A thread at Garrett’s blog has inspired me to post a favorite television memory. Does anybody else remember that episode of You Can’t Do That On Television where “the Russians” took over? Instead of green slime they had red slime, and instead of being slimed when you said “I don’t know” you were slimed when you said “freedom.”
Now I just need to look for it on YouTube.
UPDATE: Ha! A coworker found the episode on YouTube!
(1) When I was in kindergarten, they brought a fire truck to school one day for us to look at, touch, climb on, and be generally awed by (as 5-year-olds are wont to do). At one point all the kids started urging the firefighter to “do the siren,” so she did. Then one kid started crying. I wasn’t at all upset by the siren, and actually I thought it was pretty stupid for the kid to be crying; but for some reason, I felt a sort of peer pressure, and started crying myself just because he was. It seemed like the thing to do - even though I thought it was stupid.
(2) In 2nd grade, one time they brought a bull to school. Yes, a bull. I have no idea what the backstory behind that is, if there was even a reason or what - but it seems like a profoundly dumb idea, doesn’t it? The bull seemed pretty tame - but then, what do I know about bulls? (Not much.) I remember they had the bull tethered outside in front of the school, and we were all lined up to take turns petting it. When one little boy got up there for his turn, the bull licked his arm and left a big black mark - and the kid started wailing. Not out of pain, as I recall, but out of shock at being licked by a bull.
(3) When I was about 6 years old, there was this girl who was my age who my parents wanted me to play with. They knew her parents (don’t remember how) and I guess they figured since we were the same age, we should play. We only played twice that I remember - I went to her house once and she came to my house once. Her house was huge, had a pool, a guesthouse, they had a maid, and she had a pony FFS. Her room was very pink and had a bunch of stuff to do with ponies in it; she was very into ponies, which I found boring as hell. I wanted to play games where we ran around the backyard and got dirty and dug in the dirt and such, but she wanted to play all these girly games and not mess up her clothes. (Not that I wasn’t into my share of “girly games” - I liked to play house, and I had lots of dolls - but something about her was way too frou-frou for my taste.) She annoyed me. When my mom picked me up from her house, I asked about her family: “Are they rich?” My mom replied, “No, they just have a higher income than we do.” And being 6 years old and not knowing what that meant, but just knowing that it sounded like big adult words and a good enough explanation, I accepted it and that was that. It wasn’t until years later that I realized my mom had cleverly fooled me.
Just because.
(This time from Under the Pink.)
Father says bow your head
Like the Good Book says
Well I think the Good Book is missing some pages
Gonna lay down
Gonna lay down
And when my hand touches myself
I can finally rest my head
And when they say take of his body
I think I’ll take from mine instead
I downloaded Little Earthquakes tonight. I have the cassette somewhere, but I’m not going to take the time to find it and then try to import it to my computer somehow. Lots of memories coming back… it’s weird (and it sounds cliché and emo to say) how music can hold so many visceral memories, much like certain scents.
He said you’re really an ugly girl
But I like the way you play
And I died
But I thanked him
Can you believe that
Sick, sick
Holding on to his picture
Dressing up every day
I got something to say you know
But nothing comes
Yes I know what you think of me
You never shut up
Yeah I can hear that
But what if I’m a mermaid
In these jeans of his
With her name still on it
Hey but I don’t care
‘Cause sometimes
I said sometimes
I hear my voice
And it’s been here
Silent all these years
So, it’s 9/11… and each year on this anniversary, I never know what to write. I feel like anything I could say would just be insipid.
Here’s what some fellow bloggers are saying:
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was in awe. I couldn’t believe this was really happening. I had skipped my morning class, and Chris had woken me up with, “We’re being attacked by terrorists!” I bolted upright in bed, heart pounding.
CNN was already on downstairs. We saw the second plane hit. We watched as the buildings burned and collapsed. When the towers fell, no one bothered to bleep out the swear words everyone was saying (live feed, and all), and you know, nobody cared. I don’t know why I remember that little tidbit.
I don’t know why I dragged myself to my 12:35 class… I should’ve known classes would be cancelled. I guess I wasn’t thinking.
I worried about my friends in New York. I sent emails, asking if they were okay. When I received the first email response, I stupidly wrote something flippant by way of reply… I think it was, “My mom says she doesn’t want me visiting you anymore. ;)” Yes, with the winky-smiley and everything. Soon after I sent it, I felt ashamed of that. I wrote another email, apologizing. It’s weird… I know I responded in that manner as a way of trying to cope with all the overwhelming feelings. But what’s weird is I had never been one to use humor to try to cope with tragedy… but then, nothing like that had ever happened before.
Soon an impromptu memorial had sprung up at the Arch. A few days later (I think? maybe it was the same night? I don’t remember), Chris and I went downtown. There was a guy standing in the middle of Broad St. waving a huge American flag. I took a photo of him. At the Arch memorial, there were tons of candles, flowers, random paraphernalia… and there was a notebook, where people were writing their thoughts. I picked it up and wrote something… I don’t remember much of what I wrote, but I know it started out with, “Dear New York City.” And there was something about survivor’s guilt (though I didn’t call it that, because I hadn’t yet identified it as such) in there. Chris took a photo of me writing in the journal. I didn’t know whether I should smile or not. I ended up smiling, and then later I felt like that was totally inappropriate.
Maybe tonight or tomorrow night I’ll try to find those photos. (This was before I had a digital camera, of course.)
Update: Also, here’s what I wrote on Sept. 11, 2002. I didn’t write anything in 2003, 2004, or 2005.
Today is Pi Day. Get it? 3.14!! Oh, the hilarity!
In 9th grade, we had a Pi Day Contest, wherein students (read: nerds) could write a poem or short story about pi and submit it for a chance at fame and fortune (read: further ridicule).
My poem won first place, as did Niki’s short story. By way of reward, we were allowed to leave 7th period early to eat apple pie and pick up our $10 gift certificates to… I don’t remember where.
I wish I had saved my Pi Day poem. Actually, it’s probably on a floppy disk somewhere, since at the time I’d just gotten my first computer about a month earlier and was using it for everything. But good luck finding the floppy. Anyway, I do remember that my poem was pretty dark. Yes, a poem about pi can be dark! It included the word “apocalypse” several times. I remember my math teacher called and left a message on my parents’ answering machine, informing me that I had misspelled “apocalypse” and would have to correct it and resubmit the poem. Which apparently I did, since it ended up taking the blue ribbon.
I don’t know what Niki’s short story was about (other than pi, of course). But in 10th grade, Jenny wrote a story for a math project (not Pi Day this time) about shooting up with a dirty syringe. It won some kind of award, too.
Why do I have the feeling that nowadays we’d all be called in for parent-teacher conferences, suspended for several days, and put “on notice” with the school shrink*?
* Ed. note: Our high school didn’t actually have a shrink, but it makes for a better mental image. Our high school did have a rent-a-cop, though.
For your weekend enjoyment: page 3 in the ongoing drama of my 8-year-old life. (Complete with phonetic spelling at its cutest!)
…I had an old-fashioned, time-honored, spiral-bound paper journal.
Tonight I’m going to a Weezer show out at Gwinnett Center Arena. I rediscovered Weezer a few months ago, and I’m glad I did. But I admit it’s also a little weird - it took me back to high school a little bit. And now, a relevant anecdote:
Almost exactly 11 years ago, I saw Weezer play in Aiken, South Carolina. They were nobodies at the time. They played in the gym of Aiken Tech or USC-Aiken… some such nowheresville. I went with the girl who now cuts my hair, my stupid first boyfriend, and another girl who later decided (along with the rest of ‘em) that she was too cool to hang out with me. (We’d just started high school and the cliques weren’t established yet.) We thought we were so damn cool, up in the front row (it was a general admission show), attempting to form something of a mosh pit and trying to get the band members to smile at us. I bought a bright orange Weezer t-shirt that was at least two sizes too big (I was still in the “OMG I’m self-conscious so I’d better hide my body under layers of fabric” phase) and wore it to school the next day. Oh yes, I was That Guy.
Anyway. 11 years later, Weezer has catapulted to fame, and I… well, here’s a snapshot of what happened in the intervening decade.
I just realized, today is an anniversary of sorts. Two years ago, Cari and I were hurtling west on I-20, en route to Dallas and my new life there. Here is the fateful last entry before leaving Georgia (I know, it’s not exciting at all). Of course, we all know how The Dallas Experiment turned out… but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t regret it at all. I learned a lot while I was there. And I had some good times, too - being driving distance from Niki was huge. Anyway… that’s where that is. I can hardly believe it’s been two years.
I found a bunch of my old journals while going through crap in my apartment, and started reading and reminiscing - which is what inspired me to write this. As promised, this is the post that might make some of my readers uncomfortable. Bring it! (Optional accompanying music for this post: Saint Simon by the Shins.)
By the time I was a senior in high school, my persistent virginity weighed on me like a proverbial albatross. Having always been a goal-oriented person, I was aiming to shed that mantle before I turned 18. That didn’t happen, but I came close - November 18th, 1997, a little over two weeks past my 18th birthday.
Fortune had brought a willing suitor into my life. He wasn’t that great (especially in retrospect), but he would do. We shall refer to him as Batman herein, because that is how Jenny, Niki, and I refer to him.*
A lot of girls have “first time” stories that are underwhelming at best, traumatic at worst. Fortunately mine is neither of those. I won’t speculate or philosophize about why, wherefore, etc., because I’ll probably just end up being unintentionally offensive or insensitive to someone.
Anyway, many teenage girls are passive with their sexuality at first, as they begin to discover what they want and how to express their desires. And that description certainly fit me, too - around the age of 15 and 16. In late 1997, I was cool and calculating - and horny. Once I established a rapport with Batman, I decided, “Awesome. It’s settled. I won’t be a virgin much longer.” Then I just had to set the ball rolling.
It didn’t take much, of course, being that he was an 18-year-old guy. Also, I don’t think he had ever been confronted with a girl his age who was so straightforward with her sexuality. On that night in November, I parked my car in the relatively well-concealed parking lot behind a nearby elementary school, and we got biz-zay in the front seat. I accidentally hit my elbow on the horn one time, and hilarity ensued.
I was pleasantly surprised - or should I say, my suspicions were pleasantly affirmed - by my lack of nervousness or trepidation. This is because I was ready. There was no more questioning or wondering whether I was “really ready for sex” - I knew myself and knew what I wanted.
Yeah, it hurt a little; not too badly, though. No - euphemism alert! - sparks did not fly. But it was a positive experience, and I felt, finally, unencumbered. This part of me that had longed for expression was now finally getting a chance to come into its own.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
* I was on the phone with him once when Jenny and Niki were over at my house, and he was talking about his aspirations as an actor or something, and at one point he said, “I’m going to be Batman!” To which I replied, “I know you’re going to be Batman.” Which Jenny and Niki found hilarious.
As a companion to this meme, and inspired in part by Tony Simon’s blast from the past, I present some visual aids: “What I Looked Like Ten Years Ago.”
Both of these pictures were taken at TIP (my third summer there).
Oh, and don’t forget to go to the Young Democrats of Atlanta Summerfest tomorrow afternoon.
I better go to bed now before I get carried away with unnecessary verbosity.
Tony Simon (why do I always feel the need to refer to him by first AND last name? I guess it’s like how some people at work call me Amber Rhea instead of just Amber) has started a meme, whether he likes it or not. Because I say so!
I’m not really being fair, though, because this is a rare yearbook picture of me that I actually like. But don’t worry, I have plenty of dorkified old photos, in color and better quality than this one, and I might post ‘em at some point - maybe as part of a series.
Anyway, this was cut out from the school newspaper staff photo, senior year of high school. (I was a “special columnist”… yay me.) Yes, it’s supposed to be skewed like that; they put all the group pictures at odd angles, because it was hip or different or something. There’s a word that describes my expression in this picture, but I can’t think of it. Not “intellectual,” not “brooding”… but along those lines. I was clearly a badass.
I’ve got a post about this article (young, hip virgins! w00t!) brewing, as well as an initial review of the book I recently started (Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
It feels kind of weird, being here. During my junior and senior year of high school, I spent what seemed like half my life in this place. Studying, hanging out with friends, getting caught up in teenage drama - it was the place for all of that. Jenny, Niki, and I spent untold hours in the cafe, harassing our friends who worked there. We also learned lots of excellent synonyms for “loose woman,” thanks to the plethora of thesauri. Mandi and I were asked on more than one occasion by middle-aged women sitting near us to either change our topic of conversation or move away from them. Charlie cruised this place like the clubs none of us could get into at age 17. And so on and so forth.
If I may employ some hyberbole… it was one of the only places in this godforsaken town where I felt at home. (Except for those times when there was teenage drama going on, of course.)
You wanted “lots of entries about sex”, so I’ll go ahead and oblige with one. (Note: going forward, you may have to allow for a liberal interpretation of the word “lots.”)
Spring of my senior year of high school, I was (as per usual) studying in the B&N cafe one night, and there was this guy sitting at the next table… somehow we struck up a conversation. Sucks that I can’t remember exactly how. I think it was over something really obscure, though. Like British politics in the 17th century or some shit. Anyway, we talked for quite some time, until the place closed; then we exchanged email addresses (nerd alert!) and went our separate ways.
As it turns out, he was 24 (I, of course, was at the tender age of 18) and in the Army. Ooh, scandalous! One night I went over to his place (yes, on the base) to watch a movie. Afterwards, as I got up to leave, he tried to be all smooth by saying he’d “never kissed anyone in BDUs” - referring to the camoflague Army jacket that I wore.
-I feel that this is getting long and boring. So, cut to the chase: turns out that, in addition to being very intelligent, he was also a self-proclaimed born-again Christian. (Although I don’t think he ever used the term “born-again”; but I can’t remember what he did use, so there you go.) What did this mean? Well, it meant that every time after we’d have sex, he’d lecture me about why it was wrong and why that’s not what God wants, blah blah blah etc. etc. That got old real fast. Also amusing was the fact that even though we clearly shouldn’t be doing it, it wasn’t as bad as it could be, because he made sure to steer clear of the dreaded penis-vagina penetration, which is what sends you straight to hell. 69 is wrong, sure, but it isn’t really sex. Right? Riiiiight.
I think he lasted for about two months. A very sporadic arrangement, to be sure. I finally got sick of the lectures and exploded one night into a long rant about how if it was so goddamn wrong then why can’t he keep his hands out of my pants? It’s “wrong” but he’s not saying no to any blowjobs, right? Yet somehow I was more morally culpable than him. Never figured that one out.
Fuck it! Who has time for that shit? Not me. Fucking hypocrites. (Ha! Pun! Whooooo…)
I wish I could file my blog posts under more than one category. This would go under “Personal” and “Sex.” But I can’t, so I must pick just one. Gah.
…including the one I was looking for of my locker. Unfortunately, you really can’t make out the “Why am I such a sex symbol?” piece of paper. (It is partially overlapping the awesome “House of Breakfast Pleasure” poster, directly to the left of the “WTSC 91.1 FM” part.)
Here’s an awesome picture from the England trip, summer of ‘97. Stonehenge rocks. (Ha! Pun!) Click the picture for a bigger version.
Furthermore, here is a sequence of 3 pictures taken a few days after I got my hair chopped off (and chopped it remains, to this day). I was 17.
This will sound conceited and self-absorbed, but since apparently the consensus among some is that I am conceited and self-absorbed, I might as well go ahead and say it! Looking through these pictures, I realized I was a lot better looking in high school than I gave myself credit for, and I should’ve lightened up and not been so self-conscious. But, high school is all about self-consciousness, so… Anyway, I’ll do a post some other time about how some of the people in high school really warped my self-perception or whatever.
I found a lot more than just these, but I only had the patience to scan and subject you to a few.
However, I didn’t find the pictures from Niki’s 16th birthday that I was looking for. Damn. So she might get off scott free this year.
This morning I went to get my hair did at 8:00 AM. -Well, actually, my appointment was at 8:45, but Chris had an appointment at 8:00 and we went together — we’re fabulous! So anyway, the fabulous gay man I usually go to was already booked, so when I scheduled the appointment a few days ago I had to go to this other woman, the only one who was available. Turns out I went to high school with her (at Evans). She recognized me before I recognized her (probably because she was using a different name; I asked her about it and she said, “Yeah, when you start working here, if you have the same name as someone else, they make you pick another name.”) She started by asking me if I knew [name removed to protect the guilty] — and I said, “Wow… yeah, he was my boyfriend for 2 ill-advised months in 9th grade.” That’s when she told me who she was, and that was followed by a few minutes of the usual, “Ohmigod, how are you, this is so crazy…” etc. She informed me that she had kept in touch with the guy in question until a few years ago, and the last she’d heard of him, he had “come out” (”even though he still dated women, so I don’t know, maybe he’s bi or something,” she explained), was on drugs, had ripped a bunch of people off, had gotten a girl pregnant, and was “living with her in some crackhouse.” Nice!
She asked me if I kept in touch with anyone from Evans and I said just a few. I asked if she remembered Jenny, Niki, or Dipika. She said she knew their names, but that’s all. Which makes sense — they moved in entirely different circles. So anyway, I was kind of on edge throughout the entire haircut… because even as we reminisced and commiserated against the people who were the “popular” kids in high school and used to make fun of us, I was remembering that she used to make fun of me a bit. Now, let me regale you with tales of the social hierarchy at fantastic Evans High School! She was decidedly part of the so-called “freak” contingent. I was on the fringes of that group, but wasn’t cool enough (understand the extreme irony here, btw, as most of the people who were cool enough are now apparently dead or on drugs) to really be a part of it; I didn’t shop at the hip downtown stores — ok, store — or listen to music that was obscure enough…etc. I was a “poser” or whatever according to her group; I was remembering that. I was also remembering the time she ate some acid before home room and was freaking out by 3rd period. Nice.
Finally I’d gotten fed up with the complete and utter bullshit of this contrived social hierarchy, and my parents let me transfer to Augusta Prep. The rest, as they say, is history. To be fair, I probably would’ve liked Evans better during junior and senior year, taking refuge in AP classes with Jenny, Niki, Dipika, and the rest of those kind of people (uh, smart people). Still, it’s interesting how such a seemingly innocuous — friendly, even — reunion can turn a part of you right back into that awkward, depressed, self-conscious 15-year-old (and when I say you, I mean me).
Later I’ll have an amusing photo montage for you of my new haircut, before I climbed into bed and napped it all up. If I told you how long it’s taking me to do this in Photoshop, you’d laugh and call me a freak. So I won’t.
I’m up so late that I dared to put the f-word in the title of this entry.
I’m abusing the repeat function in iTunes again. This time with “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne. (And I don’t want to hear your shit about it.) All the teen pseudo-angst seems somehow strangely appropriate, alongside reading all my old blog entries and thinking about how different things used to be and how little I knew of what was going to come and hit me in the face like a sack of bricks.
Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?
…why am I living in Bizarro World?
Now it won’t have quite the same effect. Oh well.
Referring to my pen-and-paper journal (how archaic!) from a year ago: Feb. 17th 2004 was the day I got my official offer letter (even though I already knew I had the job, since the weekend before that I flew to ATL to find an apartment) and put in my notice with Katapultz (who would announce less than a month later the fact that they were going out of business as of June 2004). Anyway, just thought it was momentous! Sadly, I don’t have an electronic or paper version of my blog from mid-January - mid-May 2004, so I can’t see what I wrote for public consumption.
Everyone knows where I work, but I’m feeling stupid and paranoid tonight so I’m not mentioning the company name herein. I know that simply saying where I work isn’t going to get me dooced — and I know that my boss knows about my blog and evidently has no quarrel with it — but still.
It can be a weird feeling to suddenly hear a song (or decide to listen to a CD) that you haven’t heard in a long time. Certain CDs really take me back to certain periods in my life. I go through phases of listening to one or a few CDs a lot, and then those songs become stuck with that time period in my memory. So when I hear them again after a long period of time, it’s kind of a weird feeling. A mixture of fondness and pain… you know, nostalgia.
Here are a few examples:
Unrelated thought: I hope whitechocolatespaceegg doesn’t freeze in my car (which is parked on 9th St.) overnight.
This is one of my favorite pictures of “the three musketeers”:
This was taken at my high school graduation. June 6, 1998, like the datestamp on the picture says. (I think Jenny and Niki’s graduation was a week later.) Wow… 6½ years ago. I feel old. (Yes, I am holding cash money in my left hand.)
I’m feeling retrospective (can you use that word that way?) and introspective tonight. Just felt like taking this picture out of its frame (it usually lives on my nightstand) and scanning it.
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