24: on being twenty

Since turning twenty I have:

• lost one friend, alienated several others, and ruined a several-year relationship with The (Ex) Boy -- who I will never mention here again at the fear of being dooced -- all through my own stupidity and destructive behavior
• defeated my internet addiction (I'm only on all of the time now because I haven't got anything else to do)
• bought a new fish to replace my last one, Laertes, who I killed in a tragic accident with a bathroom sink
  
• written most of a book
• run away to europe for two months. paid for it all myself. survived. thrived.
• cut off over a foot of hair
  
• read maybe fifty books (I do not have my book journal at work with me and so do not have the exact number)
  
• decided to go back to school
• did I mention EUROPE? Eight foreign countries? Feeding myself, navigating twisty streets and train stations, fending off amorous frenchmen? Surviving in Paris alone despite not speaking french and being terrified out of my mind?
• forcibly asserted my independence from the family
• changed
  

And there are still seven months left.

p.s. Nablopomo is finally defeating me. Can't. Sentence. Properly. Maybe tomorrow I'll just post something from a notebook that I've already written.

Ten

I don't remember being ten. I keep thinking of things and realizing that no, that was when I was nine, or eleven, or eight, or twelve. When I was ten I was in fifth grade. In one year I would realize that I was growing breasts and this sudden push towards adulthood would traumatize me so completely that I would never quite recover, but at ten I was still blissfully disconnected from temporal reality.

My two best friends and I played Star Wars constantly, reenacting scenes from the movies sometimes, but mostly making up elaborate stories of our own. Because I was best at slouching and drawling and being sarcastic, I was Han Solo, but my secondary role was Everyone Else because Katie had a monopoly on the role of Princess Leia. Sometimes you might convince her to do a Chewie roar or a stormtrooper, but she always reverted quickly. I never minded: playing every single character gave me almost full control over the plots of our games. I was the sole mastermind of political intrigues and kidnappings! At the time I was very proud of my plots, but in retrospect a lot of our games consisted of gossiping about Luke and when he was going to find a good woman and settle down.

When our third friend played with us she had to be Luke, which she didn't like. We tried to invent a new jedi for her, but Katie and I had so finely honed our interactive storytelling that there wasn't much room for a third mind. Instead, we tried games for three people: Redwall, The Golden Compass, and our famous original, Crazy Tour Guide. Jessica got the role of the Crazy Tour Guide, and she did it amazingly. Katie and I invented an ever-rotating cast of six to ten characters who were taking an exotic tour to the amazon or the sahara or the moons of Jupiter. We always played several characters each to allow room for knocking some off. Travel with the Crazy Tour Guide was dangerous, after all.

(The Tour Guide was crazy mostly because she believed herself to be an alien from Jupiter. She also had a zeal for dangerous sports and a criminal apathy towards the safety of her charges. Also? She could time travel. Jess played her as deliciously spacey and eccentric, somewhere between new-age koogy and obsessively scientifcic.)

The only other thing I can remember is the boy who sat between Katie and me for half a year, and only because on Valentine's day he presented us each with a Reese's Peanut butter Cup and asked us out, both at once. We took the candy, but rejected him. His name was Tommy, but we called him Monkey Boy. He really did have remarkably simian features, almost like a neanderthal. I saw him in August at Wal-Mart or something and it's just gotten worse over time. Poor kid.

3: Friday Five

I have seen blogs do Friday fives -- a list of five questions that you post and answer on your blog. I may fall back on some of these lists later, as I become more and more desperate for content, but for now I am going to use the concept for a different set of themed Friday posts. There are four Fridays in November. Four times five is 20, which is my current age. This begs me to devote my Fridays to reflections on multiples of five in my life. Or really just the ages five, ten, 15, and 20.

Enough preamble. When I was five-years-old:

• I decided that I didn't like bananas. I remember the moment: we were on an inexplicable picnic in the middle of an empty sagebrush desert. My prepared lunch was a peanut butter and banana sandwich. One bite it and it occurred to me that bananas were completely unacceptable foods and no one should consume them ever! I screamed and dropped the sandwich and enraged my parents. This was the beginning of the systematic axing of foods from my diet that lasted for twelve straight years and cumulated in those three months when I ate nothing but fat free pretzels and peanut butter toast. I'm working on reversing the process. But I still won't eat bananas.
• My kindergarten teacher was evil. She was the sort of person who should not be allowed to look after small children. Maybe she had started out saintly-patient, but years of laboring to teach five-year-olds to tie their shoes had turned her cantankerous, even cruel. She had a particular dislike for my first best friend. Once she refused to accompany S. to the bathroom, and, when she started to cry because she really needed to pee, the teacher put her in time-out. Poor S. wet herself, her chair, and the carpet around her. We spent years speculating on the source of Miss P's vendetta. Our reconstructions indicate that Miss P's persecution of S. began when S. accidentally dropped the class rabbit after it scratched her. Obviously the rabbit was as unsuited to kindergarten as the teacher.
  
• My dad bought me my favourite stuffed animal, a grey squirrel, at a Grand Canyon Lodge. He was, specifically, a kaibab squirrel. I named him after my father, and he soon became king of all of my stuffed animals. His full title is King Richard the Flying Kaibab Squirrel, but close friends and family had permission to call him Ricky. [Note: kaibab squirrels do not fly, but I had no idea about this until I looked up that wiki article. I blame this lifelong misconception on my father, who read me the information card that came with Ricky.]
• I refused to respond unless I was deferentially referred to as Princess. I stopped calling my parents 'Mama' and 'Papa.' Instead, I called them King and Queen. The titles eventually dropped off, and ever since then I've called them by their first names.

To any poor souls who find their way here: what do you remember about being five-years-old?