Bringing this over from Twitter!
[save & repost rather than reblog, please!]
When I was a kid I hated Heath bars, but they’re my dad’s favorite candy so I pretended I liked them so we’d have it in common. Now I genuinely love them.
I took a freshman-level art class my senior year of high school because I had a crush on the art teacher. I sat near her desk and we’d talk about musicals; sometimes I run into her at Muny shows and I still get hearts in my eyes
I’m still self-conscious about the stuff I got bullied over in grade school/middle school. A girl who was particularly awful to me when I was in grade school went to my college, and every time I saw her my self-confidence just nosedived. She sat in the row in front of me during my graduation ceremony, and the whole time I was like “I hope she hears me talking and laughing with Austin and Mary, I HOPE SHE FUCKING HEARS ME HAVING FRIENDS AND BEING LIKED BY PEOPLE.” She didn’t seem to be sitting with any friends during the ceremony and I was spitefully glad about it.
I really love swimming and being part of a team, so I was on my high school’s swim team all four years and was co-captain senior year. However, I don’t super give a shit about being fast or improving my time, and I think that drove my coach up a wall. She was very patient with me though, and I really appreciate it because in retrospect I probably could’ve put in a lot more effort than I did. I liked being able to call myself an athlete a lot more than I actually cared about behaving like one.
I care a lot more about the tradition of performing Shakespeare than William Shakespeare the individual – I’m not really determined to prove he’s a feminist or was queer or supported X political belief or whatever; the plays are what we make of them now and I don’t particularly care what he’d think of them. The admission essay I wrote when I applied to the Denver Publishing Institute was about how it doesn’t matter whether Shakespeare was a genius or not, what mattered was that his work had good circulation.
I really enjoy talking on the phone, and I call my friends just to chat fairly often, but I’ll usually overemphasize how much I ~LLOVE TO TALK ON THE PHONE!!!!!!~~ because I talk to myself constantly (CON👏🏻STANT👏🏻LY👏🏻) and I’d rather people just assume I’m on the phone
In seventh grade, I got my period early while I was on a field trip and bled through my uniform skirt. Nobody had a change of clothes for me and this happened pretty early in the morning, so I had to wear that bloody skirt around all day.
This one girl, who I’d sort of been friends with but had been progressively getting meaner and meaner the longer I knew her, started jokingly referring to me as ‘Carrie’ – which in retrospect is kind of hilariously sophisticated for a seventh grader. But I’d read The Princess Diaries so I was familiar with the plot of Carrie thanks to Michael Moscovitz, and it was really distressing at the time. But not a lot of other kids really got it, so it kind of ran into the ground by the end of the week.
This same girl sat in front of me in class and would go on a rant every time she saw me rereading a book, because she thought rereading books was stupid and also that I was stupid.
I’m still friends with her on Facebook because she does a lot of stupid shit now, and as I have mentioned before I’m kind of spitefully mean. I should probably defriend her though because being reminded of her existence probably contributes to the thing where I’m still self-conscious about stuff people made fun of me for in middle school.
I never got to have a goth phase (religious parents) but I DID have a phase freshman year of high school where my friend Carlye and I read the entire collected works of Edgar Allan Poe and got waaaaay way too into it. Like, I memorized The Tell-Tale Heart in its entirety and could recite it like a monologue.
My mom used to take my phone a lot and go through my text messages, so I’m still in the habit of hiding my phone when I’m at home whenever I’m not using it so that it won’t be lying around. As a result, I’m constantly losing track of my phone in my house (I’ve never actually lost it for real though!)
The most conflicting emotions I’ve ever had about anything were induced by a 10-page paper I began at 6 am to meet the noon deadline that day (I got mixed up about deadlines and didn’t wanna ask for an extension or turn it in late, I have my pride). I was fairly certain it was the worst paper I’ve ever written and I’m kind of mad I did so well, because I scored better on it than on papers I actually put a lot of time and effort into. That professor also wasn’t usually an easy grader, so I have no idea what the deal was there.
I also got a 90 on a five-page paper I wrote in two hours while severely hungover, but that paper was covering a pretty easy topic and I’d already made an outline, so I wasn’t working from scratch. A bit less impressive.
Let this be your lesson in not procrastinating, kids
I’m kind of hesitant toward the idea of a procedure to restore perfect vision because I really like the way my face looks in glasses
I’ve never gotten high and at this point probably will not seek to because every time an opportunity has presented itself to me, my conscience hit me with HAVEN’T YOU DISAPPOINTED YOUR MOTHER ENOUGH?!!!?!!?!?!!!?!?!!!!!
My mom, like, hardcore believed in the Rapture when I was a kid. I don’t really know if she still does – she doesn’t talk about it at all anymore, so I hope not – but the concept still really freaks me out and every once in a while if I like show up early to class or something and no one’s around I’ll get that “okay but WHAT IF-” feeling of dread the same way somebody who doesn’t believe in ghosts will still wonder when they’re in a dark room and hear a creepy noise.
Also the Left Behind series really fucked me up.
Before the days of being able to delete select items off your internet browsing history, my mom would check the internet history constantly and if it was cleared we’d all get grounded (weren’t family computers fun?)
In middle school I got fed up with having no idea what a penis looked like, but I also knew I couldn’t Google it to figure out, so I Googled Michelangelo’s David because I knew it was nude and zoomed in on his crotch to see what his dick looked like.
After a while it occurred to me that I could look at books in the library without checking them out, so that’s how I learned about anatomy.
Everyone has something that makes them close a fic tab immediately, right? For some people it’s Americanisms in Harry Potter fic, for some people it’s spelling an accent out phonetically, for some people it’s first person narration, etc.
Mine is fucking misrepresenting Catholic guilt. As a diet Catholic (my dad’s Catholic, my mom’s not) I have slightly more awareness of what separates it from other forms of Christianity, and oh my god Catholic guilt is not about Hell. Catholics, as a whole, are relatively P R E T T Y C H I L L about Hell. These are the guys who came up with the idea of Purgatory, you know what I’m saying?
Here is what Catholic guilt is. It’s the idea that you’ve let GOD down, you’ve let JESUS down, you’ve let THE HOLY SPIRIT down, you’ve let MARY down, you’ve let THE SAINTS down, you’ve let THE PARISH down, you’ve let MY GRANDMOTHER, GOD REST HER SOUL down, you’ve let little Charlie in the choir down, you’ve let the priest you confess to down, and on and on and on and on.
You want hellfire and the paralyzing terror of damnation? Evangelicals.
It takes a LOT for me to get sick of something I really like. If I really love a movie/tv show/book, I swear I can read or watch it infinity times and not get tired of it. When I was in fifth grade, I read A Wrinkle in Time somewhere in the range of fifteen times within that school year alone. I’ve listened to the song Hard Out Here while getting ready in the morning every day for the past six months.
I find it really easy to go into something with fresh eyes and try to experience how different people might react to it. I looove rereading books right after I’ve recommended them to someone else to try to imagine how they’d react and then see if I’m correct when they do read them. This does, on occasion, lead to “oh shit, I recommended this really highly but now I realize my nostalgia maybe blinded me to the not great elements” moments, but overall I still like to do this.
I’m sure we’re all getting tired of me clogging your dashes like this, so I’ll make this my last fun fact about myself and even make it a fun one to reward y’all for making it this far with me:
Here is a list of things I got scolded for in the years I attended/worked at a Jesus camp from the ages of 8 to 18
- wearing a tutu with visible shorts underneath for a costume night, because “a boy might imagine what you look like without the shorts on”
- saying the word “douche”
- asking “Do you have feelings?” when a boy responded to a girl’s query of “What’s Dirty Dancing about?” with “It’s about promoting abortion.”
- hugging my friend David, because he was crying, because “we do not embrace our brothers in Christ”
- bringing Many Waters to read during down time, because even though it’s a book about Noah’s Ark there are also controversial sex angels
- responding to “Why do girls go so crazy for guys wearing baseball pants” with “you know, they have the stripes that run up from the feet to the promised land” (I wouldn’t have gotten in trouble if fucking Rachel hadn’t told on me)
- GENUINELY ASKING because I WAS CURIOUS about God’s sexual orientation, because an adult minister gave us a talk (the senior campers got an uncomfortable amount sex talks. remind me to find my notes about the S.H.A.R.K.N. talk someday) wherein he said “Gay people cannot claim to be made in the image of God, because God is not gay. I do not serve a gay God.” so I was like “Wait can God even have a sexual orientation?” because the idea of a straight male God who created human women in order to be sexually attracted to them is just not ideal
- As a staffer, we were allowed to play Disney songs in the kitchen while we mopped sometimes, and I thought Newsies would make the cut because it’s a Disney movie but there is Bad Inappropriate Language
- In a discussion about Christian media vs. Inappropriate Media I brought up Harry Potter as promoting the Christian themes of friendship, love, sacrifice, and perseverance. It did not go over well with everyone.
- Singing a song from Into the Woods
- Yelling at a guy for saying he’ll never watch a Tom Hanks movie again since Tom Hanks played a gay character in Philadelphia (specifically what I said was “WILL YOU NEVER WATCH A STANLEY TUCCI MOVIE NOW TOO BECAUSE HE PLAYED A RAPIST?!”)
- As a staffer, we had to have watches on because there was no way of contacting people (cell phones were NOT ALLOWED) so you all had to have synchronized watches. One of the maintenance guys broke his watch but fortunately a counselor had a spare. Unfortunately, she was a girl and he couldn’t go into Girl Camp to get it from her. I was like “oh we’ll both be near the petting zoo after dinner, right? I’ll just get the watch from Danae and give it to you then.” Cut to me waiting for Tucker by this fucking petting zoo for SO LONG, and then it started to get dark and some counselors mistook me for a camper and started yelling at me. It took a while for me to explain the situation, and then I still got in trouble for arranging to meet with a male staffer after dark (fortunately the petting zoo is in a super public area so I didn’t get kicked out or anything, which has happened to people for making out in secret). Also fucking Tucker had completely forgot about the watch so I had to give it to him at breakfast the next day. ALSO we worked together again the next summer and by then he’d forgotten my name.
- Not a thing I got in trouble for, but in the paperwork I filled out to work there, I had to state that I was a virgin (not in those words, I had to check a box that said “I have maintained pure romantic relationships”). Pretty sure it’s illegal to ask employees about that, but hey. Who am I to get in the way of God’s will?
You poor dear. Come have coffee at my Den of Sin
The Brain Squirrel Monologues 