Alas...

I am married.  Why, yes, I am.  I am utterly and completely exhausted from making up the sorry-excuse we have for an apartment.  I've nearly gone mad with decorations.  

I suppose you may want to know about Puerto Vallarta.  It was unbelieveable gorgeous, as is to be expected.  It also was no hotter than 90 degrees and the ocean was fantastically warm.  I loved it.  It rained every night, some nights more than half a foot.  The rich Mexicans barely navigated the flooded streets with their Jeeps and Ford trucks.

What a strange feeling, being in another world--one that is bipolar and starkly different than it's posh resorts.  Breck and I took the bus and accidently ended up in the ghetto.  By ghetto, I mean smalll one bedroom cement houses with thrown together tin roofs.  Many had the front doors wide open, and you could easily step into their world.  Beds close together, children on aunts' and uncles' laps, watching an old small television from the 1970s, if they were lucky. The mothers may have been cooking or just getting off.  it was around 8:30 and that seemed to be a big shift change, as everyone hopped on the already crowded buses to make it home. I wonder how their roofs held up in the torrential rains.  A tour guide told us it rained eight feet last year in the month of August.  Now that, my folks, is insane.  The locals kept apologizing for the weather, adding that if we had come in May or June, it wouldn't be so rainy.  We told them that we didn't mind, coming from 110 degree plus weather with less than 1/4 of the rainfall than usual this year.  We have wild fires and dying trees.  But we're still better than Dallas.  Everything is dead there right now.

When we ended up in the ghetto, we managed to tell the non-English speaking driver about our hotel, and he then directed us to another bus.  The bus drive home took another hour and fifteen minutes, because the driver litterally stopped every five feet to pick up another local.  Usually it was women toting their toddlers or babies, or lone men getting off of the job late.  None of them looked at us or acknowledged we were even there.  We just watched them, silently. 

The buses have no air conditioning...absolutely stifling.  Needless to say...I am glad to be home in the states.

Final Questions

1.  Blogging is an important way to catch the attention of younger readers.  My generation is more likely to hear of news on Facebook and Twitter than in a newspaper or on cable.  Blogging is a way to draw the reader in with a more personalized style and writing.  Blogging is more flexible, and it may be journalisms new medium within the next 20 years.

2.  I will still blog.  I have a passion for women, and I will dedicate myself to having a job that would help women who are in abusive situations.  I love writing blogs, and now that I've quite Outback, I'll have more time to research feminist issues.

3.  If I were to change it, I would make my subject broader than sexual abuses, to abuses against women in general.  That way I would have more information to write about, and I could cover an array of subjects.

India for jobs anyone?

The recession is an unrelenting beast that's tearing at my current job...you know, the one waiting tables.  The other day I walked out of there with $5.  Does that tell you anything?  And even if people do come out and we're busy, I still make half of what I made four years ago as a college freshman who knew absolutely nothing about waiting tables.

I need money.  I eat maybe once a day.  I barely pay my bills.  I buy clothes and makeup because my mom lends me money.  You know me, I can't let my looks go away all together.  I'm forever exhausted, and there is never enough time to breathe, let alone sleep.

I am looking for any job that I can make a decent amount on, not $10,000 a year.  From the looks of it, a foreign correspondent in India makes more, and it sure does sound like more fun.  I want to be done with this part, but I'm not even sure if I'm graduating this semester.

In India, my discipline is growing phenomenally.  Here it's dying tragically with thousands of readers losing interest or passing away.  The future of the newspaper is in the hands of baby boomers who are retiring and even dying.  Younger people are looking elsewhere for their news.  Definitely not in places where it costs to obtain credible information.  This is depressing to me.  Knowledge is the base of our democracy...and most of us really don't want to know.  We just want to feel.  I want to go somewhere on the other side of the world.  I want to be where people are hungry for words, and even hungrier for the knowledge that feeds a democracy.  Can I become one of them?  Can I be a part of something big that is happening now?  The things that are happening here are falling on deaf ears.

Voy a Puerto Vallarta

¿Cómo se dice I'm excited?  Reservations are set for July 31, 2011 for a six day, five night stay at the Fiesta Americana resort.  My passport is being processed, and I'm presently nagging my fiance to renew his.  My mother is very worried about me, and she says that Mexico is a dangerous place to be.  Up north by the border, most certainly.  And I'm sure there are dangers, but I think traveling internationally always poses its hazards. 


We will be flying, and the trip itself doesn't cost half as much as our plane tickets.  That's the sad part.  But I am holding on to the thought of this trip to get me through the next couple of weeks, for sure.  It's my happiness and I am trying to push out the thoughts of stresses school and wedding related.  It's life.

No puedo esperar para ir.  I have been asking my friendly Hispanic and Guatemalan friends about words and phrases.  Praise God.  The end is near.  Now, I only need a job.  But I think I'm going to post some rules about traveling and safety in Mexico and trafficking hazards that might possibly be there.  Keep in touch!

Pimping 15-year-olds? Wow.

I got this stories off of ABC news online.  Sounds incredibly like the Elizabeth Smart story, you know the one of the girl who was abducted to be a sex slave for a creepy couple.  Ugh.  It makes me very sad.

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=1596778&page=1

I used to be a gullible person, too, and at the age of 15, I definitely was. Offers of modeling and show business, fellow children who pretend to be your friends and push you into a car...would you fall for it?  I can't imagine how long it would take for a little girl like that to recover from such a terrible and frightening tragedy.  How would  someone move on?  Mine was only one night blurred in pieces and fragments of memories, but several months or even years of captivation?  My mind couldn't even fathom.

In Other News...

Women's Funding Network made a big boo-boo and used a bogus study to wage an assault on underage prostitution, and though the fight is a just one, the study was classified as intellectual guesswork by several independent officials.

Fighting for a good and noble cause is great, but make sure that you have the right numbers, my friends.  Not doing so portrays sex trafficking activists as fools in a portrait that is already muddled and skewed.  It's part of what I've said before...misrepresentation of the issue causes people to not pay attention.  This issues isn't a single issue, there are many complex issues in of itself.  Eh...I love when people guess.  I also love when reporters don't double check their sources.  Tisk, tisk.

Women's Funding Network sex trafficking study is junk science.

Time to Re-evaluate

I've been reading the stories on my Kindle about Libya and the crisis in the Middle East.  It's confusing and sad, and as a nation, I'm pretty sure that we have no idea what we're doing over there.  We're stretching ourselves and our resources thin, if you ask me.  And, by the way, they don't want us over there anyways, right?

It's complicated.  The rebels we think we should help may be a part of Al Qaeda.  Isn't that comforting?  America is very disillusioned, and her public tosses opinions back and forth in a game of political tennis, but no one really wins.  Where are we going?  What do we believe?

It is obvious that as a whole, we don't know.  Heck, I don't even know anymore.  There's always a new war and even more debt to be acquired.  This world is a turbulent place, and the vast amounts of information at our finger tips should make it easy.  But, as I waded through the New York Times today, I found it difficult to really pick a side.  I don't know what I believe anymore.  Everything seems to be grey.

I think it's time to go back to the basics.  I need to re-establish myself.  I'm ridding myself of the anger and ignorance, maybe a little bit of the selfishness too.  Maybe America should do the same.

I wish I was a genius...

It would be so much easier.  If I was a prodigy, I wouldn't have to do things like this.  There are brilliant people, and yes, there are very few that reach the level of genius or billionaire.  I am not one.  The one thing that keeps me in journalism is my raw honesty.  And hard work, but lately I haven't been working that hard.  It's hard to find the focus again.  What was that one thing that made me spark and glow?  Who was I four years ago?  And who am I now?

I don't know any more.  Days run together and nights blur.  I'm this tired thing, and where anger and injustice used to spur me on, I am now exhausted, and too much so to find my direction.

That raw honesty made me.  That fire was me.  I'm saddened now.  I hate this system.  College and school.  Jobs.  That rat race.  I despise it.  It's meaningless.  What is it all for again?  What is it that you're all telling me?  Journalism isn't dead, but I'm not quite sure I want to jump on the train for a thing that is so unpredictable.  Maybe I need to.

That feeling in the pit of my stomach again.

Long before I was ever raped, there were other things wrong in my life.  Not wrong like I was beaten every day.  Not wrong like I was starving or people I loved were dying.  Well, not yet anyways.

But I am the daughter of an angry man who is a Baptist deacon.  He has spent his whole life with people praising him for who he is in public, but when he was home, my daddy was a completely different person.  I believe this is just a story, a gene if you will, that has been passed through my daddy's lineage.  My daddy is angry.  And so was his daddy, but that doesn't make it right.  And the more I look at myself in the mirror, the more I realize I've turned into him.  Oh,  how I swore to myself that I'd never.

After he yelled at me for two hours when I was eight...I swore to myself very hard that it wouldn't happen.  I would never be like him.  You see, I was cleaning my little sister's ears, and she has sensitive ears, and I accidentally when in too far.  He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the living room, and yes, he held on to my arm and screamed at me for two hours.  He kept screaming...spitting on my face.  I was the only one he yelled at for hours on end.  I used to cry, but by the time I was in sixth grade, I was poking holes in his arguments left and right.  He didn't like that, when I pointed out how he was completely different at home.  He didn't like that I could see he was a hypocrite.  When I was in high school, he would yell for hours at me in the living room about how disrespectful I was.  To my dad, respect isn't earned.  It comes with the title of a parent, and to some degree, that's true.  But when you watch your father slap your mother, and scream at her for hours, and eventually he does the same to you, how do you respect that man?

He hit me several times in high school, leaving bruises.  One time he slapped my face so hard my nose wouldn't stop bleeding that night.  That night I wanted to kill him.  There was another time where he got into an argument with my mother on my birthday, and I went downstairs to stop him from hurting her.  He was so mean to her.  He threw me against the wall and said it was none of my business.

In the Brooks family, we are forced to be quite about these things, that and the many things wrong with my grandparents as well.  As children, we are never right...or maybe it was just me that was never right.  He never yelled at the other kids.  Maybe it's because I had a fire in me that knew he was completely wrong, and by the age of 12, I wasn't afraid of him.  And in high school, I just learned to zone out counting the threads in the curtains, observing how the brown thread weaved in and out forming the strangest and most beautiful patterns.  I couldn't even hear him yelling anymore.

My poor mother has been in the middle trying to defend me for 22 years.  You want to know why I am a professing Christian who curses and is completely vulgar?  Because that is me.  I'm not going to lie about my problems or act like they don't exist.  I'm angry.  Yes.  I am completely unprofessional, and borderline psycho, but I will not hide that from people.  I am what I am.  In that way, I'll never be like my father.  If people want to judge me, then let them.  I am not perfect, nor will I ever be.  Jesus loves me.  Some days I feel like He's the only one who does, and every day I hate myself for letting Him down.  But if I let my dad down, I don't care.  I remember the times he told me that I could go nowhere without him and when I left his house I would fall flat on my face.  That was one of the reasons I didn't tell my parents I was raped for months.  I was afraid that he would make me stay in Guymon.  I was afraid he would say, "I told you so."

My butt's on the line...

So, Dr. Clark warned me that I need to post every day until the end of this class to catch up.  I remember one classmate commenting that she would like to hear more about my life, and I suppose that if I am to post each day, then I'll start with my life and what made me such an advocate.  I was a woman's advocate far before the rape, though that may not surprise you.

I will begin by addressing my life from the beginning or even before then.  There are many things you must know about me to get a grasp on why I am so vulgar, angst, and verbal.  I seem to others to be only two things:  either intensely goofy or extremely ticked off.  So, here's the story.  My story and how I became who I am.

I am the oldest of four children, with two younger sisters and a baby brother.  My father is a telephone man from the panhandle, my mother an English teacher who once dreamed of being a journalist.  Then she got married and shortly thereafter was pregnant with me.  So, instead, she taught.

My father came from a very strict family.  My grandfather is a wonderful man, but one of few words and little compassion.  He wears a starched shirt with dress pants every day, shiny black shoes and his hair is perfectly combed into place.  I have never seen him in jeans, let alone shorts.  My grandfather's father was a man who was very stern, hot tempered, and he would beat his children for touching things such as the family car.  His wife was a very soft spoken woman who served him until his death.

Needless to say, my grandfather was taught to work very hard and take good care of the few things he had.  While being a math teacher, my grandfather managed to hold down several jobs to save up money for a house he would build one day.  In fact, this house was the priority of my grandfather's life when my dad was a child, and my grandfather missed out on seeing my dad grow up.  He is still obsessed with investing in expensive things and buying lavish possessions.   I remember being very young and going into his house.  Our feet had to be flat on the carpet, our hands in our laps.  We couldn't touch anything in his house.

His wife, my Memi, was leery of men and a believer in health magazines that wrote about getting Alzheimer's from deodorant and secrets to keeping her young.  She sells Mary Kay, and has the face to prove that it works.  My Memi is obsessed with perfect health and cleanliness.  She too was a teacher, an English teacher with perfect grammar that taught herself how to play the piano later in life when they could afford to buy a piano.

My father grew up as the baby boy with an older sister.  My father was and still is very good looking.  He was dyslexic and hated school, something that didn't fly when your parents are both teachers.   My father loves cars and working on them.  He works with his hands to build many things from book shelves to model airplanes.  My mom says that my dad's parents weren't there, and that my grandparents have spent the last 25 years trying to make up it.  She also says that their relationship is unhealthy.  And it might be true, because my know-it-all grandparents have supervised every part of my parents' lives since we moved to Guymon when I was five.  I remember my mom being upset when my grandfather dictated what houses my parents should buy and how my mother should decorate and remodel her kitchen.

My mother, on the other hand,  came from a family completely opposite.  My Papa Bill couldn't care less about material possessions, as long as he has one TV to watch his sports on.  His father was a good man who was married to a slightly crazy, but beautiful woman.  That was my Memaw...she would tell me of the Indians that raised her and other tall tales as she was fading into dementia.  She cursed and kicked Papa Bill when he moved her out of Odessa and into a nursing home.  She was some kind of fighter.  My mother's mom was an only child who always wanted a sister.  She is kind and sweet, thoughtful of everyone.  She remembers the days of World War II and she tells me about them.  She talks and sometimes asserts her opinion, but more than anything, she is very good about being a loving mother.

 My mom is their youngest and only daughter out of four children.  She admits she might have been slightly spoiled, being the baby.  The relationship between my mother and her father was strained, to say the least.  My Papa is a sweet man who didn't know how to deal with a daughter after having three sons.  His love of sports is second only to his love of God, and rightfully so, since he used to be a baptist preacher.  He's a diehard Dallas Cowboys fan, a graduate of the Baylor.  Eventually, my mother grew to understand Papa Bill.  He is kind man who spoiled his grandkids with candy.  He has a soft spot for children and an even softer spot for dogs.

My Granny cooks and cleans, and she loves nothing more when all of her family are in town, sleeping on makeshift cots in the living and dining rooms.  My mom always believed that her mother was perfect.  She still tells me that today, and yes, my grandmother is the perfect wife of the 1950s, wearing adorable tea length skirts and baking cookies.  She buts June Cleaver to shame.  She worked at Sears & Roebuck part time, and took care of her four kids.  Eventually, she ran for county clerk and occupied the spot for 15 years.  She still seems perfect. 

My mom's parents don't have that much money, but on my birthday or for Christmas I get more money from them than from my dad's parents.  The funny thing is that my dad's parents have saved up plenty of money in their lifetime (they can be pretty stingy), enough to go and buy two different Corvettes--one being a Z06--a Firebird, a Cadilac XLR convertable, two different motorcycles, and endless trips to who knows where.  Then we get $20 for our gift.  They're funny.  I never touched anything in my Memi's house, no, because that would be a crime.  But, I could spill grape juice on my Papa and Granny's carpet and it would be okay, they wouldn't yell at me.

That's where my parents came from.  I had to give you some background on them before I started my story about my parents.  We will pick up there tomorrow.

Trafficking in the Show Biz

I'm watching CSI:  Special Victims Unit.  This episode is about a Ukrainian girl being trafficked in New York.  Yes, this type of thing happens.  Girls from Eastern Europe are transported to U.S. to be drugged in brothels.  It's true, but this is not the only face of trafficking. 

Trafficking takes place all over the world, and a majority of the time poverty is a contributing factor that forces or coerse women into trafficking.  In Thailand, poor women from Laos come to the brothels looking for work, some of them knowing what is entailed.  Some just think the women think that they're becoming waitresses or bartenders, but most of the time these women are expected to go home with customers if they are requested.

Across the world, in the United States teens or young children are trafficked on the streets.  Homeless children are very much at risk for being trafficked, whether by pimps or even there own parents.  According to Kimberly Kotrla at least 100,000 children are being trafficked various ways from pornography, prostitution, stripping or other sexual services.  She also pointed to the fact that 70 percent of prostitutes join the sex industry before they are 18.  In fact one prostitute atested to this in Kotrla's article.:

"We’re all under 18.  We’re all the same age.  There would be a few girls I knew who were in their 20s or whatever, but they were doing it since our age anyways.  I did wait till 12, and these girls had been doing it since they were eight or nine and now they are like 23."

These kinds of acts take place everywhere, and trafficking isn't only what they portray in the movies and on TV.  It has many facets.

The Innovation of Blogging

Blogging has picked up a considerate following, but will it continue to gain momentum?  AOL online bought the Huffington Post, and that says something for the world of blogging.  It's becoming the news medium for news.  For some, it's a great way to break the conventionalism of journalism, bringing in younger and more contemporary audiences.

But not all journalists can reconcile the idea of putting themselves in stories and news.  It's difficult to insert your own spin and opinion on a topic.  This would require some sort of  expertise, wouldn't it?

I don't think I'm an expert in anything, and nor are other bloggers necessarily all-knowing about the topics they blog.  This leniency might be the reason why blogging is growing, but as previously stated in other blogs, ethics should be strongly considered, resources should be experts and well-trusted.

This blog thing could be my career.  Or it could be a flub.  Who knows?

So, you think only women can be sex slaves?

I read a piece in the the New York Times last night about boys recruited by Afghan police to be child soldiers, and even more frequently, sex slaves.

As a victim myself, I can only slightly empathize.  But really, I can't.  Can you imagine being an eight or nine-year-old boy that is kidnapped, forced to be a sex slave and shunned by people around you who don't have human rights themselves?  In the Arabic and Islamic world, pedophilia and homosexuality are far from accepted, but Afghanistan is different.  This sexual trade of adolescent boys isn't anything new.  It's a tradition that has been going on for centuries called bacha bazi.

See this article: http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-26/world/ctw.afghanistan.sex.trade_1_boys-afghan-dance?_s=PM:WORLD.

The term "bacha bazi" literally means playing with boys.  Sick isn't it?  The only good thing to be said of the exiled Taliban is that they banned this practice, and now that the Taliban is gone, the tradition is running rampant again.

I'm constantly amazed at the cruelty of humanity.  So here's a new one to gasp at.

Making a difference is exhausting...

I'm just trying and I never know if I'll get anywhere.

Making a difference is a difficult thing.  When you look around you at people who are so content to be mediocre, why not join them?  I mean, everyone is trying to make it right?

I'm trying to make it.  I work around 30 hours a week.  I have a seven day work week this week, actually.  I have assignments and stories required of me in other places.  And sometimes, I don't get enough sleep.  And still I fail.

Sometimes my life demands so much of me.  I shy away from it.  I know why I do that, too.  After everything I've been through I have been so determined to not be a failure.  Failing would be anything less than amazing.  I don't feel amazing anymore.  I'm trying to see where my own thoughts and wonderings fit in.  And I don't want to give to something that isn't for me or isn't going to work.

I see kids my age who are bogged down with their own problems.  I'm sad for them.

The bad thing about being a victim of some sort is that you don't trust or care for anyone.  It's hard to love anyone else when you can't love yourself.  It's hard loving me when I don't see the fire I once had for this thing called writing.  I once loved it.  But now, I think I'm scared of it.  That's why I don't have much to say.  I'm afraid of what I might find.

Along with this, I don't care for the average person.  Part of me despises him.  I serve him for hours on end and get a two dollar tip.  The average person isn't considerate.  I guess that is why I try so hard to do everything at once, not let people down, be considerate...but deep down inside, I think it's letting myself down at this point.

Reasons why we shouldn't blog...

It seems like it's easy to blame a bloggers for the crap on the internet.  I mean after all, they aren't even real journalists, or are they?

Daniel Cavanagh doesn't consider himself a journalist.  Perhaps this is why he doesn't consider it ethically wrong to interview people and not mention that they might be recorded, or that the information they give would be used for a blog.  To many journalists, this is ethically wrong.  But what is a blogger?  Does writing about subjects in their community require them to adhere to the same standards as journalists?

With the struggle and eventual death of newspapers, the fate of news both locally and nationally lays in the hands of people like Daniel Cavanagh, but what are the rules to play by?  The Los Angeles Times isn't as highly regarded as it once was, with people complaining about the lack of content or the lack of class of the Times.

But what can be expected?  News is evolving and it looks like blogging is becoming a more legitimate source of news.   It's replacing the big city papers, and spring up in small towns where newspapers haven't been.  It's easier to do, but ethics and accurate reporting still need to be trademarks of news sources.  Without these, blogging is just a bunch of meaningless blab.

For me, blogging is a tool.  It's to spread the word, and maybe Cavanagh considers it to be so, as well.  For him, it helps him expose things, and I want to expose things myself.  If it ticks people off, then so be it.

So, it begins...

Have you ever had a feeling about something, so terrible and deep that it makes your stomach split in two? This is how I feel every time I think about my first year in college.

Here, I am starting a blog for women.  This a list of things that women should know about abuses, whether physical or mental, against other women.  These abuses can occur in the United States, but they can also cover topics such as trafficking, prostitution, and cultural differences between American women and women around the world.

I am very interested in topics that affect women.  I was raped the first week of my freshman year in college.  I went to a college pool party by myself, and a guy put something in my drink.  I passed out within thirty minutes and the last thing I remember was him putting me in his truck.  I woke up paralyzed and face down on a bed to someone raping me.

I come from a fairly small town.  I began my adult life very naive, but after the first week, that all changed.

I didn't tell my parents for seven months.  The night I was kidnapped, the man who took me had purposefully stashed my purse with my phone and keys at his friend's apartment.  When I woke up, all I can remember is asking where my clothes were, where my purse was.  And each time he would answer that we would get them in the morning.  My parents had been calling me all night and I never answered.  There's nothing like a parent's instinct.  Usually I call every day, if even just to say hi.  But I hadn't that Tuesday night.

They called my Residential Advisor (RA), but she said that I wasn't opening my door and that I was probably asleep.  

The next day, when he took me to get my purse, I said nothing.  I really think he believed that I didn't remember any of it.  I called my parents and lied about how I had taken some allergy pills and passed out.  Then I went to French class, only to get up and leave in the middle of it to throw up something bright yellow.

When I went back to my dorm, I told myself I would never speak of it, that I would forget, but I didn't.  I threw myself into work and getting straight A's in all of my classes.  My parents were proud.  I was excelling.  Well, at least that's what they thought.

I finally told them months later, when my managers at work were worried about me.  Just the smell of a certain cologne would send me into chills and sobs.  I would have to leave work because the smell of him sent me back there.

Four years later, I still have nightmares and major scars because of that one night.  I am past it, for the most part though.  Over the last couple of years, it has been my goal to take this experience and try with the best of my ability to stop it from happening to other women.

But it does happen, every day.  Women all around the world are subjects of sexual and physical abuses.  Women are discriminated against, treated as property, drugged, raped, beaten, and even ostracized for their terrible circumstances.   With this blog, I will come up with a list of things women need to know about these abuses, how to escape them, and how to deal with the aftermath.