My green-eyed girl turns 13 this week.

May God have mercy on my soul.

She faces a different world than I did when I turned 13 (1980, *gasp*). In some ways better, in others worse.

She faces a world where she can get ahead, where glass-ceilings are fewer and the ones that still exist are becoming easier to break through. She has a mother who is a successful career woman and has that role model to pattern her life after.

She thinks she can make a difference, and I hope she's right.

When I turned 13, there was still a certain set of expectations for women in our society - and those have mostly fallen by the wayside for her.

This is a strange subject to be my first SwordsCrossed diary... but so be it.

The current "Second Life" craze sweeping through SwordsCrossed has been very amusing to me.

You see... I joined Second Life more than a year and a half ago. In that year and a half, my relationship with "SL" has been an off and on love affair.

When I joined in October of 2005, I created a male avatar and went about exploring my new universe.

One thing I found as I began to travel around was that there was definitely a difference in how the various types of avatars were treated.

The avatar types can be broken down into 5 basic classes: