Grim and Grimmer

I seem to spend my days serving people who don't exhibit common courtesy, or writing about rather dire topics.  Sadly, I rather doubt either of those two things will be changing in the near future.  People, are, and presumably will remain, dickheads.  Don't get me wrong; a lot of our customers are really nice, polite, and friendly.  They're just trying to make conversation, are genuinely curious, and think they're being friendly.  To be fair, I used to think it was nice to ask someone who clearly doesn't sound local where they're from.  Obviously, as I'm still fielding that question 5+ times a day (I've been there 4 weeks now, and we have loads of regulars), I've changed my opinion on that score--even when you're truly interested and nice about it, the question gets really bloody tiresome.

Top that off with the fact that I write a weekly article for the Girl Museum's blog.  Don't get me wrong--I really do love doing it.  Essentially, what I do is scour the web and other news sources (but mostly the web, as we want to have the article linked) for a story about girls or girlhood.  Local, international, whatever.  It doesn't matter.  Try it though.  There's a lot of different search terms you can use, but the end result will be pretty grim.  Assuming your search terms turn up a plethora of stories--mine usually don't--they will be dire.  Sad.  Depressing.  In short, grim.  Girls being raped, or murdered, or tortured.  Girls being kept down by The Man (yeah, ok, usually literally).  Occasionally, I turn up something positive, or at least funny and not too horrid.  But for an example, today I just wrote and submitted a post on honor killings.  Yay for that bit of cheerfulness.  Last week, I opted out of writing an article on female genital mutilation/female circumcision (bit too much for me), so instead I ended up doing a bunch of research on the process of foot binding (it's damn near as horrible as FGM) for what was supposed to be a cheerful article on 5 awesome Chinese women (most of the research didn't end up in the post).  My first article was moderately happy; I talked about an organization called Pinkstinks, a group that wants to end the "princessizing" of girls.

Man, I really need something cheerful to write about.  So this is a call to arms, ladies and gents.  If you run across a story about girls or girlhood, please send it on to me so I can write about it, ESPECIALLY if it's happy, though I'd like it even if it's not.  Sorry, I probably won't be able to give you credit for finding it, but I would dearly appreciate it.

Also, if you'd like to read my posts on the Girl Museum blog, you can go here, though I encourage you to read all the posts, and if you've got a Blogger account, become a follower.