I was not cool in high school. I played on the academic bowl team. I ran cross-country, which was not quite the sport of prom queens at my school. My arms hung like needles from the billowing sleeves of whatever giant shirt I’d decided to wear that day, and my wide-leg jeans stopped near my ankle bones to reveal, often, trouser socks and clunky Oxford dress shoes.
I had footwear issues in general, really. I completely lacked whatever gene it is that tells a person which height of socks they should wear with which shoes and which pants. Thus the high-water issue, and thus my pairing of ankle socks with skirts. And I wore this pair of über-hippie clogs—which were, in retrospect, clearly summer-only shoes unsuitable for wear with socks of any kind—over thick woolen ones in the middle of winter.
Despite my stunning lack of cool, though, I had a great group of friends, a pack of six girls together (more or less) since elementary school. We could make each other laugh shrill, almost manic laughs by speaking only two words to invoke an inside joke. I remember my throat aching almost every afternoon of the fall of eighth grade as we played driveway basketball in the autumnal chill. And I remember listening to TLC’s “Creep” about nine hundred times.
The day would come, though, when we would graduate and scatter, and it would be time for each of us to start all over and form a new group, only I wouldn’t do a very good job. I don’t know quite how to say it: I simply fell off the planet for a few years. It's taking me a while to make my way back.
So this blog is focused on those adventures and misadventures, the comic and the tragicomic. Come watch me be socially awkward. It's great.
No comments:
Post a Comment