Tell me all about 10-year-old you

It was a drought year and the president was telling everybody to conserve energy, so I remember being reminded and scolded a lot for wasting water and leaving lights on. It was hot all spring, summer, and fall, yellow and sere. I remember going down to the Valley with my dad and Yosemite Falls was a mere trickle.

I read or re-read a lot of history that year, Churchill, Bruce Catton, and various books on the Civil War. We had an old mattress on our porch that I would lay down on with my book and read, mostly oblivious to the mule deer on our 'lawn', or the raucous cries of the scrub jays. I wrote this a month or so ago about my cat at the time:

"...Trinka. I still picture her often sitting still, silent and leopard-like on the branch of an oak tree, her tortoise-shell coat the perfect camouflage in an early autumnal tree, so that the only thing that ever gave her away was the occasional flick of her tail. I remember her 'hunting' the deer and I remember the rage visible in her eyes when her gift of a bushbunny left a deep red stain in the middle of the white living room rug and she and it were tossed outside. I remember how she would very lightly rub her cool nose against mine to wake me in the middle of the night if she wanted me to pet her. I remember"..."'camping' on an old mattress on the front porch stubbornly refusing to re-engage with civilized living, watching the moon in the midnight blue sky strewn with millions of stars, and listening as Trinka, or the deer, or who knew what else rustled quietly through the yellowed grasses and crackling leaves in the penumbra."

My best friend was the son of the caretaker of the SDA summer camp across the South Fork of the Merced and about a mile down. Since we were godless hippies and his parents weren't always fond of sending him over and since my dad was often working, after school I'd go over to his place, where we had the run of the camp. We used to race golf carts up and down the property which snaked up a hill, or play starter pistol tag, which consisted of trying to sneak up on each other and shoot a starter pistol at the other. After an hour of creeping silently through a forest, when somebody surprises you by jumping out behind you and firing, the loud report maxes out your adrenaline and then reverberates eerily through the trees.

I went to grammar school about an hour outside the park in a town called Oakhurst. I remember scrimping loose change from around the house so that I, a lactose-intolerant child on a supposedly dairy-free diet, could buy an eskimo pie when I got off the school bus before my mile long hike back to our house. I listened to a radio station out of Fresno that played 60's and contemporary rock mostly but I remember loads of disco, some of which I liked and some of which I found boring. Looking at the top 40 for that year, I see some things that I liked at the time, but it wasn't a great year, musically for me.

That fall my mother tried to kidnap me for the last time, playing on my divided loyalties to her and to my father and I felt immensely guilty afterwards that, when faced with the choice of living with my heartbroken dad in Yosemite (his wife had recently left him) or my then-nutso mom, even more nutso step-father, and trapped brothers in the San Fernando Valley, I hadn't had the courage to be more forthright to my mother and tell her categorically that she lived in a dysfunctional household in one of the state's many armpits. More than any other thing, I hold that feeling of guilt against my mother, who should have known better.

Two years later we moved to Marin.

I just went back and reread that -- nothing twatty or self-important that I can make out: it just reads like a glimpse of a real life; it's coherent and it's moving, like so many others on this thread.

It's sounding twatty or self-important (or incoherent or just plain fucked up) that's preventing me from trying this... even though I love most of the entries here.

It's 1996-97. I live in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a quite dull suburb of DC. I'm quite happy. I'm in fifth grade at good old Somerset Elementary. My teacher is the same as last year, a friend of my family, who had his finger bitten off by a dead shark while living in the Marshall Islands (where I lived for half a year). He's a wonderful teacher - still sends us letters occasionally. I often stay behind after school to help clean up the room. I don't really know why, it's something that I do. Our class of 30 has 3 Ukrainians in it. More Ukrainians than blacks.

I'm still good friends with my neighbors, and my best friend lives in the house just down from mine. We play basketball sometimes, but he's a foot taller than me, and it's not the most fun thing in the world. I'm short, did I mention? Very short. My dad tells me that he was the shortest kid in his class for a long time.

We have guinea pigs. Lots of 'em. This may be the year we had 12.

I am woefully unaware of pop culture. I do love the Simpsons, but my family never watches sitcoms, and the only TV is in my parents' room. When I listen to the radio, it's either the oldies station or baseball games. It's not until 6th grade that my friends start extolling the virtues of No Doubt and Third Eye Blind. I have no concept of rap music. (I don't think I've fully stressed how very white my neighborhood is.) I barely listen to any music that my dad doesn't like. I feel somewhat ashamed when I turn out to like a song that my dad hates. Luckily for the future me, he liked a lot of great music.

I think my obsession with baseball is around its height at this point. The Orioles are my team, and I follow every game. They're actually good in 1996, and make it to the playoffs. I watch as Jeffrey Maier gives the Yankees a home run, and the team melts down. I wish death upon him. I play in little league - I think this is around when I started pitching. I was great - I could throw strikes, and since no one was used to hitting balls pitched by humans, I could strike people out all the time. Later, of course, they learned to hit, and my star dimmed gradually. I went back to playing the infield. I have a screen set up in my back yard, which I can pitch balls at, and they come back either in the air or as grounder, depending on where I throw it. I work out entire games in my head. I usually win.

I go to camp in Washington State at the end of fifth grade. My parents want me and my sister out of their hair as they help my grandparents move from their beautiful but horribly located home in Seattle to a nice but rather nondescript apartment. Camp is okay. I only seem to get the hang of it by the last few days. A number of the kids in my tents have just discovered swearing and girls, so you can imagine the conversations. I don't have much to contribute. I'm sad about losing my grandparents' house. There was a huge grey room on the bottom floor, filled with piping and old rubbish, where I could find all kinds of things, most notably an electric chord organ.

In school I'm probably irritatingly smart. I get placed in an elite vocabulary group with 3 or 4 other people. We get "existential" as a vocab word, and have a unit on banned books. This was the same school that last year assigned us to read an essay by Vaclav Havel, which had a number of veiled references to the dark secrets of European leaders. Of course, the banned books aren't all that dirty - one of them was banned for the use of the phrase "armpit fart." We have sex ed this year, and everyone's very giggly. I still feel terrible for suggesting that one of the girls in the video looks like a classmate of mine. She didn't actually get teased much about it, but it was a mean thing to do, and I like(d) her.

What am I reading? This one's tough. Most of my favorites - the Moomins, Five Children and It, Hitchhiker's Guide - I first read in third grade. I'm a huge Daniel Pinkwater fan. Occasionally I try pointing metal objects at my sister while saying, "You are in my power. You must obey." I'm probably reading a bunch of baseball-related books. I can't remember when I started reading Ray Bradbury, or when my dad recommended that I read The Circus of Dr. Lao. The idea of staying up late reading, far past my bed time, makes me happy. I love Pogo, thanks to my parents, but I haven't quite figured out Krazy Kat. My family has a tendency to talk in Pogo dialect amongst ourselves.

My family has a house in rural Virginia, which we visit on weekends. It's marvelous - I think there's still a creek flowing right by it into a swimming hole at this point, where my sister and I swim and catch tadpoles in the spring. It may be around this time that the first of two massive floods hits the region, floods that are only supposed to happen every 500 years. Massive mudslides occur on the Blue Ridge Mountains, houses are lost, the landscape looks markedly different. The place has changed drastically, and I just want it to go back to the way it was, and I know that it won't. Some things are repaired - the main river, which ended up flowing throwgh a cow pasture, is moved back within its banks, and our creek comes back for a time. Still wonderful, but not quite the same.

I may have been older than 10, but I want to write about this anyway. There's one day in Virginia when I start thinking about memory, about how most of what I see and think today is going to end up lost. So I decide to remember certain things. I remember a bee flying back and forth in the sun. I remember a small fish, swimming in the middle of the creek. I remember a flower petal on the ground, even though I decided not to choose to remember that one, as it would be trite and precious.

The end of elementary school makes me a bit sad. Well, not the end of school, but the horrible anticipation of middle school. No more recess is a pretty depressing thought. Near the end of fifth grade, in our music class, two twins in the class perform a song for us. I can't remember for the life of me what it was called, or what the lyrics or tune were. Something to do with fishing, maybe? But I find it tremendously moving. It gives me the image of people separated by water, or floating away. It feels like a farewell.

I don't think I've ever written this much about any one part of my life. This thread is amazing. I like that even the googlers feel inspired enough to tell a group of strangers all about their lives.

As I said way upthread:

...I've recently got a camera for the first time

And in digging through old photo albums and scanning some selections up onto Flickr I've got visual references for my post about being 10:

I would be living on the third floor of the duplex my family got at Mare Island, a naval base in the north part of San Francisco Bay.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3174/2674577905_44518a2a6d.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3042/2674577993_bb5552c0e3.jpg

I have my dear first hamster Tory in a cage opposite my bed

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3090/2674577943_f72edf76f1.jpg

(I still have and use that desk.)

Not referred to in that post but illustrative -- the family dog Sally:

Me in the middle of this Webelos den line-up, my dad right behind me:

Flowers near the back door steps:

...and happy birthday to me:

...since I actually got this camera for that tenth birthday.

Bah, totally forgot about the three photo limit. Once again:

Me in the middle of this Webelos den line-up, my dad right behind me:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3230/2675397266_7857aff6c2.jpg

Flowers near the back door steps:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3158/2675397116_4e520ec866.jpg

...and happy birthday to me:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3033/2675441754_beabea85c9.jpg

...since I actually got this camera for that tenth birthday.

Also, I realize that desk comment makes no sense without the second photo that should have gone with it:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3266/2674578019_e2d736e568.jpg

awesome tiger poster!

And Sally:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3138/2674577973_5a3c15c8e0.jpg

Yeah the tiger poster, as with the koala one, would have been from National Geographic's World magazine, their for-kids spinoff.

oh i am familiar with the national geographic kids mag posters

i probably had that tiger poster when i was a few years younger than you!

yeah i loved natl geographic world. some relative or other gave that as a gift to me and my sister a few years running.

:-D

i have no idea how you folks have been able to do this.
so much heartwarming detail.
wonderful thread.
like some others, my life pre 18 years of age is full of memory blanks.
such a situation keeps me sane.
here's some random thoughts as to the 10th year i lived.
1978 :
i live in addingham (near ilkley where there are some moors.), on a new estate thats still being built while we here.
these half built houses are the best playground ever.
dad is unemployed again.
arguments.
traditional drunken car crash at christmas time.
arguments. alcohol. bullying.
i watch top of the pops religiously.
i saw a video of someone called Sid Vicious is performing C'mon Everybody while riding a motorbike in his grotty pants, he makes me laugh.
not really bothered about music, but i have a few 7" singles that my parents gave me that i play on a great little orange 7" record player. you push the single in the front, and the music comes out of the top. when you press the button to release the record it flys out really fast.
great fun.
i really like that song called "Mr Blue Sky" thats on Radio 2 all the time.
my younger sister gets on my nerves, she does bad stuff, and i get into trouble.
i'm sure its just a phase and we'll become best friends later.

i saw a video of someone called Sid Vicious is performing C'mon Everybody while riding a motorbike in his grotty pants, he makes me laugh

oops. not released until 1979 - i got that wrong.

WELL JEEZ, Mark. Can we trust you again.

you wouldn't be the first to ask me that ned.

Great photos, Ned! Love the posters.

This is an amazing thread.

1995 wasn't that long ago. My parents still live in the house we lived in then. This was a year before my dad finally got around to building my room in the attic so I was still sleeping in their room at that age.

Was kind of a tomboy but had a crush on dorky classmate in glasses who used to skateboard at the playground behind my house. He liked Guns 'n' Roses and Aerosmith. I thought he was the coolest person my age I had ever met. (We were in the same class again three years later and he turned out to be a 13-year-old jerk. Go figure.)

Stephen King's IT, The Sound of Music, The Nightmare Before Christmas, ET, and Beetlejuice were my VCR staples. But my brother and I also watched loads of movies that year from the laser disc (!!) rental store - needless to say, the store didn't last long and afaik was the only one of its kind in the country. but it was great for a couple of years and we taped tons of movies from LDs. mostly stuff that never made it to theatres in Malaysia or that I was too young for and my brother, at 17/18, was just right for. he'd cover my eyes during teh nekkid bits in such films as The Crow, Mallrats and Michael Crichton/Wesley Snipes thriller Rising Sun.

Went to Denmark for a couple of weeks with my dad to visit my mum who was in Copenhagen on a three-month teaching exchange. Saw the Royal Danish Ballet do A Midsummer Night's Dream, which triggered my life-long love of dance and visited Legoland, which quickly became my favourite place in the world.

Learnt about sex. Reaction: *scrunched-up nose*

I spent a lot of time at my best friend's - she was girlier and funnier than me (still is, we're still best buds) and I was insanely jealous that her parents let her keep hamsters and mine didn't. I also spent a lot of time at my other best friend's. she and her sisters were X-files nuts and got me into the show heavily.

I listened to whatever my older brother did which was a lot of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and NWA and Snoop and lol Boys II Men. God he really loved that "End of the Road". note: Malaysia, at the time, was nearly always about two years late on any Western pop trends so my brother was just about otm in his musical tastes.

Prince of Persia and Skunny on PC, Sonic on Sega Game Gear.

Read tons of Enid Blyton girls' school books and Roald Dahl. But my favourite book was a collection of Greek myths.

Which was directly connected to my love of astronomy. Knew every constellation and the myths behind them. (When my room was finally built the next year, it had a low ceiling and I painstakingly used tiny glow-in-the-dark star stickers to map out the sky.)

I had chickenpox and got to skip school for two weeks AND got a Lego space shuttle set to keep me busy. As far as toys went, I never did like girls' toys and thought dolls were boring. Loved that Lego set, and all the Lego I inherited from my older siblings.

Loved bubble baths and spent hours in the tub with my awesome ship, also built from Lego. It had removable weights on the bottom to keep it from capsizing - I've never seen such weights on any new Lego since.

I've mentioned my brother a lot but I have an older sister too. She was studying in Iowa at this time.

Quit piano lessons, a decision I regret to this day.

love this thread. can't remember being ten!

Eleven years of posting here and coming across something as remarkable as CB's post, something as memorable as Liz's, something as familiar as Ned's stickers on a mirror -- all for the first time.

I guess it's why I keep coming back.

man this thread

i love you all tbh

I really liked K'Nex, "Jellyhead" by Crush, and watching QVC

my best friend at school was a skinny redhead named tony -- have no idea what happened to him after that year. we were both obsessed with the animorphs books.
my parents gave me my own room in the basement and helped me decorate it with all space stuff (a national geographic poster of the local galaxies, an airbrush painting of some planets, "a new hope" poster, silver foil wallpaper).
i got earthbound for xmas (with the giant box and the players guide with the stinky scratch n' sniff stickers).
we got a jack russell terrier named lucy, who was the family dog until she died just a couple years ago. best dog ever.
had a huge collection of rocks and minerals, meticulously ordered and labeled. often i'd line them all up in a long row and stare at them for what felt like hours.
my favorite music was a cassette of the jurassic park score that i'd listen to on a boombox with my ear right up to the speaker.
i probably still had a bowl haircut.

I found out that the "auntie" who was hogging my bed as I was relegated to the floor was actually my half sister.
I was knocking about with a future serial killer and a violent heroin addict gangster at school and never felt in any kind of peril.
Me + my older brother frequented a computer club above a town centre pub and progressed from wanting a Sharp MZ80k to a Commodore 64. He is now a big-shot programmer living in Dubai and I am me!
Went to this weird cunt's house a couple of times for First Confirmation preparation, rebelled against it. I wasn't That rebellious, cos I still turned up to be confirmed by Bishop Fuck-face or whoever!

I was wholesome and I liked to bake things with my grandmother

In the fall of 1978, I was in the sixth grade at St. George's School in Spokane, WA, my family having just relocated from Bethesda, MD. It was horrid, as I missed my old friends and school. Over the summer I had gone to camp in Maine, which was more horrid still, as I could make no sense of the culture and hated most everyone around me. Worse, I had tried to feel up a boy who seemed approachable, but he freaked out and called me a "faggot" and ran away yelling about it. The spectre of this, the idea that all the other kids were whispering unheard behind my back, hung over the rest of the summer.

In Spokane, I was meant to be memorizing my times tables but did not. As a result, I had to stay back in class every Friday as the other kids went to the roller rink, our reward for proper recitation. I knew this was meant to be a humiliating punishment, but I rather enjoyed the time spent alone reading pervy science-fiction novels. There was also a health class in which we got to learn about fallopian tubes and squish bits of cigarette lung encased in plastic.

I had a crush on a girl named Shelly, though I rarely managed the courage to actually speak with her. She was pretty and blonde, with thick wire-framed glasses and a reading habit. At the end of the year, Margaret wrote in my yearbook that maybe I didn’t know it, but Shelly liked me. I decided Margaret was probably just fucking with me. Or Shelly. One way or the other.

This period in my life was so traumatic that I essentially forced it out of my memory long ago. My life timeline seems to skip directly from age 8 to 13 when I think back on it nowadays; I know what happened in between but it's too uncomfortable to think about even decades later.

in July 1991 all I can say for sure is that we were living in donegal and I was going into 5th class that September, my fourth year in a row at the same school, which is twice as long as any previous best.

I'm not sure in which house I'm living in atm, its a somewhat fuzzy time to recall and there are three or four contenders - the most likely one is a big old awesome place with an orchard, a patch of woodland a lumberyard next door and sheds filled with stuff left by the previous owners like cannonballs and highwayman looking pistols and rusty badger traps, all of which we are left to our own devices in and with.

we are four brothers, one older that tends towards violent temper and the physical ability to indulge well in it- i worship and hate him will do for many years yet- and two younger and therefore of little interest beyond the way extent to which their adoration boosts my enormous ego or my frequent tormenting of them amuses me. the nearer of them is not as bright as I or the youngest and I'm merciless with him, in no small part because he's already almost my size and goodlooking. the youngest has a gap of a couple of years on the rest of us and is a violently tempered but brilliant redhead midget and I teach him to read before the rest of his class on a whim that lasts longer than most.

I am youngest in my class of ten and tallest and fastest, and cleverest along with one other boy who was kept back for two years to attend with his brother. he is diligent and mannerly and reserved and an unfortunate contrast in most other ways too but I dont blame him for that and get along fine with him and everyone else in the class, except the girls who are to be avoided in terrified panic wherever possible although I love lor3tta with the Spanish skin fiercely and jealously even after talking to her (normally the point at which I decide people aren't worth bothering with) and she gets glasses.

I'm already losing teeth, four in a single public health dentist visit this year, and I attend school smelling of urine most days, though the headlice seem not to mind.

I haven't formed any opinions of my parents beyond that which is normal in childhood just yet, but I have begun to have inklings about the amount and ferocity of the fights when my dad is home.

I read everything. everything comprises black plastic bags full of Enid blyton books from cousins, old western pulps from grandad and uncles, readers digest collections on the occult and anything else I can find.

I'm gullible and prone to being made a fool of in class or by my peers, or by myself in front of them, but this is OK by me and not unusual in a small school so I don't take it to heart.

I lived with my schizophrenic mother and her abusive boyfriends. My sister moved out when she was 14, leaving me alone with them.

I turn 10 in March 1995. That's during grade four -- I'm always one of the oldest kids in my year.

The snow is going to melt soon which means I can ride my bike everywhere again. I have a new-ish bike. It's teal and has 18 speeds. Having lots of speeds is really cool.

Later that spring we get a puppy. He lives until February 2014.

During summer vacation I play along with The Price is Right every morning. Then I ride my bike, and play some Sega Genesis, and read books, and build houses out of Lego, and maybe play Batman with my little brother until he annoys me.

Sometimes I convince my mom to let me stay up late and watch Married With Children reruns. I think she lets me because she knows I won't get any of the raunchier jokes.

My best friends is Lisa H. Her family has neat things like a computer and a car phone. We play Wolfenstein 3D and Day of the Tentacle.

I take 'piano' lessons once a week. We can't afford a piano though, so I only get to practice on a cheap keyboard with hilarious presets.

In grade five there's a chart on the wall where we can put a sticker next to our name for each book we read. By the end of the school year, I have 75 stickers, by far the most in the class, and I am very smug about this.

Sometimes I secretly read books during class because the lessons bore me. My teacher notices and writes about it in my report card and asks me to stop. I find out years later that my mom didn't want to skip me ahead because she thought the kids in the year above me were all delinquents.

During lunch breaks my class listens to the radio or CDs. Weird Al's 'Bad Hair Day' is our favourite.

I listen to Rick Dees and the weekly top 40 every Saturday. I am beginning to develop taste in music, sort of. For Christmas I get my very own CD player and Dance Mix 95.

wow, i barely have any memory of this year. 4th grade. i became friends with a kid in my class who had some anger management issues. i could sympathize with him so i hung out and we'd talk about shit. we became good friends and my hunch was right, his home life sucked worse than mine. i spent that entire summer hanging out with him and his older brother, and we'd literally spend every single day together because our parents were MIA. we were little juvenile delinquents, stealing candy and porno mags from the convenience mart, made makeshift slingshots and we'd fire rocks at cars, that sorta thing.

our friendship ended that fall when i hung out with him, his older brother and his brother's friend. we were hiking through the woods, and i remember his older brother got me to smoke a cigarette. as we walked through the woods we found this abandoned warehouse and we decided to try and demolish it. we smashed all the windows with rocks, broke the doors down, hurled cinder blocks through the walls, etc. and as we left a police officer "arrested" us. i remember riding in the back of the police cruiser feeling so incredibly ashamed of myself. my mom said "don't hang out with them again" and i didn't. never saw him or talked to him again after that. about 10 years ago i ran into his older brother and he told me he had just gotten out of federal prison for grand theft auto and a few other wonderful offenses. guess i was better off never seeing them again and going in a different direction.

I got Garfield's Nine Lives and the Monkees' Pool It! for my tenth birthday, and they were perfect gifts. I'm pretty sure that was the same year that my mom's cousin was working at a restaurant owned by Jim Davis and arranged for me to meet him. I wept when I found out it was happening. I guess the Monkees were riding high on their '80s resurgence at the time, and I was way into the old records (all of which my mom had and gave to me).

I got glasses for the first time. Big, doofy ones. I had no sense of my vision fading but I guess my mom noticed me sitting way too close to the TV.

I stayed up late almost every weekend and watched as much Night Flight on USA as I could before I'd pass out. I also watched a lot of WWF and GLOW. And Captain Power!

I think my dad was gone most or all of that year (serving with the Navy). We moved back to the town I was born in to be near my grandparents, at least partly because my mom had just given birth to my sister a few months before. I never really thought about it until just now, but I imagine that was pretty rough on her (particularly with three other boys to wrangle). The beginning of fifth grade marked my sixth school (of thirteen, counting all of K-12).

Ten was the age when I last threw up (for non-alcohol-related reasons). The whole family had stomach flu. I staved it off for a while but finally relented while Taylor Dayne's "Tell It To My Heart" was on MTV. I couldn't listen to that song for years.

Bobby C00ns was a completely mental kid in our neighborhood who threw a stick in my spokes when I rode by him on my bike one time, and who one other time crawled out of the school bus window while we were stopped at a red light and ran away. Would not be at all surprised to discover that he's currently dead or in prison.

I was way into Spaceballs. I drew a ton of comics, many of which were Cracked-esque parodies (Cracked seemed much more aligned with my sensibilities than Mad was). I got really good at drawing ALF, and I was way into creating mazes.

I saw Revenge Of The Nerds at a friend's house and was completely scandalized by the full-frontal nudity on display. I didn't think they could show something like that in a mainstream movie.

I drove a chisel into my hand while making a pinewood derby car for Cub Scouts. There's still a scar.

i have one more to add. i can't remember whether this is age 9 or 10 but it's in that time frame.

it's the mid-'80s and my parents are part of the new york folk music/environmentalist community. one weekend we go upstate to a festival, and like a lot of other people there for the fest, we go camping instead of stay at a motel. this happens to be the weekend i get my period for the first time. the campsite has a small restroom facility, but the line for the ladies' room is very long. my mom -- not shy about these things -- announces to the queue of women that her young daughter has just had her first period, and asks if i can skip to the front of the line. i'm HORRIFIED. i think someone offers up a pad, but i can't remember. that night, i sleep in a tent, with blood, cramps, and mosquito bites. not sure we ever go camping again after that.

I played Tiny Tim in our 5th grade stage rendition of A Christmas Carol, not because of my acting but because I was the smallest boy in my grade.

Ten happened during a harrowing period in my childhood. I keep trying to write about the good or interesting parts, but it keeps coming back to the harrowing parts.

I do have really good memories of walking to the store for Archie comics every chance I got, and going to the laundromat with my mom, which was awesome because I got to hang out with her and I always got a diet Dr. Pepper and a Klondike bar.

This is so amazing:

"Here's an actual entry of mine (I brought my first diary in to work today, pages 59-61):

"Monticello" "10 3/4" Real Late May 1988: Today in school we went to visit Monticello, Ashlawn, and U.V.A. On the way there I sat with Suzanne. We both wrote "I love Jeremy!" on our hands. Everyone found out. Then I wrote a note to Jeremy that said, "I love you" and it also had clues of who it was. He did find out that me and Suzanne wrote it. In the afternoon I sat with Nichole. She just had to write notes to Jeremy. They said stuff like, "Sarah loves you!" I felt like killing her. Then came the biggie! She asked him if he'd go with me. He said no. I could understand that since he was going with Suzanne he wouldn't want to go with me too. But Nichole just wrote more notes. Finally he said he would not go with Suzanne either. Then he started staring at me for a long, long time. Before he had asked me to look straight in his eyes. I was SO sad that almost cried. Noah joked about it. Then Jeremy said he'd go with me if I would love Eric just as much. I liked Eric only as a friend, and was afraid there was a catch to it, so I said "No." Then he stared at me some more. I showed him my hand, but he didn't budge. Finally, when we got off the bus at school, Noah said he'd call Jeremy tonight! - end

― Sarah McLUsky (coco), Monday, June 23, 2003 6:33 AM (11 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

Gayer than now, in both senses of the term.

creepy stuff imo

Then he stared at me some more. I showed him my hand, but he didn't budge.

Some rando out there reading this just flipped his fedora.

On my tenth birthday, burned that I was the only kid whose parents hadn’t bought Super Mario Brothers 3, I made a very short birthday list: 1. Super Mario Brothers 3. Before my grandmother let me take it upstairs to play it, she made me explain what the game was about, what happened “after all the mushrooms and stuff”, and was very inquisitive about what kind of species of creature was Bowser. Even at that young age I recognized there she was grilling me out of a kind of disgust that a video game would have me so antsy to leave the party, and I associated my love of Nintendo with a kind of shame.

I lived in the country and went to a school in the city near my step-father’s work. It was a forty-five minute drive. We drove a kid named Oliver, who went to the same school. I didn’t realize what <Nike Airs + parents owned a BMW + riding lessons> meant at age ten, but Oliver was rich. One day, he looked at my step-father’s seven-year old beat-up peach minivan, and said “why don’t your parents buy a new car?” We were both really into the new Batman movie, which I had to watch in secret at Oliver’s house.

I was playing violin two hours a day. I was just starting to learn unaccompanied Bach. I was excited, because one of my favourite tapes was of Pinchas Zukerman and Midori playing the Violin Double Concerto, and I was learning Bach. I was given a radio, which I listened to in bed for a couple of hours a night. My favourite songs were “Iesha” by Another Bad Creation, “All Around The World” by Digital Underground, “Let Your Backbone Slide” by Maestro Fresh-Wes, “Do You Really Want Me Baby” by Salt-N-Pepa. There was a period where it seemed as if Timmy T’s “One More Try” was always in this station’s top ten; I hated that song. I remember hearing commercials on the radio station that tried to convince me to buy StarTropics. “You can talk to dolphins,” was the selling point. I was not interested.

My older brother (fifteen) had just bought an amazing new PC and was designing the artwork for a game called Jill Of The Jungle. I would sit next to him and watch him work. Sometimes he would switch over and play other games: Xenon 2, Speedball, Captain Comic. He would let me log on to BBSes and play TradeWars, but never often enough that I could actually get anywhere.

I was reading Lloyd Alexander.

Right before summer break, my friend Brian had a birthday party and invited about fifteen kids. We went to the town fair and bought combs that looked like switchblades. He had a pool and we all changed in the bathroom, separately, leaving our clothes in a big pile. When it was time for me to leave, I accidentally put on Scott’s underwear. Scott called me that night and said “you are wearing my underwear”. The other kids made fun of me the next day, “look at his face! he enjoyed it!” Unfortunately, because it was right before summer break, I didn’t have time to repair my good social standing before going to stay with my father for the summer.

My father lived in the country, north of Antigonish. There was nothing to do at his house, so I watched VHS tapes of Fawlty Towers over and over again. I picked raspberries and my step-mother bought some pectin and some jars, and I made 20 jars of raspberry jam. Twice a day that summer I would make myself a snack of sliced bread, butter and jam. I had no physical sense of self, and I put on a lot of weight. When I came back to my mom’s, my aunt saw me with my shirt off and said “wow, you look like a blimp!” I had a mild eating disorder for the next five years.

I remember virtually nothing from being 10-years-old except a deep appreciation for Allen Sherman.

a fflam is valiant

xp

I saw this picture in a library book:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/The_cow_pock.jpg

Not realising it was supposed to be satirical, I freaked out and didn't sleep for three days. Felt so relieved when I eventually told my Dad why I was looking like a zombie and he explained that people couldn't really grow cow heads out of their arms.

BUMP

You first.

No fear I went already