The People Who Choose To Love Me

The People Who Choose To Love Me
This is my family. Watermark and all.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The Moral Of The Story Is To Not Be A Jerk In School

A while back, my husband and I made the move from California to Arizona. We decided to start fresh in a new place that has a lower cost of living. With four kids though, this means a lot of emotional upheaval, A LOT of things to pack (mostly dress up clothes and five beds), and throwing a lot of stuff out that takes up a lot of room that we have been uselessly hanging on to for nostalgic purposes.

I had not one, NOT TWO, but THREE boxes of old poetry, essays, journals, and scraps of paper that I had poured my heart out onto as a kid (mostly around age sixteen) that were just stacked up in all of my many closets over the years collecting dust and probably a few vermin.

Anyway, based on the few key words I picked out from the pieces of paper I flipped through, and the amount of times I mentioned the band Suicidal Tendencies, I can sum up my entire adolescence in three pictures. I don't even need captions for them but I'll put them in there anyway because I like to.

 Middle school me. I was terribly uninformed on the fashion of the times and liked to wear a pair of pink and purple overalls that my grandmother made. They had little hearts embroidered all over them and I liked to wear them WITH ONE STRAP UNDONE. That's right. I was that white kid.


Phase II. This one lasted awhile until I realized John Hughes and Molly Ringwald could only be replaced by Clerks and Randall Graves, which brings us to Chapter 3...


The Final Chapter. 
 This is what the latter teenage years, all of my twenties, and, let's face it, all four years of my thirties have looked like. He's my belly button twin. 

I think I have grown immensely as a human being over the years, but I still have a long way to go in the attitude department. And the patience department. I wasn't necessarily a bad kid but fostering a bad attitude gets you almost nowhere. I have learned over the years to appreciate hard work and taking responsibility for my actions, even though it's waaaaay easier to push the blame off on some schlep and take all the glory for myself.

I have been better at making friends (and keeping them) and I have met some amazing people over the years. My friend Rhondda is one of these people. If it weren't for her over the last three years I would have surely gone insane from living in a small town with almost zero like minded people. Rhondda is hilarious and our daughters are best friends and we can sit for hours and talk about anything from child rearing to alien invasions and she never once has judged me based on my opinions, beliefs, or cynicism.

In case you think I'm making up what kind of kid I was, Rhondda has brought proof! She was at my daughter's old school and saw this beauty hanging up on the wall from 1997.

I am at the top right. I'm pretty sure this was the face I wore all day, every day, until after I graduated high school. The sun was  in my eyes a little here, but I had resting bitch face for a total of six years growing up.  Now that I think of it, I was probably not a great fit for the Drill Team. Mostly because you're supposed to smile and stuff, but also because I hate the Macarena.
Everyone else in the picture was lovely and I still talk to a couple of them via social media now. I so wish I would have figured out the secret of just being a nice person at this point in time. It would have made life a lot easier. But, poetry wouldn't be the same without self inflicted misery, now would it?

10 comments:

  1. LOVE the resting bitch face photo. And a drill team member no less. That combination is hilarious. I wounder if we would have been friends in high school? I was in Band but my best friend was on the Pom-Pom squad. Thankfully fate has brought you and I together in our older and wiser years so we can appreciate each other's humor. If you had been a bitch to me in high school I would have totally iced you out. Because I hold grudges. I have resting bitch face on the inside I guess.

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    1. It's really hard to realize when you're doing it. People think I'm mad all the time but I'm just thinking about something. And, I'm positive we would have been friends!!

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  2. I was afraid this was going to be about one of your kids having a hard time in school. It sounds instead like you just had a bad case of the usual teen angst and a lot of poetry. That's how it is when you're a teen: things go from bad to verse.
    Fortunately you haven't lost that creative drive. You've just lost those crazy overalls.

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    1. I love that, Chris!! From bad to verse... I'll have to remember that the next time my teenager writes a passive aggressive story for English class about how crappy her "pretend" mom is. And, I would totally rock those overalls if I still had them.

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  3. HA, totally did the one-strap overalls too, but mine were purple and white and part of it was polka-dotted and part of it was plaid or something, which I guess was legal in the 90s. Oh and of course my friend had the same ones so we could be twins!

    Also I still have RBF.

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    1. I love when people have RBF. I always wonder, "What is it? Your boyfriend? Money problems? Period?" The mystery excites me and challenges me to make the person laugh. I'm glad I wasn't the only one strap gal around.

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  4. We all went through "awkward" adolescence. You were also a sensitive writer on top of it all. That didn't make it easy. Love the cheerleader picture. That about sums up those years.

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    1. Thanks, Laurie. You're just about the sweetest. :D

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  5. I've got a 14 year old boy with an attitude that won't quit. For males is it still RBF? Or maybe RAF (Resting Asshole Face) works better?

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