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Vintage Post: "Fantasy"

Oct 19, 2008
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Originally posted 3/8/04. My stars, looking back on how fabulously deluded I was in middle school makes me want to dig out my old diary and submit it to Cringe.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the victim of a rich inner fantasy life.

The best example of this, I think, is found in a brief history of my First True Love, Tyler Ray (First True Love not counting, of course, John Berry, the “God’s Gym”-t-shirt—wearing fourth grade class president, and Paul Wilson – Winston? Whitmore? something with a W – whose solo performance of “Blueberry Hill”, with my very capable piano accompaniment, won the fifth grade talent competition).

Tyler was in sixth grade the year I was fifth (an older man! oh, heart!), and was, if my rich inner fantasy life is any gauge, completely and utterly perfect. Our paths crossed mostly because we were both in Youth Orchestra – I was the star (there’s that rich inner fantasy life again) violin student, and he and his best friend Jeremy played stringed bass. I spent Tuesday and Thursday nights from seven to eight-thirty gazing across the gym at him from behind my violin, admiring the grace and strength with which he plucked the strings, the majestic way his muscles rippled when he reached to turn a page. Every note I played sang out Tyler, Tyler, and I hoped he could hear the passion and yearning I played to him with each line of “Theme from Ice Castles (Or, Through the Eyes of Love)” and “Ashokan Farewell” and “The Addams Family”.

Tyler was a god. He looked just like Ralph Macchio, the Karate Kid, only much, much cuter. He and Jeremy and I were Library Helpers, and after lunch, if there weren’t any magazines to shelve and the plants had all been watered, he would draw pictures of cartoon men with knobby knees and protrusive adam’s apples. He was nice to me after Jeremy broke my finger playing Rubber Band War, and even though he made fun of me for being cast as “Charlotte” from Charlotte’s Web in the library-sponsored school play Reading: the Great Adventure (my costume required black knee socks, stuffed with newspaper, to be pinned to the sides of my shirt, two on each side, as spider legs on a budget), he helped me memorize my lines. We were, I felt sure, going to live Happily Ever After together.

By Thanksgiving, my finger had mostly healed, and my rich inner fantasy life and I began making plans for a magical Christmas with Tyler. I daydreamed constantly about how it would play out: Tyler, who was, after all, extremely romantic for a sixth-grader, would call me on Christmas morning, just as we were through opening presents; and in a husky voice he would tell me that he wanted nothing more for Christmas than to spend it with the woman (in my fantasy life I was a full-blown, bra-wearing Woman) he loved more than anything, and would I please go to the movies with him that afternoon? Coyly I would tell him that I would have to ask my father and would he please call me back in twenty minutes?, but of course when I would ask my father, he would recognize that I had at last found True Love, and Tyler and I were obviously soulmates, and so of course I could go to the movies with Tyler, and he would even be happy to drop us off. Then Tyler would call me back, and I would tell him I would love to go to the movies with him, and with a sob in his voice he would say that this would be the best Christmas he had ever had, that he couldn’t believe I felt the same way about him that he felt about me, that he had wanted to ask me out for months and months but couldn’t work up the nerve. Then we would go to the movies, and sit in the back row and hold hands and confess undying love to each other and then, he would look, adoringly, into my eyes, and kiss me deeply, soulfully….

I clung to this fantasy throughout most of December, and believed it so deeply that I actually told my father that I may not be home Christmas afternoon, because I may have other plans to spend it with someone, and that a boy would probably be calling me Christmas morning but not to worry because he would like this boy very much, I was sure. Instead, though, I found out a few days before Christmas break that Tyler was going out with – Jenny! Jenny was a pink-sweatered, curly-permed sixth grade girl; she had one of those pencil cases with buttons on the side that made different things pop out, like an eraser or a pencil sharpener or a set of tiny colored pencils. She never doodled on her pristine Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. My Trapper Keeper only had kittens and was littered with “Abby Ray” and “I Love Tyler 4ever” scribbled on all the folders. I couldn’t possibly compete. Bitterly I told myself that Tyler and Jennifer couldn’t possibly last, that they’d be broken up before Spring Break; but by January I had settled on a new plan:

I would lower my standards.

I spent the first week of school after Christmas break morosely scribbling through all the “I Love Tyler”s and “Mrs. J. Tyler Ray”s on my folders and the second week of school quietly analyzing all the boys in my class (Ben – too much of a class clown; Craig – not smart enough; John – too nerdy; Ryan – picked his nose) to find my next Soulmate candidate. I finally landed on Collin, a not-too-nerdy, Hypercolor-t-shirt—wearing boy who took trumpet lessons and who had had a quiet crush on me ever since I sat behind him in third grade. So I used my budding feminine wiles to persuade Collin to ask me out, and so we shared a passionate two-week-long elementary school romance (the highlight of which was the day Collin stole a rose from the bouquet on the school librarian’s desk and gave it to me during assembly, not knowing that I had already put a break-up note in his bookbag for him to find when he got home from school). And after our two weeks were over, I learned that Jennifer had broken up with Tyler, and so I thought, what the heck, and had my best friend Sarah ask Jeremy to ask Tyler if he would go out with me.

This is the point where my rich inner fantasy life would like to take over again and insist that Tyler fell madly in love with me at that moment, and that we spent the next seven years of grade school holding hands on the school bus and making out in the bandroom, and that in fact Tyler is really a pseudonym for Aaron, and we’ve been busily living happily ever after, ever since.

What really happened, though, is that Tyler laughed at Jeremy, who laughed at Sarah, who sorrowfully told me I didn’t have a whelk’s chance in a supernova*; and slowly I decided that Tyler wasn’t nearly as cute as Ralph Macchio and his low notes were usually flat; and I – lived happily ever after. Or something. Rich inner fantasy life and all.

*"...then we don't stand a whelk's chance in a supernova."

"A what?" said Arthur sharply again. He had been following the conversation doggedly up to this point, and was keen not to lose the thread now.

"A whelk's chance in a supernova," repeated Ford without losing momentum. "The..."

"What's a whelk got to do with a supernova?" said Arthur.

"It doesn't," said Ford levelly, "stand a chance in one."

Vintage Post: "Someday I'll Learn"

Oct 13, 2008
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Originally posted 8/12/03, three months after David was born and I left full-time gainful employ to be a full-time homemaker - a rocky transition, to say the least.

As it turns out, once a tupperware has had month-and-a-half-old scalloped potatoes in its insides, it is doomed to smell like month-and-a-half-old scalloped potatoes for the rest of its life. Which is bound to be short, for a scalloped-potato-smelling tupperware.

Tonight I tackled the last frightening dirty dishes that have been lurking in the dark corners of my kitchen. But when I got to the month-and-a-half-old-scalloped-potato-tupperware, I was forced to consult my - and every good housewife's - higher power: hints-from-Heloise-dot-com.

To no avail! Heloise says nothing at all about month-and-a-half-old-scalloped-potato-stink lingering in your tupperware. I guess all the other housewives don't let their tupperware fester. Probably turn those potatoes right away into scalloped potato cake, or something equally housewifey, disguise it so well their smiling husbands and polite children don't even notice they're eating leftover scalloped potatoes. Scalloped potato scrambled egg casserole for their breakfasts. No way those good scalloped potatoes would go to waste, no suh.

Nope. Once a tupperware of scalloped potatoes has been allowed to ferment for a month and a half, you can forget it. Ain't nothin' gonna desmellify that tupperware, not ever never.

I don't even want to think about the three-month-old refried beans.

Previously Released under a Different Label

Sep 24, 2008
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Once upon a time, back before blogging was called blogging, I wrote on a LiveJournal. I'm finally getting around to taking it down, and in the interest of laziness, I plan to repost here some old entries from my carefree days of childlessness (or just-one-childness). To whet your appetite, here's the list of interests I provided on my profile page, back in 2002:

80s saturday morning cartoons, aaron's cute techie rants, aberrant art, acrophobia, adam duritz, arthur dent, arthurian legends, astonishment, authenticity, avoiding my in-laws, ayn rand, babel fish, barry kite, bed, being wooed, brand-new grass, brilliance, caffeinated breastmilk, calculated insanity, calvin and hobbes, carbohydrates, cardboard art, cheap wine, childlikeness, children's books, chivalry, conan o'brien, connotations, counting crows, deceptive cadences, deep soulful nights, diagnosis murder, dimmer switches, dooce, dr phil, dr seuss, ed, eden, effexor, einstein, el ojo rojo, ella, ennui, fattening desserts, gary larson, grammar, hallmark, haruki murakami, hating la leche league, healthy paranoia, idealists, indecision, inferences, infps, interesting blogs, irony, johnson and johnson commercials, kiersey, labyrinthian libraries, large men named guido, law and order: suv, lime juice, little-known facts, living happily ever after, long hamstrings, lovers in love, low menacing tones, making up words, mariska hargitay's hair, maurice sendak, melodrama, metafiction, metaphors, militant grammarians, monster the cat, my wonderful husband, napoleon bonaparte, naps, onomotopoeia, orson scott card, overdue library books, overspending, parts of speech, passions the soap, philosophy, prefixes, proper punctuation, pumpernickel bagels, queen yoda, rachmaninov, rainbow eyes, randomness, reclaiming my childhood, red roses, robert grudin, robert pirsig, romance, salvador dali, self-effacement, she-ra stories, singing in the car, sleeping through the night, sloths, smoove b, snogging, solfege, solitude, soul-searching, spelling bee championships, spelling long words, sudden insight, suffixes, summer reading lists, sunshine, sweet baby breath, sweet nothings, tea, the lady chablis, the place thingy, the placebo effect, the prefix meta-, thinking well, throw pillows, thunderstorms, tired cliches, txt msging martin, unexpected compliments, vicki iovine, wackiness, wikipedia, writing, zamboniousness

There now. Doesn't twenty-year-old me seem like the sort of person you'd like to meet? Or else a right geek. You decide.