Celebrating Twelve Years of No Longer Being in Junior High

I read Lola's post today about her jr. high blues and it caused me to reflect on some of my own jr. high experiences. In celebration of being out of jr. high for twelve years, allow me to tell you twelve jr. high experiences.

1. My First Break-up
I had a boyfriend in sixth grade. Sorry Mom, if you're finding out like this. He was one of the bad boys, of course, because all girls love the boys who don't do well in school and spend loads of time in detention... er... Okay, so he met my two criteria of 1) liking me, and 2) not being physically repulsive. So he was my boyfriend. In sixth grade, we'd go for bike rides after school, or I'd go over to his house. My mom didn't know, of course. And for the record, although he was my "boyfriend," there was absolutely no physical contact between us ever. We just played together. But he dumped me in seventh grade because he liked a girl named Jenny.

2. My Second Boyfriend
And he passed me on to this other guy whose name I can't remember. He met one of my criteria; he liked me. But when he put his arm around me during a field trip, I realized that he really was physically repulsive and I dumped him immediately.

3. My Third Boyfriend
One day a group of friends decided that a boy named James and I should be boyfriend and girlfriend. They decided it. We never discussed it, but we reluctantly agreed that we would give it a try. We never had any physical contact and our friendship didn't change at all. But someone told my mom that I had a boyfriend and I went home that day to find out that I was grounded for a week.

4. Writing Lines
My eighth grade homeroom teacher (meaning that she was responsible to teach us half our classes while we'd go to other teachers for the other half) fought to have me in her homeroom. Apparently, during the summer between seventh and eighth grades, during a meeting where all the teachers were dividing the students, she said, "I don't care what losers you give me, as long as I get Cicada." Her specialty was physical education, so she was also my gym teacher. Sometimes I'd purposely forget my gym clothes so that I could sit out and write lines instead of participating in class. I'd rush through all the lines I was supposed to write and then I'd write funny lines. They were always complimentary to her, of course. Then she'd hang my lines on her office wall. She never gave me an A in her gym class. But I always knew I was one of her favorites, and that was enough.

5. My Fight
I have already talked about my fight in great detail.

6. Sorel Boots
Although it was northern Ontario and winters were terribly cold and we had to spend an entire hour outside during recess, we as kids dumbly decided that it was not cool to zip up your coat. It was not cool to wear a hat. It was not cool to wear mittens. It was not cool to wear a scarf. And it really was not cool to wear Sorel boots. One day, my dad made me wear Sorel boots to school. I cried. A lot. They were so huge I could barely even shove them in my locker once I got to school. Later in the day, he brought me roses because he felt bad for causing me extreme humiliation. Some people might have been embarrassed to receive roses from their dad in jr. high. I was just convinced that I had the greatest dad ever.

7. Burned Pancakes
Mom would make us pancakes in the mornings on a fairly regular basis. She'd make them and then stick them in the microwave on 10% power for a half hour so that when we were ready for breakfast, we could just pull the pancakes out of the microwave. One day, Reggie Tenenbaum and/or The Boy put the pancakes in the microwave on 100% power for a half hour. After about twenty-give minutes, the entire house stank. It stank so bad that we couldn't go to the main level of the house and breathe. The mustard-colored silk shirt that I wore that day was permanently ruined by the stench. Our microwave was thrown out.

8. El Senor Hated Me
There's enough material here to write an entire post some day, but let's just say that El Senor and I didn't get along when we were growing up. Problems between us marked my entire childhood. One particular jr. high experience was learning that he had composed a song for his high school music class. It was called "Dropping Bricks on Cicada's Head."

9. I Had Really Bad Hair
Mom, what were you thinking? Not only did I have bad hair (my mom hasn't bought a scanner yet, so I don't have proof, but really---think a tight, short-haired perm, that I would gel... sick) but I had bad makeup. For some reason, my mom thought that jr. high was an appropriate time for a girl to start to wear makeup. My pictures from this time period have convinced me that my daughters won't be able to wear makeup till high school and then, only under strict supervision. Oh, and braces. Ugh.



10. I Liked Star Trek...
...way too much.

11. I Can Finally Admit I Had a Crush on My Geography Teacher
I did! I really did! But I haven't ever told anyone, I don't think, and now I'm telling the whole internet. I have denied it for years, but I may as well let it out now. The funny thing is that I swear I found him in our local paper's classifieds. I'd read the classifieds with a friend and make fun of all the single people putting ads out. One day, I read one aloud to her and asked, "Who does that make you think of?" Without any hints from me, she immediately identified the man as our geography teacher. The ad started with the words "No more games." The next day in class, I told him that I had had a dream with him in it, and then the words "No more games" appeared. He went practically white and I asked him, "What do you think it means?" He said, "I think it means you need to get back to work." I said, "I think it means I should stop reading the classifieds." Oh, the witty banter we had... Mr. Geography Teacher, where are you now?

12. I Had Big Boobs
It's true. I may as well admit this, too. And one day, I had to run a race for gym class. I was competing against one girl and I simply wasn't fast enough. After the race, my above-mentioned third boyfriend commented to me, "You would have won, but your boobs got in the way." And I know that I can share this with the internet, because it always made my mom laugh when I told her that, so she won't be mad that I just shared it with everyone.

Lola, I wouldn't trade places with you. But live it up while you can.

I know kung-fu... or karate.

Since I shared a story about spin class this week, and since my springboard diving class is one of my most popular stories, I thought I might share a new story this week about a class that I had the same semester as my springboard diving class. I took karate.

Every Friday we would meet for two hours. And as with spring board diving, I sucked at karate from the very beginning. Our instructor was a Korean fellow who spoke English with a very thick accent. He loved to show the class tricks and stunts and his sense of humor combined with physical antics reminded me a little of Jackie Chan.

One day, I went to class after donating blood. Donating blood had never caused any problems for me before, so I had no reason to believe that my physical performance would be hindered by my loss of blood. To warm up, the instructor brought us through a review of all the kicks we'd learned---ten kicks in all, and we had to do ten reps of each kick, all in succession. In case you can't do the math, that's one hundred kicks all in a row.

I was wearing down at about 50, but I kept on going, kicking more and more weakly as I continued. Although I technically made it to one hundred, I believe my hundredth kick was not more than two inches off the ground.

Then our instructor had us relax and breathe. And that's when something funny happened. I could feel the blood draining from my head, and my vision started to go black. Recognizing this as something that can happen when I get up suddenly from a couch or bed, I waited for my vision to return immediately as it always does.

Except it didn't. I realized that I was standing in the middle of all my karate peers with my eyes wide open, and yet I could see nothing.

Before this point, I'd been debating whether or not it was a good idea to go to the edge of the classroom and sit down. At this point, once I'd lost my vision, finding my way to the edge of the room was no longer an option. So I just sat exactly where I'd been standing.

I could hear the instructor's voice distantly. It was as if I was under water. I was aware of him approaching me. "Are you okay?" he asked. I managed to say "No" before he flipped my legs up in the air so that the blood could drain back to my head. As soon as he did it, my vision started to come back. He send me to the wall.

And I spent the rest of the class with my butt to the wall, legs in the air, relishing both my vision and the blood in my brain.

Before this time, it had been a joke amongst our classmates that our instructor didn't recognize any of us. From that day on, however, he recognized me. As we'd do kicks, he'd approach me, asking, "Dizzy? Dizzy?" One time later in the semester, we had a departmental visitor to the class, and I saw my instructor pointing me out and saying, "She faint! She faint!"

Other things can kill, too.

Several years ago, Captain Fabuloso came to me with a sore on his shin, asking me what I thought it was. I had no idea, and it didn't look too serious, either. When he suggested that maybe it was a spider bite, I agreed with him, dismissed the worry and went climbing with him and our climbing friends. The next day, I left for a weekend trip to St. George.

The night I came back to Provo, I was getting together with all my friends to climb again (we all had memberships to the Quarry). I got a ride with a close friend, who we'll call Dr. Tact, PhD (she'll have her PhD in a couple years...). She was a microbiology major and was fascinated by a number of things that were beyond me as an English major. As we pulled into the parking lot of the Quarry, she turned to me and said, "Isn't that crazy how Captain Fabuloso almost died this weekend?"

I was confused, then scared, then confused. I said, "Almost died?"

"Yes!" she said, putting the car in park and turning off the ignition. "Didn't you know?"

"Know what?"

"About his leg!"

"I know that he had a sore on it and wondered if it was a spider bite..."

"Oh, Cicada! He had a flesh-eating bacteria! It kept getting worse and worse and then he went to the hospital and they told him that if he had gone in one day later, he probably would have died, and they were mad that he had waited as long as he did to go into the hospital!"

I know that she kept on talking, shifting the subject of the conversation from Captain Fabuloso almost dying to the exact details of what a staph infection is down to the minutest level, but as her intellectual babble became fuzzy and distant, all my mind could process was almost died.

I knew that he was okay. I knew that he was joining us that evening for climbing. Yet uncontrollably, I started to sob. It was one of the strangest experiences of my life. Crying has never come upon me so suddenly and so uncontrollably. Dr. Tact stared at me wide-eyed as I almost hyperventilated between my staccato sobs.

And all the while, I kept thinking, "Everything's okay, so I can stop crying. Nothing's wrong; I can stop crying. It's okay. STOP CRYING!" But I couldn't. Instead of stopping, I just breathed out to Dr. Tact, "It's---sob---okay---sob---I'm---sob---okay!"

I was slightly shaken for the rest of the evening, but Dr. Tact at least learned a great lesson. First, it was to approach the subject gently when talking about the almost-death of a family member. Second, it was to not go into the exact biological details of how that person almost died and would have died. Valuable lessons, indeed.

(And I know for a fact that she told this story during a Relief Society lesson about four years after it happened, so I promise, she did learn the lesson!)

Making Out Can Kill

I hate to share the humiliating and intimate details of my friends' lives on the Internet, but... Oh, who am I kidding? I love it! Let me tell you a really funny story about MOTD, or Making Out Transmitted Diseases. Or at least one.

So I have a friend. We'll call her Urine Girl, because that's how I introduce her whenever I talk to my parents about her. ("You know... that girl who drank urine.") I met her over the Christmas break and immediately knew that she and I were destined to be friends. One thing that was noticeable about her over the Christmas break was that she had a rather large open sore on the top of her nose. She explained in the presence of our girl friends that she got it while making out. The guy she had been making out with was scruffy, and his scruff scratched the top of her nose. We're still not sure how, though we pestered her for details on how the top of one's nose could be so seriously scraped during a makeout. One girl cried, "You were kissing upside down, weren't you?! You were kissing upside down!" Still UG was sparing with the details.

When my parents asked her what she did to her nose, she explained that she had scraped it. My mom asked, "Scraped it having fun?" and the rest of us snickered while we watched UG try to come up with a response to that.

What I found out only a couple days ago was that the huge open sore on her nose had a staph infection, which explained why it was enormous and why it wasn't healing. Needless to say, it was good that the condition was diagnosed when they could still do something about it, rather than watch her die of a flesh-eating bacteria, contracted while making out.

Wherein I Forwent One Homework to Pursue Another

Last night, I put my hair in curlers and went to bed early so that I could get up early this morning and work on homework. I started my homework at about 5:15. At about 6:00, I started to hear birds singing around my house. No, no birds have come to my abundant bird feeder yet, and I'm trying not to take it personally. But I could hear birds singing, and thought about how strange it is that birds are diurnal, and yet obviously get up before the sun does. Everything was completely dark. Still, I wondered what bird was singing so sweetly and whether or not I could add it to my list.

By about 6:40, the sun was coming up, but I was still working on homework, so I continued to listen to the sweet singing melodies while I wrote about the idea of Europe. At 6:50, I could no longer stand it. And so, like a sexual deviant or a pervert, I emerged into the early morning outdoors in my pajamas, curlers, flip flops and with my binoculars. Not that I think that sexual deviants or perverts wear curlers. They might. It's just that you can't help but feel dirty walking around your neighborhood with binoculars in the misty morning.

I followed the sound of my singing bird and realized that it was in someone's back yard. Fortunately, it was in my former district leader's back yard. Though even if he walked out and caught me in his back yard with binoculars, there may have been awkward moments of clumsy explanation. Unfortunately, the bird in question was a robin. A robin? Yes, my disappointment was fairly bitter. Who knew they sang so sweetly? I have only ever heard them chirp.

I spent the next ten minutes walking around other people's backyards, since they all border on mine anyway. There was one tense moment when a police cruiser drove by, but I just jumped into the bushes with the rest of the starlings and sneakily snuck back to my safe little house where no one could judge me for wearing curlers, flip flops, pajamas, and carrying binoculars.