It sounded good at the time...

I finished my chemistry final and I am flooded with energy. When I say flooded I mean my brain is being drowned. Seriously. I have no brain, and I’m being swept down a river of energy. It’s not the kind of productive energy that makes people want to clean their houses or go running for 6 miles, it’s bursty writing energy and it’s driving me NUTS!!! If you don’t know what bursty means, it’s what I call it when I have a ball of excitement in my chest and I’m suddenly understanding things much better than before and I am SO CLOSE to putting it all together and figuring out what the hell is going on with the world, and the only thing I want to do with it is write it down. But I can never express it. That’s why I’m in the energy river. It only makes sense to me! The ball of energy is always about liking something so strongly that it’s like I’m straining toward it. Usually it’s an elusive concept, like the FREAKING MEANING OF LIFE. Or the Oliver McBubbins story. So, since I have again failed to grasp and hold on to the meaning of everything and then tell you guys about it, I figure I’ll just talk about a bunch of dumb things that I remember from my childhood. I’ll try and relate them all to one phrase, which I’m going to repeat each time I switch topics because otherwise this won’t make any sense, and the phrase is this:

It sounded good at the time…

…to start squirt gun fights with the neighbor boys at our apartment complex. These kids were relentless. One’s name was Taylor, and the other was Kyran (which amused me greatly because MY name was almost the same spelling, and that is cool when you are a little kid. Except it wasn’t cool for him because it was kind of a girlish name). They were both a year older than me, and when they were together they were mean. Kyran on his own was OK. He used to play catch with me and that was nice, and he’d throw it as hard as he could, which was good because I liked catching it better that way. But Taylor was just generally terrifying. And he hocked loogies on the ground at the bus stop a few years later, which made me want to barf all the time. And since they were a year older than me, they were five years older than my brother Wyeth. Who was like FOUR years old. So already you would be rooting for us if this was a TV show. But sadly it was real. They were like the American Gladiators of squirt gun fights. Our main disadvantage besides age and size was our absolute lack of up-to-date weaponry. Remember squirt guns, and when Super Soakers came out? And it was like Super Soaker 100, or Super Soaker 275, or whatever? And the number indicated roughly how many feet you could squirt? OK, so we had like Super Soaker 10. And Super Soaker 25.



So our most technologically advance weapon had a water chamber that held about six ounces of water. Which meant we had to go reload at the garden hose about every thirty seconds. And of course, the hose was guarded by someone EVIL with a Super Soaker 3900 or something INSANE that could blast our faces off. And they always took head shots. One year Taylor and Kyran got backpacks with a fire hose attached to them, I swear to God. It was a PACK of water, I don’t even know how they ran. They were like Marines. It was horrifying.



And for lack of a better picture of the backpack, think of something like this:



Luckily we were fast and we knew the good hiding places. Big kids usually don’t know the hiding places right away, because they don’t need them. But it totally sucked if we were found, because we were always trapped behind the building somewhere far, far away from the hose or even our glorious water balloon grenade supply, which was probably left unguarded since we were hiding. And then Taylor and Kyran would just kill us. We were dead. I mean, you know when you jump into a swimming pool and you don’t blow out with your nose, so water goes up it? And you have water right in your sinus for like a day? That happened when they killed us all summer long. And thankfully it didn’t snow much in Oregon, because the year it did I stupidly threw a snowball at Taylor, just as a little joke, and then Wyeth and I almost died again.

It sounded good at the time…

...to put my hair in corn rows the night before my third grade school picture day, and then take them out so I had awesome crimped hair for pictures. My friend asked if I stuck my finger in a light socket.

It sounded good at the time…

…to wear hot pink and sort of shimmery Spandex shorts and matching hot pink Saltwater sandals with a teal hoodless sweatshirt several times in fourth grade.

It sounded good at the time…

…to let Dad have a sip of our soda, ever. Dad is the fastest soda drinker I have ever seen. Our maximum soda amount allotted was one soda per day. Obviously most days we didn’t have soda, because we usually drank juice or something else because soda is bad for you. We drank an abnormally high amount of grape juice compared to other types of juice, but that’s because Wyeth is and has always been obsessed with grape juice. Anyway. Dad totally gypped us out of like three-fourths of the soda EVERY TIME. “Just a little sip,” he’d say innocently. And then he’d tip the can back and literally in one second the soda was gone. And then he'd say "No Coke, Pepsi" even though it was really Coke. So really our maximum amount was like three ounces of soda per day. OMG, does anyone remember Nehi?? It was blue. And glorious.



It sounded good at the time…

…to get the DPT vaccine. The marketing was great – no diphtheria, pertussis, or tetanus! All you have to do is be stabbed once in the leg. I don’t care about needles, I watch every time, because I kind of want to know what is going on. And I like giving blood and stuff. Being blindly stabbed is bad. That’s probably where everyone gets their fear of needles in the first place. Of course it’s terrifying if something randomly STABS you when you’re looking the other way. The anticipation is the worst part. Anyway. Wyeth and I got stabbed in the leg once to protect us from DPT, and then we were crippled for days. Seriously, we couldn’t walk. We laid there dying FOREVER in our rooms. I mean it was probably only a couple hours, but I think we got tetanus in our legs for real. It wasn’t the normal ache, it was like something is clearly wrong and if it goes on any longer we’re going to amputate. Did that happen to anyone else? You’d remember. It was the shot that paralyzed your leg. And you were probably like five. Or one, apparently, if you were Wyeth.

It sounded good at the time…

…to swim in the ocean in Oregon in January. Or November. Whenever we were at the beach. We were crazed. Well, I was crazed and I dragged Wyeth down the wrong path with me. If you don’t know what temperatures are like on the Oregon coast, just think 40s. Or 50s. Or in August, maybe 65. That’s the air. The water temperature is an enigma. I would guess ice cold. It would be so cold out we’d be wearing jackets and sweatpants TO the ocean, and then sometimes long-sleeved shirts and sweatpants INTO the ocean. Most of you know that my face gets a pretty good shade of red when I’m hot, or nervous, or embarrassed, or thinking about something that could be embarrassing to someone else hypothetically, or just excited about my chemistry final being finished. I’m pretty sure I was flushed for like the whole afternoon today. Anyway, when I’m cold I turn very red, but with flecks of purple, blue, and fuschia. And not in the face as much as my entire body. It took about 45 seconds for us to be numb, which strangely is what we were going for. Once you’re numb, it totally doesn’t matter and you can stay in forever. Or as long as Mom and Dad wanted to stand in their winter jackets on the shore trying to read and watch so we didn’t die, which was a surprisingly long time. English majors. Anyway. Wyeth and I liked getting crushed by waves, and would get disappointed and impatient if the waves were not strong enough. We never went out higher than our waists really, but that’s because we’re smart. The waves here are not calm like in some places, where people just go swimming out past the waves and hang out in their wetsuits or whatever. I wished it was, but it’s not. The other thing that’s kind of underrated about the whole thing is that we took our glasses off sometimes so we wouldn’t lose them (one time Wyeth did lose his when we were in the ocean in San Diego and that sucked). So without my glasses or contacts Adam likes to refer to me as “Mole,” because I squint and lean forward and get really close to things to read them. Or FIND them, since glasses are usually what I am trying to find when I don’t have them on. So how on earth did we see how big the waves would be? Now that I think about it, that was totally and completely psychotic. Once we were numbed and bored of the ocean, we would run into the creek which ran into the ocean and dive straight in because it was warm comparatively. When we got to the house, we got the sand hosed off of us, which was the worst part somehow. Then one of us stood by the heater while the other one took a shower, and we’d switch until we were finally thawed. By that time we were ready to go again.

It seemed good at the time…

…to bring the cat with us to the beach and let her outside. She loved it, but would never come back, so we always had to wait until she came back inside to go home if it was the last day of vacation. And she had like cat ESP because she always was gone on that day. And once her tail got bit by some crazy animal at the beach and she had to wear a cone on her head.

It sounded good at the time…

…to sneak out of bed secretly in the middle of the night to read in the living room. I swear it was like the coolest idea EVER, and it was always my idea, since I am the oldest and the bad example. Now that I’ve heard other people’s stories about sneaking out in the middle of the night, I’m pretty sure we were missing the entire point. I would like a mulligan, please. We’d be laying there in our beds and I would finally whisper the plan to Wyeth after we could tell Mom and Dad were asleep. I would leap as far off of my bed as possible and gently land in the middle of the room so as not to be eaten by the wolves under the bed. They were confined under the bed though, so once I was touching the floor I was fine. We’d choose a book and quietly crawl down the hall, which was the hard part, since it was right by Mom and Dad’s room. And it was really FUNNY to be doing this in the middle of the night, so if I looked over at Wyeth stealthily crawling away I would always start to giggle, and then we would sprint-crawl to the living room where it was safe. If I were Mom and Dad I might have killed us, because we were so giggly and annoying, but they just captured us and returned us to our room. Where we could just read anyway, I don’t know why it was so exciting to read in the dark living room when I had a perfectly good flashlight.

It sounded good at the time…

…to let Wyeth try my Dr. Pepper-flavored chapstick, because he ate it. And then all I had left was stupid Strawberry.