Twenty things about my teens

I was gonna try and keep this in more of a chronological order, but I can't be bothered to sort them out. I apologize for the over-wordiness of all this, and hope it is the least bit interesting to someone.

1. During the summer between elementary school and junior high school I was IQ tested for the first time by recommendation of my sixth grade teacher. As a result I was deemed “gifted” and enrolled in the “gifted” classes for English and Math. Math I could have done without frankly, but I LOVED my “gifted” English teachers all throughout school. Even the villainous Mr. Stoneback who made students cry. The reading lists were good and writing was one of the only things I really enjoyed being challenged by in school.
2. Junior high SUCKED. No surprise there, I guess. The clique I hung out with through most of my days at South Junior High were my obviously gay but very closeted neighbor (who I still love dearly and miss immensely – more on him in a sec), a girl who was overweight and a pathological liar, a girl who later became the drum major and a chubby blonde boy who was my first boyfriend and was later known for being on the football team but getting injured in the beginning of every season. As you can tell I was not in the upper strata of society – but I had friends, so that was something.
3. While dating said chubby boy his very shy best friend confessed to me that he had a crush on me. And then he apologized for it. Constantly. For days and days. It creeped me out and got on my nerves. And then one day in the hallway between Biology and Algebra I told him I didn’t care if he liked me, that I was sick of him talking about it, and I would rather he never talk to me again than here it one more time. And he didn’t. In fact we never spoke after that. For my part I can say it was because I was SO embarrassed by my behavior and my outburst that I could never look him in the eyes again. We went through five more years of high school without a peep. I still feel shame about it.
4. But that isn’t the thing I feel the most shame about from my teen years. I love my neighbor David. Because we moved in with my stepfather in the middle of my fifth grade year but I was allowed to finish the year out in my old school district, David was my first friend in the area. We started hanging out that summer. He was smart, funny and sweet. Over the years I spent a ton of time at his house and considered his English mom and Irish dad to be anther set of parents. But David was obviously different – and in the high school years different is very, very bad. And though it was David’s differences that made me love him, a couple of times in junior high I lashed out at him from being so “weird” that it impacted my social perception in school. The very worse was the time that we got into a physical fight on the school bus home and I tried to put lipstick on him. Thinking about it now makes me want to cry. I can’t imagine how horrible it made him feel and I’m sure it was that sort of treatment even by his closest friends that caused him to not “come out” until he went away to college. It’s all water under the bridge now because David and I are still close and keep in touch (far too sporadically) but if I could take back one thing it would be those interactions.
5. Throughout my teen years I babysat for John and Robin Matthews and their three daughters – Hannah, Kyla and Shea. I thought they were the ideal family and wanted to be just like them when I grew up. I really couldn’t overemphasize the impact their family had on my life – they spawned a lot of my interest in art and music and gave me an excellent idea of what a “whole” family was like. The girls were all amazingly smart (supra-geniuses, in fact) and sweet and are now all grown. Hannah, the oldest, graduated from college last year. (MY GOD!)
6. I became a Girl Scout in my teen years so that I could teach at Girl Scout camp during the summers. I really loved working with the kids – and my finest memory is teaching my troop to sing “Fishheads” with an accompanying dance. And though I never finished my paperwork for the coveted Girl Scout gold award – I do have the silver.
7. As Patrice can confirm in early high school I was obsessed with Matt W. It was an on again, off again, not quite just friends, not quite full-on boyfriend thing that set the precedent for ALL of my relationships with men. My inner image of him is baggy acid wash jeans, Hard Rock Café Tshirt, black Reebok high tops with no socks, laying on the floor watching tennis while eating two sandwiches after school. Oh, and that conversation we had were he told me wanted to summon a demon to do his bidding. Ha!
8. My best friend throughout all of high school was Michelle. What is most interesting about our friendship is that she was a year younger and didn’t go to my school, or even live nearby. She lived about 20 minutes away and went to an all girls Catholic school. We met when her Mom and my Dad introduced us when they were both tending bar at the Bier Garten, which Michelle’s Grandmother owned. And because we spent every available moment together, the dynamics of the in-school social scene didn’t really reach me completely. I’m no longer in touch with Michelle; we had a falling out about a stupid boy when I was a freshman at Pitt. The saddest part of that to me is that I feel like I don’t remember a lot of my teen years because I don’t have her to reminisce with me about them.
9. Patrice and I became friends when we joined Executive Council in ninth grade. I think she stayed in it throughout high school, but I only did the one year. As I recall you had to be reelected by your peers in the following years, and I didn’t want to put my name in because I knew I couldn’t take the rejection of losing. I never “ran” for anything because I was too scared to put myself on the line. But my closest school friends for the bulk of my high school education were made through Exec Council and my “gifted” classes.
10. My favorite class in high school was the Psychology elective I took during my senior year. It was a fairly simple class that a lot of kids took because the teacher was notorious for grading easy, but I just fell in love the theory, the emotion, the humanity of Psych. As a result I went to Pitt as a Psych major though I had previously wanted to do nothing but write. I didn’t get my degree in Psych, but I took enough classes, particularly in Child Psych, to qualify for a minor had I not transferred to Temple.
11. My German heritage meant there was no question about what language I was going to take in high school. I took three years of German, but refused to converse with my Oma who always tried to correct my pronunciation to her dialect. As a result I don’t remember much German at all, sadly. My senior year I decided to take a first year of Spanish and ended up in a class of all freshman. But I really dug Spanish and felt some of it came natural to me because one of my babysitters had had a Puerto Rican husband who only spoke Spanish in the house. Surely I could have absorbed some of it without realizing. Right?
12. In eighth grade my Mom gave me a black eye on the way to school. It was a total accident. I said something really bitchy to her in the car and she backhanded me. It wasn’t a hard of a hit and would not even have left a mark except that my mom was wearing a big ring and it happened to catch me right in the eye. I began crying and when my mom saw my eye was swelling up she started crying too. We were hysterical. She turned the car around and we went home to spend the day at home goofing off. The big problem occurred when I went back to school and some of my teachers seriously worried I was abused. The smaller problem was that for a time when I was in the car with my mom and she moved her hand suddenly I involuntarily ducked. It made her feel bad which made me feel worse.
13. I got my period late. And despite all the waiting and wishing, still didn’t recognize it when it happened. I expected it to be redder. I called my mom at work to ask her what the hell was wrong with me.
14. And in conjunction with that I have to mention that I was flat as a board until about my junior year. I used to pray for breasts. And now I’m living out some sort of sick joke.
15. My mom got me a used Mustang to drive when I turned 16. It was light blue and had a sunroof. I totalled it a couple of months after getting my drivers license when I drove through a red light. In my defense I have to say I was unfamiliar with the area, and it was dark, rainy, foggy and the traffic lights were on posts on the street corners and not hanging over the intersection so I didn’t even see the light until it was too late. One car hit me and pushed me into another car. It was pretty dramatic and I remember crying like a lunatic in the street after it happened. I relived that accident SO many times. In the blink of the eye in which it happened I thought I killed Michelle, who was in the passenger seat and at the point of the first impact. Luckily no one was seriously hurt. I was at my Dad’s for the weekend when the accident happened and my Dad made me call my Mom and tell her about it. It caused a big rift between my parents since my Mom said my Dad shouldn’t have let me be out that night. There once peaceable relationship was never quite the same.
16. When I turned 16 I got a job at West Coast Video in Quakertown. It was the PERFECT job for me. I got free rentals, made use of my interest in movies, and worked with an odd bunch of other teen lackeys. Oh, and the video store was in the vicinity of a different school district so I didn’t have to deal with the yahoos from my school, but rather yahoos I soon came to know strictly through work. There were only two bad things about the job. One was that we gave out free popcorn with every rental and I REEKED of popcorn, the second was that we had an adult video room and had to deal with all kinds of pervs. After I became a shift manager and could open and close the store, I had to call the cops more than once to get them to clear a masturbator out of the adult room.
17. My job resulted in me hanging out with some older kids – high school graduates and college kids. People over 21. People that I honestly thought were the coolest people in the world. The coolest among those was Kate – it was when she learned I liked Jane’s Addiction and invited me to take a bus trip with her to go see her boyfriend’s band play at CBGB’s in New York City that my life was drastically altered. It’s that band that I began driving into Manhattan to see. It’s that band that I moved to the DC area to do PR for. It’s that band that replaced their crazy bass player Steve with Mark, my husband. Not only did I fall in love with the band, which led to my life with Mark, but it was those trips to NYC that caused me to fall in love with the idea of living in the city.
18. Also through West Coast I became friends with Gayle – and in doing so started hanging out with a slightly more “adventurous” group in high school. We hung out with older guys, tried alcohol, went cruising the strip in Lansdale. Throughout my senior year I was in two cliques. I was never a “bad girl” per se, I was a “gifted” kid for God’s sake, but in my last year of high school I was certainly bad-er.
19. I also really loved my Photography classes and was incredibly blown away when I actually won an award for my “senior wall” during the end of year art show. I nearly didn’t put up a wall because I didn’t think I was near good enough to take up the space. It felt good to win something.
20. I skated through school on natural talent. I rarely did homework at home - preferring to rush through most of it in homeroom, lunch, or just the class before it was due. And the big projects you were supposed to spend weeks on were always done the night before. I never really tried in school – most likely because if I tried and failed then I’d be crushed. And also because I was lazy and knew I could get away with doing the bare minimum. I was even like that in college. It wasn’t until I went back to college part-time after a couple year hiatus that I took my school work seriously.