Have i beat this horse to death yet? Oh no! I think it moved! Beat it more!

#1 is true. I have had exactly one serious scrape or cut, ever, and it wasn’t even that serious. This wasn’t a trick, folks, because a broken collarbone is neither a scrape nor a cut. Once i cut open my finger on a catfood lid and it bled for about an hour, but i didn’t even need a stitch. I must’ve been fifteen or sixteen and i remember being amused when my neighbor put on latex gloves to help me bandage up my finger because it meant he assumed i actually had the chance to catch any bloodborne diseases, which was a little flattering. Later that summer he gave offered me a bass guitar and some cocaine, of which i took one.

#2 is true. I used to have a foot fetish before i understood what was supposed to be attractive about people. Um, yeah. It’s hard for something about girls to be hot when you’re five, so i think i just arbitrarily picked feet. It was actually pretty funny, because if i was hanging out with a girl with her shoes off it was entirely equal to me walking down the street now and seeing someone i know who’s totally topless and trying to have a conversation with her without making her aware of looking directly at or directly away from her chest. I think the reason everyone thought i was a bit gay when i was little is because sometimes i’d get distracted by boys with nice feet. Yeah… the weirdness knows no bounds.

#4 is true. I still fit into my first pair of jeans. My first pair of jeans were purchased in eighth grade, and i’m wearing them right now as cutoffs. There wasn’t a reason to have jeans when i wore a uniform to school every day, and seventh grade was the year of the sweatsuit. And, since i barely nudge having over a 30inch waist now, 30×30’s were massive on me six years ago. Love that trim girlish figure.

#5 is false! Before this year i had cried exactly twice since i left grade school? What utter tripe; i’m such a fucking wuss. I’ve cried on the phone to Gina, cried when we had to put my cat Keeko to sleep, and once i mustered up some rockin’ alligator-tears for a substitute we had in English class who wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom. Suckers.

#9 is true. I have never been outside of this time zone. Okay, this one is a little fudgey, but only because of my mother. As far as i ever knew, i had never been out of this time zone, having only been up to Boston and down to Florida. However, my mother informs me that Jamaica is indeed in the next time zone over from this one, and i have visited there twice, albeit very briefly. However, i’m still counting this question as true because i didn’t have a watch with me in Jamaica on either trip and my mother never saw it fit to tell me that we had lost an hour on the way down or gained one on the way up. Way to go mom. So, from now on this is false, but up until today i had no idea.

#11 is true. Until next year i will have spent a third of my life on welfare, a fifth of my life in braces, and nearly half my life without ever having a friend enter my bedroom. After my parents got separated my mother and i were on government assistance for quite some time while she bartended at night and went to nursing school during the day. I will never oppose welfare because i am a result of the welfare system gone right, and if you’d like to tell me that the goverment shouldn’t provide for people in a tough position then you’re telling me that my mother should have never gone to college and that i’m not supposed to be here either, among other things. So, there’s a real life story for you, chew on that. I had braces for four and a quarter years, and it was not fun, but my teeth are absolutely perfect now. I had exactly two friends ever enter my bedroom in the house where i lived for nearly a decade and a half, because i had no friends and even the ones i had hardly ever came to my house, let alone my bedroom. After we moved i had a ton of people who came into my bedroom, and since most of my friends were girls i think it made my mom a little nervous, but nothing steamy ever happened. I mean, why would anything steamy happen? I am the opposite of steam, yet i am not ice because then i would be cool. Contemplate that one.

#12 is true. I learned to subtract from playing Monopoly. A lot of my friends somehow contrived to learn how to read at age three or four, and i can’t imagine that, but i knew math very early. I was a kid who was into doing things, so my mom eventually resorted to Risk and Monopoly hoping to bore me to death, but it didn’t work. At all. However, being a resourceful mother, she just made it a point to teach me how to make change through playing Monopoly (and how to achieve socio-economic domination through the both combined) so that in first grade math was barely as hard as raiding the $1’s drawer. In fact, when i got tested for MG at the end of first grade they gave me this really complicated problem about babysitting and i blithely used multiplication to answer it while the tester let her mouth hang open and my mom smirked to herself. Don’t ever ask her about it, though, or she’ll brag about showing me mentally engaging flashcards rather than talk about board games.

#16 is true. is true. I was the worst reader in my first grade class. Even though i was a tremendously good student, and could spell well, and had very high listening comprehension, i couldn’t ever put it all together and read. There’s one infamous story i have about those giant reading charts with the pictures next to the vocabulary words. One day i got this word that made absolutely no sense to me and the picture seems to look a lot like Toucan Sam with a drippy nose and i just stared and stared at it until finally one of my classmates shouted out “it’s ‘water’!” Coulda fooled me. That summer i read my first book (a children’s version of Dracula … can you see how i got so fucked up? This is like the “how did Peter get so fucked up” game) Somehow by the end of second grade i was in the top reading group in the class, and in third grade i was reading books for eighth graders. And everyone lived happily ever after. The end.

#21 is true. I refused to wear anything coloured navy to the point of a temper tantrum until it became one of my school colors last year. It looked much too much like black and it always was trying to trick me into buying it, and if my mom handed me that even looked a little like navy i would go into full-out only-child tantrum mode until the piece of clothing was back on the rack. If you were ever wondering, that’s why “touch” has the following line: “there’s no place to touch you, skin sweet with navy blue, but it’s so close to black though.” Damn those hot indy-rock girls and their navy tee-shirts. Actually, it turns out i look really good in navy; who knew?

#22 is true. is true. Both girls i’ve ever asked out on a date wound up kissing my best friends. Another fudged one; it’s actually all three girls i’ve ever asked out on a date. Juliana was the first, and she wound up dating Justin. (Evil) Kate (daughter of a local news anchor) was second (see “Falling Down“), and she wound up being slutty with the now-disavowed Lucas. Jesse with blue hair was the last one (see “Afterglow“), and she had her first hook-up with Andrea. Anastasia never hooked up with any of my best friends; she just neglected to acknowledge my romantic existance so i never asked her out. Lots of songs about that…

And that, my friends, is more than you should ever have to hear about my life in a single week. Goodnight.