| SwankiVY's Life Story! |
SwankiVY's High School Years! Be sure and click links and thumbnails while reading for the multimedia swankivy experience! Or see them all in one place here: Ninth Grade: 1992-1993 High school began for me at Riverview High School in Sarasota. I took a summer tennis class through the school just for fun, where I met a guy named Bill that I liked and pretended to have a crush on (but really just liked talking to). After the summer was over, I started grade 9 in the August of 1992. I got contact lenses to help with my continually degrading vision (argh), and I had a hard time with them because I think eyes are icky to look at, so I couldn't even look at mine to see where I was putting the contacts. I learned anyway, though to this day I don't look in the mirror while I'm doing it. I enrolled myself in a basically honors-everything-but-math curriculum: I took Geometry, English Honors I, Earth Science, Health, Personal Fitness, and this strange class that was called "Family Living" for the first half and "Child Development" for the second. But the most important class was a big change from middle school: I joined the chorus.  Chorus shaped pretty much the next decade of my life, and it began in Mrs. Mullett's Girls' Chorus. I joined the chorus because my mom made a comment over the summer about loving to hear me sing, so I decided I would take chorus instead of strings; I didn't have any idea how much that would affect my high school and college career! I walked into the class on day one and saw my friend Kristen sitting near the end, so I sat near her and struck up a conversation. When the teacher came in, she explained to us that our voices were too young to have matured into anything but soprano at our age, so her philosophy was to indiscriminately assign voice parts to us based on where we were sitting. The left section of girls became first sopranos, the middle section was the second sopranos, and the right section was the altos. Yup, that's how I ended up singing alto in freshman year. (If you have heard me sing you may find it hard to imagine me singing the low women's part, but that's how it happened.) Mrs. Mullett was a super-inspirational teacher who really made me want to try hard. She announced early on that she wanted all of us--even if we were beginners--to try out for All-State Chorus, which involved many exercises such as sight-singing, ear training (mostly identifying intervals and chord types just by hearing them), and taking dictation (writing down music by hearing it played). I found out quickly that I was very good at all these things and became minorly obsessed with learning about music theory. We worked little cram sessions into our daily rehearsals--most of which were just learning songs for the first concert--and soon enough the All-State tryouts were upon us. I got the highest scores in my school for the 9th/10th grade division, and so I was allowed to try out for the next audition. Only three girls from our class got in, and I became good friends with Moni, the other girl in the alto section who had made it in. (The other was a girl named Melissa, and we weren't close but knew each other from middle school.) Those who had passed the auditions received packets of music to learn and study, and come the next audition we'd have to perform our parts with octets of random people from schools all over Florida. I drove everyone crazy at home practicing my music, I'm sure, but I learned my parts very well and passed that audition too, which meant I had made it into the SATB 9th/10th Grade All-State Chorus. Definitely one of the big achievements of my high school life. Meanwhile, in non-chorus-obsessed life, my friend Kristen had developed a crush on a boy named Peter, and as I came to know of him through her, it turned out HE developed a crush on ME. Luckily Kristen's interest had waned somewhat by the time Peter wrote me a note and asked me if I would date him. I was a little taken aback because I hardly knew the guy, but I had NOT been popular in middle school and no one had ever been interested in me that way, so the flattering notion that someone thought I was cute spurred me into saying yes. By October 1992, I had my first boyfriend.
I was into the television shows Tiny Toons, Beavis and Butt-head, and Liquid Television, and I kept in touch with my friend Emily from middle school even though she was going to a different school. She taught me about a strange phone number you could call--we called it "the Bridge"--and it would connect you with a bunch of other people, whoever happened to be calling in. It was like an early version of a chat room, except on the phone--you never knew if it'd be empty or have other people in it, but it was a cool way to do three-way calling even if you didn't have that feature on your phone. I met her friends Jason and John during this period, which freaked my parents out when they found out because these guys were like nineteen years old or something and I was only fourteen. Also, my friend Kristen was always having drama with her family and friends, and I got drawn into that sometimes, talking on the phone or hanging out with her to try to figure out what the hell was going on and trying to help her. Life went on. Besides the usual doing of homework, hanging out with friends, and watching TV, I concentrated a LOT on chorus and practiced my little teenage butt off. It paid off; in December we had the "Madrigal Dinner" which was like a Renaissance program where we entertained guests for several hours with songs and dances, though it was mostly run by Center Stage, Riverview's more advanced show choir. I was kinda bedazzled by them--they were all upperclassmen and they got to wear cool outfits and do awesome little dances, and they sang so well. My Girls' Chorus pals and I were just random wenches, though the other two All-State girls and I were picked to do our own song where we wandered around singing "The Beggars' Round" while asking for money. People actually gave us cash even though we weren't expecting them to. It was neat that we had our own song, but I wished I could have been in the Center Stage.  In other areas I was still being very creative. I wrote a short story and re-formed it into a novella, representing my first honestly edited piece of fiction. It was called "Al's Story," about a girl who has an alien's baby. I doodled in class while bored often. At the beginning of that year I guess I got it in my head that I wanted to write another book (maybe a New Year's resolution?), so I started one, but I didn't write it with a fire under my butt like my other stuff. It was a vague and meandering science fiction story and involved a middle school student who could read people's minds. It was kind of a difficult book because a lot of the stuff I was writing was autobiographical and I wanted to stay away from that sort of thing, but I guess, having just gotten out of being in middle school myself, a lot of my own experiences leaked in. I plugged away at it anyway, and sorta forced some innocent romance into it because I thought I might be expected to. It didn't get a title, but I called it the "Skyler Stories Project" because that was the main character's name. I also wrote another poem and called it "Stowaway on Planet Earth." (These writing links do leave the autobiography area because they're actually on my novel and poetry info pages, so be sure to get back to this page if you want to continue reading.) Shortly thereafter, in February of 1993 . . . Center Stage chorus had TRYOUTS. I was like, wow, I have to try! I auditioned, and they picked me! So I was set to be in the school's most advanced chorus when the program started up next year. In the meantime, we started training for district contests, which occurred in March of 1993. Our chorus received superior markings, which meant we were allowed to go on and compete at state level. We were overjoyed, of course. Some upperclassmen competed with solos, too, and I hadn't known that was an option; inspired by my classmates, I would later go on to do solos at district level every year, but as a freshman I didn't know about it.  By this point of course all my friends were boy-crazy, and having a boyfriend who didn't seem particularly obsessed with trying to get me in bed kinda protected me from having to deal with it for most of the year. I think our first kiss was when my mom demanded that we do so while she was dropping him off at home or something. I got my first french kiss from him (and a few more after that) but they were over very quickly and I wasn't sure what to think. I did know there wasn't anything I liked about it, and I knew the idea kinda grossed me out, and I do recall thinking it was gross one time when he chewed my used gum. Whoa! In any case I thought boys generally did gross things (like, Peter liked to burp into a Crystal Pepsi can and pretend to "hold it in" until he had to burp again and "let it out"), so that wasn't too surprising. Most of our relationship pretty much seemed to be "guy and girl who hang out and might occasionally smooch or hold hands." He wasn't someone I told everything to or wanted to spend all my time with. But speaking of boys, I was still getting phone calls from those boys I knew through Emily. Jason was the main one, and he was intriguing, but he had quite an ego sometimes and pissed me off by going on about how smart, unusually sensitive, or talented he was at whatever. He once told me he could hypnotize me over the phone if he wanted to. I totally let him try it. It didn't work. He was one of the first people with whom I was able to have real philosophical conversations, though. After we stopped talking I really wondered what happened to him. The other guy, John, was also interesting to talk to but a lot of what he wanted to talk about (or argue about) was me and my attitude toward sex and relationships. I already had a boyfriend but I wasn't interested in sex with him, and John said there must be something wrong with the guy if he wasn't "pursuing" me and I should maybe hang out with someone who could show me a good time or whatever. I was like, screw you, I'm fifteen. I once got grounded from the phone for talking to him too much. Especially when my parents found out how old he was. (Thppt!) I didn't watch a lot of TV during that time but I still liked my Doogie Howser and Parker Lewis and had started liking a couple other stupid things on TV. I still really liked animation, and Nickelodeon came out with a show called Roundhouse which seemed especially interesting to me because it was musical. When May rolled around, our whole chorus program went to State Festival and competed with the best of the best. I had to do double duty, singing with the Girls' Chorus as well as Mixed because there weren't enough altos in the women's group. We did very well, with superior ratings in two of our groups and an excellent in the other. Ahh, and then I found out my family was moving. That was devastating. I thought my world was going to fall apart because everything had gone so well for me and I was looking forward so excitedly to being in the show choir program . . . and I wasn't going to be able to. I seriously considered asking my parents if I could move in with my grandparents so I could continue going to Riverview, but it wasn't going to happen. When my boyfriend found out, he broke up with me because he didn't want a long-distance relationship (his breakup note told me he was "bord of me" anyway, which was lovely), and I started eating lunch with my old friend Jenna and her group instead of with Peter. There wasn't much of school left to worry about anyway. Weirdly, my friend Sharon's boyfriend Shawn heard that I was newly single and all of a sudden broke up with her and asked me out in a rather strange note, talking about how he'd liked me for so long. I was like, wow, I don't even know you. What the hell? I did end up going to dinner with him once, but was very specific about not wanting to be his girlfriend.
I ended the year with decent grades: B's in Geometry, English, and Earth Science, and A's in the Family Living/Child Development class, the Health class, and of course Chorus. After school was out, I took a class I needed to receive my learner's permit. My friend Jenna was in my class, which made the boredom tolerable. I passed the class and went to the DMV and got my first ever official ID. In my photo I looked about ten. And then I also got to go to Show Choir Camp at the end of June, which was held at what would one day be my college, the University of Florida.
That summer I took a summer school class in typing (where I got my modest start to becoming a SPEED TYPIST!!) and another one in team sports to get a physical credit out of the way. The team sports class had so few enrolled that we actually . . . really didn't get to play any team sports. We did a little tennis and some dumbness, but I recall the teacher giving us whole sessions where we got to play cards and drink pop. My friend Jenna was in that class too and that was cool; it was the last time I hung out with her and we didn't keep in touch. I got my braces off (FINALLY!!!) on July 7th of that year, and then we moved to Tampa. We did some school touring but ended up settling on getting me enrolled at Chamberlain Senior High School. In our new house, I got my own room, though I didn't get to decorate it right away because we rented rather than bought the house at first. Tampa, in a different school district than Sarasota, had different rules for how school was run, and in this area high school started with tenth grade while eighth and ninth were some kind of junior high and sixth and seventh graders went to some bizarre places called "centers." I enrolled in the usual classes: English, math (I took Algebra II), science (I took Biology Honors), and social studies (World History Honors), plus I signed up for Spanish and . . . chorus. Again. A huge disappointment occurred when we tried to make contact with the chorus teacher, Mr. Compher, ahead of time, and he didn't really see what the big deal was. I had a recommendation letter from my previous teacher and glowing reviews that were supposed to indicate to him that advanced chorus was an option for me, but he wasn't interested in auditioning me or anything of the sort. "Nope. All sophomores start in beginning choir. Period." Wow! So, all that practice and work and participating in All-State Chorus meant nothing to this guy, and I would have to share my musical life with beginners and perform what might as well have been remedial material. It is NOT fun to sit around while new singers learn to read music, and I'd already done it once. Just like having to be the youngest grade in the school again like last year, I was basically facing repeating a year having an experience I hadn't cared for the first time. Plus no chance at being challenged in the subject which meant the most to me. I grumbled and enrolled in Women's Chorus.  I started school at Chamberlain on August 19, 1993. I quickly got into the swing of things; I made friends with an alto named Amy and bonded with some of the cool girls in my chorus class. What was weird was a LOT of these gals were unusually advanced in music and had gotten the same crappy deal I had. My Spanish class, taught by Mrs. Quintana, was fun because it had a different vibe from most of the honors classes I was taking, and this was enjoyable rather than annoying mostly because of my friendship with a girl named Heather. (She had told me enthusiastically on the first day of school that she intended to make friends with at least one person in each class. I was her choice.) We passed notes and sometimes I helped her with Spanish verb conjugations. I revamped my Oatanese code language to be easier to write and not so obviously a "code" for English letters, and I gave Heather a key to the code, but she never became "fluent" as it were. I got better at writing in it and used it often to write notes to myself or to write in my diaries so no one could read them. (I also continued writing in a new private diary, which lasted me until I was through with junior year. I didn't write often, but when I did, it was cathartic.) It turned out that Amy and Heather and I all wore the same shoes (black Converse All-Stars), and sometimes when we all wore them on the same day it was dubbed "Shoe-Day" and we'd do a dance or something. Amy was also in my biology class, and though we were not lab partners we managed to have a lot of fun tossing notes at each other and making fun of our teacher Mrs. Wilson. (She was a good teacher, but we liked to call her "The Amazon Stewardess" because something about the way she dressed made her look like a flight attendant, and then she was REALLY tall.) That class involved some dissecting and it was really uncool. My lab partner Cuong was absent a lot (so much so that we called him "The Amazing Absent Lab Partner!"), so sometimes I ended up pairing with Amy anyway and there'd be a group of three. World History was taught by this rather nutty man named Mr. Saltzgaver. He was kinda notoriously out of touch, to the point where he actually appeared confused when our room full of teenagers burst into laughter at his educational film about pirates when the narration described their "endless quest for booty" or that "oil was used as an all-purpose lubricant." I was friends with a boy named Alex in that class, and we discovered that Mr. Saltzy didn't actually grade our work. (He tested this by filling in blanks sometimes with the word "penis." He'd still get A's on the worksheets.) I wasn't brave enough to do that most of the time, but after watching him grade our "current events" projects by not looking at them and drawing a line through the articles (so other people couldn't use the same ones), he would just give us full credit. I decided if he wasn't going to read them, I wasn't going to do them, and wrote my next set of essays on Suzanne Vega and Spam instead of the current events material. Yup, I got full credit. One day while leafing through newspapers to find articles to use for one of these projects, I found a mention of a journalist wanting folks to send him mail about "What's so great about Beavis and Butt-head?" I liked that show but it was banned at my house because my mom thought it was sick. Which of course made me want to watch it more. I wrote to the newspaper guy and told him I liked the show not because it was stupid, but because it accurately reflected how stupid some of my peers are. Ha. Chorus was okay, but I felt like my teacher specifically disliked me since I had expected to be treated like something other than a beginner when I came in. I hit him up for information about All-State and was upset to find out he hadn't been planning to mention the opportunity to his beginning chorus members. I got really pissed off and asked him if that was a rule or something, and he said if I REALLY wanted to he guessed I could try out--that is, if I thought I could make it. I MADE IT LAST YEAR, HELLO. The only thing I liked more about this teacher was that he actually did test our voices for range and put me where I belonged in the soprano section. (I sang first soprano from then on in every chorus I've been in.) I of course did try out for All-State and passed the first audition. The octet auditions were held at our school, actually, and so it was no problem to attend them. I passed that too, but it was still to be decided whether I'd be in the all-women's or the four-part chorus when the time came. I started hanging out with Amy on the patio before school, since we were both on an early bus and had to do something to pass the time. We sometimes had a Frisbee game going and one of her friends was in a Christian group which liked to get together in the same area to sing religious songs and have a prayer circle. Mostly we just all stood around talking and joking around. A lot of Amy's friends were people who went to junior high with her, and I was kinda not a part of their group, but I knew some of them and they were mostly friendly. Amy and I sometimes did creative things like make lists of weird stuff to do, and in biology class we got bored one day and started writing bizarre phrases on a piece of paper, which we'd leave in the desk for other students in other classes to find. (We called this practice our attempt to have "Desk Pals," but it really never worked. However, one day I drew a character named Pimpy the Stud-Mouse, and we laughed about it. He would later become famous.) We'd also try to beat the teacher to class so we could write something insane on the board. The "alternative" music scene had hit the mainstream hard, and that year's music awards were full of alterna-rock folks. Heather and I really liked the 4 Non Blondes and had fun talking about music and singing to it. We had a teen girl notebook that we exchanged with dumb notes to each other during Spanish class. I went to her house I think just once. Sometimes she'd come to mine. But for some reason she had to switch schools, I think. So Amy and I had to have Shoe-Day by ourselves. I liked a lot of alternative type music but also some pop, and my sister was still a fan of metal and some of the alternative stuff I liked. I got into Belly, Björk, Blind Melon, the Breeders, Frente!, Smashing Pumpkins, Ween, The Residents, and Negativland. I had to hide my Ween tapes from my mom because there were some really filthy songs. I still liked more mellow music too, like my Suzanne Vega and some oldies (especially Simon and Garfunkel), as well as some New Age artists; it was around this time that I started liking Jan Hammer and David Lanz/Paul Speer.
And speaking of reading, I liked reading silly and serious science fiction, and occasionally fantasy stuff, but most people seemed to think that if you liked fantasy you must like magic and dragons and wizards and D&D, and none of that stuff was interesting to me. I enjoyed the work of Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert, Octavia Butler, William Sleator, and to some extent Stephen King (loved his storytelling style, but his subject matter bothered me). I thought the Hitchhiker's jokes were hilarious, and started being silly with my friends by answering questions with "42!" since that was after all the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. I also made a hobby out of putting weird things in my purse, including a can of Spam, a spatula, and a small washcloth that I referred to as my towel (since all good hitchhikers are supposed to have one). The boys on our bus thought I was weird, especially when Amy and I sang songs like Weird Al polkas and "Chapel of Love" in harmony. My sister and I very occasionally baby-sat for a family in our neighborhood somewhere. They had two sons and a baby girl, and we'd do a tag-team effort where we'd each be responsible for one kid. (I'd take the older and she'd take the younger, and the baby girl was always already asleep when we were there.) One day after we finally got the kids to go to bed, I saw the parents' newspaper and picked up the Friday Extra, and there was an article about Beavis and Butt-head in there and they'd used a quote from me, from that letter I'd sent in! I felt famous. My sister was amused by it. A bunch of my classmates had seen my name and mentioned it to me when school started again after the weekend. Even my Amazing Absent Lab Partner said something. (Shortly thereafter, he moved back to China.) Hanging out with Amy on the school patio gave rise to the entrance of another person in my life who would be partially responsible for shaping the rest of it. Phil, recently broken up with his girlfriend, was on the rebound and spotted me sometime in October because our people hung out near his people. He liked the way I dressed (I was a fan of cute bodysuits and skirts and decorating myself in innovative ways), so he came over to talk to me. Soon he was flirting with me and writing me notes and wanting to call me. I didn't really know what to do with that because I had started realizing I wasn't attracted to other people the way all my friends were, so even though I was friendly to Phil I wasn't interested in him that way. I was excited because he was interested in my writing and had some things in common with me, though, so I had fun having long conversations with him. (He read my half-finished book about the middle-school girl.) Halfway through October he asked me to be his girlfriend. I said no.  Despite Phil's antics, I did have a good time with what he ended up bringing to my life; he had a group of friends who became my friends as soon as I became a fixture in his life, and so my "group" became this group of older boys: Phil, Aaron, Bryan, and Steve. They were all juniors, and then there was a senior girl named Meghan, whose relationship with Phil was kind of complicated so I was unsure of whether they were friends. (She was the one who'd broken up with Phil before I met him.) I only saw her here and there but I knew who she was. I found out later that most of them liked the show Animaniacs (which I didn't watch at the time) and Bryan, Aaron, and Meghan jokingly referred to each other as Yakko, Wakko, and Dot. Both Phil and Amy were into Weird Al, and I ended up borrowing an Al tape from Phil. Phil's influence also got me into Dr. Demento, as well as Monty Python (by listening to one of their music tapes), which I later started watching on TV, and I laughed my butt off at a filthy Adam Sandler tape. The gags on the tape became recurring jokes that my friends and I would shout at each other. I started eating lunch with the group instead of some quiet girls I knew from class acquaintance. When Phil was in a good mood, he'd be loud and obnoxious and try to throw grapes (or other things) down girls' shirts. When he was in a bad mood, he'd do some weird attention-getting thing like tell someone before lunch that he was going off by himself because no one likes him anyway, and we'd sometimes ignore him or sometimes play the stupid game and try to find him. It got tiresome, but we cared, so we tried. I was doing pretty good in school, and I took the PSAT. Amy and I had a lot of silly inside jokes and we tended to write notes to each other in biology class, which we would crumple into a ball and throw across the classroom. (I don't think we ever got caught.) We had stupid hand signals and gestures we'd do at each other in chorus class to make each other crack up--there was one where we'd suggestively try to eat our own shoulders--and most people thought were were kind of psychotic. We got an idea that we should try to start a band, and Amy and I came up with some names for it. (Our favorite was "More Than Slightly.") We made tapes of songs we thought we could cover with two- or three-part harmony (if we could recruit a third girl for our group), and that's how I got to know the Indigo Girls. (I still like them a lot, and I'm pretty sure I got introduced to them because they were on the "Possibles For More Than Slightly" tape.) Around this time I also had my first professional voice lesson with a lady named Dawn; I've forgotten why I signed up with her, but maybe it was just to try to get more serious about my singing on my own since I wasn't really being challenged at school. Dawn was a college-level music teacher but she agreed to take me as a voice student and worked with me on some techniques. She got me a gig singing at some production, and later set me up to sing in a mall. I practiced for that and got my dad to be my accompanist.  I tended to be late to class a lot, and by December I ended up getting a lateness-related assignment for three periods of after-school detention. Phil tried to entertain me in detention by doing obnoxious things outside the window, like pretending to hang himself by his tie. (Yeah, he liked to wear a tie. References to the tie made it into my "Bruce the Duck" story.) When I wasn't busy in detention, Phil called me a lot, and so did a couple of the other friends. Steve and Aaron were interested in talking to me too, though it seemed like Bryan was more stand-offish. Besides these guys, my chorus friends Amy and later another girl named Ammy (also pronounced "Amy") were fun to hang out with, though for some reason I could never get Amy to hang out with me outside school. (Never really figured out why. She did sleep over once, but that was ONCE during our whole high school friendship. We wore our matching piano socks and took strange pictures that night, and we had quite a lot of fun, so it was weird that she never wanted to do it again. I used to joke that it was because her house was made of cheese and she didn't want me to find out. She would never comment.) Phil wrote me notes all the time and when we went out usually we'd have fun and then something dumb would happen like he'd try to kiss me and spend the next three days apologizing for it ("I'm so stupid, sorry, just for a moment I forgot we're just friends!"). I still didn't know what to do about that, but he'd keep writing me these notes about trying to understand what I really wanted and assuring me that he'd be there if I was ever ready. ::sigh:: The "It's not you, it's me" line didn't work very well on him, and he kept acting like my rejections of a relationship were a rejection of HIM. There was one time when he suggested I'd have to "try" the romance thing to see if I liked it, and that he could tell I wasn't experienced by the stuff I wrote in my stories. (Hmm. I bet he would have happily volunteered for research!) He also used to kinda test me to see if maybe I secretly liked him, by expressing interest in other girls or hinting that they looked hot to see if maybe I'd get jealous. He didn't really know how to handle it that I didn't care what he thought of other girls. (And in fact I would have preferred that he went after other girls, even if it meant I got to hang out with him less. This ended up being a very important aspect of me that he found out about in a big way later in our high school lives.) For his birthday in November, he requested a kiss. I provided him with a large-sized wrapped Hershey's Kiss in response. His letters to me frequently suggested that if he was bothering me, I could just forget he existed and never speak to him again, and that'd be fine. (Sure, I bet.) In December my performance in the mall came, and I performed "The Wind Beneath My Wings" and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." I forgot the words on one of the songs, but ad-libbed until I remembered. (My teacher was proud of me that I didn't go to pieces.) We got the whole thing on video but later the tape got eaten by a black hole when it was lent to my uncle or something. (Too bad; we played with the camera after and taped some really hilarious things, like my sister and me pretending to fight over an autographed poster of Pimpy the Stud-Mouse.) Another interesting thing was getting invited to Phil's aunt's house, where we watched movies and ate. I think that most of the time when I went to events with him, people assumed we were dating. He sometimes drew me neat little pictures with calligraphy writing. I still have a lot of them. There were times when he hung out at my house and he was on decent terms with my parents and (depending on their moods) my sisters. Lindsay and Phil kidded around and made up a code language at one time, which they dubbed "Philinzish." It wasn't secret or anything, though. They decided that someone's stomach is called "fuish." You can imagine what "subfuish" was. My relationship with him was okay for the most part, but it seemed every few days he was saying something really over-the-top offensive and pissing off me or one of my friends, and then he'd write me notes apologizing or asking me to tell someone he didn't mean whatever crazy thing he said. We all knew that that was just the way Phil was, but it was also really hard to treat the apologies as sincere when we all knew he'd do it again the next week. We had a holiday concert on December 2 for chorus, but we got lost on the way to the site and I missed my performance! And my mom was so frustrated with the experience that she didn't even let me stay to watch the rest of the concert, which ended up making my teacher very angry with me. He made me do some kind of make-up assignment and told me if I didn't do it I'd fail because the concerts are pretty much the closest thing to an exam that you can have in chorus classes. Later that month I got assigned to the women's four-part All-State chorus, which was unfortunately not as "elite" as the mixed four-part; I think part of the reason was that this year I had auditioned as a soprano and not an alto, and there were TONS more sopranos. It meant I had to learn new music, which was annoying. I went to those workshops and had a lot of fun, and we had a concert. My favorite song in that performance set was called "Life Has Loveliness To Sell." While I was there I had a sort of disturbing run-in with the folks from my old school. I actually saw some of them there and it almost seemed like they were talking to me out of obligation or something. I never did see them again after that. I think they were suprised I was now singing soprano.  In my English class we were assigned to write Shakespearean sonnets. Everyone freaked out and for some reason the teacher became sympathetic and relaxed the assignment so that you basically just had to write a poem of SOME kind. I was annoyed at that, because I liked standards, and wrote a damn Shakespearean sonnet anyway. (We had to pick from themes, though, and I picked "happiness." It was hard to squeeze that in, but I managed.) I wrote a poem called "Realistic," and read it to the class when asked. My teacher was so impressed that she had it entered in a contest. It didn't win anything. Probably because it didn't make a lot of sense if you actually think about it. I also had to write a short autobiography, and read and write essays on certain books from the reading lists. Mine were The Chosen and The Mayor of Casterbridge (links lead to a place where you can read the essays, if you're interested).
District contest arrived for our little chorus. I seem to recall it took some convincing, but I got my teacher to allow me to sign up to compete individually at the district level as well as with the Women's Chorus. I learned and practiced two classical art songs; if I remember correctly, they were "Per la gloria d'adorarvi" by Boncini and "On Wings of Song" by Mendelssohn. (You can hear me sing "Per la gloria" here, but it is not my high school performance; it was recorded much later.) But something awful happened: I got sick. And of COURSE it was the kind of sick that affected my voice. For several days before the contest I avoided talking almost completely. I had a few ready-made signs to flash at people to explain my inability to talk, and I religiously washed my throat with honey mixes and whatnot in accordance with folk remedies. In a practice run of my solo I tried little pieces of my songs, which was enough to satisfy my teacher that I could come in on time with my accompanist and whatnot, and then he ordered me not to sing anymore until my performance. (Yay.) I was so worried that I was going to screw up, but then I actually ended up singing my solo songs very well. I was very relieved after that and performed in the group as well, and afterwards on the same night there was a surprise birthday party for Amy at one of her friends' houses. I spent most of the night screaming on a trampoline with my friend Jen (the one who laughed like a dolphin), not caring that my voice was gone because I was temporarily freed from caring if it sounded okay. That night I went to bed totally exhausted and woke up in the morning after a long sleep, faintly hearing my mother getting a call from my chorus teacher on the phone. I'd gotten a rating of Superior on my solo (the best rating you can get). I was so happy I just went right back to sleep with a big smile on my face. It was nice to feel so relieved. That morning is still one of my favorite memories. Our chorus class started planning a trip to Washington, D.C., and we were going to perform in some kind of concert and go sightseeing. Amy and I had plans of our own: we wanted to come up with insane pranks to play on our chorus teacher while we were in D.C. We were planning to have Ammy in our hotel room, but we didn't have a fourth and the rooms were supposed to have four in them, so we ended up with a roommate named Stephanie whom we didn't know well. Amy and I were doing a lot of planning for our upcoming mischief for the trip.
We did our choral performance and did some touring in Washington, D.C. Our roommate Stephanie got violently ill on something she ate and had to stay in the hotel room. :( It sucked. We got propositioned by Hare Krishnas who wanted us to buy their books and their Bhagavad-Gita, and we actually did so. I started reading them and thought they were neat (since they lined up somewhat with my interest in meditation), and I briefly became a vegetarian. For like two days. Until I remembered that bacon is good. One day--keep in mind I was only sixteen--my parents and I were home alone for some reason (guess my sisters were with friends), and my parents were in a silly mood and wanted to go out, so we tried to look for a karaoke place to go to. I had never been to karaoke because usually they were bars and they wouldn't let a teenager in. We ended up not being able to find a karaoke place, but then my parents decided to take me to a comedy club. You had to be eighteen to get in. I didn't have an ID or anything, but my mom was convinced that she could make me look grown-up enough that they wouldn't ask. She put me in one of her outfits and did my hair and make-up, and sure enough . . . I got in! (My mom tried to push the envelope by trying to order an alcoholic drink for me, but they didn't buy it and asked for ID, so that didn't work. I didn't want the alcohol anyway, but my mom is a little mischievous, you know.) I don't recall the show being good, but it was definitely an experience, being treated like an adult by adults. I started watching a quirky television show called Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and most of the jokes from the show struck my group of friends as VERY funny. I obsessively taped the shows and would show them to my pals whenever we got the chance, and of course we repeated the lines to each other often. It was not unusual to hear us casually informing each other, "Yeah, I saw a yard gnome once. It didn't scare me!" or doing Zorak's hypnotism chant in the hallway. Meghan liked the show a lot and we passed the tape around. It was great, and of course many of the jokes survived as silly inside jokes. (To this day we can nonchalantly claim to have acquired "the sick of Moltar" and know what each other mean, et cetera.) A big project on an assigned reading was due near the end of April, and I had read Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. I got a B on it and was kinda disappointed. I was used to kicking butt in English. May arrived. I did something dumb: I climbed up on the roof to retrieve a Frisbee when someone threw it onto the ledge over the school patio, and then I just decided to jump off. I hurt my back a little. That was annoying. I went out to the beach with my friends (the road trip was amusing because we took two cars and the other car lost its hubcap!), but it was hard to have fun when my neck and back hurt. Urgh. Meghan was at that beach gathering and that was when I realized we had similar interests in music. We sang together at the beach and there was sort of a weird connection that we both didn't expect. I was disappointed that I only found out how cool she was just before she was going to go to college. Later that month we had to dissect a rat in biology class. It ended up being a PREGNANT RAT. Our teacher was so excited that it had babies inside it and became very enthusiastic. I was really grossed out. And it REALLY freaked Amy out. Aww! We had a chorus concert and had a neat song about the Creation story. (I didn't care that it was Bible stuff--it was a really cool song!) Then we had an awards ceremony and I got recognized as "Outstanding Sophomore of the Year" in chorus. I also got some other joke award based on how I sometimes wore blue sunglasses, and some of us got our "letter" to put on a letter jacket if we bothered to get one. (I didn't.) I got some other weird recognitions for all the stuff I'd participated in, so that was kind of a nice big ego trip. Then my chorus friends and I went to a HUGE audition for next year's Act I (the show choir). There were tons of people and lots of them were good. In fact, there were so many good auditions that our teacher decided to create a new group to hold them all; he kept a "mixed" Act I group and then created a new advanced women's choir that ended up being named Treble Makers. Amy and I got into that. Next year was set. I took my finals and did okay on most of them, but kinda got annoyed over lack of ability in math and history. (I was better at English and science, though I didn't like biology much except for the cool unit on genetics.) I got bored during final exams and wrote a silly poem called "Breaking Out of Structure." And then my year as a sophomore was over. That summer was interesting for a few reasons. First, my friend Aaron and a couple of the others were (at least in name, for some of them) active Christians, and Aaron had been bugging me to come to his Youth Group. I didn't want to, but after they convinced me it's mostly just social stuff (except there's some talking about Jesus here and there), I went along and my sister came too. Phil, Aaron, Meghan, and Phil's sister were also there. It was not a fun experience when the guy was doing the "talking about Jesus" part because he started pointing out how the Apocalypse was coming and lecturing us about how we could tell the signs were there (think "you'll definitely be seeing THIS around September this year!"), and then he had us all shut our eyes and raise our hands if we'd accepted Jesus. (Obviously he knew the status of the others there, 'cause my sister and I were the only ones who were new. This was directed at US.) The guy went on talking for a while as people sat there either with raised hands or not, lecturing us about how WE DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO OUR SOUL WHEN WE DIE AND blahdeblah this is the only way. He finally ran out of steam. My sister and I conversed afterwards and she was like "Did you raise your hand?" I said no. "I didn't either," she told me. Dude, that is not the way to convert people. There was singing and some people watching wrestling. Ho-hum. We went home and I never went there again. I had a lot more fun when we did silly things like go to karaoke and watch our friends sing songs while forgetting the words. (Eventually we had found a place called Legends that did allow underage people in, and sometimes my family went there too. We had a grand old time.) I took a summer chorus program at my school and participated in a show choir performance called "Rock the House." Some disagreeable people ruined some of it (most notably some prissy people who seemed to think being on the pep squad and teaching us cheesy choreography meant they also should be in charge of some of the singing decisions or something), but overall it was pretty fun. We had our concert on July 20th after extensive preparation, and I had a solo (my mom liked Whitney Houston, so I auditioned to sing the song "Run to You" and got chosen). I think I briefly met a girl who was soon to become an important friend--Mia--sometime that summer. I remember talking about having a Ween tape in my purse while we were both waiting for rides home. So basically we knew OF each other but that was probably the first time we met. She was about to be a sophomore at the school, as was my sister Patricia. I often had to wait a long time to get picked up due to my mom being either late or busy doing something else, so sometimes I wandered around the school while it was empty. I wrote a prose poem called "They Used to Be Here" in which I tried to capture the feeling of the sleeping school.
I had a friend taping the Animaniacs show for me, but I was really sad that I was missing it and all stupid obsessed. In any case, the camping was okay--I think it rained the first night and I almost froze my ass off because part of my sleeping bag got wet. But after that we had some climbing adventures, hiking around, seeing beautiful scenery, and socializing a little with the people who owned the land. (They had a daughter, but we didn't have much in common.) Heather was fun to have with us and we went exploring and took pictures. We discovered that Lindsay could burp really well if we fed her wine, and I wrote some new poetry while on the trip. My poem "Canopy" was about a cool experience I had looking at the light in the trees, and I wrote my poem "Sharing With Innocence" during the car ride. When I got back I watched my taped episodes of the cartoon show and acquired a copy of the soundtrack, quickly devoting myself to learning all the songs.  School started again in the fall of 1994. I was a junior (yaaay!) and I took two periods of chorus. This was possible because I was skipping math. The next logical class for me to take would be either a trigonometry class or an alternative called Analysis of Functions (largely mocked because it was abbreviated "Anal Fun" on the official schedules!), and I decided to stall a year and wait for my younger sister Patricia to catch up so that we could take a math class together in my final year of high school. (Hey, free tutoring!) I took the Treble Makers class (advanced women's), and I also got to be in Concert Chorus, a mixed group. I wasn't always serious about some aspects of the class--you know, the occasional blown-off assignment--but I normally gave it my all. Along with that I took an honors chemistry class, the honors-level English class, the second-level Spanish elective, and . . . AP History. The teacher of that class, Mr. Laundy, was the school's god. Seriously. He was this famously funny and cool older man who sometimes wore different-colored socks LIKE ME, and he would ramble about drinking and make dirty jokes and talk about historical events like he had BEEN THERE. Mr. Laundy's favorite bands were CCR and They Might Be Giants, and he could be coerced into singing their songs sometimes. It was amazingly entertaining, but it still didn't help me do well in history. I sucked. I proceeded to have fun in school by trying whenever possible to make my assignments interesting even when they weren't designed to be. Most notably, I did goofy things in Spanish class, writing creative things in response to my prompts. My teacher seemed to think I was a riot, and seemed to enjoy it when I kept trying to work in references to jumping on my bed. At one point we had to find partners and write a Spanish conversation to have in front of the class, and I harassed my partner into making it very silly with me. He was younger and I think he might have been a little intimidated by me. Heh.  In English, I continued to do well (despite my penchant for elaborate folder-decorating), completing the usual sorts of projects. That year I memorized and recited the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling, wrote a report called "The Little Man: An Analysis of the Humor of James Thurber," and read/analyzed the book The Great Gatsby through use of a journal, doing a final paper on the book. I unofficially joined the science Brain Bowl club even though I wasn't actually in the Science Academic Society, because all my friends were in science club and it seemed cool to me. Meghan may have been gone, but Phil and Steve and Aaron and Bryan were still there (though only Phil and Bry were in the science club), and there were tons of silly events. I played ping-pong with my friends in my parents' garage (though my parents, I believe, suspected me of doing OTHER things out there with Phil), and my obsession with Animaniacs was raging. I pissed off my friend Amy by harassing her to watch the stupid thing, and started obsessively collecting the merchandise and taping the shows. I had so many Animaniacs shirts gathered over the course of that year that I could wear a different one for THREE WEEKS and not repeat. Phil got irritated that Bryan and Aaron were "Yakko and Wakko" and seemed to think that meant I'd be doing something with them that I wouldn't do with him. He was still jealous of my cartoon loves and even a tree that I kissed. I knew it had to be a bit over the top when I received a school-sent Valentine that someone paid to have addressed from one of the characters. Hmm. Enter Mia.   I taught her my Oatanese language and she picked it up pretty well, and from that point on most of our notes to each other included some Oatanese in them; some of them were ALL Oatanese. She liked to use the expression "PO!" (it didn't really mean anything, and if you said someone was "po" you might just as easily mean something good as something bad), and I combined the Oatanese letter "O" with the Oatanese letter "P" and came up with a "letter PO," which we sometimes inserted randomly to make messages harder to decode. (Otherwise letters on their own might have been thought by a nosy person to stand only for either I or A, but now it could be PO!) Oatanese also actually got its name from Mia, though for a while we called it "Oatian" until we realized it sounded like "Ocean" and that was lame. It was based on some passing joke Mia made about a band called "Oatie and the Goats," but even though I don't remember anything about why it was funny (nor did I listen to that band's music), the name stuck. Soon enough we started actually filming the movie, with my sister's help. I made cutouts of all the characters and we read the script from offscreen in cheesy voices to simulate how they talked. We used lots of props and made lots of messes, and of course had tons of fun. You can actually watch a bunch of the clips on the "Bruce the Duck" movie page. Besides Mia, my new friend was a boy from my chorus named Mike. He had transfered to our school and claimed the attention of many a silly high school girl. I liked him, but a lot of the guys were sort of defensive around him because he had long hair and was a sensitive poet and was very individual and interesting, so their first inclination was to make fun of him and worry that their girlfriends were going to be taken in by his charm. I introduced him to my group--my guys didn't seem to really dig him--but Amy thought he was cool, and my sister liked him as well and we used to ride around in his very distinctive car listening to Tori Amos and being high school kids. He was obsessed with R.E.M. and was a big English geek, and Phil didn't like him. ::shrug:: Mike liked my sister's lunchbox (which was shaped like a car and covered with stickers), and we liked his Converse All-Stars. At some point I got to go visit Meg at college, see the dorm, and meet Dena. Dena was a good friend of Meg's and she apparently LOVED Animaniacs as much as I did. I found out while I was there that they had Internet access from the labs and were able to print all kinds of interesting stuff about Animaniacs, and because I had no idea what the scope of the Internet was at the time, I was disappointed that they hadn't printed out everything there was in existence for me. I spent some time copying song lyrics from a huge printout they had. They also gave me a printout of the Rocky Horror Picture Show script with audience participation lines inserted. And I even got an Animaniacs-related purity test to take home! Wow! I had fun chilling with my friends, and I briefly got to meet John too, who was a faaaabulous gay guy who was also very close with Meg and Dena. They were planning to get an apartment together the next year.  More of the usual silliness ensued. I went to see Rocky Horror Picture Show with some friends and lost my Rocky virginity (though I didn't have to do anything embarrassing because there were so many "virgins" that night and I didn't get picked). I auditioned and got in for All-State. I made the mixed group this time, and my favorite song in the performance was called "Musick's Empire." I was Dot from Animaniacs for Halloween. Our women's group did an advanced performance of "Dancing Day" with harp accompaniment, and I got to do the solo in our holiday concert. Some of the girls from our group went caroling in this one girl's neighborhood, only to find out most of them sang the same part and usually me and one other girl had to try to provide the harmony on our own. I performed at Solo/Ensemble Festival and this time only got an Excellent rating (performing songs called "Dedication" and "My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair," the latter of which you can hear me sing here, but it is not my high school performance; it was recorded much later)--I had a cold, actually. I was mostly a B student unless it had to do with chorus or Spanish class (got A's in those). I started writing an episode guide for the Animaniacs show (which was really, more than anything, a guide for what was on which of my videotapes), including song lyrics, color-coded scripts, and drawings of all the characters. And I took the stupid Animaniacs purity test from the Internet over and over, trying to be more disgustingly obsessed. Heh. I had a new year's party at which I kissed several of my friends when the clock flipped, and I ended up confusing the hell out of Phil by doing that. (I got a "Where do we stand??" note the next day.) I turned seventeen. Meghan sent me a whole box of Xanth books that year, and we had a special silly thing going with Aaron because he turned eighteen on January eighteenth and she turned nineteen on January nineteenth! I hadn't been a Piers Anthony fan before, but I thought the books were okay, and enjoyed being in on the jokes at that point when Meg would make them. There were twin princesses in the books named Ida and Ivy, and Meg decided we were their real-life counterparts. To this day the two of us have "Ida" and "Ivy" in our screennames. Heh.
We had such a good time that we decided the fifth of every month needed to be "Boognish Day"--Boognish was Ween's original deity, or something--and we'd wear the same clothes we wore to the concert and paint Boognishes on our faces. This set off a string of fake holidays such as Yarn Day, Bowl Day, and Pimpy Day. A day called "Chu-Head Day" appeared based on Mia's crazy Pac-Man-looking evil cartoon character that she liked to draw biting people's butts. (Her friend Molly had something to do with that, also--and Molly was pretty hilarious herself, having helped write many insane things with us when we had occasion to.) There was even a Mitch Kramer Day, but I didn't understand it because I had not watched Dazed and Confused. On Bruce Day, we wore shirts I'd made with puffy paint which advertised "Bruce the Duck" and claimed "I went to the Guava Tree and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." (I also sometimes puffy-painted Ween and "Bruce" references on my shoes. I liked decorating my clothing with our inside jokes.) I sometimes enforced Yarn Day and made people wear pieces of yarn on their bodies. Mike was very pleasant about this and usually consented to tie yarn on his Converse All-Stars. And life was good.
And of course less than a week later he was pushing for a more physical relationship and I demanded to know "what happened to you not wanting to change me?" His rationale was that he had a sex drive, and if he chased OTHER girls with his sex drive then it would constitute cheating on me. I told him to go ahead. He didn't like that answer. I placated him somewhat by consenting to try his backrubs and massages and whatnot (which didn't necessarily seem sexual to me), and he was encouraged by the fact that I enjoyed them. He was very good at it and was always the type of person who got energized by physical contact. At first it was a little weird to me but I got over it and liked it. I'd always loved having my back scratched by my mom as a child, and this guy was pretty much willing to do it all night if I wanted. We went on little dates, had silly parties with our friends, and spent a lot of time misunderstanding/being misunderstood and disappointing each other/being disappointed. It always took him a long time to wear me down into trying something "romantic" with him, until I got sick of his over-the-top reactions at my refusal and subscribed to "you don't know until you try it." (That was of course probably one of the worst things I could have done, but we all make mistakes.) The problem was that if I tried kissing him and then assured him that yeah, as expected I didn't enjoy it, he would act like I had REVOKED something he had once been allowed to do and that therefore he must have "done something" to upset me, at which point he'd start trying to "earn" the right to whatever it was again. Over the next few months I had a really hard time trying to find a good balance between keeping him happy and keeping him off my back. I really think he believed that one of these days my hormones would kick in and everything would be smooth sailing, but . . . that never happened. Soon afterward, Phil started liking Mia, and Mia kinda seemed to really get into anything I was into, so I guess she liked him back. Phil decided to pull a weird move: he asked me if I would mind him asking HER to be his girlfriend. I think this was set up to be a win/win situation for him. If I said he couldn't, this would mean I was exerting possessiveness over him. If I said to go ahead, then . . . HEY, two chicks! Needless to say, I was fine with him going after someone else--in fact, as long as she was receptive, I was thrilled that his attentions would be divided--and she accepted his terms. So I got to share my boyfriend with one of my best friends. Likely this sounds kind of psychotic. Goes to show you how honestly unaffected by normal human jealousy I was. Ehh. The three of us went to Tampa Theatre to see the movie Crumb and it was raining something nasty, and when we came out someone had smashed the window of Phil's car with a brick and stolen both our purses. Mia found hers in a trashcan nearby, but it had largely been emptied. (She was happy to find the purse, though. I had painted Animaniacs characters on it for her in puffy paint.) I didn't find mine, and we wondered if we would hear tales of downtown hooligans eating Spam and attacking people with mallets soon (since those things had been in my purse). Sometime after that my mom placed restrictions on me that I wasn't allowed to drive with Phil anymore for some reason, and Mia had no such restrictions, so the two of them got to go out and have fun and I didn't get to go. Wah. Nevertheless, we still had a lot of fun with small group gatherings, doing silly things like having a contest as to who could stuff the most marshmallows in our mouths, and of course we had little television marathons and pointless parties. It wasn't a bad high school life.
I still kept some of my pen pal relationships, and one of them was a guy named TJ. He was actually an imprisoned person--went to jail for something to do with theft, I think--and I never had "no prisoners!" next to my name in the friendship books so he started writing me. I wrote him about my silly obsessions and whatnot. He liked to draw and for a long time he would regularly send me cards featuring Disney or Warner Bros. characters, complete with semi-cheesy messages inside. One time he drew a picture of me in pastels. It was pretty good, based on my tenth grade school picture. I tended to write long letters to my few pen pals, and with the exception of TJ, they usually only wrote short ones back, seeming more interested in trading stickers. Hmmm. Phil was a senior, so his prom was approaching. He decided to ask me to go with him and I said yes. The search for a prom dress began. I ended up with a rather ugly blue dress because budget required me to shop at thrift stores and my tiny size made the available options very limited, to say nothing for my wish for a modest style. I didn't like the dress I got but at least I got one. Our friend Bryan had a girlfriend named Jenny (not the same Jenny from my Spanish class), but she at the last minute could not go because of a death in the family, so Bryan got Mia to go as her substitute. Steve had asked Heather to go with him, but for some reason she decided to switch and go with Aaron, so she brought her sister along to go with Steve. Her sister, who was in eighth grade. ::blink::
Mia and I hid under the table for part of the prom for some reason. It wasn't a very fun night. The boys found us, though, and then we all went bowling. Heather and Aaron had their own issues. I was glad it was over when I got home. And no, I did not use the condoms my mother had given me. Ew!!! Mia and I continued our happy Animaniacs and Ween obsessions while continuing to film our movie whenever we could. The mess annoyed my mom. Sometimes we filmed goofy other things too. Mia was very into the Ween stuff and went crazy collecting their videos, their hard-to-find music, their posters, their promotional clothing. And she sent them a letter asking them to come to her birthday party. My sister and I thought that was a little crazy, but we were supportive. Every teen girl (well, most anyway) needs a celebrity crush, and Dean Ween WAS a bit more accessible than most considering he actually HAD kissed her. . . . I liked coming home in the afternoons and watching my cartoons, especially The Tick (second to Animaniacs, of course). I drew pictures of the Animaniacs characters ALL the time. We also had some fun with a very strange set of letters and an audio tape that had been thrown in Mia's friend Molly's front yard; it was a tape of spiritual songs played by an amateur, interspersed with paranoid rants about how the speaker was not actually prejudiced against black people, but Hollywood celebrities had declared him to be prejudiced against black people, so therefore everyone thought he was. We would quote the "Crazy Guy" tape all the time, reminding each other of the conspiracies that were communicated to this guy through Billy Dee Williams and the 700 Club. In other weird news, my mom and my youngest sister Lindsay and I went to see Rocky Horror, and my mom got dressed up for it. It was funny. I said something really disgusting during the Rocky virgin rites and the hosts rewarded me (among others) by saying I'd won a virgin. Heh. (If you don't get the references to Rocky and the virgin thing, uh, I probably can't explain it to you. This is the Internet! Look it up!)
My friend Alex from tenth grade remained a friend of the group, and sometimes Mia, Phil, and I would go hang out with Alex and his brother Max. We ended up seeing some of our first anime this way, and in early August we saw Project A-ko. I drew my first anime-style pictures by freeze-framing that anime.
So. My boyfriend had disappeared to the University of Florida, off to be with Meghan and other cool people. And of course Meg and I had been in touch, seeing each other on holidays and writing each other ridiculous letters, but most of the time I'd known her it had been a long-distance relationship, so to speak. It was weird getting "deserted" by most of my friends, with only Mia and my sister and the pals from my chorus to keep me company. But Meg, John, and Dena did in fact get their apartment, and I was cheered by the fact that they thought it would be cool if I moved in with them when and if I got into the University of Florida and decided to go there. Whee! I was no longer keeping an actual journal, but I wrote loads of silly things in my agenda book, as well as a ridiculous and offensive year plan. I applied for my first real job at Sweet Tomatoes Restaurant. A week later I got interviewed, and I was hired as a pasta chef. (In the loosest sense of the word, of course. It meant I pushed a button to cook pasta, reloaded types of sauces, and dished it up to people.) I was such a bouncy, happy kid that they started calling me "The Happy Pasta Girl."
My AP English class had an interesting teacher--Mr. Fairweather--who didn't mind treating smart kids like smart kids and was kind of irreverent with us. Our summer reading had been to tackle The Odyssey, and when we got started in school it wasn't long before we had to write a paper on it. We also did some writings on an abbreviated portion of The Bear by Faulkner (bleh, I hated Faulkner), discussions of archetypes, some analyzation of Sophocles (I was not a fan of the Oedipus stories either), and some timed writings. My sister became somewhat friendly with a dude named Dustin, who was a sophomore and rode our bus. He was a quirky fellow who provided me my first introduction to the Church of the SubGenius. I had so much fun with the books and pissed off some crazy goody-goodies in chorus with my Revelation X book. (I remember one of them asking if it was a religious book, and I acted all serious about telling her about the coming of the Xist saucers to take all the believing SubGenii to Planet X to become Overmen and Überwomen. She replied, "Isn't that a little SILLY?" and I said, "Not any more silly than believing that a guy who died 2,000 years ago is going to come take all the Christians to Heaven with him to have tea with God." She wasn't happy with me.) Dustin also showed me The Happy Mutant Handbook and Generation Ecch. Had fun with those too, plus he liked Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Shade the Changing Man comics. Interesting guy. We sometimes defaced newspapers together. I also got to know a boy named Jason through my sister, and we called him "Smeg." He had a car named "The Bloke" and he became somewhat friendly with Mia and my group. We enjoyed his antics, which sometimes included attempting to bathe in the school water fountain. We would sometimes take the weird foreign phrases coined by other people and yell them in the hall (I think our favorite thing was yelling "Nyet Brookee!" at anyone who technically was not wearing pants), and he liked Red Dwarf and Monty Python as much as our group did, and we'd always make silly jokes about haggis and (of course) Spam. Some of our group ate lunch outside, and we were always doing silly things. We started a game called "can baseball" in which I used the mallet in my purse as a baseball bat and we'd try to hit soda cans from our lunches, running the bases afterwards. (It's harder than it sounds!)  My dad quit his job in September and ended up at a new bank pretty much doing the same thing. Shortly afterwards my Uncle Kenny died of complications stemming from AIDS. It was terribly sad and my poor mom was heartbroken. I regularly went to work and did pasta shifts, but I wasn't eighteen yet and wasn't allowed to work more than four hours without a break. Mia's birthday came, and the Ween brothers did in fact not show up to her party. Weirdly, though--I'm still not sure how this worked, actually--Dean actually called her and wished her a happy birthday. One of our friends tipped his grandma or something. It was really weird. She was ecstatic. Also in October I got to see Fiddler on the Roof with my family, and then for Halloween Mia and I dressed up as Tank Girl and Jet Girl. Alex's brother Max did himself up as Sub Girl to match us, and we had a good time. We also sometimes got invited to Alex and Max's house with Phil on the weekends to do some kind of weird job for which Alex's mom paid us, but I can't remember much of what it involved. I just remember they always had a LOT of really neat snacks there and they always paid us too much money. In November I took the SAT, for which I'd prepared with the class, and wasn't too impressed with my 1320. (The scores had been rearranged and recentered so many times by then that I didn't know WHAT was any good.) I worked my butt off applying to colleges, and on November 6, I found out that I had been accepted to the University of Florida. That school was my first choice because all my friends were going there, though I also got into a couple other schools. I guess the idea of moving away from my family scared me, and I wanted to be somewhere where people would know me, so instead of caring as much about the college, I cared about who was going to be there. Not the best philosophy, of course, but ultimately a college education was all I was really aiming for. I buckled down and started working on the scholarship applications I was eligible for, and set myself up to audition for their music program.  Mia started working at Sweet Tomatoes with me, doing greeting and seating shifts, and I started learning other tasks like how to do the salad bar and occasionally working the dining room. I got a record for the biggest tip (beating the current champion) because a table of four college guys thought I was cute. Who gets a twelve-dollar tip at a serve-yourself buffet restaurant?? Me, that's who! Sometimes Mia and I had the same shift and we'd pretend to attack each other while working, most notably by acting out the Sailor Moon attacks across the restaurant. (Mia was Sailor Mars and I was Sailor Venus.) We were kinda friendly with our boss, Melissa, and ended up going to a concert with her once. Then there was also a holiday party we were invited to, which ended up being kind of lame. We called it "The Sweet Tomatoes Prom" and ended up mostly ditching the party to run around in the hotel it was in, exploring. It was crap. Mia and I often spent all our money at the recently-opened Warner Bros. store in nearby Brandon, or on magazines or clothes that featured Ween. Making a pilgrimmage to the Warner Bros. store was something we'd plan and save up for for weeks! December came and I performed in my chorus's presentation of A Ceremony of Carols. I was the soloist for our main performance, but another girl did the same solo when we did it for a local senior center. It was cool, and that's still one of my favorite pieces. The All-State chorus performance came--I had again been relegated to the women's chorus, where we learned new music and my favorite piece was "I Will Be Earth."
Long story short, she listened, and the high school drama was complete: my boyfriend had slept with my best friend. This is where I was supposed to be really upset, I suppose. Um, but I wasn't. At all. When he called me to apologize, totally falling over himself all upset, I told him it was okay if he wanted to sleep with her and to go 'head and do it more if he wanted to. This was not what he expected. He ended up somehow convincing me that I needed to punish him for it, and I asked him what he expected me to say. It appeared that what he wanted to hear was that I would bar him from seeing Meg, so I went along with that, after which he reversed directions and was like, "Oh, I don't know if I can do THAT, I don't know if I can stay away from her." ::sigh:: Then . . . don't, like I was saying. Man, sex is weird. (Mia, conversely, did not accept these terms. She broke up with Phil after physically kicking him out of her house. Yup! She kicked him until he left!) On January 17, 1996, I turned eighteen. I "celebrated" by buying a lottery ticket. I didn't win anything. My mom also made me go to the supermarket counter and get her cigarettes. I think she just wanted me to feel grown-up or like I had a privilege or something. It was more embarrassing than anything. I didn't want to look like the jerk of a kid who finally reaches age eighteen and eagerly runs out to PURCHASE CIGARETTES, WHEEE! I got them after being questioned at the counter (they had to call the manager because the counter girl didn't believe I was eighteen), and put them in my mom's cart, and then later someone followed me around the store and stopped me coming out of the checkout (where I'd bought a candy bar independently of my mom). They were like, "Where are the cigarettes??" I had to explain I'd gotten them for my mom and she had them. We had to wait for her to come through the line before they believed me. Gee, that was fun. My friend Heather had more issues with her family and my mother decided to let her move in with us. We gave her the guestroom, and by January 24 she was a new member of our household. This was a bit weird for me, but not bad of course. My mom managed to help her out getting her back in school and dealing with some issues, and helped her save money from a job. I remember that was one of the days I was defacing newspapers with Patricia's friend Dustin, because that was when she was moving in. (Oh, and there was one time when we got a hold of the SubGenius video Arise! and watched it; it was bizarre, but great. Somehow we got our hands on a tape of the radio show Hour of Slack, too, and played it amongst our friends.) Just a couple days after Heather moved in, I had to go to Gainesville to audition for the University of Florida music program. My main audition piece was "Se tu m'ami se sospiri" (which you can hear me perform here, but it is not my high school performance; it was recorded much later). I was accepted to the program (though they wouldn't let me in as a performance major; apparently I actually was not a strong enough performer for that, ho-hum). I think I visited Phil when I was there, and visited with Meg and her friends John and Dena. We were all going to be roommates if everything went smoothly next fall. I'm pretty sure Phil showed me his dorm room and I got to play with a computer that he used to "telnet" to a place called MuMu Land. I had fun talking to the random people and filed the name of the talker away in my head. Ah, what other crazy things were going on? I was reading the comics of Sam and Max and laughing my head off. And obsessively going through a book called High Weirdness By Mail and trying to send away for weird stuff. (I ended up getting some REALLY sick comics from that once. If you ever wondered, Pee Dog is horrifying.) I listened to a radio show called the Fox Kids' Countdown because they occasionally had Animaniacs-related stuff on there, and learned some funny songs. (Of course, I had to get up very early in the morning to listen, and sometimes I just taped it while I snoozed.) And I liked the animation of Bill Plympton. Something historic happened on January 29th, 1996. I got on the Internet on my own for the first time. My family got one of those free AOL CDs and we installed it on a crap computer my uncle had given us. It was America Online version 2.0. I went on there, made a screenname for myself (PACLFBFBIV, which stood for Princess Angelina Contessa Louisa Francesca Banana Fanna Bobesca the Fourth, which was a funny way of saying I was Dot Junior), and I found a Warner Bros. chat room and some Animaniacs-related message boards. I went crazy all over those things. The WB chat room was fun and I bothered the hosts to give me trivia questions. They soon found out I was an Animaniacs nutball and let me WRITE trivia. They also found out I was eighteen, which meant I'd actually be old enough to apply to BE a host, but they said you also had to be an AOL member for at least six months before applying, so I'd have to wait. I made a few friends through AOL but nobody serious--just people I chatted with and one person who liked Space Ghost Coast to Coast like I did. Somehow she convinced me to send her my tape of the shows, and I did so, then kicked myself because I didn't have a copy of my own and I didn't know if I was going to get it back from her. I wrote her e-mail address down so I could make sure to keep in touch and get my tape back, and while I was at it I made a list of all the other important people in case I needed it. I also liked to participate in quizzes about Animaniacs on the 'Net, where I'd discovered some rabid fangirls (well, they were largely girls) who were very much into the voice actors of the show. (I didn't really have much interest in them as "celebrities"--just in their work--and I thought that was a bit weird.) I looked forward to taking a new quiz made up by someone every week, because new episodes of the Animaniacs show had started airing on Saturday mornings, so I reprised my role as an excited little kid and got up early for cartoons. I would also keep watching as they put on the Pinky and the Brain cartoon, followed by Freakazoid and Earthworm Jim (and I did like that last one despite its not actually being a Warner cartoon). This Internet stuff didn't last long because budget restrictions meant I had to limit my time (it was a by-the-minute charge at the time), and soon enough the computer broke anyway. Forget it.
Solo/Ensemble festival came. I sang "Pleading" by Franz and "Longing for Spring" by Mozart (and you can hear me sing that here, but it is not my high school performance; it was recorded much later). I received a superior rating on my solo. And then my English teacher announced that we were going to have a choice of final projects: we could either do a critical paper or a creative paper. The catch was, we had to submit a creative portfolio to him and be APPROVED if we were going to be allowed to do the creative, and I really wanted to be in that. But the thing is, my critical papers throughout the year always got rave reviews from the teacher; every time we finished a book and had to do a paper, the teacher would take his favorite ones and make transparencies out of them to use as examples, and honestly mine was the example about every other time (especially on the timed writings). Still, I wanted to be a creative writer, and so I about killed myself trying to meet the deadline, finishing a short story entitled "Moonlight." I turned it in and awaited his verdict, and he never told me whether I'd been approved for the creative paper. As the deadline for the papers approached, I asked him after class about it one day. His response was something like "Oh, you turned one in? I forgot. I never read it. I don't even know where it is. Oh well, you'll need to just do the critical paper." I was so upset. And very disillusioned. I did the critical paper and kicked its ass, but that total shutdown without even READING my stuff was terrible. Other people told me that teacher more or less only INTENDED to offer the creative paper to people whose work he already knew, because he was himself a fiction writer and knew some of the students outside class because they came to his readings and junk. I got a hold of his novel and tried to read it. I had trouble getting even a fourth of the way through it and was bewildered by how little it held my interest. Definitely not my kind of thing--and I was kinda glad he hadn't read my stuff if his own work indicated his taste. I let some of my friends read the story and they liked it. I later took the thing and revamped it a bit during my first year of college, and it remains the earliest short story that can be read on my short stories page. I don't think it's too bad for a high school kid, but it's not great. I continued to do well in English, really liking the Shakespeare studies on Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet (which we followed with the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), and sometimes for extra credit we got to color associated pictures (a couple of examples survived!), and my favorite novel we read that year was Catch-22. I wrote some good papers on a poetic story excerpt called "The White Heron" and the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, gearing up for that all-important AP exam. My other classes were going okay, but I sucked at math despite my sister's attempts to tutor me. I liked my teacher and she liked to squirt me with the overhead projector's cleaner on purpose, but I was a terrible Analysis of Functions student. I preferred using my graphing calculator to use the text option and write really insane things, which I'd later find in the calculator and laugh at. More boyfriend troubles descended. I tried to distract myself as much as possible, and put it out of my mind when our chorus went to group Choral Festival and achieved superiors. I concentrated on school, on work, working double shifts sometimes now that I was eighteen and allowed to do so. But it was difficult to keep it out of my mind for long. I felt like a storm was coming and I didn't know if I'd ever escape--I didn't see a good way out. Either I'd have to just give up my own wants and needs and give myself over to what he wanted--a physical relationship I didn't want--or I'd have to put my foot down and make it clear that he was never going to get that with me. I didn't have the guts to do either one, though my heart knew I would be better off if I broke up with him. I just cared too much about what would happen to him if I became the latest in the long line of people who had thrown him away, and since I didn't see a way out, I began to get physically ill. By the time spring break arrived and Phil was back in town, the thought of having to face him actually caused me to throw up. I have to say it's a very weird feeling to have a person who causes you so much worry tenderly holding your hair while you puke. I numbly went to work and ignored life and slept too much, and ended up getting talked into an early anniversary date with Phil. We would be celebrating our first anniversary as official boyfriend/girlfriend on March 20th, but he'd be back at college at that point, so on the 13th we went out to lunch at a Spanish restaurant. I tried to keep the atmosphere light and I tried to avoid initiating physical contact with him. I was well aware that an anniversary of this magnitude was likely to make Phil think he had a better chance of some nookie with me. I was personable and friendly to him, but not physically open whatsoever. When he took me home, he stopped the car in front of my parents' house and we sat there a moment. I knew that if we were a normal happy couple this would be a good time to initiate a kiss or grab his hand or something. There was no way I could do it. Then he dropped the bomb. "I think we should break up because YOU'RE not happy." I agreed that I wasn't happy, relieved that he'd opened this door, happily discussed the ending of our relationship and the terms, and got out of the car before he could say anything else to try to backpedal. I remember walking across my parents' lawn feeling like a big burden had been lifted. I knew Phil very well, though. I knew he hadn't meant what he'd said. I strongly suspected that he'd been hoping for a "What? Of course I'm happy! Come here, you stud!" response, or at least was hoping I'd give him some reassurance that I was at least HAPPY with him. Instead I confirmed all his fears and escaped. I knew he would be back and that he was very likely going to call me later to try to talk me back into dating him. I told myself I'd been given a loophole that I might not have been strong enough to initiate myself, and that I would hold onto it come hell or high water. I couldn't be sucked under again. I was at my limit and I wasn't any good to anyone like that. Surprise. When he got home he called me and told me he hadn't meant it. I don't remember the conversation very well, except that he wanted to come over again and see me. I told him it wasn't going to change that I indeed hadn't been happy with our relationship and was glad to be moving out of its boyfriend/girlfriend definition. He didn't care and came over anyway. After which he left confused, having been unable to talk me back into it again. Cue the next phone call, which escalated into a shouting match. I was actually surprised that he used the F-word with me. The second time he said "fuck you," I hung up on him. I just didn't know what else to do. We didn't speak for a while. I was sad for him but didn't think there was any more I could do at the time. He went back to school in Gainesville and I returned to my senior year. Mia and I filmed one more episode of "Bruce the Duck" and had a viewing party that was about as big as my sixteenth birthday party had been. I made invitations and then passed out directions that involved cutouts of Pimpy the Stud-Mouse with rolled-up maps sticking out of his underwear. The party was a great success. "Remember, all technical difficulties are intentional!" Another silly thing I did was take some of my work earnings and send them to the Church of the SubGenius so I could become an ordained SubG minister. I plugged in the name "SwankiVY, Queen of Budgiland" as my SubG name. I had a really weird feeling when I was writing it that that name was going to follow me. And considering you're reading this on swankivy.com , I think I was right. I don't remember when exactly this happened, but I'd planned to move in with Meghan when I got to Gainesville to go to college (along with her roomies John and Dena). Turned out they had decided to kick Meggie out of the apartment. She'd lost her ability to contribute monetarily due to several factors, got screwed in school because of tendonitis (a big problem if you play violin in school, guys), and they didn't like her housekeeping habits. John wanted to know if I still wanted to be their roommate even if Meg was gone. I didn't have much of a choice since I'd missed the application deadlines for dorms and didn't want to be in those anyway. I wasn't sure what to think of that, though. Then one day I was at work serving pasta and some guy walked up. I asked him "Would you like some pasta?" and he replied that he would like some Ween pasta with Animaniacs sauce, or something like that. Obviously someone who knew me, but I didn't recognize him. Turned out he was my pen pal TJ, and he'd just gotten out of prison. For some reason my mom was totally okay with this and he came over to watch Animaniacs with me. (Maybe I didn't tell her he was a prison pen pal?) She hired him to do some work in the yard for us. I think this ended up being okay until we found out that he asked Heather if she knew where to buy pot and we found out he was coming back after dark and sleeping in our backyard. I don't know what happened to him after my mom stopped allowing him to come around on account of the weird behavior. He'd never been anything but completely sweet to me, so who knows?
The end of the year was upon us. I passed all my classes. Our school newspaper allowed seniors to leave "last will and testaments" to underclassmen, so I paid for an ad in which I declared myself to be of "obsessive mind and rodent-infested body," and proceeded to leave to Mia "a jug of 8-ball liquid, Mr. T, a place at the guava tree, vats of Spam, a large fish named Ishmael to hit people with, Sylvia the Spatula, a man named Mickey, all the stumps she can carry, my Yakko plushies, a promise of Weenfest '96 mark 2, my wiggies, the Hair Fairy, Evie, and lots of persecution, as well as Hygnwei." I also promised to my sister "a 6'4" 300 lb. factory worker from Hoboken, NJ." I attended Senior Send-Off, and received my grades: my weighted GPA for my high school career was 4.28. Go me.
The next day, which was a Friday, Heather had convinced me to go to the skating rink even though Friday was annoying kids' night, because there was a singing contest. "I KNOW YOU WILL WIN IT!" she said. So I kinda humored her, you know, and entered the contest. And then I DID win it. Which was AWESOME because the prize was 200 tickets' worth of junk from their dumb prize counter, and THEY HAD AN ANIMANIACS WATER BOTTLE. Score. I got my wisdom teeth out on June 10th in preparation for going to college. My sister had hers out on the same day, actually, but hers were impacted and mine weren't, so we had very different surgeries. She was on soup for a week while I got to go home and eat a grilled cheese sandwich immediately. Weird. And guess what? Then I got a letter from Ivan Stang of the Church of the SubGenius, saying my membership would be processed and stuff. He liked the letter I'd written him (in which I'd told him about the dumb soprano girls' reaction to Revelation X). It was a nice response. He said he'd hired Jesus, actually, and that Jesus would step on it processing my membership. Soon I had a membership card to write "SwankiVY, Queen of Budgiland" on. Yay. Sad things began to happen. I did all kinds of wrap-up procedures for my childhood. Mia came over and filmed me while I made a documentary of my high school room, and then I had to take down my decorations and dismantle a lot of my stuff so I could pack it for college. My mom wanted me to have a driver's license before I went to college (even though I truly didn't know how to drive yet), so she pushed me into taking the driver's test and I flunked it big-time. That was the last time I drove a car--July 10, 1996--while running over a cone. I got a doctor's appointment on July 12. I finished reading a present from Mia--Joan D. Vinge's third Cat book, Dreamfall!!!--on July 13. I packed my life into boxes. Quit my job. Got a bank account. Made Mia promise to tape the new Animaniacs episodes for me because they only showed on the Warner Bros. network which wasn't operational in Gainesville yet. Hugged my family and friends a lot. And moved out of my parents' house, never to be a kid again. Ooh, that sounds dramatic! Life does go on after childhood, actually. If you'd like to see how college went for me, move along, move along.
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