Facebook – Destroying Friendships One Person at a Time

This is my new Facebook mantra. Thanks Dani Quinnzell for making this up for me!

Obviously, I’m having some online frustrations lately! While Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch with people, it seems that many people don’t realize that it’s also a way to catch them in lies or to create hurt feelings. Case in point, I’d like to talk about Sally.

Now, Sally and I met because she reached out to me, saying she was new to the area and really wanted to put in the effort to make some friends here. We seemed to really hit it off, and she had kids that were around my kids ages, so it was a good fit.

However, what I’ve noticed is that Sally is never around. Every time she gets more than a few hours off from work, she leaves the state to visit friends and family. Alright, it’s her life, she can do as she pleases, but then I’m stuck scratching my head as to why she reached out to me in the first place, because now I’m continuously trying to put effort into a friendship that I’m not even sure exists.

I wouldn’t say I’m needy as a friend, but I do have certain expectations of people. For instance, if you say we’re going to meet up on Wednesday, or your coming to the movies with me on Friday, I expect you to either follow through, or cancel in a respectable way. What I don’t expect is to log onto Facebook and see that you’ve left town and are instead hanging out with other people during the time that we had plans set up. Or, I text you when you are supposed to be somewhere, and you have a really pathetic excuse for not coming, like “I’m too tired” or “I my kid has homework.” You could have cancelled LONG before I asked where you were at.

What makes me even angrier is that my kids love Sally’s kids, and I have made the mistake before of telling them we’ll be meeting up, then Sally doesn’t show up. Now my kids are upset and hurt because this person is breaking their plans with us. I don’t care for it.

But, I have still tolerated it, hoping the good person I originally met is just going through an awkward patch and we can still be good friends in the near future. However, I’m really at my breaking point now. I am always inviting Sally out or to join in activities with us, and she always says she’s so interested and to send her the information online. I do so, and Sally acts like she never sees the information. For example, I spent months inviting her to join our scouts, and she always said “yeah, yeah, I’m interested just send me the info!”

What happened? She never came, never acknowledged my information sent to her (at least 15 times), and then she comes up to me the last time we get together and says she’s joining another scout program that her friend recommends. Umm… okay, it’s your life and all, but you couldn’t have said this to me so I’m not wasting MY TIME sending you information over and over about our scouts? It felt like a slap in the face. And now to see her post about scouting online, it upsets me, because she really made me feel blown off in the matter, but now she’s so in love with scouting that it’s every post online.

So, after this, and a half dozen similar incidents like this, but involving other topics, I finally posted online that I’m wasting my time with certain friendships instead of putting my effort into better ones, so I’d be deleting people soon. Now, Sally had blown me off at least three times since we last met up a month ago, yet she was able to comment within minutes of me posting that saying she would care if I deleted her.

I’m kind of angry that she hasn’t had time in the last four weeks to follow through on what she says she is going to do with me, but she can jump right onto Facebook and act like it would be such a loss to not be my friend any longer. It’s perplexing, to say the least. But, considering I can’t look at her posts in my newsfeed without feeling upset, I think it’s time to let this friendship go and move on. I feel that she’s been a complete waste of my time, and that there’s no sincerity in our “friendship” because she can’t stand to stay in town to be anyone’s friend.

Who is Boo? The Pixar Theory Visited.

Have you heard about the Pixar Theory that this guy apaprently spent a year working on? It essentially explains, in detail, how all of Pixar’s movies are in the same universe, but different time lines. Some people are describing it as a thesis, so, like any good thesis will receive, I’m going to do a bit of challenging. (btw, you can see the original post http://jonnegroni.com/2013/07/11/the-pixar-theory/).

What caught my eye the most was the reference to Boo from Monsters Inc. Easily my favorite Pixar character, the theory is that Monsters Inc. is based in the future from Boo’s timeline – so the monsters are the reclaiming of society after humans meet an end of days kind of thing, and they go in the past to harvest human children’s screams much like we harvest dinosaur remains to make fuel.

It COULD fit, because, honestly, we don’t see much of the human world in Monsters Inc.  Plus, having any inkling of knowledge that humans destroyed their own existence would easily lead a monster population to fear all humans. After all, do we ever see much of anything that relates a specific time frame to the human world?  We assume the monsters live in a parallel universe that is in a linear time to our own, but there’s no evidence to fully support the timeframe that the humans are living in.

But here’s what we do see:  at the end of Monster’s Inc, Boo, who never is given a real name, but I have seen referred to as Mary in several published texts (remember when they used to make all those books giving the 4-1-1 of all the different comic characters and their universes? There was a Monsters Inc. one that called her Mary too.), goes home and we see some toys in the background. One of those toys is Jesse, the cowgirl counterpart to Woody in Toy Story. She also has a Nemo fish toy, even though that movie released two years after Monsters Inc.

Now hang in here with me for a minute. In Toy Story 3, as you can see in the photo here, there is a little girl at Sunnyside that looks a lot like Boo. Too much, in fact, to call it a coincidence. Pixar loves Easter Eggs, and to me, there is no doubt in my mind that this is one of them, and gives us enough to go on to assume that Bonnie (the young girl from Toy Story 3 who received the toys at the end) and Boo are friends.

When Monsters Inc. concludes, we have Sully opening Boo’s repaired door – the end. What we don’t get is a clear idea of how much time has passed between the door being shredded and reconstructed. It was enough time for Sully to take over the energy plant and for Mike to rebuild the door from splinters. But was that months? Years?  I assume it couldn’t have been a large amount of time, because when Sully takes Boo home, there’s a drawing on her art easel that is now on the wall when Sully peaks his head through the door.   I mean, everyone is different, but I probably wouldn’t save a drawing like that for years on end.  All the same though, we don’t get to see Boo when Sully re-enters, so it’s a question that’s bothered me for the last twelve years.  And when I thought we finally got a sequel – boo, it’s a pre-quel without Boo!

Looking at the situation realistically, Sully probably came back to say goodbye to Boo again.  He may have popped in on her from time to time, but we know they’re from two different spaces, making they’re platonic relationship is star crossed.  So, going back to the Pixar Theory that’s linked to above, where does that leave Boo?  The theory proposes that Boo saw into the future due to following Sully, she knew that doors were the key to Sully, and believed that Sully was a cat, which gave her the motivation to master time travel and become obsessed with animals having human traits – making her the Witch in Brave.  As far fetched as this seems, it’s not a bad angle when you think about it.  After all, we saw a Nemo toy appear in Monsters Inc. in 2001 – Finding Nemo was released in 2003.  So Pixar has a grand plan that we don’t always see.  Maybe in 2015 we’ll get a film from Pixar about time travel that would solidify the gaps in the Boo theory.

But, I would like to take this a bit farther.  Lets say Boo is the little girl at Sunnyside Daycare, and she grows up to master time travel – even though we don’t know how yet.  What if Boo grew up with Bonnie, admiring Woody for years (since she owns her own Jesse – or maybe borrowed Bonnie’s?).  Now, Boo learns how to time travel as an adult, and maybe she can’t find Sully, or maybe she has different goals for time travel now and thinks that Sully was an imaginary friend as an adult.  Maybe she wants to go back in time and prove to everyone that Sully was real, or perhaps she wants to go back to the happiest time of her life.  In any scenario, Boo could end up – with time travel – as an adult living in the years that she was a child (just to help any confused readers: say Boo grew up in 2000, invented time travel in 2030, and went back in time to 2000 as an adult).  Maybe she gets trapped in that time and, by the time she’s gotten back to 2030 and has the technology to reinvent time travel, perhaps she goes all the way to the time of Brave and is in that timeline a few decades before Merida comes around.  AND, after so many years of pining for her “kitty,” she reflects, or sneaks a peak at Sully again, and realizes that he looks more like a bear (which he does, based on shape and size).  That explains the Witch’s obsession with bears, and why there’s a little carving of Sully in the background.  A witch turning people into bears either because she’s bitter about her loss of Sully, or because she hopes to recreate him – it fits!

Another idea:  Perhaps a young adult Boo is involved with time travel and wants to test it out by going back and finding a new Woody  doll.  We know in Toy Story 2 that the Prospector said their show and toy line was huge until the moon landing in 1969.  Then everyone only wanted space toys.  But, while Boo’s going back in time, the machine breaks, or possibly malfunctions and only takes her a few years into the future, stranding Boo in the 1970s or 80s.  No one knows what time she’s in, and the technology was new, so there’s no one coming to rescue her.  She copes with that, and eventually settles in and has a life, including children, her oldest of which was given the Woody doll she went back in time for.  Boo could have been Andy’s mom, and then, once her kids were grown and time travel was possible, she could have split to the Dark Ages, where she makes replicas of the Pizza Planet truck while thinking about when her kids were young.

We do hear Andy’s Mom in Toy Story 2 tell Al (from Al’s Toy Barn) that she can’t part with Woody because it’s an old family toy.  She knew it was one of her son’s favorite toys, sure, but Andy was 8 when Toy Story released in 1995 – making him assumedly born in 1987, 18 years after the productions of Woody’s Round Up ceased.  Even if we assume that mom was a very young mother at is 30 during Toy Story 2 – that would have left her at age 12 when the production of Woody stopped – and it’s unlikely that a 12 year old girl wanted a cowboy doll.  So how did Woody come to be in that family and why did he mean so much to Andy’s mom when Wheezy sure didn’t?  Could Woody have even been a gift from Bonnie right before Boo was going to time travel?

Boo had a Jesse doll as a child, we know that’s a fact.  But when Jesse and Bullseye magically show up in Andy’s room, we never get any reaction from the mother.  She’s clearly a single mom, we get no hints that there are any gift-giving visitors going to Andy’s house, and Andy’s mom is VERY aware of how old and rare Woody is.  Why did she never question where Jesse came from?  Was it because Jesse was already a familiar friend to mom?

Or, maybe Boo never got stuck in time.  Maybe she fell in love with an era or a person and just chose to stay there, but pops in and out of time as she pleases.  The Witch in Brave may be sitting at a family dinner in 2013 at Thanksgiving, and visiting Bonnie for Xmas in 2040.  But we do hear a hint of love that Andy’s Mom gives towards Bonnie, even though Bonnie is much younger than either of Andy’s Mom’s children.  Andy barely even questions it when his mom tells him to take the toys to Bonnie’s house.  The families know each other well, even though it’s left up to the imagination to guess why that is.

More ideas still:  If that is not Boo at Sunnyside – what if Boo was also Emily from Toy Story 2 that abandoned Jesse?  Similarly, the girl at Sunnyside could have been Boo’s daughter, or great-granddaughter.  Or, what if Boo is Andy’s daughter, and, by that time, Bonnie has grown out of her toys and gives the special ones to Boo?  Then Andy kept the toys in a safe place until his daughter got bigger, but she loved Jesse and kept snatching her away.  We have no solid proof of the Pixar timeline IF all of the films are in the same universe, so it is all speculative, even though it all seems very intertwined.  But, there is something hauntingly special about the Witch in Brave having Sully art in her home, and we get little hints in Brave and Monsters Inc that the two movies are connected to Toy Story somehow.

Now, I’d also like to look at the Pixar Theory and potentially answer a question raised – if Monsters Inc is in the future, after WALL-E took place, then what happened to the machines and humans again?  We don’t see any living machines like WALL-E in Monsters Inc, and there are no people living with the monsters.  But we know that Pixar is a great fan of Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and many other films), and I believe it was Miyazaki that worked on a story that involved humans living underground after polluting the world too much, and as the world healed itself, the human population could not survive in the fresh air any longer.  Taking that into account, what if the humans started to clean up the Earth, but just laid the foundation and died out?  After being stationary and breathing manufactured space air for 800 years, that’s going to be a near impossible adjustment.  There’s even a moment in WALL-E where they show that being in space will mess with how human’s bones grow.  So, it’s a safe assumption that humans returned to Earth with grand intentions, but were too far adapted to space life to change anything.  Then there would be no one to to maintain the machines, and they couldn’t be able to maintain themselves because the world had been cleaned up just enough that finding pieces and parts of machinery (and ones that worked to your mechanical specifications) was no longer possible.  It gives way for something else to adapt and take over the Earth – which could be “monsters” or mutated/evolved animals.

Merida Controversy

I am hearing a lot of commotion about Princess Merida becoming the official 11th Disney Princess and being made over. I fully agree with the complaint too. Merida is a rough and tumble kind of gal, and now she’s slathered in make-up and put in the sparkly dress that looks oddly similar to the one she rebelled against wearing in the movie. It is a slap in the face for feminism to say the least.

But, realistically, would you expect any less from Disney? In the 1930s there were some very well respected female artists and animators that applied to work for Disney, and Walt wrote back (or rather, his secretary did, one has to wonder if she saw the irony in what she was being forced to write for Walt Disney) that women are not considered for any creative positions or training, and that women could only become inkers or painters. It’s not surprising that that part of the Disney legacy is living on.

You might not guess that Disney is a chauvinist company after watching any Disney movie, because the princesses (ie female characters) are the studio’s bread and butter for almost 80 years. In fact, it’s just been recently that Disney has taken any effort to preserve major boy characters. Had it not been for the release of Cars and Toy Story, the “boy” side of the Disney Store would be pretty pathetic looking compared to the glitter and glamor of the Princess side of the store. This was especially true during Halloween time when you’d see tons of girl costumes, then, maybe some Peter Pan costumes for the boys, along with whatever flavor of the year character was out (any remember Hercules, Aladdin, Pheobos, Pinocchio, Arthur, Tarzan, Shang, or Jim Hawkins? The Disney Store sure doesn’t!).

So, then, to me, it’s no real surprise that Merida was given a giant make over during her coronation with Disney. The exact same action was done to Pocahontas and Mulan when the princesses were turned into their own group franchise. And, even though Pocahontas was a strong, independent, female character, compare Merida’s make over to Mulan’s.

When you see Mulan, she always wears the geisha-like kimono (I’m sorry, I’m not sure what the proper term for these are in China) and often with the full geisha-like make up. We don’t see much of soldier Mulan, because she isn’t cutesy, and so Disney has decided she will not sell. Mulan also meet her failures while trying to be the “perfect bride” wearing the kimono dress, and she does not care for the dress. She makes complaints about it, and flat out says she only wears it to try and make her family happy. She’s only “playing a part” to be a bride in the pink kimono, yet that is her one and only image that gets slapped onto Princess franchise items. Isn’t that essentially Merida’s new transformation? Merida wore the dress because her mother forced her, it was a “husband finding” dress, and the dress is the visual center piece for the problems that propel the plot of the film.

And while we’re ever on the subject – Mulan is not, and never has been, a Princess. Her father was not royal, neither was anyone else in her family, and she is not adopted by the Emperor at the end of either movie (almost marries a son of one, but that’s a different issue that also didn’t occur). We presume that eventually Mulan will marry Shang, but he is only a military man, nothing special as far as royalty. And it would not bother me to have Mulan included, but we have had other, legitimate, Disney Princesses left out altogether. Where is Kida? She was the Princess of Atlantis, but, apparently, not pretty or popular enough to make the cut. Arguments could also be made for Gizelle’s exclusion, even though she was only animated for a small portion of Enchanted.

The moral of the story – Disney is here to make money, and they have already decided, after years of being proven right, that little guys buy fairy tales, and families will spend big money to go to the Bibbity Bobbity Boutique to get their daughters (or themselves) decked out in sparkles and fancy dresses. So it’s of little wonder that Disney would try to vamp up Merida to use her as another cash cow. Or, in Mulan, “we’re gonna turn this sow’s ear into a silk purse!”

As a side note, my daughter has a Merida costume. We picked the dark green one, but mainly because it was covered in fancy, celtic glitter swirls. So, yeah, little girls buy the fantasy, not the reality, and as long as that is true, the idea of how a princess will be most profitable will never change at Disney either.

Student Loan Bail Out – What We Didn’t Sign Up For

Every week or so I run a search for updated information on a student loan bail out in the United States. Why? Because my husband and I are making a household income of less than $29,000 a year, and our student loans are combined at over $76,000 (it is on a $0 Income Based Repayment plan, but the interest capitalizes and swells up the debt farther and farther). This is not what I want, nor is it the life I envisioned after spending over half my life being told that education was the way to find success and gain worthwhile employment in life.

In my searches for student loan debt crisis and bail out information, I see a lot of people strongly opposing the government stepping in and washing away the huge load of debt. In some ways, I agree with this sentiment, however, I think those against the bail outs are not considering the issues I face, such as:

1) I have a high level of stress as to how we will ever pay these loans back. YES, if you stay on the Income Based repayment plan for 25 years, anything not paid off goes away. To the contrary, though, my goal in life is NOT to remain in a poverty income level. Even so, we can only do what we can do at this point. My understanding, though, is that if we do not stay in the Income Based Repayment income level for 25 years straight, we owe all that money, plus the thousands of dollars of compounding interest. Is that unfair? Yes and no. Yes it is what I ultimately agreed to (it was either that or default), but inflating my loan and punishing me for being able to pay in the future is not right in my opinion.

2) I would love to make $100,000 a year and pay those loans back, as agreed, with the full interest asked – but where are the jobs I was promised? The student loan offices told me I would make $50k a year and so I should live off of the federal loans, focus on school, and then watch how easy it would all be to repay. I was lied to. I was bait and switched.

3) The university sets the tuition terms, and the government hands out this money for student loans without considering anything about the student! “Barely pass high school? Borrow this money, no problem! Want to major in basket weaving? Just sign on the dotted line, they’ll be $50k a year jobs waiting for you at the end of the four-year rainbow! You have maxed out credit cards and are about to file bankruptcy? We don’t even consider that!”

This loan should have been reserved for high performing academics who were entering majors in certain fields needed by the United States (doctors, engineers, etc etc etc). In a worst case scenario, the government should have said, something like “we can give loans to x amount of people entering Chemistry, x amount in biology, x amount in psychology, x amount in sociology…” and so forth. This was a supply and demand issue that has now caused PhD’s to work at McJobs and many others to have no way to repay these loans because the market was over-saturated.

4) To this day I have still never owned a Smart Phone, or any of the other “cool” things that those against student loan bail outs claim I used my money for. You know where my loans went? Tuition, Books (some at $200-500 EACH because of that lovely university printing press and edition scam), Rent, Daycare, and Food. Sure, not every college student has children to care for, and there will always be people abusing the system to buy things they shouldn’t, but then why make the cash available in the first place? Anyone who’s taken a simple psychology class, or watched enough Dr. Phil, knows that the brain isn’t fully developed until the mid-twenties, which means most college students taking out student loans can’t see far enough down the road to understand that any negative implications exist.

6) There is blame to be put onto the borrowers, however, I was not the one promoting college as “the only way to a high paying future” since I first entered a public school. I didn’t post up photographs of all the graduating Seniors in the 12th grade who were attending college as an “inspiration” to follow in their footsteps, no matter what the cost. And, while I realize in hindsight that my career/income goals were unrealistic, I did not realize in my teens and early twenties that I was making a deal with the Devil, as it were. “I’ll save your life now, and you just give me your first born child in ten years!” was the essential deal we made. We were targeted and exploited, and our “reward” was a worthless piece of paper.

7) Much like the housing market crash, people believed that if they got approved for the loan, then they must be able to repay it. Also similar is the inflated cost of homes and tuition in schools. I bought a house last year, when our income was higher. We make due alright, but I’ve noticed a huge drop in housing values in the year we’ve lived in our house. Now, houses listed in 2012 for $150k are valued at $50k. Likewise, the degree that earns $30k a year, tops, should not cost $35k to obtain. It has an up-side-down value when compared to the job market. So housing and student loan debt was not a malicious attempt to steal from or hurt anyone, it is ignorance to reality mixed with predatory lending and manufactured prices. Very smart people worked very hard to fleece many of us.

8)  The government unfairly decides who can go to college for free.  If you are deemed to be from a low income family who “can’t afford college,” you will likely get something like a Pell Grant to pay your tuition for you!  But I, as someone in a low income adult family, am expected to come up with the money to pay back these loans because my parents weren’t broke when I entered the system.  Lets either make college free for all, or give out free money on merit based achievements (ie academics or a talent like sports), NOT just because Suzy has two working parents and Johnny lives with his Grandma who draws Social Security.  That just puts Suzy on wellfare later because she can’t get a job to get her out of her crippling debt!

Here are my personal suggestions for the government dealing with student loan debt:

1) Erasing the debt for everyone would be ideal. However, I can see negative implications across the board from this happening as well. Remember the huge bail outs given to the banks for the housing market? Not a single Joe Nobody had their debt erased, and none of them got to keep their house all the same.

2) Lower the interest rates! Have you seen the details on a student loan bill? Half of your money for five years (on a ten year repayment plan) goes to interest! If I’m borrowing $40k for a degree from a state university, how about I pay back a flat $45k instead of $80k-200K?

3) Make compounding interest disappear! Again, this doesn’t fix all the problems, but it would help millions of former students get their debt repaid easier.

4) Allow student loans to go into bankruptcy. That way, if you didn’t get what you bought into, you at least have some out. Personally, I would declare bankruptcy tomorrow to get the loans off of my back, because I can’t find a single full time job that pays more than minimum wage.

5) Lets scale way back on the 25 years of poverty rule. How about we set up something like a five or ten year “too broke to pay” plan?

6) Make colleges accountable! Like tropical fish, they will grow to the size of their environment, so the more English majors that apply, the more they will expand their department to accommodate. The more we raise the student loan withdraw ceiling, the more the universities will charge! I shouldn’t need any loan to attend a PUBLIC and state sponsored school, it should be a low cost per credit hour fee. But, because the school can get it, the will, and because they don’t have to answer for drop out rates or under-employment/unemployment, they won’t .

7) Freeze interest for those in any type of repayment modification. If you are deferred or on an income based plan, getting help doesn’t help you in the long run, it earns the loan a higher total. It’s a debt spiral that easily gets out of control, and could just as easily be put to a stop.

As an example, let me share a story of my friend and the sorority. My friend hit financial issues, didn’t have money for dues, and so was dismissed from meetings and events, while also being charged $50 for each event she missed. So, if she didn’t have $200 to pay off her dues on Monday, how was she expected to come up with $250 on Sunday after missing a meeting? It was ultimately an unfair way to weed out any “poor girls.” That’s the same principle with interest rates, and especially those compounding ones.

Why, if no one can pay their tab, don’t we do something about that? No one really wants to welch on their debts, but we get driven in that direction. So why doesn’t anyone stop it? Well, because companies love it when students default (which is why so many of the lifelines we’re given have unclear and difficult to follow directions) because then Uncle Sam pays your tab, and you STILL owe the money too – so they get to double dip!

This fix isn’t rocket science, but it does involve making LESS money for businesses, so nothing gets resolved. I don’t necessarily want my debt erased (I’ll take it if you’re offering, but I don’t expect it), but I don’t need my debt getting worse off because of my financial status – and all because I believe that education was the key to success!

Are American Girl Dolls “Worth It?”

My daughter just brought home her 3rd American Girl doll today. She now owns Caroline (bought with her birthday money in November), McKenna (lucky raffle ticket winners), and Saige (doll bought with Xmas money from grandparents – all other outfits courtesy of daddy being a push over). These dolls were $105 each, with Saige ringing in 2013 with a universal price increase of $5 per doll. A lot of people are not shy to freak out and cackle, “how can you buy these things?” (or let her “waste” her money on them).

Yes, yes, I fully understand that these are just toys, and they may well sit in a closet someday, never seeing the light of day. My mom certainly doesn’t seem to understand the value of American Girl versus the Target, Walmart, or Toys R’ Us brand of 18″ dolls (and in some areas/items, I agree as well) but here are some reasons why I like the American Girl line:

1) It has a history. Literally! The Historic dolls (ie, the ones with 6+ books in their series, who lived in a specific time frame) open up the past and let children experience history through stories that still feel relevant and relatable to them. The company is also roughly as old as I am, and gaining significant new ground with their stores, so I see no reason to assume the American Girl line will go under any time soon (R.I.P. Magic Attic Club…).

I can remember going to Sam’s Club in the mid-1990s and seeing Felicity, Addy, Samantha, and Kirsten books (Molly apparently existed back then too, but I never recall seeing her). While these were never dolls I owned as a child, reading the books from the library is still a memory that I have and can transfer forward to my daughter.  Except, this time around, my daughter owns a few of the book sets herself.  My local library still has American Girl on the shelves, but rarely a “Meet” book that is the first in the series.  So, when my daughter wanted Caroline, I paid to upgrade to the set with her complete book series as well.

2) There is an amazing online community fro American Girl on YouTube. This happens a lot and for a lot of different topics, but I have seen my five-year-old click away on YouTube watching fan made video after video, and now she’s motivated to make her own. They don’t always make sense, and they aren’t the most polished creations, but they’re hers, and they’re getting her creativity flowing. And, as a vlogger, I know the generalized world of haters and trolls, but I have rarely seen this happen within the American Girl community. They are mostly young girls (some adult women as well) who enjoy their dolls and support each other, and that makes my daughter smile when I read her a comment someone left on her video.  Yes, there could have been something else that my daughter connected with via YouTube, but the bottom line is that she did not (she also loves My Little Pony, but the brony community online has a lot of adults who make videos with vulgarity or other themes that are at a college or higher age level).  She makes American Girl fan videos because she enjoys watching them herself.

3) I get to have that time to sit down and read the stories with her. Aside from the Girl Scout Journey books, we don’t have many titles that take more than one sitting to read. The stories are for older girls, but it also helps develop my five year old’s cognitive, logic, and reasoning skills as she has to pay attention and retain the stories from one night to the next. We also break frequently to discuss what happened, why she thinks it happened, and what she thinks will go on next.  I did this with my son and he reads at a fifth grade level as a second grader now.

4) McKenna saved my sanity. Alright, let me paint this picture: five-year-old terrorist in gymnastics class, won’t listen, won’t cooperate, they’re ready to throw her out. We started reading McKenna’s books, watched her movie, and a flip seemed to switch in her head. She went from “I can never do that so why even bother,” to “McKenna struggled and got better and so can I!” (well, not in so many words, but it’s there in her attitude!). So far, so good, and she always talks about McKenna – sometimes spacing out and calling her “the gymnastics girl” – when she does well in class.  For those of you who say a doll, book, and movie cannot do this, I can only respond with: you’d be surprised.  The week my daughter saw McKenna’s movie, she got her first ribbon for being the best student in a class of fifteen girls and had no complaints about her behavior for the first time in her four months of lessons.  Will an American Girl offer the same types of change in your own daughter?  That I cannot say for certain, but I am impressed.

5) The My American Girl dolls (the ones with no official story lines, but many options to “twin” out your daughter) have some really sweet options to them. Whereas, once, you could only get ears pierced on your doll, now you can have hearing aids installed. They even have a newer option to make your doll bald so that even those little girls fighting cancer can have a twin. I can’t say the photos I see posted online of little girls with hearing aids or no hair holding their matching dolls don’t make me cry.

6) The value seems to retain well, even for dolls in less than pristine condition. This can always change in the future (*cough* Beanie Babies *cough*), and American Girl is very “hot” right now, but I’ve consistently noticed that used dolls and new dolls hold a very similar price, even after years of play time.  There are also lots of stories about moms giving daughters their old dolls, so obviously, the dolls are not designed to fall apart in an hour, like many other toys seem to be these days.

7) Maybe this should be #1, but the quality and attention to detail for the dolls are very impressive. When my mom talks about just buying the Walmart off brand clothes, I cringe a little. Yes, I certainly see that a $35 outfit for a doll is more than I’ve spent on myself in clothes in the past two years, but, if I could find a dress from 1812 that had that much quality and attention to detail for $100, I would probably covet it as well for myself. The difference being that I can afford the doll fashion more. And whereas an off brand would have flat, shinny, dull, or generally cheap fabric and bad stitching, American Girl uses high quality material. Even their accessories, like hats and pianos and pets, have amazing attention to detail. Compare Kit’s Preserves kit to an off brand doll food set at Toys R Us – it doesn’t compare at all! Now, having said this, I am a fan of the Target version of the bathtub, wooden dresser, kitchen, and horses, and they are significantly cheaper when you can find the items in the store. But as far as outfits and the actual dolls, I don’t see any competition for American Girl’s production in the near future.

My only major negatives with American Girl is that the items are costly and large, with lots of things always coming out and retiring. I wanted to get my daughter a cupcake set and was somewhat horrified to find out that I could only get the cupcakes if I bought the $85 table (that I had nowhere to store). I also thought that Saige’s Hot Air Balloon was interesting, until I saw it was roughly 50″ tall! There are also no real dollhouses for 18-inch-ers, so storage can become tricky if you enjoy owning the furniture.

Another complaint that I see constantly, but do not have myself, is that the dolls are not made in America.  People, stay with me here, but what in the world is made in the US anymore?  First, a US factory might say “made in America” on the tag, but who would the workers be?  Illegal immigrants are the most likely candidate, and I for one would rather support an entire community in China than pay illegals to make our country a little bit worse.  I couldn’t imagine how much the dolls would cost if you paid an American factory with US citizens to produce the toys.  In the beginning, the dolls were made in West Germany, so no jobs have been lost for Americans.  Matel bought the company years ago and moved production to China.  In China, an average factory worker makes roughly $50 US Dollars a YEAR.  Tell me a person in American that would accept that same salary.  Not even illegal immigrant workers would take that little.  In the US, we want $2-4,000 a month in salary, plus health care and other benefits.  Our economy has priced our own people out of the market, so seeing a doll called American Girl does not mean she was made in America.  She was designed in America, written about in America, goes to the doll hospital in America, and has employed at least several hundred US citizens to work for her in stores and customer services.  What else do you want?  Go see how many people are complaining about the dolls price going from $105 in 2012 to $110 in 2013 and tell me, realistically, that American Girl could survive paying all US salaries.

But, in short, if you don’t think the dolls are worth it, don’t buy them. It’s up to you to decide how many, if any, your child gets, and most of the dolls (aside from the Girl of the Year that retires once she sells out) are always available, making them a motivational tool that parents can use to prompt their children to experience budgeting and saving techniques. That way, you turn a potential, bank-breaking negative into a positive learning experience, and you might get someone else to sweep and vacuum to boot.

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