Hiatus

Check out www.WhereDemGirlsAt.wordpress.com to keep up with me, Lauren, and our crazy hijinks as we travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again.

Obsessions

Source

This woman had an irrational fear of getting on the highway. Not the type of fear most people have, where they want to avoid it because there might be traffic. She had a complete life inhibiting fear of getting onto the freeway- there was nothing free about it for her. The story was on an episode of Obsessions, which is one of those shows that's like a train wreck. You watch the entire episode thinking... how can she live like this? The answer, of course, is that she cant - which is why she's on the show in the first place.

I, by no means, have an obsessive compulsive disorder, or something that keeps me from living my life the way I want to live it. I don't have to check the alarm clock 50 times a night to make sure that it's set to the right time. What I do have, would widely be considered quirks. Strange little things that - to varying degrees- everyone has. I just have this sinking suspicion that mine are a weeeee bit quirkier than most peoples.

I'm in elementary school, I"m standing in my parents master bathroom and I don't remember why I went in there. What I do remember is that I'm about an inch away from the mirror and all the lights are on in the bathroom. I'm leaning over the sink and looking at myself wide eyed. I keep stretching my eyelids up as far as they will go and twisting my head back and forth trying to get a little circle of light - a reflection on my eye from the bulb above- to sit in the center of my pupil. What I wanted, needed, was for that little spot of light to go into the small black circle in the middle of my eye. I'm starting to get anxious, throwing my head way back while looking down at the mirror to see if that makes the light go where I want it; but it wont. No matter which way I turn my head, or which way I roll my eyes around the light refuses to go into my pupil. I start thinking, it's awfully black. it's very dark. It's like a little hole in my eye. Is it really a hole in my eye? I always thought it was a spot, but if no light will go there maybe it's because it's a hole. My thoughts are racing - what a tremendous discovery! I have a little hole in my eye! But how can I be sure? Well, if it's a hole, I should be able to stick something into it.

Like a pin.

Source

Something like a little pin. That's what I need.

I hunt around looking for one in my bathroom, but there just isn't one to be found.

I decide I'll just try to touch it with my finger and see if I can feel a little space, a gap where there isn't anything because there's really only a hole there. The problem is, my eye really doesn't want me to stick my finger on it. (Shocking, right?) But more than my eye doesn't want my finger in it, my brain NEEDS to know if that is a hole in my eye - So I force my finger onto my eye, not once, BUT TWICE. (Because, maybe I just didn't feel it right the first time and there really is a hole but it's just really small and my finger didn't feel it)

Finally, my eye stinging, but my brain finally satiated that the little dot in my eye is just that, a dot (not a hole) I leave the bathroom.

-end memory

That's weird right? I feel like most people don't have little kid memories like this. Am I totally wrong? Do you have crazy memories from when you were a child?

A little bit of pixie dust

My best friend in the whole world had blonde hair and a scar on his chest that ran from his collar bone to his belly button. He lived two houses down from me and had parents that were always way more worried about him than I thought was necessary. The scar was from heart surgery that he had when he was a baby - maybe that's why his mom always seemed like she was hovering. Maybe it was because I seemed like a kid that would only get into trouble. He was 7, I was 8 and we both had vivid imaginations. We would parade around the basement making elaborate plans for puppet shows. He told me once that there was a prize for the cleanest street ( a thing that I still find myself believing when I see a particularly dirty street "man, this place will never win the cleanest street prize")we spent the afternoon sweeping the gutters and throwing away pile after pile of gravel.We made up wild games of fantasy; I have a vivid memory of playing Rapunzel in the back yard and pretending the long rope on the playground was golden hair and that the princess had to be protected from an awful troll who was keeping her captive. We even had an imaginary friend called Invisible Ghost. We spent afternoons trying to coax him out of cabinets where he was hiding because he was scared, or chasing him around because he was running away. Every-day-reality was so tightly interlaced with the imaginary that sometimes it got hard to tell where one started and the other stopped. Which is why looking back I"m not at all surprised that for years I was convinced I could fly.

I woke up with the sort of longing you might get when you dream about food. You know what I mean, like when you dream you're sucking down a huge milkshake and you wake up and that's the only thing that you want for breakfast. It was like that. I woke up and the sun was coming in the windows of my bedroom. I woke up with a start- like I knew that there was something awesome that I needed to get to doing. The smile on my face wouldn't stop because I knew as soon as I could get outside I was going flying - just like yesterday. Yesterday I was running up and down the yard and soaring into the air, and after all my practice yesterday today was going to be much better.

To really get a feel for this whole experience you need to have an idea of what yard behind my house looks like. My dad is a bit of a garden buff and had turned our long rectangular yard into three quarters plant bed. The edge of the L shaped flower bed is bordered by a stone wall, about a foot high at the far end. Prime running area started at the bottom of the L of the flower bed and was a thin stretch of grass that stretched up parallel to the stem part of the L.

This strip of grass was going to be the run way. The recipe for flight was absolutely clear in my mind. Start at the top section of grass.Run with every ounce of speed you could muster up; then, take a leap up onto the stone wall, turn around and launch yourself with a two foot jump as far and fast as possible into the air. If you were going fast enough, and if you pushed off the wall hard enough you would start to fly. So that's what I did. Over, and over, and over again. Run, jump, turn, leap. Repeat. Run, jump, turn, leap. Each time telling myself that I just didn't get quite fast enough; if I just pushed off the wall with a little more force I would definitely make it next time.The thing is, I never lost hope, or thought to myself "this is nuts, kids can't fly". The image was so clear in my mind. After all, I had just done it yesterday.

I spent the afternoon sprinting up and down that strip of grass and jumping into the air over and over. It wasn't until years later that I realized when I woke up that morning remembering flying in my back yard, that the memory wasn't from the day before, but the night before. Of course I had dreamt the whole thing - but at the time it didn't even seem like a possibility. It didn't even cross my mind. I though, oh, if the wind would just blow a little bit when I'm jumping that would probably help. Or, maybe I need to perfect my turning technique, I'm losing a lot of speed when I turn around the jump. Even though I'm an adult and I know I never actually soared around the trees in my back yard, I still have this crisp memory - it's so ingrained. Even though I know it never happened, I'm just as content to believe that it did. Right now I'm smiling because I can feel the air rushing past my face as I swoop in and out of the leaves, and the memory is as real and clear as if it was a memory of riding my bike. I must have revisited this memory a million times, but just recently I took away something more from it.

The wonderful thing about the whole memory obviously isn't that I started to fly around my back yard. The perfect part is that it never occurred to me that I couldn't.

Something that must be shared

This amazing video somehow actually manages to capture the awe inspiring, breathtaking magnitude that is a redwood forest. If you've never been, and you live far away from the pacific ocean, this is the very best next thing.

Growing is Forever from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

It's officially on my list of things that help to bring me to a peaceful place.

a girl and her dog.

This is how my dog sleeps. All the time.

except for when he sleep like this: with his legs straight up in the air.

and that's all I have to say about that.

Future scientist? Or maybe just a Harry Potter fan

Student: what is that class in high school where you get to make potions?

me: ummmmmmm................ hmmmmm............chemistry?

Student: YES! I can't wait for chemistry!

A day in the life- 6th grade

My job has its ups and downs just like anyones job, but friends, when my job is funny, it is really funny.

For instance:

Child I have never seen before in my life approaches me in the hallway and in all seriousness says:

"I hate this. Because I'm not wearing socks."

Then, completely walks away as if I just took a load off his shoulders. I have never seen him since.

A student in my class:

"she went and it was just really little..... but THEN she went again and it was waaaaaaaaay bigger" Said in the middle of the cafeteria in reference to her best friends first period

During a science movie about how atoms make up everything in the whole enitre world around us and how COOL it is:

"Ms. Redler. Don't you know this is boring?"

Random 5th grade girl walks up to my coworker, sits down next to her at a table and says:

"People think you can't survive a dog attack. But you can."

These are the first words my coworker has ever spoken to that student, though fortunately for us all, they are not the last because later in the week she blessed us with this little gem:

dog attack girl:"If you hug a unicorn does it turn into a fairy?"

To which the only appropriate response is:

Teacher: "I don't know, it's never happened to me before."

and finally:

Me: "Put your head down" (something we do every day before we start math, so that the class settles down for instructions)

Me: "Put your head down"(clearly some students aren't following directions- shocking. I know.)

Random student: "She doesn't mean THAT head"

Me: ..... jaw drops to the floor.... looks at the offending student who looks back at me very confused because I"m sure I'm staring him down with shock and he has no idea that I think he's just made a sexual reference.

Random student: looking extremely confused puts his head down

I still haven't figured that last one out.

I'll keep you updated; as more random 11 year oldness will surely be happening again soon.