I’ve joined the rest of you

It started while I was waiting for a phone to be answered.

See, I have to call like 30 police agencies at the end of each night for my job. Usually I check Facebook and Twitter at the end of the list, just before I go home. But the other night, I tried something different.

I watched Glee.

I was predisposed to hate Glee. Their “Last Christmas” filled my mouth with bile.

But the show is … likeable. Hey, it’s network television. For the masses. Of course the plot is idiotic. Of course the songs are auto-tuned beyond all personality. Of course the vastly superior black singer will be featured only when the cute white girl can’t hit the big notes.

Still, the cheerleading coach is awesome, and the caricatures of high school types are so over-the-top that they kind of work.

I know because I was one of them.

In the last episode I saw, that white girl is trying to persuade the glee club to be in a yearbook picture so she can have more yearbook pictures than anyone in the history of the school.

Yeah, I was THAT girl in high school.

Oh, I had a 4.0 and reminded people of it almost every day. I was in every activity — and all but fabricated some of them. Those five mornings I made crafts with the church preschool kids so I could skip the sermons? That made me a “Sunday School Teacher” on applications. Other kids actually had me examine their scholarship forms, like an H&R Block guy at tax time, to suggest extra “activities” they could claim.

I was an impossible snot. My friends from high school are clearly some of the most tolerant people ever.

Have I changed? Do I still look for ways to hold myself above others? Do I still cry when I lose at Boggle?

Sometimes. But I don’t take myself quite so seriously anymore.

You learn something talking to 30 police agencies a day: Backstory matters.

They don’t have scholarships for people who stay out of trouble even though their families beat each other with truck parts and hold up gas stations with underwear on their faces. They don’t have yearbook pages for people who graduate even though they had their heads whacked against walls when they were babies.

Those people were the real overachievers. Even if they now watch Glee.

Oh, wait.

Picture Pages Friday: Yes, I WAS perfect

As it has become Baby Gripes Week here at Poor Penmanship, I just wanted to point out to everyone that I was a delightful child who never caused a whit of trouble.

That’s my dad and Grandpa Rundell. We formed some sort of cool coats gang back in the day. My street name was WAAAAAAAH.

Thanks to everyone who has put up with the noise, then and now.

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Butchered, historically

Just downriver from my high school was a meat packing plant that had operated in some incarnation since 1877 and every day infused the city of Ottumwa with the smell of pork rinds and death.

That smell was my only personal connection to the plant.* That, and the fact that I grew up on the North Side. The North Side historically existed as the “management” side of town and, despite our commitment to fake-wood paneling, never could shake its white collar sensibilities. By my day, it wasn’t really about meat packing or even money — rich and poor people were everywhere. But still there was a vestigial North Side class, one that protected its children from tobacco chewers and people who said “Warshington.”

I was part of that class, but I didn’t know the difference until Lego castles and dead pigs filled our high school library for the annual Medieval Fair.

Medieval Fair was something the 10th grade world history classes did just before Christmas. It was billed as a showcase for every student’s talent, but I’m pretty sure the point was to get the history teachers back on schedule. My class jumped to Medieval Fair straight from ancient Greece.

The reason we’d fallen so far behind was that my teacher’s method was to make us read the entire textbook aloud in class. A paragraph per student. Including the illiterate kid.

This was something I had not seen growing up North Side. At 16, the boy could barely sound out letters. It was a total phonic meltdown, painful for us all. We began counting the paragraphs ahead of time to see which one he’d have to read. If it was a doozy, kids would skip paragraphs or sneak in a photo caption to throw off the count. Then the teacher thought we were screwing around, so he became hyper-vigilant.

At that point, the kid’s best hope was for all of us to read as slowly as possible.

And so, in December, we hopped from the Battle of Corinth to the Battle of Hastings and never looked back.

*****

I’ll be the first to admit my Medieval Fair project was way too big a deal. My friend Sarah and I researched Christmas carol origins (pre-Internet this was really hard) and wrote up little reports next to the staff music on parchmenty paper. Sarah used a calligraphy pen to make it pretty, and I bound the pages with ribbons.

On project day, I placed the carol book on my desk and glowed until frantic hissing broke out between the two girls across the aisle. I’ll call them Loretta and Tina.

“Loretta! Did you buy our project?” Tina whispered.

From a True Value Hardware bag, Loretta produced a Duraflame firelog and a plastic Christmas wreath covered with fake frost.

“Perfect!” Tina cheered.

“What is that?” I asked.

Tina stuck the Duraflame through the Christmas wreath.

“It’s a Yule log.”

They never did unwrap the Duraflame. I stared at the label. DUR(wreath)LAME, it said.

“What!” Loretta grumbled. “It’s no worse than the cookies.”

The cookies. Our teachers had given everyone a list of project ideas for the fair, and one of them was a “Medieval” recipe for cookies. The recipe made several appearances at Medieval Fair, scrawled onto notecards and stapled to paper plates that obviously contained Pillsbury Instant Sugar Cookies.

It was too late to help those people, or Tina and Loretta. I mumbled something about how resourceful they were, and that should count for a lot.

A few days later our grades came back. I got a 95.

So did the Yule log.

*****

As we filed into the library to admire our classmates’ work, a noxious odor sunk into my hair.

“What is going on at the plant today?” I asked. No one knew or cared or even seemed to notice. The smell got stronger. Like garbage, or roadkill up close.

Then, rising grandly from behind dozens of Medieval Pillsbury cookies, the source came into view: Two hog faces, eyes open and cloudy, displayed on serving platters.

One ambitious student had arranged grapes behind the ears and shoved an apple in its mouth.

The whole library smelled of rotting flesh.

I held my nose and leaned close enough to see the grade.

98.

“Can you believe those?” the teacher said to me. “The boys just went down to the plant and asked for Boar’s Heads. And they got ‘em!”

I left the banquet table to check out some Reynolds Wrap longswords next to my beloved carol book and tried not to gag on the past.

*After I left Ottumwa, my brother worked a couple of summers at the plant. He was a shit-squeezer — the guy who flushes poop out of the pigs’ intestines. His safety steward was my old friend Josh, who got sent to the docter in 7th grade after he snorted a chain of paper clips into his nose and pulled them out of his mouth.

Jock girl

One of my guiding principles is Never Play Team Sports.

Team sports are trouble. You ask anyone who has played junior high volleyball. Life is never quite the same after you’ve been screamed at by the popular girl in front of half the 13-year-olds in your town. Your friends freeze in terror. No one comforts you as you bawl your eyes out in the locker room. But plenty of people stare.

There’s no bouncing back from that, even when the other girls turn on the tyrant a week later in a grand, weepy, hairbrush-throwing coup d’etat led by my friend Tara, to whom I am forever indebted and who, I believe, also has given up team sports.

Never Play Team Sports has given me a chance to repair. It has shifted my focus to more fulfilling pursuits, such as writing and music and watching Wipeout. Never Play Team Sports has buoyed my soul lo these many years.

But eventually, you look at yourself in the mirror and say, “My, how you’ve grown.” You tiptoe back toward dreams of glory.

And then you get drunk at a party and join your friends’ kickball team.

My first game is tonight.

Wish me luck.

Lead a snot into temptation

Video blogging attempt. Thoughts on divine intervention, free will and snots who never had a prayer.

And frogs.

I look like a tard. Expect a speedy return to print.

**********

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