Letz start some blog postz

Hi everyone, and welcome to our blog! A brief introduction: we are four recent graduates of the University of Chicago who got placed together first year by some miracle on the part of the housing system. We all liked each other and proceeded to live together all four years, first in housing, and then in apartments. When we graduated, we scattered - and I'm now working as a computational biologist in Boston, MA. Which is awesome. (Disregard the fact that I'm writing this at work; I do actually like my job, I promise.)

I'm going to start with a sort of random question: do you think teenage girls are bored? And if so, what sort of games/activities should be created to change that? I should explain where I'm getting this train of thought. Last night I asked my boyfriend which gender child he would like to have if he could only have one. He said a boy, which didn't surprise me, because I would have said a girl. But I found his explanation surprising: "Girls are mischievous" (hello, aren't boys the ones who are supposed to play pranks?). According to him, boys do things when they hang out together, such as stereotypically masculine activities like shooting hoops, other variations on tossing a ball around, and playing video games. But girls only have one thing to do when they hang out together: talk. He doesn't know what they find to talk about, but whatever it is, "they must be up to no good". I'm guessing he meant by this that the lack of female hang-out activities leads to the sort of drama we all remember from Mean Girls.

At first I laughed at him, but after I read a paragraph in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex that basically stated exactly what he had just said without the video games, I started to reconsider. What is it, exactly, that girls do together? Other than talk? I couldn't think of anything until my tween years came flooding back to me and I remembered one thing: Klutz crafts books. My 13-year-old self enjoyed nothing more than sitting down and making some (very tacky, very ugly) jewelry, or decorating cookies, or making paper dolls, or, at one point, making a pin-ball machine with my friends. What made this really fun was the aspect of collaboration, and I think that whenever the act of creation got touched by competition, it ruined it for me. Competition for me meant that someone was doing better than someone else, and that inevitably meant someone wasn't having fun.

These activites mostly ended when I got further into my teenage years, though; the tacky jewelry and paper dolls started losing their glittery charm and I got very busy with music lessons, plays, and schoolwork. But my love of collaborative creation has never gone away: for example, some of my favorite memories from college are of sitting around drinking cheap wine and making bad art with cheap supplies. There's only so much bad art you can make, though, and there's the real problem with creation: you take stuff and create more stuff with it, all of which is stuff you don't need. What's the solution?