young adults

[hahawhat]

I never read young adult novels, but I think I'm going to start.  I was always busy trying to be really a big intellectual, reading John Ashbery at like 14 because I heard him read a poem on NPR (what?  As if I could understand one goddamn stanza back then?  I could hardly handle putting in a tampon).  When I was 9, I took a titanic leather bound

Comments

[hahawhat]

That is the coolest job in the world, your mom has. Damn.

I think we definitely had to read those for school, which is a whole separate world for me. I'm not so into boys' fiction like Hatchet, and I HATE outdoorsy stuff, hahahahaha. I am a PRINCESS.

And you mentioning Redwall is giving me FLASHBACKS!#!!!@#$!!!!! You totally just triggered WHY I hated YA books when I was young!!!!!

Ok, so when I first moved to this new school, I was total misfit and like, even though I didn't LIKE them, I was spending my lunch time with this group of girls who were SERIOUS nerds, and they were all obsessed with the Redwall books. After eating, we would traipse out to this little clearing at the top of an incline, and right below us, all the jock boys would play football. They would spend the whole time talking FANTASY talk (ugh), and assembling an arsenal of mini-catapults made of sticks and grass and sharpened rocks painted with berries, and other crap that bored me. One day, somebody found their stash and totally destroyed their arsenal, and they blamed ME, and wouldn't talk to me for like TWO YEARS, and so I spend half of middle school eating by myself with a walkman on, infuriated that even the NERDS thought they were too cool for me.

Fucking nerds. Seriously. Ugh.

[churchofmanlove]

Oh man, we TOTALLY would have been mad enemies (frenemies?) back in tha day!

[hahawhat]

Ahaha, were you that kind of nerd? One of their big things was to make plans to launch a full-scale attack on the boys below us. I also tried to hang out with some of them after school, but their parents always wanted really STRUCTURED and PLANNED FOR "playdates" (unheard of in my world), and they did things like have "family board game night" and made beds with pastel-painted rooms.

I am such an asshole about nerds. Even now, when I do asst. teaching for art classes, it is all I can do to keep from grabbing them by their shirts and yelling, "GET IT TOGETHER. WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM." I especially hate the ones who kiss my ass, they are always super bummed out on me when I'm like, "Do you think I care what Jose said? Mind your business."

I STRONGLY doubt you were ever this kind of nerd. They don't grow up to be people like you. Srsly.

[churchofmanlove]

Haha, ok, maybe not but I was WAAAY in to FANTASY talk. Actually, we probably wouldn't have been friends simply because I spent too much time in the woods. ALONE.

[hahawhat]

Ahaha, loving it--you go on loving talking mice, it don't bother me! Me, personally, I'm just a little averse to bullshit, so when these broads would be like "I WISH LIFE WAS LIKE THIS, AND MY CAT COULD BE MY BEST FRIEND," even at 11, I found it a real eye-roller.

Also, alone time is what makes people AWESOME. Do you think if you ever have kids, you will encourage them to be a lil' hermit? I think I will. Probs why I should never breed.

[churchofmanlove]

No, I totally would. I would drag them off into the shit hole wilderness where I grew up and they would probably never forgive me for it because by then everyone else's kids will have fucking wifi implanted in their brains or some shit.

Man, I forged some pretty deep-seeded relationships with those fucking mice. There's a part in the beginning of one of them where one of the mice dies in his lover (entirely chaste, mind you) mouse's arms, and I fucking lost it and moped around for days.

Oh, and I forgot all about the Narnia books! Shit man, now THERE was an obsession for the ages...I crawled to the back of a lot of closets that year...

[dinosnore]

ahah Lilah I am a creepy eavesdropper but the fact that you hate nerds is so endearing to me.
also, The Pigman comes to mind, if only because I had a huge crush on the young male protagonist based solely on the cover illustration: