| SwankiVY's Life Story! |
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Click Here For Middle School Extras: Okay, so, I should probably preface my middle school life story by saying it was probably the worst period of my life. Being that I'm writing this so many years later it seems a little grayed over and not as horrific, but I spent the next three years feeling very awkward, unpopular, ugly, stupid, and untalented, and what had worked for me before in elementary school no longer worked. I'd always felt special largely because adults treated me like something special, but in middle school it came clear to me that as kids who weren't really little kids anymore, we were supposed to get busy defining our identities in terms of each other--with regards to our peers, not our authority figures. That bothered me, because after all, I was still drawing mermaids and playing with dolls, not thinking about boys or responsibility or how to be popular. Before the year started, we moved into our Sarasota house and got settled. I had to share a room with my sister again, but we didn't really mind at first. (Later we decided we were sick of it and my parents dry-walled off a room in the garage to make her a bedroom, and she moved out, but that was a while later.) My room had a sliding glass door that opened out onto the lanai--also known by some as a "Florida room"--where there was porch furniture and our built-in, screened-in pool. (Wow!) Our house also had a backyard that contained fruit trees. We had three orange trees, one lemon tree, and one grapefruit tree. We were definitely in Florida. I was a little traumatized when we went to a doctor for our routine health screen before entering our new schools and I found out my vision was way below par. I hadn't realized that I was nearsighted, though sometimes Mom would grump at me for bending over really close to look into a drawer when I was digging for something. I got a prescription for glasses, and the glasses looked really dumb on me in my opinion. I was told I needed to use them "as needed" but it was implied that I should probably be wearing them for pretty much everyday use. This was unacceptable to me because I didn't like how they looked, so I only used them when I needed to see faraway stuff, like the chalkboard. I started sixth grade at McIntosh Middle School, Home of the Eagles, on August 28, 1989. Changing classes was an intimidating idea to me, but I relaxed a bit when I found out it was basically a circulation with a "team" of four teachers who were all collected in the same area (with the exception of the exploratory--"explo"--and P.E. classes). The whole concept of having lockers and being forbidden to go to them outside appointed times was also intimidating. It seemed so . . . I dunno, grown-up, and too much responsibility. I was never a kid who really liked change. But I still managed to deal with it.
The interesting thing about that year was "the wheel." Our exploratory classes were offered in eight sections, and we'd each get to sample six of them. I started in band with Mrs. Smith, where I was assigned the clarinet as my instrument. (Later, halfway through that six weeks, we had to switch instruments and I had to play the baritone horn, which was almost as big as I was!) I was excited by getting to switch and try so many subjects, and looked forward to trying the next five: strings/chorus, agriculture, art, shop, and Spanish. People who started with band didn't get to go as far as home ec or business occupations. I probably would have liked home ec. Oh well. Besides that we had P.E., and my coach was Mrs. Murtland. I HATED P.E., largely because we had to "dress out." I was sort of appalled by this. Going into a locker room and changing into a P.E. outfit with the school's name on it was shocking to me, to say nothing of going into the shower room afterwards and being *required* to take a shower. I hadn't exactly hit puberty yet (though I'd managed to get my mom to let me get a bra for modesty purposes in the locker room). I remember being really surprised by the one girl who had no modesty at all and just stripped in front of everyone and sat her naked butt right on the bench while she put on her socks, while most of the rest of us were so focused on hiding under our towels while changing that we didn't have a second to peek at each other anyway. We didn't really do much in P.E. besides play the usual kickball games, fitness exercises, running, and soccer, though I do seem to recall us having a football unit that I actually kind of enjoyed. (I sometimes played center, and our team got into the finals. Yay!) The biggest eye-opener was that the kids seemed a lot more mature. Maybe it was just that I was from the South and despite its geography Florida is NOT "the South"; things are more relaxed up in North Carolina, and kids down in Sarasota just seemed more worldly. They actually used cuss words--which didn't bother me but also surprised me--and they dressed like they thought they were little grown-ups, and some of them were in ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS. I didn't relate to them very well, and they suddenly seemed to all be into the same music and expected me to know it, and I was also expected to have an opinion on "Gators vs. Seminoles" because THOSE ARE THE TEAMS, man! I honestly couldn't have told you it was college football they were talking about. I also wasn't sure why my Trapper Keeper wasn't really that cool to anyone. Trapper Keepers were awesome! I was really overwhelmed that first week. I did eventually acquire a few friends. I met a girl named Sara in the beginning of school, and she was fairly soft-spoken but really fun to be around. I remember having a conversation with her about how perverted Paula Abdul's new music video was (Sara called it "nasty"). We got together outside school a few times, though she moved away in October so our school friendship was really short-lived. For some reason I remember being impressed that part of her family was black and part of her family was white, though that was probably because there wasn't a lot of that kind of diversity where I'd just come from in North Carolina. (Sara was biracial, but I didn't know that word at the time and told my mom my new friend was "blackish-white." Heh.) I also met a friend named Cara, and thought it was funny that my friends' names rhymed. Cara wasn't what I'd call soft-spoken at all--I usually got along better with the shy girls--but people thought she was weird because she was one of those kids whose mom made her clothes and she lived way out in the boonies on a farm. I tended to gravitate toward people who didn't have a lot of friends (or vice versa), so I guess that's what we had in common at first, and Cara also had two younger sisters like I did so we talked about how bratty they were and family problems. I got to go out to her house too--animals out the wazoo, she even had a ferret!--and her mom had stuff like family schedules on the wall and a very organized setup. I was impressed that Cara had her own sort of hangout area with a pinball machine in it. A PINBALL MACHINE. Whoa. I think my last significant friend at the time--acquired part-way through the year--was Emily. Emily was outspoken and sort of obnoxious and liked to pull my hair, and was pretty unpopular and people always teased her, but I thought she was cool and we sometimes sat together when we had the same classes (we were in the same exploratory classes). I hung onto my friendship with Emily throughout middle school and then kept in touch into high school, but we ultimately started going in VERY different directions. She liked rap music and cuss words and her family was kinda dysfunctional in the ways you'd hear about on after-school specials--like, I actually went to her house and got to drink alcohol once. It was only a wine cooler, but damn was that badass. Except I didn't really want to be badass. I rode a bus to school and hated it. For some reason a couple of the kids on the bus liked to sit behind me and try to do shitty things to me like put gum in my hair. A boy on the bus who was a year older than me sometimes tried to defend me from them because he was a nice guy and had nice manners, so I sort of had a crush on him. His name was Gregg and he was in the band. He also lived in my neighborhood and there were times when we walked home together, but that didn't really start becoming a routine until the year after. My sister Patricia--she'd decided to be "Patricia" instead of Pattie once we moved--was too young for middle school still so she was in a mixed fourth/fifth advanced program with a lady named Mrs. Duke. It was sort of an experimental class, but it was weird that both my sisters were going to a different school than I was. Lindsay entered first grade at the same school, Lakeview Elementary. She made friends with a little girl named Laura at her school, and their family lived close to ours so sort of by association I started being acquainted with her older brother Chris and I liked him too. We both liked reading, but I don't remember much else about him. I seem to recall that when we first moved into the neighborhood we were also briefly friendly with a family across the street, and I liked their daughter Kimmy. I liked her name and her hair and we played hopscotch and some other stuff. I let her try my pogo stick but it was really rusty because I'd had it since I was seven. I was a voracious reader that year because there wasn't much else to keep me busy. Mr. Fecteau's English class was quite varied, and he made us memorize a huge list of -ous adjectives and had a strange focus on French (wanted us to learn French vocabulary and we got extra credit for learning the French national anthem and singing it in front of the class), and he had a program for which we could read a book and do a report on it as extra credit. Each completed book report would earn us a mark on a chart. I was in a race with the other smart girl in the class to get to the top first. (She annoyed me because she also could draw, and I thought she was probably better at it than I was.) I mostly read Baby-Sitter's Club books and stuff for tweens, but I was getting irritated with it. There was too much romance in these books; my literature was pushing me toward teen romance and boy/girl crap, and I still wanted my fairy tales. In any case, participation in this program also earned me frequent "Book-It!" pizza certificates, so I got to have personal pan pizzas a lot during that year. It was awesome.
I was acing English and spelling, doing well in social studies, managing fine in science, and squeaking by in math. My math teacher pissed me off because she was very impatient with our on-level math class when we didn't follow as fast as her advanced classes, and when we didn't do well or couldn't complete examples she always taunted us with, "Well, MY GOOD CLASS can do it." Um, Mrs. Dupree, that's why they're your good class and we're not. I was always a little impatient with my classmates myself in that class because really I probably COULD have been in the advanced class, but I just didn't take to it as easily as my other subjects and I didn't really know how to study because I was used to things just being easy. One night I had a math problem that I couldn't figure out and my sister started lecturing me about it because I was whining and panicking about not being able to do it. She told me very matter-of-factly that I didn't understand how to do it because I never listen to my teachers when they explain things. I got really annoyed at her for that. (Then it turned out the problem was extra credit and actually HADN'T been explained. Relief! But when I tried to ha-ha my sister about it, she was like "So?" Meh.) In my world culture class the teacher was always pretty strict but I found myself liking her. She became one of my favorite teachers. In non-school news, I still didn't want to grow up and I ended up dressing up as Cyndi Lauper (in a newspaper dress) for Halloween that year. I also developed a fascination with Nintendo. I really wanted one and that year we received one for Chanukah, to share between us three kids. We had a neighbor named Matt (who I suspected had a crush on me because he always wanted me to ride on the pegs of his bike and hold onto his shoulders, but I just thought of him as a kid because he was only like a year older than my baby sister), and he had a Nintendo with all the special controllers and stuff; I used to go to his house and play his system until we got our own. I got obsessed with wanting to save the princess on Super Mario Bros., but when I finally did, that was over with quickly. I also liked going skating, and there was a periodic field trip with our school where the whole group would descend upon the skating rink and I'd actually spend most of my time there playing the arcade games. (I think my Silver Card got me free tokens, too.) But the arcade version of the Mario game had a TIME LIMIT on it, so what fun was that?? Sometimes I went in the backyard and hung around amongst the fruit trees. I liked picking the fruit, and sometimes Matt would come over and we'd use the rotten ones for baseballs and get sticky. I actually kinda wanted to play baseball, and I did that a little in the lot behind the house with my dad. (But not often.) I also sometimes rode a bike around, but I was mostly an indoor, nose-in-a-book kid, unless I was in the pool. We had a jacuzzi, too. It came with the house. Our family sometimes played kickball games, occasionally with some kids from the neighborhood joining in, and sometimes when it was just the kids we'd run into a cul-de-sac and play Bound Ball. I was the oldest kid in the group and I liked making the younger kids appalled by using cuss words if I made a mistake in the game or I got "out." I guess I thought I was cool and that was very grown-up of me. Hah. I was trying really hard not to bicker with my sisters because I wanted to be the peacemaker and the "mature one," but sometimes I joined right in (especially when things seemed "unfair" to me--I had a really rigid sense of justice, even if it had nothing to do with me). Our parents decided to implement another behavioral rewards program where if we were good all week Patricia and I would get five bucks and Lindsay would get three. But if we were BAD, our parents had the option of taking 50¢ off (or 30¢, for Lindsay). They kept a chart on the refrigerator so they could remember who got what demerits, but they weren't always so stringent about actually marking them down when they happened, so I actually got a couple demerits myself if I offered to get up and mark the chart for my sisters' transgressions. I guess "Lindsay, 30¢ off!" "WANT ME TO MARK IT FOR YOU???" came off kind of goody-goody and snotty, but I didn't see it that way; I really wasn't doing it out of gleeful excitement over someone else getting punished, and it hurt a lot more to hear "Go ahead, and mark 50¢ off for yourself so you'll learn to MIND YOUR BUSINESS" than it did to lose the 50¢ itself. Lindsay got a lot of demerits because she was prone to being late to bed and also lying about brushing her teeth or whining or temper tantrums--she was a little kid, after all--and my mom seriously forgot to record half of them. It always chapped my ass when that happened. I used to frustrate my mom and be punished with 50¢ off mostly for "air-head" behavior, like if she asked me to go get the cotton balls for her and I didn't know where they were. She'd always say the proper response should have been to just go LOOK for them, or that I was pretending not to know so I wouldn't have to get up, and that always upset me too. To this day being told I have an ulterior motive or an underlying selfish purpose to actions that are actually innocent is one of my biggest pet peeves, so I guess it started early. When I took strings/chorus with Mr. Jarvis in the explo program, I was intrigued. I didn't like the chorus part very much because all we did was sing crappy medleys, but when I got to play the violin I was sort of sucked in by it. I also thought I was pretty good at it. The explo program was to help us figure out what elective we wanted to choose for seventh and eighth grade, so I kept this one in mind. In the band and strings classes I became a little friendly with a classmate named Natalie, and sometimes we talked on the bus together (I guess we lived close), but nothing really ever came of it. (I remember really liking her day-glo neon socks. Those were the days--neon!) I had a few other friends that I met that year and sometimes we'd have the occasional hang-out session, but most of them didn't become close or frequently-seen friends. Some girls I remember being friendly with were Theresa, Joline, Jennifer, Jenna, and Cara's friend Brenda who I got to talk with at her birthday party. We had a joke about Frogger and how the frogs have sex in the video game. Seemed funny at the time. I took agriculture with Ms. Pope--we did some neat stuff like learning to make our own butter and planting some plants in a coke-bottle terrarium--but then art came up and I had a great time. I learned to make interesting lettering with the principles taught to me, and Emily and I always sat together and she would sing her songs from the radio and I would giggle because she had the words wrong sometimes (like she thought the song "Bust A Move" was called "Buster Move"). The teacher, who was also a Mrs. Smith, thought I was a good artist, but a lot of the class involved painting and I didn't care for it. Someone had drawn the "Metallica" logo on the wall in the art room, and someone else had written "sucks" under it. When I later found out my sister liked Metallica, I responded, "Metallica sucks!" thinking of the graffiti. She was like, "Huh?" and I had nothing to say but "Well . . . uh . . . it said so on the wall?" Heh. When I ended up in shop with Mr. Maynard, I didn't know what to think. I had heard of people taking shop classes on TV shows or whatever but I was like, what? We're going to make crap out of wood? I made an ugly bird and learned to use a jig saw. The automatic cutter thingie terrified me. I was afraid of getting debris in the eye. I always wore my goggles. My dad got to keep my project to put on his work desk. And my last explo class of the year was Spanish, which I actually thought was fun but mostly consisted of us watching old episodes of ¡Saludos! which seemed like a Spanish version of Sesame Street. There were rumors that the teacher, Mr. Holahan, had a glass eye. It might've been true. ::shrug:: I still liked my dollhouse and sometimes I decorated it. I liked to pose the doll family inside pretending they were doing something. Sometimes I'd come home after painstakingly setting them up to look like they were eating breakfast and my mom had moved them so the mom and dad were on top of each other in the bed. And I'd be like, "MOOOOOM, why are you making my dolls have sex??" She thought it was really funny. I guess I had no sense of humor. Though it honestly woulda been funnier to me if it hadn't taken me so damn long to get the dolls to balance and stand up! Another thing I was obsessed with was pen pals. I really wanted to get more pen pals and so the first time my pal Amber sent me a "friendship book," I filled it out and sent it on. I got a few more pals from that, until girls I didn't know were sending me their photos and stuff. It was really fun, and it was actually more fun to trade stickers and look at their pictures and collect cool pens/stationery to write them than it actually was to write the letters, because a lot of these gals didn't really have much to say. Mostly we just filled out questions and answers to each other, and I got the sense that a lot of the time my letters didn't really get read because (as you might suspect) even then I had the tendency to ramble. It was frustrating to write a long letter and get back a pretty, decorated letter whose content was mostly "SO, WHUZ UP? HAHAHA! [SMILEY FACE]." We got another Mario game for our Nintendo and played the hell out of it. I loved Mario 2, though I think we'd played it for the first time back when we lived in the condo and we'd been renting it. I liked challenging myself by using the difficult characters and not warping, and I still managed to kick the game's behind. My sisters weren't as obsessive as I was and therefore due to practice my turns usually lasted longer, which was sometimes the cause of fights. I got irritated when my mom wanted to put a time limit on me for that, too. It just wasn't fun anymore when doing well at something brought down a punishment. Once my sisters figured out putting a foot behind the TV messed up the reception, and one or both of them would do it purposely while I was in the middle of a hard jump, trying to make me fail. I'd scream, which would attract parental attention and I'd get sent to my room for "overreacting--for GOD'S SAKE, it's JUST A GAME." Bleh. Back to reading. I also liked playing the piano and practicing, but I didn't really have structured lessons with my father anymore. I tried to go farther in playing books and "Dozen-A-Day" exercise books, but they were kind of boring, so Lindsay and I decided to play games and invented exercise routines (like, calisthenics) based on the scales and stuff because the exercises were jokingly named after various physical exercises you could do. Some of them were very tough to actually physically emulate. We tried. Or we colored the piano books instead of playing the exercises in them. At the end of my first half of sixth grade, The Simpsons debuted, and it became one of my favorite shows. I liked how it was still a cartoon, but was also an adult-type show that my friends watched. It was very "cool" to watch The Simpsons and some of us were very excited about the tee shirts, some of which got banned for having phrases like "eat my shorts" on them. I never got a Simpsons shirt but I did try to learn to draw them. I seem to also recall that the fashions included slap bracelets (woo-hoo!), ruffled jean skirts, puffy paint shirts, Swatch watches, and, of course, the poofy bangs. I had tried another crap perm to do something with my hair, but it was damaged from swimming so much in chlorinated pools, and it sort of started to turn green. Several people commented on it.
When I finished sixth grade and summer came, I was relieved. My best friend at the end of the year was Cara (well, she DID sign the "B/F/F" page on my yearbook!), and we got together now and then but I mostly spent the time with my family. I did a lot of swimming and relaxing, but also tried for the first time to do something to make my own pocket money: I tried baby-sitting! I liked children, but sadly it turned out I was horrible at being in charge of them. I was only twelve when I did my first baby-sitting job that did not involve just watching Lindsay. It was scary, and truthfully I think about it now and I wonder why someone would actually leave their toddler with a twelve-year-old and go out. I didn't really know the family and I was not comfortable with the situation; I ended up chasing this little boy around and around and getting very frustrated because he kept escaping. The money I got from that seemed like nowhere near enough to subject myself to that again. Over the summer I played with some kids in the neighborhood (I remember going to Matt's and playing by the creek with a younger boy named Shay whose older sister was in my classes), but I was doing a lot of thinking. I had been frustrated the previous year at my inability to be accepted by the other students. I was tired of not being as cool as they were, so I got a haircut (gasp!) to get rid of the green in my hair, and I think I got another perm. It was a disaster but I thought it looked cool. I started to practice with more make-up at that time than I ever had in my life, and that summer I got a second hole pierced in my ears. I bought a purse I thought was ugly because it looked like the other girls' ugly purses, and I started reading magazines about the celebrities I was supposed to like. I read them like course material, trying to remember the New Kids on the Block band members' names so I'd know what the kids were talking about when school started again. Weirdly my parents picked up on this and got my sister and me tickets to a New Kids concert, which we went to in August of 1990. It was exciting because it was our first concert, but neither of us actually KNEW much about the New Kids, and after about a quarter of the concert my ears started hurting and I sat down in my chair with my hands over my ears. My sister kidded me about it. I think I got one of their tapes after that and listened to their music, and I thought it was okay, though I preferred Paula Abdul and Debbie Gibson because I liked singing with them. (Also still liked Madonna, and The Immaculate Collection had recently come out. I listened to it a lot.) My aunt sent me a tape of Suzanne Vega and I ended up liking her a lot too. I think it was also around that time that I played tennis with my dad sometimes, and the two of us would go out with our rackets and bring a big jug of water and try to kill each other. Dad always beat me, but I was learning. My grandparents (Dad's parents) moved from up north (New Jersey) down to Sarasota for their retirement, so suddenly they were in the same city as we were, and I thought it was great because I was excited to get to know them better. Our family set up a program where each of us grandkids would get individual days with our grandparents doing the activity of our choice, and I'd always want to go to the Main Book Shop (where my grandma would always let me get a new book!) and I'd eat with them and get to look at my grandma's photo albums. She and I share the tendency to be archivists/historians/documenters and we were always the communicators of the family, so looking through these great memories was awesome for me. Fall of 1990 came and I started seventh grade, and my sister Patricia started going to McIntosh as well but didn't get the same teachers. If I had to pick, that was probably the worst year of my life, but I can't isolate really why. I was so anxious about so many things and I was really starting to feel a lot of peer pressure; there was a lot of "YOU'RE A LOSER!" and "YOU'RE A NERD!" going around, and I didn't want to repeat that for seventh grade. As a result I really worked hard at trying to blend in, which as you can imagine was not the right answer. It only made me more miserable, partly because it wasn't me and partly because I wasn't very successful at it. I thought I was doing everything right--listening to their music, dressing in a slightly more preppy way, using hairspray on my hair and doing up my bangs like them, trying to hang out with cool kids. . . . Yeah, not me.
We saw my mom's side of the family while we were up there and had a holiday gathering together. I really like family gatherings. I got to play with my cousin Alyssa, who was a little toddler at the time and so cute, and we had Christmas at my grandparents' house which was a change of scene for our family. Everyone at the gathering seemed to think we children were so interesting and always wanted us to talk about ourselves, so it was nice to have people interested in what my life was like instead of making me feel like a dork all the time like at school. I had fun with my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents.
I continued to do a lot of reading, and I made a wonderful discovery: SCIENCE FICTION. As mentioned before, I'd been getting frustrated that everything for tweens seemed to be about budding romance, and even though I read a couple of those Sweet Valley books they really bored me. I ended up discovering a book called Psion by Joan D. Vinge, which for some odd reason happened to be in the young adult section at the library (looking back, I CANNOT imagine why that is), but I fell in love with the main character Cat and was relieved to find that there were imaginative stories for grown-ups. I wasn't stuck with crappy romance for the rest of my life. I credit that book with influencing my writing style immensely in my later years, and with nailing down the idea that books should be character-oriented. I don't know what my writing style would be like today if I hadn't found that book. Ms. Vinge remains my favorite writer to this day. My tennis lessons were fun but I was frustrated by the fact that I was one of the best but not THE best, you know? I could sometimes be competitive, and usually our round robin tournaments had me facing off against a boy named Richie who was one year younger than me (and my sister knew him from school, I think). Richie had a peculiar hitting style; every shot was a slow, controlled LOB. His technique was completely at odds with what we were being taught, but he almost always won because he was so careful to never hit the ball out or into the net. The rest of us made mistakes because we were taking chances, so he'd just let our mistakes screw us over and he'd win the tournaments. I hated being second place to him, but then after lessons we'd always talk and I liked him as a person. The lessons didn't last very long, but I still played with Dad sometimes. I finally got my period sometime toward the end of that school year, believe it or not--I was closer to fourteen than thirteen. I told my mom, but for a long time she didn't believe me and thought I was lying because my underwear wasn't stained and I didn't ask her any questions. (I didn't HAVE any questions. I'd known this stuff since I was five.) When I finally did come to her to ask about tampons since I hated the pads, she finally figured out I wasn't b.s.ing, which was when I found out she'd been thinking I'd been b.s.ing all that time. Urgh. That sort of thing annoyed me about my mom, but it's important to note that during this time she was one of the only things in my life that kept me sane. I came home sad or depressed a lot and she would listen, and she told me something that I would remember for the rest of my life: She said that right now the kids were all mean and rotten and cruel and they were all going to step on me because I was nice. But, Mom said, if I could retain that attitude when I grew up, everyone was going to get sick of the meanness and want to be friends with people who are decent human beings. People who are kind-hearted and respect each other. She told me that one day EVERYONE was going to want to be my friend. Unfortunately I had a long time to wait before that came true, but it ultimately did. Still, I had to survive middle school first. . . . I tried to write a book a couple times but kept scrapping what I had. I actually wrote three or four chapters of a novel (short chapters) before deciding the idea overwhelmed me and pitching the whole thing. When I think about the idea today I still think it would be too big a plot for me to write, so it's probably a good thing that I didn't try, but I still wish I'd KEPT the stupid thing. I started to realize this "writing a book thing" was going to be hard, but I still wanted to try it. I had more thinking to do. I believe that was also the year that we started getting picked up by a bus after school that went to the Girls Club, a.k.a. Girls Inc. It was an after-school program for collective daycare and my sisters and I all went. Because of our ages, though, we were in different groups. I was a teenager, so I was allowed access to "the teen room" and most of the activities were pretty much optional. For a while I was a little sullen about being in daycare and just sat in the teen room doing my homework or making string macrame bracelets, but it kinda irritated me that my sister was allowed in there even though she wasn't a teen. (She wasn't TECHNICALLY allowed, but nobody ever chased her out, and a few other ALMOST-teens snuck in sometimes too.) Being only a year older than Patricia made me kinda defensive about the things I was allowed to do that she wasn't, so I got annoyed and decided to join the Junior Staff program, which she had no interest in.
I finished up the year as an honor roll student, doing particularly well in English. I wrote a short story as an assignment--a little ditty called "Never Ever"--in response to a prompt, and I got props for it. I had always had aspirations of being an author since elementary school, but I started to seriously think about what kinds of stories I wanted to write, and I was always leaning toward speculative fiction. I continued to read the science fiction and imaginative books--I really liked Lois Duncan and Monica Hughes, and was always combing libraries for more good stuff. I was more than willing to try to read way above my level rather than stomach the romantic and "real life" books, with the notable exception of the Baby-Sitters' Club because I liked the characters. I also got really into naming trends and making lists of my favorite names, some of which I thought I might want to use for characters if I ever got around to writing a book. That summer, after seventh grade, I tried out for the tennis team so I could be in it for eighth grade if I was good enough. I was basically an average player--about half the kids I played with were abysmal, and half of them were good, and I was really right in the middle. What frustrated me, though, was that because there were so many beginners TRYING OUT FOR THE TENNIS TEAM, they actually had to teach us scoring. And, just like my experience with idiots trying to learn chess, some of them just didn't get it. My usual nature was to be more accepting and give people a chance instead of being tough on them, and this totally bit me in the ass when I ended up paired with a girl who completely did NOT comprehend scoring. (Well, either she didn't, or she was so desperate to win that she resorted to tricks.) I kept winning the game and then she'd think we still had a point to play, and I didn't have the heart to correct her. So we got to a standoff on a deuce at one point, and every time I got the advantage she'd still think it was deuce. Somehow she grasped the concept of advantage the one time SHE got it, and because I made a bad shot during that exchange she "won" that game (even though I'd won it like three times before then and hadn't forced her to recognize it). But then I realized I'd kinda screwed myself when she happily skipped over and reported her win, and what was I going to do, challenge at that point? That afternoon I got cut from the team with a couple others. It was really sad. To my knowledge actually that girl who "beat" me didn't make final cut either, and who knows if I would have managed to get on the team anyway, but I did wonder what the next year what life would have been like if I might have been able to be on a sports team and have those friends. And then, joy of joys, in 1991 I got braces. ARRRRGH. Braces sucked. That's all you need to know.
I spent more time TV-watching than I had ever before during that time. I liked Doogie Howser and Parker Lewis Can't Lose and to some extent Roseanne, and I still liked cartoons and kids' shows a lot, so Ren & Stimpy was a favorite, and I thought The Adventures of Pete and Pete was great. Sometimes I hung out with Emily, whose life was getting pretty wild, and even though she was only in eighth grade she was starting to hang around with these scary gangsta-style men who were seriously in their twenties, talking about how hot they were and wanting to go meet them at the mall. There was one mall we were allowed to go to to get dropped off, but my mom wouldn't let me go to the other one with just friends. That was always the one Emily wanted to go to to meet her thug boyfriends. I was with her a few times somehow when that worked out, and they always made me really uncomfortable because they cussed a lot and were always grabbing her ass. I still felt like I wanted to stay a little kid and I wasn't into this junk, and I kinda sometimes felt like they were trying to set me up with whatever guy's friends were around. Good thing they never really seemed interested. In November we took a trip to Chicago to see my Aunt Patty's wedding and see my grandmother perform in a revival of the Broadway tour of Man of La Mancha. Grandma had also been an original cast member, but I'd never seen her perform. After the wedding I got horribly sick and had a hard time staying awake during the play because I was so miserable, but it was a wonderful experience. Raúl Julia was in the play with my grandma, and I got to meet him briefly backstage. I seem to recall that after the play we went to someone's friend's house and I went right to bed to sleep off my illness while everyone else had dinner. Meh. When I turned 14 I got my own television. My sisters were suitably jealous of my present, though I wasn't super excited by a TV. It sounds kind of petty of me, but the main reason I liked it was that I was the only kid who had one in the family. I even had a remote control! I took to watching my shows in the bedroom just because I could. There was a T.G.I.F. lineup that I always watched even though there wasn't a show on it that I loved. I think I just figured they were part of the culture of my generation and I was "supposed" to watch them. Luckily I couldn't stomach 90210 even for the purpose of being cool. I started getting restless and finally decided I needed a real creative outlet. I bit the bullet and decided to write my first real novel, and I determined that no matter what I wasn't going to stop writing it and I was going to do the stupid thing straight through. By the end of February, 1992, I had written my first novel at age fourteen. I called it Double Vision. (That link goes to my "ancient history" writing page, where you can learn more about it and see excerpts.) When it was done I drew cover art and shared it with my family. My grandma read it and said she was "tickled." Reading it now I can't really imagine why, except if you think bad writing is very cute. My poetry was a lot better than my novel-writing skills at the time.
My memory's a little foggy here, but sometime in the latter part of middle school I took a very brief foray into dance lessons, and it might have been during eighth grade. I had always kinda been jealous of dancer girls because people seemed to think dance was really cool, so I took a jazz class. I really did enjoy it, but I wasn't good at it, and I felt kinda awkward because even as small as I was I was one of the bigger girls in the class due to my being a beginner but being so comparatively old. The entry-level class was labeled "A" and there was a more advanced class called "B," and I remember once having to dance with a partner from B and one of the instructions was for the A dancer to fall backwards and be "caught" by the B dancer. I was appalled because my partner was this tiny girl named Sky and she looked like she'd break in half if I fell on her. Dear lord. I think that's the only time in my life I felt like I was too BIG (maybe only along with an experience of being the biggest child playing on a Mickey D's playground or something). In any case I got really into practicing the routines and would sometimes do so in our front yard, in my leotard and everything. I believe I took the class for two sessions and then quit, but I don't know if it was something I decided to stop or if my parents just didn't have the funds for it. Maybe some of both, and I didn't like one of my instructors or the bratty/cattiness of some of the class participants. I still remember some basic steps and ballet positions from that class, but I didn't pursue it. I started writing some more serious poetry that year, and most of it was pretty depressing and discussed loneliness and alienation. I'm sure I was just trying to be poetic and dramatic some of the time, but I really did feel pretty lonely and misunderstood. I came up with some poems that are actually pretty surprising for a fourteen-year-old. You can read these ones here: "The Solitary Observer," "I Was Born With A Bad Name," and a poem that was set to crappy music (so it was really song lyrics) called "Missing Name."
Science class was interesting too, and it was my first introduction to chemistry and the periodic table. I LOVED the periodic table, and I loved Mrs. Erb's fun approach to experiments. The only thing I hated was when we had to dissect a cow eye and a fetal pig. I was a baby about it but my lab partner Purita was even more of a baby about it (and didn't want to get guts under her nails; I had no such excuse since I bit my nails), so I ended up having to do most of it. Yuck. We got to do a scientific study of which chocolate chip cookie brand contains the most chocolate chips (and of course that involved cookie-eating), and we even learned about the principles of aerodynamics by constructing our own gliders out of simple materials and trying to launch them farther than each other. I was amused that the construction that flew the farthest actually went against most of the principles, since it was ROUND and not aerodynamic at all. Haha! In orchestra I finally got to talk to that David kid I "liked" and I taught him how to make a house out of cards. He was really impressed and liked it. I seem to recall he was in a car with me at some point en route to a friend's birthday party or some kind of carpool event, and it was fun getting to hang out with him. My friend Jenna had recently discovered how to flirt and was obsessed with a boy named Sam and was always talking about him. I still didn't really understand the "flirting" thing. I didn't get it. I also really didn't get it when Emily wrote stuff about "getting laid" in my yearbook. I'M STILL A KID AND SO ARE YOU! LEAVE ME ALONE! Rivalry erupted at the end of the year because some of us were going to Riverview for high school, and some were going to Sarasota High. My yearbook was covered with people writing either "RHS #1!" or "SHS #1!" and subsequent signers would write "SUCKS" next to whatever school was appropriate. I was slated to go to Riverview High the next year. I ended up talking to and hanging out with a classmate named Aubrie who was at my bus stop and got myself invited over to her house once just after the summer started, which was cool because she was going to be going to my high school too and I thought it'd be cool if we ended up being better friends, but that didn't end up happening. Then my grades came in, and somehow I'd gotten straight A's for the first time since elementary school, and got my first Gold Card as a result. I got to use it in shops for rewards that summer, so that was a fun novelty before diving into the Scary World of High School.
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