Yesterday someone came to go fish by typing "diagram of how to put the penis in" into Yahoo. I'm not sure how they got here -- I've never written about diagramming the act. Of course, I'm curious about who it was. First of all, diagram of putting the penis into what, exactly? A vagina? A melon? A bowling ball?
And then I thought, well, maybe it was a virgin who was just doing some advance planning. It's kind of sweet. Maybe it was some 15 year old boy who is contemplating the act and searching for info, getting all sweaty at his family computer, erasing the history cache so his mom and dad won't notice what he's looking for.
Well, let the suspense come to an end: I have no touching advice for virgins, nor are there diagrams here of how the whole thing works. I have nothing inspiring or illuminating to say about losing one's virginity. My own experience was sort of anticlimactic.
I was young. I was 13. My mother had decided to take the panic route by telling me boys were all after only one thing, but neglected to tell me what that one thing was. I assumed she was talking about sex, and she made it seem like such a big deal. And I'm naturally curious and at 13 I was all about disobeying my mother. So I decided to get it over with.
My reasoning skills at 13 were simple -- people made a huge deal over losing or keeping their virginity. Every book I was reading at the time was some huge morality diatribe with this big decision involved. And I just figured my life would be infinitely easier if it weren't an issue. Do it, get it over with, and never deal with it again.
I wasn't dating anyone at the time. All the boys my age didn't seem like good candidates for the great "pluck my flower" caper. I really put a lot of thought into it -- I wanted it to be someone older, someone who wasn't a virgin, someone who wouldn't tell everyone in the entire town. In a town the size of my hometown, it doesn't take much for everyone to know your business. I once got fired from a dairy and 20 minutes later my mother knew all about it.
Somehow I made a decision on a boy who was a senior in high school. See now, I know what you're thinking -- what kind of 17 year old boy would want to have sex with a 13 year old girl? Aside from your average neighborhood pedophile, I mean. Well, let's just say that I stopped growing at the age of 11. I didn't look like I was 13. The boy and I were friends -- we had frank talks about things and I knew he'd be open to the suggestion.
It was like a business transaction. I proposed a deal. He agreed. We set upon negotiations.
I won't say much about the actual act. It was....OK. I wasn't thinking much in terms of emotional connection. I've never really equated sex with love. Over the years, this has really been a good quality to have. It's kept me from getting insane a few times. You know, you meet a boy. Eventually you have sex and then the boy bails. I've seen girls turn into stalkery lunatics over stuff like that because, in general, we're taught to equate sex with love.
At any rate, after the big deflowering I was happy with my decision. No one knew except me and the boy. He never discussed it with anyone, at my request. I didn't turn into a raving nympho. It never became an issue in my life. I didn't even have sex again until I was 16. At 31, I still don't regret my decision.
A couple of years ago my cousin Krista came to me for advice on whether or not to have sex. I don't think I really helped her. I didn't tell her my story, because my decision was right for me but probably wouldn't have been right for her. I told her that if she was asking me what to do, she wasn't ready for it.
And then I gave her a handful of condoms.
I thought I'd never make it home. Right before we left the weather service issued flood warnings for the entire area, along with "damaging winds" watches. I had visions of being blown off a bridge and plummeting to my death.
It generally takes about 2.5 - 3 hours to drive from my mom's house in Berwick to my my house in Philadelphia. Today it took almost 4 hours. I knew it was going to be a crappy ride when we approached the Lehigh Tunnel and it had taken us two hours to get there.
For those of you who have never had the pleasure of driving on the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Tunnel is pretty much the halfway point between Berwick and Philadelphia. Instead of winding the Turnpike around the mountain, a big hole was blasted through the mountain.
The Tunnel always sort of held a certain morbid fascination with me when I was a kid. Convinced that the Tunnel would collapse as I was being driven through it and kill me, I used start writing my last will and testament about two miles before we got to the Tunnel. I'd bequeath my stuffed animal collection to a friend...my Shaun Cassidy records to another friend. You get the idea. There were occasionally melodramatic deathbed confessions [the car being my own personal deathbed, you understand]. Once I tapped my Aunt and Uncle on the shoulder as we were driving through, told them I loved them dearly, and then draped myself over the backseat in a dramatic pose fit for being crushed to death.
I still get a little excited when I go through the Tunnel. It's not like I'm preparing to give away my prized possessions or anything, but I still kind of wonder if I should strike a pose appropriate for being found under a boulder.
Yesterday while I was feeding Statia sushi and Nutella for lunch [no, not simultaneously and not literally], we started talking about the weird people we date for no good reason. Most of us have dated a long string of losers -- they wouldn't be ex-boyfriends and/or ex-girlfriends if they weren't losers, right?
Oh sure, you can decide that someone isn't right for you in a nice way, but when it all comes down to it you usually end up dumping someone because that person is a loser. You would think it would say something about our choice in dates if that's all we end up with, but that's not true -- most relationships start out with everyone on their best behavior and you're blinded by lust or obsession or the dreaded crush, and you don't notice that the person likes to behead animals and pop zits in public. It's only after about a month, when the glow wears off, that you begin to notice the person you're dating is the biggest loser on the planet.
Like most of you, I have a long and varied dating history. Craig and I have been together for a very long time [we started dating around 1993 or 1994], but before then I considered myself an equal opportunity dater. If someone asked me out, unless I knew the person was an axe murderer or something, I'd probably go out. I'm smart enough to realize that some people are hard to get a feel for unless you really spend time with them, and I wanted to give people a chance. What I learned is that first impressions are rarely wrong, and I should have listened to my gut. I would have sat home a lot more, but I wouldn't have spent years wondering why I couldn't seem to date a normal guy. Of course, then I wouldn't have bizarre dating stories to share.
I have publicly named my top five strange dates, but I have never mentioned the number one strangest dating experience until now. I guess I was saving it for a special occasion.
I briefly dated someone who honestly believed himself to be a vampire. And he looked exactly like Howard Stern. And did I mention that he was a pizza delivery boy, lived at home with his parents, and was 35 years old?
How does one meet and begin to date someone like that? Honestly, I have no real recollection of ever meeting him for the first time, nor do I remember how we started to date. Perhaps he used some sort of vampire-y trick to schnooker me into it. Before you know it, he was my kinda boyfriend and we dated for about three months. In all that time, he never once asked if he could bite me, nor did he ever display any sort of vampire-y behavior. And we never really talked about it. And, strangely enough, I didn't seem to be bothered by it. Maybe I was in a fugue state.
What's really odd is that I don't ever remember an official break up. One day we were dating and one day we weren't. And it's not like I was especially fond of him -- he was nice enough, but I wasn't really in like with him or anything.
Maybe one day I'll tell you about the clarinet playing cab driver I dated for a while. Now there's a story.
My grandmother has a doll that scares the bejeezus out of me. Truth be told, she has exactly one doll in her entire house. She's not a doll person, nor does she collect stuffed animals or stuff like that. But this one single doll resides in her house, and has for as long as I can remember. It's a doll of the Chatty Cathy variety, and it's about three feet tall with matted blonde hair and blue eyes that close when the doll is reclining.
When I was little I was freaked out by the thing because it was as big as I was [or bigger, depending on the year]. I never really got all that much taller [5'2"], and so it's still a little disconcerting to be near a doll that's almost as tall as I am. My grandmother has always kept this doll in the guest bedroom and always refused to let me move the doll elsewhere when I stayed overnight.
So whenever I stayed overnight it was just me and the doll -- staring each other down. I'd be sort of in bed with the covers pulled up to my nose, but still ready to bolt at the slightest sign of movement from the doll. And it got worse after I saw Poltergeist -- remember the scene with the clown doll?
When I was about 14 years old the Chatty Cathy doll developed some sort of mind of it's own. The pull string activated voice box started going off on it's own at irregular intervals, usually when I was just about to fall asleep. So there I would be, on the verge of a troubled and uneasy, nightmare filled slumber, and the doll would suddenly shout "I love you, Mommy!"
There have never been any words more terrifying than those.
The doll is still in the house, but, thankfully, the voice box has long since died. It might have something to do with the time I threw the doll down after it kept me awake one night too often. Well, that, and when I hopped up and down on it's chest with my Doc Martens two or three dozen times.
But the stupid doll still stares at me every time I walk in the house. I swear my grandmother puts the doll out just to freak me out.
When I was a kid my mother used to take my brother and I to Hershey Park a couple times every year. Sometimes she just took us through the "museum" outside the park, which was free. Hey, we were poor and had to take our amusement where we could get it!
Anyway, I used to have this reoccuring dream that I hopped out of the little moving car you sit in to go through the "museum" and went swimming in the "chocolate river" so I could steal sips of melted chocolate. In my dream, it was really chocolate. I also dreamt quite often that I'd hop out of the little car thingy and steal the Hershey's Kisses that rolling down the conveyor belt.
It just occured to me that it's a miracle I didn't turn out to be klepto.
So would you rather die young and stay pretty, or get real old and eventually become a boring shell of your former self? Personally, I don't like the idea of getting old. There are the wrinkles and the crepey skin, and that awful smell that really old people get, and everything revolves around your bowel health. No thanks.
And I'm really afraid of getting boring. I may not live life on the edge anymore, but people don't fake narcolepsy to get out of talking to me at parties.
This all comes up because I was playing Google last night. I got bored and decided to Google the names of several former members of the vast go fish harem. I expected that, if I got a hit on any of them, these former beaus would be leading exciting lives of danger and intrigue.
Alas, no.
I found the very first guy I dated in college. His name is Jared. To my utter horror, Jared has a cheesy "Welcome to my personal website" Geocities page. And it's not particularly well-designed. In fact, it's just awful.
What makes it even worse is that he's now balding and boring. He actually has a link so I can check out his magnet collection. Oh my. Having a magnet collection is one thing -- scanning them so I can marvel at his plethora of "welcome to [insert state name here]" magnets is quite another.
I'm trying to forget all that and remember the Jared I used to know. The Jared whose nickname was "Elephant" [guess why] and who partied like a rock star. The Jared who was a pleasure to sleep next to in the dead of winter because he was like a furnace and his frat house didn't have heat. One weekend he took me to New York City and took me on my first carriage ride through Central Park. He was fun and sweet. Now he's, I don't know, old. He probably sits couchside most nights with his wife [who resembles me quite a bit] and picks his ass and drinks Metamucil.
This is proof that I shouldn't attend any high school or college reunions -- seeing old, formerly fun, boyfriends who are now old and boring is sure to be a little too depressing for me.
I have always sort of fantasized about running for political office, but never thought it would ever work out - I have a checkered past filled with drunken debauchery, drugs and alcohol, and once I was even suspended from school for threatening to kill a teacher. However, a President was elected who did most of that stuff -- I mean, it's amazing George still has the brain cells to function on a daily basis with all the illegal drugs and high volumes of hooch he crammed into his system.
So, in the interest of making everything public up front [which means it's all out in the open and no one can surprise me with anything during my hypothetical politcal office run], I'm going to come clean: I have appeared in a photograph with my tongue on a penis. No, no, it's true...see for yourself:
I should just devote every Saturday to seeing just how badly I can embarrass the hell out of myself. It beats sitting around picking the fuzz out of my belly button.
Do you remember the excitement of getting your first driver's license? Despite the fact that I hate to drive and haven't driven since I was about 25, I was thrilled at the idea of getting my license.
Being an avid reader of good literature and also your typical teenage romance trash novels, I was firmly entrenched in the idea that the test was hard and I would likely fail at least once. But it's obvious that none of the writers of those kinds of novels ever visited my hometown -- the course involves driving around the block, doing a three point turn, and then parking at the curb. Even a novice like me could handle something like that.
It's the photo taking portion of the extravaganza that was the most memorable.
So, you know how the DMV likes to hire people with various disabilities? Well, the guy who took my photo was mildly retarded and looked EXACTLY like James Brown. I'm not even exaggerating -- he had the hair, the same complexion. The only thing he lacked was a sequined jacket.
I half expected him to say, "Look at the camera, smile if you like. HOT PANTS!" and then do a little dance around the room. "I FEEL GOOD! UH!"
Needless to say, I look ridiculous in the photo on my first license [which, nobly, I gave away to my younger look-alike cousin so she could partake of alcoholic beverages -- yeah, I'm a giver that way] -- I'm smirking from trying not to giggle at my bizarre thoughts, and I'm wearing a Richard Marx tshirt from the concert I attended the night before.
Hold on to the night, yo.
Easter generally reminds me of two things: tulips and trips to the Emergency Room.
Tulips are pretty self-explanatory [I took the photo to the left on Saturday morning before running with Tracey] but ER visits are a strange thing to associate with Easter. Goose eggs=Easter eggs, perhaps?
I have never been to an ER for myself. But it seems every Easter when I was young I was there -- my brother couldn't stop himself from whacking his head on stuff, or busting his forehead or lip open on something, or just generally needing medical attention that day.
My most vivid Easter/ER memory was when I was about 9 years old. My mother took us to the park to play. My brother got the monkey bars in his sights and took off full speed. He didn't even slow up, he just plunged head-first into the metal monkey bars and sort of bounced off and just laid there.
Yep, that sure was fun.
Just to prove what a complete freak I was as a teen...
In 1987 I was 15 years old. A boy said the following to me: "You're going to be a yuppie and you give off an air of glamour." A 17 year old boy named Brett said that to me over the phone on August 3. He was trying to convince me to date him.
Today I read that in an old journal and thought to myself, 'Self, what kind of fucking moron compliments a girl by calling her a future yuppie?'
And then I read the next line in the journal -- "I always did think he was a nice guy. Maybe I will go out with him!"
Doh!
Dear Madam or Sir,
I'd like to tell you a little story about how I was traumatized for life at your establishment, Caesar's Cove Haven in the beautiful Pocono mountains.
I was dating a boy named Ken a few years ago and we decided to take our first weekend trip together. He told me a few friends of his had rented a cabin in the Poconos and asked if I'd like to join them. Now, I'm not a camping type of girl, but Ken assured me that the cabin had electricity and running water so I relented. A weekend away from the city didn't sound half bad.
Ken picked me up and we drove to the Poconos. Let me take this opportunity to explain the relationship. Ken is someone I've known since I was 12 years old, but we had only recently started dating. At this point, we had been casually dating for about a month. I know his entire family and he knows mine. We had smooched, but that's about as far as things had gone at that point.
So anyway, we talked on the ride up to the mountains. I joked about all those cheesy newlywed places and their champagne glass tubs and heart shaped beds. Ken got a little quiet, but I didn't think anything of it. I'm a chatty girl and I kept rambling on.
We're driving up a mountain when Ken casually says, "Oh, my friends bailed on the cabin this weekend so it will just be us. I hope you don't mind." I was a bit freaked out. It's not that I thought Ken would turn into a sex-crazed maniac or anything, but the relationship was new and I didn't want there to be a lot of awkward alone time, you see.
Then he pulled into the entrance drive for Caesar's Cove Haven. I gripped the door handle and anxiously asked, "Um, Ken, isn't this one of those places with the champagne glass tubs?"
"No, no," Ken assured me. "This place just runs the cabins."
I was not reassured, however. In fact, my stomach was in knots. I had a very bad feeling.
Ken turned the key in the lock of our cabin, which [from the outside] looked way too small to house the half a dozen other guests that should have been with us. Ken opened the door and I walked inside. Directly inside the door was a red heart shaped tub and next to that was a gigantic round bed decked out in satin sheets.
I froze.
Ken pounced on the bed, patted it and grinned. "Well, come on in! Aren't you surprised?"
Surprised...yes, I was surprised. And horrified. The room was decorated in early American cheap slut. I was afraid to touch anything for fear of catching a veneral disease or two that a prior couple of hump bunnies had left behind.
After much coaxing and threatening, Ken drove me back to Philadelphia. That was almost two hours of silence. Not a very comfortable ride, I must admit.
As I'm sure you can imagine, Ken and I are not dating anymore. In fact, I haven't spoken to Ken since that day. My family used to ask why and, in the interest of sparing Ken's family the indignity of learning their son is a sneaky liar and probably dripping with VD, I merely said that it just wouldn't have worked out.
I know that you're used to beautiful stories of newlywed bliss, but I thought you might want to know the other side of it.
Best wishes,
Nicole
P.S. FYI: the Poconos are not mountains, they are divided plateau. My high school earth science teacher has been pissed off about that for years.
When I was 10 years old I wanted to marry Jon-Erik Hexum. I was sure that when I became an adult we would meet and fall helplessly in love. After all, my devotion was strong. I sent him pre-pubescent love letters professing my deep feelings...sometimes twice or three times every month.
Luckily, this was all before the time of crazed stalker fans. He probably would have slapped a restraining order on my smitten ass if I did that now. Of course, he can't -- he's dead.
Oh, it was a dark day in the house of go fish that day. I clutched the signed postcard he had sent me to my preteen bosom and sobbed when I heard the news he accidentally shot himself. My dreams -- shattered.
As an adult I barely remember that series Voyagers he was on. Do you? That little kid, Meeno Peluce and him running around history, sort of like Quantum Leap but dumber.
The annual Red Cross blood drive here at work is coming up. I just requested my appointment. I'm a champion blood donor -- everytime I'm eligible I pony up to the draining station and make a deposit. I'm a giver goddess like that.
The first time I gave blood, however, was rather traumatic. I almost never gave again because of a Nurse Rached-like character who was intent on traumatizing me for life.
No, really.
I remember the day well, almost as if it was yesterday. I was newly 18 years old, a senior in high school. I had come to think of it like a rite of passage -- voting, driving, giving blood. My mother was one of those crazy blood donors with pins signifying her accomplishment of giving 12,000 gallons of blood over her lifetime and stuff like that. I was slightly frightened, but totally psyched up for it.
Nurse Rached was one of those large, solid women with cafeteria lady breasts -- you know the type. She was an old-fashioned, no-nonsense kind of chick. She always wore the standard nurses outfit with the zip up the front polyester dress, white stockings, white orthopedic shoes, and little starched cap. Her biceps were the size of tree trunks. I thought she was going to open up her mouth and say [in a really gruff Bouvier sister smoker voice] "I'm Bertha. You're next. Fill out this questionnaire." Instead, she sort of grunted at me and motioned me into a chair and then handed me a clipboard and pen.
I should have taken the hint and run out of there. But I was young and naive and full of hope and visions of saving a life. Dumbass.
So I fill out the little questionnaire, marvelling at all the bizarre diseases I didn't have. I had never left the country, never had a tattoo or body peircing, had unprotected sex with anyone. Funny how things change so drastically. Ah, memories.
Nurse Rached/Bertha tore the clipboard out of my hand and did the blood pressure/temperature/iron testing. She seemed disappointed that I passed. She glared at me through her narrow, squinty eyes. She grunted again, and pointed to the table with an ominous, spastic hand.
I started to get a little nervous.
I laid down on the table and tried to look cool. I was thinking how happy I was that I hadn't worn a skirt, and that it wasn't game day so I didn't have to wear my cheerleading uniform. I looked up at the bleachers [the blood drive was in the gym, probably in case of any bleeders -- the gym is an easy clean up] and tried to relax a little. And then Nurse Rached approached me with a needle the size of an ice pick, evil grin on her pinched face.
It was that moment I knew something very bad was going to happen. I looked around frantically for an escape route.
She slapped my elbow pit for a vein, found one that suited her, wound up like she was throwing a softball, and jabbed me hard with the needle. Blood spurted across the white Nurse's uniform.
To say that I screamed would be an understatement. Wailed, shrieked, screeched -- all good descriptive words that fail to meet the actual event which took place.
The gym had been relatively quiet until the silence was shattered by my outburst. But I was determined to stick it out. I assured the startled on-lookers that I fine, merely surprised by the viciousness of Nurse Rached's attack. I laid back, trying to find my happy place so I didn't have to notice the horrible pain emanating from the hatchet wound in my armpit.
Raise your hand if you know what happens when you're traumatized...that's right, your blood vessels constrict. The one that the needle had been rammed into was now hugging the needle and I was tearing up. I was only halfway done filling up the bag and things were not looking good.
Nurse Rached came flying at me, face purple with rage. First, she told me to get a grip and then twisted the needle in my arm to see if she could get the blood flowing in my arm again. I whimpered in pain, sure that I was going to die. Nurse Rached had just about all she could deal with from me.
"I don't even know why you tried to give blood," she screamed at me. "You're too young and too immature! I can't believe we even wasted our time with you! Look at you!" Then she yanked the needle out of my arm, patched up the gigantic hole, and practically bodily carried me over to the juice/cookie table.
I vowed never again to give blood. Traumatized for life doesn't even begin to cover it. Word of what happened travelled fast and by the end of the day the episode had turned into Nurse Rached putting me in a headlock and stabbing me with a pen.
Somehow my boyfriend's mother found out about it. She was a nurse. Nurse Rached was fired for her behavior, and I was left with a deep fear of needles and nurses and giving blood.
Like I said, funny how things change so drastically
I never see random grocery store employees making like rabbits when I go to the grocery store. Instead, I see people with mullets picking their noses or asses [or both]. Of course, I'm not sure that I would want to see any of the employees at the local shop making with the sweet sweet forbidden workplace love...some of them are really scary looking.
But, inspired by Joelle's list of public places where she has tripped the light fandango, I offer up my own list here [mostly because I don't want to waste all her comment space with my list]:
I hate it when you wake up with plans, but then notice that the weather is going to ruin your plans.
Tracey and I knew that there was a chance of rain, so it shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but dammit I really wanted to run today!
The other day Tracey said that she was already panicking about running the Race. Now that I ran last year, I'm not nervous or panicked at all, but last year I was looking for any excuse not to go. The day of the race I kept thinking 'What the hell am I doing? There's no way I'm going to finish this race. I'm going to come in last. I'm going to embarrass myself.'...you know, blah blah blah. I felt like I was going to puke.
Like most things in life, pushing through the fear and just getting on with it are usually rewarding. Like when I got my ears pierced for the first time, for instance.
I was five years old, and my mom took me to Ames department store. I was a pretty serious kid. I wanted earrings, but I was scared shitless to have a peice of stainless steel shoved through my earlobe. So I turned to my mom, and said, "Mommy, just let me shake for a little bit, and then I'll do it."
So I stood there in the store for 15 minutes, shaking like a leaf, and then I pulled it together and hopped into the chair. Simple as that. I did the same when my mom had to change my earrings for the first time -- I asked her to let me shake for a while, then got a grip and let her change them.
I was going through some papers tonight and I ran across this photo of my brother and I from 1979 [which makes me about 7 years old]. Please tell me that I'm not the only one with one of these silly special effects photos. I mean, cripes, is that spooky or what? I'm just a big floating disembodied head. Not to mention, I was obviously going through my Chrissy Snow phase.
Why do parents do things like this to their kids?
Granted, it was the 1970s, but I have more photos of me with plaid bell bottoms and absolutely hideous shirts than I can count. It was bad enough in the '80s when I could pick out my own clothes and be responsible for my ultimate embarrassment [yeah, remember flourescent pink sweatdresses and jeans worn with pumps and frilly blouses?], so why can't parents dress their kids normally?
I shudder to think of what children of the '00s are going to say about their photos. Some of the clothing I've seen on kids and being sold for kids is atrocious -- it's like Heidi Fleiss' clothing line for the young pimp and ho. Maybe the kids [as adults] will wonder if their parents were trying to coax them into the working world at a young age. Personally, for me, I'm sure that my parents lived next door to the film lot that brought us Die Blackula Die and Car Wash, and they were making their living by peddling me as a professional extra. It's some wonder that I was never photographed in fish aquarium platform shoes for the toddler.
Hey, the 1980s were good to me....
It was just unfortunate for my hair, eyebrows, and sense of fashion. Oy vey.
I was just reminded of my Human Sexuality class a few semesters ago. My instructor is a sexual issues counselor to the mentally challenged in the area, which is kind of a strange thing. She always had really bizarre stories, and the class ended up being really interesting.
The last class was held in her apartment not far from the school. She liked to have a little party for her students, hand out the grades from the Final, and have one last class lecture. She liked to bring in a recently operated on transgendered person and a pre-op transexual to talk about their experiences.
Two of the most gorgeous black women I have ever seen walked into her apartment. The one who had just had her operation was named Sheena. I will never forget what she said:
This will likely be my last post of the day. I'll be making the three hour trek to my hometown in an hour or two to attend my grandfather's viewing this evening. Tomorrow morning is the funeral, and then we're driving back to Philadelphia. I'm tired.
When Craig and I first started dating, Craig had atrocious grammar. I'm not talking about dangling participles or things like that -- it was mostly a lot of ain't and double negatives. You know, things that drive me insane.
I have never been one of those girls who believes that she can mold her man, change him into a whole other person through gentle ministrations and well-timed nagging. But I will admit that I devised a plan to cure Craig of his offensive grammatical habits. There are certain things I'm willing to overlook, but going through life with phrases like "I ain't got no paper" isn't one of them.
Craig hadn't met my mother yet, so I convinced him that she would hate him if he had bad grammar.
Now, my mother is married to someone who loves NASCAR to the point that he has an entire room devoted to NASCAR collectibles. An entire room! Bad grammar doesn't phase her in the slightest. She spent years working in factories with people who were barely able to function, let alone speak with good grammar. And she loves everyone...with the possible exception of my former boyfriend.
But I had Craig convinced that he would walk into my house and innocently say something that would make my mother's head explode in grammatical badness, and then she would hate him forever and forbid me to continue seeing him. And so Craig's quest for decent grammar began. He was so nervous the first time he met my mother he could barely speak. Heh.
I shouldn't laugh, really. It was sort of a mean thing to do to someone, just as a means of getting my own way. But Craig doesn't hold it against me. I think. I'm just waiting for the retribution.
If you read go fish with any regularity you know by now that I am the Queen of Clumsiness. You should bow before me...yes, really, go ahead. I'd get up from my throne, but I'm afraid I'd trip and impale your head with my scepter.
One side effect from my horrible clutziness is that I'm afraid to sleep more than three feet off the ground. This is fine for normal circumstances when I have to sleep in a regular bed, and it's excellent for when I need to sleep on the floor. But there was a period of time when I was required to sleep in a loft. Terrible things happen when the only choice I have is to sleep in a loft.
Things that require ice packs and stitches.
The first time I fell out of a loft was while I was in college. My former boyfriend lived in a fraternity house in the middle of North Philadelphia. It had a small vermin problem, so sleeping on the ground was completely out of the question for fear that one would wake up in the middle of the night snuggling up with the rat the size of a Buick. So everyone had sleeping lofts that were 15-20 feet off the ground. To get into the loft you had to climb a rickety ladder.
Now let's keep in mind that these lofts were built by a bunch of only marginally sober and dumber than dirt fraternity boys, OK? The lofts were held together with chewing gum and some rusty nails they found in the house. The loft and ladder swayed alarmingly anytime I got into bed. But one morning I was getting out of bed, the entire house was still asleep...the ladder half-broke and I was too clumsy to hang out, and I fell 15 feet and landed flat on my back on top of a support beam.
After the shock wore off, I noticed that I couldn't breathe very well and couldn't even yell for help. Instead I started to whimper pathetically. After about 20 minutes my ex-boyfriend noticed I wasn't in bed and looked over the side of the loft at me snivelling on the floor. Luckily, all I needed were ice packs for a few hours and I was good as new.
The second time I fell out of my loft was a few years later when I was living on my own. I had a great little studio apartment with a sleeping loft, much sturdier built than the other loft. The ladder to the loft crossed right in front of my front window and ended directly in front of a huge heater with a lot of sharp edges -- that's important to remember.
One night I was climbing the ladder to the loft, lost my balance and fell off the ladder head first. On the way down I got tangled up in a plant I had hanging in my window, then I cracked my head on the heater, and landed on my hip in the cat box [which I kept on the side of the ladder]. After I landed the rest of the plant hit me in the head. Yeah, good times.
I passed out for a minute, and when I woke up I was covered in blood and dirt. I hobbled to the bathroom and sort of got myself cleaned up, but the bleeding in my head wouldn't stop so I called a cab and went to the hospital. I'm not even kidding you -- the doctors and nurses were laughing so hard they were tearing up when I told them what happened.
Don't even get me started about trees.
As yuou might know by now, I'm a giant packrat. I'm afraid to throw anything out for fear that something awful will happen to me and my loved ones will only be left with my memories. Maybe that's not exactly it, but I like having stuff.
I am one of those people who saves letters. I have a huge box full of notes that my high school boyfriend would pass me when we saw each other between classes. They aren't notes full of passionate prose or admissions of undying love, but they're sweet and make me laugh and wonder what he's doing.
So in the spirit of nostalgia and long lost loves and all of that, you can read one of these antiquated missives right here.
Enjoy!
When you're a Jet,
If the spit hits the fan,
You got brothers around,
You're a family man!
I was never in a sorority in college. At Temple U. most of the sororities have really bad reputations. The big joke is that there is supposedly some old law still on the books in Pennsylania that classifies any house with more than six women living in it as a whorehouse, and at Temple U. that ain't far from the truth. Who really knows if that law really exists, but I had never met any sorority girls who didn't fit the stereotype. And so rushing a sorority never sounded like a good idea to me. And so I have a very biased attitude toward sorority girls.
It always surprises me when I meet a woman who was in a sorority in college but is not a skanky ho. One of my co-workers was a sorority girl, but is so nice and normal and not a slut. It is through Rebecca that I am slowly attempting to transform my low opinion of sorority girls. One day I'll be able to hear the word "mixer" without sneering and picturing huge orgies. So help me, that is my pledge.
I must admit that I don't have a high opinion of fraternity boys either. Oh sure, I dated a few...but mostly because they were always so utterly stupid. And we all know that stupid in the head=good lay. So I'll admit that my motives were not always pure. But shit like that occasionally got me in trouble.
Take, for instance, the time one of my fraternity snacks took a particular liking to me. Poor, dumb Chuck. He showed up at my house one night in his standard state of operation: stupid and piss drunk. It was around 11pm, and he buzzed my intercom, wanting to come on up and romance me with his charming ways [I seem to remember he had a fondness for trying to sex me up by bringing a bottle of pink champale for us to drink and gifting me with a bag of Skittles. Trés hot.], but I was a little tired of him and was in no mood to deal with a drunk. I told him to go home. But you know how sometimes things don't register right away? Or at all? Chuck continued to buzz my intercom for hours. Hours! I was alternately serenaded with Air Supply songs and cursed out.
After recording all of it for posterity, I called one of his fraternity brothers around 3am to come and remove his silly ass from my doorstep. The ensuing scene vaguely reminded me of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, but Chuck had suddenly developed a Popeye-esque inflection to his voice.
I incorporated one of Chuck's ballads into my answering machine message after that.
Oh sure, I was a mean, mean woman back then, but it's all because of my prejudice against sororities and fraternities. I'm sure one day I'll discover the error in my ways. And then maybe I can join in the musical...when you're a jet, you're a jet to the end....
Just for the record, Mrs. Roboto is my hero. Really.
Despite the fact that I was a cheerleader and did all sorts of other join-y, extracurricular stuff, I was not in the normal popular kind of crowd. I wore a lot of black, dyed my hair purple in the off season, wore Doc Martens, and usually had Black Flag or Agent Orange playing on my radio. I didn't really want my team to win. I was the bitter cheerleader. I hated the crowd that got together on the weekends to break into daddy's cabin and have a kegger.
I stood up for myself when I had to, but Mrs. Roboto takes the prize -- I wish I could claim the lock story as my own. Of course, everyone at my school thought I was a satanist so maybe my well-cultivated evil eye would have been enough to strike fear into the hearts of the moronic. But I would have loved to feel the hard metal thump against someone's head.
For those of us who grew up, thinking we were going to be anarchists and then instead grew up to be part of what we never thought we would, remember who we used to be is a weird experience. I always thought I'd be an investigative journalist, bringing corrupt politicians to their knees, bucking the establishment, zinging it to the man. Instead I'm not doing anything quite so subversive or revolutionary. But I'd like to think I'm still doing something good with my life -- raising money for charity is somewhat noble.
Sometimes I go back through my old journals and I laugh. Mrs. Roboto says the girl she used to be "doesn't seem like a part of me but I'm sure she is." It's true. For most of us, the person we were in early parts of our lives is no longer who we are today, but the past is there, just under the surface, waiting for some weird memory to trigger it. It's always a part of us.
Let me clear this up: just because I was a cheerleader doesn't mean I enjoy watching football or basketball. I understand the games well, having been exposed to it on a weekly basis for a million years, but watching most sporting events is just about as exciting as watching paint dry.
Yeah, so, I don't watch sports on television and I rarely attend sporting events. But I am going to make an exception this weekend -- I'm going to watch the Eagles game.
It's not about the game or the team. Making it to the Superbowl would be a nice thing for the city and the team, but I just don't care about it. It's about the stadium. This game will be one of the last played at Veteran's Stadium. So I will watch the last game[s] at the Vet.
Maybe it's silly for me to feel so sentimental about the stadium, but I am so saddened to see it go. A new stadium will replace it this year, and the Vet will be imploded. It's been around just slightly longer than I have. It was the first location I cheered at in college. Temple U. didn't have it's own football field at the time, so we played at the Vet. I had some great times there.
Yep, that's me on the end. Do you see how empty the stadium was? It's because Temple's football team has always sucked. Hardly anyone voluntarily came to those games. Because there was hardly anyone watching, we had so much fun goofing off.
My grandparents and my mother came to the Vet to watch me cheer once. That, in itself, is a minor miracle, but it's a funny memory! I talked my mom and my grandparents into taking the Broad Street subway to the game. That was pure comedy gold -- it's the one and only time any of them have been on a subway. My grandfather was petrified that he was going to get cooties from all the non-white people on the subway. The look of terror when a little black girl bumped into him was priceless. My grandparents had just returned from a pilgrimage to Dollywood, and my grandmother had a silly pair of glasses that had Dolly's eyes painted onto the lenses that she insisted on wearing the whole time. It was a funny, funny day.
Another hilarious time at the Vet was after the homecoming game my freshman year -- MC Hammer was our homecoming entertainment. We were all on top of one of the dugouts being smacked asses, and he was all Hammer-pantsed out, doing his little Hammer dance across the stage in the middle of the field.
So many funny memories that I can't help but be kind of sad to know that the Vet is in it's final days. Sure, the stadium is falling apart and is a total hazard, but I'll miss seeing it.
Arrivederci, old friend!
Last night Craig and I were going through some boxes of junk that have been following me around from house to house for the last thirteen years. We came across a treasure trove of artifacts from my first year of junior high school.
At Berwick Area Junior High School [in 1983 anyway] all 7th graders were required to take a half year of industrial arts classes [aka: shop class] and a half year of home economics classes [aka: home-ec]. I was pretty excited to take shop class -- I had never used power tools and it never occured to me that I might lose a limb or anything. Home-ec, on the other hand, held no fascination for me whatsoever. I mean, who the hell wants to learn to be a haus frau, right?
In 2003 I'm sure that home-ec and shop classes have been upgraded to be glamourous and hip. In shop kids probably build Habitat for Humanity houses or something, and in home-ec kids probably learn to oven dry pot in order to make hemp bracelets and tie-dye stuff.
My first day of shop I vividly remember walking into a huge, cavernous room with lots of sharp things. The shop teacher, Mr. Less, was missing a few digits, which didn't strike a note of confidence with me. I sat down and Mr. Less looked over us with disgust. "No jewelry will be worn at any time in this room," he barked, giving me the evil eye. "And you will wear these at all times!" And with that he pulled out the most vile thing I have ever seen: shop safety glasses.
I recoiled in horror. They were hideous. I would look like a moron. Surely, he didn't mean me. And the jewelry! Didn't Mr. Less realize that it took me twenty minutes each morning just to pick out my jewelry and put on 100 rubber bracelets.
Despite all that, I had a wonderful couple of months bonding with the planer and the jigsaw. I made a spectacular cutting board and even a set of bookshelves which are still hanging in my bathroom at this very moment. See, quality workmanship was produced in that shop class.
Home-ec, on the other hand, was pure silliness. We were all divided into groups and we each had our own little kitchenette. Every class we cooked something new. Guess what my project was? Go ahead, guess.
Any ideas?
That's right: segmented orange with confectioners sugar.
Yep, instruction was actually given for segmenting an orange. It was like a class in independent living for the mentally challenged. My instructor actually demonstrated how to peel an orange and how to sprinkle on the confectioners sugar. And fanning out the slices into a pleasing arc sure was difficult.
I've always wondered what one would have to do to fail the orange segment part of the class. Fail to remove the pith correctly? Fail to fan out the segments correctly? Miss the plate when sprinkling the sugar?
While I'm sure the school district thought this type of education would prepare me for adulthood, I'm sorry to report that I have never sat down with a beautifully prepared segmented orange artfully sprinkled with confectioners sugar.
But dammit, I sure can square dance.
Like almost all teenager girls, I used to lie through my teeth about my age. From the time I turned 12 I was telling guys I was 16 or 17 in order to make myself seem cooler. I probably could have passed for older, so that wasn't a real issue -- I was certainly an early bloomer and you know most guys [of any age] are really only focused on your ta-tas anyway.
Usually lying about my age was not a big deal -- like if my friends and I were at an amusement park...we'd find some hot boys to hang out with who thought we were much older, smooch a little, and then we'd never see them again. No one got hurt, and I got a little bit of older-guy action.
Things that seem like a good idea at the time if I don't get caught often go wrong for me. All wrong.
It would seem that, along the way, I picked up a few stalker types.
My first extra-nutty stalker was a boy named Rob. I met him while on vacation at my Aunt's house outside of Philadelphia when I was 13. He was 17. And sure, he was a sweet guy and a good kisser and all of that. When I left to come back home after my vacation, Rob insisted that he would write to me every day and maybe he'd even come to visit. Considering my mom's Rules for Dating, that was a scary idea to me. But whatever.
Rob wrote a letter to me every single freakin' day for a year. They were letters full of teenage boy romantic fantasies: "I love you so much. I can't wait to see you again. You make me feel so special and wonderful. I can't wait to kiss you again." Blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, I was rolling my eyes at these letters and every once in a great while I'd send him a postcard.
So I visited my Aunt again the following summer. Rob was on her porch waiting for me to arrive. With flowers. It was kind of sweet, but also kind of creepy. And then I left to come home, and the letters continued. At this point he had graduated from high school, and I was 14. Right around December he decided to enlist in the Army. That's when I got the proposal.
Yep, I was 14 years old and Rob asked me to marry him before he was shipped out to boot camp. Uh huh. So I did what any normal girl would do -- sent him a letter telling him that I did not live in West Virginia, was way too young to get hitched as I was only 14, and told him I never wanted to hear from him again.
I got a few more letters before he left saying he didn't care how old I was, he loved me, blah blah blah, but after he began boot camp I never heard from him again. No doubt he came to his senses and realized how icky the whole idea was.
After that, lying about my age lost it's appeal.
Happy New Years Eve Day!
Yeah, so after a horrible catastrophic start with my own domain and Moveable Type and the corruption of MT after only a week, I'm finally on my way to fixing the problem. I signed up with a new service provider and I signed up with MT to get an installation. I thought about trying to install MT myself but I am a total moron when it comes to that kind of thing. Hopefully the queue for an install isn't horribly long because I'm dying to get everything back up and running. Of course, if any MT wiz kids need something to keep them occupied for a few minutes, I will gladly accept the gift that keeps on giving: the gift of MT installation! *evil grin*
New Years Eve is always a weird thing. One of my earliest memories of New Years Eve is when I was about ten years old. My brother and I were allowed to stay up with my mom and my aunts, who were all gathered at my house. I specifically remember feeling like I was getting away with something -- we were watching Wayland Flowers and Madame on TV. Madame flashed TVland, showing us all that the curtains don't match the carpet, if you know what I mean. I was alternately grossed out and fascinated.
I'm always amazed at what passed for entertainment when I was a kid.
My next memory of New Years Eve is when I was 14. My friend Anna decided she wanted to have a rockin' New Years Eve party -- good food, loud music, hundreds of people. So I immediately set out to find an appropriate outfit. It being 1986, I found the perfect ensemble: gold lame pants with a gold lame long blouse with a keyhole neck. Oh, and gold penny loafers. I was the height of fashion.
I walked into the party only to discover that only ten people had shown up. Anna's parents looked at me like I was insane, and I spent the rest of the party fielding cracks about looking like C3PO.
The next New Years Eve I remember is my freshman year of college. I came home from college and my best friend from high school, Dani, invited me to attend a party at King's College, a small private University in Scranton, PA. It's like everyone was socially retarded -- people kept asking me if I minded being around so many people who aren't white, and if I minded being around so much filth. By 10pm I basically offended everyone there by calling them small minded racists and left the party.
Yeah, I have never really had a good New Years Eve out in public, so Craig and I make our own fun at home. This year we broke the bank to collect a feast of seafood and booze and we'll be living it up hermit-style. The same as it ever was, I suppose.
I'll be thinking of all of you later on, and I will toast to your good fortune in 2003. Best of luck to you all!
Since I'm ruminating about dating today, perhaps I should shed a little light on my first and only blind date. It was 1988 so you know the fashion, at least, is entertaining.
I used to be friends with a girl named Christine. She was one of those girls that mothers didn't like because she was just a bit too mature, and kind of dangerous looking. I was endlessly fascinated by her -- she was incredibly smart, but she was kind of a floozy. All of her friends were a little bit older, and she smoked and liked to party. So when Chris said she wanted to fix me up with a friend, I was amenable.
"He's gorgeous," Christine purred to me. "His name is Evan and he's 23. Dark hair, hot car. You'll love him."
'Evan,' I thought to myself. I was sure he'd be a wonderful person and we'd make a great connection and then he'd sweep me off my 16 year old feet and take me away from all that I had come to hate.
Of course, it never occured to me to question why a 23 year old would want to date a 16 year old and why this 23 year old guy was still hanging out in Berwick. Most normal people graduate from high school and run far, far away.
So the day of the date arrives. Evan pulls up in a red Camaro. And I thought it was cool because it was 1988. And then he stepped out of the car. I recoiled in horror. The guy wasn't Quasimodo or anything, but he was wearing acid wash Z Cavaricci jeans, a black leather jacket that resembled a Members Only jacket, and about 10 pounds worth of gold chains. Oh, and did I mention he was sporting a curly mullet and tiny mustache? Oh yeah.
I instinctively knew that in his car were a slew of tapes by Loverboy, Journey, and REO Speedwagon. I was sure he really liked club music. I knew this date was doomed.
My mother's eyes almost bugged out of her head when she answered the door. I couldn't tell if she was pissed that I had dared to agree to date someone so much older, or if she was trying not to laugh at this guido monstrosity that was darkening our doorstep.
Evan, despite being a total dork, was a gentlemanly type. He opened the door to his lovely red Camaro for me, and escorted me to the movie theater. And that's where he lost points -- he took me to the Berwick movie theater.
The Berwick movie theater is where all the local delinquents hang out. Walking on the floor of the theater is difficult because of how sticky it is. And it's scary to consider what that stick might be. Sitting in a seat was like taking a major chance -- who knew what dangerous germs might be lurking that would turn you into a braindead townie? If he cared about my health and well being, Evan would have taken me to the Bloomsburg theater. At least there I wouldn't have to sanitize myself afterwards.
The movie was Throw Momma from the Train. Yes, a classic date movie. He tried to hold my hand in his sweaty, clammy palm. I eventually faked a hand cramp. He tried to kiss me, but I started to laugh when his cheesy little mustache tickled my nose. He tried to feed me some crappy pick up lines and I just stared at him.
I'm certain he knew the date was a bust. He took me directly home after the movie and I never heard from him again.
I imagine Evan from time to time. He's about 38 by now, and probably still living the good life in Berwick. I'm sure he's sort of like Disco Stu, longing for the days when hair metal was king.
I wasn't allowed to date until I was almost 16. My mother was convinced Very Bad Things would happen if I were to be left alone with a boy, regardless of whether or not said boy was a friend or a boyfriend. That's right -- I wasn't even allowed to go hang out with my male friends. Because, you know, all boys have urges.
Yeah, and I'm a gentle flower who can't defend herself against a boy. My best friend at the time was named Jeff -- he was a tall, scrawny guy who couldn't even beat me at arm wrestling. Uh huh, that's a real threat.
But I digress. One day my mom came to me, it was about a month before my 16th birthday, and said, "I've decided that you can date if you want to. But I have some ground rules. I must meet and approve any boy you go out with."
I was thrilled. I had been practicing for my first date since I was 13 years old. My first date ensemble was picked out. My hair and make up strategy was set in stone. I practiced the good night kiss with my teddy bear. The only kink in my plan was that I currently was sans boyfriend and no one would ask me out on dates anymore because the answer was always no, accompanied by a spastic fit of anger at my mother.
My fevered brain pitched in agony. Finally, I formulated a plan. Now, I had to have a date. After complaining to my mother for 4 years that I couldn't date or hang out with my friends it was imperative that I have an immediate date so my mother would see that I had boys lying in wait to date me. So I asked a former boyfriend named John to take me to the movies Friday night. It was perfect.
Friday night came. My mother has known John for as long as I have, and still made him come in and sit down so she could glower at him for a while before we left for our date. I remember that we went to a movie at the Wyoming Valley Mall in Wilkes-Barre, PA, but I don't remember what we saw. And I remember that the idea of smooching him goodnight gave me the willies, so there was no goodnight kiss.
I recently received a Christmas card from John and his wife. They have a four year old daughter. I will admit that it makes me feel a little old to know that one of my first boyfriends is 35 and has a child, but probably the majority of my ex-boyfriends are now married with children. I am, after all, almost 31 years old. But still, on some level, I fully expect all former boyfriends to yearn for me until their deaths.
I want you to think of the music from The Wizard of Oz when the witch is riding her bicycle. Got it? Now imagine that instead of the witch, it's me. Do you have it in your head?
Good.
Now imagine me [with the music] riding on a busy Philadelphia street at 8am, barely awake, fighting not to fall off my bike. And then, in an attempt to make it past the gridlock traffic, I get bike messenger-like courage and attempt to ride in between two cars that are really really close together.
Can you feel in your gut what's coming next?
I wedged my huge granny bike in between the two cars. I mean it. Literally wedged myself by catching one handlebar on one car and the other handlebar on the other. Both drivers, luckily enough, got out of their cars and started yelling at me.
It being early, and me not being quite awake, glared at both of them, wrenched my bike out of the spot with a mighty yank and a screech and took off the other way, leaving the yelling drivers screaming after me.
This is my typical experience during a SEPTA strike here in the city [which happens almost everytime contracts are up for renewal -- every three years]. It's a huge pain in the ass and everyone gets testy. Since Philadelphia's transit system and Philadelphia itself are so much smaller than NYC's transit system, I'm so glad for everyone potentially affected that the strike has been averted [at least temporarily].
People get nuts when they're left to their own ingenuity to get to work. It's all fine for bike messengers and other regular bike riders to laugh in the face of danger by braving the traffic. But stupid people like me on a bike are a menace. I have seen at least one person die on a bike during every single transit strike in Philadelphia. In the 12 years that I've lived here I've been through three of them. People forget basic safety rules, or people in cars refuse to "share the road."
So I'm really hoping that the transit strike doesn't happen -- remember, blood runs red on the road kids!
Most of you know the extent to which I will go to make a buck. While I've had other jobs I consider to be bottom of the barrel, being a Christmas elf was definitely not one of my better jobs.
I tend to block out the memory of those long six weeks at Strawbridge & Clothier at the Gallery Mall in Philadelphia. Perhaps it was the uniform -- not so much an elf, as a Mrs. Claus-type. I would have much preferred pointy shoes with bells and tights to wearing a floor length red gown designed to make me look matronly.
Or maybe it was the hordes of children [because you know how much I like children] that descended upon Santa, slobbering and drooling and acting like smacked asses.
I remember going to see Santa as a kid, and I was so overwhelmingly concerned that Santa would see me acting badly that I just sort of stood there like a statue, afraid to even so much as look cross-eyed at someone. These kids didn't seem to care at all -- they were like wild animals, raised by wolves maybe. Meanwhile, their parents stared adoringly [yet vacantly] at their demon seed offspring, unaware [or maybe unconcerned] that little six year old Johnny was attempting to sex me up.
There was a routine we Mrs. Clauslettes had to adhere to. We were stationed throughout the line to keep the peace. Sort of like bouncers for the kindergarten crowd. Our first line of defense was the kindly yet pointed stare and a quick and jolly "Santa is watching, you know!" But, like I said, most of these kids were too feral to care or take notice. The second line of defense was an unfettered glare of death and a request for the offending tykes name. And then I'd mock whisper into my walkie talkie, "Clausette to Mrs. Claus! We have a very naughty boy who won't stop beating the other kids senseless. Please let Santa know that Mikey's house should be skipped on Christmas Eve."
Of course, most of the time, that didn't work either. And we weren't permitted to physically harm the rotten kids, no matter what they did. There was really no third line of defense. Mostly I'd just give Damien or whatever his name was the evil eye and curse his future.
When the kids got the front of the line, the Clausette stationed at the front of the line made a big deal out of asking the kids names so we could have a record of who came to see Santa. When the front line Clausette would usher the current lap sitters away, she would whisper the names of the next kids to Santa. And then Santa would always strike the fear of no gifts into the next kids by yelling, "Ho ho ho! Ashley and Dante! Come see Santa! I haven't seen you since last year! Look how big you got!"
There were three different Santas the year I worked as an Elf/Clausette. One was the best Santa ever -- he had been Santa-ing at Strawbridge for 25 years and remembered the kids from year to year without needing to be told names. He was amazing! The second Santa was a hard of hearing old coot who always fucked up the names and struck me as slightly creepy. The third Santa was a 25 year old guy who had recently left his studies to become a priest. He was totally hot. Anytime Santa #3 was working I always made sure I was the front Clausette -- he was unused to dealing with women and it was easy to fluster him. I'd just give him a wicked, openly wanton stare and he'd start to stutter. Yes, I'm a horrible person.
The part of my job that was almost worse than dealing with the kids was taking care of the Santa. After every two hours the Santa would need a break. So the front Clausette would make a big deal of saying Santa needed to go feed the reindeer and we'd be back in 20 minutes. Santa #1 didn't need much help -- we'd have to help him out of his jacket and that would be the end of it. Santa #3 was sort of afraid of women all together, so he refused any help at all. But Santa #2, the slightly creepy one, demanded that we basically strip him to his boxers and undershirt during his break. And he smelled. Bad. I made sure I was never the front Clausette when Santa #2 was working.
Part of the experience of working as an Elf/Clausette at Strawbridge was mingling with the young actor wannabes working at the Dickens Village a few floors down. It was this half anamatronic, half live show of an English village, a la A Christmas Carol. Of course, I ended up dating one of them -- a scruffy boy named Chad. I had doubts that Chad was a serious actor: he had never seen Taxi Driver. Really, Chad was just funding his huge pot habit. You could tell when Chad was around by the aroma of burning rope wafting before him.
Good times.
It was with a heavy heart that I awoke this morning. It's officially the holiday season. In Philadelphia this means only thing -- the Mummers.
If you haven't seen the Mummers Parade on New Years Day live in Philadelphia you just haven't seen anything. It is a spectacle that can't be explained or believed. New Years Day in Philadelphia is always a little like navigating the frozen tundra -- it's bitterly cold and windy and frostbite is only a moment away.
OK, so what's a Mummer? Generally a Mummer is a man [although there are women Mummers, it's just not as a common], usually a blue collar type, who dresses up in sequined outfits but isn't a drag queen, and maybe plays a banjo. A Mummer dances, sometimes prances, and almost always struts. And it's tradition to do all of this while piss drunk on camera.
I'm told the alcohol is necessary to ward off the cold.
The first time I saw a live Mummers Parade was my freshman year of college. I ventured out into the sub-Arctic temperatures with Christy and a few other friends. Immediately upon arrival at City Hall we were swarmed by drunken Mummers from the Comics division. In other words, we were attacked by Wenches. The men in the Comics division dress in drag. After trying to bum smooches from us, they continued on their way. This happened at least half a dozen more times, and twice a Wench almost puked on my shoes. Happy New Year!
The rest of the parade isn't nearly as volatile, but still vaguely freaky. And the freakiness doesn't lessen with each passing year.
I used to live in South Philly, down near Two Street. Many of the Mummers organizations have clubhouses on Two Street. Right about this time is when they'd all start practicing in earnest underneath I-95. Watching them practice is actually kind of cool. But I got all Mummered out the last year I lived in South Philly.
Picture it: it's New Years Eve. I'm drunk as hell. Craig and I arrive back at my apartment after a long night and all we want to do is fall deep asleep so we can have the energy to nurse our hangovers the next morning. All of a sudden "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover" comes blasting in my window.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?
I look outside and a stupid fucking Mummer has parked one of their huge music vans with the loudspeakers on top outside of my building and decide that all of Two Street and its vicinity need to get into the Mummer spirit.
Have you ever heard that sleep deprivation and dream deprivation can make you insane? Or that being bombarded with horrible music for long periods of time as a method of torture is very effective? Well, yes, to all of it. By the time morning rolled around and the asshole moved his truck off to parade I was ready to don camo fatigues and go on a mission to pick off any Mummer I might happen to see. Just call me G.I. Nicole.
After that I sort of lost any sort of desire to see a Mummers Parade live. Watching it on TV sucks because it's mostly pretty boring. I will admit to being a sucker for the Fancy Brigade division. It's sort of like musical theatre on crack.
Luckily the Mummers don't have a stronghold in Fishtown. The minute I see a Wench walking down the street here on New Year's Day I'm moving out.
Bah humbug!
As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am a total foodie. I love restaurants and dessert. I love linen napkins, which I refuse to use at home in order to make going out to eat a more exciting experience.
But I have had some strange times in restaurants. A couple of years ago a bunch of us went to dinner at the Astral Plane, a once excellent restaurant at 20th & Lombard. It's a cute little place, all candlelit and a great atmospheric type of place for a first date [note: I don't recommend this restaurant anymore -- the food has gone downhill]. Christy was with us that night -- she was wearing a loose black sweater. She reached across the table to snag a sugarcube and the flame from the candle on our table lit her sweater sleeve on fire.
So imagine a nice, quiet, dark restaurant suddenly disturbed by screams of terror coming from Christy, gasps from the rest of us, and Christy sort of running around the restaurant with her flailing, flaming arm. Oddly enough, her arm went out of its own accord and the moment of danger was over, leaving Christy standing in the middle of the restaurant looking like a smacked ass.
The moral to this story: always wear fire retardant clothing if you're going to someplace candlelit.
It filled my heart with glee to see that a movie about being a band geek is coming to a theater near you. Drumline promises to make millions just because there has never been a movie that portrays band geeks in a cool way.
I can talk smack about band geeks. I was one in the distinguished ranks for one year in the 9th grade. That's right, along with my longtime gig as a cheerleader and overinvolved school activity joiner I was also in the color guard of the band at Berwick Area Senior High. I was a flag twirler, keeper of aesthetics on the field, wearer of the ugliest uniform imaginable. One day I'll find that picture and you'll be sorry!
OK, I know that Drumline is about a band at a traditionally black college. And the band that I was in was certainly the honkiest band in America. We were lucky to keep in step, so I'm sure doing funky steps while marching would have been out of the question. Plus, the woman who was responsible for the color guard's choreography [and uniforms] was a rural, middle aged housewife with no rhythm. Uh huh, so I know that this movie is not about your typical high school band experience.
Be that as it may, I'm sure it will still speak to all us former band geeks. If you were never in band, you can not imagine the experience. Most people think all the band geeks are second only to Trekkies and computer nerds in their uncoolness, but I tell you it's just not true. There was more shacking up and nudity going on during those bus trips than you could ever imagine. It was like Caligula on road trips. Call them geeks all you want, but those band guys get play like you would not believe. Now that I have let the secret out of the bag, I expect high school band's will be flooded with new members.
Dude, boys who play trumpet have the strongest lips! And it's a well known fact that those guys on the drumline have, um, nimble fingers. Heh.
I left the color guard with sadness, but I had other things to do. I was left with the innate ability to keep in step no matter what though, and it has come in handy. I'm also good at manuveuring huge poles in a rather graceful manner, which definitely gives me the edge if I'm ever in a pole fight to the death.
Long live the band geek!
What do you get when you combine a bored 14 year old girl, a gun-crazy friend, and a rural town? That's right -- you get me taking a hunting safety course. No, I'm not kidding.
There we were, surrounded by grizzled old men who had accidentally shot their best friends while hunting and neophyte, fresh-faced hunters, all gungho to get back out there in the woods and shoot some deer for the sheer fun of it. It was a two hour course at the local gun club. It was all about how not to shoot yourself or anyone else in the pursuit of grisly animal murders.
Before you get all pumped up and ready to crucify me for my anti-hunter rhetoric, you should know that I'm not really anti-hunting. I completely understand that hunting is necessary for population control of animals like deer, and hunting is OK with me as long as the meat is actually being used as food. In my ideal world hunters are using pretty much every little bit of what they kill -- because there are uses for pretty much all parts of animals.
What I am against is hunting because you enjoy killing stuff. It's sadistic and creepy. My Uncle Dan is the original Great White Hunter. His first wedding was a Daniel Boone, dress in deer skin with fringe type of extravaganza, complete with muzzle loaders and big beards. He loves hunting. He doesn't care what animal it is, he wants to kill it, gut it, skin it, and show off it's head. It's always slightly chilling to visit their house when I go home to Berwick for holidays.
You walk into the house and there's this eerie quiet. Racks of guns twinkle as sunlight glints off the barrels. Uncle Dan usually sits on the couch polishing one of his many guns. Do you know how disconcerting it is to walk into someone's house when they're polishing a gun? I'm always tempted to run for cover.
What's more frightening are my Uncle Dan's two kids, Rick and Mark. Rick is about 12 years old and has a speech impediment. Last Christmas during the family party he was fixated on going hunting for vacation. "I'm gowing to huwnt cawibou!" Rick screamed constantly. "I'm gownna kiwl 'em and stawb 'em and wip owt theiw guts! Cawibou!" Charming. Mark is 7 and has the chilling stare of a future serial killer. He won't ever speak to anyone, but constantly just studies us all with his freaky look...like he's trying to come with a plan to pick us all off, one by one.
They all like the killing part of hunting, not just enjoyment of good marksmanship and all that other hunting crap.
Yes, it's completely strange that I willingly attended a class in hunting safety, especially since I have never gone hunting. I have fired shotguns and pistols, and I'm a fairly decent shot. But I will never be out in the woods with my flourescent orange cap, trying to rub out Smoky the Bear.
What made me very very afraid during that class is that all the stuff taught was perfectly normal, common sense type of stuff -- unless you are using your gun, always point it at the ground; never clean your gun while it's loaded; always wear bright and reflective clothing while hunting. If you have to teach a class filled with stuff that any normal human would already know, than we are all in serious trouble.
I still have my little card that certifies I passed my written hunting safety exam somewhere. And this is the time of year that I always think about that class. Deer hunting season is almost upon us in Pennsylvania.
The Berwick school district actually gets two days off of school for the beginning of deer season. Is that fucked up or what? Right now Pennsylvanians can legally shoot rabbits, male pheasants [and females in designated areas], quails, crows, woodchucks, starlings and sparrows, wild turkeys, raccoons and fox, coyotes, skunks, bobcats, and squirrels. Personally, I can't see the benefit to shooting sparrows -- can you even eat a sparrow? Would there be anything left after you shot it?
I've had a myriad of weird jobs in my lifetime. There was the Barney-string cheese nightmare, the time I got fired for not fucking the guy who made the donuts, and that horrible summer I worked at a Sesame Street-themed amusement park. I guess I should be thrilled none of my jobs involved the sex trade.
Because it almost happened.
I needed a job. I was broke, and I wasn't going to school at the time. My binge drinking habit required me to get a job that paid a lot, so I decided to look for a waitressing job in an upscale restaurant. I ended up cocktail waitressing at a very nice restaurant lounge. The actual pay sucked, but the tips were really good.
One day my friend Brenda came into town for a visit. She and her friend Cara stopped by my apartment. Cara had to go to work, but Brenda and I were going shopping and we dropped Cara off. Cara worked as a cocktail waitress at Thee Doll House, paragon of sin and stripping in Philadelphia.
I have other friends who work in the sex industry. My friend Kathleen is a dominatrix at a local B&D house of pain type of place. She loves it. I don't look down at her for her choice -- I just know that it's not for me. Working as a stripper or dominatrix or call girl just seems like a last resort type of thing, even though I know the money rocks. I was a little less snooty about Cara's job because she wasn't actually stripping. She was just selling drinks to pervs wearing large overcoats in a small dark room.
So anyway, the whole way there Cara is talking up her job. "The guys who come in are so nice," she smiled. "They're all regulars and not creepy at all! They always leave really great tips. The strippers are really nice too. They're not gross or anything, and everyone is really friendly! It's a great place to work! Hey, they're hiring cocktail waitresses -- Nicole, you should stop by and have an interview!"
The idea planted itself in my head. Could I work at a strip club? Would I be grossed out by the obvious health violations? I thought on it for a few weeks, and finally made the ultimate decision: to go for an interview.
So one fine Thursday night I put on a suit and went down to Thee Doll House. I walked up to the door and a huge ugly bald bouncer stopped me. "The strippers entrace is in the back," he told me.
Yeah.
"I'm here for an interview with Ralph," I told the large man. He led me into the club.
It was the first and only time I have ever been to a titty joint. I don't know what I was expecting -- but it certainly wasn't as classy as those strip joints you see on TV. There were no velvet curtains and cigar smoking tycoons leering at the dancers. It was basically a plywood stage painted black with the requisite stripper pole in the middle, with stairs leading off the stage on either side and some cheesy chrome railings. The girl on stage looked like she was an 11 year old crack whore and she was licking the pole. The same pole that all night stripper cooch came in contact with. I can't even imagine the flaming infection that girl got in her mouth.
Anyway, big bouncer guy lead me to a table and told me Ralph would be out shortly. Shortly ended up being two hours. I watched two hours worth of bad stripping and I saw more floppy boobies, stretch marks, and c-section scars than I care to remember. Not to mention the class of clientele -- think of the biggest losers imaginable with hygiene and dental problems. Now imagine them in flannel.
The highlights:
I really don't understand what the big thrill is with going to see strippers. I was way more grossed out then turned on. Maybe I'd have to be a boy to really get it.
Good news! The FDA has approved a twenty minute HIV test that's easy to use! Woohoo!
I'm not even being facetious -- I'm genuinely thrilled about this. I have had about 15 HIV tests over the years. It's not because I was ever an IV drug user or because I was hoe-ing my ass around Philadelphia or anything like that. It's because I dated a boy in college who slept with just about half of Temple University's campus when we were dating. And I dated him for two years. That's a lot of chicks.
I should have been suspicious when Dave came down with a scorching case of genital warts. But I was being all stupid at the time and believed him when he said his doctor told him it was from jerking off with a wart on his pimp hand. That's totally true: I fell for the spiel.
When Dave dumped my stupid ass I wallowed in self pity for about a week. And then one his fraternity brothers took pity on me and told me that Dave had brought home a different unsuspecting [and sometimes suspecting] victim every night that I wasn't at the house. That's when I became the hardened and bitter woman you see before you!
But statistically if you have one STD, you have another -- so I immediately went to the free clinic at Broad and Lombard Streets for a full on exam and battery of testing. I got tested every six months for three years because I was so worried. Plus I've had random checks now and then.
If you've ever had that kind of test when there might actually be a reason to worry, it's nerve racking. It takes up to two weeks sometimes if the lab is backed up. The first time I was tested was the absolute worst...and it's not just because of the waiting.
Have you ever been to an urban free clinic? One that's located almost in the heart of male/tranny prostitute central? Picture me waiting in line with about three female crack whore hookers, about a dozen shemale prostitutes, two dozen drag queens, and three dozen other random people who look like they sleep in the gutter. Now imagine waiting in line there with all of them for, oh, about six hours.
What was particularly funny is that the guy who drew my blood mistook me for a prostitute. He told me that I looked nice in regular clothes, you know, not my "street clothes"...and that I cleaned up nice. He then gave me a card to some sort of hooker rehabilitation place. It's nice to know I give off the aura of being willing to suck dick for $5.
Yeah, so that was my first experience at the free clinic. And you have to go back to the clinic to get your results because they give you a number so you remain anonymous. One of the nice trannies must have known I was sweating it out because he sat down next to me and starting patting my arm and telling me it was all going to be OK.
And luckily it was.
But I have never quite forgiven Dave. I run into him every now and then and he basically kisses my ass and tells me how wonderful I look, blah blah blah. And then I ask him how his genital warts are doing.
Back in the 1970's the only video game that was readily available to me was Pong. My great-grandfather had this monsterous gaming system [definitely bigger than a breadbox] that only played Pong and he loved to play. We had these weird mock competitions.
I hate Pong. No wonder I have very little hand-eye coordination.
As a kid, we were pretty poor so I didn't have access to a lot of the same types of toys that other kids did. I had huge families of grocery store barbies. You know, not the Barbie, but her lightweight plastic counterpart without a real name. My grandmother was a seamstress, so my fake barbies had a killer wardrobe, but I lacked accessories like shoes, and the barbie Corvette and Dream House. My great-grandfather liked to build stuff out of popsicle sticks so I eventually had barbie-sized things like a porch glider.
I only had one barbie that was a brand name -- it was my Cher barbie doll. She came with a long mauve fishtail style dress and her wrist was jointed. It was hysterically funny!
This may make me seem strange but my favorite game when I was kid was called Witches Brew. As you might know, we lived out in the middle of no where. The closest town was about five miles away and there were no other kids anywhere close by. So I'd drag my brother over to my grandparents house and make him pretend to be my sorcerer's apprentice. We'd pick those little red berries off the shrubs, poison ivy [and I wonder why I am immune], violets, and anything else we could find; stir it up in a big bucket with some water and makeup weird spells to say over the bot of "brew." Then we'd climb the tree by the poison ivy covered shed and pretend to hex people.
When I did get a game for Christmas or my birthday, it was officially a shared toy. Our Hungry, Hungry Hippo game lasted about a week before my brother stole the hippo jaws off all the hippos. No one would play Uno with me. My mother hid our Simon game after two weeks because it was so damn loud.
The strangest game I ever received [and the most gender-biased, which I'm sure traumatized me for life and turned me into the freaky chick that I am today] was this sort of makeup makeover thing. It was this big plastic board with the complexions of four people [light white, dark white, olive, and black] and these slide-y things with makeup colors on them...you know, so you could decide which complexion looked best with the frosty blue eye shadow which came with the game.
Was that a hint that I needed a little bit of lipstick? I think I was ten years old!
I look at some of the shit toys that kids have access to today and the mind boggles. Would I have grown up to be a better person if I had a battery powered mini Jeep Cherokee? Or if I had Barbie's recording studio with working sound mixer?
Where are the Weeble Wobbles of yesteryear? Don't you know -- Weebles Wobble but the don't fall down!
This is just an aside because I'm so excited: I just booked my trip to Paris! Bwah! Heeehehheeee! I'm going to Paris! I'm going to Paris! I'm going to gain 25 pounds while I'm there! I'm going to Paris!
...We now return you to your regularly scheduled entry...
Happy Hell Night Day everyone! Are you prepared to defend your home from the roving bands of hooligans armed with toilet paper and rotten eggs? Craig often speaks of sitting on the front steps with an air rifle, but I doubt he'd actually go that far.
To be honest, our neighborhood is pretty quiet on Hell Night. The police are out in force and, while kids may try to leave a flaming bag of shit on someone's doorstep, they rarely get a chance. Plus, about a month before Halloween the stores refuse to sell eggs to anyone under the age of 18.
I have only been a victim of Hell Night shenanigans twice as an adult. I was once egged from a passing car, which was absolutely gross -- I think those kids must have had the eggs buried behind the house for a whole year. I've also had my windows soaped. Not really a big deal.
As a kid I never really participated in Hell Night. My mother's house is out in the middle of nowhere. It kind of takes all the fun out of it when you have to walk two miles in half a foot of snow to the nearest house to egg it. Of course, I didn't really see the point of it anyway.
Craig, on the other hand, was one of those kids that everyone feared and hated on Hell Night. He and his band of thug friends prepared for Hell Night months in advance, stockpiling soap and toilet paper pilfered from anywhere they could get it. Eggs were acquired and left to rot. Shaving cream and large rocks were in large supply. They once were detained by police for throwing boulders off a bridge into oncoming traffic.
Now that Craig is an adult, I think it's hilariously funny that he is so bothered by kids roaming the neighborhoods being devious and bad. You'd think he'd understand and at least think it's kind of comical, and then get all nostalgic.
Sometimes karma is a funny thing.
I have always been an anally retentive good student. My high school GPA was a 97 when I graduated. What I am about to reveal will forever brand me as the miscreant I truly am: I hated every second of gym class.
As you may know, I attended elementary school, junior high, and high school in a very small town. 80% of the school budget was earmarked for the football team. That means we didn't really have a lot of money to spend on physical education curricula.
Gym class in Berwick, Pennsylvania was always just plain stupid. If I were to believe everything my gym teacher told us, learning to square dance is one of the most important things a young lady can learn. That's right -- every year for six years I "had a hot time in the old barn" and doe-si-doed my partner around the circle. I still have nightmares about promenading in the wrong direction. I guess it's sort of like the screaming of the lambs.
Yeah, so I can square dance like nobodies' business.
Another absolutely ridiculous thing we had to do is learn to canoe. But only for two weeks one year -- our gym teacher had a brother who had a canoe, but I think someone broke the canoe so we never had another canoe lesson after that first year. It was during our annual month-long swimming section. Tell me if it makes sense to force forty girls to walk 10 minutes to the junior high school where the pool was located, get changed, spend 15 minutes in the pool, and then give those same 40 girls 10 minutes to dry their hair, reapply makeup, get changed, and make it back to class in time. And there were only 4 electrical outlets.
Because my hometown is firmly entrenched in the splendor that is high school football, all girls were required to learn to throw a perfect spiral football pass. You could literally flunk a semester of gym if you couldn't spiral a ball and hit a bullseye. Because of this I can hit a fly 20 yards away with a perfectly spiralled pass. I'm sure they were thinking that most of us would end up breeding in Berwick and we might one day be responsible for teaching our sons to throw a football. It never really became useful to me, other than for impressing boys. My pickup line at bars should have been, "Hey sugar -- want to buy me a beer? I can throw a perfect spiral pass and I'm a wildcat in the sack!" Wink wink!
My all time favorite stupid gym class section was something called New Games. We essentially played children's games for a month. Yep, Duck Duck Goose, Pass the Information, shit like that. Training for motherhood? Maybe. Again, not something that has served me well.
But hey, I still remember how to square dance like a pro!
I once was forced to listen to The New Kids On the Block for 23 hours straight. The same tape over and over again. It was a nightmarish, torturous car ride from hell....
...with my 8 year old cousin. It was just about 12 years ago during a vacation to Florida with my grandparents and cousin but I remember it like it was yesterday. It explains why I had to stop watching Boston Public now that Joey McIntyre has been made a cast member. I can barely stand to see Mark Wahlberg because he is the brother of Donnie. The song Hangin' Tough gives me the dry heaves.
This trauma from my past may also explain the aversion-bordering-on-seething rage I feel for the boy band and bubble gum pop explosion over the past few years. If you hear of some otherwise normal girl going ax-murdering crazy because Britney Spears released another album, that could very well be me.
Where is REM when you need them, dammit? I want teen angst, not puppy love!
I like to make an ass out of myself in front of large crowds of people. This much should be obvious as I tell hugely embarrassing stories and post hideous pictures of myself constantly here at Go Fish. And, of course, you all know that I was a cheerleader for almost 10 years. No, not afraid of looking stupid to the masses.
What you might not know is that I can pinpoint the beginnings of this weird lack of self-consciousness. Both of my grandmothers used to encourage me to stand up wherever I might be and belt out the song You Are My Sunshine. Not just the first verse, but the entire song. And, more often than not, I would sing into the end of my jump rope.
Oh, but it doesn't end there. My Grammy Phyllis loved Lawrence Welk. When Lawrence Welk was on my Grammy P pulled up a big stool and I was expected to jump up and dance for her and whoever else was in the room. My Grammy Inky, on the other hand, was a big fan of Hee Haw. So whenever they'd do a hoe-down, I'd jump up on the stool at her house and pretend to clog. No shame, I tell ya.
The problem with that is they thought it was the cutest thing ever, and I was generally eager to please as a kid. So over the years if there was an occasion for me to act like a moron in public, I was there.
Possibly the single dumbest thing I've done in public is to join in the strange lip synch craze that overtook us all in the early 1980s. My junior high school held a lip synch contest during a school dance when I was in the 7th grade. My friends and I gathered together and thought long and hard about what we wanted to do. It came to us in a flash of brilliance.
We would be The Go-Gos.
At the time no one had yet seen the masterbatory after show video of the girls and we all thought they were the coolest. And I, yes, I got to be Belinda Carlisle -- queen of the cool girls! Yes!
So the lip synch contest approached and I practiced in front of my mirror. My mother was so sick of the song We Got the Beat she threatened to throw out my tape. I gathered the necessary elements of a Go-Gos-esque ensemble: Flashdance-cut gray sweatshirt, pink leggings, pink pumps, white hip slung belt, and lots of rubber bracelets. I was ready.
Unfortunately, the other girls in my group were not quite so completely excited about being on stage in front of the school. But I made them take the stage. If I remember correctly, our stage name was something silly like Glam Girls.
The MC announces us and I run out onto the stage, followed by the rest of my group, sort of pissily moping onto their marks. As I was running to my spot on stage I completely wiped out. One of my shoes flew into the audience.
Because I have absolutely no shame whatsoever, I jumped back up, took off my other shoe and started to lip synch like nothing ever happened. Of course, the rest of my "band mates" were in shock and not really doing anything other than standing there staring at me like I had grown a second head.
We managed to get through the song. I know you'll be surprised when I tell you this but we didn't win the competition. We lost to a bunch of wood shop guys lip synching to Def Leppard.
Bastards.
When I lived in the ghetto I had this gorgeous neighbor named Todd. Todd was in medical school and to say that my roomies and I drooled over him is an understatement. We used to sit around and discuss him and wonder what he was like in bed and get upset because he didn't want to go out with any of us.
As it turns out, I got the opportunity for a sneak preview of what we were all missing with Todd in the sack.
Todd's bedroom window was literally 2 feet from mine. In fact, I could see into his window as his room is around the corner. Usually we kept all of our windows closed and locked for fear that some acrobatic criminal would break into the apartment as we slept, but one night it was so hot that we had to open the windows.
I'm sleeping peacefully when all of a sudden I am rudely awakened to the sound of outright shrieks coming from next door. For a minute I was ready to call the police, but then I heard it: Todd was yelling "Who's your daddy?" to which the lucky girl was screeching "Oh, Todd, give it to me! Fuck me hard!" And on and on.
Of course, I am not one to lie quietly and not share. So I ran around the apartment and woke up the other roomies and we gathered at the window, quietly choking back giggles as they just got louder and louder. Cats were gathering on the fire escape and yowling. I think I saw a few homeless people gather underneath the window.
And then it happened.
Todd and his, um, partner were pressed up against the wall just inside of his bedroom window. Todd just happened to turn his head toward my window and saw all of us pressing our faces against the screen. He screamed like a little girl, which made the girl scream even louder [not in ecstacy this time]. Todd slammed the window shut, pulled the blinds, and then we heard the girl yelling at him and she ran out of the apartment.
Since I am at home being all sick today, have nothing else to talk about, and I am somewhat delirious, I've decided to embarrass myself even further.
When I was very young, I had a special relationship with my potty chair. I'm told that I would sit on the thing for hours, fall asleep there [yes, that's me in the photo asleep on the training crapper], and never want to be far away from it. If you're a parent, I'm sure you think that it's probably a good thing since I was potty trained early on. And that's true. But if you're a non-parent [like me], you just think that's plain weird, and I have to have some sort of potty-related trauma from the whole experience. I don't think that part is true -- I have a healthy attitude toward the whole issue of voiding bodily waste.
I've read a lot in journals/blogs over the last few months about the trauma that other people have with going to the bathroom. My own husband has colitis and irritable bowel syndrome, so I understand the phobia associated with taking a shit. After all, on our trip to London last year Craig spent the better part of our visit to the Tower of London getting very well-acquainted with the lavatorial facilities throughout the Tower.
I was, however, surprised when Christy told me [during our trip last weekend] that she herself is afflicted with some sort of strange defecation-homesickness thing. Christy claims that she never availed herself of the dorm facilities in order to relieve herself during our entire freshman year of college. Now, granted, Christy's parents live about 30-40 minutes away, but I find it hard to believe that Christy never once took a shit in the dorms. She said that she only felt comfortable in her own bathroom.
Is this common? Do people hold it in until they reach their own bathrooms? I once read that you can have an aneurism from straining during the whole event, and I suppose it would be better to be found in your own bathroom than discovered by a co-worker with your pants around your ankles.
I have always maintained that I was a pretty good kid. And I was, with the exception of a year when I was obviously possessed.
This is me in the sixth grade. Notice that I was going through an uber awkward period. And let's keep in mind here that it was 1983 or 1984, so no cracks about the cheesy reflective photograph! However, feel free to make fun of the rest of my generous early '80s awkwardness all you want.
At the end of sixth grade I apparently lost what little sense I possessed. I copied a dirty poem from somewhere [because I know my fevered preteen brain could not have come up with anything quite so inspired] and handwrote at least 50 copies and distributed them throughout my elementary school.
Who knows, you may recognize the poem. Here's a little nugget from the poem:
I will never forget this as long as I live: we were in Reading class, doing work from those literature books from the '80s -- I think they were called things like Dungeons and Dragons, and changed according to which level of reading you were at. Anyway, we were all passing a copy of this poem around the room during class, and my teacher, Mr. Ricci, intercepted the note.
Mr. Ricci's face turned purple, but I think he was really just trying not to laugh. I was sent to the Principal's office [because the Principal is your pal!] and my mom had to come in, and it was a whole big mess. I think I was grounded for months.
After that incident I sort of got a bad rap with some of the teachers. And my sexploits were not forgotten by my classmates either. For some unknown reason after that I decided I wanted to be a sex therapist. You know, just like Dr. Ruth. And so throughout the remainder of my sixth grade year and until the end of my seventh grade year I was seriously monitored by my teachers.
Can you imagine what they were thinking? They probably imagined that I was having orgies with the local Elks Club or something. Or that I was secretly running an underground kiddie porn ring.
But really, I just thought Dr. Ruth was cool.
I've had quite an eventful couple of days. First, I break a guy's finger for manhandling me, then I freak out and make a grown faux punk boy cry like a little bitch. Where can a week go after that?
I am not normally a violent girl. True, I do carry an illegal weapon on me at all times [mine is illegal because it is filed to a sharp point]. But I don't go around threatening people with it, nor do I regularly get into fist fights.
I have been in two fights in my entire life, only one of which I was actively involved in.
The first fight was in the 8th grade when some crazy chick with a grudge jumped on me after a dance and attempted to beat the hell out of me. I say attempted because the girl was wasted and I outweighed her by at least 20 pounds. It was likely a comical sight: little 8th grade me running around a pole with this insane drunk girl chasing me, trying to land a punch. She eventually tired out, gave up, and then passed out in front of me and a huge crowd of on-lookers. Does that make me the winner by default?
The second fight was in college, and it was a noble fight: purely in defense of my roommate. We were at this horrible cheesy club called Maui that used to be on Delaware Avenue. Christy was dancing with some guy. There were a group of guys and a girl dancing next to them. One of the guys punched the guy Christy was dancing with, and when Christy tried to break it up, the girl clocked Christy in the mouth. Since I and the rest of my roomies at the time were standing five feet away it became a minor rumble. At least I wasn't running around a pole that time.
Under normal circumstances, however, I am calm and not prone to fits of wild violence. I'm just not afraid to defend myself.
There is one place that I am constantly willing to pick a fight: mosh pits. I used to be pretty easy-going about being a pit, but after I got kicked in the head at an L7 show by someone being a total smacked ass I got a little more proactive about stupid people in mosh pits.
I don't go to a lot of shows anymore. The majority of people attending shows of bands I like are assholes. Every time I see a Rollins Band show there are at least two dozen completely out of control pre-teen boys hurling themselves in the pit looking for a fight. They think the purpose of a pit is to hurt people. I was injured at a Beastie Boys show because some kid thought it would be a great idea to start throwing people into the pit, people who didn't want to be there and didn't know how to leave it.
This is going to make me sound like a bitter old hag at my ripe old age of 30, but I remember when pits where just people sort of bouncing off one another, like a cosmic popcorn popper. That's why it's called slam dancing, and not punch everyone in the face dancing. But, like everything else, someone got the wrong idea and made it about violence. So now venturing into the pit is an exercise in mortal combat.
The very first show I went to when I moved to Philly was Nine Inch Nails [1990, so it was the tour for Pretty Hate Machine. I saw them in Trenton, NJ at a place called City Gardens]. It was bliss to be in the pit there -- no one trying to kill anyone else, just everyone kind of hanging out together and enjoying the show. I went to see the last tour of NIN and it was not the same -- it was a bunch of testosterone-driven adolescents who missed the point.
Now that I'm complaining about "those damn kids," does this mean I should just give it up? Walk with a cane? Adopt a few hundred cats?
Hell, I've already taken up knitting.
I often marvel at the fact that I escaped my hometown of Berwick, Pennsylvania. It's a very small town filled with bars and factories, and [as Susan and Tina and others from the area can tell you] growing up there is not conducive to you doing great things with your life.
From the time I was old enough to realize that Berwick is an armpit [about age 6] I have wanted to leave. I fantasized about learning to drive just so I could get in the car and drive far, far away. I dreamt of moving to the other edge of the universe just so I could be as far away from Berwick as possible.
There are a limited number of things you can do as a teenager in Berwick in order to pass the time.
One of our favorite places to sneak in some nooky was a Ukrainian Orthodox church picnic area. It was around the corner from my mom's house and usually pretty empty, although one time some people mowing the grass showed up out of no where.
My point is that with those three meager options, it's easy to get caught up in the whole thing and end up in Berwick for the rest of your life. You spend your time in a perpetual stupor or in prison and don't see the need to get out of town, or you get knocked up and have to get married and don't have the option of leaving town. Next thing you know, you're working in a factory for minimum wage for the rest of your life, living in a tiny town with no decent shopping or restaurants.
So today I'm feeling lucky. I am. I am lucky. I'm lucky that I had the sense to use multiple forms of birth control at all times. And I'm lucky that I was able to leave and go to college elsewhere.
I guess that enjoying where you live is what you make it. My mom still lives in the house I grew up and loves living in the boondocks of Berwick. Tina lives in Shickshinny and I think she likes it. Some people are not city people. I'm just not a small town living kind of person, I suppose.
I do not enjoy the scent of cow manure.
I have been trained to use a crumpled up piece of paper in my own defense. And that's kind of funny, considering I have a serious phobia about crumpled up paper.
After I was robbed at knifepoint during college I took a self-defense class. My instructor looked totally harmless, but he is a self defense expert. John Mayberry. He taught Hapkido, as well as self defense.
The first story he told us is of a 90 year old woman who beat her attacker senseless with a can of peas. He tried to steal her groceries, and it serves him right. The second story is of a 30 year old woman who was violently attacked in an elevator. Luckily she had a ballpoint pen handy and, in the end, blinded her attacker. You use what's on hand, and think on your feet.
I'm not a big fan of needless violence. But if someone attacks me I will beat them to a bloody pulp with anything I can find. Of course, the first thing John taught us is not to fight unless you have to. And when you do fight, disable your attacker so that you know he [or she] won't be getting up to chase you. Do what you have to do.
A few years ago I was organizing a self defense class for a company I worked for. I wanted John to teach it. When I called Temple University to talk to him, he was gone. And his replacement said that he is now [maybe not still] in a mental institution. I was more than a little freaked out.
The first thing that came to my mind is that John was just a crackpot masquerading as a self defense instructor and that everything he taught us was bullshit. That's not the case though -- he just had a breakdown.
John was always a very intense guy -- he really took arming women with the tools they need to be safe very seriously. The reason why is that when he was in college eight of his closest friends gang raped his girlfriend while he was out of town and left her for dead. And I guess the intensity of it all just got to him.
I hope he's better now.
I know you would be upset if I didn't offer up the obligatory picture of myself this morning. I give you black and white business Nicole! Behold the splendor! Heh.
This is my mom and dad at their senior prom. My mom was a pretty rockin' chick in 1969, bouffant hair not withstanding. I'm not sure why she married my dad -- he really isn't a hot guy and he certainly isn't a nice person. I shudder to think what the actual reason is [oww, ouch, my eyes! Jagged spoon!].
I really didn't care when they announced they were getting a divorce. I was in the 4th grade and by that time my dad hadn't been around much anyway. I don't remember seeing him more half a dozen times from kindergarten until 4th grade. I don't remember asking my mom where he was, but I doubt I knew that he just abandoned us at will. Maybe I just thought he went out on a long trip for ice cream, like my dad's father did [and that is a true story, I swear it].
Anyhoo, I had read a book a few months before in which the lead character's parents got a divorce. The girl in the story was at McDonald's with her brother when the parents announced they were divorcing. The girl threw up her hamburger because she was so upset and was traumatized for life: no more McDonald's food for her. I thought that was the normal reaction for people to have when their parents got divorced.
My mom and dad gathered my brother and I in the kitchen of our house and made the big announcement. My mom had this strange half smirk on her face [probably trying to keep the excitement of getting rid of the ass from bubbling to the surface], but my dad was crying his eyes out. Like I said, I really didn't care that they were divorcing because my life certainly wouldn't be directly affected.
However, I felt it was my duty to at least make an effort to pretend to be upset. Since we weren't at McDonald's and there was no food involved, I couldn't reenact the scene from the book. I improvised: I ran out of the kitchen shrieking.
Yes, I'm totally serious -- I should have won an Academy Award. I ran into my room, slammed the door behind me, and pretended to be Deeply Upset. My dad came in and said something or other to me [you can see how I've committed his soothing words to memory], and that was the end of it.
He left [again], my mom flushed a Dunkin' Donuts box full of drugs and drug paraphenalia he left behind, and I stopped pretending like I cared about it. Life continued normally.
Statistics show the divorce rate somewhere around 50%. I'm not saying that the Census Bureau lies, but almost all of my friends' parents are happily married. In fact, I am the only person of all my friends with divorced parents. And I only have one friend who is divorced. Where are all these divorced people?
Of course, considering my mom and dad have both been married three times each, maybe my parents are counting more than once.
**NOTE: all scans in this entry may be clicked on to see a larger view.
I'm your typical, garden variety packrat. I find it difficult to throw away things of a sentimental nature. Every single last one of my journals from the time I was in third grade have been saved. I have my baby jewelry. And I have a folder of stuff from kindergarten and first grade.
I think I must have been the weirdest kid imaginable.
Take, for instance, this drawing of mine aptly named "Happiness is the Hardy Boys"...I don't remember having a thing for both Hardy Boys. Maybe I was just being diplomatic. Sure, I lurved me some Shaun Cassidy. But Parker Stevens? Ugh. But hey, maybe happiness really is the Hardy Boys. Maybe I've just forgotten how to experience true joy.
Yep, you might be able to tell I was sorting through some stuff today. And to think I would have gone another day without being reminded that I won Second Place in the Rea and Derrick Drug Store "Draw Mom" contest. Who says I never win anything?!
And who says the Stanford Achievement Test lies? Check me out -- I'm all smart and shit! It seems as if I have fallen far short of my potential. Perhaps I should be President by now? Hmmm, maybe they do lie.
I obviously had skewed self-awareness issues. Case in point: self-portrait entitled "Me in May." Never once in my entire life have I ever worn a red strapless gown with a big red bead necklace. But at the age of 5 or 6 that is how I was picturing myself.
Instead of President, maybe I should have been Vanna White? Thanks Bob, I'd like to buy a vowel.
I don't know know, was I a strange kid? Maybe. But probably no more bizarre than any other kid who fabricated extra members of their immediate family. Yeah, really -- I don't know who Mona and Kim are. At the time I had no friends or family named Mona or Kim and I never had imaginary friends. So who the fuck are Mona and Kim?
The bigger question is why can't I will myself to throw this kind of shit out? Sure, it has entertainment value but it's just a testament to my odd youth.
I'd like to buy a vowel.
You know two things about me by now: I was a cheerleader for umpteen years and I'm not the most graceful person in the world. So my next revelation should come as no surprise.
Most of my injuries have been as a direct result of cheerleading. And I know what you're thinking: "How can cheerleading be dangerous? You jump around and act like a dork in a short skirt!"
This is true to some extent, but have you ever watched cheerleading competitions on ESPN? You know those girls who get flung into the air and tossed around like rag dolls? Well, that used to be me.
One day during practice we were doing a stunt called a 2-2-1. The basic formation is I get tossed up and land with one foot each in the hands of another person, and then a second person gets tossed up and I catch her in a chair [not an actual chair -- it's the name of the catch. In reality my arm is raised and in a locked position and the tossed person is sitting on my hand]. That's the ideal situation. Unfortunately, the people tossing the girl up to me threw her a bit too hard so she landed way too hard on me, which caused my arm to buckle and the stunt to collapse. I threw the girl away from the stunt so she wouldn't land on anyone and I started to twist away from the stunt but one of the morons holding my feet didn't let go. That means that I'm twisting but my leg is not. My knee dislocated and I landed on my knee where my kneecap should have been.
Astoundingly nothing really all that bad happened. I couldn't walk very well for a couple of days and I chipped my kneecap, but that was all. I can't count the number of times I've been dropped on my tailbone, dropped on my knees, dropped on my head [that sure explains a lot], fallen on other various parts of my body.
Today my right knee is aching like crazy. It's one of those humid rainy days that seems to make my knees swell up. I tell people it's an old cheerleading injury. The truth is that I've been cursed since birth. I have a malformation of my knee that is not uncommon in women. My kneecap doesn't track correctly -- if you were too look at an xray of my knee, instead of tracking in the middle my kneecap tracks to the outside. And that means my kneecaps have a tendency to dislocate.
I never thought it was weird that I'd be changing the sheets on my bed, crack my knee on the edge of the bed, and my kneecap would halfway pop out of joint. I was 10 years old, I thought it was normal! I started getting arthritic pains when I was 16. I knew that wasn't normal.
A few years ago a doctor told me I might face an early knee replacement if I didn't make some preventative changes. The key is to make sure I have super strong quad muscles in my legs -- if the muscles are strong it pulls the ligaments tighter and keeps my kneecap in check, apparently. And so I have really strong legs.
People have worse problems than this, but I'm bitching about it today because my knee is throbbing. But at the same time, I know that things could be worse. I haven't been to physical therapy in 5 years and I ran in my first race on Mothers Day. My knee still pops out of joint every so often, but I haven't had a full fledged, can't get the kneecap back in by myself, moment in years. So even though my knee hurts like a motherfucker today, I'm not all that upset.
Nothing a little Aleve can't cure. Hey, look ma, I'm a commercial!
I typically spend about 45-60 minutes every day on the subway or on a bus. There is tons of advertising. Most of it is racially skewed.
Last Friday I was late to work because of some fuck up with the train. I had to take an additional bus and a different subway route. I had a lot of extra time to ponder the advertising. Someone screwed up when placing the advertisements for Eclipse gum. There are three separate ads -- two of them feature a black man from the nose to the chin, licking his teeth and one of them features a white woman from the nose to the chin, licking her teeth. The one with the white woman has a caption that reads "Va Voom." The ads with the black man have captions that read "Ma Snizzle" and "Cha-Ching." How absolutely wrong and racially stigmatizing is that? I sat there and stared in utter disbelief at the blatant stupidity of advertisers. And then I started laughing hysterically at the person who put these three ads all together -- it was either a brilliant outing of advertising idiocy or just some dumbass who didn't read the placement directions.
There's shit like that all over the city. For being a city that is filled with people of all colors and backgrounds, Philadelphia is still relatively segregated, neighborhood-wise. My current neighborhood, Fishtown, is mostly white. The next neighborhood over is predominatly latino. Alot of the neighborhoods in North Philly are mostly black. There are pocket neighborhoods of asian families in South Philly and North Philly. I'd say that very few neighborhoods in Philadelphia are honestly populated by an even mix of all ethnic backgrounds...maybe Center City, parts of West Philadelphia, Queens Village maybe. I've lived all over the city, and I've seen all the advertising. It makes me sick, to be honest.
I used to live in North Philadelphia at 19th & Girard. It's a predominantly black neighborhood, mostly families, and it's on the edge of a very poor ghetto. There were always huge billboards for malt liquor and Newport cigarettes, as well as other advertisements that were obviously geared toward what ad reps think are your typical ghetto fabulous family. The Eclipse ad that says "Ma Snizzle" would have fit right in with the other ludicrous advertising schemes.
It's not just the advertisements, though. Even the products readily available at convenience stores are different! One of my favorites is a line of potato chips called Rap Snacks. The first time I ever saw them was while living at 19th & Girard -- they were sold at the Texaco across the street from my apartment. Of course, being completely incredulous that anything this bizarre could be sold, I had to have them. The chips are actually awesome -- I'm a big fan of the Red Hot Cheddar chips with Mack Yo on the bag. The Sweeties are also pretty good. But the ultimate chips types are Chumpie Chips and Homegirl Chips [neither of which I could find a scan of, unfortunately]. Chumpie Chips have a little posse on the front of the bag and this little story on the back about how you can be "phat" while still being a good person and not "throwing down."
Now, I still have an unopened bag of Homegirl chips at home. I was afraid I'd never find them again. There's a gaggle of ghetto fabulous girls on the front of the bag and the back of the bag gives seriously Life Advice. Ready for it? Here it is:
I attended my mother's second wedding in my cheerleading uniform. There I stood, royal blue and white school spirit blazing, witnessing the downfall of modern civilization.
OK, maybe not the downfall of modern civilization. But my mother's second husband, John, was certainly not a good addition to my family. And it wasn't a huge wedding -- it was a 5 minute Justice of the Peace affair. But I attended in my uniform as a sort of formal protest. The symbolism was probably lost on everyone present, but hey, I'm a subtle rebel!
No one in my family ever really liked John. He was a bully who was missing half his teeth. His first marriage didn't work out because his ex-wife is 500 pound lesbian biker chick with self control issues and a drug problem. His two children by that marriage were terminally fucked up and annoying. One talked non-stop and the other was a criminal in training.
I know it's a miracle that this gem of a guy stayed single long enough to be reeled in by my mom. And boy, do I feel lucky.
Even though I wasn't particularly fond of John, I thought we had a peaceful understanding. I stayed out of his way and he stayed out of mine. That understanding was shattered one day I played hooky from school. John came home for lunch from work unexpectedly so I hid in my closet.
I hear my bedroom door open and I'm wondering what the hell my stepfather is doing in my room. After a couple of minutes he says, "Slut!" and leaves to go back to work. I peek out of the closet and my journal is sitting on my bed. Well.
The funniest part is that there was nothing really in there that would qualify that type of response. So maybe he just couldn't read and was imagining that I was doing all manner of slutty things.
But that earned John my official Mark of Disapproval. My mother's marriage to John was not good to begin with. Like I said, he's a total ass but I stayed far away from any controversy. After the journal episode, I was always two seconds away from throwing down, ready to argue any little point, or make him seem like a bigger schmuck than he already was.
Don't screw with the little blonde girl in the cheerleading uniform, pal! Heh.
I won't go into the specifics because they are long and boring, but John eventually left my mother for another woman. My mom, queen of avoiding marital confrontation, was upset for about two seconds until she realized that she no longer had to put up with his antics.
Last I heard he was supporting his new girlfriend and her nine children from a previous marriage to someone linked to the mafia. Karma is a wonderful thing.
I'm going wig shopping today during my lunch hour.
You may remember that Craig and I are going to the Henri David Halloween Ball for the tenth time this year, and we're going as Frank Cross and the Ghost of Christmas Present from the movie Scrooged. Well, today begins my costume quest. It all hinges on the wig. And so I'm shopping for some hair today.
I like my hair -- it's really thin and really straight, but I usually don't have to fight with it too much and it doesn't complain a lot when I color my hair. But I have always been jealous of my friends who get braids and extensions, or those who can wear wigs without looking stupid. Because of my hair type I can't pull off extensions and wigs just look, well, wiggy. I'd love to get braids, but I think I'd just look stupid. And so I'm stuck with my hair, which is OK.
But I do love wig shopping. The Frederick's of Hollywood catalog comes to my door every month or two, and they have these seductress wigs and hair pieces that I've been drooling over for months. Now that my hair is growing out [it just hits the bottom of my ears now], I'll be able to wear partial hair pieces soon. I'm all excited about it! I'm going to run around in my Frederick's of Hollywood hair, flipping my long luxurious locks with the back of my hand, driving men wild with desire over my faux hair! Whenever I see fake hair I always think of Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion at their senior prom when whatsherhead practically dislocates her neck as she's whipping her hair around.
My hair has been a major source of embarrassment for me throughout the years. I wish I had some photo scans with me to illustrate the horror, but I didn't plan on outing myself as a "hair don't" today. My mother used to set my hair in rag curlers when I was little so I'd look like Shirley Temple. And she gave me perms every couple of months, which made me look as if I had stuck my finger into a light socket. By the time I was old enough to dictate my own hair styles, it was the '80s and bad hair was the thing. I've had mall bangs, high hair, that weird asymmetrical short cut, Billy Idol spikes, metal chick frizzy hair, etc. I suppose everyone looks back at their hairstyles at some point and cringe. At least I hope I'm in good company.
It's just about that time again.
When I was growing up, we got a lot of snow. It seems that most years the ground would have a least an inch or two of snow from December to February. There are lots of ski resorts not far from my house, and there were always ski trips planned at my high school.
I feel no qualms in telling you that I hate snow. I hate it with a fiery passion that knows no equal. My mother had to force me to go sledding when I was growing up. She thought I was just being contrary, but I really just didn't want to get snow in my face, down my pants, and in my mittens. Skiing? Not so much, thanks. Snow is not my friend.
Growing up in a place where we got a lot of snow, I felt like a reject [even more so] during the winter months when everyone else was thrilled with the snow. Yes, I think it's pretty when it just snows, but I don't want to be anywhere near it. I like it when the air gets colder, I just don't like the snow.
I remember the very day I declared war on the snow. I was seven years old and I was on my way home from school. My mom wasn't home yet so my brother and I walked back the lane to my aunt's house. It had snowed overnight and was really cold -- the kind of snow that when you step on it, the frozen crust holds you up for half a second before you sink down into it. It must have snowed at least half a foot because the snow was up to my knees. My brother said something stupid and I threw my orange metal Scooby Doo lunch box at him.
I will pause in the story now to let you know that we lived [my mom still does] on top of a really big hill. Really big and really steep. Almost mountainous. And it's all farmland, so during the winter there's nothing growing there.
So. A thick crusty slick surface of snow. A very big hill with no things to run into. I watch in horror as my metal lunchbox goes sailing across the 10 acres of my mother's yard, across the farm fields, and down down down the hill.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I would have sat down right there and started to cry if I wasn't sure that my ass would have frozen to the snow. With my brother in hysterics, I start the long trek down the hill to fetch my lunchbox. A lost lunchbox would have netted me a long lecture and a smack for sure.
Step, pause, crunch. Step, pause, crunch. I felt like Grizzly Adams, battling the elements. And then it started to snow some more. And keep in mind that at the top of this huge hill it's windy as hell. So I have wind sand-blasting my face with snow. My little legs are getting very tired. I start to wonder if I'll ever see my family again.
After 30 minutes I finally make it to the bottom of the hill. Luckily the snow did not entirely cover my Scooby Doo lunchbox, and the lunchbox is bright orange anyway. I stand victorious, clutching my lunchbox to my chest. And then I look up the hill.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I spent about 5 minutes willing myself to be buried in snow and die so I wouldn't have to walk back up the hill, but I finally started dragging myself and that damn lunchbox back up the hill.
About halfway up the hill I thought I spied vultures circling the area.
The entire trip took me almost 90 minutes but I did it. I was Queen of the Mountain! I shook my fist to the sky and vowed to forever hate the snow.
And I have been slightly suspicious of Scooby Doo ever since, as well.
You know two things about me by now: I was a cheerleader for umpteen years and I'm not the most graceful person in the world. So my next revelation should come as no surprise.
Most of my injuries have been as a direct result of cheerleading. And I know what you're thinking: "How can cheerleading be dangerous? You jump around and act like a dork in a short skirt!"
This is true to some extent, but have you ever watched cheerleading competitions on ESPN? You know those girls who get flung into the air and tossed around like rag dolls? Well, that used to be me.
One day during practice we were doing a stunt called a 2-2-1. The basic formation is I get tossed up and land with one foot each in the hands of another person, and then a second person gets tossed up and I catch her in a chair [not an actual chair -- it's the name of the catch. In reality my arm is raised and in a locked position and the tossed person is sitting on my hand]. That's the ideal situation. Unfortunately, the people tossing the girl up to me threw her a bit too hard so she landed way too hard on me, which caused my arm to buckle and the stunt to collapse. I threw the girl away from the stunt so she wouldn't land on anyone and I started to twist away from the stunt but one of the morons holding my feet didn't let go. That means that I'm twisting but my leg is not. My knee dislocated and I landed on my knee where my kneecap should have been.
Astoundingly nothing really all that bad happened. I couldn't walk very well for a couple of days and I chipped my kneecap, but that was all. I can't count the number of times I've been dropped on my tailbone, dropped on my knees, dropped on my head [that sure explains a lot], fallen on other various parts of my body.
Today my right knee is aching like crazy. It's one of those humid rainy days that seems to make my knees swell up. I tell people it's an old cheerleading injury. The truth is that I've been cursed since birth. I have a malformation of my knee that is not uncommon in women. My kneecap doesn't track correctly -- if you were too look at an xray of my knee, instead of tracking in the middle my kneecap tracks to the outside. And that means my kneecaps have a tendency to dislocate.
I never thought it was weird that I'd be changing the sheets on my bed, crack my knee on the edge of the bed, and my kneecap would halfway pop out of joint. I was 10 years old, I thought it was normal! I started getting arthritic pains when I was 16. I knew that wasn't normal.
A few years ago a doctor told me I might face an early knee replacement if I didn't make some preventative changes. The key is to make sure I have super strong quad muscles in my legs -- if the muscles are strong it pulls the ligaments tighter and keeps my kneecap in check, apparently. And so I have really strong legs.
People have worse problems than this, but I'm bitching about it today because my knee is throbbing. But at the same time, I know that things could be worse. I haven't been to physical therapy in 5 years and I ran in my first race on Mothers Day. My knee still pops out of joint every so often, but I haven't had a full fledged, can't get the kneecap back in by myself, moment in years. So even though my knee hurts like a motherfucker today, I'm not all that upset.
Nothing a little Aleve can't cure. Hey, look ma, I'm a commercial!
I think I probably singlehandedly kept Maybelline and Cover Girl makeup in high profitability throughout the 1980s.
Makeup always seemed kind of cool to me. When I was 8 my grandmother sold Mary Kay Cosmetics. One night while I was spending the night at my grandparents house I locked myself in the bathroom and didn't emerge until I looked like a hooker. My grandmother's Mary Kay makeup collection was decimated. I could have been Tammy Faye Baker's illegitimate love child.
I stole 2 of those little Avon lipstick samples from my mom when I was 10 [who was selling Avon at the time] and wore lipstick in my school picture. I sort of resembled a half made up geisha.
I started wearing makeup all day, every day when I was in the 7th grade. I didn't just wear lip gloss and eyeliner -- I wore the whole makeup kit: foundation, powder, blush, eyeliner, mascara, eyeshadow, lipliner and lipstick. I would not leave the house unless I was in full makeup.
Even in my most punk rawk days of blue hair, purple Doc 10 holes [which I still own and love], ripped fishnets, and dog collars, my makeup was on and perfectly applied. My lipstick may have been black, but goddamn it it was gorgeous!
This went on until only about 3 years ago. For some unknown reason, appearing in public without makeup struck fear into the very center of my heart. And then one day I woke up, looked in the mirror and decided I look fine without makeup.
I guess I must have had an epiphany.
This morning I got out of bed, threw on sweatpants, a tshirt, and a doorag and went to the grocery store. Years ago this would not have been possible. Now it's sort of my weekend uniform.
I'm not sure if Craig is happy or sad with the change. On one hand, I'm sure he got sick of having to wait for me while I put on my second coat of mascara. On the other hand, he probably gets sick of seeing me in a doorag.
I was a prepubescent Valley Girl.
"But Nicole," you may exclaim, "you grew up in the boondocks, not the wilds of the San Fernando Valley!" Yes, this is true but I still proclaim that I, Nicole of Sunnybrook Farms, owned a pink sweatshirt dress and uttered the words "Fer shurr!"
It was third or fourth grade [the early '80s] and roach clips with feathers attached were the "in" thing. No, not roach clips for use in smoking a doobie -- they were worn in the hair! The smell of change was in the air.
And then it happened: a copy of Fer Shurr: How to Be a Valley Girl, Totally fell into my impressionable young hands.
It was innocent enough -- the word "like" started to pop up in my everyday vocabulary. I started to express dismay by shouting "gag me with a chainsaw!" Before long I was wearing headbands and legwarmers.
It was horrible. I was a dork.
I'd like to think I'm not a dork anymore, but the simple fact of the matter is that I am. I love the movie Valley Girl and I watch it at least once every month. I love the soundtrack -- on any given moment you might be able to hear Johnny Are You Queer on my CD player. I lurve me some Elizabeth Daily in a jumpsuit! It's sick!
If being a dork is wrong, I don't want to be right.
When I was in college I had a job at a cheesy jewelry store called Crown Jewel. Most malls have one -- sometimes they're called Piercing Pagodas. Usually they sell costume jewelry, a few gold chains, gold charms, that type of thing.
And they pierce ears.
I loved working at the Crown Jewel because I got to the wield the piercing gun with an iron fist. It was depressing on days when no one came in for an ear piercing.
Maybe it spoke to my inner dominatrix. Perhaps I was really meant to be Mistress Nicole, Queen of Ye Olde English Chambers. A good friend of mine, Kathleen, earns her living as a dominatrix in Philly. She's been trying to talk me into it for years.
My favorite victims customers were guys. They'd come in, all macho, wanting to get an ear pierced. The first problem arose when deciding which ear to get pierced. I don't know if this was an issue where you live, but at one time if a boy had the wrong ear pierced it meant something. Just to be a total bitch, I'd tell them it was the wrong ear that should be pierced, and they always listened to me.
And it was always the same. I'd have this guy sitting in the official piercing chair, wipe his ear down, put a purple marker dot on his ear, and then shoot the earring through his lobe. And then the pierced boy would hold back tears as he left the store.
I have mixed feelings about piercing babies. On one hand, I really don't like children. On the other hand, the sound of babies crying makes my skin crawl. We had two guns so two of us could pierce simultaneously. We'd do the countdown, pierce, and then run for cover.
I admit freely that getting your ears pierced hurts. But it isn't the piercing that hurts -- it's the sound of the gun in your ear combined with the alcohol getting into the hole in your ear.
One day I had to pierce my half-sister's ears. She was 7, I think. She wouldn't let me pierce her second ear. I had to bring the gun home with me one night and pierce it when she was sleeping. She wasn't sleeping for long. I don't think she spoke to me for weeks.
Ah, memories.
Eating pizza always reminds me of being stoned.
I have just returned from lunch with some co-workers. We went to Lombardi's on 18th Street and chowed down on some very excellent pizza with wild mushrooms and kalamata olives on it. Even gourmet pizza reminds me of being baked.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not a drug-addled lunatic. I've seen first hand that a drug-infested adult lifestyle is a bad choice [thanks dad!] Hey kids, crack kills!
I never drank or smoked pot in high school. It's not like I was against it, but I just didn't have time to be stupid. I was too busy trying to get the hell out of there.
My first drink was a 40 oz. White Mountain Berry wine cooler [malt beverage, thanks]. Um yeah, let's try to keep in mind that Temple University is located in the middle of the ghetto in North Philadelphia.
Nicole+40 oz. wine cooler=ghetto fabulous
But I digress. Toward the end of first semester during my freshman year I took two hits of blotter acid. Something you might have already figured out about me: I'm a total control freak. So I spent the rest of the evening, pupils dilated, wandering around the dorms trying to "act normal." I actually sat down in my room, listened to Mozart, and wrote a letter to my mom about the guy I was currently seeing. I wrote in time to the music in a big loopy scrawl off the side of my stationery and onto my bedspread. I still have the letter, it's just that funny. It goes something like this:
A few months later I went to my first party at casa de Andy and Brian, resident stoners. They grew pot in a large trunk using this crazy hydroponics system in the closet in their dorm. They served pot brownies, jello shots, and passed around a bong and a toilet paper tube with a dryer sheet attached. Within 30 minutes everyone was laying on the floor in a stupor. The room smelled like pot smoke and dryer sheets. I went back to my room and wrote a parody of The Raven about the party. It involved afro wings and roller skates. And then I ate some pizza.
One year I took 4 hits of acid on Halloween and went to a costume party. I spent an hour sitting next to a boy watching the hair grow out of his arm. It was fascinating. My boyfriend at the time was dropping acid for the first time that night and was scared to go in the bathroom because there was something breathing in the corner. One of his fraternity brothers was dressed like a court jester and was freaking us all out...he was the evil jester. The whole night was completely wacky. The next morning a friend of ours drove us around Philadelphia. We were still tripping so everything seemed so vivid. Everything was so green. And -- you guessed it -- we ate pizza.
One of the silliest nights of my life was spent with an ex-boyfriend, his friends, and some of my friends. We had a granny blanket bake. For those of you thinking "What the hell is that?", it's when you all huddle underneath a blanket with the ends of it tucked underneath you and pass around a joint or two. The smoke stays in with you and you get good and fucking stoned. After we ended the bake I kept smacking my head off things because I was laughing so hard. Almost too hard to eat the pizza.
The last time I smoked I made such an ass out of myself that I swore off drugs forever. I was at a bar with Christy and my friend Steve. Also there was this guy Duncan that I just adored and wanted to smooch. I was super drunk, and then I went out to the parking lot and partook of some of Steve's stash 'o weed. I came back into the bar and literally threw myself on poor Duncan. It was appalling. I went home, cried, and ate pizza.
I guess I also should have sworn of alcohol, but a girl can only give up so much.
I haven't smoked or anything for a few years now. I don't think my drug experiences are much different from a typical person. I just wish it wasn't all tied up in a culture of pizza.
I graduated from high school in 1990, and immediately left town. Escaping Berwick, Pennsylvania was foremost on my mind ever since I was old enough to know I hated it there.
There's not much to do in Berwick. You can watch the grass grow, hone your cow tipping skills, maybe aspire to be the town drunk. The thing Berwick is absolutely known for, though, is the strange cult of high school football. Tina can attest to the bizarre reverence with which football is treated in town. Coach Curry has been the football coach forever, the Berwick Bulldogs always have a winning season, and most of the time they at least take the division championship. Every Friday night during football season, 99% of the town is at Crispin Field attending the game. Any smart criminal would choose Friday night to rob every house in Berwick...but all the criminals are at the game, too.
In my own fevered brain, I've often imagined what it will be like when Coach Curry passes on to that big football field in the sky. I'm convinced that he will be cryogenically frozen, entombed in a glass preservation case, and buried in the middle of Crispin Field. During half time the lights will dim, Coach Curry's tomb will rise from underneath the field in a dramatic moment of fog and fireworks, and a tribute will be paid with a virgin sacrifice -- probably one of the cheerleaders. Or not.
As you might remember, I was a cheerleader. I hate everything about football and basketball, so I've often wondered why I would want to be a cheerleader. The answer still evades me. I was a cheerleader for a long time, though -- all through junior high, high school, and college.
It's an embarrassing thing to admit to people. It's right up there with admitting that you masterbate constantly or you pick your nose and eat it or you get off on childhood pictures of Cindy Brady. Right away, people assume that I spent the better part of my youth dating the captain of the football team and flouncing around like a pretty princess.
Well, I may be blonde but I have never flounced anywhere, not a single day in my entire life and I've never dated the team captain. In fact, I refused to date anyone on the football team in high school. You know, on principle.
And here's a few other cheerleader-y stereotypes I'd like to clear up: I'm wasn't a slut, or stupid, or outrageously popular, or mean to other people, or stuck up, or crazy with the school spirit.
I did plot to take over the world, however. Pinky, are you thinking what I'm thinking?
Today is all about two things for me: cooking and being lazy. It's a rainy Sunday and it's kind of cold outside. So I'm going to sit on the couch and watch Groundhog Day, and when I'm not sitting on the couch I'm going to make mushroom soup and apple cake.
I'm such a domestic goddess.
That isn't true, of course. If I were a domestic goddess I'd also be cleaning and washing clothes and that type of stuff while wearing pearls, a dress, and high heels. I'm wearing sweatpants and an old tshirt, and I don't clean unless forced. Hell, I'm not even wearing lipstick.
It seem practically luxurious to know I don't have to go to work tomorrow. I am looking forward to starting a new semester though...I even made myself a brand spanking new journal to use as a Spanish notebook. I wonder if I will be assigned a new and exciting Spanish name. In high school, I was Enriquetta. In French I was Nicole [because Nicole is a French name]. I can't remember what my Latin name was.
My Latin instructor probably didn't assign names anyway. He was a freak. Come to think of it, almost all of my high school language instructors were complete freaks. I had one year of French with Madame Strausser, who not-so-secretly wished to marry the Prince of Monaco. She wore a beehive hairstyle everyday, despite the fact that the fad had worn off twenty years prior. We speculated that she was a cokehead. My second year of French was with Monsieur Langdon. Mr. Langdon had a big dent in the side of his head from an attempted suicide a few year earlier [something involving sadness over an affair with a student gone wrong]. He shot himself in the head but survived, and the school district welcomed him back to mold our impressionable minds with open arms. He had a nervous tick and hated all of us. Mr. Langdon actually finished the job a few years ago, I hear. He got smarter: instead of trying to shoot himself in the side of the head, he put the gun in his mouth. My only year of Spanish was with Senora Serff, fierce wearer of the original bullet bra. She'd torpedo her way around the class and purposely hit you in the head with these massive doorknocker necklaces she favored. She cut her own hair and longed for the days of corporal punishment. And then, my personal favorite: Mr. Kishbaugh. Mr. Kishbaugh was so old my mother had him in high school, too. He was at the beginning stage of serious dementia. To this day I remember the Latin word for bread because when he taught us the word he threw loaves of bread at us. No, I'm not kidding. He loved to throw things: bread, chairs, chalkboard erasers. I hear he died recently too.
I shudder to think of what misfits are now teaching languages at Berwick Senior High School.
My mother was slightly crazy when I was a teenager. Apparently she was driven over the edge by a myriad of reproductive organ problems, including endometriosis. Since she is now well into menopause, my mother has mellowed considerably. But at the time when all this was going on, I thought she was insane.
I was actually a really good kid -- I earned great grades, was reasonably well-adjusted, participated in sports and other after school activities, and was well-liked by my teachers. I read constantly and never got in trouble with the law or anyone else, for that matter.
But my mom had a rule that was absolutely non-negotiable: I had to be home in time for curfew, no matter what. The punishment for being late was being grounded one day for each minute I was late.
I was grounded from the time I turned 12 until I left home to go to college when I was 18.
See, the problem is that the rule was non-negotiable. If I was out under normal circumstances, it was not hard to be in by midnight or 10pm [if it was a school night]. However, one night some friends and I drove to Wilkes-Barre [that's about 45 minutes or so from my hometown] for something or other. We left to come back home around 10:30 pm so everyone had plenty of time to get delivered home. Unfortunately there was a huge fatal accident that shut down the highway. This was before everyone on the planet had a cell phone, and we were stuck out in the middle of nowhere on the highway with no phone anywhere in the vicinity. We ended up getting home at 1am.
Despite the fact that the accident had been on the news, my mother grounded me for 60 days.
Being grounded for me meant that I could go to school, and I could attend my sports practices and games, but nothing else. No TV, no phone, no books....only homework and my bedroom. She once experimented with not allowing me to attend practices and games, but I think my coach called her to complain about me missing so many games.
My mother had other ways of torturing me. Once every other month or so I'd come home to find every drawer in my bedroom overturned onto the floor, and every piece of clothing in my closet tossed on top of the pile. This would occur when my mother was in the grips of some bizarre cleaning frenzy. She'd decide that my dresser drawers weren't organized enough. She was super particular about underwear -- all of my underwear had to be folded in threes and grouped by color. So if the underwear was folded wrong or wasn't sorted to her liking, all the drawers would get dumped. And then I'd have to refold everything and put it back into the drawers and closet while she sat at my desk and supervised.
Every once in a while my mom would decide that she didn't like my attitude [can anyone blame me for being slightly resentful?] and would force me to stand in front of her for an hour while she yelled at me that I was an "ugly person." When she first started to do this I would get upset and start to cry, but then she would just yell at me more and tell me that "crocodile tears" wouldn't help.
It's a minor miracle that I didn't turn out to be an axe murderer.
The funny thing is that my mom and I are sort of friends now. I left home at the earliest opportunity and barely spoke to her for 5 years. Like I said, she has mellowed considerably now that she has gotten medical help for her various problems.
I still get the heebie jeebies in my old bedroom though.
When I was a kid, my mom worked two full time jobs to make ends meet. My grandparents lived next door to us, so my brother and I usually slept at their house. One night while I was asleep, my brother [who was about 4 or 5 at the time, which made me 7 or 8] got up and grabbed a bottle of red nailpolish and painted me, himself, and the sheets in the guest room.
The following morning I was awakened by screams of terror. My mom thought someone had broken in during the night and killed the both us in a very bloody rampage.
I even remember the name of the nailpolish: it was called Chianti and it was from Avon. It's strange the things you remember.
Is "vanilla sex" like Vanilla Coke? And why would anyone be looking for vanilla sex at Go Fish? Yes, that's right -- I have finally gotten my first hit on an odd browser search. I have a warm and fuzzy feeling. Maybe I should go out and have some nice vanilla sex to celebrate.
I used to have a roommate named Karl who was the ultimate vanilla sex guy. I don't know this from personal experience -- Christy used to date him. Karl liked his sex missionary and really wasn't interested in anything else. They didn't date for very long. But he did make a decent roommate.
Craig once saw Karl naked by accident. Apparently Karl is super hairy. The story is that Craig was passing by the bathroom and Karl hadn't shut the door so Craig witness what he thought was a Sasquatch emerging from the shower.
At first Craig was scared because he thought there was a bear loose in the house, but then he just started looking for a jagged spoon to jam into his eyes. This knowledge leaves me with an unpleasant visual of Christy and Karl having their missionary sex. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwww.
I'm a terrible roommate. I have certain anal retentive tendencies about cleaning and various other things that make me unpleasant to live with. Karl volunteered to go to Iraq during Desert Storm to get away from me. I felt bad for about 5 minutes, and then I luxuriated in living alone again.
Sometimes I wish that Craig and I could have an arrangement where we living in a double house and he gets one half and I get the other. Craig offends most of my anal retentive tendencies which drives me insane. I get pissy if the toilet seat is up, or if the kitchen cabinets are open even so much as a centimeter. I am tempted to throw his tools in the garbage when he leaves them lying around the floor for weeks at a time. Occasionally I am tempted to cut my foot on one so he feels guilty about it, but I'm not quite that crazy.
I'm taking my last personal day of the Summer. While I'm delighted to be at home on a Friday, it's sad that Summer is almost over. Oh, and I'm slightly hungover.
Last night I met up with Christy and our friend Sharon, who recently moved back to the mainland after living in Hawaii for a few years. We missed her. It was a touching reunion.
Let me tell you a little story about Sharon, just to set the tone of the night. Sharon is insane. Certifiably so, actually. Christy's family calls her Sharon Manson. When we were in college there was this big episode. Sharon was obsessed with some former boyfriend of hers. He did something that offended her, and Sharon and got all drunk and stoned one night as a result. She was a mess. But she decided that she had to find this guy, so she jumped into her car and sped off in pursuit.
So Christy gets a call from our friend Ann, who has attempted to stop Sharon and is now hysterical. Christy and Ann go out looking for Sharon, and I stay at the house in case she calls. Three hours later they return, sans Sharon, but with a really funny story.
Apparently, Sharon was spotted a 7-11. When Ann and Christy approached her, Sharon took off and tried to get back in her car. This big soap opera type of thing ensued during which Ann tried to reason with Sharon, and then tried to get into her car. And then Sharon backed out of the parking lot, with Ann clinging desperately to the door being dragged through the lot.
I guess you have to know Ann to think this is funny. Everything was fine in the end, but Sharon is a total drama queen.
Last night was no exception. She almost threw a temper tantrum at the restaurant because the chef wouldn't burn her turna. She pitched a fit at the liquor store because they didn't carry her favorite brand of wine. She fell asleep during the Phrenic Dance Company concert we were at and started to snore. These are trying times.
Speaking of the restaurant, I now have a new restaurant to highly recommend. There's a small little place in the Fairmount neighborhood of Philly called Figs. The food is very very good, but dessert is lacking [and we all know how I feel about dessert!]. Figs is meditteranean-ish. They have a beet and haricot vert salad that is unbelievable. I don't even really like beets very much, but this salad was perfect. The beets weren't mushy, the goat cheese was yummy, and the beans were delicious. I could definitely stand to have some more of that right this very instant. Oh, and I had a nice halibut entree. But I'm all about the beet salad.
The dance company we saw last night was excellent. Phrenic is headed by several former dancers from the Pennsylvania Ballet, and it's basically modern ballet on pointe. The show was gorgeous! See them if you can!
So you know all about my Christmas present to my grandparents -- I confiscated all their loose photos and promised to make them a photo album. I was looking through the 3 gargantuan boxes of photos today when I noticed something: there were little mustaches drawn onto some of them.
And then I remembered something that I had blocked out: I was the one who did it.
I was a rather creative child. At the age of 5 I decided I wanted to create a wall-size mural, and I did it -- I used my grandmother's white stucco hallway as a canvas and a purple crayon as my paintbrush. It was gorgeous, I tell you! But my piece d'resistance was the day I decided to go through all of my grandparent's photographs and draw mustaches on all the relatives I didn't like.
The funny thing was that I denied it. And looking at the photographs I can't believe that anyone bought it -- in pictures of all the grandchildren I'm the only one without a mustache.
I can't believe the end of summer is nearing. Where did the time go?
After an entire summer of sweating glowing, and the super humidity, I guess I shouldn't be too upset. But summer always reminds me of not working, and a girl can dream, right?
Occasionally I get upset because I'm not Anna Nicole Smith. Don't get me wrong: I don't actually want to be her. I don't want huge boobs and a small IQ. Millions of people making fun of me is not my idea of a good time. That said, why couldn't I have been conniving enough to hook up with a rich old guy?
I guess the real answer to that is it would be like having sex with your grandfather, and: ew! Yuck! But a rich guy would have been OK.
I imagine myself as a kept woman, spending my days poolside in my fabulous house or shopping with credit cards I will never have to pay off. Then summer really would be exactly as I remember it from my youth. OK, maybe not.
Summer for me as a kid [or before I was forced to get a job] was spent dodging crazy country drivers on my bicycle. We lived out in the middle of nowhere and I had to peddle my ass 3 miles into town if I wanted to see my friends. And the drivers I'm talking about are the kind who own pick up trucks with antlers on the front, a gun rack in the back, and a horn that plays Dixie. They swerve to hit cats and other small animals on the side of the road. So imagine the points available for running over a little girl on a bicycle!
It's probably why I get misty playing Frogger.
Oh, top 5 former boyfriends and random hook-ups, how I lurve you....let me count the ways:
1. Heavy Metal Huggies Man. HMHM is the all time favorite of all my friends and I. HMHM [whose real name I actually just can't remember] and I met one fateful night when I was 22 at Zero [a cool club near South Street that is, unfortunately, no longer with us]. His long and flowing wavy red hair drew me to him like a fly to, well, flypaper. I longed to grope his hair, so I marched up to him and introduced myself. We spent the evening dancing and laughing. He offered to give my roomies and I a ride home, and that's when it all went sour. He drove a red Camaro, you see. I lost all respect for him right then and there, but it got worse. HMHM played Slayer on the way home -- really loud. After he dropped us off, my roomies told me the worst news: there was a package of Huggies daipers in his back seat. I "lost" his phone number.
2. Slut Boy. That's right, Anthony Spatafore, I'm talking to you! My upstairs neighbor in the dorms when I was a freshman was a total slut, but kind of sexy. When I get bored, I get curious, and this always leads to trouble. Spat [as he was affectionately known] had a uniform: loose jeans and a white vneck tshirt. And really nice lips. So I took him on a test run one boring winter night. I wasn't impressed, and I was mildly amused when Spat told me I had an "impressive repertoire." Uh, OK, thanks.
3. Medical Experiment Todd. I'm getting misty now. One of my sophomore year flings, Todd paid his way through college being the subject of various medical experiments. He sold his sperm. He sold his blood. He sold his bone marrow. But he couldn't give away his heart - alack alas!
4. Ding Dong. Whenever I hear of others being stalked, I always think of you, Chuck! The fraternity brother of one of my old roommates, I had a crush on Chuck during my sophomore year. I tried to lure him away from his amazon girlfriend with my boob platter, but to no avail. Until the following year when we had 5 minutes of wretched sex and then he stalked me for two months, that is. If the doorbell is ringing at 4am for 3 hours, it must be Chuck.
5. Party Guy. The guy who always saved me from overly aggressive pursuers at a club called The Bank, and was present at every show I ever saw at a small live band space called Dobbs...it was inevitable that we would end up hanging out. He looked like Howard Stern, the only part of which was good was his gorgeous long hair. I was 22 at the time, and dating an older man seemed cool [he was 31] until I found out that he still lived with his parents and was a pizza delivery boy. Ugh!
I will now shed a tear in their memory.
As of this moment, I'm officially on hiatus [read: vacation] until Tuesday, August 6. Try not to break into my house and steal my underwear just because you miss me, OK?
So I've been thinking about what weird and traumatizing tidbit I should leave you with [you know, food for thought]. It occurs to me that I mentioned my previous brushes with the law, but never really elaborated. So I'm now going to tell you all the sordid details of the last time I came close to getting hauled to prison.
I was waitressing at this cheesy italian place that used to be on the concourse level at Market East [next to the Gallery Mall], and I got to be good friends with this guy named Steve. Steve taught me how to cook teriyaki chicken and gave me advice on my busy love life.
So one fine day in January I am hunkered down in my bed, recovering from the flu. I get a call from Steve. Steve has met some positively tasty little snack named Mark. Mark has invited him to Atlantic City, but Steve doesn't know Mark very well. What if he's an axe-murderer?
As I counsel Steve, he gets this bright idea that I should come along as buffer. Sort of like a possible cock block if the need should arise. I resist, pointing out that I am barely conscious as a result of the flu recovery medication. But I am in a weakened state and Steve talks me into it.
"Be ready at 6," he says. "We'll be by to pick you up."
Mark is not quite my type, but then again I am not a young gay man. Steve is wiping the drool though, so who am I to judge, right? Mark is driving a car that smells of lubricant and I have to sit in the backseat. Yuck.
About halfway to Atlantic City I totally pass out cold. I wake up about 9pm when Steve shakes me awake and tells me that he and Mark are going for a romantic moonlit walk on the beach. And then they leave.
You know, I guess I should have been worried for my safety. There I was, a cute and nubile young blonde girl passed out cold in the back of a crappy car parked on the streets of Atlantic City. Have you been to Atlantic City? It's a slum!
Anyway, the next thing I know I am rudely awakened by someone hitting me in the knee with something hard. What the hell? I open my eyes and someone's shining a really bright light in my face.
"Miss, will you exit the car please?"
That's right -- the cops. I was totally confused. When I got out of the car I was in the middle of a camping park and the whole area smelled of pot smoke. I glared at Steve.
After being quizzed for five minutes, they arrested Steve for possession, and let me and Mark go with a citation. And since Mark had a suspended license I had to drive this big ass car to the police station to spring Steve from the pokey.
And that's when I got the whole story from Mark, who was crying like a little girl. Apparently the two of them smoked on the beach and then came back to the car and decided they were hungry. So they stopped at a grocery story and got some steaks and a bag of charcoal, and then looked around for the nearest camping park so they could use a grill.
They got kicked out of the park by a manager because it was about midnight [ie, after hours], so they just drove deeper into the park thinking that no one would notice someone grilling at midnight. So the manager called the cops. And that's where the story picks up.
So anyway, we waited at the jail for about two hours until Steve was released, and I had to drive home to Philadelphia in Mark's car. I think Steve was putting the moves on Mark in the backseat.
That should be the end of the story, but it's not.
I had to appear in court. Steve and Mark were also supposed to appear in court but both of them flaked so I had no way of getting there other than public transport. So I took the bus to Atlantic City, and then caught another bus from there to the courthouse which was out in the middle of nowhere. I thought about bailing too, but a no show means a bench warrant for your arrest. No thanks.
So I made an appearance at court, and wore the most upstanding and innocent thing I could find. And then I threw myself on the mercy of the court. "But I was asleep," I wailed. "I had no knowledge!"
They took pity on me and dropped all charges. That's the closest I've ever come to having a real police record. Isn't that the dumbest thing you've ever heard?
I read Turning on the Girls last night. I couldn't help myself! And I really liked it alot -- it was hilarious in spots. I've always wondered what would happen if women took over the world, and I now I know one scenario. And the porn! Heeeeeeeeeeeee! A highly recommended read to all and sundry.
It's been really hot all week, which always puts me in mind of my least favorite summer job. That would be working at Sesame Place. You know I'm not a fan of children, right?
So how does someone who dislikes children get a job working with children? Well, the pay is good. And I wasn't actively working with kids -- I was working in Group Sales. So I had to deal with their parents, which is almost worse. I can forgive a kid for being stupid and inconsiderate because maybe they just haven't learned anything yet. But when an adult throws a hissy fit because his or her coupon expired three years ago and I refuse to honor it, well....it isn't nearly as forgiveable.
At face value the job sucked simply in terms of uniform. The polo shirts were bright yellow, the shorts were kelly green, and the belts were super red. Oh, and did I mention the fabulous kelly green satin jackets? Right off the bat, it's just a bad situation.
Oh, and then there were the morning calisthenics we were required to perform in front of the entry point...you know, to show the salivating kids and parents waiting to get in that we were just rarin' to go, ready to serve. It's always fun to do 50 jumping jacks in a polyester uniform when it's 110 degrees with 80,000% humidity.
I felt relatively lucky -- I rarely worked inside the park. I was almost always in a booth just outside the entrance. Inside the park was like hell on earth. Parents fighting with each other, fighting with the characters, fighting with their kids, fighting with the food service people. It's almost an exact replica of Dante's Inferno, with each ride being a different level of hell. The pee-infested waters of the Rambling River, the vomit inducing Vapor Trail, the constant scene of drowning that is the Teeny Tiny Tidal Wave....all are reserved for a different brand of sinner, and I was sort of the gatekeeper.
That summer may just have sealed the deal for me in terms of my rabid dislike of children. And I'm convinced that the park is some sort of evil joke -- last year some parent actually physically attacked one of the characters. How sick is that?
On a break last night during Logic class I wandered into the ladies room. I was adjusting my doo-rag [give me a break, it was my day off] when a movement under the soap dispenser caught my eye.
That's right about the time I screamed like a little girl and fled the scene.
No, it wasn't a dead body or a random body part. It was a roach the size of a small dog.
Temple University is in the middle of the North Philly ghetto. I lived on campus for two years and if there is one thing I've come to know, it's that the roaches are plentiful. But this was Temple's Center City campus -- it's supposed to be clean and pest-free. And so I was seriously grossed out.
It seems all of my bug-related trauma is all tied up Temple U. [go Owls!] I had never seen a roach or a rat until I moved there. I was welcomed to Philadelphia by a massive troop of roaches in the women's bathroom on the 9th floor of Johnson Hall -- they did a little dance for me and then formed the words "Hello there!" OK, not really, but just about.
And then there was the time my roommates and I accidentally kicked a hole in the ceiling of our room [912, Johnson Hall]. The hole appeared and then we were running for our lives. Apparently there must have been some toxic waste in the ceiling because there was a whole batallion of flying cockroaches that came streaming out of the hole. We were afraid for our lives, I tell you!
When I lived in Temple Towers, it was a whole different experience. Since we were drunk or drugged about 70% of the time, it became a weird game of delayed reaction to see who could kill the roach the fastest. As I'm sure you can imagine, this sometimes lasted for hours.
I'm seriously squicked by roaches. I know they can't really hurt me, but yuck! Have you seen those commercials for Orkin where it all starts out like it's a commercial for bath products and then this roach crawls across the television screen? I'm about two seconds away from suing Orkin for mental trauma. Ick!
Combine a dirt poor college student with an easy way to make $20/hour and what do you get? You get me pimping myself out as Barney the purple dinosaur.
I'm so ashamed...I only did it that once, and it seemed like it would be innocent fun! Really! I didn't know I'd feel so dirty, so violated, so......stupid.
In my college years I was hard up for money. Paying my own way through college while having nothing more than a work study job at the Financial Aid office didn't cut it. And so through this abject poverty, I came to know the horror of being dressed in a Barney suit handing out string cheese at the mall. And not just any string cheese -- fruit flavored string cheese.
Uh huh, you read correctly: fruit flavored string cheese. I remember the bizarre taste vividly...there was strawberry, banana, and strawberry-banana. It was disgusting and smelled like fruit scented gym socks -- inside the Barney head.
I perservered for two terror filled days of being mauled by drooling children, beaten about the head and shoulders by passing teenage boys, and assailed with that gawd awful smell of mall disinfectant and smelly cheese.
The money was nice but the trauma I suffered still lives on. Just last night I had a dream that the Barney head was stuck on my shoulders for eternity. I woke up screaming.
So I'm making a visit to Berwick this weekend -- that's my hometown that's in the middle of No Man's Land, Pennsylvania. I couldn't wait to make a quick exodus after graduating high school, and I still get the heebie jeebies when I have to go back.
Berwick is a very strange place -- during the holiday season there is this thing called the Christmas Boulevard. It is basically about 10 or 15 small plots of grass in the middle of wide street that get decorated with all manner of cheesy wooden and even cheesier animatronic Christmas decorations. Oh, and Santa hangs out to collect letters and hands out bags of potato chips.
Yes, that's right -- potato chips. Not candy canes, or Christmas cookies, or even fruitcake -- potato chips. One of the largest Berwick employers is Wise potato chips and so the Berwickian Santa hands out Wise potato chips. Aside from this bizarre annual ritual, there really isn't much to do -- watch the grass grow, tip some cows, or breed kids to play football.
If I had my way about it I would never set foot in Berwick again. But my mother requires at least one or two visits every year in order to keep the peace. Craig and I will leave the comforts of urban living on Friday afternoon after work and drive the 2 hours to get to the freaky land of country kitsch that is Berwick.
And then Craig and I will pack up as possible on Sunday morning and escape back to civilization. And another visit will be over.
I just had lunch with some friends at Logan Circle near the Swann Fountain.
I feel very fortunate that two of my friends from college work around the corner. We always have funny things to talk about, and it's always a funny time.
I see Christy all the time, but I rarely see Dave. Dave told me today that he loves me because I understand why A Flock of Seagulls is significant.
We were talking about Christy's snack, Eric. Eric is a few years younger and has no idea why the ticket counter guy with the Flock hair in The Wedding Singer was so funny. So Dave and I talked about what Flock song is the best -- Dave likes "Wishing" but I like "Space Age Love Song." Christy thinks we're both insane.
I'm so lucky to have good friends. I really and truly do have some wonderful friends.
Dave likes to tell the story of how he met the two of us. Christy doesn't remember very much, but I remember vividly because he and his roomies were the first people from the other dorm we met. One day Christy, my other roomies and I were dancing in the dorm room...Christy and I may have been practicing some dance for cheerleading, but everyone else was bouncing around the room like idiots too and not worrying that our window was open. And then there's this knock on the door.
It's Dave and his two roommates who happen to live across the way in the other dorm. They saw us freaking out from their room and decided they had to meet us. We've all been friends ever since.
Sometimes I miss being able to meet people by doing silly things like dancing in front of your window. Dancing in front of my window at home would only earn me an audience of drunk slobs with mullets from the bar next door. I'm sure I could meet them, but it wouldn't be fun.
It's now pretty much a given that I will, in all likelihood, flunk my Logic class. I had my first test last night and I mostly guessed at 75% of the questions. I'm perfectly capable of constructing truth tables and figuring out truth functionality, etc, etc....but 75% of the test was deductive reasoning based on questions about the rules of formation and transformation.
And what's worse is that my idiotic instructor can't grasp the fact that some of us might actually need some instruction on how to answer these questions. He keeps saying things are "ridiculously simple"...which is a surefire way to jinx me.
I'm taking this Logic class as a way to satisfy my upper level mathematics requirement. My brain rejects all that is math-related. I can barely add and subtract, let along do algebra and calculus.
The moment when I rejected math is still very fresh in my head. When I was in the sixth grade I got the chicken pox [don't believe it when you hear you can't get chicken pox more than once -- I've had them twice] and missed a week or two of school. I think we were learning really rudimentary algebra, and you know if you miss the formative stuff you're screwed because it all builds on the basics.
My sixth grade teacher was Mr. Ricci -- he looked just like a chipmunk. He stayed late with me after school to catch me up on everything I had missed. I was still not feeling great, and I was just dead tired and didn't feel like learning anything. Mr. Ricci got fed up with trying to teach me algebra when I wasn't in the mood to learn and yelled at me. He called me stupid, and told me that this math was "ridiculously easy." See a pattern?
I don't blame Mr. Ricci for dooming me to a life of math stupidity, but it didn't help my situation. And now here I am, almost twenty years later, hoping that the Logic test will be graded on a huge curve.
A-humpin' and a-pumpin'....
That is the phrase my mother actually used when my former stepfather [John] caught me and my boyfriend [named Scott] having sex one fine day when I was 17.
It's not like there was anything kinky abnormal going on...just straight vanilla sex that most teens have. John had the decency not to interrupt right then and there, but I suspect that he would have videotaped it if he could have. John was a perv.
So later that day, I get summoned by my mother to have a chat. I had no clue that I'd been snagged, so I was unprepared when she said, "John came home from lunch today and ran into you and Scott having sex in your bedroom. He was so embarrassed that he went into our bedroom and shut the door, but there was all this a-humpin' and a-pumpin' going on."
In my house we never talked about sex, so to hear this come out of my mother's mouth was bizarre and surreal. Plus I had to bite the inside of my mouth to keep from laughing.
Nothing much ever came from it -- I think I got grounded for a few weeks and my mother took me to have my first gynecological exam at Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood and I have a long and illustrious relationship, which is why I am such a big proponent of their work.
The episode was never referred to again.
I kept waiting for the big Sex Talk when I was younger. Hey, I read Judy Blume books and all manner of other teen and preteen literature. I knew that it was just a matter of time before my mom sat down with me and explained the birds and the bees. It never happened.
My mother and I have a weird relationship -- we don't hug and kiss or ever say "I love you." We're just not close. I don't ever remember being touchy feely with anyone in my family. But you don't have to be close to get the Sex Talk.
I will now reveal to you the wonderment of what amounted to the whole of information received from my mother on the topic of sex.
Are you ready?
When I started getting my period at the age of 11 my mother left a medical encyclopedia on my bed with a menstual pad as a bookmark. It was bookmarked to the section on menstruation.
Nothing like the personal touch.
But again, because I had been reading Judy Blume books I was well prepared and already knew what was going on. But yeah, I learned everything I know about the technical aspects of sex and contraception and childbirth from a medical encyclopedia.
Sometimes I wonder how I turned out to be the fine upstanding citizen that I am.
I'm not a good drunk.
I've learned to respect my liver more often over the years, but there have been more times than I care to remember when I woke up in my bathroom with my cheek pressed against the cool porcelain of the toilet.
Probably the worst story in my collection of stupid drunk tales is a weekend the summer after I turned 21. Any story that involves partial nudity and police officers can't be good.
A group of friends and I decided to go to some beach in Delaware to see a band. My friend Brenda was dating the lead singer of this band [a local cover band]. So after the band was done playing we met them at a bar around the corner from the beach. I ate about 1 plateful of jalapeno poppers and about a six pack of Dos Equis beer.
Then we went to some cheesy ass dance club where some moron started feeding me shots of tequila. I had to have drunk half a bottle of tequila when all that liquor finally hit me.
Now the rest of this adventure is all second hand information -- I, thankfully, do not recall any of it. Apparently, I was much like the drunk girl character from Saturday Night Live...just falling over, slurred speech drunk. I threw myself on the drummer from the band. Literally. According to my friends I looked like I had grown several additional arms and all of them were molesting the poor drummer.
Luckily my friends were not as drunk as I was and pulled me off the guy. As we were walking back to the car, I jumped into the back of some stranger's van and tried to sleep it off. The girls got me out of the van and into the car.
They wanted to drive home from Delaware that night, but I had other ideas. For every two blocks they drove, I had to throw up. They stopped at a Wawa or 7-Eleven or something to get some water and crackers for me. Big mistake to leave me in the car by myself.
You know how most convenience stores have big glass storefronts? Well, let's just say that I wanted to change my clothes so I got out of the car and just stripped down in the parking lot. I flashed/mooned the entire Wawa, including about 5 police officers who threatened to arrest me for public nudity.
After getting me out of being arrested, my friends gave up on driving home and parked in grocery store parking lot overnight.
And that's where I woke up the next day, feeling absolutely wretched.
To this day I can't stand the smell of tequila.
I just had lunch with Christy, who had news for me about our former roomie, Ellen. I don't know too many people who like Ellen. She comes off really nice at first, but is really a screwed up pot of seething hate and stupidity.
I met Ellen when I was a freshman. She was a friend of Christy's from high school. If you don't know Ellen very well, she seems like a really nice girl...someone you'd want to hang out with. So when Christy and I moved to Temple Towers, we invited her to live with us.
At Towers we lived in a 3 bedroom apartment that housed 7 girls. Ellen in a room with Felicia. I lived in a room with Christy and Carole. Kathy lived in a room with Pamela. Oddly, the room I lived in was the sane room. Ellen, Felicia, Pam, and Kathy all had these huge issues that made them hard to deal with.
-Felicia made a pass at every single guy any of us ever brought home. We suspected that she and her dad had some bizarre sexual relationship going on.
-Pamela was in college to meet a husband, and that was it. She decided that she was the mom of the group and tried to keep us in line by punishing us. Once she took all of her utensils and cookware out of the kitchen and hid it in her bedroom because someone didn't wash one of her pots within the 24 hour time limit. She eventually stopped talking to any of us and sequestered herself in her bedroom along with the future husband.
-Kathy was a supermodel type who had a drug problem. We couldn't go out clubbing with her because we'd tell her we were leaving at 11:00 and she'd be ready to go, decide she hated her hair and spend an additional 2 hours showering and changing.
Ellen was a whole other story. Before I relay this story to you, you have to know that I have a fairly low tolerance for bullshit. When I was in college it was even lower.
The first thing that Ellen did to piss everyone off is constantly complain about her body. Ellen weighed about 10 pounds in the shower, and had absolutely no boobs or hips whatsoever to speak of, was about 5'9", had long blonde hair and blue eyes -- yet she was constantly bitching about looking fat or ugly. When it's 11pm and we're ready to go out, and we have Ellen literally crying buckets because she has this imaginary flab on her ass...well, we all wanted to kill her. Eventually we just started to leave without her and she got over it.
I understand that some people do not have any self-confidence. But Ellen's antics smacked of just wanting to hear someone go on about how pretty she looked, or how thin she was, or whatever.
She also liked to pretend that she was the most innocent virgin on the planet. Trust me when I say that Ellen probably slept with more people than any of us combined...she just liked to pretend that we didn't know about it. An example of how well she hid her activities: she was shacking up with our friend George, and I was sort of going out with his roomie Vince. They had bunkbeds -- I was in bed with Vince and Ellen was in bed with George. If someone is having sex, it was known. Trust me, Ellen and George were having sex. Yet to this day she denies that she and George ever had sex. Of course, George used to report back to us every day so we know that's not true.
At Temple U. there is this day long celebration where everyone just wanders around in a drunken fog -- it's called Spring Fling. I started drinking around 7am...I think I was drinking tequila and pineapple juice. Ellen wandered in around 9am from another fling. She was dating some guy who was a fraternity brother of my ex-boyfriend. She started moaning that he didn't really like her and that he was just using her. She wouldn't shut up about it. Ellen literally went on for 2 hours about how she wasn't good enough, she was fat, this guy didn't like her, blah blah blah. I was wasted and I'd had enough so I threw my glass of tequila at her [it missed] and screamed at her enough to make her sob uncontrollably.
In true Ellen fashion, she pretended like it never happened.
However, there is one episode that just speaks volumes about what kind of girl Ellen is. I was dating this guy named Todd and the two of us were hanging out in my room watching TV [no, really!]. All of a sudden I hear this gut-wrenching shriek coming from Ellen's room. I ran over to the room and Ellen was in the fetal position on her bed, clutching the phone to her miniscule bosom. And she was screeching at the top of her lungs, screaming "Noooooooooooooooooo!"
I thought someone had died, I really did. I finally got her to calm down a little and tell me what was going on. Apparently, the health services clinic had just called to tell her that she had chlamydia [you know, from all that sex she wasn't having]. Before I had a chance to say anything, she wailed, "Why me? It should have been someone like you! You sleep around -- it should have been you!"
I came pretty close to slapping her silly, but I just got up and walked out and we haven't spoken since. But again, I digress...
The news that Christy had was that apparently Ellen has cheated on her husband of one year already. And I'm supposed to be the floozy. Ha!
4:30 yesterday afternoon the lights went out in Georgia. OK, not Georgia -- it was Philadelphia, and not all of Philadelphia, just a small quadrant. Really! The quasi-comical thing about it is that at the time I was reading an article about the al-Quaeda and their ability to wreak havoc with a cyber attack.
Yeah so I got to leave work about 20 minutes early. And thankfully I was stopped before I could post again yesterday. Sometimes I just go overboard -- it's a product of being bored at work and analyzing things way too much. Occasionally I get the idea that my powers of reasoning got stuck in the fourth grade. I'm feeling much better today.
Well, except for the fact that that I wiped out in the subway this morning. Damn sandals! I, being the blase urbanite that I am, nonchalently picked myself up off the floor [which reeked of urine -- yay!] and kept walking as if I meant to do it.
I hate it when that happens.
But the simple truth of the matter is that I am a world class klutz. If there's a wall to walk into or a flight of stairs to fall down, I'm your girl. I can barely walk and think at the same time.
The funniest thing is that I should be graceful: I was a cheerleader, dancer, and gymnast for almost 10 years. You want to throw me up into the air and hold me up by one foot while I do a heel stretch? OK, not a problem. Want to see me do a couple of back tucks? I can do that. But if you want me to walk down the street without tripping over my own feet, think again...it's never going to happen.
I used to think that it was the uniform. You know, I put on the cheerleading skirt and I am transformed into Graceful Girl. I learned the hard way that I was deluding myself.
I actually fell backward through a set of swinging doors in front of hundreds of people. When I was 16 I was cheering at a basketball game -- during the game there wasn't alot of space so we sat in the bleachers to cheer and occasionally two of us would do a cheer at the end of the court. So I was up...I had to do a cheer. And as luck would have it I was right in front two giant swinging doors. I did a jump, landed too low to hold my balance and fell through the doors, landing in a jumbled heap in the boys locker room.
That's not even the worst -- I've fallen up a set of bleachers, fallen out of a loft [twice], fallen down many many sets of stairs, had many a menacing bike accident...oh yeah, I am Calamity Nicole.
Maybe my goal for today should be to make it through without making an ass out of myself. It'll be tough.
It is hotter than fresh baked rolls outside. The heat index is supposed to be up around 110 degrees today and we've got the ozone alert going and all of that. It's just one of the many ways living in Philadelphia can be hazardous to your health...the heat, and worrying that the crazy pigeon lady is really feeding the stupid pigeons intelliegence-enhancing drugs (you know, like in that stupid movie Deep Blue Sea).
There are other hazards, I suppose. My friend Gretchen was attacked two months ago coming out of her boyfriend's house. Some guy just grabbed her and tried to get her into his truck. Luckily she was able to fight with him and get away, but not before he stabbed her twice - once in the eye and once in the shoulder. She lost her eye but she's doing really well otherwise. You have to expect stuff like that living in the city, but it's never something you get comfortable with.
I was attacked when I lived on Temple University campus. Temple is located in North Philadelphia and is completely surrounded by ghetto....so you have to be careful. I was out one night with this guy I was dating -- he lived across campus, so he walked me back to my dorm. About halfway there this guy grabbed me and put a knife to my throat. The guy I was dating actually ran away. He demanded I give him my money, so I did and that was that. He ran one way, I ran the other. Luckily I was one of those typical starving college students -- I think he got away with $2.00 in dimes and my beloved mouse change purse. And I was lucky -- it could have been so much worse.
The next semester I took a class in self defense. Quite honestly I think it should be a required class if you're going to live at Temple. The whole time I was taking the class, I had these horrible violent dreams about what I would do if I were ever attacked again. I still have those dreams every once in a while -- dreams where I am just kicking the shit out of the asshole who attacks me.
I haven't been mugged since, although I get the sense that I've been cased a few times. In self defense we were taught to be hyper aware of your surroundings, and I am. That self defense class was brutal -- I lost clumps of hair while being mock attacked by the instructors. Strangers must have thought I was in an abusive relationship because I always had bruises and scrapes. One day in class I actually broke my finger on my instructors athletic cup while we were fighting. I reached into crush his goods and kind of forgot they all wear protective equipment. I heard a snap and then my finger was sort of dangling from the first knuckle. It was gross!
Occasionally I am convinced that the other passengers on the subway can hear me think because the force of my thoughts are so loud. I doubt it's really true, but it just feels that way. Today I was waxing nostalgic about teen romance novels and my relationships with boys. Maybe "nostalgic" isn't really where I'm going...
I blame teen romance novels for all of my weird former notions about how romance is supposed to be, how families are supposed to be, and how easy it should be to find love. I have always been a voracious reader -- so I was reading everything I could lay my hands on from an early age. Since I grew up in East Gybip, Pennsylvania [ok, Berwick] there was the library or there was a lone bookstore in a mall 2 hours away. Since both places had a very limited selection, it was either books about how to cook 'possum or stupid teen romances.
You know, people like to blame books like "Catcher in the Rye" and "Slaughterhouse 25" for warping the teenage brain and being evil, but they really only teach us it's OK to be warped. Misery loves company, right? All those idiot pro-censorship freaks ought to aim their lunacy at teen romance novels. I didn't really have a lot of guidance in the parental department and so I was just really confused.
Let's review. Losing my virginity at an early age to an older man in a yellow van with red shag carpeting was the beginning of the saga. Pure comedy gold. After that I think I fit right into the young girl cliche of having wild crushes on boys with dizzying depression of the bad poetry writing kind. The only difference is that I was obsessed with sex and sexual innuendo. By the age of 15 I had declared to all my friends that I wanted to be the next Dr. Ruth. Also at the age of 14 I suddenly developed this horrible reputation as a slut [for no good reason either -- I rarely dated anyone and I didn't have sex again until I was almost 17]. Coincidentally, it wasn't until I was 17 that I found out why.
Imagine my surprise when I get a call at age 17 from a boy that I sort of dated when I was 14 [in a junior high way -- we never went on an actual date, but we said we were "going together" and I think I may have kissed him once]. This boy Mike had just graduated from high school and must have been going through a twelve step program or something...he called to tell me that he had started some vicious rumors about me when we broke up way back when.
But I digress. My first boyfriend was Scott when I was 17 and he was 16. We dated for almost 2 years. My freshman year of college was a blur of stupid drunken hookups. I met my second boyfriend, Dave, at the end of my freshman year. We dated for two years, during half of which he was screwing every girl on Temple U. campus behind my back. When we broke up I felt broken. I really didn't know if I would ever feel normal again. It took me 3 years to get my shit together.
During that 3 years I just didn't feel anything. I kept a snack available in the form of Vince, who lived on my floor of the dorm and was an enormous slut but also one of the sweetest guys on earth. We spend some quality time together that year in between all the other diversions that came along. The year after that I lived in an apartment with Christy and various other revolving roomates [including Vince for a period of time]. It was a lost year for me...I just couldn't feel anything for anyone.
The last part of 1995 and beginning of 1996 was simultaneously the best and worst year of my life. On one hand I was finally living by myself and I loved it. I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, without worrying about pissing someone off. I had absolute freedom. But I was still completely numb and so I dated the absolute dregs of society. I met a guy, Justin, who was so completely annoying that I had to shut him up by any means necessary. Most of the time that meant kissing him. But I dated him for a few months because of, well, endowments. Finally I couldn't stand to hear him say another word and we stopped seeing each other. And then I met a guy named Jason who looked like Howard Stern but was super nice and alot of fun to hang out with. But he was a 35 year old pizza boy who still lived with his parents. It was sad. And then there was a friend of a friend who I hooked up with one night...the next night he got drunk, came to my apartment building, and rang my doorbell until 6am. I never really dated anyone for longer than a couple of weeks...I just wanted throwaway sex and absolutely no emotional connections. I was a wreck.
The whole thing has been a comedy of errors.
By Easter of 1996 I met Craig and then the stupidity was over [for the most part]. I always fantasize that I could hop into a time warp and change this or that about my life...but the simple fact is that I like who I turned out to be. So if changing things would result in a different end result...well, I guess I wouldn't change a thing.
But I can still blame teen romances.
The Goo Goo Dolls are playing at the Tweeter in August...Craig is going to try to get some tickets on Saturday. I miss going out drinking and seeing bands and coming into work the next day hungover and tired. Of course, hanging out at the outdoor Tweeter is not exactly the same as spending an evening in a smoky hole in the wall bar.
Before Craig and I got really serious I used to have a weekly ritual. My friend Mike came and picked me up every Thursday night and we'd go see a band. I saw some really good bands, and some absolutely wretched bands. I miss Mike and I miss going to see bands. Since Mike sort of just disappeared one day, I can't completely recapture the glory days, but I do intend to try to get out more. I hate to blame Craig for making me more of a homebody because I sort of let myself get dragged into it.
I will fully admit that I'm a blog/journal troll...I usually end up visiting about a dozen blogs every day and I read the current entry. Today I read something that made my blood run cold -- this girl just graduated from high school and had to go do something that required wearing a suit. She put on the suit and said that it made her look 30. I looked around for a guestbook so I could tell her to fuck off, but she had no contact info up. I look at myself in the mirror every day and I don't think I'm old and I certainly don't look old. Of course, I should cut the kid some slack -- when you're 18, 30 really seems old. I remember thinking I'd probably be dead by now, or I'd be driving a hovercraft. Either way, it seems worlds away when you're 18.
My early 20's were a blur of drunken debauchery. My late 20's were spent trying to reconcile drunken debauchery with domestic bliss. I don't know what my 30's will be about.
My first job out of college that didn't involve food service or retail sales was as a secretary for a headhunter's group. It was run by an old old man who fancied himself to be the leader of the free world. He sequestered himself away in his big office, king of his castle....or at least king of his gargantuan desk and massive leather chair.
Every morning at precisely 9:15 am I was expected to deliver a cup of coffee to him. The office manager had to train me to make his coffee just the right way. I had to arrive at the office at 7am in order to steal into his office and grab the cup without being seen. I always heard the Mission Impossible theme playing as I clandestinely slunk into his office for the coffee cup.
The coffee formula that pleased: a teaspoon of sugar substitute and enough non-dairy creamer to make the coffee beige. I then had to put his Very Special Cork Coaster over top of the coffee so it wouldn't get cold in the 2.5 seconds it took to traverse the hallway between the kitchen and his office.
The moment of truth would arrive: the delivery. I was instructed and schooled for this very moment. Every morning at precisely 9:15 I would quietly knock at his door to which an ominous "come in" would follow [and a "bwa hah hah," but only in my young adult fantasies]. I would carefully open the door and, eyes cast to the floor as not to make eye contact with the all powerful corporate giant at the desk, approach his desk. With an ultra feminine and submissive "Your coffee, sir," I would present the coffee to His Royal Majesty The President and stand, hands folded, until he sampled the coffee.
And then it would happen -- the majestic and grave nod of approval. Overjoyed at not being singled out as the maker of the worst cup of coffee in the world, I would bow and scrape my way to the door and flee in terror.
And then I was fired for calling the man an asshole. It's a long story.
But since that time I have always had a deep suspicion of the Boss Man. My current boss [Amy] is the most wonderful human being on the planet. This is what happened this morning....
Amy just returned from a 2 week vacation in Italy. When I arrived at work this morning, Amy left a bag from LUSH on my desk with 3 bath bombs. She gets little gifts for everyone in our department and anyone else who she thinks of when she's on vacation -- I've never known a boss who is thinking of his/her department while they're away!
It's not just that she buys us stuff (and puts thought into it besides). She is constantly giving us extra days off, telling us to leave early, taking us out to lunch. And that's really nice too, but she constantly fights for us with the administration. And covers our butts and, well, I just can't say enough good things about her. She is genuinely a nice person.
Christy and I were giggling over the weekend about this party that I had at one of my old houses. I was living in this cute little two story house in South Philly near Pat's Steaks, and I decided to have a party to celebrate the fact that Christy was in town. She was on tour at the time and I never got to see her. So anyway...my house was pretty small, but I had about 100 people crammed into it. There were all of my friends, and then all of Christy's cast and crew, and she had invited the cast of Miss Saigon [who was also in town]. There were just people everywhere and everyone was just trashed. The police came and everything, so I know everyone had a great time.
What made the party though, was some guy that I had invited from work. It was someone that I didn't know very well, but I was feeling charitable -- you know, he was a dork and I figured he be sort of fun to have around. He asked me what he could bring...I'm thinking "Bring beer....or bring a bottle of vodka....just bring alcohol." But I said "Bring whatever you want!"
So this guy busts out with "OK, I'll bring some vanilla ice cream."
Vanilla ice cream? To a house party? What?
So I called Christy and we absolutely screamed about it. It was the funniest thing either of us had ever heard. So we're at the party later that night and this guy hasn't shown up yet. Christy starts telling people that vanilla ice cream is on the way.
People start obsessively wanting to make beer floats with the ice cream. It's never good to tell drunk people about any kind of food.
Finally this guy shows up without ice cream. He was the pariah of the party. People threw beer at him. Christy hooked up with him -- it was crazy.
