Bad as I wanna be, Part 1

If I were to admit all the horrid things I did when I was little, you might not believe me. I know I do such a great job at convincing everyone that I am just so sweet and nice and yada blah, which maybe I am NOW, but when I was a child I had some problems. Being Nice kind of problems. I don't know why I changed or what trigger flipped in my head that lit a giant neon NO ONE WILL LIKE YOU IF YOU KEEP ACTING THIS WAY sign. It was a benevolent trigger. It trigged without warning. But trigg it did, and now I can say I'm a nice girl with good intentions (97.2% of the time). I'm sure you will believe me when I tell you that roughly half of the mean stuff I did involved writing. Because I have never been at a lack for words, especially the written kind.

And now, I'm going to get my Confessional on. In between the instances of my heart blackening, I was a good little Catholic girl who just wanted to be liked.

Oh god, here we go...

- In third grade there was a very dorky new kid named Jeff Blue. No one liked him, and I'll venture to say it was because he was an other-side-of-tracks kind of child. He was sticky, wore dirty clothes and spoke horrible English, and I'm sorry, but in Clayton, MO? Good luck with that. (I don't remember now, but he was probably what us snot-rags called "a seminary kid," meaning he only went to Clayton because his dad was studying to become a minister at the seminary which just happened to be in Clayton. Seminary kids were usually poor and only stayed a year or two before moving again. Never was there a popular seminary kid, is what I'm trying to tell you.) I decided my best friend Jessica and I should write Jeff Blue a sexy note. Where in the fuck I learned sexy words and phrases by third grade is beyond...fuck, nevermind, for a second I forgot I had an older brother. Anyway. We sat at the antique secretary in my living room after school one day (apparently I held nothing sacred, as this secretary used to belong to my very refined grandmother, who also used to write with the fancy pen that we used. Ahem. I used.) and crafted a very clever note To: Jeff B. From: Your Secret Admirer. Some phrases I specifically recall: "I think your blue eyes are sexy, isn't it great your last name is Blue?" and "I want you to touch my boobies." And because I was such a smart child at the age of eight, my method of delivering this note involved following Jeff to his cubby in the hall, handing him the note and saying "Here, Jeff. I found this on the floor. It has your name on it." What do you know, that fucking redneck Jeff turned out to be just as big an asshat as we thought. He took the note directly to his resource teacher (resource = trying to unknot kids with Problems) and not long after that I was being questioned by the resource teacher about the filthy note. Denied! Oh, how I denied. My parents were called and I still wouldn't admit to it. Finally I confessed to my mother and told her Jessica helped me which was a shitface thing to do considering the idea was mine and I was the one who gathered the necessary materials, thought up the content, and wrote the words. She just sat there and made me feel like it was a good idea. When I told my mom she called Jessica's parents and ya wanna know what they did? Laugh. I was so grounded, and her parents LAUGHED. Here's the revelation, though - Jeff Blue in fact knew how much of a loser he was and that he couldn't possibly have a secret admirer. So in the end, I was right about him.

- When I was about 11, my best friend Ann and I both really liked to read dirty books. (By this time my old BFF Jessica had become the Bee's Knees and left me in the dorky quagmire despite still owning the ST ENDS portion of our BFF necklace). The dirtiest book, of course, was Forever by Judy Blume. I was too afraid to go buy the book because other than maxi pads, I couldn't think of a more embarassing situation at a checkout counter. Somehow I was alone in the sixth grade hallway at night, I must have been there for some function, and I noticed a copy of Forever sitting on someone's desk. Why they would leave it out for some uptight adult to notice, I don't know. But I took that shit right off her desk. And Ann and I gobbled it up. We memorized the page number where the girl gets introduced to her boyfriend's penis, Ralph, and then proceeds to get her cherry popped. (It was page 151.) Once those few pages had basically been memorized, Ann and I decided we needed to write our own. Unlike the Jeff Blue incident, I didn't want her to help me write. That would have been like masturbating together, which is something better left for lovers, not BFFs. Our family had just purchased an Apple computer, so clickity-clack, out came my erotica, typed. I don't remember any of these stories, but I do know that I used every dirty word, situation, phrase, and thought I could think of. And there wasn't just one story. Try five or six. I know this was my way of exploring sexuality on my own terms and in a way that was most comfortable for me - by age ten I was already churning out short stories at such a rate that my fifth grade teacher called me "prolific," which I thought was the coolest thing anyone had ever said to me before I even looked it up. This story wouldn't have to end poorly, if it weren't for, again, my stupidity. I left a story out somewhere in my mother's path. She read it, she conferenced with my dad, and I wish I could tell you that this ended with a great peer-editing session, but my parents are Catholic, remember? They might as well have found out I was doling out blowjobs to street ruffians. I had to sit through a lengthy lecture about the power of words, the importance of discretion, and ultimately "When you write something down, it could be there forever. YOU MUST BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WRITE."
But did I learn? Perhaps the very, VERY hard way...

- When I was 12, I was heavily involved with horseback riding. My parents had just bought me my first horse, which...hum it with me now...OMMMMM. Riding consumed all of my free time and I loved every second of it. I had a new group of friends my age and got to take my horse to horse shows and frequently came away with all kinds of ribbons, blue included. My riding instructors were Tina and her daughter, Bettina, and I thought they hung the moon. So much so that when I had to get Confirmed in the Catholic church, I chose Tina as my sponsor even though the right thing would have been to choose my highly religious aunt. But Tina was technically Catholic and formally My Role Model. During this time, a girl name Jenny started working at the stable where we rode. She lived a few miles away and was definitely not as fortunate as the rest of us - we knew this because she worked there, she didn't ride there. She cleaned stalls and assisted us at horse shows. She was extremely trustworthy, and because she was 15, cool. I'd never had an older friend before, and me and her got on like cherries and chocolate. I even went to her house a few times. I wanted her to think I was the coolest girl she knew, and after being invited to her house I decided I could trust her. So, again, I wrote something that I shouldn't have and gave it to Jenny. This diatribe of mine was nothing short of hideously, inexcuseably mean. I dedicated a paragraph to each person we knew at the stable, including my beloveds, Tina and Bettina. I went off as much and as far as a 12 year old can go off. I made up slanderous shit. I made fun of things that couldn't be helped. I said something about the 9 year old boy that rode with us "popping a semi" which is just gross. What I definitely didn't expect to happen happened. Jenny showed Tina the letter. I have never felt so ashamed. There was no reason for me to write that bullshit, because I honestly adored every person that I had so carelessly ripped apart. In my effort to convince Jenny that I was cool I forgot that cool people don't call their friends rich bitches with sticks up their asses and reduce their role models to crabby wrinkled hags. That doozy, my friends, put an end to the days of writing things that shouldn't be written. Or rather, the days of sharing those things.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I come clean about the mean shit that had nothing to do with writing. THEN you can proceed to think I'm a dirty rotten scoundrel. GREAT movie, by the way.