Flowers: My father used to "steal" lilacs from a bush belonging to one of my cousins (it was in her backyard but the blooms stuck out over the fence). We also have photographic evidence of him "stealing" my aunt's strawberries. Petty theft apparently runs in my family.
Sleepovers: I remember watching some iteration of Friday the Thirteenth (or maybe it was Nightmare on Elm Street the Somethingth?), falling asleep and having my underwear frozen because I was the first to fall asleep. Kids are weird.
If my aunt or my neighbor grew strawberries, I'd definitely steal them too. Yum.
Frozen underwear?! Eek. How is that done?
Most of the pranks I remember from sleepovers were done while people were awake, often as part of "Truth or Dare." Once, my friends "spilled" nail polish on the host's mother's new carpet, but it was really one of those fake spills from a gag shop made of plastic. Her mom came downstairs and freaked out, and they all laughed, and I think after she was done having a heart attack she laughed too.
My birthmother squirted my favorite sweatshirt with disappearing ink on April Fool's day when I was ten. (She also got me to lick a nine volt battery without telling me what would happen and fed me venison jerky without telling me what it was. *eyeroll* Yeah, family.)
The frozen underwear is the spare set, not the ones you're wearing - basically they just wet them and stick them in the freezer.
One April Fool's day in middle school a kid from my class got disappearing ink on a library book I was reading. I don't know that he meant to (probably just sloppy aim), but it gave me a bad shock. Later that day I dumped a cupful of water on him. I was a quiet kid (frequently got asked the obnoxious "Can you talk?", which I answered with annoyed glares), but I could vindictive.
I remember in seventh grade getting teased for reading books with sex scenes. An eighth grader friend of mine was gushing over "Wicked", which she had just read, and blushingly admitting it had explicit sex scenes, and I made the mistake of remarking that they weren't particularly more explicit than the scenes in a lot of other books. Mind you, she's the one who corrected my pronunciation of "whore" when we were in fifth and sixth grade. (I'd only ever read it, so until she corrected me I'd thought it was a homophone of "war" rather than of "hoar". Ever since then I've been hyperaware of the sounds of the opening lines of "Evangeline".)
Heh. My tenth grade English teacher once told me to stop reading porn (jokingly, but she had a very dry delivery). I was reading The English Patient at the time and had just finished The Thorn Birds because my mom had made me watch the miniseries with her.
That class also had a lot of instances like the one you describe, of humorous mispronunciation. Well, that was mostly a small group of us clustered in desks against the wall rather than the whole class, but there were things like "heretofore" -- my friend thought it was her-ET-uh-for -- and colonel (you can guess).
I can remember for a lot of words the occasion on which I learned the correct pronunciation. For "colonel" it was my father reading aloud "Tintin and the Broken Ear". Because he read the Tintin books aloud to me, I am always startled to hear people pronounce the character's name as if it were an English word.
Tintin! I love those books. I've always had a crush on the Captain. I probably pronounce his (i.e., Tintin's) name wrong, though, since I've never heard it out loud.
4. Reading in the presence of othersthewlisian_aferJanuary 19 2008, 22:26:19 UTC
Whee. My memories tend to run long. So I'm going to post them as separate replies because I hate posting comments that run the risk of being too long to actually post. XD
Endangered Species by Ronnie Tanksley is surely one of the most poorly-written and even-more-poorly-edited books of all time. It is full of typos and plot holes and horrendous dialogue and ... ugh. I mean, the point of view and the verb tenses switch in the middle of paragraphs sometimes. It's just awful. It takes place locally, though, and the author is from the area. So when it was published in 1997, they made a big deal of it at the Barnes & Noble on Wolf Road in Albany. I'd heard about the book on the radio late one night and I was intrigued, so I convinced my parents to take me to the release/signing
( ... )
One of my favorite spots in the world when I was little was this area at the edge of my yard. There's a big mulberry tree (which was the bane of my mother's existence when the berries were ripe because my clothes and I were constantly stained) and rowan bushes and sumac and some sort of shrubs with lots of thorns and ... all kinds of stuff! I could just squeeze through all the branches and crawl down the small embankment to an outcropping of shale where I'd sit and hide with books or a portable stereo or a notebook and pencil for hours. I loved it because even if my parents knew where I was, I was certain they would never be able to make me come out unless I wanted to. It was such a tight fit even for me, they had no chance of physically removing me. I always felt so safe.
Re: 5. ...botany?bironicJanuary 20 2008, 01:09:03 UTC
That sounds lovely. We never had a real hiding place or secret spot in our backyards growing up. The closest we got was a small clearing off to the side of the yard when we moved houses, under an evergreen tree, but it was clearly visible from the house and not really a hiding place at all.
6. Questionable content at sleepoversthewlisian_aferJanuary 19 2008, 23:14:24 UTC
In elementary school, I was the leader of a three-person clique which consisted of myself and my friends K and L. We had sleepovers as often as we possibly could, usually at L's house because her parents ran a small dairy farm and we loved having REALLY fresh milk with breakfast and L's mother made the most killer pancakes
( ... )
Re: 6. Questionable content at sleepoversthewlisian_aferJanuary 20 2008, 05:30:33 UTC
You know what? They were. XD Breakfast was awkward as fuck that day, but we didn't stop doing our sleepovers there most of the time.
I dunno about you but when I stopped being bossy I started being manipulative. XD I still stayed mostly in charge but I learned to get people to do what I wanted them to do by subtle suggestions and psychology instead of by putting my hands on my hips and shouting orders. hahahaha
Comments 46
Sleepovers: I remember watching some iteration of Friday the Thirteenth (or maybe it was Nightmare on Elm Street the Somethingth?), falling asleep and having my underwear frozen because I was the first to fall asleep. Kids are weird.
Reply
Frozen underwear?! Eek. How is that done?
Most of the pranks I remember from sleepovers were done while people were awake, often as part of "Truth or Dare." Once, my friends "spilled" nail polish on the host's mother's new carpet, but it was really one of those fake spills from a gag shop made of plastic. Her mom came downstairs and freaked out, and they all laughed, and I think after she was done having a heart attack she laughed too.
Reply
The frozen underwear is the spare set, not the ones you're wearing - basically they just wet them and stick them in the freezer.
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That class also had a lot of instances like the one you describe, of humorous mispronunciation. Well, that was mostly a small group of us clustered in desks against the wall rather than the whole class, but there were things like "heretofore" -- my friend thought it was her-ET-uh-for -- and colonel (you can guess).
Reply
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Endangered Species by Ronnie Tanksley is surely one of the most poorly-written and even-more-poorly-edited books of all time. It is full of typos and plot holes and horrendous dialogue and ... ugh. I mean, the point of view and the verb tenses switch in the middle of paragraphs sometimes. It's just awful. It takes place locally, though, and the author is from the area. So when it was published in 1997, they made a big deal of it at the Barnes & Noble on Wolf Road in Albany. I'd heard about the book on the radio late one night and I was intrigued, so I convinced my parents to take me to the release/signing ( ... )
Reply
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One of my favorite spots in the world when I was little was this area at the edge of my yard. There's a big mulberry tree (which was the bane of my mother's existence when the berries were ripe because my clothes and I were constantly stained) and rowan bushes and sumac and some sort of shrubs with lots of thorns and ... all kinds of stuff! I could just squeeze through all the branches and crawl down the small embankment to an outcropping of shale where I'd sit and hide with books or a portable stereo or a notebook and pencil for hours. I loved it because even if my parents knew where I was, I was certain they would never be able to make me come out unless I wanted to. It was such a tight fit even for me, they had no chance of physically removing me. I always felt so safe.
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OT: I used to be pretty bossy when I was a kid, too. I wonder what happened. :)
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I dunno about you but when I stopped being bossy I started being manipulative. XD I still stayed mostly in charge but I learned to get people to do what I wanted them to do by subtle suggestions and psychology instead of by putting my hands on my hips and shouting orders. hahahaha
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