Yesterday was a long hard day job kind of day and it sucked. I hated it. And it likely will not be ending anytime soon and thus I will continue to hate it. I can't believe there are people who actually enjoy the minutia of accounting and business. It's like the seven circles of hell from where I'm sitting.

But I digress.

There is still one more piece to get done for sending out to lit journal world ("Looking for Ben Eielson") but I was feeling more about my short story involving teenage girls and so I'm taking a mini break from all things Alaska and flying. (I deserve it, trust me.) I've been thinking a lot about being a teenage girl in general and what I was like specifically and there are some feelings of anger and frustration that are still so pure and strong to me that It's like they were yesterday. I'm reading Cecil Castellucci's ROSE SEES RED and Sarah Ockler's FIXING DELILAH HANNAFORD both of which have remarkably true teenage girl protagonists. (This is no surprise for Castellucci, of course - she can't write a fake teen girl character.)

Ockler's book had one passage that really stopped me though. The main character, Delilah, has been sneaking out at night to see a boy who she knows treats her badly and is caught shoplifting a tube of lipstick (a mistake) and her mother is certain she is going to hell in a handbasket. What ensues is the classic "what is going on with you young lady you aren't acting like yourself and I don't understand it" conversation. Delilah then muses on all the reasons why her behavior has changed - from friends who are now far more interested in drinking then they used to be and how a mean girl has taken over the lit journal she used to love and turned it into a gossip rag and how someone took a risque picture of her with a cellphone and spread it all over the place and basically how high school sucks in every way possible.

And I thought well, that's true because I remember it just like that (minus the slick cellphone picture taking as I was a child of the eighties). There are a dozen different reasons why it's hard to be a teenage girl, just like there are for why it's hard to be an adult woman. For some reason we collectively keep forgetting that though - we keep forgetting how utterly miserable it was for our 16 year old selves.

I've been thinking about this so much lately (between the books I'm reading, the story I'm writing, and the next round of What a Girl Wants) and I find myself - absurdly - frustrated all over again for my teenage self. I can see her so clearly, with all that she could not control and all that she thought she would do differently if only the control was hers.

And then I shake myself awake and look at the piles of papers surrounding me and Quickbooks humming on my computer and the phone incessantly ringing and realize that I never did learn that control thing well enough. Maybe that's why I find myself writing so easily from a 16 year old perspective - I'm still just as angry as she was in a lot of ways, and still trying to find a voice loud enough to scream with.

[Post pic - because sometimes you get so angry you just want to scream...or punch something...]