In media created for the 15-19 age group, especially dystopian and urban fantasy narratives, there is a trend of presenting the protagonist with two (or as many as six) virtues or ideals which are pitted against each other, due to circumstances which force those values to be expressed in their unhealthy extremes, to the exclusion of each other. Sometimes the young reader is railroaded by the narrative into agreeing with whichever side the protagonist ultimately takes, due to the author treating the "opposite virtue" as innately flawed or prone to extreme black-and-white thinking. Other times, the choice is agonised over by the character at first, but later it is revealed to be a false choice, under a hegemonic authority which pits various sides of society against each other as a mechanism of control.

Truth versus Beauty

two fifty a pitcher 

the beer nuts are free

we come every Wednesday for Ladies’ Night

and a girl with a rose tattoo on her thigh 

who dances like fingers trailing through water

or a breeze that blows through a room full of candles

she looks very much like a young Mia Farrow 

her hair is the color of thousands of summers

our hair is thinning and beginning to gray

we look a lot like boarded

Most of my diaristic writing is done by touch typing into a word processor interface - most often Amplenote - both because this medium is faster, more accessible, and less prone to inducing hand cramps, and because it's easier to save backups of my own writing, when it is already digitised (and searchable, for that matter). I do still use paper notebooks constantly, however, for rapid capture of ideas, especially when I am away from