sentimental value

When I first laid eyes on it, nothing seemed to pop. It was so plain in design, minimalist and somewhat drab. It's just a jacket and what the hell is the north face?

That was roughly eight years ago and I still wear that jacket to this day. Granted, most of the fleece lining has fallen off and it has seen better days. Wind passes right through it like Mexican food through my digestive tract. Nowadays I mostly keep it around for sentimental purposes.

Throughout its lifespan, I've done some rather crazy things to it. For instance, my first year in high school, I treated the jacket as my personal filing cabinet. The left chest pocket held my cache of class notes all neatly folded and my other pockets contained my writing utensils. The insanity even went as far as carrying a calculator, scissor, mini stapler, highlighter, sticky notes and other miscellaneous items in the jacket. To this day, I'm not quite sure what compelled me to stuff my pocket with all those items, but I am sure I've had a few moments when it has come in handy.

Don't worry. These days, the Denali lives a quieter existence, draped over my body as a personal reminder of days long gone.

as if it couldn't get any worse

I don't quite understand dentists. I completely dread the two days a year when I find myself reclined in a chair with a stranger's hand shoved down my throat. Perhaps the negativity stems from the invasion of privacy (it's my mouth...gross), the lingering odor of disinfectants and what I can only assume is the rotting stench from the pile of collected teeth, or quite simply the pain and torture that is afflicted on my poor teeth. I'm positively convinced the dental hygienist are only one step below serial killers. With some professional training, they could make a career out of their skills with the CIA torturing war criminals. The idea of trusting my dental hygiene to a person with a high school diploma is mind boggling. Guess it shouldn't surprise me that I often walk away from the cleaning with various holes in my gum line from "oops" and "uh-ohs." Lousy sadists.

and i thought my jokes were bad

I was humming a tune while walking to class the other day when something completely out of the blue occurred. I think I was singing the falsetto part to some song quietly when the guy in front of me turns away and gives me a funny look. You know the kind of look you have when you observe something that boggles your mind, like a guy making his own sandwich or something.

I felt really self-conscious and had a shifty eye moment for a while. Sometimes I forget that people can hear me when I hum. This one time back in third grade, I was humming while waiting in line to go out to recess. All of a sudden, the teacher whips around and asked loudly, "Who is humming?" OH SCHNAP!?! Up to that point in my life, I never knew people could hear me while I hummed. I wasn't familiar with the whole sound waves and physics of the thing. Who knew?

They need to come up with some sort of invisibility cloak for this sort of situation. Crushing blow to my self-esteem. Plus, I need to stop humming embarrassing songs.

right'n the kisser

When I was in fifth grade, I sent one of my best friends to the hospital with a concussion. To my defense, it wasn't intentional nor was it entirely my fault. It was a cold winter, back when it used to snow on time; yes it used to actually snow in December. We were outside for recess bundled up in our snow gear, having a great time playing in the snow. Someone said we should make a giant snow man, as big as we could possibly make it.

The tasks were delegated and we set forth on recreating a real life Frosty. The "legs" of the snowman were enormous; it reached as high as my chest. I was given the job of making the 'body" portion. Well one simple thing we didn't take into consideration before making the snow man was how we were going to assemble the monstrosity. We had to take a) a finely packed ball of snow as big around as three watermelons and lift it with b) our scrawny prepubescent, underdeveloped arm muscles. The equation didn't work in our favour. Guess that's why I've always hated arithmetics.

We decided to give it a try anyways. No luck, we couldn't even lift it up with our combined efforts. Then the brilliant idea of rolling it up a human "ramp" was born out of desperation. The idea was to have someone be the "ramp," while the others would gradually roll the body into place. I drew the short straw, not literally, and was given the position of ramp. My friend, Matt, was given the task of being on the opposite side of me to hold the legs in place while we executed this operation. We finally got the ball rolling on this plan [har har har ball get it?] and began to push it ungracefully on my back.

Somehow someone slipped and instead of pushing the giant globe on my back, pushed me. I lost my footing since I was completely off balance and slammed right into Matt's face. I don't quite remember what happened afterwards, but I do recall an ambulance coming to whisk Matt to the hospital. It was a few days before Matt came back, he had a good size goose egg on his forehead. I apologized to him during an awkward encountered, but everything turned out fine and we remained friends. A few months later, Matt and his family moved away and I lost contact with him. Now we both attend the same college. We're not friends anymore, more like friendly acquaintances. Too much time apart I guess.

The snowman was never finished and the dismembered body parts melted into indistinguishable lumps. I never made another snowman since.

this is an emergency

I remember this one time when I accidentally called 911. It happened a long time ago when I was too young and naive to know any better. My brother and I were sitting around at home alone, my parents used to leave us home alone a lot, and I started playing around with the phone. I randomly dialed in numbers and giggled when strangers would pick up the phone. Somehow I managed to dial in 911 during my sporadic number selection, because the voice on the other line said, "You've reached 911, what is your emergency?" Snap! I hung up quickly, but I wasn't slick enough because the operator called me right back and yelled at me for calling 911.

I bring this up because of what happened recently in Jacksonville. Basically the guy was mad because he didn't get what he ordered and called 911. The cops ended up arresting him for making false 911 calls.

I just wanted to say that I can see where this guy was coming from. There have been many times when I've encountered incompetent customer service and wish I could have "Bruce Wayne'd" it. By that I mean purchasing the establishment in front of the employee and then firing him or her on the spot. What a thrill that would be. Completely a jerk move, but I think certain allowances can be made.

I think I'm introverted too.

crush

My first crush was when I was in first grade. There was this girl named "Jamie" and she was in the grade above me. I'm not sure if they still do this now, but back then the school district used to have joint first and second grade classes. Usually you would end up having the same teacher for both grades. Anyways, I forget how the whole situation started but for some reason I was mad at this one guy and the teacher decided to pair me up with Jamie. It was her job to try to calm me down and cheer me up. Well needless to say it worked, but I couldn't let on that it did. I had to pretend that I was still mad at the guy so she would stick around. Like most crushes at that age, my attention wandered to the next thing that struck my fancy. However, I did share a "Couples Only" skate with her back when skating rinks were the place to hang out on weekends.