Okay, when you tell a graduating senior this:

"You might just have to find a job you weren't planning on as much. Pay your dues. It's okay if your dreams don't come true the second you get out, or the month, or the decade..."

What she hears is this:

"What's the matter with you? You can't just expect to be happy, are you insane?"

I mean jeebus, ever since I came up with the idea of the professional freelance thing do you know how many people have told me I'll never make it? It was just an idea! Plus, it's not like I'm saying I want to be a rock star or an actress or the freaking president of the united states... how does anyone ever get to be that? By purchasing earplugs at Sam's club to avoid all the people in the world telling them they can't do it, that's what I'm guessing.

The thing is, paying my dues at some big faceless company wouldn't bother me a bit if I thought it would put me on the road to fulfillment. But I don't think it will. I think it'll put me on the road to mediocracy, like the people I worked with this summer. Get your paycheck. Feed your kids. Have a coffee break. That was your life, aren't you happy, you had security... and now you're dead.

but i digress...

This week's amazon.com used purchase (I'm addicted in the worst way) was The Crow on VHS. $1.50 plus $3.00 s&h, go figure! I had to get it, it would take me back to a time in my life I find both influential and amusing. Summer, 1994. I would start high school that fall. Kurt Cobain killed himself in March. Our parents called him a waistoid but to us he was saying something (what I don't know, when you're 14 you don't have to know things like that). We weren't quite in the freaky gothic era yet though, it was sort of a depressed grunge. My parents bought me a guitar, partially because I wanted to lead sunday school music at my church, partly because they hoped if I had something to do I wouldn't hang out with the anti-christ who lived down the street named Kristen. I still hung out with her. We played Magic: The Gathering and tried to seek the truth. Empowerment. Anti-establishment. Anti-soccer-mom too because our neighborhood was full of these awful gossipy women who did nothing but talk about how bad we were.

14 is an awkward age. Everyone does bad things when they're 14. Our activities were not that bad; looking back I wonder why my parents and the soccer moms were concerned because compared to some other kids at my school I was an angel. There were no drugs involved. I never drank. I wasn't having sex or getting in fights. We snuck out a couple times but jeez, all that meant was that we were running lose in the suburbs at night.

And we watched The Crow. and listened to the soundtrack. movies & songs about how society was messed up and the artists of the world needed to find something real and sacred. It'd be interesting to be in my old brain for a day. I thought I was very tough back then, that's one thing I've lost. I was sure of everything, all I knew was truth.

I suppose, in a way, I am still like that but with a different Truth. I don't base it on rebelion for one thing. I think of my relationships more logically. Finally being good at math did that to me - in the 8th grade I was still awful at math, I never really got anything until geometry & pre-calc, then it settled in to place. Weird, huh?

Oh, and those soccer moms? Their perfect kids grew up to be potheads. I know, I'd hang out at the pool this summer and listen to the highschoolers talk about how high they'd gotten the night before. I bet their moms still think they're perfect... good thing they aren't like those teenagers a few years back, huh? Yeah. Suburbs.

the day is cold and crappy. sigh.

The vacation I took made me lazy, I've lost my momentum. Before break I was all work-a-holic girl, 12 hours a day on senior design, 10 hours a week on technical writing internship, and a very clean room. Now I'm pretty damn content to just piddle around... tell myself that installing a poll script on my web page all by myself is an educational accomplishment or something.

I guess I am kinda proud of myself for that.

Found out today that my boss went to the same elementary school I did in St. Louis! WHOH! She's five years older than I am, of course, so we didn't know one another or have any friends in college, but we remember teachers! The music teacher, the gym teachers, even the librarian... it's so nuts! I told her I'd like to find some old kids I went to school with, if nothing else just to prove how normal I turned out (did I turn out normal? uh-oh). I was a freakish little girl (who'd have guessed?). Like, in the third grade I had a huge crush on the boy who sat next to me, Phillip Olson, so I told him I was from Mars and disguised as a human to learn about their culture. He kinda went along with it to be nice, but looking back I bet he was scared and wanted to move to another table.

By forth grade, I was in the group of kids that nobody officially listened to... it was like, me, the girl with bifocals, the boy that couldn't talk right or read, and the kid who smelled. So I didn't have my weird effect on the general population anymore, just my group of really "special" friends.

You know, people act like that's a bad thing, but here 10 years later I'm a reasonably normal young woman. I never did drugs, got pregnant or dropped out of school - in fact I'm about to get a college degree. I have enough friends to keep me happy. I shower regularly. So I turned out better than, oh, probably 35-50% of the U.S. population, wouldn't you say? I think if I have kids and they turn out to be freaky nerds (of course they will, what am I doing with the "if" stuff?), I'll just encourage that and not worry too much. Most of us seem alright.

And Phillip, if you're out there, I'm sorry I freaked you out and said I was going to have you abducted. Hey, I'm Spacefem, what did you expect?