Starring Julie

Thursday, August 5, 2004

It has come to my attention that I almost never update my rant column. This is a problem that I shall seek to fix.

What I’ll do for today’s update is something of a re-run. What I mean by that is, if anyone from my training in Youth Evangelism Service (YES) is reading this, it will sound extremely familiar but to the rest of you it’ll be new. What I’m posting today is an excerpt from "From Here Till Now."

From Here Till Now was a newsletter that my four roommates and I released on a weekly basis while we lived in Harrisburg Pennsylvania being trained for different trips we would be taking related to church work. There were about forty of us in all of the training, but the five members of Room 15 (strangely we always referred to ourselves as members rather than residents of Room 15, as if we were some sort of special club) took it upon ourselves to make sure every Friday night there was a milkshake party with loud music, blacklights, and other various party elements with milkshakes taking the place of what would be alcohol at most other parties. And during the party we released a new issue of From Here Till Now with our fake, semi libelous, yet hilarious news. Basically, we just said whatever we wanted and everyone got a kick out of it. I happened to be editor of From Here Till Now which didn’t really mean anything, except that I made sure there weren’t any horrendous spelling errors in the paper and that the information contained was as fake as it possibly could be. I also wrote and illustrated a comic strip for the paper called The Adventures of Janelle & Michelle. After a couple more comics I’m planning on doing a short week long intermission type of thing with non-story related comics, and I might use one of the episodes of The Adventures of Janelle & Michelle since it uses a different type of art style and some of them are actually pretty funny even if you don’t know the people in the comic.

Anyway, I’m starting to become overly wordy. I do that from time to time. What I’m posting today is a reprint of an article I wrote for issue three of From Here Till Now. The inspiration behind the story is that several people in my neighborhood in Harrisburg for some reason thought that I was not actually a boy; rather, they believed that I had two X chromosomes. I have no idea why this was, nor did any of my friends or any of the other people training with me at Harrisburg. I’m only 5’6" tall but I have sideburns and I don’t believe that most women grow those unless they live at the circus. Also, I don’t have breasts. This is the article I wrote in response:

Originally Published From Here Till Now Volume 3: November 15, 2002

Seibert = Man

by Seibert

I’m going to answer an item that seems to be causing everyone a great deal of confusion once and for all. Here it is, it’s now official, public knowledge – I’m a boy.

As hard as this seems to be for everyone to believe, it’s true and I take great umbrage that anyone would believe otherwise. I mean sure, most women grow a more full beard than me, and I’ll grant you that I enjoy playing Pretty Pretty Princess a little more than a man probably should and often win when I do play. So what if I have thick, flowing hair that drives most women to jealousy with cute little curls around my ears. There is plenty of barely sufficient evidence to support my being a man, and a man for all other men to model their own manhood and manliness after. I’m the manliest manly man known to mankind.

I grew up out in the lush forests of Lewisburg Pennsylvania where there’s plenty of space for a young lad to romp and play sports and climb trees. Of course, I didn’t do any of that. Instead I sat peacefully in the yard wearing my favorite pink button down shirt and picked flowers. Hey, so what if pink was my favorite color? The gender labeling of colors is something that I take a strong stance against to this day. It’s perfectly natural for a man to enjoy the color pink and I don’t think my friends should have laughed at me when I wore pink clothing. Judging a man by the color of his shirt is just plain WRONG.

I never played sports in school. The other boys never wanted me on their teams due to my frail, pale, pasty, demi-feminine frame. I was always the 9th grader the 7th graders beat up. Since all the guys were involved in sports, I had to resort to the girls for companionship. I strangely enough found acceptance with them. I’m pretty sure they knew I was a guy, and yet they talked to me about their problems and told me everything that was going on with them including some things I would have preferred not to hear ever in my life and could be a better person had I not heard it. Still, I was glad for their friendship despite my politely refusing their slumber party invitations and their desperate pleas to join the cheerleading squad and become a "Trailblazer."

Wow, talk about tearing down your own argument. Those last couple paragraphs have been nothing short of incriminating. Things, however, have changed. I’ve taken my girly-man roots and turned my pathetic self around into a manly man man man. I burp loudly and can do so on command. I manhandle Bixler. I don’t own a red Chevy truck but wish I did and daydream about my many nonexistent sports conquests constantly. I make fun of girls. I forget to put the toilet seat down.

I feel I’ve adequately presented my case now. Next time someone says to me, "So what’s your name, Miss?" I can answer and answer with pride, "I’m no Miss, I’m pure MAN, baby!"

That’s an excerpt of one of the issues of From Here Till Now. At the end of training we made our own FHTN t-shirts… I’ll try to post a picture of mine sometime. Let me know what you think and if you’re interested in reading more FHTN… if not, it’s understandable since it’s a lot of inside jokes but it is something we had a good time with while it lasted. If you’d like more, e-mail me or use the forum to say something like "I love From Here Till Now."

That’s it for now…

-Kevin

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

So my dad installed a firewall on the network that completely shut down my ability to scan the comics to my computer, which i was unable to fix until it was too late to do any work on the comic. Sorry, it'll be delayed until tomorrow.

- Emrys