Just bein' Miley

Hello, kids. Today I took a complicated test on a complicated book. Luckily,

Oh, goody. I was going to say "I don't think I did that poorly," but I stopped in the middle to check if it'd been graded already. I got a D. On an ENGLISH test. Faaaantastic. On the bright side, it was the last real assignment I'll ever have to do in high school. On the not-so-bright side, I now have a C. In English. Kick me in the face. I'm totally not in the mood for blogging anymore at the present time. Here's another editorial I wrote yesterday for my school's newspaper:

Unless you’re elderly or a Pokemon master, chances are you know quite a bit about Miley Cyrus. At the age of sixteen, she has over 196,000,000 Google search results. According to Forbes magazine, she’s the world’s fifteenth richest person under the age of 25. Her TV show, Hannah Montana, has pulverized the Disney channel’s previous ratings. Both of her albums, Meet Miley Cyrus (2007) and Breakout (2008) went straight to number one. Her face is practically wallpaper at Wal-Mart and Claire’s. She’s starred in two feature films and sold out concert locations all across the country.

Oh yeah, and a lot of people hate her.

I’ll admit—when Cyrus first came on the scene as Hannah Montana in 2006, I thought she was annoying. Lots of mouthy overacting in the style of Raven-Symone, highly-edited children’s motivational songs, and one of those prepubescent ribcage-y body types: it all seemed enough for me to dismiss. Little did I know that Disney’s ability to reel in audiences of all ages would lead to my own succumbing to Miley Mania.

Though it was at first against my will, I found myself frequently impressed by Cyrus’s interview performance. She doesn’t answer questions like a ditz. She carries herself with a womanlike maturity while still trying to live down to America’s expectations for her to be a little girl.

The general public has formed the common misconception that Cyrus can’t sing. I understand why this would be assumed, as her most widely heard music is from when she was fourteen years old. Quite contrarily, however, Cyrus performs the majority of her concerts live and successfully. When was the last time Britney Spears even had her headset microphone turned on at a show? Cyrus beautifully delivered her new single, “The Climb,” at the children’s inaugural concert this winter, under an enormous amount of pressure, and the audience was visibly shaken.

It should also be noted that Cyrus wrote and cowrote the majority of both her albums, which is a pretty monumental feat for a young actress, especially considering that her competition, people like Jamie Lynn Spears and Lindsay Lohan-- who are respectively pregnant with a second illegitimate child and a rehab patient—have never penned a meaningful word in their lives. While somewhat trivial, (Who didn’t laugh when they heard “My best friend Leslie said, ‘Oh, she’s just bein’ Miley’?”) Cyrus’s lyrics speak to the souls of pre-teen girls everywhere. She sings about skateboarding after school; not indiscriminate sex.

Which brings us to the inevitable discussion of her sexy Internet photos. Last year, a set of photographs were leaked to the web, picturing Cyrus posing for a girlfriend’s digital camera with hints of her undergarments purposely showing. Yes, parents have reason to be cautious when their daughters’ favorite star is seen in a lime green bra, but in my opinion, the whole ordeal was wildly blown out of proportion. The pictures, while racy, were nothing you wouldn’t see on the Myspace pages of half our student body. They’re a far cry from child pornography, and incomparable to High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens’s nude photos. The real crime in this situation is that members of the media are exploiting the childish mistakes of a child for their own benefit.

While it is evident that Miley Cyrus has some growing up to do, I honestly cannot foresee a drug meltdown or head-shaving in her future. Being in the public eye 24/7, the self-proclaimed Christian teen deserves a medal for having so few strikes against her decency record to date. My advice? Leave her alone. She’s just bein’ Miley.

Weight: I don't know right now.

Chipotle burritos this year: 15

Subscribers: 15,732

Days left of high school: 16

Bye, guys! Hopefully I'll see you tomorrow. Proooom niiiiight.