Playground Detectives

I don't know that I had a terribly vivid imagination as a kid, but I was a highly suspicious and somewhat paranoid kid. I liked knowing exactly what to expect and having explanations for things I didn't understand. That being said, I was shy of adults and didn't particularly like to ask questions that I thought might be obvious. Which left me with little else to do when I discovered a mystery during recess but speculate and think about maybe investigating.

There were two major mysteries that existed on my grade school playground: The Mystery of the Red Colored Wood in the Mulch Pile on the upper playground and The Mystery of the Missing Fence on the lower. My team of fellow investigators included Coleman, Joey, and occasionally Kara.

Joey fancied himself an intellectual, but one who liked NASCAR and pro-wrestling. He got all A's, and the teachers were always fond of him, except for when he constantly interrupted their questions with the answers. Coleman had decided to become the class clown and my sidekick, which was great because I loved people who made me laugh and let me boss them around. The teachers were less fond of him, especially when he had a tantrum because I didn't win the class spelling bee. I was baffled by his loyalty, but he was fun to have around. Kara mostly just hung around to watch Coleman do something foolish and maybe get hurt.

I decided early on that the mulch pile mystery was definitely the inferior one. Coleman's conclusion of MURDER, because of the presence of reddish wood chips, just seemed too obvious. And frankly, his later addition of the escaped zoo gorilla seemed silly.

"There is no wood that is red! Look around! All the trees are brown! THERE HAS TO BE A BODY SOMEWHERE," and then he would furiously dig into the huge mountain of wood and dirt. Joey would scoff.

"What about REDWOOD trees?" he asked. Coleman shook his head, still digging.

"This wood is TOO red. Too red for anything but MURDER." He gave up digging soon, and we bounced around on top of the pile, until the teachers told us to get down before we hurt ourselves.

The fence mystery captured my imagination for almost two years. It was perhaps more intriguing because of its lack of evidence of foul play, unlike the red wood chips in the mulch pile. One day a panel of the chain link fence surrounding the lower playground and separating it from the patch of woods at the back of the school, was present, was there, and the next it simply wasn't. The panel beside it appeared twisted, the pole half out of the ground and the wire poking out the sides. It was all very suspicious.

"Maybe it was a wild boar. My dad read about a wild boar in North Georgia that got up to like, 100 pounds," Joey informed us as we examined the gate. This time Coleman scoffed.

"ONE HUNDRED pounds? Have you seen pigs? They are definitely not that big," he informed Joey.

Eventually interest in the gate died down, but I would glance at it every so often, with its strange gaping entrance into the woods, and wonder. Finally I decided that I would never know. A few weeks before summer after third grade, I saw the school janitor replacing the panel, and concluded that it must have been a routine maintenance thing.

OR WAS IT.

And Then All My Dreams Came True

I never talked, or even thought, much about dreams until middle school. I've always had pretty vivid nightmares, but nice or interesting dreams, no. I could remember very well the murderous evil reflected in the eyes of the skeletons that burst from the glowing green hell of my closet, but happy thoughts just seemed to dissipate in a faintly cheerful puff in the morning. If I did remember a dream that wasn't a nightmare, it was unbelievably boring, like a re-run of the particularly dull parts of my day. This was not the case for my new school's friends, who frequently had creative, fascinating dream worlds in which magical adventures with talking animals occurred, or hilarious, incongruous happenstances with schoolmates took place. They could spend entire recesses discussing their dreams, while I said little and thought resentfully about my dream closet of horrors.

In high school, we learned about lucid dreams, in which you could harness your brain to have whatever type of dream you wanted when you became aware that you were dreaming.

I. Was. Thrilled.

No more beloved family members turning to me in the car before turning into carnivorous monsters and devouring me! No more creepy strangers breaking into my bedroom at night and almost stabbing me! My nighttime horrors were over, now that I realized I could trick my brain into not being a terrifying fount of hellish imagination!

I tried for weeks to have a lucid dream, before I mostly gave up. I didn't have many nightmares any more, only the dull ones, so it wasn't really that big of a deal. And then one night. I was dreaming about walking to class at school, trying to remember the date, when I realized that the date was during fall break. So I couldn't really be at school. I MUST BE DREAMING, OMG.

What should I do what should I do what should I do? I could do anything! I could fly off into the air! I could conjure a unicorn from thin air and ride it all the way home where I would dig up buried treasure in the yard and build a castle of rainbows and laughter! I could remember all the rules of algebra and not forget them five minutes after I learned them! I was paralyzed in the courtyard with joy and indecision.

It was then that I remembered vaguely wishing I could play an instrument well. NOW I COULD, BY GOD, MY WISHES COULD BE GRANTED. So I immediately started a bluegrass band in my school chaplain's office with me on banjo, some guy I had a crush on for like, two months on guitar, and a random girl on violin. We were intense, probably the best bluegrass band that school had EVER SEEN. After we played a few songs, I drove home in my car to watch TV and take the rest of my dream day off.

Because ANYTHING WAS POSSIBLE.

The Monologist

Although I am now pretty much a nervous 21 year old senior in college with no solid life destination in mind, when I was a somewhat confident eight (?) year old second grader, I was going places. I'm not saying I was always sure of everything I did, I was still pretty nervous with anything that wasn't familiar, (even fun things like field trips could set off my panic instinct), but when Ms. B let me read to the class for the last hour or so before the last bell rang, I was THE BOSS.

I would arrange everyone on the carpet while I took the teacher's stool, and generously let them choose which one of the two chapter books I had been reading from lately; usually a Boxcar Children mystery or an abridged kiddie version of a Jack London novel. Then I would settle down to let them bask in my reading prowess. I didn't do different voices for the characters, but what I lacked in voice acting, I made up for in enthusiasm and emphasis. It was my favorite thing. When I was an adult, I thought, I would definitely make this a regular thing. Maybe even a job!

I liked being able to hold people's attention with a story, even if it wasn't my own, and even better if they laughed. Mostly I wanted people to laugh, even though I wasn't daring enough to be the class clown. Anyway, Ms. B obviously thought I had what it took, or she wouldn't ask me to read aloud so often.

A few years later I found out the reason Ms. B either let me read or showed so many movies to my class was because she was severely depressed after the death of her mother and sister earlier that year.

But I still love reading aloud. David Sedaris is my specialty, so hit me up if you're depressed, I guess.

Crybaby or An Exercise in Emotional Hyperbole

I have become the biggest crybaby as I've gotten older. Well, that sounds a bit over the top; what I mean is I am a lot more willing to cry over fictional characters now than I was before. I don't know if it's hormones or what, but I like to think it's because I'm just a more ~*deep and caring person*~ who feels things more acutely. I cried as a kid, don't get me wrong, but within the last year or so it has gotten, by my standards, out of control.

The worst offender is the beginning of Pixar's movie Up. It is not my favorite Pixar movie, or movie period, but I swear to God, that five minute montage at the beginning kicks me in the heart and makes me cry involuntarily every single time. I genuinely dislike watching the beginning with other people because I know I will end up bawling and embarassing myself. And while we're talking about Pixar. oh God, Toy Story 3, oh God. I guess kid movies destroy me, I don't even know. Big Fish can sneak up on me too, if I'm not careful.

Books can be just as bad for my fragile psyche as movies, though. When my mom recommended The Book Thief , I thought Here we go, another Holocaust story, because I'm basically a terrible person. The story even starts out listing the people who die, since the narrator is freaking Death itself, so it shouldn't be a big shocker when it happens, but the ending just destroyed me. Just kicked my heart around the room as I heaved these ridiculous sobs that would be more appropriate at the funeral of a loved one because of this fictional couple that would never be.

Let the Great World Spin is, I think, a collection of short stories all set in pre-9/11 New York City. I just started it a week or so ago and have only finished the first story. It was a fantastic one, but I knew I was in for it when the main characters were Irish brothers. Nothing good can come of Irish brothers in books, they are the main characters in almost every tragedy. The end, which flashes back and forth between the tortured younger brother, who was in a fatal car accident, and the older brother, who was going about his business and unaware of the accident until just before the younger brother's death, made me hold my breath and then burst into tears at the younger brother's last words. Just astonishing.

Anyway, now that I've flaunted my emotional instability, what movies or books make you cry?

A jumbled post about writing

I have this bizarre love/hate relationship with writing that I'm not sure is entirely normal. I wonder if it would be the same if I didn't have an unfortunately strong penchant both for procrastination and perfectionism, at least when it comes to starting things, but as it is most writing I do is like freaking pulling rotten teeth. It's not all that fun or easy, but I have to or my head will explode. That's kind of a dramatic way of putting it, but really, evn my journal entries tend to be a bit sporadic because I don't have the patience to write all I want to write. In the end, it's my main outlet of expression, even if I don't care for it like I should.

The most difficult for me by far is creative writing. I suppose it's because I've kept a journal about my life since I was seven, but writing fiction is ridiculously challenging for me. I remember once in third grade, we had to write and illustrate our own fictional stories and enter them in a creative writing contest at the school. I spent weeks on that thing I think, storming around, frustrated that I couldn't think of where to send my guppy main character on his epic journey through the sea next. At one point I gave him a best friend who was an angelfish, and who was this big tough fighter guy; mainly I remember this because I was thrilled at thinking of this, creating a tough angelfish! Hahaha, what wit! I think it ended with the guppy and angelfish playing checkers? I don't know.

I read once that the mark of a really intelligent and creative person is if they created and imagined living in a little world of their own and I felt slightly bad for myself. Does it count if it was a half-assed world, cobbled together from books I'd read and TV I'd seen? I was too busy exploring other people's fictional worlds to create my own, I guess. I did, and still do, far more reading than writing.

My mom is teaching a creative writing class this next year, and I'm eyeing her cirriculum warily as I help her gather it together. She's gotten a bunch of writing prompt books off Amazon.com that maybe I could try out sometime, when I gather the courage. I think the key is habit? I know that's how exercise became less daunting for me, knowing that at a certain time in the evening I was going over there, because it was that time. Maybe this school year will be the year I become more comfortable with my compulsion.

Derrrrrrp OR Summer for Lazy Nerds

I was hanging out with one of my friends who's returned from working at summer camp since May, and she asked how my summer was. I thought for a bit and then replied that I'd watched the new Doctor Who season and read the Sherlock Holmes stories whilst watching various TV series adaptations of the same. After having told me all these stories about working in the cafeteria at camp and helping supervise the kids and having all these meaningful interactions with people, my friend was like, "Really? That's...all?"

And I said, "YUP."

SUMMERTIME YOU GUYS. IT IS NOT MY MOST PRODUCTIVE TIME PERIOD.

The Regular

I went to pick up Chinese at the local Chinese place, and as I was paying, the cashier lady asked me if I was working at the front desk for the dorm again this summer. I was astonished. I do get food from the place somewhat often, a couple of times every few weeks I guess, so I guess I would be considered a regular, but I had no idea she knew I worked at the dorm. It was kind of nice to think that she remembered me so well. I can't say whether I would be able to do the same if our roles were reversed.

I'm also a regular at a nearby car repair place, run by an old man. I don't know that we've had a conversation yet that wasn't about the weather, but he always seems to be pleased that I make an effort. He confessed to me once that few people even bother rolling down the window when they come through, then shook his head and frowned at the middle distance. It made me feel inordinately proud of myself, making awkward stabs at friendliness.

Being a regular is both nice and strange. It shouldn't surprise me, I guess, that frequent exposure to another person creates familiarization and friendship, but somehow I'm always pleasantly surprised when someone remembers me. It makes me want to try harder to remember people's names and faces instead of spending so much time daydreaming about nonsense like I usually do.