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Anonymous
San Francisco, California USA
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I was born in California behind the Orange Curtain. My mom was a special ed teacher and my dad the principal of the school where she worked. Dad was in love with Mom but not necessarily vice-versa. But both really wanted children so there you have it.*
I had a boyfriend in preschool. I've been a serial monogamist ever since.
I cried the first days of kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, but not third grade. In grade school and junior high I was a "gifted minor." In second grade I told my teacher that my mom was pregnant but she wasn't.* My mom was really confused when she came to pick me up at school one day and the teacher congratulated her. That year was also spirit of 76 and we had cool school pictures. In third grade I was in Brownies but I dropped out because I freaked too much if I was the last person to be picked up by their mom or dad and it seemed like I was a lot so I just quit. In fourth grade I had a perm. I was the Sugar Plum Fairy and I improvised my entire Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy dance. In fifth grade I moved to a new school where there was no special program for "gifted minors." I became obsessed with being popular which required me to buy navy blue Nikes with a white swoosh and Chemin de Fer jeans. That school was walking distance from my house so I joined girl scouts. I skinned my knee really bad selling girl scout calendars. I still have that scar. In seventh grade I read the Preppy Handbook and wore nothing but Izod shirts. I was an alternate for my junior high cheerleading squad. I was in a band that my piano teacher put together called the Breckenridge Musikids. I wanted to be a singer but they told me I wasn't ready yet and I had to play keyboards and tambourine and this other rhythm instrument and this little thing that looks like a tiny piano that you blow into. Mr. Breckenridge broke up the band before I had a chance to become a singer.
Freshman and sophomore years of high school I did pretty well for myself. I dated three guys who approached me and asked me out, not at the same time though. Throughout my sophomore year I dated a senior who was the captain of the football team and the Homecoming King. Did that propel me into popularity. Yes. He graduated at the end of my sophomore year and we broke up because he got his hair cut and I didn't like it.
Junior and senior years of high school sucked and I don't even want to talk about it. The highlight of junior year was that I was captain of the drill team and got to wear a full headdress instead of just a little feather. (We were the Indians.) And I was captain of the Super Squad. The highlight of senior year was that I made Varsity Yell so haha those girls in junior high to whom I was their alternate can eat me. And I was in the Dance Company and got the award for Most Creative Choreography. I applied to three schools: USC, UCLA as a backup, and UC Santa Barbara as a last resort. I got into all three so I went to USC. (As far as I was concerned that was how the world was organized.)
Freshman year at USC was a stoned haze. My best friend flunked out. I feel bad because I think I was a bad influence on her. I went to the first few days of USC Song Girl tryouts but decided that they were never going to pick someone like me, with short-ish hair and a fairly flat chest, so I just skipped it. Sophomore year I joined the USC Marching Band and twirled a flag. That was pretty fun although I really wanted to wear the normal band uniform instead of the quasi-uniform with a little cheerleader skirt. So senior year I switched to cymbals. That was pretty fun. My major at USC was Critical Studies in Film and Television. I made a movie called "When the Tooth Fairy Comes" about a college guy who put his wisdom teeth under his pillow and then carried on an ongoing sexual affair with the Tooth Fairy until he was all out of teeth. My classmate was Bryan Singer, who went on to direct The Usual Suspects and The X-Men. I think he took me to a breakfast where George H.W. Bush, then president, was speaking. But that could have been a hallucination.
After college I moved back to the OC, messed around for a couple of years, and then moved up to San Francisco for law school. That was totally boring except the part where I worked as a waitress the whole while. Then all the rest is really boring. I was boy crazy until age 27, then dated a girl for five years who later became a boy, then dated a few boys, then dated another girl, and now I'm boy crazy again.
Despite how exciting that sounds, my life is boring boring boring now. I don't want to have kids that come out of my body. Ew. And I don't like housepets. Double ew. I have some really good friends but they are all either coupled up or are madly in love with me and I just want to be friends. These days I spend a lot of time alone, pretty much by choice. I make a lot of money and spend way too much of it.
My dad is my favorite parent.* He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease right after I took the bar exam and he died in 2006 ten years later. I did a good job of internalizing all of my pain throughout those ten years watching him deteriorate and then when he died I pretty much lost it. I'm still kind of finding it I guess. When he died I was sitting there holding his hand and watching him. Everyone else was asleep. That was one of my favorite moments of all time, cause he had been in a coma for ten days and we knew he was going to die and I wanted to be there when it happened. I display his ashes on a shelf in my house.
In the future I hope to someday find a guy to have fun with over the long term. And hopefully someday we will be mature enough to adopt a kid. Not a baby and not someone from another country. A kid from the U.S., someone old enough that he or she likely would languish in foster care for the rest of his or her minority if it weren't for us adopting him or her. Or them - it would be really cool to adopt siblings who likely would be split up if it weren't for us adopting them. I would like to do something to make those kids' lives better than they would have been in foster care. I am scared that I am too psycho for the government to ever let me adopt kids out of foster care though.
Oh yeah I have a sister. She and I have been through thick and thin together.* She is awesome. She's younger than me but she is way more mature and stable than me. She makes like one fifth of my salary if not less, but she has no debt and lots of savings unlike me. She wants to get married and have a family and she is gorgeous and I don't know why she isn't yet married and pregnant. I feel sad for her sometimes. Lots of the time.
The end. I can't even talk about the stuff that was really painful. Like for example when my grandma died in our pool and my Dad was devastated. Or like when my Dad spent countless hours fixing up this bike for me and painting it and making it look cute so he could teach me to ride on it and then when he gave it to me I just said, "this is used," and it broke my Dad's heart, and then like the next year my mom bought my sister and me brand new bikes for Christmas. Or the time in high school when I realized that if you refuse to have sex with any guy but you agree to have oral sex the guys will tell each other about it and all of a sudden your nickname is "DTA," which stands for "Deep Throat Addict." Or the time in my senior year of high school when I had this huge out-of-control party when my dad was away and then the neighbors told him and I got in a lot of trouble and I ran away but only across the street and stayed with the across-the-street neighbors for at least a week maybe more, and then this one day after school we were painting signs for the next day's pep rally and my dad came there and he said please come home so I did.
* My parents got divorced when I was in second grade. My dad didn't want the divorce and he never remarried. My mom moved right in with her boyfriend and my parents had joint custody. My sister and I lived two weeks with Mom and then two weeks with Dad, they both lived close enough so they could drive us to school. Every two weeks we had to pack up all of our earthly belongings and move them to the other parent's house. And then the same thing two weeks later. It is hard for me to imagine how much of a negative effect that had on me. Or who I would be if I hadn't gone through that. For some reason my sister isn't fucked up and I like to think it's because I sheltered her and made her believe that it was all okay. For example, "It's no big deal that our parents are divorced, we get two Christmases!!" My mom and her boyfriend had lots of crazy friends and they were all stoners and vegetarians. They were so lame, this one time they told me and my sister to stay up in our room and when we peeked out they were all downstairs smoking pot and listening to Cheech and Chong records. Sometimes the stoned friends were fun. This one woman got out all the pots and pans this one night and we banged on them to Doobie Brothers music like they were drums. We used to have contests on who could do the "I'm melting" scene from The Wizard of Oz the best. When we went to a restaurant we told them that our last name was Pudley. We had these fictional names, mine was Priscilla Pudley. My sister was Penelope Pudley. We had a white van with rainbows winding all around it. About four years into the divorce, just when we were getting used to that boyfriend and started liking him, my mom broke up with him and then she was single for like a month and then one day she went to Florida to visit her parents and my sister and I stayed with my mom's friend for the week. We got a call from my mom and she was all, "Guess what, I got married!" And we were all, "to whom??" (Except we were like eleven so we didn't say "whom.") It was some new guy that she had taken to Florida to meet her parents. Little thing she forgot, to introduce him to her kids. We sat down with my mom's friend and made a list of pros and cons of having this new dad that we had never met before. It turned out in the end that there were a lot of pros and not too many cons. This one time we were on my stepdad's sailboat with them and a bunch of their friends and they started smoking a joint and passed it right across me. I was like 12. I should have grabbed it and taken a toke, that would have served them right. I'm not sure whether that is a pro or a con. Mom and he divorced about ten years later. She is still single.
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