Tee Hee

When I applied for university housing, way back when, I remember selecting as my first choice one of the freshman high-rises. They had sort of a bum rap — sardine cans of clueless freshmen, essentially — but I'd had a great experience in a high-rise at GHP and thought it'd be a bonding experience. I've since heard from others that it did help them integrate and make proper friend groups that have lasted well past university.

One of my other choices (there were three blank lines to fill in) was Mary Lyndon, selected sort of at random from UGA's website.

That summer, at a pool party, I met a really hot guy who was apparently going into his second year at UGA. "What dorm will you be in?" I asked. "Mary Lyndon!" Thought I: DAMN. There's a chance, though, right?

The chances were minimal. Everybody got put into the high-rises because they didn't get into all the other dorms on campus.

Not a month later, the phone rang, and — like one of those crisp scenes recorded in HD forever — I remember the conversation exactly.

"Hi, I'm phoning from UGA's housing department. We've had some sort of a mix-up and can't seem to find the form where you indicated your housing preferences! I'm so sorry we've left it this late to contact you! I'll do my best to place you in your first choice. So sorry. So... what was your first choice?"

"Mary Lyndon."


It was an easy lie. And bless her, that lady DID allocate me into Mary Lyndon.



Only now, 8 years later, did it occur to me what incredible consequences my flash of a lie might have had on the rest of my life. Who knows? Maybe if I had been in one of the high-rises, I wouldn't have walked out on UGA after two years; I might have chosen different majors; I might have made a lot of different choices in a lot of different ways.


I, for one, am laughing about it.

Sexism totally doesn't exist any more! ... Promise!

When I was little, teachers and classmates told me I was smart. I heard this so out of proportion to all other topics that I concluded: This is all I am. This is all I have.

And of course there were books, shows, and movies that made it seem like that would be okay — that the smart girl sometimes wins, that intelligence bests riches. So I clung to being smart and never gave a second thought to branching out in the personal attribute pool.

It was only once I became a frumpy, bitter teenager, tired of accidentally overhearing less than flattering statements about myself, that I paid closer attention to those shows and movies. Sure, you can be smart, but you better damn well be pretty, too. You can be The Intelligent One, and people will love you, but when you take off your glasses, you need to look like Rachel Leigh Cook or Carly Pope.

True frumpy girls, it seems, get nowhere. Invest in contacts or — better yet — laser surgery.

There are exceptions, of course: if you're funny (I'm not), rich (I'm not), fashionable (I'm not), or just extraordinarily fun to be around (ba ha hahaha!), you might make do with being intelligent and ugly. I wasn't, didn't, and couldn't.

The next time I feel guilty about my late mother's voice ringing in my ears about how I'm too vain about my hair, or I spend too much time choosing an outfit — I'm just gonna tell her, "Sorry, Mami. We've got a ways to go yet, and I want to Be Not Nobody." And then I'll bust into that Vanessa Carlton song, and the ghost of my late mother, who was a pianist, will be so horrified that... okay, yeah.

Singing Along in the Car (an entry featuring zeugmatic overuse)

If cars and music go together like peas and carrots, then friendships are the stews they're bulking up, or the broth, or, uh, I dunno.

Okay, you know what? Let's forget the food metaphor. My life is peppered (sorry, couldn't resist) with memories of driving around with various people, singing or listening to various CDs (this was mostly before the days of mp3 players).

I remember when two of my friends and I crept almost silently along a quiet neighborhood, making endless 2 mph loops to Godspeed You Black Emperor. It was trippy and sober, pointless and blissful.

I remember trips from Atlanta to Rome, Georgia with those same friends (and a few others, on occasion), staying excited throughout that mind-bogglingly tedious drive by doing a probably dangerous amount of in-car dancing — to everything from Rob Zombie to Mt. Sims.

I remember when I was a senior in high school, toward the end of the year, three random classmates and I got free advance tickets to see Death to Smoochy — one of them drove, we all listened to Outkast on the way there, and one of them suddenly said (after only 12 years of school together), "I never realized you had a sense of humor before!" Better late than never!

I remember driving around the loop road around Athens, Georgia, listening to the same three U2 songs over and over, because neither the person I was with or I could figure out how to progress — with the CD or each other.

I remember driving around Roswell, Georgia, singing along to You Oughta Know like it was going out of style — which, of course, it was. But my friend and I didn't care, and we rolled down the windows and shrieked along like the nerds we were happy to be.

I remember the summer I spent attached to the hip of a good friend; we'd wake up together, do nothing together, eat together, drive around listening to ABBA Gold together, then decide where to fall asleep together. It was an entire summer of Dancing Queens and Chiquititas — the first summer after my mother's death — when my father still paid all my gas money bills, I didn't have a job or any concerns over acquiring one, and I was starting to figure out who I was and who I could be in the absence of my mother.

I remember when another friend and I made faces behind my parents' backs as we trundled about, listening to my father's absolutely vile CD of Linda Ronstadt mariachi covers.

I remember driving back from Massachusetts to Georgia with a then-boyfriend and the heady mix of awesome and inexcusable he played us (everything from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5 to the theme song from Greatest American Hero).

I remember driving to Cleveland with my father and playing him Weezer — his first exposure to the band, whom he now quite likes.


Funnily enough, I don't actually have a clue what was playing for a lot of memories related to my very first boyfriend ever. I remember what I was generally listening to at the time, but it's impossible to pin songs or artists to memories like the time I took him to the Chattahoochee to meet my late mother, or the time we were in the car with two of his friends and they asked whether we were dating, and we kinda looked at each other for confirmation before saying, "... Yes?"

I don't know if this means that my brain blocked out the information or never absorbed the musical context in the first place.

[Un]Interrupted Prosperity[/Romance]

Have you ever been about to kiss somebody — like, both of you holding your breath, intense gazing, inches away — and then had somebody walk through the door and interrupt you?


This happened to me, once. ON VALENTINE'S DAY, too. It was maybe a year or more before I eventually snogged the guy.

Tickling

There are only two guys who ever got away with tickling me. I mean huge, all-out tickle fights. Funnily enough, I never actually kissed either of them midst tickle-fight or even in that rough time period. I did end up kissing both of them at various points, but never around time of tickle-fighting. I guess the fights were a sort of... substitution, maybe?



Now that I think about it, they really hated each other (or said they did; I never saw them interact or even meet, but they had a few mutual acquaintances). I used to wish I could combine them into the perfect man.

Omissions and Inclusions

Scarier to me than any of my memories are the things I feel like I SHOULD remember and don't, especially details of past relationships and friendships.

The digital age has provided me with an invaluable insight into my own personal history. Old email in-boxes, old email out-boxes (far more telling in some lights), and online journal entries refresh my feeble 26-year-old memory.

But there are gaps in the telling. I now regret not having recorded even more, only so that when I now question the truly important details ("Did I actually make out with Person X topless? What was that, 2004?"), I could find a definitive answer.

Oddly enough, I seem to have kept better track of my roller-coasters of emotions than of the actual events that triggered them. It's a bit pointless, really, to have recorded things from this angle; surely if I'd just written down what happened, the emotions could then follow?

But no, that's not true either. I read over chat logs and remember what I felt — but I don't remember what I felt.

Home

Shortly after we moved from Shetland to Cornwall, I told my then-husband that I wasn't sure Cornwall would ever feel like home the way Shetland did.

... and it never did.



Shetland may have been fucked up, but Cornwall and Devon are juuuust close enough (culturally) to my nook of the USA to make me resent the differences.

April Fool's Day is the worst day of the year.

I hate virtually all practical jokes and always have. I'm just not a practical joke type of person, and then my resentment deepened when, year after year, people would think March 31 was almost April Fool's and get me some "hilarious" gag gift. Thanks, but no thanks.


I was born congenitally gullible; practical jokes are a minefield. You know how you can say, "Hey, look! Here's 'gullible' written on the wall!" — and some people will look? I'm one of them.

This of course then became The Paradox of Gullible People: I became (and still am) totally paranoid and frequently refuse to believe what people are telling me — or if they're telling me something I don't want to hear, I refuse to believe they have my best interests at heart. And then the problem with paranoia is that every so rarely, some crazy, horrible fear proves to be spot-on, so then the paranoia bulks itself massively, feeding on this incident.


All I know is that when I was about 13, on April 1st, a few of my classmates in the gym told me, "You've got a wasp stuck in your hair!"

I refused to believe them, thinking it was another crappy April Fool's Day joke, until I finally thought I might actually feel something squirming around. I reached up to feel in my hair —


Aaaaand then I got stung by a wasp, and the day after a birthday is always a bit of a downer anyway, and honestly, there is NO worse day than April 1st, wasp or no wasp, so April can just bite me, and if my classmates hadn't tormented me constantly anyway, I might have believed them, so it's obviously all their fault.


Right?

Birthday Reminiscing

One of the first birthday-specific memories I have is of my 10th birthday. I whined and whined and whined until finally my mother said I could invite 10 whole friends to commemorate my 10 years.

It ended up being horrifically stressful. It's certainly the earliest memory I have of thinking, "Oh, now I know what stress means! I get it!" I'm sure the other little girls thought it was no better or worse than other birthday parties they attended, but I just couldn't keep track of how all my friends were getting along, and the thought of any two of them not liking each other terrified me.

Of course, when you grow up to be me, you learn quite quickly that no matter how much you love somebody or something, others are unlikely to share in your enthusiasm to the same extent. I might love cephalopods, and I might love you, but you are not required to love cephalopods also.




I won't deny it helps, though.

Originally posted in 2007...

[But I STILL think about that damn plastic fork.]




Shortly before my mother died (not more than two weeks prior), my father, my mother, and I all sat in a row on the edge of my parents' TV, staring at a U.S. Open tennis match. A buff American was playing an equally buff Australian. My mother turned to us and asked, "Could you bring me a fork?"

A fork? Okay, sure. Whatever. My father gave me a look that said, "You heard your mother! Erm... or... well... make her happy?" I ran down to the kitchen and decided a plastic fork might be safer; she accepted the white, plastic fork with obvious, earnest gratitude. Relieved (and holding the fork upright in one hand), she began to nod off to sleep.

My father couldn't contain his curiosity and stopped her mid-drifting to ask her why she wanted the fork.

"In case the Brazilians win!" and she pointed at the TV.


A few nights ago, I was walking home from work, and I spotted a white, plastic fork by the side of the road. I make it a habit to pick up at least one piece of litter per walk, so that I can assuage my own ecological guilt by that one unit. Naturally, the fork found its way to my hand, and I in turn found myself thinking I must look really odd, wielding this shiny, white, plastic fork in the darkness of a Shetland night.

AND THEN I remembered.

And then I felt okay and brandished that fork all the way home. Because I really DO need it, in case the Brazilians win.