Ongoing list of what kind of a weird little kid I was.

Today’s list is taken from a time in my life when things were going pretty damn poorly. Yet, thinking about the kind of kid I was, I still want to go back in time and give myself a stomp on the foot.

• In fifth grade I planned a lip synching routine to “Nasty Boys” that would end in me ripping off my three sizes too big suit jacket to reveal a dayglo bikini. At the time I was developing this routine, it seemed like it was destined to be the coolest thing anyone had ever done or seen. Come the day of the performance, when I tried to give my Janet Jackson tape to our choir teacher, she reminded me that we were meant to actually sing a song ourselves. Taking it in stride, I made the best possible choice (in my mind), and still performed the whole routine, only instead of lip synching, I sang that bitch a capella and still went for my epic bikini revealing finale. I was extremely surprised when, instead of wild applause, the whole auditorium was filled with horrified faces. Nobody even laughed. They just sat there. I grabbed my jacket, exited the stage, and instead of- oh, I don’t know, logically feeling embarrassed, I immediately began to formulate a new routine that might be better received. Luckily, I changed schools shortly after that.
• That same year, but at a different school, I wrote a play to perform for our D.A.R.E. cop. The major premise of the play was that my friends and I were hookers. There wasn’t much about drugs in the plot. I remember it kind of dragged at the end. I played the sweet, dumb hooker.
• That same year, when my best friend Shannon told me that she wasn’t best friends with me anymore, because her new best friend was Michelle, who lived next door and had just gotten a trampoline, I reacted by locking myself in Shannon’s house, threatening to stab myself in the heart with a knife, then swallowing three bottles of tylenol. I then spent a few days in a regular hospital in a bed next to a woman who was having a hysterectomy. Back then, if you had anything not right with the downstairs, they just went in and chopped out your uterus. I recall being extremely chatty with this incredibly gracious woman about how I had just tried to kill myself. Looking back, I try to imagine what I would feel like laying in a hospital bed post surgery, listening to an 11 year old talk about suicide.
• I had started smoking cigarettes around then, and my 15 year old next door neighbor would smoke with me in my step-grandma’s house until right before she got home. Then one day, for absolutely no reason at all, I went over to the girl’s house, asked earnestly to speak to her mother, then told her mother that I was afraid the girl would get lung cancer or possibly start to use drugs, so I needed to tell the mother in person that her daughter was addicted to cigarettes. The girl’s mother, who was a stripper who had the kind of face that said “I’m too tired for this shit”, seemed pretty bugged by my heart-to-heart about her daughter’s lung health.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2012 at 1:03 am and is filed under Blog, When I Was A Kid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.