i'm always intrigued by...

what my mind comes up with right before i fall asleep. unless it's that feeling of falling when your body relaxes. hate that. anyway, last night i started thinking about things i remember from my life. and it's so strange what i remember and what i dont' remember. i know what i was wearing the day i passed out in high school, but i have no clue what the date was, or wheter i was in a or b lunch, or what classes i'd had that day. so, because nothing THAT exciting has been hapenning in my life because it's summer break and i just hang out at my house all day, and because i don't feel like rehashing everything that happened at lindsay's wedding ( i will do so, but not today) i've decided to write down a list of things i remember.

• when we lived in terre haute, (we moved to jamestown when i was almost 4) we had a sandbox outside. one day, i wondered what sand tasted like, so i tried some. it mostly tastes gritty, with a hint of cat pee.
  
• the back door at our house in terre haute stuck, because back doors often do that, and i had trouble opening it, which i know is shocking considering my three-year-old strength. i told mom and dad that i couldn't open the door, but didn't have the cognizance or the vocabulary to tell them why, so they assumed that i was too short, and dad put a cinder block next to the door so i could stand on it and open it. i remember thinking they were dumb, because i could obviously read the handle (i was THREE wasn't i?) but the door was dumb, and they needed to fix the door. not my shortness. i've gotten over it, and mom and dad, i no longer think you're dumb.
• i remember the day that i discovered that if i rode my bike down my street to the left, i could see the back of heidi and lindsay's house. i previously hadn't known how to get there.
  
• i always have trouble sleeping the night before something big or monumental. the night before i started kindergarten, i was terrified because alana bloom down the street had told me that my teacher, mrs. kohler, was mean. i remember that mom and dad came into my room (probalby because i was crying--i was a horrible crybaby when i was a kid) and sat with me for a while and tried to convince me that it would be okay and mom sat on the bed with me and dad sat on the chair that went with my vanity and propped his feet on the fan on the floor (this was before we put a ceiling fan in my room). turns out, alana bloom was right--mrs. kohler was mean. not to me, but to other kids. she's someone who should not be teaching kindergarten.
• speaking of kindergarten, we had these activity packets that we had to fill out every morning within the first hour. i have no clue how many pages they were, but it seemed like there were at least 30 pages, all of which had intricate, difficult instructions (we're talking on par with building a nuclear reactor) and i was always afraid that i wouldn't finish in time and i would get in trouble. people always think i'm exaggerating this, but the first hour of each day made me want to have an anxiety attack. so i would hurry through my cutting and pasting so that i would get done in time and then i would get check-minuses on my cutting and pasting, when it was really the teacher's fault for putting that much pressure on a 5-year-old.
• i remember the night that my brother michael broke his arm. or maybe his leg. but he was trying to do skateboard tricks in front of the house and fell. once when one of the boys broke an appendage--it had to have been michael, because jonathan broke his arm before jamestown (maybe before i was born) and he broke his knee at camp and i already wasn't there. or maybe it was jonathan, because i got to go to debbie noggle's parents' house and ride horses, and i was the best time of my life. and the next morning we went down the road to debbie noggle's grandma's house and she made us waffles, which was very exciting because i loved waffles as a kid and they were one of two things my mom can't make (no bake cookies are the other thing). she's really good at making everything else. she makes a mean pot roast. it tried to bite me.
  
• i remember imagene owen, and that she had a ladder in one of her closets in the kitchen, and the ladder led to the upstairs and it was so cool. and then as i got older and thought about it, i decided that it was probably from the underground railroad (i went on a big harriet tubman kick in about 4th grade) and that made it even cooler.
  
• when we first moved to jamestown, there was a ladder in the back of what became the storage room in the basement, and my brothers told me that it led to a secret passageway to the church building. i was never able to investigate, because it was impossible to get to the back of the storage room. the only things i ever got out of there were suitcases, coolers, and my dad's record collection. i'm not sure what the rest of it was.
• i had a huge walk-in closet at the house in jamestown, and i always wanted to play in it, because a) it was cool, and b) heidi and lindsay got to. but, i wasn't allowed to because i always made a mess in there. and if you've met my mother, you understand why my closet wasn't allowed to be messy.
  
• once, in junior high, i was burning a candle in my room when the wick got too low and stopped burning. i decided to melt the rest of the wax, so that i could use it in another candle, instead of just throwing it away like a normal person. i then decided that the best way to melt the wax was to put bits of kleenex in there and light them on fire so that there would be heat to melt the wax, and an energy source that i could keep adding to as it burned down. i forgot, however, that i'm a moron, so the next thing i know, this little fire is kind of raging out of control in the candle jar. first i grabbed a spray bottle of water, but that just seemed to make the fire jump higher, which was not what i wanted. please remember that we lived in a house owned by the church where my dad worked, so if i burned it down, i would be in trouble with my parents, the church, and God. i was REALLY concerned with putting it out. i thought back to my fire safety classes in first grade, and i remembered that they way to put out a fire if water wouldn't work, was to smother it. so i grabbed a mirror and put it over the candle and put out the fire. i took the mirror off and had a new problem: lots of smoke. so i grab a sock off of the floor (dirty, of course, because i was in junior high, after all) and pick of the candle and take it to the window and open the window and put a fan on it to blow the smoke outside. i then realized that my room smelled like smoke, so i ran out and told my mom everything, finishing with, "I just want you to know so you don't think that i'm smoking or anything, because i'm not." at that point, many of my friends were smokers, and mom knew this, and i didn't want her to think i was doing it, because i didn't want to get in trouble. i threw away the candle. and have never tried to melt wax again.
• remember when you were little and life was measured by tv shows? how many mister rogerses or how many sesame streets until something? that was cool.
  
• before i learned how to tell time, or maybe just as i was beginning to tell time, i thought that "a quarter till" or "after" was 25 minutes, because one quarter was 25 cents, so that made sense. stupid fractions.
• i couldn't never understand why my neighbors across the street, wendy and heather, called their dad "wayne" instead of "dad." he was, of course, their stepdad, but i didn't get that when i was a kid. i also never understood why "big heather" and "little heather" had different last names, and why big heather was only there on the weekends. big heather was wayne's daughter from his first marriage, obviously, and little heather was his stepdaughter.
  
• there used to be an urban legend that a man hid behind the sign for our church and shot the man who lived in the house across the street from me. it happened a long time ago. i wonder if it's true.
  
• that sign was the best place to play as a child. you could hide behind it. and if you were one of the big kids, you could climb on top of it. i never did.
• the year we did "the great late potentate" for our christmas musical at church i was 5, i think, and if you watch the video from the second night, there's one part where the camera is on me, and i don't realize it, obviously, because i am just scratching my ass for all i'm worth. i'm classy.
• my aunt and uncle had a foster son, i think his name was robbie, and i have almost no recollection of him. i think he was at a few christmases when i was really little, but i don't ever remember talking to him, or even interacting with him. i wonder what ever happened to him.
• when i was in early grade school one day we went to visit my great aunt and uncle. i'm not sure exactly where they lived, but i think it was near ohio. anyway, they lived in florida during the winter, as old people in the midwest tend to do, and i overheard someone mention that they lived there. i thought we were going to see them in florida. now, i wasn't sure where florida was, but i was pretty sure it was really far away, and it seemed crazy that we were going there and back in a day. it seemed better to do for a long time and pack clothes and stuff. i was schocked when it only took about an hour. and then we got there, and their house was on a pond, and there were ducks and we got to feed them. that was also the first time i ever saw burner covers on a stove, which i still do not understand. why cover the burners? everyone knows they're there? this is why i made it my sacred duty to keep burning them until mom gave up. mom, i won.
  

enough memories for tonight. two really quick things: why is jon stwart's hair staring to look really similar to that of luke perry and jason priestly on the first few seasons of 90210?

and is anyone really shocked that lance bass is gay? seriously? that's not news. once 'nsync became really popular, i decided that everyone liked justin, and i should try to be different and like someone else. i honestly tried to cultivate a liking to lance, but he was too gay even back then. back in the super-gay boy band heyday of the late 90's, early 2000s. *sigh* those were the times.