Entries from November 2004 ↓

In 6th grade I lived in a tiny two bedroom apartment on Hibiscus St. with my mother and my sister.  I rode my bike a lot then–on the porch and down and around the dead-end loop that was my street.  The road ended at the parking lot of my aparment building, but not before climbing an enormous hill.  That paved mountain of a back yard was lots of fun on two wheels.  My sister and the only other neighbor our age would ride together almost nightly.

On this afternoon, for some reason long ago lost on me, I was riding the neighbor girl’s bike instead of my own, even though it was too small for me.  She was a couple of years younger, and tiny, but I pulled my knees to my ears and rode it anyway.

The huge hill curved to the right and out of sight of those standing at the top.  My sister and the neighbor stood watching as I shot down the slope on the teeny bicycle, the tops of my thighs smacking the pink rubber-covered handlebars all the way down.  Once out of sight I tossed the bike gently to the side and layed down on the ground next to it.  I screamed for my sister and friend, yelling that I’d crashed only to laugh uncontrollably when they came jogging down.

For an 11-year old that is a pretty cunning trick, so I had to do it again.  After they took a few turns I did the exact same thing, only this time it wasn’t as easy to get them to come running.  I had to plead and insist "I’M NOT KIDDING THIS TIME!"  They finally came to my aid looking thoroughly worried.  Haha!–gotten again. 

Life was good.  I was 11, riding bikes after school, fooling my sister and having some laughs.  I was feeling pretty invincible.  So, I mounted the bike for a third sail down the hill, and I was almost around the corner when my too-long legs sent the handlebars  akimbo causing me to flip over the bike and meet fast and furious with the ground below.  The bicycle landed on top of me.

I tried to get up by propping my weight on my left arm, but I learned quickly and in a horrifying amount of pain that my arm was broken.  I screamed for help.  I heard nothing in return but echo of my pitiful plea.

I lay crumpled and covered by a bike on the street for ten or fifteen minutes.  I tried, but I couldn’t get up, the pain was too hot and searing.  Finally a neighbor drove by and called an ambulance. 

Once at the backwoods Ashland City hospital they realized the break was too severe for them to handle.  They wrapped my mangled left arm in a magazine and duct taped it up.  I was transported to a Nashville hospital wearing a glossy, yet sturdy, Vogue magazine on my arm.  The nurse who saw me right after I was admitted laughed out loud when she saw it.

Anyway, if you are wondering I learned my lesson.  I don’t ever fake it anymore.  Nothing good ever comes of that.

This morning I ironed my clothes, smoothed my hair, brushed and flossed my teeth, put on two coats of mascara only to walk out the back door into the rain, falling flat on my ass.

I dried myself, walked it off a bit, then headed right back out into the rain to work.

Only to discover once I arrived, I wasn’t even supposed to be there today.

The following card, which I find totally hilarious, was created by Alan Cross of What Would W Do?

You can get a better look at it on his website.

One weekend my father took my sister and myself and my stepmom and my teenaged stepsister and her friend to the park.  We packed an oversized Thremos cooler with sandwiches and corn chips and canned sodas and drove out for a day of play.  We found a place to picnic once we arrived and unpacked our belongings, staking our ground.  My sister and I immediately sprinted straight for the swings.  I hopped on the first one I saw and began pumping my legs in efforts to make my belly-lurching ascent.  My sister studied each swing below me, hesitating, but all I could feel was the fall afternoon air cool on my face swinging high toward the trees and the sky and the clouds.

"Can I have your swing?  These all have bugs on them," my sister shouted from below.  Typically I would tell her to shove off and just wipe the seat clear, but I was feeling nice.  It was Park Day, and I could handle some dirt and a few bugs so my baby sister wouldn’t have to.

Without thinking I let go of the chains and launched myself into the air at the swing’s highest climb then fell dozens of feet onto my wrist.  My body followed too quickly thereafter.

I didn’t know I had broken my arm even though I heard three snaps and it went completely numb.  I didn’t cry, just kicked my legs and wailed.  My sister, looking paniced, searched for the nearest adult to help her heap of a sibling, but the nearest family was Asian and spoke no English.  My sister ran to find my father and while she was gone I layed on the ground in the most severe amount of pain I’d ever experienced surrounded by startled strangers speaking with a frenzy and in a foreign language.  Park Day had just gotten way fucked up.

My Dad came running and at first began inspecting my legs.  I had to tell him it was my arm, it’s just I couldn’t move it.  Like some sort of superhero he ripped a towel in half lengthwise and fashioned a sling for my gimpy arm.  The nearest hospital was 30 miles away and we’d all piled into one car for the trip to the park.  I remember sitting on someone’s lap on the way to the emergency room.

Although we didn’t get going to the hospital right away.  My stepsister and her scandalous friend went to hide in the woods and smoke cigarettes.  When it was time to go get me mended they were nowhere to be found.  Finally they emerged stinky from the woods.  They got busted that day and I was forever dubbed a nark by my stepsister from then on.  Stupid, brittle bones.

Once the endorphins wore off I was in excrutiating pain.  A nurse gave me a shot for the pain IN MY BROKEN ARM.  Oh God, the agony.  There was so much waiting, too.  I was told the doctor was going to set my arm 20 whole minutes before it actually happened.  I just had to look at my disfigured limb and imagine what putting me back together was going to entail.

Do you know?  Have you ever had a broken bone set?  If not, let me tell you it is a terrifying, hair-raising horror.  The crunch of your bones crudely crunching back into place is a sound you never want to hear.

I wore a hot pink cast home that day.  I thought it would be better than the other option, blue, until I got home and realized it clashed with every single thing in my closet.  I was 7 or so when this happened and too young to swallow pills.  They wanted to prescribe me a pain killer strong enough to mask the pain, but didn’t have anything in liquid form.  So the doctor’s idea was to crush up the pill and make me eat it in syrup or jelly.  It was torture just to ease the pain of my shattered bone.

That was a really traumatizing time for me.  I would, long after I had my cast removed, have phantom pains or my entire arm would go numb.  ["Are you talking about that little girl?"]  To this day I can’t watch videos of fools on skateboards who break their legs, it fucking kills me.  I also don’t like to hear stories of broken bones because the pain was so intense it still gets to me.

My left arm was broken again a few years later in the same place.  It is warped now, bowed a little, but you wouldn’t notice unless I pointed it out.  But it’s sensitive in that spot to the touch.  Put your hand there and I might cringe.

You know what?  Fuck encores.  I hate that shit.

I only hate them because everybody freaking does them.  EVERYBODY.  Even the shitty little jam band that cleared the place out does an encore.  People even write it out on the set list: ENCORE 1, ENCORE 2.

Look you presumputous fucks, I paid $15 to stand up and drink overpriced beer to hear you so give me all you got.  Don’t go holding out, knowing you are going to give in in the end.  You play all the songs then I will clap my ass off for you.  Deal?

• Brittneylynn  (Just one word.  My dad calls me this.  It’s so cute.  He goes, "Brittneylynn, now listen here."  Or "Brittneylynn, why aren’t you eating meat?"  He does it so often I wonder if he calls me that to my sister as well.)
• Twizzler  (My friend Travis called me this.  One day at work I was in the kitchen where we both worked completely loaded down with plates in both arms.  It is about that time that Travis offered me some of his licorice.  I chose to have some even though I don’t really like licorice, but I really want to, ya know?  So I just keep eating it then spitting it out.  It’s wasteful, really.  Anyway I opened my gullet like a hungry fish since I couldn’t take the licorice fromhim by hand.  Seeing me in a compromising position led Travis to decide to smack me about the lips and face with the flacid piece of licorice a la some freaky porn movie starring grandpas.  Henceforth I was known as Twizzler.)
• Twiz  (It evolved.  This is what he calls me currently.)
• Booty  (This did tragic things to an adolescent’s self esteem.)
• Skinny Innis  (My dad’s side of the family–a robust set at best–called me this.  I PROVED THEM WRONG!)
• Burt ze Bra  (I’m not really sure about this one.  My friend Carrie was weird.)
• Skeeter  (This was my code name from when I was in the DYCG club.  A club that had four members, two of which hadn’t gotten there period, who liked to make up dances.  DYCG stood for Daring Young Courageous Girls.  And that is pretty much what we were.
• Britta  (My sister calls me this.  Britta is how I signed my own yearbook in fifth grade.  Thing is, nobody called me Britta which sheds light onto why I was signing my own yearbook in the first place.  Nothing like a nickname that is always a little sting of humilation.)

Also, I want to tell you the best nickname I have ever heard.  It belonged to a dishwasher I worked with almost 7 years ago.  His name was Cool Breeze.  And man, if anybody was ever a cool breeze, well, Cool Breeze was the one.

Along with a fantastic brown leather coat and a pair of neon New Balance running shoes, I got a $7 webcam at the thrift store.  I plugged the USB in and the boyfriend found drivers for it.  We had it working within minutes of getting home.

If you’ve been reading for a year or more you’ll remember I had a live streaming webcam as part of my weblog for many months.  Then I lived alone and ran it all the time.  Sometimes I put a movie on and aimed my webcam at the tv while I was away.  It was an experiment for me for some time.  It’s been a long time since that streaming webcam software I bought expired, so I was looking for software that would stream video onto a webpage viewable in a browser.  And I wanted it to be free.

I don’t know if I have ever told you this, but the interweb is my boyfriend’s bitch.  My boyfriend can prove that he is right about ANY disagreement by consulting Google.  He is technically savvy and a ravenous problem solver, and thus I have a working webcam.

At right under the Webcam heading you’ll see an image grabbed from webcam.  That image will change if you refresh my blog, or you can see a bigger version that refreshes itself every 10 seconds by clicking on the webcam image at right.  I’ve also included a discussion board for the webcam in case I have food on my face and you’d like to clue me in. 

I’ll only have this thing on when I’m actually at the computer.  The boyfriend has threatened to shut down the broadcast if he’s ever once seen on the interweb in his undies.

I’m just a little bit competitive.  Well, I used to be much more competitive when I was younger.  I remember in high school, sometimes teachers would read the names of those who made A’s, and for no other reason than to hear aloud that I was number one I would study extra hard and write 3 pages instead of 2 in hopes of being named top student.

You would have hated me.

I was only 19 when I started as a waitress at Outback in my college town.  I had been working at the Cooker, which is now out of business (even though the Cooker in Murfreesboro has a sign that says "The Cooker Pie is Back" just above the For Rent sign, with some of the letters dangling half-off pitifully), but most of my days there were spent standing around.  Once some of us heard word there would be an Outback opening in town we envisioned our ticket out of that other snore of a restaurant.  And you got to wear jeans!  None of that dry-cleaned 100% cotton shirts, heavily starched, with a tie and khaki pants.  Rumor had it girls could even wear shorts!

So, I interviewed with Outback.  It was a three-day process with a battery of tests to boot.  I was one of the last people hired for the 60-person staff in the trailer office next to the enormous Outback Steakouse neon sign lying on the ground.  Amazing how huge one of those things is when you are walking along beside it.

We trained while the building was being finished.  In fact, most of our first day was spent outside.  Since every single employee there was brand new, they shipped in a team of trainers from other stores to educate and excite the new servers.  One of the five of Outback’s "Principles and Beliefs" is Fun.  They say they make Outback a fun place to work to keep employees happy–this is their philosophy anyway.  The execution is often somewhat lacking.

Anyway, on the very first day of training we played games.  For a couple of hours, I think.  They did this one weird game where you carry a frisbee in your butt and the first one to the finish line wins a giant Foster’s surfboard (NOTE: Not an actual surfboard).  I sat that one out.  But I did get VERY INTO an intense game of Simon Says.  Like I said, there were 60 or so of us, all in dark denim and bushman’s shirts, our trainers leading the game, taking turns playing Simon.  I was focused.  I wanted to win that game.  I had never met 95% of those people before and what better way to introduce myself than by beating them? 

Eventually there were only 8 of us left playing.  Dozens and dozens of my co-workers all stood watching from the sidelines as we fought hard to the end.  The game had gotten tedious by then, but none of us still playing wanted to stop.  So the trainers taking turns playing Simon would switch out more frequently to try to trip us up.  One of the trainers, a petite ex-UT cheerleader from a Knoxville Outback switched places with the previous Simon and yelled as her first instruction, "Jump around and act like a cheerleader!"

Immediately and with great gusto I screamed "Whooooo!" at the top of my lungs, jumped up and down and even kicked my leg into the air.  Alas, I was the only one.  The cute college cheerleader waitress didn’t say "Simon Says," so in front of a sea of strangers who would soon become people I’d see almost every day, I got all Kirstin Dunst in Bring it On in front of everybody.

The wall of laughter from the sidelines was a thousand slaps to my face, and my cheeks were red enough for that to be true.  I ran from the group of players to the only person I knew there, who turned to me and said, "That.  Was awesome."

How they found me:

• Reasons for Big Ankles

• Hardcore Fairy Tattoos
• I’ll Beat that Bitch with a Bottle
• Jumpin Jammerz
• People Living Like they Ain’t Got No Mommas
• How to Carry Food Trays
• Who Owned the Horse Kevin Costner Rode in Dances with Wolves?
• Growing Pains Theme Song A Capella
• Mandy Moore’s Feet
• Jack Hammering with Panties
• Fetish Eating TAMPON
• Omen with Big Asses
• Cracker Jack Peanut Ratio
• Sexy Latinas Being Splurged Upon Porn
• Condom and Milk

Due to being about 14,000 words behind schedule, I have postponed my attempt to write a novel in a month.  I jumped on board at the last minute at the behest of other writers and was gung-ho about the project.  I was just going to write.  I wasn’t going to concern myself with rules, I was just going to get down 2,000 words a day in efforts to get 50,000 words by December.  It is an enormous undertaking and I praise heavily those who’ve been slaving away at your keyboards injesting coffee by the pot.  Onward soldiers, at the end you’ll have written a fucking book.  Not a bad reward for all the endless work.

Instead I’m going to spend November coming up with a story better than the piece of shit one I came up with at the last second and outlining that sucker.  I’ll have it pretty well mapped out on cards and on paper and in my head.  Then the writing can come much easier.  I keep getting hung up, because frankly I don’t know where I’m going and the gas station was out of maps.

Also, I’m going to shoot for 35,000 words.  I’ve never written anything over 10,000 words, so I need a goal I can acheive.  A novella is more my style anyway.

In order to be held accountable since everyone else will have finished writing–the message boards all closed, the sense of comradarie totally absent–I will post a passage once a week.  More if I’m comfortable with revealing that much. 

Anyway, I haven’t given up, I’ve made it manageable.  Comments about the fiction will be welcomed, and I hope you’ll tend toward constructive. 

The only thing I’m keeping from my first attempt at novel writing is my working title: Giddyup, Socks and Shoes!