reassurance, I think of the violence and the misery they bring to so many of us. I've only ever held a gun once, at an adventure holiday aiming at paper targets, and even then I felt a little uneasy about holding the potential weapon. I felt so uncomfortable knowing that in my hands I held the potential power to kill or seriously injure another being. Granted I knew nothing about aiming and shooting but the power it possessed was an uneasy and nasty one. I didn't understand why people would use these for fun, why having such a head start with the weapon and aiming it at helpless animals was considered a sport. I knew for certain that if I kept a gun in my house I wouldn't feel safe, I would feel restless that such a violent object lay somewhere near me, that I owned such a thing. What a horrible thought, that with this thing you could easily, heartlessly and quickly end someone's life. That by owning a gun, you have the potential to play God. How utterly terrifying.

Which is why, and I say this with  unfaltering confidence, I am in full support of Obama's attempt at changing the laws of owning guns in the USA. The Connecticut school shooting was just tip of the iceberg in convincing almost the rest of the world that such casual ownership and sale of weaponry was a terrible and fatal mistake. The fact that in America it is easier to buy a gun than to have health insurance is surely a twisted statistic and an ironic view of priorities in the USA. Conservative Americans claim it to be the land of the free, but how free would you feel if anyone had the right to possess a dangerous weapon and you couldn't afford to be treated if you got shot? To me, that sounds extremely condemning.

I would feel safer in the knowledge that those who decided to own a gun had been checked and licensed and were more unlikely to go on a killing spree of innocent people than to know that I could buy the weapon if I so wished. I think that the 'right' to own a gun is quite frankly a very foolish right, you are essentially giving people the go ahead to play around with life, choose who may die. I simply find it a frightening thought, that people even feel they need this access to killing machines to feel secure. I personally feel that if I was in a situation when someone had broken into the house or put me in some kind of danger I wouldn't hesitate about killing them or not, because I just wouldn't do it. I would find another way around it because ending someone's life, no matter who they were, would be an unbearable thing to do. It is in no way my right to cause somebody's death, and I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did.

What kind of a person doesn't question killing a human being? Independent of whether you are in a life or death situation yourself I think you'd be more likely to do damage to your mental wellbeing if you made the decision to take another's life than you would be physically hurt in not doing so. So why would one fight for the right to have this horrible decision and to carry on the higher potential for more ghastly events like the school shooting? I do not normally condemn another person's right to make their own opinion known and to have that opinion but in this situation I believe that those clinging onto the Second Amendment are quite simply wrong. The people such as those trying to get Piers Morgan deported are to me exactly the type of person you wouldn't trust in anyway shape or form with a gun in any situation. To be frank, they appear in interviews to often have a screw loose, to be one sandwich short of a picnic, which is not giving me total reassurance that they are making the right decision in fighting for this right.

I am supporting President Obama in his decision to reevaluate the laws about the possession of guns because I believe them to be a great threat in the wrong hands, or quite often in any hands at all. I am not American, and I do not live in the USA but I believe that for the welfare of the citizens there this conservative view of such weaponry must be reviewed. So you can stick your Second Amendment, dear traditionalist, right up where the sun don't shine. Because it would be a safer world for everyone if we had a gun free nation to follow by.