I was awkward in sixth grade. Really awkward. I had braces and that weird half-child, half-teenager body that we curvy women were blessed with at the age of 11. I felt like a monster in sixth grade, too tall, too bulky, too zit-y, too totally, totally uncool. I have an official school picture of myself with dishwater brown shoulder length hair, a beaded necklace that I loved because it was rainbow colors but hated because it was choker, and a white t-shirt with three little lizards where the breast pocket would have been if I had bought it out of an LL Bean catalogue instead of those middle school fundraiser booklets that charges you $35 for a nature-themed t-shirt and promises to reserve an acre of the rainforest in your name. I wanted to be remembered as the adidas-track pants wearing, lizard t-shirt, rainbow choker kid, because that was cooool. Nevermind that choker necklaces make me feel like I need to puke. I suffered for beauty.
But I had friends! I guess. I had 3 friends, one girl and two guys, although I’m pretty sure now they thought I was a total loser back then and could have done without me. I think I was their hanger-on that they tolerated because my girl friend was actually pretty cool and liked doing guy stuff like snowboarding and skateboarding and re-making Blink-182 music videos. This usually entailed someone climbing onto a roof with a snare drum and banging on it for 2 minutes, and then some random artistic shots of beleaguered stuffed animals getting pulled along on a skateboard by a jump rope and neighborhood kids throwing those little spark-poppers on the ground. I don’t know, I was never there. I always watched them later. One time for Christmas we exchanged gifts at Ledo’s Pizza and they all got me cool stuff like a Star Wars Compendium and a walkman, and I got them all….wait for it….matching stuffed lizards. What was I thinking? I don’t know. I do know I labored over those Christmas gifts for weeks. It is SO. HARD. buying Christmas gifts for two 12 year old boys who listened to Snoop Dog and whose favorite card came was Bullshit.
Have you ever heard of Bullshit? You split the deck up with however many people are playing, let’s say 4. On your turn, you put cards face down into the middle pile, and say “3 Jacks,” or whatever it is. But you can lie. You can say “2 eights,” but really put down an Ace and a Seven. If someone around the table thinks you’re lying, they say “Bullshit!” and you have to flip the cards over. If you were lying, you pick up all the cards in the center. If you were telling the truth, the person who called Bullshit on you has to pick them up. Whenever I am playing a game, no matter what it is, I always reach a point where I’m tired of playing and don’t care about winning anymore, so I ruin the game for everyone. It’s my thing. When we were playing Bullshit at Ledo’s Pizza the day of the stuffed lizards, I put down 15 Aces. I just wanted to eat my triple bacon pizza and get the hell out of there so the guy friends could go hang out with the girl friend in peace and I could go home and watch CATS for the 30th time.
Awkward.
I used to say things, too, that were borrowed from other things because that’s easier than thinking for yourself and risking being original and thus being rejected. All those 80’s sitcom clichés, like saying “who died?” in a room of sad-faced people and “you fell out of the ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down” were how I communicated. Verbally, that is. I found journals a while ago that me and the girl friend used to use to pass notes (no cell phones) and I can’t believe how funny I could be when I could write it down. We were smart note-passers. We had an entire composition book that looked like all our class composition books, so it only looked like we were helping each other study or something. I found it, and was really encouraged by what I read. It made me think maybe I wasn’t totally as awkward as I assume I was. But then again, I’ve always expressed myself better in writing.
Mom says I used to write her and dad letters when I was angry or sad or mad about something and leave them on their pillows. I remember resolving to keep a log of all the terrible things they said to me to have hard, written proof with dates and verbatim quotes for my final angry-letter magnum opus. They were going to find a hole burned through the middle of their bed and at the bottom would be my Letter of Wrongs Done. I think I kept it up for three weeks and only had two entries, like “dad made me feed the cat when he was sitting and the table NOT DOING ANYTHING” and, after digging the log out of a pile of detritus in the middle of my floor, “mom said I was a SLOB!” I gave it up when I realized I would never have much of a case.
But verbally I was like a lava floe of awkward. Searingly embarrassing and impossible to predict the flight path. Which brings me to my first lesson in being original.
One morning I got on the bus and everyone looked dreary. Well, sad. But it was about 6 in the morning, and no middle-schooler looks chipper at 6 in the morning on a Wednesday. Then I got to school, and we all sat in the cafeteria for about 15 minutes until the bell rang and we were released to our homerooms. I saw pockets of kids around the cafeteria looking sad, some were crying. A lot of the kids were people I knew in my classes, in my grade.
At my locker, my friend Heidi’s locker was right next to mine, and she was crying. It was time to get to the bottom of this. And so I pulled from my Arsenal of Awkwardness and said, “who died?”
Our classmate Jessica died. I hadn’t really known her that well. Her appendix had burst the night before and she was dead before the ambulances could get her to the hospital, because we lived in horse country and the nearest hospital was 30 minutes away. And that was the last time I snarkily asked anyone who died.
That was a changing moment for me. I think this was the moment I really became self-aware. I remember praying that Heidi didn’t hear it as a sound byte I borrowed from a sitcom, but a sincere question that I’d heard someone had died and didn’t know who. I remember holding back my tears until I got home and immediately running up to my room to create a set of self-imposed interaction rules, like “now we’re only going to listen to people and say the absolute minimum of words in response,” or “before we say it, let’s decide if it’s a good idea to say.” I was so altered and saddened by my own foot-in-mouth awkwardness that I went home and wrote a set of rules I knew I needed to follow from then on, a manifesto that no one ever saw but myself. I found them when I was cleaning out my room when I was 20 and my parents moved to a suburb. They went something like this, and please keep in mind I didn’t have any internet top 10 lists of Things You Shouldn’t Say to help me, and never discussed it with any of my friends, since they were 12 and busy making music videos:
1. Only say it if you really mean it.
2. Don’t try to make people laugh anymore because it doesn’t work.
3. Wait and listen for the whole thing before you say something.
4. If you don’t know, just say you don’t know.
5. If you like a boy, just don’t talk to him. Just ignore it.
6. Only talk about what you know about from now on.
7. If you didn’t think of it, don’t say it like you did.
And there was more of the same. Basically I was about 25 rules saying “Don’t Say Stupid Shit” that I kept writing over and over and over, like a punishment for being so flippant in the face of a death anyone with an appendix could suffer at any time. Hell. I could die that death. And the angry god I believed in at that time was probably plotting it for me, because I handled it so callously. It can be so very painful when you finally become self-aware. Now, when I go home and dig out my old yearbooks I always end up looking at Jessica’s picture.
My mom gave me a sympathy card after Jessica died that still makes me cry to read it. But I still never know if I’m crying for her or myself.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
I'm all, WTF at this post, but here it is. Nonsense.
When I was a teenager my friends A and E went with me to the Renaissance Festival in Maryland, which I feel pretty safe in saying is the best Renaissance Festival in the country. My mom has a friend who actually works at the Renaissance Festival in Texas and the size and sheen of her Faerie Queen wings along with her brood of children dressed like fairies in sunshine-y Facebook pictures once led me to suspect my Renaissance Festival was NOT the best Renaissance Festival in the country. But then I remembered her Renaissance Festival was in Texas, and I felt better. Sorry, Texas. You’re like the rich kid in Catholic school who wears his tie all loose and shirt untucked and has a cocaine addiction. You’re really loud and obnoxious and think everyone wants to be you. Every now and then we kind of do, but really we just wish you’d transfer out of our class.
Anyway, we went to the Renaissance Festival, and one of them forked up the $20 it took for a tarot card reading. In all the years I’ve been going there, about 15, there has been a dude (the same dude), sitting on the balcony outside the Tarot hut, every weekend, every season, every year, ALL DAY, without fail, screaming “foooortUNES, GEEEET your fortUNES, FORTunes read HEEEERE” like he’s selling hot dogs at a baseball game. And he’s one of those uncomfortable hollerers who makes eye contact with you when you walk by. We always joked about doing it but this year, I think it was E, was ready to do it. E and A’s attraction to mysticism began and ended with Jesus, but E had a serious dose of Buffy the Vampire Slayer coursing through the religious centers in his brain that allowed a modicum of benign fascination with things like Wicca, séances, graveyards, and the occult. As a Star Wars nut flirting with atheism who really didn’t care if she pissed off any gods or spirits, we had a pretty fantastic time doing whatever ridiculous thing we decided to do that day. A didn’t care for half of it, but he stuck around for our daily Moulin Rouge! and Whitney Houston sing-alongs. I miss those guys.
Now that I think about it, it might have been A who got the Tarot card reading. All I know for sure is that one of them got it, cajoled the tarot reader into letting all three of us into the reading room, and somebody kept kicking me under the table to get me to stop snickering. And one of them spent $20 to be told, by a shirtless, bearded, 70 year old man, that “they have some hard times ahead, but ultimately they’ll triumph.” Because if you’re a weekend tarot reader making some extra cash at the Renaissance Festival to supplement your day job as a produce stocker at Whole Foods, what else do you say to middle class, white, high school boys?
All my snickering and atheism aside, though, I wasn’t the one to get my cards read (although they first offered to pay for ME to get the reading), because I do know certain truths about myself, and knew them even as a 15 year old high on chocolate-dipped cheesecake and curly fries, excited to go to the Rennfest without her parents for once. The first thing I know is that I am terrified for anyone to know my innermost thoughts, desires, hopes, and dreams. The second is that I’m pretty sure that anybody, even a hack tarot reader, will be able to see them in my eyes if he sits in silence with me in a dark room for a few minutes. The third is that NO ONE is allowed to know my future before I do. I was terrified of prophesy before I even knew what it was. All those philosophical/physical postulations about the observed object changing behavior for the sake of being observed and the mere act of knowing the outcome dictates your present actions were scary and real, because I knew I would do that. I don’t need no Tarot card reader telling me I’ll have hard times ahead. A and E’s great fortune was an overarching belief in the Lord, and so all other spirit magic was declared null and void and thus a non-threat. Even at 15 I had a vague appreciation of the One Soul concepts and space-time jumbles my hippie grandmother used to feed me, that Time as we know it is less of a line and more of a cloud and the past, present and future were actually one.
I’ve had prophetic dreams for as long as I can remember dreaming. I’m not talking about an oracle coming to me in my dreams and proclaiming crucial world events as it hovers in a blinding white light. I’m talking about stupid little moments in my life that I can only recall dreaming about when they happen to me. This weekend I went for a walk and there was a point where a man I’d never seen before walked a dog I’d never seen before on a stretch of sidewalk I’d never walked before, and I had dreamed it all before. That one little instant in time like a snapshot (man in khaki pants. Dog with red collar. Pink flower petals in grass. Blue and white sneakers. Taking a walk. Gray shorts.) was something that happened in my brain before and I feel a pulling sensation in my chest like the moment I’m living now is lassoing the moment I dreamed and syncing them up into one. I’ve tried to talk to people about it before and everyone is pretty convinced it’s still just re-constructed moments from previous days sifted together into a dream that happens to match the moment I’m living now. But this time, that explanation doesn’t work. I bought those gray shorts in the morning at Marshalls, having never seen them before, and put them on 2 hours later to take a walk in the afternoon. I’ve never owned a pair of gray shorts in my life until Saturday.
I’m fascinated with books that can assess my character based on the day I was born or what my name is. We have a book at my parents’ house that describes “Jackie” and “Jacqueline” and I’m a perfect meld of each. But why? Is it because I actually am that way, or is it because I read those entries when I was 16 and, having known them, grew into the person I was prophesized to be? Can the power of suggestion really be so great that I can be influenced by 6 paragraphs in a compendium of names? And why, if I am so susceptible to all this otherworldly influence, do I think hypnotism is such a crock of shit?
Despite how eerily accurate I’ve found these predictions to be in my own life, I suspect they are catered to play to social norms that most women will conform to in their life. One entry tells me a Jackie “wants it all – the job, marriage, and children; she’ll have at least three,” which is probably true of almost all Jackies out there. On that same token, I don’t believe that all Jackies “will excel in music and will probably pursue a career in teaching or writing.” Whatever. The more I talk about it, the less equipped I feel to talk about it. Probably won’t have three kids, is all I can say. And, I spell my name with a Y. So that MUST affect SOMEthing in your little runic interpretations, Mr. Prophecy Book.
I like the idea that Time isn’t linear. I think it would explain a lot of things, like how I can dream moments in my life before they happen and how I can meet someone and feel like I have an instant connection with them, like I’ve known them forever. I think it would explain a lot of things, like the soul mate concept. I’m pretty sure quantum physics is going to explain it all. I just have to wait for some smartypants scientist to bring it all down to my level.
I always feel like a monkey banging on a keyboard when I talk about this stuff. I had a prophetic dream and wanted to talk about it, since no one believes me and I can never remember it when I wake up to tell anyone, unlike my dreams about splitting myself into three off-beat personas disguised as professors named Dino (a guy with a blond beard), Bino (a woman who wore scarves and funky glasses) and Gino (a turtleneck wearing guy with black hair). I remember that dream really well. I adopted different personas to steal my students’ credit and buy a bunch of stuff. I was a benevolent crook, though, because I would only steal credit from underage kids, and their credit would just re-set when they turned 18. So one day one of my students was crying in class because her credit had been stolen and I consoled her by saying “don’t worry, you’re only 17. It’ll clear on your 18th birthday.” Then she told me she was 19, not 17, and her credit was ruined forever. I had racked up $516 billion worth of credit card debt on her name. I felt so bad, I confessed to my three personas and everyone felt betrayed. But then they invited me to a dinner party. I asked if I could come as one of my personas, because “I’m so boring when I’m just me.” The dream people let me do it, and then for the rest of the dream I kept at my three professor’s jobs and interacting with everyone, and all the people I met knew I was playing a character and they played along with me because they felt bad for me and knew I was uncomfortable being myself.
The deeper meaning there is hardly deeper. But I take comfort in the thought that it indicates I can at least pretend to be more than just myself, and my imagination can’t fit into a mold laid out by some book on a coffee table, even if my personality can.
Anyway, we went to the Renaissance Festival, and one of them forked up the $20 it took for a tarot card reading. In all the years I’ve been going there, about 15, there has been a dude (the same dude), sitting on the balcony outside the Tarot hut, every weekend, every season, every year, ALL DAY, without fail, screaming “foooortUNES, GEEEET your fortUNES, FORTunes read HEEEERE” like he’s selling hot dogs at a baseball game. And he’s one of those uncomfortable hollerers who makes eye contact with you when you walk by. We always joked about doing it but this year, I think it was E, was ready to do it. E and A’s attraction to mysticism began and ended with Jesus, but E had a serious dose of Buffy the Vampire Slayer coursing through the religious centers in his brain that allowed a modicum of benign fascination with things like Wicca, séances, graveyards, and the occult. As a Star Wars nut flirting with atheism who really didn’t care if she pissed off any gods or spirits, we had a pretty fantastic time doing whatever ridiculous thing we decided to do that day. A didn’t care for half of it, but he stuck around for our daily Moulin Rouge! and Whitney Houston sing-alongs. I miss those guys.
Now that I think about it, it might have been A who got the Tarot card reading. All I know for sure is that one of them got it, cajoled the tarot reader into letting all three of us into the reading room, and somebody kept kicking me under the table to get me to stop snickering. And one of them spent $20 to be told, by a shirtless, bearded, 70 year old man, that “they have some hard times ahead, but ultimately they’ll triumph.” Because if you’re a weekend tarot reader making some extra cash at the Renaissance Festival to supplement your day job as a produce stocker at Whole Foods, what else do you say to middle class, white, high school boys?
All my snickering and atheism aside, though, I wasn’t the one to get my cards read (although they first offered to pay for ME to get the reading), because I do know certain truths about myself, and knew them even as a 15 year old high on chocolate-dipped cheesecake and curly fries, excited to go to the Rennfest without her parents for once. The first thing I know is that I am terrified for anyone to know my innermost thoughts, desires, hopes, and dreams. The second is that I’m pretty sure that anybody, even a hack tarot reader, will be able to see them in my eyes if he sits in silence with me in a dark room for a few minutes. The third is that NO ONE is allowed to know my future before I do. I was terrified of prophesy before I even knew what it was. All those philosophical/physical postulations about the observed object changing behavior for the sake of being observed and the mere act of knowing the outcome dictates your present actions were scary and real, because I knew I would do that. I don’t need no Tarot card reader telling me I’ll have hard times ahead. A and E’s great fortune was an overarching belief in the Lord, and so all other spirit magic was declared null and void and thus a non-threat. Even at 15 I had a vague appreciation of the One Soul concepts and space-time jumbles my hippie grandmother used to feed me, that Time as we know it is less of a line and more of a cloud and the past, present and future were actually one.
I’ve had prophetic dreams for as long as I can remember dreaming. I’m not talking about an oracle coming to me in my dreams and proclaiming crucial world events as it hovers in a blinding white light. I’m talking about stupid little moments in my life that I can only recall dreaming about when they happen to me. This weekend I went for a walk and there was a point where a man I’d never seen before walked a dog I’d never seen before on a stretch of sidewalk I’d never walked before, and I had dreamed it all before. That one little instant in time like a snapshot (man in khaki pants. Dog with red collar. Pink flower petals in grass. Blue and white sneakers. Taking a walk. Gray shorts.) was something that happened in my brain before and I feel a pulling sensation in my chest like the moment I’m living now is lassoing the moment I dreamed and syncing them up into one. I’ve tried to talk to people about it before and everyone is pretty convinced it’s still just re-constructed moments from previous days sifted together into a dream that happens to match the moment I’m living now. But this time, that explanation doesn’t work. I bought those gray shorts in the morning at Marshalls, having never seen them before, and put them on 2 hours later to take a walk in the afternoon. I’ve never owned a pair of gray shorts in my life until Saturday.
I’m fascinated with books that can assess my character based on the day I was born or what my name is. We have a book at my parents’ house that describes “Jackie” and “Jacqueline” and I’m a perfect meld of each. But why? Is it because I actually am that way, or is it because I read those entries when I was 16 and, having known them, grew into the person I was prophesized to be? Can the power of suggestion really be so great that I can be influenced by 6 paragraphs in a compendium of names? And why, if I am so susceptible to all this otherworldly influence, do I think hypnotism is such a crock of shit?
Despite how eerily accurate I’ve found these predictions to be in my own life, I suspect they are catered to play to social norms that most women will conform to in their life. One entry tells me a Jackie “wants it all – the job, marriage, and children; she’ll have at least three,” which is probably true of almost all Jackies out there. On that same token, I don’t believe that all Jackies “will excel in music and will probably pursue a career in teaching or writing.” Whatever. The more I talk about it, the less equipped I feel to talk about it. Probably won’t have three kids, is all I can say. And, I spell my name with a Y. So that MUST affect SOMEthing in your little runic interpretations, Mr. Prophecy Book.
I like the idea that Time isn’t linear. I think it would explain a lot of things, like how I can dream moments in my life before they happen and how I can meet someone and feel like I have an instant connection with them, like I’ve known them forever. I think it would explain a lot of things, like the soul mate concept. I’m pretty sure quantum physics is going to explain it all. I just have to wait for some smartypants scientist to bring it all down to my level.
I always feel like a monkey banging on a keyboard when I talk about this stuff. I had a prophetic dream and wanted to talk about it, since no one believes me and I can never remember it when I wake up to tell anyone, unlike my dreams about splitting myself into three off-beat personas disguised as professors named Dino (a guy with a blond beard), Bino (a woman who wore scarves and funky glasses) and Gino (a turtleneck wearing guy with black hair). I remember that dream really well. I adopted different personas to steal my students’ credit and buy a bunch of stuff. I was a benevolent crook, though, because I would only steal credit from underage kids, and their credit would just re-set when they turned 18. So one day one of my students was crying in class because her credit had been stolen and I consoled her by saying “don’t worry, you’re only 17. It’ll clear on your 18th birthday.” Then she told me she was 19, not 17, and her credit was ruined forever. I had racked up $516 billion worth of credit card debt on her name. I felt so bad, I confessed to my three personas and everyone felt betrayed. But then they invited me to a dinner party. I asked if I could come as one of my personas, because “I’m so boring when I’m just me.” The dream people let me do it, and then for the rest of the dream I kept at my three professor’s jobs and interacting with everyone, and all the people I met knew I was playing a character and they played along with me because they felt bad for me and knew I was uncomfortable being myself.
The deeper meaning there is hardly deeper. But I take comfort in the thought that it indicates I can at least pretend to be more than just myself, and my imagination can’t fit into a mold laid out by some book on a coffee table, even if my personality can.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Written yesterday.
I recently got a compliment on my blog through a facebook message and the utter shame I felt at abandoning it a few months ago was akin to the shame I feel for not calling back certain friends and family who definitely, definitely need call backs, and so today, on my 25th birthday, I resolve to:
1. Keep up the damn blog
2. Call my damn friends
So there you go. I don’t know why humanity needs milestones like birthdays and new years to do things they could just as easily begin at 2:41 p.m. on any random day of the week. We just love bookends. Whether they are weighted-bottom brushed bronze Atlas statues we found at Barnes and Noble to keep our collection of Garfield compilations upright or they are arbitrary days thrust upon you in the grand scheme of space-time, we all like a starting place and an ending place.
I’ve been doing some stuff – new job, grown up apartment, zumba classes. Had a tearful goodbye with my beloved scrapyard (who were happy for me that I was advancing myself, imagine that) and began a full time with benefits job in advertising. And no, it’s nothing like Mad Men.
Really, with the routine I have found myself in, I should have plenty of time to keep up with this. Lately, I’ve even had islands of time during my work day in which I’m completely caught up and can take a few minutes breather, but my computer screen faces the door so anybody could stick their head in and see I’m updating a blog. The internet has some image or e-card or something that says “My fondest wish is to have a job where only I can see my computer screen.” Where’s the trust? She asks, as she writes a blog in a word document to throw off the scent at noon on a Friday.
The thing about having a steady job and a nice place to live with a schedule and a routine that is the same every day is that nothing really interesting happens to me anymore. I love it, I’m such a creature of habit, but life sometimes falls into a quiet sameness like rocking back and forth on a calm ocean on a sunny day. Maybe one day it will get on my nerves and I’ll go stir-crazy, but right now it’s sure as hell pretty nice. It’s not so much giving in to domestication as it is enjoying stability. I graduated college with a massive amount of debt into a job I was quickly fired from (twice), into almost a year of unemployment and then a year of a job that destroyed my mind, body, and will to live, to a part-time job handing out cash at a scrapyard that didn’t make nearly enough money but restored my faith in the American workplace, and now to a job with a sustaining salary that I can foreseeably stay at for a long, long time. Jesus Christ, can anybody blame me for actually wanting to go home, make dinner, clean up a little, watch Iron Chef and go to sleep at 10? Mmmmm, spiney lobster challenge.
Personally, I think it boils down to my selfish need to declare myself autonomous, to have things that are mine and didn’t belong to anyone else first, which I’ve never had before. Things have recently become mine:
1. Bed
2. Couch
3. Bookshelf
4. TV
5. Kitchenaid mixer
6. Whisk
7. Nesting rainbow mixing bowls
8. Bamboo spoons
9. Garlic press
10. Seat covers
11. Pillows
12. Shower curtains
13. Tea pitcher
14. Toaster
Of course, all these things are joint-owned and sometimes purchased solely by CS, but come on. We know who really owns the nesting rainbow mixing bowls.
But anyway. That’s how things are going. I’ll be back to regularly scheduled updating now – I feel like I have a few blogs backed up that could get posted. And if not, somebody guilt me out and I’ll start up on the next person’s birthday. Dad’s is in June.
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