redxdollxshoes

I remember actually liking the snow when I was a kid. That's pretty normal. I guess it would be abnormal for a kid to dislike the snow. I used to walk to school with my best friend Sara and her little brother Alex and we'd climb over every single snowbank, our own version of mountain climbing. We'd be wearing our big puffy coats, probably some shade of hot pink or purple or both. Once in sixth grade I was climbing a particularly icy snow bank and I slipped and hit my mouth on it. It hurt a lot, but Sara told me it was okay. I asked some other people at school if my mouth was okay and they all said yeah. It wasn't until I got home that day that I looked in the mirror and saw a huge red gash splitting my lip. Liars.

I don't remember when winter lost its charm for me. Went through puberty and suddenly the idea of lying down in the snow and waving my arms and legs to make an "angel" became appalling. I think I came down with my first case of cabin fever when I was fourteen and February just seemed like it was going on forever. I still like the first snow, when it's soft and coats every tree branch and makes everything look new and fresh and blank. Then after about a week when it turns into ice and the cars make it all gray and you want to dress cute but it's so cold you just put on pants and a sweater, I'm over it.

Every now and then I do little writing exercises to warm up. I don't do it nearly enough though, so I figure I'll post them and maybe that will encourage me to do it more often. Not to mention make this journal more interesting to read than the usual, "This is what I did this week," "Here's a meme," type stuff.

1. I was a terrible student in school. Dismally terrible. When I was a kid, I would put off doing my homework for as long as I could, then I'd spend all night struggling with it. Especially math, which was my nemesis. I went to Catholic school till fifth grade, and I was always the worst student in class because I'd rather daydream than do my work, and even if I did it, I would forget to turn it in. My 1st grade teacher (who was EVIL) complained to my mother that I was always "daydreaming out the window", which confused my literal 6-yr-old mind, because I didn't get how you could dream during the day, and the windows were behind us. I struggled with my grades all the way to college, then did a complete turnaround and suddenly had a 4.0. Overnight I became a good student who aced my tests and always handed in my homework. I had two theories on this; that I actually wanted to be in college, as opposed to grade or high school, so I worked harder, and that college wasn't so freaking early in the morning and I worked better with a scattered schedule. Maybe I would have been a better student if school started at 10 in the morning instead of 8.

2. I was equally bad at my first job. I worked for two years for Werner Ladders, a ladder company that my mom worked at for 15 years (and then got laid off last year...fuckers). This was the job that taught me that I never wanted to work in an office environment. Cubicles, and flourescent lighting and bitchy coworkers, oh my! I was always screwing things up, like stamping the wrong document, or entering the wrong thing into the computer. I worked there part time during the school year, and that was such a bad move. I made more money than my friends, who worked minimum wage fast food jobs, and that was the only reason why I stayed. Finally one day, I got laid off. It wasn't anything personal, for the most part, lots of people were getting laid off at that time, and since I was known as the girl who always wore black and didn't smile and "didn't seem to care," I got the axe. I had to suppress the smile of glee that was about to spread on my face! Best firing ever.

3. I was officially one of the "popular kids" in sixth grade. I sat at the cool kid table and had those sky-high ratted bangs that were like a sticky wave over my forehead. We all travelled in a pack and made fun of those of us who were less fortunate. We spent our afternoons talking about the boys that we liked, and choreographed dances to Janet Jackson songs. I just remember having to hide a lot...everyone made fun of me for reading, so I stopped bringing books to school and stopped using big words. I pretended to have a crush on a guy named Joe, even though he was kind of annoying and had that ugly Bart Simpson spiky flat top that all the boys wore at that time. Then at the end of the year, a girl who had never really liked me started a rumor that I said the head popular girl was a crack addict and a whore that had slept with the entire seventh grade. No one believed me when I said that wasn't true, and I was swiftly excommunicated. Looking back, I'm pretty sure they didn't believe the rumor, but they suspected that I was a weird girl infiltrating their ranks, and they were looking for a way to get me out. In the end, it was kind of a relief, and I went back to my nerdy girl ways.