All the crazy shit I did tonight, those will be the best memories

Hello all,

I hope everyone had a fabulous holiday season.  Once finals were over and done with, my holiday was great.  I got everything I could have possibly asked for and more for Christmas and had a wonderful birthday shopping with my mom!  Even the Tampa trip was...less soul-numbing than usual.  Woo!

There are many things that I should be doing right now which would probably trump writing this blog entry.  Among them are finding a job, studying for the LSAT, emailing professors about recommendation letters, and mailing out my thank you cards from Christmas.  These are all extremely important things, and I will definitely get around to all of them in the near future.  The one thing that makes me most anxious is emailing professors about writing me a letter of rec.  I suppose I'm just afraid that one of them will email me back and be like "no, sorry" and then I'm going to be a. screwed, and b. traumatized from the rejection.  Does anybody else feel this way when asking for things like this?  It's really kind of a paralyzing fear right now.

I realize that I've already broken my promise to update this blog frequently.  I can't say I'm totally surprised; it's a lifelong trend for me.  As a kid, whenever I would get a pretty new diary or journal, I would get really excited and write in it everyday for maybe a week or two.  Then, it would slowly fall off.  After that, my diary pages just became places for me to either mindlessly doodle or write down my superior medical diagnoses when I was playing doctor to my ill stuffed animals.

Now I'm actually pretty angry with myself for doing this because going through childhood diaries is actually the most entertaining thing ever.  Yet, because I was lazy about writing them, I have so few entries to read.

The best thing about reading my old diary was realizing just how trivial my issues really were back in the day.  Yet, back then, every single one of these issues seemed like a humungous obstacle fated to trip me up on my journey to happiness.  I was such a melodramatic child; every minor incident was played up as the worst thing that ever could have possibly happened to me.  For instance, one of my entires told of a day when I was playing on the jungle gym with my friends and when I went down the slide it made a weird squeaky noise and my friends laughed at me.  I, of course, was absolutely devastated by this turn of events.  THEY WERE LAUGHING.  AT ME!  MY LIFE IS OVER.

Another time, my friends and I were playing "Let's pretend we're married to The Hansons" at recess--kind of self-explanatory what occurred during this game.  It was my turn to pick my Hanson last that day, and I ended up with, god forbid, ISAAC, who everybody knew was the "ugly, weird, and old" one (those adjectives were word-for-word how I described him in my diary).  My favorite was Taylor because he was the sexiest, obviously, but one of my friends had picked him first.  How was I supposed to pretend I was married to Isaac when I didn't even LOVE HIM?!  It was a horrible day in my life.

I also had in the back of my diary a list in which I wrote down every boy that I liked and every girl that I considered a friend (ranking them in order of "bestness" of course).   I swear, when you're a kid, there's nothing better than ranking people.  It just keeps everything so orderly and black-and-white.  Obviously, I prioritized my friends at the top of the list over those at the bottom because that's just the way the list works.

It's probably a good thing that I always hid my diaries well/nobody cared enough to ever really look through them because the fallout from that boys list getting out would have been probably the worst thing that could have ever happened to me as a small child.  I was easily humiliated back then; every slight tease felt like a severe blow to my psyche.  Combine this with my previously mentioned fear of rejection and you can see why I would have been horrified if any boy actually found out I liked them.

Unfortunately, one day, this exact thing happened, and it was the worst day of my childhood (aside, maybe, from the day I broke my arm or the day some douchebag ice skated over my fingers--but those are stories for another day).  I actually still remember it in some detail, which probably speaks to how traumatizing it was for me.  Let me take you back to the event.

To set the scene:  I was in the first grade in Mrs. Doosenbury's class.  I was a tall, lanky child with bangs and long brown hair.  I was probably still wearing dresses and bows at that time because that's how my mom dressed me and I hadn't yet reached that rebellious "I CAN DRESS MYSELF!" stage where all you wear is hideous shit until you realize the principles of colors and the idea of matching a few years later.

Moving on!  Essentially, what happened was that I liked some cutie named Joseph, but from what I can remember we were never really friendly or anything like that.  In fact, I think he was kind of rude.  But I shouldn't slander him on my blog.  Anyway, so I liked him, probably only because he was cute.  And somehow one of my "friends" found out about this during recess; I don't remember her name at this point.  I made her PROMISE not to tell anybody, but she was a bottom-of-the-list friend so I didn't really trust her.

So of course, what does she do?  Spread the fuckin' word like the little backstabbing 6 year-old bitch she was!  I get back in my class from recess and as soon as I enter the room I hear the my classmates coming together in harmony to sing "Lauren loves Joseph!" in that humiliating and traumatizing way that only children can pull off.  Of course I protested, "I DO NOT!" the entire time until I was red in the face.

Finally, my teacher came back in the room and settled everybody down, but it was too late.  The damage was done.  He knew, he definitely did NOT like me back after that little show, and I was sure I was going to die of shame.

I don't really remember what the fallout of that day was, but I'm fairly certain that in true ADD fashion, everybody was talking about "someone loves someone" else the next day and we all moved on.   Well, except me.  I remained traumatized about it.  I'm sure my mother told me that "someday you'll look back on this and laugh!" (which I do now), and I probably responded with something like "NO I WON'T!  I WILL BE SAD ABOUT THIS <dramatic pause> FOREVER!!!" as I sobbed hysterically.  I'm glad she didn't laugh at me; looking back, I probably would have laughed at me if I were her.  

Today, I'm glad I live life a little bit less melodramatically.

Happy 2011 everyone,

Lauren