Last night, I read some stuff about being an adult that really changed some things in me personally. I have never been "fine" with being an adult for a few reasons. One, I don't feel like one. Two, as a kid, adults frequently let me down. The second I more or less got over as the years went by: I learned for forgive the frailty of the human ( Read more... )

I had a classmate who had this opinion on Star Wars back in the 1980s ( Read more... )

My dad had an unusual gift of making people feel stupid. While discussing this with someone who had similar problems as a child, we tried to diagram how these conversations would go. What resulted was a string of IMs about techniques so evil and horrible, that I am scared to post them lest it give some evil person ideas. I think I may someday ( Read more... )

In 1977, I was a book nerd who signed up for the Scholastic Book thing... many of you remember it back in US grammar school. There was an onionskin paper catalog that had mostly reprints of popular kids books, with some posters, calendars, and sometimes toys tossed in. My mother made sure I got a lot of books, and I was the ONLY kid I knew who ( Read more... )

It's gonna be a very bad day for many, many people on Sunday. Yes, I'm talking about the Rapture. But not in the way people have been talking about. In less than 16 hours, there will be a lot of angry and confused Christians. But as I joked about some of the rapture humor, from calling them "Rapturfarians" to suggesting we release helium-filled ( Read more... )

So, this Christmas was almost canceled at my house. This hits me pretty hard because, well, Christmas is special to me for reasons that are not always made clear ( Read more... )

When I was a kid, I used to think that if I predicted bad things for an outcome, then I'd be "ready" in some way and "anything that happens less than the worst I predicted" puts me ahead of the game, right? Typical of an 8-year old living a terrible childhood, I actually thought this was a good idea. I was CONSTANTLY disappointed by people or ( Read more... )

I guess I haven't written much in my LJ as I used to because a lot of my childhood issues are either resolved or not surfacing as much as they used to ( Read more... )

In 1987, this was a Thursday. It was a nondescript partly cloudy day as I sat in a small pickup truck owned by a man I knew as "Quasi." In the cab behind us was about half my worldly possessions that I had been packing like crazy the following week. My father was out of town, and I was using this long weekend to get the hell out ( Read more... )

When my father bought his first yacht, my mother was convinced the very first thing I would do was drown alone at night when I fell off the boat peeing or something. Then I would be eaten by a large fish as a final insult to the 7 years she had raised me. The fact I swam at Tuckaho with friends didn't make a difference so they made me pass a ( Read more... )