Bullying in the News

Two weeks ago, a couple of people on Facebook posted Ellen's video about the recent spate of bullying-related suicides. It made me cry. I wanted to repost it, but I didn't know what to say, and I didn't know if I wanted to say it on Facebook, for a lot of reasons.

I tend to lose all sense of rationality on the subject of bullying.

I don't know how much my mom knows about what junior high was like for me (to clarify: I wasn't bullied because I was a lesbian; I was bullied because I was the smart, opinionated fat girl, and all the bullying was verbal), and I don't really want to talk to her about it, which I know posting on Facebook would probably lead to. I'm also Facebook friends with a lot of people from junior high and high school, and I don't want to hurt them by talking about it and I don't want them to hurt me by looking back and saying, "that's not the way it was."

I'm not doing anything about it in the world, and I'm not sure just talking about it is going to help.

I also tend to lose all hope on the subject of bullying.

And so the only two somewhat rational things I have to say are also severely lacking in cheerfulness:

I can't join in with all the people who are grimly pleased about the media attention. This time it's bullying of lgbt teens, last time it was cyberbullying, before that was queen bees and wannabes, and before that it was Columbine. Has each iteration made things better for bullied kids, or is it just this month's sensational news story?

I find it almost unbearably sad that the best we can do for bullied kids is tell them, "It gets better," and hope they don't read the statistics on workplace bullying. I wish we lived in a world where we could tell them, "It's not okay. You don't have to live with it. Adults will help you," and mean it.

Asking: NaNo

Sooooo, I think I'm caving into peer pressure and doing NaNo this year. This means I have to try to finish writing my Leighton/Vicky-T story and editing my other novel this month. Eep! Anyway, the real reason for this post is that as I was chatting with someone who came back to yoga after a summer away, I realized I haven't taken a day off in the ten months I've been at my job. (I don't get any paid time off until after the first year.) I could conceivably take a couple of days off in November, so for those of you who've done NaNo before, when did you find you most wanted some uninterrupted time to write? Was it at the beginning when you were still excited about it? In the middle when you were starting to worry about it? At the end when you were panicking to finish? Or should I just take the whole week of Thanksgiving off? (Actually, if I were to do that, I would probably take off Tuesday and Wednesday of that week and Monday of the week after - that Monday is probably going to be extremely busy. And the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of taking the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off to cook. I could make two kinds of pie!)