Tell me all about 10-year-old you

I'm doing well enough at school that I've been offered to skip a year but I don't like the idea and my parents agree. The highlight of every year is visiting my grandparents in Cumbria at Easter, because I get extra pocket money and can go into Kendal and visit the toyshop there. Also the journey up is really exciting, I love being on a motorway. Going to France in the Summer is still good but less fun because it gets a bit boring sleeping in a tent. They do have minigolf though and really nice sausages.

I have made new friends including Matthew and Christie and Frank, but I miss my best friend Simon from Darlington. I like to invent electronic things and have a big "Radio Shack" 150-in-1 kit that can make annoying noises and a radio! Like Tico Tico (up there) I listen to the Top 40 with my Mum every sunday and I tape a lot of my favourites though the annoying DJ messes up the starts and ends. I don't like any particular bands.

I read a lot, but still go out and play in the back field and crawl under the garage where there are damp carpets.

we just got a Commodore 16 which is my first computer. i am using it to play Exorcist, Treasure Island, Crazy Golf, Ikari Warriors and write little programs that make a Hangman. oh and yesterday i completed level 2 of Tomcat only to find thats where the game ends - imagine my disappointment!

my Mum let me watch Robocop the other day - i'm not sure she realised how violent it was. it was cool but the bit where he dies and the bit where the man gets burnt by the toxic waste is horrible. i try not to think about it and instead dream about building my own life-size ED-209 out of Lego.

going to Thorpe Park this weekend with my mate Kevin and his family. they're quite well off so that'll be fun. Kev told me they've made Phantom Fantasia a lot scarier now.

did you see Kylie on TOTP? man she is rubbish, i prefer The Chart Show - they played that new Beatmasters tune which is grate. i also like INXS but not U2, they're so boring.

i hope i get that Yamaha keyboard for Christmas.

dinner's ready now, seeya later.

I have recently started my new school and I really like it, though it's weird. We are not allowed to draw outlines, and we write in thick crayons. I am learning about the Norse gods and vikings at the moment; we do a play and I am Freya (I do not in fact master the use of the semi-colon for another 7 years.) Television is frowned on at school, but we still have one. I can't remember what I watch.

For my tenth birthday I had a Care Bear cake. I am not allowed Barbie, but I have some Sindys and my friend Miriam has a brilliant Sindy house. My other favourite toys are Sylvanian Families, My Little Ponies and my collection of identical teddy bears. My best friends at my old school were Cara, Miriam, Amy and Stephanie. I still see them and Stephanie is at my new school too, but sometimes I hate her.

The books I like are mainly by Enid Blyton and I have a crush on Dick from the Famous Five. I also like The Railway Children, Anne of Green Gables and A Little Princess.

I think we went to Corfu for a holiday. And I probably broke my arm again this year.

Singing to plants is supposed to be good for them. Instead, I play violin to my favorite plant. I am especially fond of Beethoven's Romance. I have played violin for five years, but my friend Caroline is much better than me. She's a prodigy, and I wouldn't want to practice that hard anyway.

My older sister and I adore Duran Duran. I have a thing for Nick Rhodes. We have all the albums and know all the lyrics and find trivia about the band members in silly magazines. We always watch Saturday Night Videos. A friend of my sister's is obsessed with Van Halen and so we watch the video for "Jump" over and over and over. I think Eddie Van Halen is pretty cute. We listen to our Pyromania record a lot too. (Yes, I know, it's unusual to get along so well with an older sister. She's more of a friend than a sibling.)

I read a lot. There's a boy who follows me around at the library and makes fun of how I leave with my arms piled with books. The librarian tells me that the boy later checks out piles of books himself. I am baffled by this.

It becomes well known that I laugh readily, and this is taken advantage of frequently at lunchtime, especially if I'm drinking milk. Milk-shooting-out-of-nose ensues. I find this embarrassing but funny. I have a crush on the boy who makes me laugh.

Second half of year ten: I am back at home in San Antonio, absolutely abhorring the heat and sun and humid air and burnt brown and yellow-green of it all. I am now in the fifth grade in a rather good Catholic grade school, still wearing the itchy plaid uniform skirts and suspenders. The best thing about living here is that we are living near a large amount of our family now and can participate in family functions. The worst part? You want me to run down that list for you?

I am starting to get into classic rock, though more of the pop side of classic rock, such as Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac. My favorite songs are "Do It Again" and "Rhiannon". We (my parents and I) find out from relatives back at home that I have a new little cousin and her name happens to be Rhiannon. I am surprised. My one good friend is a girl named Angela, who is in the fifth grade.

My favorite TV shows to watch are "Comic Strip Live", "Life Goes On", "Northern Exposure" and "America's Funniest Home Videos". I remember getting freaked out by Arachnophobia in the theaters. Mom and I were one of the many who went to see Dances with Wolves in the theater, and we also watched Die Hard 2, Edward Scissorhands, Ghost, and tons of other movies, since we go to the movies once a week.

I am a happy-go-lucky kid who also takes herself too seriously and who is a bit of a loner. This is made possible due to the fact that, as always, I am a freak. My favorite possessions are my Fisher Price record player, my little TV (I have a TV in my bedroom for the first time in my life!), my bicycle, my two favorite teddy bears (although I would never admit to actually still be into teddy bears), and a blue outfit I've decided is my favorite. My favorite colors are blue, white, and purple. I love books -- the school librarians know my name. I am studious. I make nothing but As and Bs in my courses, including P.E. I am just starting to get into playing tennis. I think it is the absolute coolest thing to do.

I am into stand-up comedy. My favorite stand-up comedians are Elayne Boozler, Paula Poundstone, Rita Rudner, Sam Kinison, Ray Romano, and Jay Leno. I root for the San Antonio Spurs and am happy they got this guy named David Robinson into their team, because they seem improved by his presence. I am still more than a year away from discovering the '80s, music-wise.

That's it. I think. Me in a nutshell, age 10. From what I can recall, that is.

I like Nik Kershaw, Duran Duran and Howard Jones, and religiously tape the top 40 every Sunday on my lovely new "portable stereo" (actually mono as it only has one speaker). In fact I like all chart music as I have yet to discern a proper taste in music for myself yet. I read Smash Hits and Look In and have posters of Charlie Nicholas, Tucker Jenkins (even though I'm not allowed to watch Grange Hill) and various pop stars on my wall. Although I don't know it yet, my obsession with the Top 40 will win me many a pub quiz.

I play Hopper on our C64 when I can get my dad off it.

I read Frederick Forsyth and Wilbur Smith books that I borrow off my dad, as I like big books. My favourite books that I borrow from the library are the Ramona Quimby ones. My mum reads me the serialisation of Adrian Mole from her Woman's Realm (possibly Woman's Weekly) every week and we think it's great.

Every Friday night I get a Cadbury's Dairy Milk and I answer lots of questions on whatever game show is on. My mum lets me stay up late on a Saturday to watch Cagney and Lacey (my younger brother is allowed to stay up late and listen to the theme tune - it's his favourite).

I have just got a new puppy called Sandy and a new big brother called Michael (he's fostered). I'm quite happy really considering the school thing. I'm also on Valium (but my mum isn't happy about it, so it's pretty short-lived).

Sometimes kids make fun of me because last year I used to cry because I thought I was going to miss the bus. I would get scared that I'd be trapped at school and wouldn't be able to get home. The kid who makes fun of me most is this girl Sara. She's mean and I want my friends to hate her but they won't. She's stupid and her mouth moves funny when she talks.

My favorite thing in the whole world is the Beatles. I don't remember why I suddenly got obsessed with them, but I remember exactly where it happened: on the crushed gravel walkway leading up to the school orchestra practice room, I suddenly said to myself, "I am going to be a Beatles fan" and a warm light washed over me. The first Beatles tape I bought was Rock 'n' Roll Music, Vol. 2. Soon I started buying records. By next year I will have reissues of every record they made. My favorite thing to do while listening to my Beatles records is stare at the gatefold of the Rarities album which has the picture of them in butcher's smocks with chunks of bloody meat and dismembered baby dolls. Gross!!

Earlier this year I went to my friend Mitch's birthday party where we watched Revenge of the Nerds. It was funny! It also had naked women in it. This is the first time I've seen naked women. I felt guilty about it, and when I got home I told my mom. I liked seeing the naked women but not with Mitch's mom in the room.

Grandpa wanted to buy me a BB gun for my birthday but mom wouldn't let him. So he got me a skateboard instead. Except I can't ride it because the road in front of my house isn't paved. I'm not going to cry about it though. I'm bigger now and don't do that anymore.

Troon doesn't have a proper cinema, but my friend Barry Dunlop's dad runs a film club in the local town hall, showing films about the time they'd go to video years later, and I get in free and am even allowed up to the projector room. Once, Barry and his dad, Johnny, turn up at my house with the projector and a screen, and we watch the Doctor Who movie about Daleks in my living room. Cool!

My friends and I build dens and fight with older kids that try to wreck them. Even though I've been badly beaten a few times and had to have three stitches in my forehead after a half brick hit me on the forehead, there's glory in these conflicts, and I often feel like a maverick hero in a grand adventure. Our gangleader, Paul (Magoo) has a sister, Julie, who's not as annoying as most other girls, and kind of pretty. I buy 2000AD, but sometimes Battle, Tiger and Roy of the Rovers, though I'm not so into football as my dad, who supports Rangers and hates Catholics. Most of my friends are Catholic and I'm glad this annoys him as I know he's being silly. Sometimes, I argue with him, but get nowhere. My bestest friend is Mark, who has a lumbering laborador called Prince, which flattens me with an affectionate leap every time I visit. My bike is a Grifter, metallic blue with rainbow stickers, battered now, and stuck permanently in 3rd gear, but I love her more than my little yellow boxer and I've twice outpaced bullies in racers that were trying to catch me and give me a kicking.

At school, I have Miss Ridgeway, who's done a lot to stop the other kids from bullying me. Occasionally, I've encountered Mrs Kalogeris, who I know is to be my Primary 7 teacher, and will spend the next year undoing all Mrs Ridgeway's good work, partly because of her feud with Mrs Young, partly because she's hated me since I started at Troon Primary. My gran and grandpa on my mum's side (or nonna and grampa as I call them - nonna's Italian for grandmother. My aunt married an Italian) sometimes take me to Kelburn, a country park which is really cool because it has a mock army assault course complete with death slide. They spoil me a bit, because grampa is managing director of the local shipyard and can afford to.

My dad listens to loud music on his stereo. He's not into punk anymore; these days its Dexys and the New Romantics, though he occasionally goes back to his AC/DC albums and prances round the living room playing air guitar. I've got some singles too, including the smurfs, mull of kintyre, and my Bay City Rollers gatefold albums, which I'm still not embarassed by. When I grow up, I want tartan trousers just like theirs. My dad lets me watch the Young Ones even though it's past my bedtime because mum goes to gran's the night it's on. It's our little secret.

When it rains and there's no one about, I like to go out walking and think. Sometimes I write little stories, usually using words I learnt recently (everyone is "burly" in one, even the girls) which I illustrate also (badly - I can't draw hands or feet, so amputate all my subjects). The thing I want to be the most is a writer, though a detective or a pirate would be fun, too.

Somedays I'm happy, somedays I'm not. Life's not so bad, though, even if Mum and dad fight a lot.

My brother and sister recently moved to the US and I miss them, but also enjoy the lack of teasing and general older sibling abuse. Plus, I get to take over my sister’s room as an ‘office’, which I use to do my homework in and store my books. Additional bonus, their best friends come and take me out all the time to go see films or hang out. I insist on repeat viewings of Foxy Brown (four times in the theatre)

I’m bored at school but love my friends. Most of them are a few years older than me so I’m like a lil brother/mascot. I’ve started reading with an absolute vengeance and spend more and more time with my nose buried in a book. This combined with my new glasses earns me the nickname of “professor”. I am fascinated by history and mythology and decide I want to be an archaeologist when I grow up.

I’m working my way through my parents’ record collection (mostly jazz, Ethiopian & classical) and my brother and sisters (reggae, funk, disco). I love it all.

I kiss a boy for the first time. We agree this is something we do not discuss at school.

My stepdad has left and gone back to the States, and none of us have ever been happier. He was an asshole and he broke my mom's ribs. I have murderous dreams about him, and will for years. I've made a great friend in Chrissy - she lives down the hill from me, and since my mom works all the time and my brother is never home, we hang out a lot. We go to the beach, go horse riding, the the movies, to the pier, to the tide pools - anywhere and everywhere. I love her and she'll be my best friend for years, though we'll fall out of touch when I move back to the States in a couple years.

I read a lot, and spend a lot of time dreaming about what my life will be like when I get older, and I think I want to be a veterinarian because I love animals, and I miss my dad.

My friends are all KISS fans. I have an OK social life, a good circle of kids to play baseball and have birthday parties and run around the woods with, but I'm still hugely insecure in social situations and prone to temper tantrums that often involve me throwing things at people (and always missing -- for a while I thought I just had really bad aim, but over time I realized it was deliberate -- some part of me knew that hitting someone in the head with a baseball or rock would probably not be a good thing). My best friend is also named Jesse**. He has a cool older sister who listens to the Adolescents, and his aunt is P.J. Soles who was in "Rock 'n' Roll High School" and gave him and his sister a bunch of Ramones albums -- ergo, I discover punk rock, although it doesn't hit me as hard as "You Shook Me All Night Long," which is ruling the "Hot 5 at 9" on the top 40 radio station my sister (18 months younger) and I listen to every night. Somewhere in here I buy my first American 45: "Ah Leah" by Donnie Iris.

(**Three years later, Jesse and I go to see the Ramones play at SUNY Brockport. We jump up and down in wonderment. About two months after that, Jesse's in a car accident and suffers permanent brain damage. He's been mostly institutionalized for the last 20 years. I used to have dreams about him sometimes and see him as he would have been without the accident, and we'd hang out and talk about music or whatever. But that stopped after a while.)

I love football, and feel proud that despite my terrible health I make the school team when I am fit enough to attend school at all. I read some, but have never had any encouragement at all in this, from school or home. I'm as keen on Marvel Comics, in this great Kirby era, as books.

I have zero interest in music - I'm in a house where there is none (nor books). I love TV of course, and some of it is in colour now!

I live in a village called Sherston halfway between Bristol and Swindon on the old A4, where my dad owns the butcher's shop - we live over it in a fantastic 17th century ex-coaching inn. I have a brother three years younger than me. There aren't so many kids of my age within walking distance, so I'm sort of friends with those that are, but skipping a year at school has kind of separated me from them, in some ways.

ah, if I think more about this it'll be depressing - my mother made my life a misery a lot of the time. I'll leave it there.

How many of you kept a journal when you were 10? I started one when I was 8. I'll try to remember to bring my 10-year-old diary in next week when I get back from my vacation. Wouldn't want to miss any details.

I live with my mom and my stepdad. I'm an only child, and while not spoiled with toys and stuff, I can probably get attention if I need it, which isn't very often. I read a *lot*. 'The Dark is Rising' is my favorite book. I like Fig Newtons. I'm not very social and rather quiet apart from very rare outbursts of impetuousness, which is maybe why I'm being taken to a therapist. She is old and boring. I'm not really into pop music yet--my parents listen to classical and jazz. I like the loud grim Russian composers.

This summer my real father will take me away for a week to his house in Texas, where I will enjoy learning to water ski but be resolutely miserable the rest of the time. In school we take the California Standardized Test (or maybe the Iowa?) and I finish each section early and read Isaac Asimov's 'Inside the Atom' while waiting for the next one. I'm a GEEK. Missy A. is the first student to grasp the technique of long division and I have a crush on her--she has red hair and doesn't spray imaginary disinfectant on the things I've touched like some of the girls. I like to draw maps of places, some of them real and some not. Pennsylvania is easy because it's mostly straight lines.

:(

i see him only on the weekends, every other saturday, from 10-5. this isn't a lot, but it's all i remember ever seeing him, really. he still lives in phoenixville, where i was born and lived until second grade. plus we get to go out to lunch to places like pizza hut and we usually get to see a movie at the end of the day. my dad has just started dating a woman named lisa, but i don't think he's living with her yet. we spend a lot of time at her apartment because my dad lives in a studio apartment (or, as i saw it, one room) in a kirk van houten style batchelors flophouse uptown. she is also divorced. i don't like her sons. they're older and mean to me. plus they have red hair and look funny. but they have a nintendo entertainment system, which i don't.

music is confined to weird al, the beastie boys first album, and pop radio, but i am beginning to get my first taste of wider music. i am briefly obsessed with george michael. he upsets me, but i am also fascinated by his "faith" video and the song "father figure." it sounds strange and eerie.

school is hard, and i don't like it much. but my school also has the best playground ever, with a giant tireswing hung from a dinosaur made of wood. my best friends are andrew (who shares my love of drawing comics and weird al) and eric (who i find out is adopted, which makes me sad...also he has a weird hippie family who put honey on pancakes which are made out of wheat.) my other best friend is seth who doesn't go to our school and lives a town away in wayne, in an apartment above a store. i remember it being subtly impressed upon me that this was something to look down on, even though we lived in a double house owned by my stepdad's parents. still, his mom is cool; she lets us watch movies like robocop when i sleep over. also he has a crazy computer which hooks up to the tv! i want a computer.

i am probably the happiest i will ever be, socially, for the rest of my life.

most of the summer is spent at the ymca swimming pool, with my mom's best friend and her two kids. they're my friends, but i don't ever see them outside of when my mom is around and i dont like them much, really. but they have a nintendo too. why don't i?

in the fall of 88 i remember being briefly obsessed with "pour some sugar on me", going so far as to be caught out singing it in class and being laughed at. i'm too embarassed to ever sing again in front of people, until two years later when something similar happens. i also play team soccer and our team end up being the league champions! i get a trophy! it is the only time i will ever be remotely "good" at sports.

i also read a lot, including the dark is rising books too, asimov's foundation (i don't get most of it), the lloyd alexander prydain books, and tolkein.

i write a report on a smorgsboard restaurant in lancaster, pa (that's where the amish are from and where my dad's brother and his horrible family live...it is 45 minutes away and feels like another planet, all outlet malls and farms) which wins an award and is so convincing about the quality of the place that my teacher calls my mom to get its address. my mom is convinced i should become a "writer." it's all downhill from there.

But my home is a mostly fun place to live in. Jimmer and Jeff and Gary are my best friends. We roam around the cornfields and throw mud at the cows. One day I tried to climb an electric fence. My brother and I have a tree house and we fight a lot. I read lots of comics and my favorites are Spider Man, and The Fantastic Four. I also get books on astronomy and a Heinlein juvenile each week when I go to the library. I watch Doctor Who on the CBC. My Mom and Dad are pretty unmusical, and most of what I hear is on my donut radio I put under my pillow at night. Two of my favorite songs are "Mr. Jaws," "Rhinestone Cowboy," I liked ABBA when I saw them on TV, but Jimmer tells me ABBA is for girls and that KISS is much cooler. His parents buy KISS 8-tracks for him whenever he wants.

That's all, bye.

but i loev this thread :-)

I'm noticing divorce as a trend: everybody's doing it. About a month after we move to the new house, my dad is demoted to the sofa and that's the beginning of the end for my parents. Still, the highlight of my week is staying up late with him to watch Saturday Night Live (due to a habit of NOT asking my parents what things I hear, see or read actually mean, I look everything up in the dictionary, which is good since ours is grown-up enough to have 'fuck' in it) though I worry when Gilda Radner starts joking about penis envy. I'm allowed to stay up late and watch the news; my dad watches All-Star wrestling on the weekend (which I hate) and horse racing (which we argue about, he had horses when he was growing up and I am mega-jealous because I am not allowed to ride). To compensate, I collect Breyer model horses. There are six girls at school who also do, and we compete. We are officially horse-mad. My best friend is one of those girls who are the family's baby, and she gets to paint her room purple and lavender, which is way too Barbie for me.

We have an antique armchair that is the perfect size for a ten-year-old to sit bucketed in with legs falling over the side, reading until detected way past a reasonable bedtime. I'm into Watership Down, Judy Blume, Oscar Wilde, and spend hours at my aunt and uncle's place four houses away, reading fairy tales, mythology, their National Geographics, my aunt's Jackie Susann books, anything. I draw on paper my mom brings home from work (she works long hours, occasionally my dad disappears for a few weeks when he can't explain where the bill money's gone). Mannequins, horses and rabbits. Surprise surprise, I really want a rabbit: we get one called Muggs. Muggs is black, gets on with Casey, our third poodle (poodles one and two having met horrible deaths a la Spinal Tap drummers) and rides in my bicycle basket. I have an old one-gear two-tone bike with '50's chrome flourishes and FINS. I wear Adidas tops and boot-cut Levi's, gaucho skirts and cotton blouses. Sometimes I cook dinner for me and my sister if my mom is running late. Sometimes I run into the kitchen on bills night to tell my folks to stop fighting NOW.

School absolutely and totally sucks. I'm in a 'combination' class for fifth and sixth graders taught by the psychopath who taught me in third grade, and from day one I just don't want to be there. We sit at tables and store our stuff in cubby holes, which the teacher will empty, flinging one person's stuff on to the floor in front of the whole class, shouting at them to pick up their mess. I feel separated from my friends in 'normal' fifth-grade classes with DESKS. I have a hopeless crush on Jeff N, who looks like a sixth-grade Keanu-alike. He's never shitty about it, but his friends tease me. But anything kids might have to say pales in comparison to Psycho Teacher because she's HORRIBLE to me. I am blamed for every last thing that goes wrong in the classroom and I plummet from straight As to quivering mass in the corner, worried that I will wind up repeating the year, repeating it under her instruction.

I think I want to be an actress. I think I want to be an artist. I write all the time.

I taped some songs of the radio. Communards "Don't Leave Me This Way". My aunt cuts my hair :( I have to start wearing glasses :(

I wish my dad would buy us a video recorder, everyone at school has them and watches Nightmare on Elm Street.

I've just moved schools, from the local primary to a really posh one where they have uniforms and everything. I'm kind of angry about it, because even though I was miserable and my teacher hated me, it feels like I've betrayed my old school. Also, everyone at the new one knows more than me, and the year before they all got badges for being able to say their times tables up to twenty-five. I don't even know what seven times eight is, and I'm in the bottom stream. I get moved up into the top stream by the end of the year, though, which means I'm going to go into the top class next year and then I'm going to get into a good senior school. In the top stream classes, we have to do handwriting lessons, and I hate Mr Borg who takes them. I don't know why his name is funny. The music teacher really likes me, though. He's fat, black-bearded and bass-voiced, and loves opera, and I've been in a real opera and can sing plummy. I'm also in a proper choir, and I get to go on summer camps and sing stuff from musicals and hang out with the cool girls three years older than me, who get into massive trouble for having their boyfriends in their dorm room.

My best friend at the new school is called Tess, and she lives in this amazing house with a stainless-steel fridge that makes ice, and she gets her breakfast cereal from America and has an au pair and a housekeeper. She barely ever comes over to my house: I'm a bit ashamed that it isn't big and neat and shining and new-looking like hers is, even though our garden is better, because it's got strawberry plants and applemint and lemonbalm. My room is also better, even though it's smaller: my bed's raised up really high and at night I can look out over all the lights of London, the BT tower blinking a red goodnight. We play dress-up in her basement, which has a multi-gym in it that we're not allowed to touch, pretend we're people in books and off the telly. Everyone else watches Neighbours and Home and Away, but my alder brother doesn't like it so neither do I.

I think "book" means "novel", and I'm going to be a writer when I grow up. My favourite book is David Copperfield, but I still have a slightly shameful love of the Swallows and Amazons series. I don't know how to sail, but I do know how to ride horses, which is really useful because at my new school everyone's into horseriding. They buy Horse and Pony magazine, where all my friends at my old school bought Shout and Just Seventeen and were into Take That and boys. I solve the confusing question of boys by deciding that they're useless, anyway, and the world would be a better place if we just got rid of them except for breeding purposes.

As for Take That, I decide that they're no longer any good and burn my tape of the first album. I don't really listen to pop music much, only the old stuff we have at home, like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and my favourite song is "She's not there" by the Zombies. I really like Benjamin Britten, and want to be a good enough singer to do the solo in "Balulalow", and I hate Michael Tippet with a passion and make up the alto part in "Crown of the year" instead of learning it. In my opinion, it would sound bad no matter what I sang. I don't see why people want want to listen to something that ugly.

(Good lord that was long.) This thread rocks.

it snowed once, and my pal stuart and I, we ran through the falling snowflakes and pretended we were flying through hyperspace.

This is honestly the best thing I've ever read anywhere. I wish I could print it out right now and laminate each page so it will all last for eternity. Some of us seem to have had an idyllic childhood, some of us seem to have had it rough growing up, and the rest of us are in the middle.

Oh yeah, as to the reason why we moved around (we moved around several times when I was little): my mom was in the civil service and moved us around several times so that she could get her G.S. level up. (I trust a few people around here know what that means.) She retired with an amazingly high income for someone with "just" a high school education. She's always been a real go-getter, which I feel with great pleasure I'm turning into.

I read a lot, mostly RL Stine and Christopher Pike books and the Xanth novels that my mom gives me. Near the end of this year, I also read a copy of Good Omens stolen from my brother. I doubt I understand much, but it's still hilarious.

All my friends are girls, for some reason. I'm the biggest kid in my class, so I still don't get picked on, even with such an obvious target.

I'm a huge 49ers fan. Joe Montana is Allah, Buddha and Jesus all wrapped into one.

When I was younger I would visit my grandparents and play with the girl next door to them, who was my age and named Jennifer. Suddenly now I lived up there and Jennifer was in my class. There was some sort of prepubertal emotional thing going on between us but it never made much sense and nothing particularly illicit occurred.

I watched Transformers and collected them; my friend, who was a year younger, had more Transformers than me. I was a latchkey kid, and wasn't allowed to have anyone over until my mother got home, but I would sneak my friend in and we would play. Sometimes my mother would come home before he had left and we'd have to sneak him out.

We didn't have much money, although I was totally unaware of this back then. But for a while, we didn't have curtains in my room -- instead, some of my mother's nightgowns. One was pink, one was blue.

Manic Monday was on the radio a lot, and the proto-Zoo radio show had a segment called "Miami Mice" in which squeaky voiced detectives... well, you get the idea.

I think I might have begun reading D&D rulebooks around this time. I was fascinated by the rules (both the wonkiness of it all and the attempt at life simulation, I guess) but never got into actually playing the game.

One of the things I liked about my school was that it had a big painted map of the lower 48 states in the playground. One day I pointed out to my teacher that Connecticut was wrong in that map, because it didn't have the little notch that's missing (in the middle of the northern border).

channel 9 reruns old episodes of saturday night live from the 70s at 3 am, and i tape them on our beta and watch them with my mom sunday afternoons. i try to ingratiate myself w/her whenever i can in hopes of placating her violent temper. she was still mysterious & godlike to me then, i couldn’t understand how she could hurt me so impulsively. my dad is sort of a schizoid nonentity. he has paranoid episodes every once in a while where he says frightening things. i had ignored him for years at this point & would remind my little brother (age 6) and sister (3) to do the same. i am a terrible older sister, always using my size/age against them, just because i could.

mom has started working 3-midnight shifts at the nursing home friday-sunday. every friday after school i am allowed to let myself into the house & stay there alone until my dad gets home. my brother and sister have to stay at our next-door neighbors. they have a nintendo & lots of brand name junk food over there but i prefer to have those 3 hours by myself. the possibilities of being alone were endless, though i'd usually wind up running down the list of all the things i wasn't supposed to do. so friday afternoons were spent listening to beatles records (don't touch!), dancing on the nappy orange carpet to madonna (catholicism is serious business), sneaking drinks from the liquor cabinet (i poured myself a coffeemug full of whiskey once) and watching mtv & 'you can't do that on television' (never understood what was so offensive about that last one.)

i came down pneumonia twice this year & missed about 3 months of school. i was excused from gym when i finally went back. that was awesome.

my best friend is my cat, willie nelson. i don't have a best person friend anymore; i won't have any friends at all for another 6 years. this doesn't really bother me, except for when i'm placed in unescapable social situations. i'm not scared of anything besides tornadoes & my parents. i read and draw and write compulsively and love to walk deep into the woods behind our house. if you walk back far enough, there's an empty farmhouse with a hole through the second floor to the first. i have developed what the professionals call a 'rich interior world' & have begun to leave it less and less often.

(eep, that was wordy.)

I live in Claremont. It is my third new town in several years. My mom left my father for my stepfather when I was five or six, and my stepfather was a nightmare, so she moved back in with my dad, bringing me and my sister along. Only that wasn't going to work out so good, either, so we moved in with my grandmother in Claremont, which is where my stepfather found us, and started paying visits & insinuating himself back into our lives with lots of apologies & promises, and now we live with him again, only he hasn't really changed.

I spend more and more time alone in my room listening to music through headphones. I buy beat-up vinyl LPs for twenty-three cents: Jethro Tull's Benefit, Genesis's Foxtrot. For Christmas I only ask for two classes of things: books and records. The music means so much to me that I cannot articulate it, nor do I feel like it's necessary to do so: how could anyone not feel that music was the only reason to go on living? I hold a cassette recorder up to the AM radio and night and tape songs randomly. "You Make Lovin' Fun" by Fleetwood Mac. "Gold" by whoever that guy who did "Gold" was, the one about "When the lights go down in the California town."

I want so badly to be liked by the girls in Mrs. Vancil's class, but I am not cool. The cool guys like to hang out with me because I'm funny, and I can swear like a grown-up, and I've seen & heard things that they've only thought about before, but I am only marginally of their number. When I go to their birthday parties, I feel like I'm on somebody else's planet. I can't invite people over to my house, because that would mean my stepfather would have to get dressed, which he doesn't like to do.

My stepfather enrolls me in Little League. I am very bad at it and I get beaten & yelled at when I take a called third strike. It makes me so angry! Doesn't my stepfather know that if it'd've looked like a strike to me, I would have swung at it? I am learning to hate things I'm not good at, and I hate that feeling, and it's a vicious circle. I feel like if the girls liked me better, life would at least be bearable. It's not that they're mean to me; they're actually kind of nice, and they like talking with me. But it's plain that I am not going to be anybody's boyfriend. I fear being alone.

The one thing I have besides my stereo & my headphones is my ability to write. Mrs. Vancil praises my writing & I know that I deserve it. I feel like it's the only thing I have that can't be somehow stripped from me. Sometimes I think to myself: "What will you do if you can't become a famous writer?" I can't even stand the thought of it. I wonder whether suicides really go to Hell.

I have a dog named Puppet, a cat named Moosey (among several other cats, but this one is mine). Naturally, my stepfather is mean to my cat: not physically, but he talks with open contempt of this particular cat. I can't understand it. I write my own words in my head where no-one can hear them for Kenny Nolan's song "I Like Dreamin'," which song I don't really like much, but it gets stuck in your head, you know. My version is called "I Like Moosey."

There's more but I really can't do this.

Anyway. Tep.10. 1985. Fourth grade. Weird year. They had finally taken me out of all the remedial programs, and wanted me to skip a grade, and I didn't want to because I'd already gone one year where all my friends were in a different grade than me because of this "Readiness" program they did between Kindergarten and 1st grade. So instead they put me in an accelerated reading program: 2 4th graders, 2 5th graders, 2 6th graders. I don't remember what we read, besides The Call of the Wild, The Trumpeter of Krakow, and Bless the Beasts and Children (which landed me in the guidance counselor's office when I didn't want to talk about the suicide scene; I'd attempted suicide earlier that year).

My fourth grade teacher didn't like the fact that these gifted programs existed, so made me do the reading homework for my regular class as well. It never really occurred to me that it wouldn't have mattered if I'd skipped it, since she wasn't the one giving me my reading grade.

We had to write essays every week for this accelerated thing, which meant my mother sitting by the keyboard with me every damn night it rolled around, prodding me for each sentence. "What's the answer to the question about the symbolism in the second chapter?" "Blah blah blah." "Well, write that down, then." Took hours. Harder work than anyone asked of me until 10th grade or so (although I'd dropped out of the honors classes by then, or that might not be the case). Wouldn't be as nice a writer now if my mother hadn't had the patience to do that. The program didn't last much longer -- it briefly morphed into a touchy-feely "tell me about your dreams" crapiculum -- because it was turning us all into prepubescent hypercompetitive neurotics.

Okay, let me think, what else. I played a shitload of poker. Every Friday night, my friends would come over to my place and we'd buy Cheetos and Welch's grape soda and Reese's peanut butter cups and whatnot and we'd play poker for either chips or nickels, depending on whether we all had money or not. I hadn't discovered roleplaying games yet; I mean, I'd discovered them, but I was forbidden to play them, so this was my gaming geekery at the time -- five-card poker, usually with someone throwing in like a dozen different wild cards ("Yeah, uh, okay, the game is five-card draw, and ... suicide kings, black queens, jacks, deuces, and the three of hearts are wild.")

My closest friends were more or less the same friends I would have through the end of junior high, except that in 5th grade I met Matt, who was my best friend until I left NH. We spent Halloweens watching horror movies and trick-or-treating two nights -- Hollis did it one night, and Nashua always did it another, and by 4th grade at least some kids' parents had divorced, and all divorced fathers lived in Nashua because there were no apartments in Hollis, only large Colonial houses and newer sunroofed/swimming-pooled cul-de-sac developments. We went to Red Sox games five or six times in the summer, and if I'm remembering my timing right, it was the days of Roger Clemens and Wade Boggs and Oil Can Boyd.

... yeah, I'm remembering my timing right, because 1986 was the Series and Buckner. Goddamn and goddamn.

Those Halloweens also meant the Playboy channel, because Nashua had cable and Hollis did not -- you were always jealous of children of divorced parents back then, because they got to watch Danger Mouse and You Can't Do That On Television (what on earth can't you do on television? the rest of us wondered - it must involved nakedness!) on weekends -- and divorced fathers quite naturally always subscribed to the Playboy channel. We would put it on mute, play poker, and trade our Halloween candy: I got every damn Almond Joy in the room, man. Nobody wanted their Almond Joys. I could trade a Sugar Daddy for like three of those puppies. I was the fucking man.

I got online for the first time, on my dad's .. XT? AT? ... whatever was his computer (mine was the PCjr still, with King's Quest and PC Pool and the BASIC cartridge you had to pop in for some games and Qwerty for homework). CompuServe, I think, but it might have been the Source. We had a 300 baud modem and my father had some kind of answering machine program running, but my mother didn't want him to use it because he was out of town or at work late so often (he ran a computer store and maintenance service thing) and it was a DOS command-line program she didn't feel like using "when we could just buy an answering machine, for heaven's sake, if we really needed one.")

"Getting online" in 1985, btw, mostly consisted of logging on, sitting there for a minute, and then telling the friend who was watching wide-eyed as I did so, "Yeah, I'm gonna, uh ... hack NASA now," and then hitting a bunch of keys which usually brought up a message-board discussion of Fortran or Lotus 123 or some damn thing. We'd watched Wargames and Whiz Kids too much.

I didn't have Nintendo yet. I don't remember if it was out, only that I didn't get it for a few years after my friends did, because a) I mentioned the PCjr with King's Quest, right? Who the hell needed Super Mario Brothers when I had King's Quest? and b) I had an Odyssey^2, so until that broke and I couldn't play Pickaxe Pete anymore, I had zero interest in any of this newfangled shit.

At the arcade, I was horrible at Dragon's Lair but plunked two tokens in once every visit, because you just had to. I was okay at Spy Hunter and Punch-Out. I fucking owned Tron Discs. My intials were on that bitch's topspot right up until the day they rolled it out to make room for the Blockbuster.

We had a VCR, emphasis on the R since there was only one place around that rented videos, and it was across the street from my father's store. Once in a great while we rented movies: I picked one (Star Trek or Indiana Jones, or a comedy that I managed to convince my father didn't have any swearing or sex in it; we were only allowed to see R-rated movies if they were rated R for violence) and my younger brother picked one (almost without fail, that one was a Chuck Norris movie). If we took too long to decide, my father would invoke his fiat and rent a James Bond movie or a western instead.

Television ... this might have been the year I would occasionally sneak the black-and-white rabbit-eared television set into my room so I could watch Facts of Life and Manimal even though they were on later than I was supposed to be watching television. Diff'rent Strokes and WKRP, in just-after-dinner syndicated reruns, were my daily fare. Jennifer from WKRP and Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman were two halves of my Ideal Woman Coin.

I read a good deal, several novels a week, whatever I could get my hands on. I wrote ineffectively and immaturely but with great attention paid to the summaries I would write in my notebook before starting the story (rarely making it more than a page or two beyond that summary). I'm not sure if I had started listening to music much yet. The first song I remember being on heavy rotation on the radio when I started listening regularly is "Point of No Return" by ... Nu-Shooz? (It's the spelling I'm not sure of, not the band.)

I thought it might be cool to look back at the person you were at 10 years old and see how that time might have shaped the way you are now, whether your interests/influences at that time had any bearing on the path you ended up following through life. But I was totally unprepared for the roller-coaster ride of incredible emotion I have felt when reading your replies. This thread has blown me away.

You're amazing, people. Now I know why I like it here so much.

I also have this memory of being in school one day and some well-meaning classmate encouraging me to smile, only for me to be all like "b-b-but I have nothing to smile about", and I was right as in hindsight my miserable time at primary school was soon to be replicated at grammar school...just as well I couldn't have known though

I amn't ever really bullied, except for occasional stuff, I don't remember being really miserable. In the summers we go to France, I love this and I get on very well with my mothers twins son, who is my age.

I like Nirvana I think, I hear alot of music in the house from my brother, so I'm familiar with stuff like MBV and loads of other early 90s indie without ever really getting it fully. I remember liking Carter USM though, my brother had Sheriff Fatman on vinyl.

I suppose I am happy, I don't remember not being happy, not for any prolonged period, I have had a blessed existence I suppose.

all i remeber of this year was waiting for him to come back and for my mom and my dad to be married again.

the church promised families to be together forever, i was worried that i was being punished for being bad or that my dad was a bad man.

I was very anxious to be a teenager, however, as that seemed to involve dressing up and going on dates, and all sorts of fun. My teenage years didn't quite work out that way.

I don't have a lot of memories of my parents, they were always very busy when I was little. But once we were in an art gallery when I was 10 or maybe a bit younger and I was really tired. I was looking for my mom--she's an academic, with short gray hair. I saw the back of someone with short gray hair and a tweedy jacket and went over and put my head on the person's shoulder. It was some man, who was very surprised, and taken aback when I told him that I'd thought he was my mom. I think he understood my mistake when we found her--she did look much the same from the back. I was very embarrassed though.

I sit next to Dave, who I quite like. We both do big projects on loons and help each other out in the library. Nicole wants to sit next to him too, but I won't give up my spot, and we hate one another (she later gets a boob job at 16 after her mother marries the owner of the only Gentlemen's Club in my city). Dave asks me what music I like halfway through the year and I've never listened to music really, but I know some things that were popular the summer before, so I say, "Green Day" hoping to be cool and he says, "Really? I can't tell what the singer is saying." and I am too embarrassed to ever speak to him for the remainder of elementry school.

My parents have been divorced for five years and my father finally tells me about the cancer he was diagnosed with two years before which will kill him when I am fourteen. I'm slightly irritated that he told my brother and I at the same time since my brother is FOURTEEN months younger than me and obviously not mature enough for such confidences. All that cancer means to me is that he makes lots of weird rancid-tasting herbal teas. But he seems to like them, so it's OK.

I split my time between both parents' houses. My mother has moved four times in the past five years, but I think it's kind of exciting. We'd just moved into a new blue house closer to the school and my brother and I wrote on all the boxes that had been labeled "kitchen" or "dining room": ISAAC IS COOL! JESSE IS COOL! with permenent marker so the movers put every single box in our rooms.

I spend all my time reading bad fantasy novels and eating carrots because I am convinced it will make my eyes better and I won't have to wear glasses anymore (it does) and playing legos and imaginary games that must involve lava with my brother.

Over the course of the school year I break four fingers and my wrist and am very proud because it seems like something a boy would do. When I break my wrist I get a bright orange cast and use it to knock down the football at recess. It itches a lot so I scratch under the cast with a pencil with one of those detachable erasers on the end which then falls out under the cast. When I go to the doctor to get the cast removed he asks me if it had itched at all and I (incomprehensibly) say No whereupon he cuts it open to reveal the green eraser.

I went to a wedding and blushed in sympathy with the bride who had to kiss someone IN PUBLIC!!!! I memorize all the planets and signs and their significances and symbols for my dad the astrologer who truly believes we are guided by the celestial heavens. I have since forgotten them all. I tell him that I can see auras and he thinks I am awesome and incredible and then on his deathbed four years later I tell him No, that was all a lie, because it seems important suddenly that he know this truth at the end, but thankfully he doesn't believe me.

I didn't mind the operations, cuz frankly it got me out of school for long periods of time.

My motor coordination is terrible; I'm also the slowest kid in the school. For a couple of summers, my parents have been sending me to a remedial motor coordination program at Michigan State, where most of the other kids are severely retarded or otherwise impaired. We throw and catch an ancient Nerf ball all day. I tell my parents that it looks "like a desiccated lime," and they laugh. Not many hopelessly uncoordinated ten-year-olds use words like "desiccated." Nothing will help until I get an Atari in a year or two, and play Space Invaders until my hands can do more or less what my eyes want them to.

I have very few friends at Wardcliff Elementary School, despite having gotten myself elected student council president--I made ridiculous but impressive posters and delivered a high-rhetoric campaign speech that I wrote myself. I get along much better with the teachers; Mrs. Goldstein asks me if I can come in one day after school and explain this "Dungeons and Dragons" thing that all the boys are so excited about. I do have one friend with whom I play D&D a lot, but that's really about it, and neither of us have money to buy expander kits or enough imagination to invent our own, so we just keep working on new variations on the single adventure that comes with the basic game over and over.

I am very lonely. I'm also very geeky, and regularly get shoved around. I realize that I am very different from most of the other kids, but will feel more and more horribly disaffected and unable to communicate with them until, when I am 13, MTS (the Northwestern University branch of SMPY) swoops in and saves my life.

I've been playing piano for a couple of years, and am not at all good at it. I've just started playing cello (the Okemos school system has an excellent orchestra program), and am not very good at that either. All I listen to are my parents' classical records, though I did like "Walk This Way" and "We Will Rock You."

I have discovered comic books last year; there's a store in East Lansing that specializes in them, and every Friday night my mom drives me there so I can buy a few. I read them over and over and over. My favorites are "Green Lantern" (which fits neatly with my favorite fantasy construct: creating ephemeral forms through sheer force of will) and "The Flash," although I have a special fondness for "Adventure Comics," too. I'm not much of a Marvel guy until Andy Wolf across the street introduces me to Frank Miller's _Daredevil_, which he won't do until late in the year, I think.

I've been going to an after-school day care thing for a few years run by a neighborhood woman who loves to have kids around, has a playground in her living room, has four adopted children (one of whom is seriously hyperactive and can't read yet at the age of 9--she's got me coaching him a little), and even lets her day care kids play with X-Acto knives under her supervision (though not me, thanks to the aforementioned coordination problems). Eventually, she will move to Mexico for a couple of years, and I will be sent to the home of her assistant, whose idea of day care is leaving the TV on and occasionally reciting Steve Martin routines to us or telling us how quickly she can score some pot if somebody gives her ten dollars.

My grandparents are all still alive and I adore them all, though my wonderful paternal grandmother has been in terrible pain with shingles and appears to have lost her will to live. (She will recover, live happily to the age of 99, and have her first one-woman painting exhibition at the age of 96.)

I want to be an actor when I grow up.

I strongly dislike school and spend as much time as possible pretending I'm not there. I have a best friend, Izzy, who is a little too busy to spend as much time with me as I'd like, since he plays sports and music and I don't. After school, since I have a few hours to kill before my parents get home, I go to a community center/playground thing, where I make model airplanes, with little attention to the finished product. At the center, I have a crush on two sisters, Allison and Laura. I don't confide this crush to my model-building companion, Duke, who, in mirrored sunglasses and an Army jacket, embodies fourth-grade cool. At home, the only thing I hate more than school is sleep. I spend my nights reading and talking to my cat, and finally pass out with the lights on.

My mom buys me Pac-Man roller skates at Macy's and immediately they get me into trouble. Around the corner from my building one Saturday, I am heading down a long hill when I realize that I haven't learned how to stop. The hill culminates in a 200-foot drop into the Hudson River, straight ahead. On my left is a sharply spiked fence. On my right are speeding cars. I weigh the options and throw myself to the ground, face-forward, arms extended. X-rays later that night reveal that my wrist is broken. My cast gets lots of attention at school, but I'd rather be reading Lloyd Alexander and Asterix and playing on the classroom Apple than talking to curious girls about my arm. It does get me excused from some lengthy writing assignments.

One day in the elevator, helping my mom carry laundry to the basement, I say to her seriously, "I'm a little unhappy about the idea that I have to grow up. I think I'd be happiest if I could stay ten -- no, nine -- forever."

The only thing that calms me down is drawing, which I do excessively, using up box after box of crayons. I draw monsters, fight scenes and cartoons, sometimes copying Garfield. When I draw a mushroom cloud I hide the picture so no one gets angry at me (this is 1988). My dad's attempts to get me into woodworking remain futile - I prefer use his tools to kill bugs with them. My sister and me are not allowed to watch TV or use dad's stereo. She reads lots of books instead while I listen to radio plays. Most of the books I read are novelizations of the films I can't see, especially Aliens and the Star Wars series. Years later I will be deeply disappointed about the actual Star Wars movies because they had looked so much better in my mind. (Aliens will turn out better than imagined though.)

At school I manage to be the pale, bespectacled kid with straight-A marks and the class bully rolled in one. I am in fourth grade and have already collected two reprimands for violence from the principal. My three closest friends are also bullies, and we spend a lot of time hassling people, breaking windows, lighting firecrackers, and setting fire to letterboxes - good fun. We never get caught. The kid we hassle the most will team up with some of my mother's ex-pupils and become my arch-nemesis in high school but I don't know that yet.

I go to Berlin on summer vacation with my family. A toy pistol in my baggage gets us into trouble at the airport. Being on an aeroplane for the first time doesn't impress me half as much as the five metres high stucco ceilings in my uncle's apartment. I get lost in the subway and need half a day to find my way back, reduced to tears. I marvel at the graffiti on the Berlin wall and Moevenpick ice cream served in freshly-baked cones. My mom tries to read the Return of the Jedi novel to me but gets too upset to go on when it comes to Princess Leia chained to Jabba's throne.

at school i spend a lot of time with sarah b, meah, and beth but really i get along with everyone, except k1rstee haar (har har). we play an elaborate game set in an orphanage. our orphanage/dungeon cells are the relatively large window sills outside the boys' toilets (we occasionally stand on them on tip toe and spy on the boys washing their hands at recess). nearly all our games involve not having parents or just casually omit them. however i am rarely one of the orphans - i tend to play adult roles (always villains).
we also put together a lot of plays and acts, often parodies of television commercials or our teachers. we perform them at school and at the annual camp to universal acclaim - this year the camp is at philip island, where we sleep in wagons with canvas doors whose ceilings are coated in condensation every morning.

i have a younger sister at the school who at this time is glued to her black bowler hat due to a hated short haircut - later when she removes the hat nobody will recognise her. sarah b insists on playing with her because she is 'adorable' but i'd rather not have her around because she wrecks the games.

i read a lot of fantasy books and funny stories like 'round the twist' and mad magazine is hilarious and the fold-ins are genius, but my favourite thing is the little sergio aragones drawings done around the margins. i like tv, don't have a nintendo but get entranced every time i try out someone else's, play computer games such as goldenaxe, tetris and commander keen.

i have terrible ball handling skills, but i somehow end up on the football (aussie rules) team, one of 3 or 4 girls compulsorily enlisted. there's somehow more honour in being bad at footy than at netball, girls are supposed to play netball. our team loses every game except one! i like eating the oranges at half time.

i watch video hits every saturday morning. i am obsessed with 'infinity' by guru josh, and the 'it's got to be perfect' video by fairground attraction captivates me, i consider the singer very stylish and beautiful. i occasionally buy smash hits and i have posters of the klf and michael jackson, inxs and danni minogue. i have a very limited range of records that i get for complex reasons to do with how well things are doing on the charts and how they are perceived by other people and now i couldnt tell you how i ended up with the stuff i had. i remember not even liking these songs but making myself listen to them and forcing myself to like them. i did tape things i actually liked off the radio though.

most of all my favourite thing to do is drawing. i also keep a folder of pictures cut out of magazines, mostly interior decoration magazines.
(eek it's terrifying how much i can remember... i could easily go on for another ten paragraphs... i was very happy)

I go to a small private prep school (I got a scholarship here, apparently they think I’m clever or something). It’s a girls’ school, and there are only about 12 of us in my class. I really love it here. Lots of our classes are taught by the Headmaster, and he brings his black Labrador dog (called Rifleman) into the lessons with him. Rifle falls asleep and has funny little doggy dreams where he thinks he’s chasing cats or something, and his paws start twitching and he barks in his sleep. This makes everyone giggle a lot. I’m good at languages, and I'm almost always top of the class. I play netball – I’m the school team captain. I play Goal Attack because I’m a brilliant shooter.

At school, I'm the youngest in my class because I was moved up a year when I was 7. I'm fiercely competitive, and whilst I pretend it doesn't matter what grade I get for tests, it does matter. A lot. I like being top. Mondays are the Latin vocabulary tests, and I always always get them right (we are rewarded with money if do!). Spelling tests are easy. I love writing stories, essays, poems. I write all the time. I win the top prize in a national competition for one of my essays. I decide I want to be a writer when I grow up.

In May (I think) I take part in the annual Speech & Drama Festival at the Town Hall. Lots of the local schools take part, you have to recite monologues, act out duologues and take part in short plays, do public speaking exercises and stuff. My great (friendly) rival is a girl called Sally-Ann who goes to the local Catholic Girls' school and she has a deformed hand which I find fascinating and have to try hard not to stare at. I win a stack of gold medals and fancy certificates for my performances. So does Sally-Ann, but I win more than her so that's okay. I decide I want to be an actress when I grow up.

This is the year I do my Personal Survival Swimming badges, too. I pass the bronze and silver ones easily, but the gold one is much harder. I don't think I swam enough lengths, but the person counting them didn't seem to notice and I didn't say anything. I have to jump off the top diving board wearing pyjamas over my swimming costume, tread water for ages, swim about a million lengths of the pool, take the pyjamas off and make them into floats in the water, dive and collect up rubber covered bricks from the bottom of the pool, and rescue someone who is pretending to drown. My knees feel like jelly on the top diving board, but I make myself jump anyway even though I am really scared.

A new girl joins my class at school. Her name is Fiona, and she has thick ginger hair and very pale skin. She's a bit creepy and doesn't fit in very well with the rest of us, but when she invites me to a sleepover at her house I agree to go. That night at her house she climbs into my bed and tries to kiss me. I slap her really hard, and she cries. She doesn't talk to me any more now. (Six years later, I see her picture in a centrefold of a men's girly magazine, doing something interesting with a cucumber. She still looks creepy).

My brother still continues to be horrible to me. He hides slugs in my bed and dismembers my doll, Annabelle. I don't really play with dolls much, but I do love Annabelle. I've had her since I was three. My Dad buys me an electric sewing machine this year, and I start designing and making doll's clothes. I find I'm good at this, and am enterprising enough to sell them to my friends to make extra pocket money, except they are always wanting me to make clothes for their Sindy dolls which I hate because that's really fiddly. I decide I want to be a fashion designer when I grow up.

My house is a half mile from Long Island Sound and I spend every day at the beach in the summer. I have a crush on a lifeguard named Vern. There’s a large rock outcropping across the street from my house that juts out into the river. My brothers and I jump off the side to the river 20 feet below. We get into our blue plastic paddle boats and slide down the rocks into the water. Big fun.

We go on a canoe trip in Maine for our summer vacation. It’s alright, but I’d rather visit a big city. I’d rather stay in a hotel with a pool and a slide. We go to Fenway Park to a Red Sox/Yankees game. I'm a Yankees fan, I'm sick of New England. I don't pay attention to the game, though. I just spend the whole time wandering around the stadium looking at all the people.

I’m in the fifth grade. My teacher, Sister Joanne, is a groovy, absent-minded nun. She’s from the neighborhood--her nieces are in my sister and brother’s classes. She's probably in her early 20s. She will sometimes lose her train of thought while lecturing and just stare out the window, playing with cord on the blinds. We all love her.

My brothers and I like to make ourselves faint while waiting for the bus by hyperventilating and then squeezing our chests as hard as we can.

I really want to be a hippie. I spend Saturday afternoons tie-dying stuff with my brothers and sisters. I’m working on a macramé belt. I try batik but it’s a lot harder so I give up. My mom encourages this artsy craftsy stuff, but we’re still not allowed to have long hair.

I can't draw and I'm really messy, so I do poorly in art at school. But my oldest brother Jim introduced me to carbon paper and we have fun tracing the characters in Archie comics and making little Tijuana Bible-type drawings.

My best friend Shaun and my little brother Steve have an air power trio, inspired by Grank Funk Railroad. I try to form a Partridge Family-style ensemble with my brothers and sisters. We have one real instrument this time-a little organ. And lots of cardboard box percussion. We fall apart after a few rehearsals in the basement. Nobody wants to be Tracy.

My wall is covered with a gigantic poster of Chicago that came with their Live at Carnegie Hall album. I still like Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears. My oldest sister Trish is 16 and really into James Taylor/Cat Stevens/Carole King etc. I am, too. I’m into everything. I got a cassette player/recorder for my birthday that year and I make my own radio show, recording the songs off the radio and adding my own Cousin Brucie style AM jock filler. Making my own top ten. I join a Columbia House Cassette club type thing, but soon get bored with the format. They all break, anyway. I love Janis Joplin and read her biography Buried Alive over and over again. I fantasize about how we’d be friends if she had lived. And I would have saved her! She’d drive me around in her psychedelic Porsche and show me off to all her friends.

My parents rarely take us to the movies. It’s too much of an undertaking with 7 kids. We all go to Fiddler on the Roof, though. And Willie Wonka at the drive-in. I probably see the Concert for Bangladesh film that year, too. I think it’s the greatest movie ever made.

I’m noticing I’m more interested in guys than girls but it’s not freaking me out yet. Until word gets out that I’d been fooling around (well, as much as you can at ten) with a couple of boys in the neighborhood. I deny everything, of course. And it goes away in a few weeks. But I’m living in fear for the next two years. I also feel really betrayed. It doesn’t make sense to me. Who told? One of them? But they did it, too! This is the biggest source of anxiety in my life.

That, and sports. I hate sports. My dad forces me to go out for Farm League baseball and it’s humiliating. I resent him for it for many years. I’m really bad at everything except swimming. But I hate the swim team, too. I’d rather be reading or watching TV or playing in the woods behind my house. The neighborhood kids have built a fort out of abandoned lumber we’ve found lying around. Pfizer, who owns the land, discovers the fort and sends a team out to dismantle it, but we just build another one in a different part of the woods.

I think McGovern’s really cool, even though my parents are Republican. I go to church every Sunday and I’m starting to hate it. I used to want to be a priest (or a monk--I thought wouldn’t have to learn Latin then and that’d be easier), but now I want to be a rock star. I’m starting to feel different from my brothers and the kids in my neighborhood for more than just being a spaz.
.

i only went to that tiny studio apartment of my dads twice, both times when we had to pick something up. it was very small, bare, kind of musty. i remember one window, with a slatted blind. there was a bed, and a big silver boom box and a few tapes & books. (my dad - ever the child of the 1970s - loved yes, genesis, king crimson, etc. i remember being fascinated by the covers of his yes cassettes, the strange neon green roger dean worlds.) i remeber feeling uncomfortable and maybe our (me and my sister) uncomfortability was feeding back onto him because i remember he seemed vaguely embarassed by it all. it depressed me. i didn't know how anyone could live therw when we lived in a big house. (again, big = a tiny three bedroom double-house.) afterwards he took us to mcdonalds for breakfast. i like mcdonalds, but not really for breakfast. i don't like eggs and cheese so i always have to get the sausage mcmuffin and hashbrown. the muffin is all doughy and sticks to the roof of my mouth and reacts funny with the ketchup. also my dad sits there after sara and i are done eating and drinks his coffee and takes FOR-EV-ER with it. boring!

sara and i get along pretty well. she is 8. she still idolizes me for the most part, and follows me everywhere. i don't mind so much. except the first signs of the typical brother/sister antipathy is starting to show.

(two years later it would explode when i was at my most unhinged - after a series of abuse by a teacher at school which i never told anyone about until i was in my 20s - when i would get into a fight with her and beat her up with an umbrella. it still makes me wince, even though i was 12 and "troubled." two days later i was shipped off to a home/hospital for "troubled" kids. its terrifying. these kids are in there for attempted suicide, arson, burglary. i just thank my lucky stars that i was just under the wire for being stuck with the teenagers, who i'm sure would have eaten me alive. it lasts for two weeks - including the most depressing thanksgiving of my life when i get to leave on a day pass - until my mother breaks down and pulls me out.)

sara and i spend most of our time together spinning records in her bedroom (she has the fisher price turntable, the lucky wench). there are, of course, a lot of "kids" records (pink panther party time, disco mickey, plenty of "story records"), but we also have a k-tel "popular hits" collection (my favorite is billy idol; sara likes hall & oates...this still holds true today) and the go-go's vacation album, from my mother. due to the cover, i think this album is from the 60s. later, i wonder how the fuck my mom got so hip.

my best friend during the summer months is kenneth. kenneth is from texas, or at least that's where he lives with his dad, and he comes back to devon to live with my mom in the summer. they live in the huge apartment complex, behind my house. kenneth is possibly chubbier and more innefectual than i am. our biggest escapade is the time we snuck off to the k-mart a few blocks away and bought a bottle of jolt cola (expressly forbidden by our parents) and drank it behind a big rock. for some reason i am never allowed inside kenneths house.

the apartment complex is weird and scary. it's full of people who were let go from a mental institution which closed down a few years before. they're a little troublesome, but mostly benign. one always walks by our house and asks "how's the kids?" to my parents. it becomes his "name": howzthekids?. a year or so later, when we move an hour away to downingtown, he's the first person we see.

my sisters best friend is a little red haired girl her age who lives in the apartment complex, megan. i am obsessed/awed/in love with her sister, beth, who is a year or two older than me. (she's the person who plays me the george michael album.) she's my first crush, and a year or two later she will be my first kiss. later than that, talking to her on the phone, i am postively awed by the scary/worldly teenager she seems to have become in my absence, talking about metal albums and cutting school.

sometime that fall, after a rather minor infraction on the part of my mother (something like not paying attention to me while putting the groceries away), i decide i've had enough of this nonsense, and i run away. i don't get very far, only to that same k-mart which is still far enough away for me to be forbidden to go to. i stayed in the tv department until it was well after dark, by which time my stepfather finally found me and dragged me home. the police were there. i remember being confused by my mothers contradictory impulses to hug me and yell at me. adults are weird.

after seeing jaws (or maybe just hearing about it), i have a recurring waking nightmare where my bedroom floor turns into water after the lights go out and there are sharks. i scream for my parents, which makes me feel like a baby, but i'm still happier when they assure me there's nothing there.

the other joy in the summer is walking to the 7-11 and buying comics. i love comics. my favorite is g.i. joe, which is much more serious than the tv show. there are ninjas.

my best friend andrew wants to be an oceanographer, so we entertain fanstasies of our future scientific careers. our other passion is legos, which he owns and i do not. i have construx, which are clumsy and hard to build. usually they just end up being fodder for action figure battles, which, as time goes on, will become epic campaigns waged across bedroom floors for days. it is also now that i start creating my own person mythology, characters, worlds, histories. later - once i became too old to play with toys - i would adapt these to comics and stories.

whenever we go to my moms best friends house, we put on "shows" with their kids, usually involving lip synching to tapes and imbecillic dance routines. our best ever was to "parents just dont understand", after which i officially "retire" the troupe to my parents dismay.

At this point I still had very little concept of anxiety: school was easy, kids and teachers liked me well enough, and there was nothing much I wanted to do that anyone had any objections to. Even Gene,, the kid who'd bullied me since third grade, had given up. All this changed drastically when I turned eleven, but still. I played lots of Nintendo with Brian and we talked about basketball, even though I didn't know much about it. My other friends collected baseball cards: I didn't like baseball at all, but I liked business, so I collected all of the team manager cards that they didn't want.

I played soccer for the town's club team, at left mid-field. The left wing was always Tony N., who I liked a lot. His teenaged sister was a lifeguard at the YMCA pool and was totally hot.

We lived in Pueblo, Colorado, in a house I really loved. The back faced out on a big stretch of prairie that's now a golf course: all the kids in the neighborhood would go out there and play war. Slightly less fun than this was playing tackle football with my older brother's friends -- though I do remember liking the older-kid approval I would get for making good plays, or taking vicious tackles and not getting upset about it. There were lots of insects and animals in the prairie: Mike found a scorpion one day, cut off its tail and pincers, and held it in his hand; neighbor Dave would put lizards, spiders, ants, and grasshoppers in an aquarium and watch them eat each other. Dave was a skater who liked the Cramps and the Housemartins; I didn't figure out who they were until later, but they seemed interesting. I liked Paula Abdul. My brother and I watched Yo! MTV Raps and agreed that it was great, but if I got into a hair-metal single he would make fun of me. A year later I started hanging out with Tim, whose old sister would help us get into college rock.

I liked reading Roald Dahl and Treasure Island and the Dr. Doolittle books. I liked writing, though mostly I would come up with the idea for what I wanted to write, make elaborate covers and title pages, and then give up after a few paragraphs. (I still have this problem.) I thought the Golden Girls were terrifically funny, though nowhere near as funny as the Bill Cosby videos my dad would rent. I was horrified when the kid up the street said his family watching the stupid-looking ABC sitcom that was on opposite the Cosby Show, and decided the only explanation for this was that his parents were racists.

Fifth grade, sorry. I was 9 in fourth grade.

behavioral problems or somesuch

Things were tough at home. I was probably born a little bit unhinged, but I grew up around a half-brother who was autistic and prone to outbursts of his own, and that exacerbated my aberrant behavior. Sometimes he lived at home (I shared a bedroom with him, which wasn't easy), the rest of the time he was in group homes and psychiatric hospitals. I believe this was the year he was at the Payne Whitney psychiatric clinic on the Upper East Side -- on a horrible ward that looked to my 10-year-old mind like I imagined a prison would look. The doctors were dead-set on sending him to the Behavior Research Institute in Rhode Island -- a controversial place that specialized in behavior-modification experiments like electroshock and punishments/deprivations of various sorts. My mother, who'd always struggled very hard to get Mark the care he needed (the state was picking up the tab; we couldn't afford to at the time), fought tooth and nail to keep this from happening. She won; that was a major relief. She had problems too -- this Mark stuff (and the Jody stuff) really drained her and she was up to her eyeballs in antidepressants and sedatives. And my dad wasn't handling any of it well at all. He had a vicious temper; he was also somewhat obsessive-compulsive, and anything/anyone that dared to throw him from his normal routine would send him over the edge. Not a happy time for me.

Anthony, did you have some sort've arrangement where you could only listen to bands whose names where catchy acronymns or something? And, if that's the case, how do you reconcile -- wait for it -- Good Charlotte (or do you insist on referring to them as, simply, GC?)

Hmm, music. Imagine seven girls in the back of one of those multi-seater vans, sitting on a piece of family-room carpet offcut. They are Camp Fire girls having a singing contest on the way to some field trip. They sing songs they've memorised off Donny and Marie, off Grease, and the Carpenters. I win about a third of the singing contests. Mrs DuFour, the mother of two of the girls, is really nice to all of us and we think Girl Scouts suck, purely because Amber and her lame mom are both so stuck-up, and her mom's in charge of it. My sister is a Brownie. Eurgh.

In the summer, my dad plays softball for a team thrown together by his friend who has a bar. My dad is horseshoe-bald and as long as I can remember, always has been. My sister and I sit in the back of the car squabbling over the radio station and nagging for Dairy Queen on hot afternoons as he drives us to the playing fields by Lake Nokomis, swearing he'll never go to DQ because when he worked at Food Producers, they made the soft-serve formula there. 'Gross!' comes the chorus from the back seat, then a guilty intake of breath: we're not allowed to say 'gross' because that's our neighbour's last name. And if we say 'fart', my grandfather bellows, 'now what kind of talk is that?' Our dad's softball game takes what seems like FOREVER punctuated by runs to the snack bar for Bomb Pops and Sno-balls, forays to the playground with the sick-making merry-go-round and swings, but finally we go back to Casey's bar, because they sponsor the team and it's one of those South Minneapolis dives that does amazing burgers, French fries, onion rings and little else apart from BOOZE. My sister is the little kid at every family gathering who goes minesweeping unattended beers undetected by adults who want to know why she's doing cartwheels everywhere by the end of the night, but here we stick to Coke.

We are always dog-tired and half-asleep on the ride home, radio tuned to a station playing Dust In The Wind, me listening way too hard to the lyrics for comfort. I'm going through a morbid phase which started last year, when my paternal grandfather died. We were supposed to be going to my dad's bowling night but my grandmother called and said he'd collapsed in their room. We arrived in Burnsville and my sister and I were sent to the TV room where a weird Do You Believe In The Paranormal? What About Life After Death? commercial for a series of mail-order books was playing out. I spent a lot of time writing ghost stories.

In the summer before we moved I spent half the time in my best friend's room, listening to Saturday Night Fever and disco. We have a friend who SWEARS her Andy Gibb poster has moving eyes. We go to the Roller Gardens on school holidays, rent skates, and do circuits while they play everything from Donna Summer to Glenn Campbell. The roller Garden is a vaulted building that looks to me like one of those old radios with the burlap-covered speakers, with a golden brontosaurus on top. I want my own skates.

I read a lot, mostly Gordon Korman and Enid Blyton. I sneak an Andrew Greeley novel from my mom's bedside table and read it a bit at a time while she is out, I think it is kind of exciting but also stupid. When I'm home alone I listen to my dad's records ("Kodachrome" by Paul Simon is my favourite). I watch Get Smart every day before supper. My best friend Jamie and I spend most of our free time at each other's houses playing Uno, writing stories and drawing, and sewing clothes for our Barbies. We always have sleepovers on the weekends. Sometimes my parents take me into town for shopping but I mostly wear my older cousins' hand me downs, and the kids in my class compliment me on my ripped-up tight acid wash jeans.

Our grade 5 teacher makes us sign our names on a list to go to the washroom, and once threw a book against the wall and yelled at Tera when she didn't do her math homework. I really don't like him. He also makes everyone stand up every morning when class starts while he recites the Lord's Prayer, but one day I decide I don't want to, and go and stand outside the classroom with the two Jehovah's Witness kids. He tells me I need a note from my parents excusing me, so I go home and tell my parents what happened. My dad says he won't write a note and I don't have to do anything I don't want to, and the next day I gleefully repeat this to the teacher who can't do a thing.

We do Canada Fitness Awards at school and I am last to finish my eight laps (I'd skipped a grade and am the youngest in the class). We also do swimming lessons, but I am too afraid to put my face underwater, and am the only one to not earn a badge. I get picked to go to the Young Artist's Conference, where I do a silkscreened shirt with a whale's tailfin going into some waves, and some hand and footprints on the back. I am in Guides, and am seconder in the Rose patrol. I wanted to be the patrol leader, but there were too many people so I "bowed out gracefully", and am still kind of annoyed that I didn't get widely applauded for this act of selflessness. We are all working on our fitness badge so every week we do aerobics to "Nasty" by Janet Jackson. I like wearing my blue uniform dress and my badge sash, but Guides is getting boring.

Once in a while someone will ask me "what's wrong?" because I'm looking mopey, even though I don't really feel sad or anything, I just think a lot. I am an A student (except in PE) and tell people I want to be a scientist when I grow up, which is not true but is what the adults seem to like hearing. My ambition only extends as far as high school, where I will be just like my cousins and wear the coolest clothes and have lots of friends. When I grow up I just know I'm gonna move to Vancouver.

I am regularly beaten up and stuffed under the school bus seat by my neighbor and his friend, who I'm starting to realize don't want to be my friends. A tall geeky kid wants to be my friend, but I hate him. I like a girl, but I'm scared to tell my parents because I just know they'll make fun of me, like they have before. But that's okay; she doesn't want to talk to me anyway.

In fifth grade I join the school chorus. No one can really sing that well, including me. I pass the audition to sing a duet with another guy, but it's not because I sing in tune, it's because I can sing loudly. During the performance I make a fool of myself dancing along to the song without realizing it.

I still don't have any friends except for the geeky kid, whom I still hate. I am beaten up by girls on several occasions.

My mum gave birth to my little brother Lindsay. i got really mad at my family cos when mum went into labour (at about 3am) i wanted to go to hospital with her but nobody woke me up to tell me and i was the last to know he'd been born. i knitted him lots of booties and jerseys and i learned how to change his nappies and prepare his bottle and stuff. he's a placid kid, and him being born is one of my fondest memories.

i don't remember what i was listening to then, probably i was still into hair metal, probably i read judy blume. i have skipped a class, i'm in standard 4 now. its exactly the same as standard two: dreadfully boring, and my classmates still hate me. so do the teachers. i have one friend, her name is amy mc, she's two years younger than me and i hang out with her and her little sisters at their farm a lot, playing on their trampoline and watching tv.

i go to brownies, but i don't remember much about it, except that the jersey i knitted for my little brother got me the knitting badge. i learn the piano, drama, singing, and i do competitions in oamaru for them, which i hate cos nerves make me shakey. i also went to dunedin for the competitions there and i met lots of cool nerdy girls who LIKED me. i got scholarships for drama and singing, but not piano, the standards there were way higher.

that was really hard to remember, and it wasn't even that long ago.

I don't go to Brownies/Guides (god knows) since the hut burnt down. I didn't like Brownies anyway. It was boring. I live in a small village. My mum took me to the city once. I wrote a story about it ,and black holes. And hobbits.

My friends and high are kings of an elementary school in rural/suburban Florida. At least we think we are because we all wear surfing t-shirts. Plenty of kids could beat me up, but I'm smart, clever, popular, and I even have some identical twin bodyguards at the playground plus I'm friends with this tall black kid who's like 6 feet high in the fifth grade. The tough kids like me for some reason.

School is so easy, I make straight A's all the time, maybe a B if I don't try too much. I'm even in the gifted class on Fridays. I like it because we play on Apple computers and write stories and stuff. I just hate doing makeup work to catch up with the lost days.

I'm in love with this girl with brown hair I see on Fridays. She isn't in my school but she comes over for the this special class because her school doesn't have it so they have to come over here. All I do is think about how pretty she is. She's rad too. She wears the best Swatch watches and Guess! overalls with one strap down and one of her Converse Allstars is turquoise and the other one is pink. I love her clothes and her little freckles. Sometimes, when I'm at home I play this game where I run and jump around in the den imagining that I'm on a motorcyle with her on the back and we're wearing matching blue and grey denim motorcycle suits. I even think about her naked too! But I'm not even her boyfriend.

LOAD "*",8,1

I have a Commodore 64 that my mother bought for me so I can do homework on my computer. OK! She doesn't know anything about computers! I don't even have a printer hooked up to it. Sure, I'll do my homework on it -- Ghostbusters, Ultima II, Bop-N-Wrestle, Jumpman Junior, and Beach Head! This kid in high school said he would give me some new floppy disks so I can expand my games. My little brother and I spend hours playing Commodore and G.I. Joe and Transformers.

I like the Bangles, Van Halen, Madonna, Prince, and Crowded House, "Don't Dream It's Over." My favorite TV show is Miami Vice. My little brother and I found a Playboy in an old trailer full of junk when we were riding our bikes down this dirt road.

I'm small but I am a good athlete. I'm the best player on my Little League team. I even made All-Stars. But I didn't practice hard at All-Star practice and the coach kept me on the bench. I also ruined a practice game and everybody was pissed at me. The bases were loaded and I was on third. We were losing by one and there were two outs. I thought the kid at bat walked so I walked home and they got me in a squeeze play. I got tagged out and the game ended. They won. The was the worst afternoon of my life.

This summer I took a summer computer class that has some middle school kids in it. They always argue about Powell and Peralta, Vision, and Santa Cruz. I'm not a good skater but I am goofy-footed. There are some pretty girls in middle school.

I hate the sixth grade. My best friend all but abandoned me. I wish I was back in elementary school. These eighth graders are scary. I though I would like it. The girl I love is in the same school now. She is very popular and I am not in her league. I'm heartbroken. I'm not a dork, but I'm not the coolest either.

1981 I was ten. My best friend's name is Jane. We hang out at her house, dress up in her mum's old ballgowns and dance around the loungeroom to My Way by Duran Duran, and sing silly songs into a tape recorder. We try smoking a cinnamon stick one day just to see what would happen (nothing).

I have started what became a lifelong preference for spending a lot of time alone in my room - my mother tells me I didn't come out of my bedroom again til I turned 18! I tell little stories into my tape player, and draw comic strips without speech balloons - I recite the stories to myself aloud instead.

In 5th grade at school we're studying thr development of man. We make baboon masks out of papier-mache and spend a day roleplaying being in a baboon colony to learn about social groups. I dont recall much else about school that year for some reason.

The first "strange" music I hear is The Damned Dont Cry by Visage. It takes a few more years but this is the doorway to my getting into alternative music.

I love rollerskating, and spend most of my time doing that when I'm not in my room reading and drawing. Sometimes I think about becoming a figure skater or a gymnast, though by the age of 14 I've started to suffer from unspecified liver problems and all my physical activity more or less stops, never to be restored really.

I think I liked living in a little fantasy world in my head. I still go back there now and then when things get hard.

It was a pretty good time.

I go to a Jewish day school where I learn Hebrew and a lot of Zionist ideology, which it will later take me a few years to unravel and disown, leading to much anguish and guilt, which still continues. I’m not too happy at this school. When I first arrive, in the third grade, everyone already knows each other. Some people make friendly overtures but I don’t know how to respond to them; I become kind of an outcast and quite unpopular. Largely this is because I’m very socially unresponsive and read all the time. Sixteen or so years later I’m a completely different person, at least in a social context (I still read a lot). It’s amazing how much I’ve changed then, in terms of relating to other people. These days I love meeting strangers and am quite friendly and outgoing; back then I was silent, unresposnive and always seemed glum to others. My parents were actually worried for a while that I was autistic.

My favourite book is The Neverending Story. I also like a bunch of other fantasy and imaginative stuff. I read a lot of kid-oriented magazines, like 3-2-1 Contact, Owl, and my favourite, Odyssey, a kid’s astronomy magazine. I’m obsessed with outer space and hope to become the first kid in space. My walls are covered in maps of the solar system. I also have a passing infatuation with unusual rocks. I read lots of comic books.

Summers I spend at a camp in Muskoka, where, if possible, I’m even more unpopular than at school. The other kids torment me with various cruel pranks and stunts, but my philosophy is to be stoic and try to just ignore them, even if it is driving me crazy and my own reaction is only reinforcing my isolation. I’m pretty miserable. I seem to get stung by bees a lot.

I love movies. My favourites at the time are probably Ghostbusters, anything to do with Indiana Jones, and that Explorers brand of mid-‘80s boys’ adventure movies. When I see one I particularly like I’m pumped up for hours afterwards.

I have a weird kind of insomnia. It’s easy enough for me to fall asleep, but I wake up almost every night at around 2AM and can’t sleep for hours. Sometimes I hear footsteps and strange voices outside my bedroom door. I believe in ghosts and all sorts of supernatural phenomena. Often I try and test myself for latent psychic abilities, but the results are never satisfying.

My mother worked double shifts at the hospital as a nurse's aid and my father would alternate between unemployment and stints as a DJ or music writer. For a short time all of our money went to publishing a local music magazine he edited.

Said father has been molesting me since I was three. Several years into it, with a brother who is now six, the abuse has gotten very extreme and I will often space out at school while I think of the sex acts my father has forced me to perform the night before. I don't have enough of a sense of self to seperate myself from what I logically know are awful things. When sexual abuse and explotiaion is discussed in school with those inane puppets I feel awful and ashamed. After my best friend Christy spends the night and my father attempts to molest her word gets around to the other kids at school that no one should go to my house. I never have anymore visitors but being naive children none of this ever gets reported to adults.

I'm beginning to come into my own musically. My parents are young hippies and I've grown up around the Beatles, Stones, Led Zep, Pink Floyd and Jimi since before I could remember. At this point in my life The Runaways and Joan Jett are the gospel and I'm determined to grow up to be a wild young soul who kicks ass and can't be tamed! I start a street gang of other prepubscent girls named The Blackhearts. Mainly we beat up boys, smoke roaches and do uppers stolen from our parents.

I've been in gifted classes since Kindergarten even though our school district doesn't start Gifted and Talented education till Fifth Grade. In third grade I write my first computer program, making a bitmap graphic of a cradle and writing the code to play Braham's Lullaby along with it. I was playing this on piano at the same time. Such a far cry from the Runaways. . .

I read whatever I can get my hands on (although nothing sticks out in my head at the time) and watched the nacesnt MTV inncessantly. I aspired to be a guitar-playing, ass-kicking bad-ass bitch.

how far we fall from our young desires. . .

*hugs That Girl*

1994. I'm in 5th grade. I'm living in Wheaton, Illinois. I'm very sick and I spend a lot of time going to Children's Memorial Hospital to see various doctors, who are all massively unhelpful, and even begin to suggest that the problem is my mother or myself. I have a fever and a rash and I'm incredibly tired and in pain all the time. Eventually I am diagnosed with a parvo virus, junior rheumatoid arthritis, then tuberculosis. I miss 56 days of school this year, sparking massive meetings between my parents and the school administration, who accuse them of indulging my "school phobia". I have no friends. My teacher hates me. But she looks like the Bride of Frankenstein and seems to have major psychological issues of her own. During one of the meetings, she expresses concern that my absences are causing me to fall behind. At further pressing, she has to admit that I'm getting all As and have absolutely no trouble understanding material without her instruction. She punishes me that quarter by flunking me on a project that she makes it impossible for me to do (by demanding that it must be written at school, and only at school, in full). There are gifted classes once a week. They are ridiculously below me, and I have no problem letting my teachers know this. I become a brat. My grandfather is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. I spend the summer in California caring for him with my mom. I am very good at pretending not to be horrified and depressed by all of this. Anyway, California is better, because my dad isn't there. He's sporadically physically abusive. And always mentally so. I'm not terrified of him. But I don't like being around him. He's cheating on my mom, but I don't know this. I read several books a day. My current favorite is The Mists of Avalon. I love fantasy stories, and spend a great deal of time daydreaming about being able to travel into my favorite books. In my darkest moments, I actually begin to believe that I have been chosen for some great otherworldly destiny. I'm getting into music. I listen to Björk and Tori Amos and Portishead and Sonic Youth endlessly. This makes me weird to my classmates. But of course, that's the least of the reasons why I am weird to them. They think I use too many big words. They hate me because I don't believe in God. Because I am liberal. Because I am sick. Because I don't dress like them. Because their parents tell them that I worship the devil. They would have made my life hell if I made any attempt to speak to them. But I am absent a lot, and on the days when I'm not, I sit in the corner and read a book whenever there is free time. I hear them laughing at me and saying horrible things. I keep getting in trouble for reading our assigned books in one sitting. The idea of reading one chapter at a time is ridiculous to me. I am incredibly unhappy. And this is the first year in which I secretly try to commit suicide.

it's big, as you can see: it was part of a charity dedicated to environmental education and the staff — including mum and dad — were live in: he ran the teaching side, she (unpaid) ran the domestic side (= cleaning, cooking, finances): every week in term time a new bunch of 30-60 students (aged 13-mature, it varied) would arrive for course in geology, freshwater biology, ecology, etc etc... sometimes someone you made friends with would come back the following year

it's right out in the country: not quite laurie lee somnolent, but not so very far from it in 1970: looking back on it, talking abt it with my mom, we wonder if it didn't work as its own better sixties, a becalmed quarantined idyll of idealistic community (sdhe has a litany of young folks who worked there and loved it, who went on to marriages that failed, jobs that were humdrum... )

the entire time feels totally wrapped in a gold glow for me: as tots, becky and i were the little emperor-buddhas of the place, able to go anywehere and be adored and fussed over — the cooking/cleaning staff were bulked out, year on year, by what were always known as the "norwegian girls", three or four tall blonde aryan-gorgeous women in their late teens or early twenties, over from norway to learn english, who'd nanny and babysit becky and me when necessary, as mothered by a four foot tall bossy, crabby, , funny, affectionate woman called maureen, as implacable as the czar of all the russias...

anyway, by age ten, this blessed era was palpably closing: i was in my second year at a little semi-local feed-school for the Great English Public School System — i would have been in my last year at the local primary school, and had been desolate at the time that i had left behind all my friends from nearby (not that nearby — no children that i knew well lived closer than three miles away over fields and busy roads)... being utterly pragmatic on the surface i adapt and fit in, but underneath this sparks a longish teenage alienation from, firstly, my sister (who is younger and still at the primary school) (and will stay in the state system and therefore not leave the school early), but secondly, on the whole, from the people i am at school with => i already associate being well-off with being cut-off and inwardly nurture the fact that most of the families of the boys i know are a lot better off than my mum and dad

but intellectually i enjoy the school, definitely: i have a june birthday, which means it makes sense to skip a year and be youngest in the class, because i'm good at maths (very well taught at my village school); we walk around self-important or self-conscious in our little grey uniforms (splashes of colour = black-and-yellow tie, yellow sock-tops), and mum is already helping me cultivate subtle borderline-rulebreaking differences => i have the longest hair in the school (ie not terribly, but it licks my collar) and the geography teacher (who has a waspish humour and who i like: a few years later he will be kicked out for groping one of the prettier boys) calls me "el beatle"; also after a few weeks of torment trying to wear "proper" uniform shoes (black lace-ups), i get medical dispensation for wide feet and wear sandals (to this day i don't really like shoes and wd go barefoot all the time if it were possible in london)

my best friend at this place is also called mark: years later he will sell me my first (and to date only) electric guitar => his parents are quaker and he is mordantly disrespectul of everything, which i like lots. like me, he is a dayboy — dayboys are in a minority at the school, many of whom are nato children, sent from british forces overseas... if i am gifted in maths and writing, i am also incurably lazy, and create endless exasperation in teachers who want more of me but don't get it: later a latin teacher will say "he sees light where others don't", which sounds great but i thin pretty much means to imply "but he misses really obvious stuff everyone else sees" => this pattern is already very set in 10-yr-old me

i am quite uninvolved in television or pop. i eat sweets if someone gives me some or buys me some: i never buy them for myself, or think to do so. what i do is read, all the time, and reread: when i invite friends round to play (a big operation, they have to be fetched or delivered by car), they get to do stuff with my lego or my toy soldiers or my marble run or whatever, while i lie on my bed and read. i go and see the aristocats and come back and complain that they projected it all blurry: after swift eye-tests, i start to wear glasses (i am tremendously pleased by this development)

at some point here my father starts reading lord of the rings to me: his plan is to read it all — he's been waiting all his life for this, it's one of the main reasons he had a son!! — but after a few chapters i get impatient and ask mum if she'll ask dad if i can read itg myself... dad says yes, his heart kind of broken (i apologised as best i could to him for this unintended act of infant cruelty last year: he was as stoically gracious about it as he always is, about everything)

the shadow over this whole time is this: my father's illness and death... which of course seems an odd thing to say when he is still living today, 33 years later, but sometime round now, becky and i learn that he is in the early stages of parkinson's disease (his beautiful cursive handwriting — learnt from reading tolkien as a teenager!! — is become jagged and shaky, and the following year he will start to teach himself to write with the other hand). l-dopa has only just been synthesised: it is not yet established as a treatment => it is considered unlikely that he live more than seven or eight years. mum and dad are dealing with this fact: i do not recall a single moment of grief or anger or hurt or confusion or whatever spilling over from them into our lives... or ever talking about it becky then

what i seem to have done is simply locked away my own fear and anger, at the looming awful loss, and decided — from round about now — that i will stop wanting things: things i want are taken away, so i will simply deal with what happens, make the most of it... my sense of dreamy estrangement and sleepwalking disconnection from my immediate surroundings, of exile, settles in for the duration

for a surprisingly long time this works pretty well: the emotional crisis doesn't come, in fact, until i myself reach more or less the age my dad was when he was first diagnosed

Paul isn't really my best friend though. I spend all my time with family friend/classmate/neighborhood hottie-tomboy Laurie S., who has beautiful long brown hair and startling blue eyes and two younger sisters who are the exact same age as my two younger brothers. Our parents get drunk together quite a lot and Laurie's family lives right across from the neighborhood pool, where I can hold my breath longer than anyone else. I practice this.

I have huge glasses and a fairly big nose and ears that earn me the sobriquet "Dumbo". I wear my school uniform (white shirt, salt-and-pepper corduroys) or I wear my soccer uniform (orange shirt with insignia, black shorts, we are the Hickory Twigs) or I wear my altar boy uniform (long white tunic) or I'm sitting in uncomfortable slax and very high shoes listening to adults sing or talk.

Mostly, though, I'm alone, reading. Issues of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Magazine borrowed from Laurie's father, and every young-adolescent book in our school library or the cool libraries downtown. I draw an editorial cartoon showing Ford as the tortoise and Carter as the hare. My parents like it when I do stuff like that, so I read them all my stories and plays and poems and stuff.

Oh and the radio roolz. I always have KISN-AM on when my brothers and I play soccer in the yard or when Scott M. and I play Army Men at his house. I like everything except some things. I learn from Scott's sister how to make an obsessive list of every song I hear on the radio and how many times I hear it, and I invent a practice of re-evaluating my favorite 100 songs every single week. Casey Kasem seems like the luckiest guy in the world because he gets to hear all these songs before I do. The Four Seasons' "December 1963 (Oh What a Night)" holds the top spot for a long time, but is usually challenged by "When Will I See You Again" and "Love Rollercoaster."

So I have a pretty great life. So what if I don't notice the rumblings: my parents' increased arguing, leading to my father setting up a TV in the garage and spending most of his time there; his insistence that I get to be a better baseball player, even if he had to chuck the ball at my head in order to get me to catch it; the way kids laugh at me for reading stuff fast and out loud and correct; my subconscious understanding that I am only really happy when alone....

Every song on the radio seems to be about death. "Billy Don't Be A Hero." "Seasons In The Sun." Every commercial on TV also invokes death: Keep your distance. Clunk click every trip. The orange/pedestrian being squashed. My dad simultaneously educates me and beats me up, at one point in August putting an electrical flex up my left nostril and threatening to plug it in at the other end. At school I am patronised, pestered and regularly threatened to be run over by other pupils' bikes. Pull myself into as small a shape as possible and try my best to hide from the world. It's 29 years later, and I'm curled up into a ball again.

I feel so sick that for the first time ever I decide to skip choir practice. This is pretty shocking, as a) I'm not a natural rulebreaker (although like evidently breeds like) and b) St. Paul's Cathedral Choir is a fascist state that demands nothing less than total obedience. I wonder why I'm even part of it - I don't remember wanting to join, just finding myself somehow inveigled into it because, oh, doesn't he have such a lovely singing voice? In two years time I will come down with pneumonia for a month and my singing voice will be gone, gone, gone. Likewise my piano and violin skills will spontaneously deteriorate and I will realise that I should never have anything to do with music.

I console myself by hiding in my room (which is easy because no-one is home) and listening to my C&C Music Factory album - my sole album, which I was motivated to buy after I sealed my friendship with my best friend Tyson through the mutual realisation that we knew every word to "Things That Make You Go Hmmm", leading to the subsequent realisation that we like making up new words to familiar melodies, something I still do now. But right now I'm all about the rhythm, and I vaguely consider dancing in my quite small room except that I still feel sick with guilt. Yes, I have a propensity for dancing alone even at this early juncture.

My grandmother comes over - or maybe she was staying with us, I'm not sure - and I go and talk to her for amusement. She was fiercely intelligent and independent only a few years before but now she's mellowed into one of those archetypal sit on my knee and let me sing "Run Rabbit Run" figures who's a dab hand with apple crumble. She asks me how I'm going at school, so i show her my nuclear energy project while carefully concealing the back page which would reveal my score crossed out and replaced with scathing denunciations. I don't think she's concentrating though - she recently had a stroke after mixing champagne and valium. This was in fact in response to me being part of St. Paul's Cathedral choir - a formidable Anglican institution that quite rightly struck fear into the heart beating within nanna's staunch Catholic breast.

My sister Katie, two years old, possibly arrives home at this point, but I don't think we talk at all - she goes to use the phone and eat some peanut butter, a substance which horrifies me. We have an amicable relationship comprised of annoyance and indifference. I vaguely disappoint her in ways that neither she or I can articulate; she is a puzzle I can't be bothered solving. This can be contrasted with my fascination for my older sister Sarah (17), who reads large novels, dates guys, fights with my parents, and is constructing a long story about some random people who date eachother, accompanied by portraits of the characters, conveyed to me in serialised bursts, and seemingly inspired by Lilly Was Here and the Tequila Sunrise soundtrack. I base all of my cultural likes and dislikes around Sarah, and its her lingering influence that shrouds my later discoveries of The Cure, Prince, Bjork, Madonna. Fairly soon after this she will date a film director, following which she will become emotionally unstable and somewhat self-centered for a long time.

I hide my project behind the couch in the living room (revealing a sub-conscious desire for my shame to be discovered) and retire again to my room, perhaps to read The Fellowship of the Ring or something by Victor Kelleher, who might be my favourite author at this stage. My mother might be downstairs by about five thirty, perhaps having bought some milk and steak and bread. I don't go down, for my guilt hangs over me to heavily to face other authority figures with a composed face, and there's the fact that I'm not supposed to be home from choir practice yet. I consider ringing Tyson, who has invited me to his grandfather's farm for the weekend, but worry that he wish to distance himself from the scandal for a while.

I sneak downstairs just to grab some biscuits to make the foundation of a horde, but run into my mother, who asks why I'm at home. Of course I'm very very sick. I don't have biscuits, but some cough medicine, after which I'm sent into unintended convalescence. I sit on my bed and inwardly moan about the awfulness of life. Of course it will be much easier in a couple of years - everything will be so much simpler when I control my own destiny.

I am hopelessly uncoordinated, I wear glasses, I'm brainy and I don't quite realize that most of the kids around me (and some of the adults, for that matter) deeply resent this. So I'm bullied a lot. I get beat up every couple of days. When I do try to defend myself, it seems I'm the one who gets into trouble, not the attacker. This makes me not want to defend myself at all.

Since over 50% of the day is scheduled for athletic activity, which suck at and view as funtime for my oppressors, or some other activity I'm completely inept (like fishing), I spend most of my time doing nothing, sitting around, pacing back and forth in the godawful heat and humidity. This irks the fuck out of the counselors, but I am a manageable disciplinary problem. For the monthly status reports, they write to my parents saying that I'm unsually bright but deeply anti-social, which is true.

Usually I'd read but bringing in books is problematic because the larger kids would try to steal or destroy them. I have very odd reading habits. I think this is the year I read, cover to cover, a first-aid book with lots of illustrations featuring sad-looking kids with serious injuries. I also love reference books written for kids: almanacs, rainy day fun time books, "kid's catalogs" modeled after the Whole Earth Catalog (which I myself would buy next year).

I more-or-less don't have to play sports but I'm expected to swim. The idea is that as your swimming level improves, you get to swim in better and better pools. For years I get stuck in the pool that's just one level up from the toddler pool. I like arts and crafts (except that ones that involve good hand-eye coorindation, like those involve hammering nails into wood). There are theatrical events which usually involve getting dressed up in crepe-paper costumes and singing lame songs your counselor wrote to the hits of the day. Stuff modeled after the funny drill routine in Stripes is de rigeur either this year or next, I can't remember. I think this stuff is deeply humiliating so I always try getting out of it.

I often kick myself for not being a contrarian little shit there. I should've set small fires. I should've run around naked. I should've peed in the swimming pool more. I should've screamed and screamed and screamed till I passed out. Just anything to make those assholes regret me being there. No, instead I was trying to be teachers' pet for a bunch of adults who couldn't care less. Smart, but not smart enough.

I could go on -- this covers only two months.

Usually when I asked my mom why I had to go summer camp, she'd say, oh, I just want you to make friends and do something other than sit around home all day. Much later in a spasm of divorce-related guilt she admitted to me that was completely bogus. My older brother was always something of disciplinary problem ot the point of being an outright danger to others on occasion; my oldest brother wasn't quite that bad until he reached puberty, when his behavior started getting increasingly self-destructive. She found she couldn't handle dealing with them all day during the summer (school days were bad enough), so she sent them to camp, at least leaving her (most of the time) the opportunity to do things during the day. She knew how much I hated camp, but I had to go because she didn't want to make it seem like she was playing favorites.

I like Top of the Pops but I don't listen to music much - I'm not really interested unless I can dance to it or it has funny words. My sister (older by six years) really like this band called The Smiths but I think they're boring and the singer looks stupid.

My love of Star Wars toys has been rapidly declining in favour of Transformers but Lego still rules - I use it to build replica Transformers. At Christmas I get my first computer: a ZX Spectrum+. The one with the plastic keys. Within days I learn how to print my name all the way down the screen in different colours. I want to be a computer programmer when I'm older.

I spend a lot of time with my family in general. In the summer we go down the shore for frequent day trips (coming home with , which builds up to staying there for two weeks at the end of the summer. I stay in the water until my lips turn blue. I stay in the sun until I turn brown. Back at the apartment we all eat Ritz crackers with peanut butter and jelly on them to hold us over until dinner. Then we generally go to the boardwalk, go on rides, play miniature golf, visit bookstores, eat more. (Sometimes we go to the Poconos for a week, and lots of very friendly people from a previous church of my father's ask us to have dinner at their big houses with swimming pools.)

This is the year that my brother breaks my leg in a mishap while he and I are kicking a ball around in the back yard. It happens around Easter and I am out of school for the rest of the year. My parents are told that I am far enough ahead academically that missing the rest of year should be okay, except when it comes to math. My grandmother stays with us so she can watch me during the day. She makes me BLT sandwiches and gets me temporarily hooked on her soap operas. I don't really mind being in a cast, since sports don't matter to me much, and there's plenty to do without moving around a lot. My best friend continus to visit me. (More than 20 years later my grandmother would continue to marvel: "That little boy came to visit him everyday." Well, he was my best friend! What did she expect?)

As usual, I go to Sunday school, church services, and whatever else is going on at the church. I believe in what I have been taught, and none of it has become problematic for me yet. Sometimes we have contemporary worship services where someone from the church will play electric guitar. We have prayer services for sick people. We have covered dish suppers. The "quarter lady" at church slips a quarter into my hand every Sunday.

I am genuinely very happy, and my family is happy the way all happy families are happy. I don't think too much about the future, but I am confident that it is going to unfold much like my present life.

I also study from a correspondence course, and from books bought off syllabi. Once a year I go up to a small room in Dublin which is the only place in Ireland that you can sit A- and O-levels. You can't sit the inter or leaving cert papers unless you're enrolled in a school. I think I'm averaging one exam per year.

My parents are probably getting concerned about the cost of my education, and starting the first overtures towards my grandfather about selling part of the farm, which has been in the family for generations. My father isn't the oldest son (of five), but he's the one that does the most work on the farm. The fight will gradually build up over the next decade.

My parents must worry about money, and how much worse it's going to get, but they never ever show it. All I (and my sisters) feel from them is unconditional love. This is a thing that their love brought forth, and it never occurs to them to do anything other than whatever is necessary to support it.

(11 years later, I start a job that will in short order allow me to pay them back ten-fold, my sisters move out to start nursing college, and my father, alone again with my mother, is ground into tiny pieces by cancer)

I spend most of the rest of my time playing with my sisters around the farm, or with my friend Patrick, though he lives a few miles away and I'd have to get driven over there. He knows the stuff you learn by hanging around other guys, and I pick it up a little haphazardly (at one point I ask his mother what the difference between a fart and a shit is. I fail to see the difference in her explanation, but gather that I shouldn't ask again).

I watch a lot of telly. Because we're out in the countryside, we can put up an enormous mast, and so I grow up watching Playschool rather than Bosco. Thursdays on BBC1 are always the best, for over five years. Cities of Gold is my favourite program, and Top of the Pops is on both RTE and BBC. RTE has ads and BBC doesn't, so if the second half on RTE gets boring, I can skip forward in time by switching channel, and if I like something on BBC, I can see it again on RTE.

And I read anything in the local library. I think it's a few years until I get to the grownups section, so I mostly read science-fiction. The Doctor Who books are brilliant, and don't terrify me as much as the TV programs.

i harass my older siblings mercilessly whenever i get bored, which isn't all that often. i read encyclopedias for kicks.

http://www.fataldimensions.org/pics/smurf/brainysmurf.gif

Most kids my age are weird, they like stupid things like Star Trek and cartoons. I don’t get it. But I like most of the neighborhood adults and friends’ parents, and they like me. My parent’s best friends live just through a little strip of woods, a few minutes walk down a path. They come over like five nights a week, and bring a big jug of wine. My mom doesn’t drink wine, I think it’s vodka. My dad doesn’t drink at all I don’t think. But when I go to bed, they are still down there on the big screened-in porch, talking loudly. My dad argues with Mrs. T a lot. She is great, but she is SO LOUD. My parents say it is because she is from Brooklyn.

Next fall I’ll be going to a private school two towns away, and I’ll have to wear a TIE every day, and a blazer. God I hate having to go there. My parents say the schools in my town are awful. Mom is always fighting the school people, and she seems proud that she is not popular with the school board whoever that is. I will miss going to school with kids in my neighborhood, well most of them. I won’t miss the ones that call me “basketball Hunter” because I’m heavy. I won’t miss Michael G***P, who was always disrupting class last year. It’s not all his fault though. He is very weird, clearly not very smart, and quite disturbed and other guys in class tease him- a lot. I feel sorry for him when kids taunt him until he screams (LOUD!) and starts crying, usually on the ground at that point. He does wear really gooby, thick, thick gigantic glasses that look ridiculous though. Why don’t his parents at least buy him new ones? I also feel sorry for my teacher Mr. Engl*rt. He is nice old man, but too quiet and not bossy enough. I told my parents he should be teaching older kids or like, college. The kids would taunt him too if they could get away with it. Actually, they do. He should quit. I hope he finds a job with people who appreciate him.

On my transistor or in my oldest sister’s car I hear only two things, Donna Summer and the Bee Gees. And I think Olivia Newton John and ABBA. It’s amazing. I like going roller skating with my oldest sister, she’s 14 years older than I am and she likes roller skating and disco-ey music. I’m not into music though. I'd be very embarrassed if my parents heard me listen to music. I like listening to the news station from New York.

My sister who's 10 years older than me moved away from our house last year. I miss her so much, I am closer to her than anyone in the world. I cried when she drove down our long driveway, I was watching from my bedroom window upstairs. When I was little she would let me sleep over in her bedroom in the other bed. She had a 45 of "Love Child" by the Supremes which I would dance around to for HOURS. Her not being here makes me so sad if I think about it. I wrote "I miss Karen" in the fog on the mirror in the bathroom at one point, and it was cool how the next time I took a shower it reappeared, though more faintly. I finally cleaned the mirror, I don't want my Mom to think I'm psycho.

A while ago I figured out that I will be 32 years old in the year 2000. I never tell anyone but I think I will only live until I’m about 18. I don't know how I'm gonna die. I don't think of it like that. I can’t imagine what I’d be doing though, being 32.

(but I guess so were everyone's)

1986-7. The last year I live in Harare, Zimbabwe before moving to South Africa. I have a wonderful time outside school with my friends Nick and Andrew (the latter was my best man last year) and a miserable time at school. I do very well there but teachers do not like me because I am arrogant. The reason I am arrogant is that I think I am a good actor because I was in Puss-in-Boots at the big Harare theatre. They have caning at our school, which makes being disliked by teachers a dangerous and painful experience. I come in for particular maltreatment at the hands of the deputy headmaster, about whom I still harbour fantasies of revenge. I have 2 school friends, Paul and Alex, but our menage is typical of all my 3-way friendships throughout my life in that there is permanent backbiting and bitching, trying to get one of the other 2 to side against the third. More often than not I am sided against myself. I hate all sport and have miserable afternoons playing cricket and rugby in the heat.

My life outside school is idyllic. I have three younger brothers. We live in a rather shabby house with 6 big pine trees in the garden. My dad has made a jungle gym out of gumpoles and hung a rope from the tree to swing on. Apart from the pine trees we have a paw-paw tree, a mango tree, a macadamia nut and an orange tree. We grow mealies and we have a chicken run. This is all in the suburbs, remember. We don't have very much money, so we don't have a TV. We play superheroes most of the time (I have a Spidey suit), but none of us really know much about them because we don't have a TV or comics. I read Narnia, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton and the Hardy Boys. On many weekends we go and stay at father's parents' tobacco farm (invaded last year) and climb koppies and swim and play one-two-three block and go to the river to look for the python. We are terrified of our grandparents, and my father is always on edge in case we offend them somehow.

I haven't really been exposed to much modern music but I don't like what I hear on the hit parade. I like Band on the Run, but this does not help with the "Amadeus" sing-a-longs in the back of the school bus.

My life is 50 years out of date, I know. I have such a rose-tinted view of that period of my life because I left when I did, and never really viewed Zim as anything but my childhood playground. I wouldn't have these memories if I had stayed there because my memories would all have blended into later relationships and circumstances. So my childhood is preserved in amber at that point and I see myself as this kind of dusky-soled prince of our African garden, instead of the embarrassingly precocious bookworm (spouting misunderstood Christian drivel) that I probably was (and remained for some time).

My parents didn't drink much at the time. Mostly did pills and smoked pot. But after they seperated the following year my mother would become an intravenous drug user. After kicking this habit about five years down the line, she would become an alcoholic and that legacy has unfortunately followed me to this day.

For anyone interested in follow-up, when I am thirteen my father will be busted and sentenced to 25 years for two counts of aggravated sexual assault to a child. My mother eventually becomes clean and sober. My brother grows to be a gang banger and drug runner till about the age of 20. He is "saved" and has three children before he turns 25 but then breaks up with his babies' momma.

I'll let you draw yr own conclusions about me.

I have embarassing hair which is too long due to me hating getting it cut, but I have to in the end for my cousin's wedding. I own every issue of the Transformers comic from issue 43 onwards, but I am very annoyed that the continuity now makes no sense and half the comic is now in black and white. I want to send off my own cartoon strips to make money. I want someone to pay me £10 a week for them, which is a fortune. I think the book of the Neverending Story is much better than the film.

I own four tapes. They are Thriller by Michael Jackson, Bad by Michael Jackson, Off The Wall by Michael Jackson and the Ghostbusters soundtrack. My mum doesn't work yet. I don't understand anything my dad does.

My best friends at school are James, Graham, Ben and Matthew. Except they all hate each other most of the time. I have won lots of marbles at school. There is a kid at school who I am convinced has stolen my Yoda. I want to go to secondary school because I think it is all like Grange Hill, my favourite programme, and I want to be in a gang and get up to loads of tricks. I don't like dogs.

i'm in 4th class and my teacher, miss balfe, is really nice. there are 3 boys in my class (out of a class of 30) [this is the last time there are boys in my class until university]. two of them are called mark, one is called kevin. i like kevin, he looks like me and likes books too. my classmates call me "the walking dictionary", i don't really see why this is a bad thing.

in the summer i hang around with other kids from my street at the tennis courts at the end of the road. we cycle our bikes around the block (i have a raleigh 18 [i think]). also in the summer i go to tramore with my family to visit my cousins. my cousin tricia and i do dance routines to songs in the charts. i like pretty much all the music on top of the pops, especially adam and the ants and the police.

in september i start in 5th class. jennifer is my best friend in school. i make a norman fort out of lollipop sticks. our teacher mrs s*mpson is horrible. during a test i am accused of cheating as i am asking the girl next to me what is on the board. i am made fun of by the teacher in front of the class and sent home with a note asking my mum to get my eyes tested. i get glasses.

i am looking forward to being in 6th class as the teacher is supposed to be very nice and the books look more interesting than ours.

there are people on hunger strike in the north. when i go to the dentist in bray there are black flags on every lamp post as bobby sands has died. everyone is very sad about bobby sands. i think margaret thatcher is mean to let them die.

I had honestly blocked that memory out until this moment.

My two older brothers (I am youngest by 9 and 11 years) still live with us but not for long. In fact, JR (21) may have already moved out; certainly he and his long hair wont stay in the house much longer. He is in a band called The Love Children and periodically he will bring home cuttings from the local paper about the "hordes of whirly indie-girls" who attend their sporadic gigs. I occasionally hear music coming from his room as I lay in bed at night. I think it is all, without exception, complete shit. Five years later I will not (he used to play The Stone Roses album sometimes). Jim (19), the other brother, has only recently decided to be called 'Jim'; Mum and Dad still call him Jamie. He plays music too; cheap-sounding punky stuff by men with bad trainers and jeans and scruffy hair. He gives me some old tapes and I love them dearly - Open Up & Say Ahhhh by Posion (this has a song with the word 'sex' in it which I am thrilled by), Apetite For Destruction by G'n'R. I also find and steal a copy of Misplaced Childhood by Marillion; I don't know which brother it belonged to, but it stays on my walkman for ages. From 14 on I will hate it to death. At one point Jim says "shouldn't you be into music and football by now? Are you gay?" I have no answer.

A girl called Skye and a boy called Andrew will tease me a lot at school and make me miserable. I will hate them. I am not cool and have no interest in sport (this will change in a year when I start playing football for fun) but I am good at talking and reading and writing and acting; I am in LOADS of plays and stuff, everything possible at school that involves getting on a stage and talking loudly. I am all set to play Fagin at one point, but I'm ill and the understudy has to take over. I am mortified; I had a false beard lined up and everything. (I desperately want sideburns from about this point, due to seeing Beverly Hills 90210 - I have never mentioned this before to anyone.)

I have my first kiss, a tentative and frankly frightened touch of the lips with a girl called Amanda. I get called 'gaylord' a lot at school even though I'm sure I'm not gay. It may be because I wear a sweatband for no reason. I stop wearing the sweatband. I read a book called 'Airship' which is big and thick and belonged to one of my brothers. It has some shagging in it and I am immensely excited by reading this under the covers. I am so excited I can no longer stand wearing pyjamas and begin to sleep in the buff, a trend that continues to this day.

It's at about this point that the fileds behind my house, always a source of great mystery and excitement whenever me and Jim go adventuring with the dog(s) [we had three at one point, which may have been for a while in this year], start to be developed into a much shoddier, council-funded echo of the estate we live on, which was built in the 70s and modelled on Clovely. My best friends are Jonny who lives down the road and Matt who I go to school with. I have a nascent interest in roleplaying games and stuff, having deemed myself too old for Transformers and Action Force now. I draw a lot, and am a very fine, if overly fussy, artist. I hate paint and colour though; everything has to be drawn in HB pencils with lots of harsh lines and shading. I hold my pen weird and get given one of those strange triangular rubber grips to put round it. My handwriting is awful, but what I write is ace. I still hold my pen weird, and writing for any length of time makes my thumb sore.

I get chosen to go on television! On a gameshow called Clockwise made by the BBC. We spend a day in Bristol filming it and my team (me and Becky - she answers more questions than I do) win! However, we don't win the big prize (a ghettoblaster) and I am mortified; the presenter (Darren Day!) is infuriated that it takes about ten takes of us at the end to get a useable smile&wave out of me in particular. Fuck the Pound Puppies - I wanted that ghettoblaster really badly. I hate ITV. I wont watch it. I don't know why. It scares me. I think it reminds me of Wayne's house, which is smaller than mine and darker too (we got to watch Robocop there on his ninth birthday, and eat egg&chips).

I love The Field at the bottom of the hill, and I dearly love The Swamp which is a small pond with an island at one end, hidden by trees. When i was younger it froze one Xmas and my brother got me to walk on the ice - I think it cracked and I fell in but I can't remember it well. It's in about 1989 that the council dig a larger, shallower pond slightly above The Swamp, and it fucks the water table of The Swamp up, meaning it is no longer a challenge to get to the island, and thus it loses it's magic. From this point on I hate the council. JR has written a song called "TDC No Ball Games" for his band (TDC = Teignbridge District Council).

Me and Jonny race down the hill to The Field on our bikes; mine is a hand-me-down Grifter, his is a flash mountain bike. I bottle out halfway and slam on my brakes, causing me and Grifter to tumble arse-over-tit-over-wheels. Jonny sees this and sees the Grifter land on top of me. It's a heavy bike and he thinks I might be dead so he runs and gets his mum. I am OK; just a bit battered. I don't ride the bike much after that.

I am enrolled in Breakdancing lessons by my mother at the local dance school. I get some new parachute pants and buy a cardboard breakin mat to do spins on. I'm in fifth grade and the kids make fun of me for going to a dance school. Except for the new kid, she's the first black kid in our school. Sara immediately becomes my friend through our love of Breakdancing, Puma's with fat laces and Newcleus' "Jam On It". At recess one day we put on a breakdance show and everyone loves it. I become popular.

My teacher is an enormous asshole, who years later was busted for molesting his students. He never did it to me, but he mentally abused me the entire year. Calling me "fatso" and "idiot". Fuck him. I beat up his son years later just for fun.

My neighborhood is a small yuppie neighborhood I remember thinking my parents were so old, they were 32. A few years older than I am now, and much more successful. My neighborhood friends were Keith, his sister Amy, Michelle, Jon, Scott and this new kid from Kentucky, Billy who was two years older. We have fun daily, playing Dukes of Hazzard and sports.

My sister is 3 at this time and very sick, she has cancer and has spent the past 3 years in and out of Childrens Hospital in Boston. Its taking its toll on my parents. Within a six month period my father will almost die with a severe intestinal problem. He is diagnosed with Crohns disease and the surgerys almost kill him. Somehow, we survive quite well financially through all this. Only for it all to go to shit in 6 years...

We're taking about the end of the '70s. I liked Blondie and Queen, music-wise. I was a bit obsessed with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, perhaps more than anything because I found the scratchy spot illos interesting. I was really into nature and animals. I wanted a dog, but mom was quite reticent about it.

A friend from school, Therese, happened to live 100 yards up the road. Sometimes, she'd come after school and hang out with me a bit. One time, we invented a load of hugely insulting nicknames for our schoolmates in a notepad (plus some weird poems about them), and that was when we became less friendly -- her mother was a strict Irish Catholic and Therese told her everything. So her mother told the headmaster at school. He had me about it and even made me empty my school drawer to find out if anything 'offensive' was in there.

When I was ten was also when dad gave me a black eye. That's the hard bit. There wasn't a good reason for it (can there ever be a good reason for hitting a kid?). He just got pissed off and hit me. Hard. The first and last time it happened, but I never trusted him or had a real relationship with him after that, right until his death last year.

It was also the year mom was in hospital very seriously ill for a month or so. I stayed with nan. I was worried about mom, but we had some nice times. I was glad I didn't have to stay with dad.

I think, on the whole, it was an okay time, apart from those bad things. They tend to stick out more. But I don't remember being particularly unhappy most of the time.

BTW, I did keep a diary for some of that year. Mostly when I was nine, not ten, though. The entries were short and sparse and written in green or red felt pen. I had an idea I might scan some of them and post them on my blog on the appropriate dates, just for something different... but the diary's packed away atm, in anticipation of our infamous house move, so meantime, someone can steal the idea if they think it sounds good! :)

October 21, 1989:

Can you believe it? I’m in sixth grade! My teacher is Mrs. C__. I’m in the band. My teacher is Miss B__. She’s funny, but tough. There’s this girl in band class named Sinetra H__ (whom I can do a great impression of) who got in trouble the other day. It wasn’t that serious. We’re having a concert next Wednesday. Oh boy, I’ve got a lot to write about – I’m in soccer. Our team is 7-2-0. Mark’s team is 8-0-1. There’s this cute girl who sits in front of me in gym class named Andrea C__ and boy is she ever cute! Ya know – like – WOW! Dude! I just sent a letter today to my pen pal, Dan King from Australia. I can’t wait until he writes me back. Oh, you’re wondering about Christy P__ - huh? Well, I dumped her for this hot babe named Andrea (oh yeah, I said that). Remember the 89 Cubs. Great team! (I hate Will Clark) – World Series – A’s & Giants. Today would be the sixth game but a 6.9 (on Richter scale) earthquake spelled disaster to San Francisco. Halloween is coming up, as you know, and we’re having a Halloween party. You can send suckers to your friends with something called a Ghoulgram and on Friday, they’ll be given out. Also on Halloween topic – I’m gonna be an old turn of the century melodrama villain type of guy and Mark – an old man. Well, my hand is gettn’ weary so, GOOD-BYE

This is the boldest confession I've ever read here.

I'm in my third and fourth years of junior school. The school's a mile away, and my mum walks me there in the morning and back again at night, in a big group with the neighbours' kids too. My best friend at school is Ian. He's the headmaster's son, he's adopted, and he's the only black person I've ever met. My other friends at school include Matthew, who lives along the street from me, Stef, who wins dancing competitions and always gets her photo in the local paper (because her dad is the editor) and Sarah. Sarah has spent most of the last year off school sick. Noone knows what's wrong with her; her doctor can't spot anything, and everyone else in the class thinks she was skiving because she didn't like our third year teacher, Mrs Calvert. In 1988 not many people in provincial England have heard of a disease called 'ME', and noone would have guessed that in June 2003 Sarah would try to kill herself.

My mum teaches a judo class after school one night a week. I hate any sort of sports, so I sit at one side of the room, very bored, doing 'special' schoolwork. The headmaster gives me special projects to keep me occupied: when i was a year or so younger I did projects on things like dinosaurs or the weather, but now he borrows maths books from the local comprehensive and sets me problems from those. When I get home I have to practise playing my recorders (I have three, in different pitches). I wanted to start playing the clarinet, but the music teacher told me my fingers are still a bit too small and I might be able to start next year. Every year our town has a recorder festival. I enter lots of categories on my own and with people, but we rarely win; usually I come second or third. One night a week my mum takes me into town on the bus after school, and I have a swimming lesson at the local pool. My tracksuit has lots of swimming badges sewn on to it; different distances, and 'survival' badges which involve swimming in your pyjamas and giving first-aid. Every time my mum buys me a new tracksuit, she has to patiently take the badges off the old one and resew them all.

At the weekend I go to the school swimming club, and then to my gran's for dinner. We sit in my gran's living room all afternoon, whilst my dad reads through her copies of The Sun and News Of The World, which she saves for him to read. I don't understand how they can print pictures of naked women - isn't that illegal? In the summer, instead of sitting in her living room all afternoon my dad will take me down to the beach, which is quite a long walk away. On Sunday mornings, my mother takes me to Sunday School. I believe absolutely in the truth of everything in the bible.

I'm switched to a new school where no one speaks French anymore, and I know only a couple people. My mom thinks that I need to keep up my French so she sends me to a Catholic French camp over the summer. I am not Catholic, nor am I French. I don't remember too much about this camp, but was strangely traumatized last St. Jean Baptiste day when I heard French Canadian girls singing the same camp songs I was unable to learn the words to because no one would teach me. I only recently learned that "tete carre" is an insult.

My favourite place to hang out is a burnt down school where my friends and I imagine who went there as if it's some kind of ancient ruin. I don't understand why anyone--especially Julie Davidson--wants to go to pre-teen dances and I have to look up the word "masterbation" so I won't answer wrong when Miss Davidson asks me if it's something I like to do.

People tell me that my friend Jon likes me because he gives me blueberry pies from McDonald's each time our class goes skiing. I think it's gross and don't believe them until 2 years later when he spraypaints my name on the side of the local high school.

I think License to Ill is the best album ever just because it annoys my parents. My brother is still a great kid. I'm two years away from hating him.

I get the 'priveliege' of telling mum. This is one of the most difficult things I ever had to do, as she and her dad have been thisclose since she arrived in NY at age 15 from Jamaica (West Indies). It took her a long while to begin grieving (didn't happen until sometime the next year). At his funeral, I was the only one that had enough courage to hold his cold, lifeless hand and touch his face. Was the first time I can remember having to be the "parent", as Mum couldn't handle it.

Also, at age 10, my parents finally decided to split for good after years of the 'revolving door' treatment: he'd leave for a while, then come back; they would fight terribly, he'd leave again. They were too young to be together.

I was gawky-looking at 10, I admit it: petite, skinny as hell, knobby knees and arms, hair in short, tight braids and glasses too large for my face. In between Mister Rogers, reggae music and Sesame Street, school wasn't fun. I only had one best friend and always had to stick up for myself in the classroom and on the blacktop playground, battling other kids who though teasing a kid with a (slight)limp was fun. There I was, feeling so different from the other kids---though 99.5% of the students were as dark as I.

Also, my mum had twins later that year (first set of two) that, unfortunately were premature (like I had been) and passed away after a day or two. [I remember, as I'd had to stay home from school.]

I am a ninja at dodge ball and a natural at crab soccer. I belong to a jump rope club called "GBI Jumpin' High" because the gym teacher thought I had mad skillz. I always get called out while playing softball because I will always let go of the bat at the end of the swing and it always flys across the room. I have read every Nancy Drew book and want to be a detective. A girl in class reads trashy novels like Jackie Collins and VC Andrews and I become enthralled by them too and want to join the Italian mob.

My brothers, Larry and Jerry, are older than me by 3 and 5 years and I never see them because they have friends that drive or live in the neighborhood. My father works 3.5 hours away in Dahlgren, Va and only comes home on weekends. He always takes me out for ice cream at Carvel and I always get black raspberry or soft vanilla serve with rainbow sprinkles. He will then drive super fast over a bump in the road so that we fly over it and I bump my head on the car ceiling and my stomache feels funny. My mother works a at a chinese restaurant either at night or until 5 in the evening. I am a latchkey kid and have to find ways to entertain myself since there are absolutely no girls my age in my neighborhood. My mother makes me go to karate class for 5 years because she wants me to be able to beat up boys. I take piano lessons from a woman down the block after school. I never practice and am never prepared so I always try to pretend I lost my key and can't go home to get my music or I am too sick to go to my lesson. This lasts for 5 more years.

I watch tons of Tv and have a book wherever I go. School is extremely easy for me and I have a weird sense of humor that causes people to laugh a lot. I am always laughing. I am obsessed with the movie Dirty Dancing and wish I could live in the Catskills and that Patrick Swazee was my boyfriend. I am horrified to find out he is in his mid-30's. But I still dance alot in my living room and listen to crazy amounts of oldies. My dad buys me a lot of compilation 50s-60s music along with Gloria Estefan, Chicago, and Richard Marx. He keeps asking me if I like Swing Out Sister. I am detached from my busy family and this will remain true to this day where they want to spend time with me but I feel obligated to find time to spend with them.

1. Turned 10 the beginning of May - had my first "big girl's party" with a store-bought cake and little prize bags and all (until then it'd been "hippy" parties with lots of stoned adults and kids running around nekkid). I broke my ankle a week before the party. Then the chicken-pox hit my school and all but one of the invited ten ended-up sick that weekend with the pox. And that tenth girl? She was thrown from a horse and broke both of her legs, so she came but was in a wheelchair. Horrid day.

2. My father married my step-mother that July - not a bad thing, actually, but odd - I'd never really thought about marriage as something someone did more than once.

3. Two of my uncles (one paternal, one maternal) got married that summer - one in Phoenix in July and one in Montana at the beginning of August. Mom took her new boyfriend to the one in Montana. I didn't like him, and nor did my sister, but he was also seen as a good thing in our eyes in that we were pretty darn poor and when he came to the house to eat and stuff he'd bring good food - like meat (we usually couldn't afford meat). So, as we're driving along some road in the Rockies, my mother turns around from the front seat and says to Jenny (my little sister) and me "Bill (the boyfriend) and I are thinking about getting married. What do you think?" I, of course, replied off the top of my head with "So does that mean we'll get meat for dinner every night?" Not an auspicious blessing, I'm afraid.

4. August 14 went over to neighbor's house, where they had an improvised slippery-slide (long piece of thick plastic, with a hose pouring water over it, making for a slippery surface to slide down, when placed on an incline) set-up in their walnut orchard. I managed to slice open one of my tuckus cheeks on a walnut shell, requiring several stitches (it's a cool scar, actually) and a teatnus shot.

5. August 17 snuck out of house (Mom was running errands and I was grounded for some reason that I can no longer recall) to go over to same neighbor's house and ride their horse - managed to get thrown and hit my head on a rock - end result was a sub-dural hematoma and a medi-vac flight and some time in ICU and then learning how to speak again (even though I was home in less than a week, of the doctors telling my parent's I'd not live and then telling them that I'd be a vegetable). My head was shaved, I had a suture line, held together with what looked like carpentry staples, covering the entire right side of my skull (temple to back of neck) and a glorious black eye, in addition to struggling with spoken language.

6. Beginning of September - began fifth grade - felt like a complete pariah - couldn't speak well enough to be understood, was wearing a head scarf all of the time, and looked like a dweeb. Totally miserable.

7. October - mother married step-father - my sister and I hated him from the start and there were many battles started the day he moved in with us.

8. November - my mother and step-father anounce that we're leaving the only home in the only town I have ever known, to move to the big city (it's all relative - my home town had a population of 106 - the town we moved to had 1300 residents). This was exascerbated by my father and step-mother making snide comments about my mother marrying my step-father for his money, among other things.

9. Spent Christmas moving and crying and swearing that the world would end - I had been on steroids since the head-surgery to prevent seizures, and they had a side-effect of kicking my body into an early puberty - I went from being flat-chested to wearing a C-cup in less than a year, so my hormones were runing rampant and I was fairly psychotic.

10. Actually, things looked-up after the new year - I actually liked my new school and my new teacher and I developed some really cool friends, who I am in touch with to this day. So, really, just half of the year sucked - but it sucked big time.

Here's an actual entry of mine (I brought my first diary in to work today, pages 59-61):

"Monticello" "10 3/4" Real Late May 1988: Today in school we went to visit Monticello, Ashlawn, and U.V.A. On the way there I sat with Suzanne. We both wrote "I love Jeremy!" on our hands. Everyone found out. Then I wrote a note to Jeremy that said, "I love you" and it also had clues of who it was. He did find out that me and Suzanne wrote it. In the afternoon I sat with Nichole. She just had to write notes to Jeremy. They said stuff like, "Sarah loves you!" I felt like killing her. Then came the biggie! She asked him if he'd go with me. He said no. I could understand that since he was going with Suzanne he wouldn't want to go with me too. But Nichole just wrote more notes. Finally he said he would not go with Suzanne either. Then he started staring at me for a long, long time. Before he had asked me to look straight in his eyes. I was SO sad that almost cried. Noah joked about it. Then Jeremy said he'd go with me if I would love Eric just as much. I liked Eric only as a friend, and was afraid there was a catch to it, so I said "No." Then he stared at me some more. I showed him my hand, but he didn't budge. Finally, when we got off the bus at school, Noah said he'd call Jeremy tonight! - end

'I showed him my hand, but he didn't budge.'

I turned 10 in October 1975 and as I've alluded to elsewhere either here or in chat there's a big age difference between me and everyone else in my family. When I turn 10, my dad is 60, my mom is 50 (she'll turn 51 two days after my birthday), my brother is 28, and my sister is 26. Whenever this comes up in school - though not very often, since at the time I'd rather jump off of a cliff than talk about myself or my family - some of the kids joke and say that I was the family afterthought. Older kids hint that I was a "save the marriage" baby. I'm not sure what that means, though I know something funny is going on because my father moved out two years previously. He had an apartment briefly and then built a kitchen and a small bedroom at the Shop (family business, small industrial chemical corp. - my dad, my brother, and my sister are the only employees. it has a real name, but everyone calls it the Shop). Once the additions were finished there, my dad moved in. Two years later I join him.

By the time I'm ten, I pretty much figured out why he left. My mom is a pathological clutterer. Whole rooms of the house are filled with old newspapers stacked two-thirds of the way to the ceiling. There's books, old clothes, furniture, and the random detritus of years of accumulation from garage sales, consignment stores, and estate sales everywhere in the house. Every so often my dad or my sister would notice a newspaper article that would read something like "10 tons of trash removed from suburban home" and we would all nervously laugh. This ends up becoming the family secret and pretty soon the other family relatives stop asking about it.

My sister and my brother have long since moved out and have gotten their own respective places. My brother has a weird girlfriend out in Tucson where he went to college and spends a lot of time out there. He has a bright orange '69 Mustang Mach I which he drives very fast while listening to music loud - one weekend he takes me along to Tucson with him and I immediately fall in love with the sound of the engine and staring out at the desert through the windows. He's not close enough in age to me where he's the obnoxious older brother and not so old enough that he's more like a parent. He's actually pretty cool and is well read up on history, art and music. Ten years later I'll find out that a couple years after I was born he was busted for smuggling dope from Mexico. Twenty years later I'll find a gun and the remnants of his coke and speed stash at the Shop when he disappears after he tries to steal the business out from under my mom and sister. At the time of this writing I haven't seen him in eight years.

My sister is continuously either taking classes or planning her next trip overseas. She's still working on her Arabic and on occasion the front office of the Shop is covered with textbooks and pages of Arabic writing. I'm totally intrigued by it because it looks like a code. With the exception of my mom, everyone in my family loves to go out to the movies - especially the old revival theater on the Balboa Peninsula. My brother takes me to see a triple bill of the first three James Bond movies and not surprisingly, my Middle East-enthralled sister takes me to see _Lawrence Of Arabia_.

Despite the freak living conditions, and the constant stress of being a 10 year old boy with no friends who lives in a suburban junkyard, relations with my mom are generally OK. Things won't really turn to shit for another couple of years. My mom has been a ice skater all her life and on a whim goes to Sun Valley and learns how to ski - sometime around here she takes me with her and against all possible odds, given my general awkwardness, lack of balance, timidness, and aversion to sports - I do pretty well. Sometime in 1976, my dad goes to the hospital in South Laguna complaining of chest pains and learns that he has diabetes, a hernia, and an immediate need for triple-bybass open heart surgery - a spectacularly big deal at the time. He's been a smoker all his life and tries to quit on occasion, but never succeeds. My dad is also the loudest snorer in the world, almost as loud as the built-in vacuum cleaner at my mom's place. I worry when he's sleeping because I can actually hear him stop breathing and make a strangling sound. Interestingly I notice that when he's not smoking, he doesn't snore.

At my mom's house, I have about one-third of a bedroom to myself - the rest of it filled with excess furniture and various overflow from the rest of the house. My territory encompasses a bed, an upright piano next to it at a perpendicular angle and a small rug in between the two. The rug has a nice quadralateral pattern to it which makes it ideal as a street grid for Matchbox and Corgi cars. Hot Wheels are present to some degree, but they're not as cool or as exclusive as the Matchbox cars. Hot Wheels are the gaudy day-glo Corvettes of toy cars. Matchboxes are the classy Aston Martins (painted British Racing Green thank you). Of the larger toy cars, Corgis are at the top of the ziggurat of cool - after all, they have the rights to James Bond's Aston Martin and Emma Peel's Lotus. Twenty years later, Julian Cope writes about these important distinctions and I'm finally validated.

The piano is a leftover from the piano lessons I had for a couple of years beginning when I was six years old. I absolutely hated it. I was utterly bored by the music and was terrified to play in front of people. The few times that the house was clean enough to have an Easter or Christmas dinner my mom would try to get me to play and I'd take off downstairs or preferably outside the house. I begin to wonder if she's doing this deliberately to embarrass me. After the piano fiasco, I didn't play it at all but I remembered how to read music (which I still remember to this day).

At the top of my bed is a small table with a lamp and a shortwave radio receiver that my father bought for me as a birthday present. Outside of the books that I inhale at an incredible rate, the shortwave is probably the single most important possession I have. The house is up on a hillside so the reception is pretty good. The BBC World Service, Radio Ecuador, Radio Australia, and New Zealand are nightly listens. When the atmosphere conditions are right, I can pick up Radio Moscow. Radio Moscow starts off the hour with this odd music theme that somehow sounds as important as Big Ben does on the BBC. One time I pick up Radio Havana - they announce a writing contest in which the winner doesn't get a cash prize, but a medal. I think of all those pictures I see of those scary looking Russians on the Kremlin Wall with their medals and think about entering the contest. I decide against it when I read up on Cuba and discover that it's forbidden to travel there.

I did think I had a good chance of winning because even though I'm in the fifth grade (with kids already turning 11 years old) I'm enrolled in sixth grade English. My mom began reading to me very early and when I'm two years old I'm already beginning to read on my own. By three, I've learned how to read maps, and by the time that I'm ten, I'm devouring books as fast I can get them. At home, there's a complete set of the Time-Life science and nature series books and I read them over and over again. One book, simply called "Matter" has descriptions of all the elements in it and I immediately begin to memorize all of them in the same way that I memorized all the state capitols and which astronauts flew on which space flight. A couple years later I hear the Tom Lehrer "Elements" song on the Dr. Demento show and I fall over laughing.

One day after class Mrs. Campbell (the history teacher) asks me point blank if I'm cheating because I'm using so many big words. I'm really not, and it takes me awhile to convince her. By the fifth grade though, I'm frustrated. Classes are boring and I basically stop doing my homework because I don't see any point to it. I do well on the tests but the teachers complain and criticize me because I don't put enough effort into the class. This reasoning doesn't make any sense to me and I protest, but this criticism continues into junior high and eventually high school. At least in fifth grade there's no letter grades.

Some other teachers mention that I don't seem to have many friends. Not entirely true: I don't have *any* friends - at least in real life. Big surprise, I'm the target of *all* the other kids: boys, girls, jocks, even the other nerdy kids. My fight or flight system is permanently stuck on "flight" and I get pretty adept at running away. Eventually the bullies, etc. give up and I left alone for the most part. This also means that during the choose up for P.E. class, not only am I the last one chosen, I'm not chosen at all. A team would rather play one guy short than have me on their team. This happens often enough that distract myself from the depression by playing around on the hillside overlooking the field and after awhile I start examining the different kinds of rocks and plants. Occasionally a teacher hollers at me and asks why I'm not playing soccer and I have to explain that I wasn't chosen and that no I don't want to be forced on a team either. Occasionally, a teacher will insist, but it usually ends with one of the other kids (teammate or not) taking aim at my head with the soccer ball. Since I've been wearing glasses since I was five and can't see my hand in front of my face without them, I'm a pretty high value target.

I'm a stick-thin, four-eyed, smart kid who constantly fails the PE tests, can't catch a ball, can't kick a ball, doesn't like the beach (highly unusual in a beach city), doesn't like sports, and has to deal with the further embarrassment of being in the special speech class (I have a problem making the "th" sound) and the "special skills" class. Special Skills is the separate smart kids class at Top Of The World Elementary, but aside from having nicer teachers it's basically the same fears - just on a smaller scale. I've terrified that a teacher is going to call on me - not that I couldn't answer the question, but I can't handle the attention of the class on me. I wish I could instantly turn into the Invisible Man and disappear. At one point during the school year, each of the Special Skills kids are supposed to make something for show and tell. I afraid of the presentation and in my floundering on deciding what sort of project to make I try to think of something that will let me fulfill the class requirement but yet get me out of making a making a presentation. After listening to the other kids go on about building toothpick bridges, miniature farms, or something equally as banal, I get disgusted and mumble out that I'm going to build the solar system. Shockingly, my teachers think this is a great idea and call my bluff. So I end up spending my Special Skills time for the next couple of weeks by working out the geometry for building a scale model solar system and do so out out paper maché. I make the gas giants by filling a balloon to the proper size and building a paper maché shell around it. On the scale I make things, the class room is where the sun is and Pluto ends up being somewhere on PCH between Laguna and Corona Del Mar, but for the sake of simplicity I hang all the planets off of the classroom ceiling with notes attached to them detailing the exact distance they would need to be to maintain the scale. Because of the construction time I got to miss the in class presentation, but the solar system was the hit for the parents visiting the Special Skills classroom during Parents Night. A picture is taken for the local Laguna Beach newspaper, but since I'm afraid of all the attention I'm nowhere to be found.

I still have to take classes outside of the Special Skills class during the second semester of the school year a paperwork mix-up doesn't schedule me for any classes for fifth and sixth period. I figure out that I'm supposed to be in a social studies class, but when I try going the teacher tells me that I don't belong there and to go to the class I'm scheduled for. I try a couple other classes and get the same response so I take the "you don't belong" to heart and spend the two or so hours up in the eucalyptus trees just above the parking lot next to the homeroom buildings. I'm terrified of getting caught, but I get pretty good at fading into the background after lunch and just disappearing until I have to be back. I spend the free time reading (as usual) draw a lot of abstract looking stuff and climb trees. The semester finally ends and I don't get caught once.

Laguna Beach, California in 1975 is still pretty much a gentle hippie artist community separate enough from the Big Outside World so I'm able to explore a lot of the town by myself. Immediately I find two things which become vitally important - the new Library that just opened up and a used bookstore on Beach St. called Buccaneer Books. The library had just opened and has this weird architecture that looks as if a colonizing space ship had crashed landed at the foot of Park Ave. The librarians keep steering me to the children's section until they finally figure out that I know what I'm doing and yes, I can read the books with the big words. I decimate the small astronomy and science-fiction sections in no time and spend a lot of time reading books on history and exploration. The library has a nice area with comfy chairs and big floor-to-ceiling windows where you can sorta see the ocean. I grab a stack of books and hang out there reading until closing time and then walk up the hill back home again. One day I examine the books that are nearest the windows and find books on art and architecture. A lot of them are on renaissance and classical art which don't do much for me, but I keep coming back to a book on surrealism and cubism. I do my best job to emulate the cubist stuff, but I don't have a steady enough hand to draw a straight line freehand, but one day in art class I accidentally discover two-point perspective and feel immensely proud of myself. Of all the art books at the library my favorite one is an annual of European commercial and industrial design - no real text at all but pages and pages of what looks like an exotic future - superhighways, airplanes, houses, cars, all of them in this same art style that looks almost computer generated (the cover to St. Etienne's _Sound Of Water_ is a good example of what I'm talking about).

Second most important place is Buccaneer Books, which I discover has an excellent used science fiction section. On her garage sale runs, my mom picks up the occasional SF paperback for me which I turn around into used credits at Buccaneer to get things more interesting. I plow through the Heinlein juveniles and the basic bread and butter SF - Asimov, Clarke, Larry Niven, but the books that I keep coming back to are the Orbit anthology series. One R.A. Lafferty story called "Continued On Next Rock" about an oddball mix up of future archeologists is hilarious and I read it over and over again. Another book intrigues the hell out of me - so much that 27 years later I can still recall precisely the first time I saw the cover. Instead of the typical alien and spaceship book covers of the day, the cover to this shows two shadowy figures in the middle of an remote and alien desert - almost a sci-fi version of _Lawrence Of Arabia_. Reading _Dune_ knocks me completely out of my tree and becomes the center of my attention for months - the following year when I finally get around to _Lord Of The Rings_ I wonder what the fuss is about. The only thing that overshadows _Dune_ is in July when I wake up early and watch Viking 1 take the first pictures from the surface of Mars. Mars looks like my desert (my desert being the Mojave around Joshua Tree) and I suddenly realize that none of the SF books I've read will ever compare with the Real Thing. I want to become an astronaut and am devastated to learn that I won't be able to go because I wear glasses.

Energized by all the sci-fi reading, I set about building successive generations of Lego spaceships. My mom gratefully picks up any and all Lego on her garage sale runs and each new supply of raw building material allows me to give the imaginary inhabitants more room and a healthy supply of landing ships, which becomes important since I noticed that the people on Moonbase Alpha in Space 1999 (which began showing that year) seem to go through a lot of spaceships. The hillside below my mom's house handily becomes an endless series of far off planets for the Lego explorers. For a couple of months in late 1975, UFO stories become popular and a bunch of UFO books, television programs and magazine articles appear. I dream about flying saucers and wish that They (whoever They were) would hurry up and get here already so I could get the heck out.

All the books take the edge off of feeling utterly alone in the world. I'm too shy and afraid to really interact with the other kids at school and I notice that I relate more to Charlie Brown in Peanuts than I do with anyone in real life. Charlie Brown is depressed, morose, feels like a failure, but yet seems to have this determined streak of perseverance in him. My dad points out that I have the same initials as Charlie Brown and I somehow find that oddly comforting. When summer comes around I spend all of my days down at the Shop where I just sort of quietly hang out and read books or watch the all important Monster Movie Sunday on KTLA television. With the sole exception of Doctor Strange, I find comic books to be completely uninteresting. Batman, X-Men, Superman, etc. - the whole lot of them just aren't as cool as Godzilla. In much the same way, the popular television shows that the other kids at school watch bore me - I can't stand Happy Days, the Brady Bunch, Scooby Doo, because they just aren't as cool as The Avengers, or Rod Serling with the Twilight Zone. I have trouble sleeping at night and occasionally sneak into the living room where I'll watch KTLA's Movies 'Till Dawn until I fall asleep. I recall one time in class that year where we were supposed to name our favorite celebrities and I got a funny look when I said Humphrey Bogart.

Even at 10 I'm still kinda afraid of the dark. The one thing that scares me the most is navigating my way past a mirror that sits on top of a desk that's in between the bed and the bathroom that's adjacent to the room that I'm sleeping in. I'm already jumpy enough when I see my reflection in a mirror but when coupled with dim light and the blurry vision if I don't have my glasses on, I manage to work myself into such a panic that sometimes I crawl on the floor. I have a recurring dream in which the house disappears and my bed rapidly expands out to the horizon and transforms itself into a barren desert landscape while I apparently shrink down to the size of an ant. Pillows become distant mesas and the whole landscape is lit as if by a full moon, but there no apparent light source. There's no other movement, but the whole transformation process is accompanied by a tremendous rush of speed - kinda like the stargate sequence in 2001. I have this dream at least a couple dozen times and each time I don't know what to do other than to start walking towards the horizon.

Despite being afraid of the dark, one of my favorite places to explore are the storm drains underneath downtown Laguna. There's a hole in the fence surrounding the drainage ditch in Laguna Canyon and one day a follow it all the way to downtown where it goes underground into a tunnel. The next day I come back with a flashlight and over the course of the next weeks and months I systemically check out all the side tunnels that I can walk through. Pretty soon it becomes my favorite way to walk to the Shop from downtown because I don't have to walk next to the traffic on Laguna Canyon Road. The echoes in the main tunnel are tremendous and I spend a lot of time making noises and playing with the delay times and trying to match the returning echo with another noise.

One night in 1976 I tag along with my sister and her boyfriend and go to the Orange Coast College computer lab where he was taking a programming class. There's a big room of punch-card typewriters and a lot of the students are milling around waiting for the printer results of the punch card jobs they submitted earlier. No one seems to mind me hanging around and a couple of the folks there even explain to me what they're doing after they notice me watching. A couple of the typewriters are actual terminals and one is busy printing out what looks like a secret code, only instead of the Arabic that my sister was writing, this code is made up of words, symbols, and little arrows. I learn that it's a computer language called APL and I immediately set about finding more about it even though I have no computer. I get a subscription to Creative Computing which reminds me more of my beloved Mad Magazine than anything else. I learn how to program on paper, but it'll still be awhile before I can get my hands on a computer for real. A year or so later (1977), my mom takes me to the San Diego County Fair and I stop dead at a booth that's run by something calling itself Apple Computer. I forget the fair entirely and spend hours at the booth exploring the Apple II they have set up. I finally get to try out some of the BASIC programs I had written beforehand and the guys at the booth are flabbergasted (and probably annoyed) by this awkward little kid that comes up that's starts hounding them with questions. Sometime around then I notice from reading the phone book (yes, I would flip through the phone book recreationally - kinda like an encyclopedia) that all the service numbers for the phone company had the same prefix, and that the prefix wasn't used anywhere else. So for a couple of months I systematically worked my way though the entire prefix exchange, making notes of anything of interest. Mostly it was either no answer or an odd sequence of tones. On rare occasion, I got a human. Most of the time I hung up, but eventually I got enough fortitude to ask them what the number was for. My mom is more of a social engineer though - in 1976 she social engineers her way into the conference of the International Astronautical Union and takes me to meet at least a dozen different astronauts. I'm introduced to a lot of folks who names I memorized, but none of that matters when I'm introduced to the Soviet cosmonaut who (at that time) had logged more time in space than anyone else anywhere. He speaks no English, but he shakes my hand and ruffles my hair.

I begged my dad for years for a computer, but he never understood what the point of them was and thought they were a fad. My mom didn't understand computers either. Fifteen years later, after I bought my own computer with my own cash, she'll ask me in all seriousness why I wasn't making as much money as Bill Gates because "he uses computers too".

When I was ten I wasn't really aware of music. The accidental _Dark Side Of The Moon_ record release planetarium show from a couple years earlier was still fresh in my mind. In music class we sing Beach Boys and John Denver songs, but I'm bored. Other kids in school love Kiss or Wings. One of the Cal Jam festivals is broadcasted on television and I see Kiss who bore me in the same way that super hero comics bore me. Aerosmith are on the same show and they're faster and better. One time while channel surfing late at night I run across a music show that's showing four funny looking guys in a deserted Roman amphitheater making a tremendously loud noise. There's no audience they're playing up to and instead they're totally focused on the noise at hand - more like they're performing some sort of ancient invocation or ritual only with modern noise. Forget that super hero crap, gimmie Doctor Strange! My brother listens to a lot of music while he's working at the Shop - most of it not resonating much with me at the time. The Santana and Beach Boys records bore me and despite my dislike of western movies I love Marty Robbins' "Gunfighter Ballads" album and keep asking my brother to play that along with _Dark Side Of The Moon_. When flipping through his albums I'm shocked to discover that there are geeky guys with glasses rocking out so I then ask him to play The Doors and Jefferson Airplane. One day my brother brings in a record completely different from anything else I've ever heard before. The cover looks like something from that European commercial design book, the band look like the students in the OCC computer lab, and the music sounds like the future. I'm so taken aback by it that I memorize the main melody and pick it out on the piano that I hadn't touched in a couple of years. The song title is German, but it's about cars. The title: "Autobahn".

Sometime in 1975, the IRS shows up at the Shop and tries to shut us down claiming that we owe tens of thousand of dollars in back taxes. Somehow my dad negotiates out from under it, but soon afterward a picture goes up at the Shop of my dad taking a leak on the White House lawn. The picture comes down briefly during the first year or so of the Reagan administration but goes back up (much to the annoyance of my ultra-Republican mom) permanently and becomes an instant conversation starter. ("who's the guy peeing on the White House lawn?" "oh, that's my dad")

Over the next couple of years I eventually make some friends and learn how to sleep with the light off. I join the Boy Scouts and immediately make friends with a smart astronomy and sci-fi geek named Ross. Two years later he'll die from leukemia. In four years I go away to high school and in eight years I check out the graduation ceremony at L.B.H.S. to see what happened to folks. A couple of people recognize me and can't believe I'm the same person.

When I'm not in school, I really like riding in the truck with my dad when he drives up to L.A. to pick up supplies for the Shop, or up to Long Beach to drop off some shipments at the Shop. The Long Beach are trips are nice because we take Pacific Coast Highway along the ocean all the way up from Laguna. On the way back we stop at Hamburger Henry in Belmont Shore where there's 50 different kinds of hamburgers. I'm forever intrigued by the Charlie Brown Burger which has peanut butter on it, but I stick with my favorite - the Texas Burger which is smothered in chili and beans. McConnells Ice Cream shop is next door and I'm forever enthralled by their coffee ice cream. Thirteen years later my dad is gone and sometime after that Hamburger Henry, McConnells and both their buildings are demolished in a fit of Belmont redevelopment. In it's place is a new building with a rather kick ass record store called Fingerprints. Twenty-seven years later it's the middle of the night and I'm in a rooftop studio apartment a couple blocks away from Fingerprints pounding this all in my laptop as fast as I can recall it. Someone give me a madeleine.

I do know that I got my appendix out that year and I really liked Nik Kershaw and Boy George. Also I got a kitten for my birthday.

Before the trip, I was a somewhat-dim, late-blooming, usually cheerful tom-boy who had few fears (other than the dark), few passions (other than glow-in-the dark things) and few interests (other than climbing trees, rollerskating and collecting ladybugs from vacant lots). By the time I returned from the trip, my outlook and intelligence had expanded exponentially.

This was probably because Europe introduced me to so many complex concepts that I'd had no exposure to before : different time-zones, language barriers, people who speak more than one language, buildings which are more than 200 years old, Communism, Socialism, cathedrals, political upheaval, cars with steering wheels on the "wrong" side, foreign currency exchange rates, paper money that is worth less than coins, siesta time and bank holidays, soccer, ABBA, Playmobil, various legends and myths, Renaissance art, lukewarm soda, fried toast and tomatoes, muselix, watermarks, gnocci, anti-Americanism, passport stamps, border guards/searches, holes in the ground called "toilets", travelling by train, travelling by boat, death, the Crusades, Henry the Eighth, relics of saints ...

In an effort to get me to improve my awful spelling and handwriting, (as well as to solidify my memories of the trip) my parents made me keep a diary of my travels. Since I would have much rather been playing with my new Playmobil guy (Robin Hood) than writing in my diary, my diary entries are typically very short, blunt, and incomplete. But, occasionally, I took the time to explain things. Many times, I just draw pictures. My favorite drawing subjects seemed to be coins, stamps, street signs, and campsites. But I also attempted to draw Giotto, the Mona Lisa and myself! Art has been a lifelong hobby of mine since then.

My favorite passage is an observation I made in France : "their movies are just like ours, only spelled differently." Here are some other entries. Some silly, some scary, some profound ...

[note : I haven't corrected any of the spelling or grammar. This is exactly how I wrote when I was 10!]

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"April 4th, 1978 [Belgium]
We went to Brussels then we ate lunch, after lunch we had a yummy waffle. We saw a town hall that had a legend to it. "The desstresed architect". Here is how it goes : a man who worked on a building made a plan for a building. He said "When the building is done it would be perfect." but when it was done, one side was shorter than the other so he climbed to the top of the building and jumped off. Then we had dinner and went to bed..."

"April 6th [France]
...we went into town .We took the subway. Then we came back and I found three friends. They were hard to understand. There was a teeter totter we played on, then they played soccer. I taught them how to play kickball.We had fun playing ball. The End."

"April 8th [France]
We woke up late. Then we went to the pool and swam for two hours. It was 2 noon over here but 6:00 in the USA. Then I played with my friends and ex-friends ..."

"April 13 [France]
We went to a walled city where there are curches and the curch had nice windows. The name of the city was Carcassone.We headed to Spain. We got lost there ..."

"April 16th [France]
We stayed in Nimes Franse where we saw many Roman ruins. We went to the Acqa Duct. Where the water was brought to the city. I saw fifty catepillars in one line going across the street. Ten got run over so I took the catepillars across to the other side. I tuched poison ivy! We went to Avignon. i saw the pope's house (he lived in it a long time ago). It was nice ..."

"April 21 [Italy]
We left Turino (Turin). We drove to Milano where we got a campsite. We took a bus to town. We saw a mall that was 100 years old! We saw a curch with the most statues in the world! We bought a toy bird that can fly! We got little pizzas .I found the pizzas tasted just like at home. That made me home-sick ..."

"April 25th [Italy]
We went to Bologna (Boloney) They were having a parade to rember the war (the second war) we went on to Flornce fast!"

"April 30th [Italy]
We went to the Vatican and saw the Sisteen Chappel and the pope's house. Well, we spent the day there. Then we ate lunch. To tell the truth, we had lunch outside the pope's house. We went to Augustus Ceazer's toamb. We went to a park with many rest areas. Thank godeness! We hobbed on a train to our campsite ..."

"May 1st {Italy]
We got on a pony cart tour. We saw ruins by the donzens. We were rounding a corner when we saw a lot of police come, and more police, we heard two bomb noises. My dad could have sworn that that sworn that the boom were bombs. We got off our buggy and we walked ..."

"May 2nd [Italy]
We woke up and my dad went into town. Mom stayed with us. Mom did the laundry. That's all I can say..."

"May 3 [Italy]
We went to Tivoli Villa that was built in the 1500s. We saw the biggest collection of fountains. We went to Hardian's villas in ruins ... we had just got on the road, we saw armed men with mechine guns behind sand bags. I forgot to tell you about the terrorists. We drove to Pompie. At our campsite we met some kids from New Zealand. their names are Sarah, James and Anne. We played till 10:00! ..."

"May 6th [Italy]
...We saw a rainbow that ended in our campsite. No gold though ..."

"May 16th [Germany]
We saw a skeleton inside a glass coffin, half-dressed ... We saw tiny figures that moved when the clock struck 11:00am, or your time in America 3:00 am. We went to a science museum and saw things that you could push, pull, bend, twist, turn, mix, fix, drope, brake, phone, smell, ring, play...etc.It was really fun! We got back to our camper just 2 seconds before it rained!"

May 24 [Germany]
We went to Dozeldorf. We saw three museums. One was historical and had many pictures of people, places and things. The second was modern. The modern art was neat. The third was the art museum. The art museum had real neat glass.We drove to Hannover. We found a campsite. We saw a poor dead rabbit. I made a grave for it."

"May 26th [Denmark]
We spent the day in Copenhagen. We saw a prade full of people, one was on stilts five feet tall that was Uncle Sam. We saw more shops. We went to Tivoli fountains and gardens. I broke my record! I found three coins on the ground instead of one!"

"June 2nd [England]
Queeny day. We went to a British museum. The museum was famous for statues. Egypt, Rome, Greece and Syra. We went to a small bench and had lunch. We saw stores shops etc... we found another nice museum full of pictures. We saw Buchingham palace. We saw them get ready for the crown serimony. Fireworks and all ..."

"June 8 [England]
In Great Briten they have newspapers for kids! Full of comics like Mini the Minx Play Ball and Rodger dodger. We went to town after some churches ..."

"June 14 [England, last day]
We woke up and prepared for the train to take us and others to Gatwick airport. We got filled out and checked out ..."

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Why?

Mike, I have a fortune cookie fortune on my wall that says :
"do not compare yourself to others, you will be happier."

(I'll ILX ponder if that means you'll be happier if you don't compare yourself, or happier if you do compare yourself ...)

Regardless, I think this is a great thread, and I'm fascinated by all the answers -- brief and rambling, funny and sad, mellow and intense.
Will we have a thread to project what we'll be doing 10 years from now too?

this should read : "I'll _let_ ILX ponder if that ..."

*snickers*

My spelling and grammar is still awful!

:)

Mike, don't you dare!

These are the just the events that made us who we are. We're not comparing...

The question should be: "Will we remember to post about the things we'll be doing in 10 years?"

And yes, I sure hope so.

Welcome back, stripey, you've been missed.

Spot on. No one here will judge you, Mike, only take in your words....and perhaps apply them to their/our own lives.

- The days when we're served sausage stew in the school diner; I dread them weeks in advance, and I can feel the sauce sticking to my tongue and teeth (this I finally tell mum and dad about, and they're really good about it and call the teacher who allows me to go home for lunch those days. Dad comes home from work and makes me fried eggs and hamburgers instead and I love him so much for that).
- Me/my house/my school being smashed by a snowplough, with a loud engine, running me over with those big wheels and crushing me into a bloody mess. I run whenever I see a plough in the winter, heart racing and feet cold.
- My grandma looking down on me from heaven being displeased (she has died and I have attended my first funeral). I talk to her often in bed before I sleep at night, apologising and asking for advise.

My older brother and sister have moved away from home. I miss them so much, and I sometimes write letters to them but it's not the same. The weekends when they come home to visit are wonderful, mum cooks really great food and I cling to my brother like I was five and not ten.

My little sister is six, she's in pre-school. We all treat her like a baby, calling her cute names and pampering her. Of course we can't know that in 15 years she'll be gravely anorexic and still depending on mum to get by. And of course I can't know that I will be blaming myself for treating her like a baby all her life, as I'm sure all the other family members do too - though we won't ever discuss it.

I spend my days reading books. My best friend from last year has found a new best friend, and I try not to care though naturally I do. I hate sports and I feel chubby even though I'm really not.

fuk.

1974-
I am 10. I live in a mobile home park in Southern California.
My mom has thrown my dad out of the house, for good reason.
My little brother is 3. He has severe, emergency-room asthma.

My 30 year-old dad is living in a motel with his alcoholic brother and fucking an 18 year old who will then become pregnant and call my mom to cry about it.
My dad doesn't give us any money nor pay any child support (and never will).
There is no family to help, and no savings account or property.

He buys a TV on credit and forges my mom's name. Creditors come to the door on the weekend, my mom sends me to answer, I hand over the Carte Blanche card to the nice lady who cuts it in half.

When the phone rings I am instructed in the many things I must say in order to not have the family broken up by the state, as I am too young to legally be home alone. I do not want to go into foster care, so I memorize the lies as best I can.

My 30 year old mom, who has a high school education and no life experience is working from 11pm to 7am for $3.65 an hour in an electronics factory.

(Who is at home during the night you may well ask? Me. Taking care of my little brother).

She works from 3pm to 11pm cleaning offices and houses. She sleeps when we are at school.

I mow lawns, wash cars, and clean other people's houses in the neighborhood, where I am a target for every perv.

I change my brother's Toddler Pampers, make the food, go to the store, do the laundry as best I can, and deal with my Dad's drunken visits to the domicile. On the weekends I help my mom clean the day care/preschool where my brother goes in exchange for a discounted rate.

On Sunday we are sent to church on a bus.

That is when I was ten. Just the facts.

I live in the nicest house my family will ever live in, a large ranch on several acres of land in a nice rural community outside of Ann Arbor. The house is set into a hill, with the driveway going down into the garage which is underneath the house and opens into the basement. Our basement is huge, it's a big playroom for my two brothers and me. My brothers are 8 and 12, I'm the middle kid. We have 3 cats and a dog, a basset hound. I hate having to clean up the crap in the yard from the dog, I don't like her much but my dad does. Our back yard has a big hill, at the bottom of it is a sand lot and woods that stretch back to the river. In the spring, the woods get really swampy and patches of quicksand appear; luckily, none of us get stuck in it, though it's one of my greatest fears.

I have to live in a room with my little brother, but it's ok for the most part. It's a big room. We push our beds together at night sometimes and pretend we are in the cockpit of an AT-AT from star wars. I think star wars is possibly the best thing ever in the history of humankind, and am constantly trying to figure out how I can get to their galaxy somehow.

I read non-stop, and always have. My earliest memory is from right before I learned how to read at age 3, looking at words and knowing all the letters, very frustrated. I don't remember how I learned, but knowing how to read made the first 4 grades of school pretty boring, and I had teachers that would get angry with me because I would wander off to read while the other kids were being taught about Mr T and his Tall Teeth along with the other letters of the alphabet. My family didn't have TV because my dad said it would rot our brains. To this day, I think it was probably the best thing my parents ever did for us.

I'm smart in school, particularly because of my reading/comprehension skills. I'm only OK in math, but the reading and language skills are so high that I always get treated like a whiz kid anyway. We have a class called 'special projects' where I get to leave regular class and go to a different room with the other smart kids, including my friend Frank, and do things like go to the cemetery next to the school and make rubbings of the gravestone inscriptions with wax paper and crayons. Luckily, this year my teacher is Mrs. Wol***ger, who was the same teacher I had last year. She's young and really cool, she switched grades so she could be our teacher for two years, and just about every single kid got to be in her class again. She makes us learn how to square dance, though.

I'm kind of a slow social developer. I'm not really interested in girls for another year or so, I'm more interested in the army. When I stay at Frank's house, we get up in the middle of the night and dress up in army gear his dad has left over from Vietnam. We tramp around out in the country around his parent's house for hours in the dark. He also reads voraciously, we've both read 'the lord of the rings' and all kinds of Piers Anthony and other fantasy books. We don't stay such good friends in middle school, though we still hang out sometimes. My best friend is a kid named Matt who comes from a very poor family, their house is barely more than a broken down cottage. His mom is really depressing, she's divorced with three kids. I'm at their house a lot, but I try not to be around Matt's mom. Matt is not good in school, but he's a great natural artist, able to draw things with uncanny precision, and pretty creative. He also is obsessed with the army, so are our brothers. We play army all the time.

I paint a picture in art, a stencil painting of a bird on a branch, repeated four times with a different colored beak each time. It gets sent to Japan for an art exhibition and I forget about it; seven years later it is returned with a letter thanking me for it, matted and in a nice frame. It's on my wall right now. Things at home are starting to worry me a little. My parents fight more than ever, and it's really loud. Also, my dad is starting to get really violent. I'm beginning to realize that other kid's dads don't punish them quite like ours does. One time he comes home at night with my older brother, whose face is totally covered in blood and swollen up. He makes my brother go back out to the car and clean the blood off the seat. When we hear his car in the driveway at night, everyone hides and is quiet, even my mom. He is a respected political figure in our town. Kids pick on me because of who my dad is all the time.

I'm mediocre at sports, but still playing most of them. I like soccer a lot, and I play baseball and floor hockey, which I also really like. I can't watch sports on tv though, so I don't know as much about them as the other kids. When fifth grade starts, I'm in a different school. All the kids want to be like the older kids now. I don't get picked on quite as much, I'm a little more anonymous in this bigger school. I don't like my teacher because she patronizes me. I hate all adults that patronize me, and most of them try to do it.

I've just changed schools. I'd been at the first school since the age of 4 or 5. The school has a large playground with a long wall with goals painted along it. We play football at breaks and lunchtimes. Due to it's layout we can't have the two goals facing each other, so we have this odd arrangement where we choose two of the painted goals and play in a semi-circle between the two. I'm a good footballer and get asked to join a Sunday league side, the Red Rockets, but my parents tell me I'm not allowed. There's a field next to the school which we use during the summer months - years earlier the school needed to expand to take more kids and they built classroom huts on the edge of the field. There are three of them slightly raised off the ground. We can't get underneath them but we imagine that they must have rats underneath. The one that was my classroom for a year also has my Starsky & Hutch Ford Torino model car underneath somewhere. In the boys toilets, there's a pair of y-fronts stuck to the ceiling - no-one knows how they got there. There's also the sole of a shoe. My best friend's little brother points at it and says 'David Soul'. My friend Dan saw an episode of Starsky & Hutch while he was on holiday in France. He says that, over there, the theme tune goes "Star-skiiii A 'utch la-la-la-la-la-la".

It's a strange time at school because we don't really have a teacher. We have a continuous stream of supply teachers. I don't think there was a curriculum, as such, and I don't remember learning much at that time. For the 20-30 of us in this class it's a really odd time - there is a palpable sense of community within this class. All the other kids in our year have had proper teachers but we are the 'lost kids' who get the supply teachers. We like Hong Kong Phooey - someone has a book which he claims is the 'Hong Kong Phooey Guide to Kung-Fu'. A lot of my friends have the 'Spy's Guidebook' - it teaches you how to write in code, the best places to leave messages for fellow 'agents' and how to work out whether you neighbour is running a counterfeiting operation. We all want to be spies when we grow up. My friend Dan, who has all the Doctor Who books, also has the Grease soundtrack album performed by the Smurfs. Years later I find out that he was just playing the stardard album at 45rpm. There are two girls in my class that I like - Heidi and Louise. I like Heidi because no-one else in the world is called Heidi except for the one in Switzerland. Heidi wears her hair in plaits. I don't know exactly why I like Louise, but I do. She has long blonde hair and is quiet. I name my bunny after her.

I like it at this school and have many friends, life is good. Then I get uprooted from this school and placed in another, a Church of England school. The new school is smaller and all the kids know each other really well. I'm an outsider. I'm really unhappy. We do a lot of verbal reasoning tests, in preparation for the 11-plus exam. Because the older you are the more intelligent you should be, there's a sliding scale of percentage points that gets added to your score depending on your relative age to the class. Being born in March I get 5% added to my score. In the test I score 98% so my final mark is 103%. We haven't really covered percentages at the time but it still doesn't make sense. I'm moved into a the 'A'-stream (crazy fule), so have to join a new class of people I don't know. Again I lose all my friends.

Why did I have to change schools? Because my Mum had a dream where God told her to put me in a new school. Both my parents have become religious. My Dad is being confirmed. My Mum becomes a Sunday school teacher. I have to go to church on a Sunday. I join the church choir and have to sing at weddings (for which I get paid exactly one of God's English Pounds). Sitting at the front of a church looking at the congregation gives me a unique perspective. The front of the church is full of people who get dressed up to go to church as a social engagement not because they have any faith. I hate church but my parents tell me I have to go. At no point do I ever believe that there is a God.

Life at home is dull. My Dad doesn't like having visitors to the house and my Mum doesn't like me going to other peoples'. It's as if I'm locked away. I have a sister but she's two years younger than me and we don't play together. I spend most of my time playing with Lego. I like to make space ships because Star Wars rules. My ambition is to make a really big (well, life size) Millenium Falcon (and still is). I worry about colour with my Lego-making. I prefer to make things all in the same colour, or at least make the colour symmetrical. My Mum has a friend who lives around the corner who we visit once in a month of Sundays, her son used to me my best friend at my first school. He says that the other kids at the first school thought that I had died. We play Lego together and he mixes the colours up - blue blocks with red blocks with yellow blocks. Nutter.

I also draw a lot. My Dad brings home from work reams of A3 tractor-fed continuous paper for us to draw on. My sister likes to draw shoes. She draws a small shoe in the centre of a page and then starts a new sheet of paper. My Dad is annoyed by the wastage. I get to draw on the back of the sheets that my sister's used.

My Dad is becoming increasingly distant. He's got a strange sense of humour and he thinks if he's wacky enough (in a Mork kind of way) then that'll see him through his parental duties. My Dad collects the bits of moulded plastic that are stuck to bits of cardboard when you buy drawing pins, for example - I think they're called blister packs. He fills these with plaster and sticks them to a piece of wood and paints it in different shades of beige. He mounts it in a frame and on the back he signs it with his name and underneath '1945 - 2010'. I've never asked him about this. He also collects milk bottles - at the weekends he gets up early and drives out until he finds a small local milk float and buys a pint of milk. He takes these home, takes a rubbing of the embossed dairy logo on the bottle and stores the empties in the loft. We have milk delivered but sometimes the top of the milk has been drunk. My Dad thinks it's the paperboy. He gets a fresh bottle of milk and carefully removes the foil cap and transfers the milk to another container. He washes out the bottle and then carefully fills it with white emulsion paint, replaces the foil cap and gets up early the next day to switch it with what the milkman brings. We stop getting the papers delivered.

My Dad's side of the family live far, far away in Kent, and visit rarely. My paternal grandmother adores my sister. We're in the kitchen and my sister, done up like a princess, has just flounced out of the room. My grandmother says to me "Don't worry, we can't all be beautiful" and follows her out of the room while I sit alone in the kitchen and cry into the sleeves of my Superman costume. All the attention and pressure on my sister will drive her into anorexia. Without any attention nothing as drastic happens to me, I got off lightly, but I will turn into a lonely, depressed teenager who finds it difficult to relate to other people and who will fail several A-levels and whose mother will beg him to say that he's on drugs, because she can't understand what went so very wrong. And so the fun began.

Hmmm, 1988. My family came back to England from Pakistan a year ago and moved down to Kent from the house we’d kept in Market Harborough all the years we were living abroad (since I was 2). I didn’t want to move to Rochester, as it sounds like ‘rot’. I like our new house, although the stair well is really big and dark at night, when the Victorian floorboards also creak because of temperature and humidity differences. We moved just after the big 1987 hurricane, and I kind of feel left out because our house roof didn’t get blown off. Dad's around intermittently, but still off freelancing in places like Bangladesh and Bhutan, but we've settled down as my sister is going to senior school next year, which is a good thing as she can't really handle it at our current school.

I’ve been going there for a while, and am learning lots of swear words. I didn’t know any before, and got told off one evening at dinner a little while ago for calling Eleanor a twat, when I’d just that second made the word up as a variation on ‘twit’. Some of the kids in my class don’t believe me when I tell them that I’ve lived in other countries, and I have to ask my mum if I can take a photograph from one of the albums in to show them. I have a pathological fear of not being believed when I really am telling the truth, and get hot and flustered when someone accuses me of lying. I am also starting to deal with being continually being called posh, when I just know a lot of words and how to pronounce them. I am busted one day for having painted the word ‘fluorescent’ in bright green on a piece of card that could have very well been used for lots of things if I hadn’t been so wasteful. They knew it was me because I’d spelt it correctly. One day a boy from the top class (which I will be in next year, when we will have to take peculiarly easy logic tests and copy out our best essays and send them off for the 11-plus people to look at) who has previously been known as the best person for drawing in the school, challenges me to a draw-off, as I have built up a reputation. I do a nice picture of a little fawn (I am a combination of very twee and horribly cynical at this time) in pastels on paper that isn’t really right and has the texture of cheap shiny bog roll and whup his ass to unanimous voting by all his mates. I can’t remember what he drew, but he is pissed off. It will be another year before I have an ongoing battle with the blonde chunky Daniel in my class as to who will win the weekly quickfire maths test set by the bestest teacher in the world, Mr Bryant.

I work out that boys testicles really are that sensitive when, after being goaded and asked by a friend to kick him in the groin, I do, and he doubles up in horrible pain. He obviously didn’t know either, or thought he was a superman or something. He doesn’t retaliate, as he is a good sport and walks home part of the way with me from school. I don’t think he fancies me though, and I don’t really like any of the boys at school. They’re all dumb apart from Neil, and he’s a little cross-eyed and shorter than me, so that’ll never work, haha.

I am a show-off and immensely arrogant, but also terrified of too much attention. I sort of want the fashionable toys and particularly Wallaby shoes that some of the kids have, but not really as I have a sneaking feeling that they’re really stupid. My favourite recording artistes are Jive Bunny, Billy Ocean, Madonna and the Academy of St Martins In The Fields (for their recording of minor Vivaldi concerti). This year I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen for the first time, and think it’s ultimately cool. I still do.

I wish I had an Amiga like my friend Barry. His dad is a computer expert and a very strange man. When I once told him my family ate kosher, he asked me if I thought god would strike me down with lightning if I ate a pork sausage. I said I didn't think so. He is very grumpy and I don't like him being around. He also lets Barry watch stuff like Monty Python, Blackadder, and Not The Nine O'Clock News. I have never seen these before, but I watch them when I'm over at Barry's house and they are very funny.

I still have to go to Hebrew school every Sunday and I hate it. I think it is funny that we use a local Catholic school for our Hebrew classes and so there is a big statue of Jesus on the cross on the wall. In the week, I go to an all-boys school, so it is strange to see girls at Hebrew school, though sometimes they have differenet classes from us. I have a really big crush on Samantha Robin, but she is angry with me because me and another boy found a ribbon and started pulling it and playing with it and it turned out to be hers.

I really like pop music. I saw Michael Jackson and Kim Wilde at Wembley last year, and I also just saw MC Hammer and Snap, which was amazing! I read Smash Hits but I don't understand all of the jokes. I also listen to the radio and tape songs I like off of it, then record myself making announcements between them. My friend Daniel's brother also made me a tape with James Brown and LL Cool J on it. I listen to it until it breaks.

I am doing really well at school, especially English, because I have got the highest marks for every story essay ALL year, except for once when my friend Ian won. I LOVE writing stories and write in a sketchbook at home as well as at school. For some reason, I am good at everything except science. I get bullied a bit by some of the boys in the year above me, but people in my class know that I am funny so they like me. Soon those older boys will leave, I hope.

Every Friday I have to go and see a child psychologist in hampstead called Mrs Luchiani. It is because my teachers and my parents think that I have a very bad temper. I guess I do, but I enjoy having a bad temper, it is something I use to protect myself because I am quiet small. I think that they are all overreacting, but I had to start doing this because I beat up my friend Adam P1nk3rf13ld after school when he went around telling everyone that I am the devil. Mrs Luchiani is strange, she gets me to talk about my week and draw pictures. I mostly draw pictures of Garfield and Disney characters, which I am very good at drawing. Sometimes we just sit in silence and this makes me very uncomfortable.

Every Friday, my mum takes me to variety Video in Belmont Circle and I rent a film. She lets me watch most things even though I am young, and I see a lot of Steve Gutenberg and John Candy movies, as well as horror films like Poltergeist whcih scare me. I genuinely believe in ghosts and psychic phenomena, especially after my grandmother died and my mum says that she saw her ghost sitting on my aunt's sofa. I am also terrified of the possibility of World War III and a new holocaust, and have lots of nightmares about concentration camps and Nazis. I am convinced that a World War could start literally overnight without warning, and that people would come knocking on our door to take us away because we were Jewish. One night, there was an illegal rave in a field close to our house. I heard all the shouting and police helicopters overhead and was convinced that it was the beginning of the end.

Not much in the beging of being ten year old me. I had just started growing acustom to being the smartest one in the calss. Then Fourth grade was over. I went to NYC for a week during summer break. Spent the rest of summer in summer school. A couple of my friends were in the same summer school. Then I was off to Fifth grade.

In fifth grade a few things changed. As we all know, 9/11 happened. That was quite a day for a ten year old. You know, your grandma waking up at six in the morning and then minutes later wake you up by screamming at the television. Well, something else happened that year. A girl I only knew through one of my friend's sister had skipped a grade. She ended up in my class. So now it was, will Aja still be the smartest one? I think I was.

What else happened was the first time I was accused of liking boys. I was always a tomboy, and still am, so it was strange that I would like boys this young. The truth was, I didn't like any boys. I had however become friends with more boys, especially a boy named Luis. He is like the kind boy who doesn't play sports. So then every one was saying I liked him. That was so wrong. He liked me. He even told me. I decided I still wanted to be his friend. He says he doesn't liek me any more but others say he does. I don't care. We became good friends when we started talking about the Simpsons everyday. I hadn't quite discovered music yet, so it was all about the Simpsons.

Nothing much else happened. It was pretty much the same as all the other years of my life.

I thought I was gay. (I wasn't).

I thought I was pretty cool (I wasn't).

I thought that I could communicate complex thoughts nonverbally with my dog. (Unproven).

I thought there could be no better friend in the world than J3r2mi4h King. (There could, and dissecting cow's hearts wasn't fun).

I thought that sex involved ice cubes and pee. (Occasionally, unfortunately, true).

I thought that if I sat on the swingset and closed my eyes and fantasized about ice cubes and pee and a certain girl in my class nobody could tell. (They could: it was the raging hard-on that gave it away.)

I went by "J.C." and I spelled it "Jaycee." (Why, why, why?)

I read Watership Down for a book report and got my first F, 'cus my teacher didn't believe I could understand it. (Marxist bunnies!)

Physically yes, but mentally?

Physically yes, but mentally?

mentally, he's 30

The housemaster is Quack Mendl. He calls me the "the fairy footballer" and, in exchange for exemption from corporal punishment, tries to recruit me as a spy. When I tell my parents proudly about this they say "I hope you're not turning into a clipe". I learn my lesson. I try to teach the other boys how to masturbate (it somehow involves crushing a piece of paper against the mattress with your genitals) but they feign incomprehension. Or perhaps they aren't actually doing it yet.

I'm top in English and bottom in everything else. They call me "Nidge" because my initials are N.J. Or sometimes "Rabbit", because I have rabbity front teeth. I doodle on my school jotters and riff so fast during guitar lessons that the teacher tells me to slow down. I run everywhere, playing a game called "Greek Drivers" which involves overtaking on blind corners. I win a drawing prize and appear as Black Patch The Pirate in a school play called "Ultima Ora", the last shore. I completely fail to memorize my lines, and improvise instead. I'm invited to sing at the boarding house end-of-year concert. I do an acoustic guitar version of "She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain" and everybody joins in. Callum Campbell, who I love but also hate because he's good-looking but also savage, tries to get people to call me "Humperstink" because I'm a singer, but the name doesn't stick.

My cassette tape recorder gets confiscated. Transistor radios are banned in the boarding house, but housemaster Quack has never seen a tape recorder before, and it's not included in the rules. He takes it anyway. He also confiscates a book of sheet music from "Hair", sex manual "The Little Red Schoolbook" and a US military cap I wear in bed. I'm reading Gerald Durrell and Paul Gallico and Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall".

I only really feel happy in the holidays, riding my yellow bike around the "fast routes" of Psychiko with my brother Mark, listening to the cicadas, playing with other ex-pat kids like Sisi and Lala, the hippy twins, or Martina, the American girl with the glass cube house. Highlight of the year is probably singing "Hey Jude" with the garage band belonging to "Monster", a rich American teen who lives in a big Hardy Boys house along Narkissou. I've never sung with a band before.

when i was ten i had just moved to brighton, brisbane, australia from margate in redlcliffe. (like a five min drive from my old house)i came to a new school and was surprised at how small it was (350/360 kids), i was givin (literally) a friend named alicia and i hated it, but she was the only one who would sit with me so i sorta just blocked it all out. i had friends in my grade that i could talk to but in lunch hrs and stuff they went off and i just didnt fit in. i stayed at alicias once (please never again!!!) and she was trying to give me alchohol (i was ten!!)but i didnt drink, after that i got a bf and she was like "its between me and him choose" and i choose her (who else would sit with me), my bf ran downstairs wen i told him i chose her and started hitting his head on a brick wall. 3yrs he got a brain tuma and had to go thruough kemo ect.. hes getting a lot better thank good but i cant help think that part of that all was my fault. but everyone says it was when he went head over heels off his bike. lots of people hated me in primary school because i told them what i thought of them. alicia turned nasty so i told he to get lost. then i found friends that i knew i was going to be friends for life with. brooke, kara and jacob. we were best friends for nearly 2 yrs and brooke, jacob and i all went to high school while kara went to a diff school, we all still keep in contact with her and i can tell you that even though when i wa 10 i hated most of it, i made the best friends that will always be there for me and that truely makes me happy.

My best friend Tricia Murphy said that Kevin Dunn's parents told him the facts of life right there at the dinner table. I am stunned by this information, mostly becuase I don't know what the facts of life are. When I asked my mother, she told me alot about birds and eggs, and then handed me a book about bees.
I feel that "the facts of life' are, indeed FACTS - and RULES - that everyone will become privy to as they grow older. Kind of like going from brownie to girl scout.
FACT: Work hard and you will progress.
That sort of thing.
I feel that my goal should be to figure out "the facts of life".
I am devastated when I realize it's just sex.

School starts and I have the teacher known for strict alphabetical order and forcing people to learn all the state capitals by heart. A boy I barely know let a crush on me fester all summer. He presents me, silently, with a thick handful of notepaper on which he has written my name, over and over, 4 columns to a side, each side, 5 whole sheets. I will still have these in my possession, 35 years later. Although we continue through school together for 7 more years, we never mention this incident. This is the year I want to be a detective. We have to write formal letters as a class assignment, so I write to President Richard Nixon, informing him of my current skills with cyphers and codes, asking for a job with the FBI.

I earn some money by babysitting for various neighbors on our quiet street and use it to buy an MIA bracelet. My parents (mostly my mother, for some reason) and I fight about it. I will wear it every day until I am 15.

My mother plays piano and our house rings with the music. We have a turntable in the living room and my sister and I play Tom Lehrer's album, the one with the red, white and black cover, with the devil playing a curving keyboard, over and over again, until we have it all memorized. Then we produce skits, acting out the songs. I don't understand the implications of My Home Town or The Old Dope Peddler for two or three more years. We see the high school production of Annie Get Your Gun. I fall in love with the guy who plays the lead.

Toward the end of the school year as my 11th birthday approaches, I proceed to fall in love with a boy in my class (not the one who had the crush) and scheme up a way to kiss him. Quite cleverly I say "Let me tell you a secret" and when he leans down I kiss him by the ear. He doesn't realize what has happened, wants to know what secret. I am overcome with something, possibly shame, and can not speak to him until we are seniors in high school.

It is a good year. The next year, life started falling apart, but when I am 10, things are okay.

~Rambling of a Procrastinator~

"Thank you, come again" - Apu from Simpsons

http://www.subsidesports.de/de/images/product/large/livass92.gif

- and wore the whole thing with pride. My best friends were M4rk Ashcr0ft and Ne1l Bra1den and on Saturday afternoons we used to go to each others' houses to play football outside and video games. Mark had Streetfighter II on the SNES so we used to play that a lot though I wasn't very good. When we went to Neil's we sometimes played Subbuteo though I could never really see the appeal. The prettiest girl in my class was called C4ther1ne Wyl13. She was beautiful but way out of my league. I fancied Judy Ch4n but she ended up going out with Neil, despite sending both of us Valentine's cards. I was sad but not surprised. He was funnier and better at football than me. And not as nerdy. I was one of the brightest in my class and used to have healthy rivalry with J0hn Denn1s0n and Ph1l1p And3rson for who would come top in class tests. I got 76/80 once in a mock 11+ - we did these every week. Once J0hn got 78 and I was a bit jealous. I'd never beat that.

When I was 10 my (paternal) Grandpa died. Mum got the phone call just as we were coming home one day and, crying, told us to stay in the car - presumably so we wouldn't hear it from someone else. The Troubles were still going on (I'm from NI) so I thought there might be a bomb in the house. There wasn't, but there was much crying when Dad got home. Mum and Dad didn't take us to the funeral, which I'm still not happy about. We were far too overprotected. We went to a memorial service a couple of weeks later though. I liked Grandpa - he always gave us Mr Kipling's almond slices when we went to his flat, and he had a moustache that bristled when he kissed me.

My brother and I were childminded by a friend of my mum's called Etta. We went to her house after school and during the holidays. I hated having to get up early all summer, but we could watch TV and play football in their huge garden with her boys, who were both older than us. They were pretty cool, and liked bands like Nirvana, the Chilis, Dead Kennedys, Alice In Chains and Mudhoney. I was a little intimidated by this stuff.

In all, I was a happy ten-year old, but probably a bit too precocious and nerdy for my own good. This would catch up on me at "big school".

6th grade.

Only been in North Florida less than a year.

Breakdancing, although very bad at it.

Hip-Hop fanatic!

I asked the Black girl in my class what she listened to hoping for the presumptious answer of the R&B/rap station Magic 95, but she said "Rock". I said "hard rock or soft". "Hard". Asked her about Quiet Riot and she never heard of them. (?!)

Remember seeing The Disco 3 on Video Soul. They announced they were going to change their name to The Fat Boys. Then they spat all over the place.

I began spitting all over the place.

The next door neighbor insisted on calling me a "Yankee".

I discovered the Lifetime Network and the Regis Philbin show. Thought I was on some underground shit.

Couldn't understand why I had gone from being the class comedian in Michigan to a total outcast in Florida.

Now know they were rednecks.

It was 1988, jeans were pegged and parachute pants were aplenty. I was a 5th grade student at Southern Elementary, here in Lexington, KY. I'm not sure what was big on the radio, but I owned 2 cassette tapes at the time: TMBG's debut LP and Fishbone's debut EP. I probably only knew who either of them were because of my dad.

I had a crush on a girl named Erin Gr4bh4m. Twice I had dreams of rescuing her from mountain lions wtf. Names kids called me: "Nicky Fumes" and "Stinkweed", insinuating that I smelled bad. I showered daily and even began wearing cologne, but they continued to berate me for my supposed consistant unpleasant odors. I promise I wasn't a farting machine or anything.

This year I had a friend whose name was also Nick, he was a year younger than me, and smaller, hence we were called "Big Nick" and "Little Nick". His sister was a 14 year old classic babe-in-disguise, her hotness masked by monstrous glasses and a horrible hairdo. (I remember this because it was around this time I got my first erection.) He shoplifted a LOT and after awhile I tried it too. I shoplifted a couple candy bars, a plastic parachute man, etc., until once my mom caught me and made me return the stuff to the store. I was then grounded for 2 weeks, during which time I took apart a crappy TV and never successfully put it back together.

(What I remember about 1998...A) I threw an awesome Halloween party, and B) I knocked up my girlfriend.)

Okay, sorry, back to 10 years old.

Oh yeah, crushes, schools, bands, and stuff...

In the 5th grade portion, I like some girl who's name I can't even remember now (lame). I kinda overheard her telling a mutual friend that she "liked that new guy because he looked like Ricky Shroder" (for the record, I grew up to look more like Gary Oldman -- oddly enough, I'm Mexican). Anyway, never had the balzac to make a 10 year old move on her.

In the 6th grade portion, I like Jennifer B, only because the puerto rican guy in the class told his friend that "she looked kinda good wearing a tie". This may've been my first lesson in fashion as a turn on. Frankly, she wasn't necessarily pretty, but just having someone else put her attire in a new perspective was enough to carry me for the whole year. We were nothing more than acquantances though.

During high school, my music partner had dated her in 9th grade or something. I had so many crushes during that span that I never even thought to mention to him that I had a crush on her in 6th grade.

As far as that 5th grade-9th grade era, I attended 8 schools in 5 years.

The Jacksonville Florida school system had these crappy "centers" instead of proper middle schools (6th grade center, 7th grade center, etc)...and my parents being new to Florida and haven't yet found their niche moved once a year in the middle of each year.

I always tried to get my friends into a "band" also. I'd scavenger their houe for "instruments", which always turned out to be their younger siblings toy piano or something. I was the jackass that'd actually try to charge neighborhood kids to watch us "perform" in the backyard.

Major fears at the time: probably quicksand, dinosaurs, and anything I'd seen/read in a scary book. (Somehow I managed to get my mother to let me read The Amityville Horror, which spooked me).

I'm going to visit that dam for the first time as an adult in two weeks.

I didn't know you were from Orange County. I'm sorry.

I had to create a recipe in a class using all metric measurements. I forgot to do it, so my recipe that I came up with at the last minute was 1 glass of 7-up and 1 scoop of Wyler's (powdered drink mix.) (Fuck me if that ain't metric too.)

It was a drought year and the president was telling everybody to conserve energy, so I remember being reminded and scolded a lot for wasting water and leaving lights on. It was hot all spring, summer, and fall, yellow and sere. I remember going down to the Valley with my dad and Yosemite Falls was a mere trickle.

I read or re-read a lot of history that year, Churchill, Bruce Catton, and various books on the Civil War. We had an old mattress on our porch that I would lay down on with my book and read, mostly oblivious to the mule deer on our 'lawn', or the raucous cries of the scrub jays. I wrote this a month or so ago about my cat at the time:

"...Trinka. I still picture her often sitting still, silent and leopard-like on the branch of an oak tree, her tortoise-shell coat the perfect camouflage in an early autumnal tree, so that the only thing that ever gave her away was the occasional flick of her tail. I remember her 'hunting' the deer and I remember the rage visible in her eyes when her gift of a bushbunny left a deep red stain in the middle of the white living room rug and she and it were tossed outside. I remember how she would very lightly rub her cool nose against mine to wake me in the middle of the night if she wanted me to pet her. I remember"..."'camping' on an old mattress on the front porch stubbornly refusing to re-engage with civilized living, watching the moon in the midnight blue sky strewn with millions of stars, and listening as Trinka, or the deer, or who knew what else rustled quietly through the yellowed grasses and crackling leaves in the penumbra."

My best friend was the son of the caretaker of the SDA summer camp across the South Fork of the Merced and about a mile down. Since we were godless hippies and his parents weren't always fond of sending him over and since my dad was often working, after school I'd go over to his place, where we had the run of the camp. We used to race golf carts up and down the property which snaked up a hill, or play starter pistol tag, which consisted of trying to sneak up on each other and shoot a starter pistol at the other. After an hour of creeping silently through a forest, when somebody surprises you by jumping out behind you and firing, the loud report maxes out your adrenaline and then reverberates eerily through the trees.

I went to grammar school about an hour outside the park in a town called Oakhurst. I remember scrimping loose change from around the house so that I, a lactose-intolerant child on a supposedly dairy-free diet, could buy an eskimo pie when I got off the school bus before my mile long hike back to our house. I listened to a radio station out of Fresno that played 60's and contemporary rock mostly but I remember loads of disco, some of which I liked and some of which I found boring. Looking at the top 40 for that year, I see some things that I liked at the time, but it wasn't a great year, musically for me.

That fall my mother tried to kidnap me for the last time, playing on my divided loyalties to her and to my father and I felt immensely guilty afterwards that, when faced with the choice of living with my heartbroken dad in Yosemite (his wife had recently left him) or my then-nutso mom, even more nutso step-father, and trapped brothers in the San Fernando Valley, I hadn't had the courage to be more forthright to my mother and tell her categorically that she lived in a dysfunctional household in one of the state's many armpits. More than any other thing, I hold that feeling of guilt against my mother, who should have known better.

Two years later we moved to Marin.

I just went back and reread that -- nothing twatty or self-important that I can make out: it just reads like a glimpse of a real life; it's coherent and it's moving, like so many others on this thread.

It's sounding twatty or self-important (or incoherent or just plain fucked up) that's preventing me from trying this... even though I love most of the entries here.

It's 1996-97. I live in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a quite dull suburb of DC. I'm quite happy. I'm in fifth grade at good old Somerset Elementary. My teacher is the same as last year, a friend of my family, who had his finger bitten off by a dead shark while living in the Marshall Islands (where I lived for half a year). He's a wonderful teacher - still sends us letters occasionally. I often stay behind after school to help clean up the room. I don't really know why, it's something that I do. Our class of 30 has 3 Ukrainians in it. More Ukrainians than blacks.

I'm still good friends with my neighbors, and my best friend lives in the house just down from mine. We play basketball sometimes, but he's a foot taller than me, and it's not the most fun thing in the world. I'm short, did I mention? Very short. My dad tells me that he was the shortest kid in his class for a long time.

We have guinea pigs. Lots of 'em. This may be the year we had 12.

I am woefully unaware of pop culture. I do love the Simpsons, but my family never watches sitcoms, and the only TV is in my parents' room. When I listen to the radio, it's either the oldies station or baseball games. It's not until 6th grade that my friends start extolling the virtues of No Doubt and Third Eye Blind. I have no concept of rap music. (I don't think I've fully stressed how very white my neighborhood is.) I barely listen to any music that my dad doesn't like. I feel somewhat ashamed when I turn out to like a song that my dad hates. Luckily for the future me, he liked a lot of great music.

I think my obsession with baseball is around its height at this point. The Orioles are my team, and I follow every game. They're actually good in 1996, and make it to the playoffs. I watch as Jeffrey Maier gives the Yankees a home run, and the team melts down. I wish death upon him. I play in little league - I think this is around when I started pitching. I was great - I could throw strikes, and since no one was used to hitting balls pitched by humans, I could strike people out all the time. Later, of course, they learned to hit, and my star dimmed gradually. I went back to playing the infield. I have a screen set up in my back yard, which I can pitch balls at, and they come back either in the air or as grounder, depending on where I throw it. I work out entire games in my head. I usually win.

I go to camp in Washington State at the end of fifth grade. My parents want me and my sister out of their hair as they help my grandparents move from their beautiful but horribly located home in Seattle to a nice but rather nondescript apartment. Camp is okay. I only seem to get the hang of it by the last few days. A number of the kids in my tents have just discovered swearing and girls, so you can imagine the conversations. I don't have much to contribute. I'm sad about losing my grandparents' house. There was a huge grey room on the bottom floor, filled with piping and old rubbish, where I could find all kinds of things, most notably an electric chord organ.

In school I'm probably irritatingly smart. I get placed in an elite vocabulary group with 3 or 4 other people. We get "existential" as a vocab word, and have a unit on banned books. This was the same school that last year assigned us to read an essay by Vaclav Havel, which had a number of veiled references to the dark secrets of European leaders. Of course, the banned books aren't all that dirty - one of them was banned for the use of the phrase "armpit fart." We have sex ed this year, and everyone's very giggly. I still feel terrible for suggesting that one of the girls in the video looks like a classmate of mine. She didn't actually get teased much about it, but it was a mean thing to do, and I like(d) her.

What am I reading? This one's tough. Most of my favorites - the Moomins, Five Children and It, Hitchhiker's Guide - I first read in third grade. I'm a huge Daniel Pinkwater fan. Occasionally I try pointing metal objects at my sister while saying, "You are in my power. You must obey." I'm probably reading a bunch of baseball-related books. I can't remember when I started reading Ray Bradbury, or when my dad recommended that I read The Circus of Dr. Lao. The idea of staying up late reading, far past my bed time, makes me happy. I love Pogo, thanks to my parents, but I haven't quite figured out Krazy Kat. My family has a tendency to talk in Pogo dialect amongst ourselves.

My family has a house in rural Virginia, which we visit on weekends. It's marvelous - I think there's still a creek flowing right by it into a swimming hole at this point, where my sister and I swim and catch tadpoles in the spring. It may be around this time that the first of two massive floods hits the region, floods that are only supposed to happen every 500 years. Massive mudslides occur on the Blue Ridge Mountains, houses are lost, the landscape looks markedly different. The place has changed drastically, and I just want it to go back to the way it was, and I know that it won't. Some things are repaired - the main river, which ended up flowing throwgh a cow pasture, is moved back within its banks, and our creek comes back for a time. Still wonderful, but not quite the same.

I may have been older than 10, but I want to write about this anyway. There's one day in Virginia when I start thinking about memory, about how most of what I see and think today is going to end up lost. So I decide to remember certain things. I remember a bee flying back and forth in the sun. I remember a small fish, swimming in the middle of the creek. I remember a flower petal on the ground, even though I decided not to choose to remember that one, as it would be trite and precious.

The end of elementary school makes me a bit sad. Well, not the end of school, but the horrible anticipation of middle school. No more recess is a pretty depressing thought. Near the end of fifth grade, in our music class, two twins in the class perform a song for us. I can't remember for the life of me what it was called, or what the lyrics or tune were. Something to do with fishing, maybe? But I find it tremendously moving. It gives me the image of people separated by water, or floating away. It feels like a farewell.

I don't think I've ever written this much about any one part of my life. This thread is amazing. I like that even the googlers feel inspired enough to tell a group of strangers all about their lives.

As I said way upthread:

...I've recently got a camera for the first time

And in digging through old photo albums and scanning some selections up onto Flickr I've got visual references for my post about being 10:

I would be living on the third floor of the duplex my family got at Mare Island, a naval base in the north part of San Francisco Bay.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3174/2674577905_44518a2a6d.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3042/2674577993_bb5552c0e3.jpg

I have my dear first hamster Tory in a cage opposite my bed

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3090/2674577943_f72edf76f1.jpg

(I still have and use that desk.)

Not referred to in that post but illustrative -- the family dog Sally:

Me in the middle of this Webelos den line-up, my dad right behind me:

Flowers near the back door steps:

...and happy birthday to me:

...since I actually got this camera for that tenth birthday.

Bah, totally forgot about the three photo limit. Once again:

Me in the middle of this Webelos den line-up, my dad right behind me:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3230/2675397266_7857aff6c2.jpg

Flowers near the back door steps:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3158/2675397116_4e520ec866.jpg

...and happy birthday to me:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3033/2675441754_beabea85c9.jpg

...since I actually got this camera for that tenth birthday.

Also, I realize that desk comment makes no sense without the second photo that should have gone with it:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3266/2674578019_e2d736e568.jpg

awesome tiger poster!

And Sally:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3138/2674577973_5a3c15c8e0.jpg

Yeah the tiger poster, as with the koala one, would have been from National Geographic's World magazine, their for-kids spinoff.

oh i am familiar with the national geographic kids mag posters

i probably had that tiger poster when i was a few years younger than you!

yeah i loved natl geographic world. some relative or other gave that as a gift to me and my sister a few years running.

:-D

i have no idea how you folks have been able to do this.
so much heartwarming detail.
wonderful thread.
like some others, my life pre 18 years of age is full of memory blanks.
such a situation keeps me sane.
here's some random thoughts as to the 10th year i lived.
1978 :
i live in addingham (near ilkley where there are some moors.), on a new estate thats still being built while we here.
these half built houses are the best playground ever.
dad is unemployed again.
arguments.
traditional drunken car crash at christmas time.
arguments. alcohol. bullying.
i watch top of the pops religiously.
i saw a video of someone called Sid Vicious is performing C'mon Everybody while riding a motorbike in his grotty pants, he makes me laugh.
not really bothered about music, but i have a few 7" singles that my parents gave me that i play on a great little orange 7" record player. you push the single in the front, and the music comes out of the top. when you press the button to release the record it flys out really fast.
great fun.
i really like that song called "Mr Blue Sky" thats on Radio 2 all the time.
my younger sister gets on my nerves, she does bad stuff, and i get into trouble.
i'm sure its just a phase and we'll become best friends later.

i saw a video of someone called Sid Vicious is performing C'mon Everybody while riding a motorbike in his grotty pants, he makes me laugh

oops. not released until 1979 - i got that wrong.

WELL JEEZ, Mark. Can we trust you again.

you wouldn't be the first to ask me that ned.

Great photos, Ned! Love the posters.

This is an amazing thread.

1995 wasn't that long ago. My parents still live in the house we lived in then. This was a year before my dad finally got around to building my room in the attic so I was still sleeping in their room at that age.

Was kind of a tomboy but had a crush on dorky classmate in glasses who used to skateboard at the playground behind my house. He liked Guns 'n' Roses and Aerosmith. I thought he was the coolest person my age I had ever met. (We were in the same class again three years later and he turned out to be a 13-year-old jerk. Go figure.)

Stephen King's IT, The Sound of Music, The Nightmare Before Christmas, ET, and Beetlejuice were my VCR staples. But my brother and I also watched loads of movies that year from the laser disc (!!) rental store - needless to say, the store didn't last long and afaik was the only one of its kind in the country. but it was great for a couple of years and we taped tons of movies from LDs. mostly stuff that never made it to theatres in Malaysia or that I was too young for and my brother, at 17/18, was just right for. he'd cover my eyes during teh nekkid bits in such films as The Crow, Mallrats and Michael Crichton/Wesley Snipes thriller Rising Sun.

Went to Denmark for a couple of weeks with my dad to visit my mum who was in Copenhagen on a three-month teaching exchange. Saw the Royal Danish Ballet do A Midsummer Night's Dream, which triggered my life-long love of dance and visited Legoland, which quickly became my favourite place in the world.

Learnt about sex. Reaction: *scrunched-up nose*

I spent a lot of time at my best friend's - she was girlier and funnier than me (still is, we're still best buds) and I was insanely jealous that her parents let her keep hamsters and mine didn't. I also spent a lot of time at my other best friend's. she and her sisters were X-files nuts and got me into the show heavily.

I listened to whatever my older brother did which was a lot of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and NWA and Snoop and lol Boys II Men. God he really loved that "End of the Road". note: Malaysia, at the time, was nearly always about two years late on any Western pop trends so my brother was just about otm in his musical tastes.

Prince of Persia and Skunny on PC, Sonic on Sega Game Gear.

Read tons of Enid Blyton girls' school books and Roald Dahl. But my favourite book was a collection of Greek myths.

Which was directly connected to my love of astronomy. Knew every constellation and the myths behind them. (When my room was finally built the next year, it had a low ceiling and I painstakingly used tiny glow-in-the-dark star stickers to map out the sky.)

I had chickenpox and got to skip school for two weeks AND got a Lego space shuttle set to keep me busy. As far as toys went, I never did like girls' toys and thought dolls were boring. Loved that Lego set, and all the Lego I inherited from my older siblings.

Loved bubble baths and spent hours in the tub with my awesome ship, also built from Lego. It had removable weights on the bottom to keep it from capsizing - I've never seen such weights on any new Lego since.

I've mentioned my brother a lot but I have an older sister too. She was studying in Iowa at this time.

Quit piano lessons, a decision I regret to this day.

love this thread. can't remember being ten!

Eleven years of posting here and coming across something as remarkable as CB's post, something as memorable as Liz's, something as familiar as Ned's stickers on a mirror -- all for the first time.

I guess it's why I keep coming back.

man this thread

i love you all tbh

I really liked K'Nex, "Jellyhead" by Crush, and watching QVC

my best friend at school was a skinny redhead named tony -- have no idea what happened to him after that year. we were both obsessed with the animorphs books.
my parents gave me my own room in the basement and helped me decorate it with all space stuff (a national geographic poster of the local galaxies, an airbrush painting of some planets, "a new hope" poster, silver foil wallpaper).
i got earthbound for xmas (with the giant box and the players guide with the stinky scratch n' sniff stickers).
we got a jack russell terrier named lucy, who was the family dog until she died just a couple years ago. best dog ever.
had a huge collection of rocks and minerals, meticulously ordered and labeled. often i'd line them all up in a long row and stare at them for what felt like hours.
my favorite music was a cassette of the jurassic park score that i'd listen to on a boombox with my ear right up to the speaker.
i probably still had a bowl haircut.

I found out that the "auntie" who was hogging my bed as I was relegated to the floor was actually my half sister.
I was knocking about with a future serial killer and a violent heroin addict gangster at school and never felt in any kind of peril.
Me + my older brother frequented a computer club above a town centre pub and progressed from wanting a Sharp MZ80k to a Commodore 64. He is now a big-shot programmer living in Dubai and I am me!
Went to this weird cunt's house a couple of times for First Confirmation preparation, rebelled against it. I wasn't That rebellious, cos I still turned up to be confirmed by Bishop Fuck-face or whoever!

I was wholesome and I liked to bake things with my grandmother

In the fall of 1978, I was in the sixth grade at St. George's School in Spokane, WA, my family having just relocated from Bethesda, MD. It was horrid, as I missed my old friends and school. Over the summer I had gone to camp in Maine, which was more horrid still, as I could make no sense of the culture and hated most everyone around me. Worse, I had tried to feel up a boy who seemed approachable, but he freaked out and called me a "faggot" and ran away yelling about it. The spectre of this, the idea that all the other kids were whispering unheard behind my back, hung over the rest of the summer.

In Spokane, I was meant to be memorizing my times tables but did not. As a result, I had to stay back in class every Friday as the other kids went to the roller rink, our reward for proper recitation. I knew this was meant to be a humiliating punishment, but I rather enjoyed the time spent alone reading pervy science-fiction novels. There was also a health class in which we got to learn about fallopian tubes and squish bits of cigarette lung encased in plastic.

I had a crush on a girl named Shelly, though I rarely managed the courage to actually speak with her. She was pretty and blonde, with thick wire-framed glasses and a reading habit. At the end of the year, Margaret wrote in my yearbook that maybe I didn’t know it, but Shelly liked me. I decided Margaret was probably just fucking with me. Or Shelly. One way or the other.

This period in my life was so traumatic that I essentially forced it out of my memory long ago. My life timeline seems to skip directly from age 8 to 13 when I think back on it nowadays; I know what happened in between but it's too uncomfortable to think about even decades later.

in July 1991 all I can say for sure is that we were living in donegal and I was going into 5th class that September, my fourth year in a row at the same school, which is twice as long as any previous best.

I'm not sure in which house I'm living in atm, its a somewhat fuzzy time to recall and there are three or four contenders - the most likely one is a big old awesome place with an orchard, a patch of woodland a lumberyard next door and sheds filled with stuff left by the previous owners like cannonballs and highwayman looking pistols and rusty badger traps, all of which we are left to our own devices in and with.

we are four brothers, one older that tends towards violent temper and the physical ability to indulge well in it- i worship and hate him will do for many years yet- and two younger and therefore of little interest beyond the way extent to which their adoration boosts my enormous ego or my frequent tormenting of them amuses me. the nearer of them is not as bright as I or the youngest and I'm merciless with him, in no small part because he's already almost my size and goodlooking. the youngest has a gap of a couple of years on the rest of us and is a violently tempered but brilliant redhead midget and I teach him to read before the rest of his class on a whim that lasts longer than most.

I am youngest in my class of ten and tallest and fastest, and cleverest along with one other boy who was kept back for two years to attend with his brother. he is diligent and mannerly and reserved and an unfortunate contrast in most other ways too but I dont blame him for that and get along fine with him and everyone else in the class, except the girls who are to be avoided in terrified panic wherever possible although I love lor3tta with the Spanish skin fiercely and jealously even after talking to her (normally the point at which I decide people aren't worth bothering with) and she gets glasses.

I'm already losing teeth, four in a single public health dentist visit this year, and I attend school smelling of urine most days, though the headlice seem not to mind.

I haven't formed any opinions of my parents beyond that which is normal in childhood just yet, but I have begun to have inklings about the amount and ferocity of the fights when my dad is home.

I read everything. everything comprises black plastic bags full of Enid blyton books from cousins, old western pulps from grandad and uncles, readers digest collections on the occult and anything else I can find.

I'm gullible and prone to being made a fool of in class or by my peers, or by myself in front of them, but this is OK by me and not unusual in a small school so I don't take it to heart.

I lived with my schizophrenic mother and her abusive boyfriends. My sister moved out when she was 14, leaving me alone with them.

I turn 10 in March 1995. That's during grade four -- I'm always one of the oldest kids in my year.

The snow is going to melt soon which means I can ride my bike everywhere again. I have a new-ish bike. It's teal and has 18 speeds. Having lots of speeds is really cool.

Later that spring we get a puppy. He lives until February 2014.

During summer vacation I play along with The Price is Right every morning. Then I ride my bike, and play some Sega Genesis, and read books, and build houses out of Lego, and maybe play Batman with my little brother until he annoys me.

Sometimes I convince my mom to let me stay up late and watch Married With Children reruns. I think she lets me because she knows I won't get any of the raunchier jokes.

My best friends is Lisa H. Her family has neat things like a computer and a car phone. We play Wolfenstein 3D and Day of the Tentacle.

I take 'piano' lessons once a week. We can't afford a piano though, so I only get to practice on a cheap keyboard with hilarious presets.

In grade five there's a chart on the wall where we can put a sticker next to our name for each book we read. By the end of the school year, I have 75 stickers, by far the most in the class, and I am very smug about this.

Sometimes I secretly read books during class because the lessons bore me. My teacher notices and writes about it in my report card and asks me to stop. I find out years later that my mom didn't want to skip me ahead because she thought the kids in the year above me were all delinquents.

During lunch breaks my class listens to the radio or CDs. Weird Al's 'Bad Hair Day' is our favourite.

I listen to Rick Dees and the weekly top 40 every Saturday. I am beginning to develop taste in music, sort of. For Christmas I get my very own CD player and Dance Mix 95.

wow, i barely have any memory of this year. 4th grade. i became friends with a kid in my class who had some anger management issues. i could sympathize with him so i hung out and we'd talk about shit. we became good friends and my hunch was right, his home life sucked worse than mine. i spent that entire summer hanging out with him and his older brother, and we'd literally spend every single day together because our parents were MIA. we were little juvenile delinquents, stealing candy and porno mags from the convenience mart, made makeshift slingshots and we'd fire rocks at cars, that sorta thing.

our friendship ended that fall when i hung out with him, his older brother and his brother's friend. we were hiking through the woods, and i remember his older brother got me to smoke a cigarette. as we walked through the woods we found this abandoned warehouse and we decided to try and demolish it. we smashed all the windows with rocks, broke the doors down, hurled cinder blocks through the walls, etc. and as we left a police officer "arrested" us. i remember riding in the back of the police cruiser feeling so incredibly ashamed of myself. my mom said "don't hang out with them again" and i didn't. never saw him or talked to him again after that. about 10 years ago i ran into his older brother and he told me he had just gotten out of federal prison for grand theft auto and a few other wonderful offenses. guess i was better off never seeing them again and going in a different direction.

I got Garfield's Nine Lives and the Monkees' Pool It! for my tenth birthday, and they were perfect gifts. I'm pretty sure that was the same year that my mom's cousin was working at a restaurant owned by Jim Davis and arranged for me to meet him. I wept when I found out it was happening. I guess the Monkees were riding high on their '80s resurgence at the time, and I was way into the old records (all of which my mom had and gave to me).

I got glasses for the first time. Big, doofy ones. I had no sense of my vision fading but I guess my mom noticed me sitting way too close to the TV.

I stayed up late almost every weekend and watched as much Night Flight on USA as I could before I'd pass out. I also watched a lot of WWF and GLOW. And Captain Power!

I think my dad was gone most or all of that year (serving with the Navy). We moved back to the town I was born in to be near my grandparents, at least partly because my mom had just given birth to my sister a few months before. I never really thought about it until just now, but I imagine that was pretty rough on her (particularly with three other boys to wrangle). The beginning of fifth grade marked my sixth school (of thirteen, counting all of K-12).

Ten was the age when I last threw up (for non-alcohol-related reasons). The whole family had stomach flu. I staved it off for a while but finally relented while Taylor Dayne's "Tell It To My Heart" was on MTV. I couldn't listen to that song for years.

Bobby C00ns was a completely mental kid in our neighborhood who threw a stick in my spokes when I rode by him on my bike one time, and who one other time crawled out of the school bus window while we were stopped at a red light and ran away. Would not be at all surprised to discover that he's currently dead or in prison.

I was way into Spaceballs. I drew a ton of comics, many of which were Cracked-esque parodies (Cracked seemed much more aligned with my sensibilities than Mad was). I got really good at drawing ALF, and I was way into creating mazes.

I saw Revenge Of The Nerds at a friend's house and was completely scandalized by the full-frontal nudity on display. I didn't think they could show something like that in a mainstream movie.

I drove a chisel into my hand while making a pinewood derby car for Cub Scouts. There's still a scar.

i have one more to add. i can't remember whether this is age 9 or 10 but it's in that time frame.

it's the mid-'80s and my parents are part of the new york folk music/environmentalist community. one weekend we go upstate to a festival, and like a lot of other people there for the fest, we go camping instead of stay at a motel. this happens to be the weekend i get my period for the first time. the campsite has a small restroom facility, but the line for the ladies' room is very long. my mom -- not shy about these things -- announces to the queue of women that her young daughter has just had her first period, and asks if i can skip to the front of the line. i'm HORRIFIED. i think someone offers up a pad, but i can't remember. that night, i sleep in a tent, with blood, cramps, and mosquito bites. not sure we ever go camping again after that.

I played Tiny Tim in our 5th grade stage rendition of A Christmas Carol, not because of my acting but because I was the smallest boy in my grade.

Ten happened during a harrowing period in my childhood. I keep trying to write about the good or interesting parts, but it keeps coming back to the harrowing parts.

I do have really good memories of walking to the store for Archie comics every chance I got, and going to the laundromat with my mom, which was awesome because I got to hang out with her and I always got a diet Dr. Pepper and a Klondike bar.

This is so amazing:

"Here's an actual entry of mine (I brought my first diary in to work today, pages 59-61):

"Monticello" "10 3/4" Real Late May 1988: Today in school we went to visit Monticello, Ashlawn, and U.V.A. On the way there I sat with Suzanne. We both wrote "I love Jeremy!" on our hands. Everyone found out. Then I wrote a note to Jeremy that said, "I love you" and it also had clues of who it was. He did find out that me and Suzanne wrote it. In the afternoon I sat with Nichole. She just had to write notes to Jeremy. They said stuff like, "Sarah loves you!" I felt like killing her. Then came the biggie! She asked him if he'd go with me. He said no. I could understand that since he was going with Suzanne he wouldn't want to go with me too. But Nichole just wrote more notes. Finally he said he would not go with Suzanne either. Then he started staring at me for a long, long time. Before he had asked me to look straight in his eyes. I was SO sad that almost cried. Noah joked about it. Then Jeremy said he'd go with me if I would love Eric just as much. I liked Eric only as a friend, and was afraid there was a catch to it, so I said "No." Then he stared at me some more. I showed him my hand, but he didn't budge. Finally, when we got off the bus at school, Noah said he'd call Jeremy tonight! - end

― Sarah McLUsky (coco), Monday, June 23, 2003 6:33 AM (11 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

Gayer than now, in both senses of the term.

creepy stuff imo

Then he stared at me some more. I showed him my hand, but he didn't budge.

Some rando out there reading this just flipped his fedora.

On my tenth birthday, burned that I was the only kid whose parents hadn’t bought Super Mario Brothers 3, I made a very short birthday list: 1. Super Mario Brothers 3. Before my grandmother let me take it upstairs to play it, she made me explain what the game was about, what happened “after all the mushrooms and stuff”, and was very inquisitive about what kind of species of creature was Bowser. Even at that young age I recognized there she was grilling me out of a kind of disgust that a video game would have me so antsy to leave the party, and I associated my love of Nintendo with a kind of shame.

I lived in the country and went to a school in the city near my step-father’s work. It was a forty-five minute drive. We drove a kid named Oliver, who went to the same school. I didn’t realize what <Nike Airs + parents owned a BMW + riding lessons> meant at age ten, but Oliver was rich. One day, he looked at my step-father’s seven-year old beat-up peach minivan, and said “why don’t your parents buy a new car?” We were both really into the new Batman movie, which I had to watch in secret at Oliver’s house.

I was playing violin two hours a day. I was just starting to learn unaccompanied Bach. I was excited, because one of my favourite tapes was of Pinchas Zukerman and Midori playing the Violin Double Concerto, and I was learning Bach. I was given a radio, which I listened to in bed for a couple of hours a night. My favourite songs were “Iesha” by Another Bad Creation, “All Around The World” by Digital Underground, “Let Your Backbone Slide” by Maestro Fresh-Wes, “Do You Really Want Me Baby” by Salt-N-Pepa. There was a period where it seemed as if Timmy T’s “One More Try” was always in this station’s top ten; I hated that song. I remember hearing commercials on the radio station that tried to convince me to buy StarTropics. “You can talk to dolphins,” was the selling point. I was not interested.

My older brother (fifteen) had just bought an amazing new PC and was designing the artwork for a game called Jill Of The Jungle. I would sit next to him and watch him work. Sometimes he would switch over and play other games: Xenon 2, Speedball, Captain Comic. He would let me log on to BBSes and play TradeWars, but never often enough that I could actually get anywhere.

I was reading Lloyd Alexander.

Right before summer break, my friend Brian had a birthday party and invited about fifteen kids. We went to the town fair and bought combs that looked like switchblades. He had a pool and we all changed in the bathroom, separately, leaving our clothes in a big pile. When it was time for me to leave, I accidentally put on Scott’s underwear. Scott called me that night and said “you are wearing my underwear”. The other kids made fun of me the next day, “look at his face! he enjoyed it!” Unfortunately, because it was right before summer break, I didn’t have time to repair my good social standing before going to stay with my father for the summer.

My father lived in the country, north of Antigonish. There was nothing to do at his house, so I watched VHS tapes of Fawlty Towers over and over again. I picked raspberries and my step-mother bought some pectin and some jars, and I made 20 jars of raspberry jam. Twice a day that summer I would make myself a snack of sliced bread, butter and jam. I had no physical sense of self, and I put on a lot of weight. When I came back to my mom’s, my aunt saw me with my shirt off and said “wow, you look like a blimp!” I had a mild eating disorder for the next five years.

I remember virtually nothing from being 10-years-old except a deep appreciation for Allen Sherman.

a fflam is valiant

xp

I saw this picture in a library book:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/The_cow_pock.jpg

Not realising it was supposed to be satirical, I freaked out and didn't sleep for three days. Felt so relieved when I eventually told my Dad why I was looking like a zombie and he explained that people couldn't really grow cow heads out of their arms.

BUMP

You first.

No fear I went already

Wow, this is a great thread. I don't know how you all remember so much detail. Here's what I know:

It's the late 70s, I just got glasses, and it's my first year in this school/town/state. I love the new house 'cause it's a big split-level, with a huge yard and trees for climbing, tunnels through the bushes, and a fenced off section with walkways and a patio. The height of luxury! The school (I'll discover later) is way inferior to my previous school, but I'm the smartest in the class, even though they learned their times tables in third grade and my old school didn't and I had to catch up quick. My younger brother (by one year) is my best friend at home, but I can't remember him even being in my classroom at school (and he was, because we had two grades per room). I want to be best friends with the most popular girl, but find it impossible to break into their long-standing cliques. At my old school I was shy and kind of clueless, but somehow navigated social stuff like finding best friends pretty easily. Here, the one girl who talks to me smells terrible and is embarrassingly halting when forced to read aloud. I'm aware that I suffer socially from being an obvious "pet" of the incompetent teacher. Overall I'm happy. I'm in my own head most of the time and all this other stuff doesn't matter very much. Books matter, though. I read all the time – classroom books, library books, parents' books. I save all my allowance to buy books at Walden's when we go to the mall. If asked, I would say that my favorite book is Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth.

<3

You first.

did so 12 years ago; being 10 hasn't changed much for me since then

Just think: That 10-year-old would be 22 by now.

I think I was probably v weird and precocious and I really loved The X-Files and Super Nintendo

on my tenth birthday i remember getting this:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51WtjK5Go2L._SX373_BO1%2C204%2C203%2C200_.jpg
i spent most of the year reading it in detail

I was in fifth grade, and I feel that very little of my taste was formed, or at least it was dormant -- I collected baseball cards, I liked whatever pop/hip-hop everyone was listening to, which I remember including Boyz II Men/ABC/BBD, maybe Young MC (or was that fourth grade?). However, I did develop my first crush, on a "tomboyish" girl (who was the daughter of a somewhat well-known leftist filmmaker that my parents had heard of), which definitely prefigured my later taste in women. I think I may have been reading Lloyd Alexander books and John R. Tunis baseball books at that time -- I had been a very precocious reader but I was starting to develop an awkward embarrassment around being smart and a desperate desire to be more normal and popular, and I wasn't reading voraciously anymore. I won second place in a school-wide math competition, beat out by a legit math genius who is now a rising star academic. I was bad at sports but I had started to make an effort to improve my baseball skills, going to batting cages and such, and developed within the next year or two into a serviceable player and decent hitter, even playing first base at times on my relatively non-competitive little league team.

I developed a brief, semi-poseurish obsession with Michael Jordan. I bought air jordans, a bulls hat, and an MJ t-shirt and at least once wore them all together to school.

A mere year later I was already getting into Living Colour and Led Zeppelin and starting to move in kind of a different direction. And also, you know, getting fur in places where I didn't have fur before.

it's 1994/95. I live with my mum, dad, and 12 year old older brother in a 3 bedroom terraced house in a former mining village in lanarkshire scotland, now a commuter suburb of Glasgow. im tall for my age, and extremely skinny.

i play football with my friends Fat Cha', Docser, and Watson in the park next to my house a lot. i have a Super Nintendo that i play a lot, i also like to read, i can remember reading kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.

i like pop music on the radio, especially dance music. i own cds by oasis, bon jovi and the beastie boys, my brother listens to rage against the machine every day, and while i enjoy them too, I am not a super fan.

We drive to Italy on holiday. It takes about two days driving to get from environs of Glasgow to Genoa. One of my great-grandfathers was Genoese, feels strange to have a connection to such an exotic place. The 1994 World Cup in the U.S. is taking place while we're in Italy, I love the World Cup, collect stickers, have a book where I update all the games' scores with a little pencil. When Italy win the semi-final we're staying in an apartment in Rome and the city goes crazy with people out partying and beeping their horns. When Italy lose the final Rome is like a ghost-town, we go out for a walk through empty streets.

Another night in Rome I am eating gelato on a park bench when I see a road traffic accident. A man on a motorcycle collides with a younger man on a moped at a T junction, the man on the motorcycle bounces off the tarmac and skids on his leather pants, but gets up and is ok. The younger man on the moped goes flying into a tree and appears to break his neck and die. By coincidence a group of his friends are walking down the street as this happens, they are the most distressed people I've ever seen. The next day there is a wreath at the foot of the tree.

i saw a boomer-soothing school play about hardworking preppies vs hedonistic dropouts called "bobbysox and yellow jackets" (originally "ducktails and bobbysox", presumably changed to avoid disappointing '90s kids to the point of riot) in which my 14-y/o babysitter, megan, already interesting in ways i couldn't account for, was a yellow jacket, that is a sarcastic greaser. (in my probably doctored memory she was one of the ones who kept her integrity, still unreformed at curtain. others were brought round by a fictional rock star with the same name as 50 cent.) on the car ride home i didn't even know what had happened to me. all crushes since have been shadows.

You all are great at remembering.

"I'm not sure in which house I'm living in atm, its a somewhat fuzzy time to recall"

In ur face

It just came back to me that I used to actually tape the top 10 countdown on whatever the pop station was, and also that I bought a Ralph Tresvant cassingle, possibly the first and one of the few cassingles I ever bought. I briefly tried to push a proto-challops line about Ralph Tresvant being underrated, although I don't even think I knew the word underrated.

my grandfather passed when i was ten so i remember that yr as sort of the beginning of the end of childhood

/maximumbummer

I was in the 5th grade and my teacher, Mrs G, was a stern and imposing woman. My best friend Amy lived behind me and I spent most of my time with her and her siblings. As an only child, I think being around a large family fascinated me. They drank milk with dinner which I thought was wild. For Halloween that year my mom made Amy and I matching witch costumes and threw the best Halloween party. We transformed our garage into a haunted scene and my dad got some dry ice for a cauldron that we pretended to stir. There was a note on the garage door to knock three times. When the kids did that my dad would open the garage door and put out the sticks with monster hands to try to pull the kids in. That party was one of the few good memories I'd have for the next couple years. My parents rented a ski house that year and it was a blast. Amy and her siblings would come up with us almost every weekend and we'd ski all day and then my dad would make big meals that we'd eat while we hung out around the fireplace. That spring her dad got a job in California and at the end of the school year they moved. I cried for weeks.