Fast Forwarded Friday

 

*I’m totally cheating and writing this post on Thursday because tomorrow is a super crazy day and I don’t want to upset my die hard followers…who happen to be my mom and dad. I apologize for being all sneaky like and breaking with the Friday Nfred beer and blog tradition. I hope you’re not so disappointed that you never read this blog again because that would make me sad and when I feel sad, I eat chocolate. And when I eat too much chocolate, Captain Red Face shows up. And when Captain Red Face shows up, I get all self conscious and full of angst and I basically regress to my awkward fourteen year old self. To wrap up this italic rant, please read my post even though it’s not Friday. If you do, you’ll be able to rest easy knowing that you have saved me from both over eating and Captain Red Face. High fives all around!*

 

The summer before grade nine was a tumultuous time in my life for many reasons…

 

1. I was petrified to start high school in the fall. Everything that I knew about grade nine came from my older brother and Degrassi. According to my brother, high school was lame and the teachers were lame and the kids were lame and it would suck and I would hate everything and everyone would think I was a loser and no, I was not allowed to talk to him at school. According to Degrassi, I would get pregnant at a house party, start dressing like a trollop, get an older abusive boyfriend and drop acid at a concert which would result in a horrible accident. Also, older kids would chase me around calling me “miner niner”. It all sounded so horrifying. Couldn’t I just stay in grade eight for a couple more years???

 

2. I was growing out my hair from a disastrous pixie cut. I believed the hairdresser when she said that I had great bone structure and would look like a sophisticated young woman. Instead I looked like a ten year old boy. The summer before grade nine, my hair was at that awkward length where it was too short to wear up, but too long that it wouldn’t just sit nicely on my head and behave. It had a mind of it’s own. It curled in random directions and was frizzy and puffy and a total nightmare. I spent hours staring at my hair from all angles in the three way mirror of my upstairs bathroom. I brushed and gelled and hairsprayed and willed my hair to grow faster. I felt like all my worries would vanish if I could just start high school with long, luxurious locks.

 

3. As if I didn’t feel bad enough about my physical appearance, I had to start wearing glasses right before grade nine started. In the early nineties, there was so such thing as “cool” eye wear. There were no hip square frames or chic wire rimmed glasses or really any appealing choices available for fourteen year old girls, except for contacts which I was not allowed. I was stuck with giant royal blue frames that I unsuccessfully tried my best to break, lose or forget at home for pretty much all of grade nine.

 

I bet you’re wondering why I’m choosing to dredge up all these dorktastic memories of my early teen years.

Well here goes…

I’ve always loved to write and whenever I get the yen to write any sort of fiction, it always falls into the Young Adult category. There’s something terribly wonderful about being a teenager. It’s confusing and exciting and scary and marvelous all at the same time.

Everyone has awkward stories from their teen years. EVERYONE!

Everyone’s gone through an ugly duckling phase. EVERYONE!

My favourite book of all time is, “Are You There God? It’s me Margaret” by Judy Blume. That book was my bible. I was never a reader as a kid, but that story captivated me. People who know me now would be shocked to learn that I was super shy as a kid when it came to talking about sex or boys or puberty with my parents. I would have rather gone to summer school or the dentist or summer dentistry school, ANYTHING but have a grown up chat with the parental units. That book gave me the answers I was so desperately seeking in the least awkward of ways. It reassured me that I was just a normal kid that was simply growing up.

Also, “we must, we must, we must increase our busts” was a catchy and extremely useful chant.

My biggest dream in life is to write a book someday. I have no desire to write the next Canadian literary juggernaut. I would love to be able to write a smart and sassy book for teen girls. In fact  I’ve already started and would you believe that the working title is…dun dun dunnn…

The Summer Before Grade Nine!

In the next couple of weeks, I’m going to start sharing my story on this very blog. The idea of this scares the poop out of me! But look how horrified I was to start this blog, and now it’s easy peasy.

What’s the point of life if you don’t at least try some things that scare you? Things that force you outside of your comfort zone? Things that make you so anxious that you feel like you’re going to ralph all over your keyboard?

Wait, why am I committing to this again?

Oh right, dreams and goals and shit.

The first chapter will be coming along next week.

I hope all you NFred readers, hi Mom and Dad, will enjoy reading my story.

Stay tuned…