Living Falling Down

I play Pokemon. Because of this, I have been laughed at, publicly mocked, and had friends walk away, never to be heard from again. I’ve been told I’m uncool, I’m stupid and even that I’m creepy because I actively participate in a “child’s game”.

I’m an adult, which means I should be abandoning all immature, childish pursuits, yes?

Hell no.

Why is it a requirement that we abandon everything we find fun as soon as we reach adulthood? Those things were fun for a reason. They were fun because they were awesome, amazing things that made us happy, and we should hold on to that as tightly as we possibly can because as we get older there will be less and less fun things to make us feel that way.

For my little sister, Brooke, Pokemon was her bliss.

Isn’t she adorable?
It started in the late-90s when she first saw the Pokemon television show. One “pika pika chu” and she was hooked. Then came the figurines, the plush toys, the trading card game and one of the happiest days of her childhood: her first Gameboy and Pokemon Blue.

She would spend her afternoons building elaborate forts in her room out of sheets and pillows, then populate them with extensive armies of Pokemon figurines. There were intricate stories developed in which these groups interacted, and every figurine had its own back story, wants and needs. To insinuate they were just toys was an insult. They were her friends, and she reveled in their company.

Often, she would supplement these dramatic performances by creating large Lego houses for her figurines to populate. She would spend hours constructing three-tiered villas where Charmander could open a coffee shop and Slowpoke could go on movie dates with Squirtle. Considering that our mother demanded all toys would be cleaned up at the end of the day, the amount of time which she devoted to the creation of these poke-homes was substantial.

Newbies should always pick the fire starter. Gotta be a pro to choose grass.

This lasted for several years of happiness until around 1999-2000 when the relationship between siblings had deteriorated to the point where we avoided each other at all possible (namely due to an intense rivalry between my older sister and me). We had developed this strange situation where, even though the three of us lived in the same house, ate at the same table and attended the same events, we had very separate lives.

My mother decided that this was unacceptable.

So she laid down her commandments:

Thou shalt choose one thing, and this thing shall be learned by your sisters.
Then thou shalt do this one thing with thy sisters at least once a week.
Thou shalt love and respect thy sibling’s thing as thine own.
Thou shalt not complain about doing your sister’s chosen thing, nor shall you mock it.

Of these commandments, we found the last to be the most difficult to abide, but nonetheless we all made our choices. My older sister chose a game called Tripoley, which could have been fun if we ever figured out the rules. Those games usually ended in mutual frustration and would result in us watching TV. I chose Legos, since it’s something I enjoyed and there were no rules to argue over. This was mildly successful, and we enjoyed some quiet afternoons building houses, mythical beasts and, for reasons I can’t remember, several failed attempts at a bust of president Clinton.

There was some Lego/Pokemon crossover.

Brooke chose Pokemon.

Specifically, the trading card game. It took a week or two for us to get a hold of the rules, but then we started having fun. We would look forward to our weekly matches, even get together more than once a week to play together. It gave us something to talk about, something to have in common, and for the first time ever we were getting along.

After a while, mom stopped enforcing her commandments and the Tripoley and Lego time abruptly stopped. However, we still played Pokemon. The look on Brooke’s face when she won a match (usually because we’d bend the rules to let her win, since she was much younger than us and strategy wasn’t her strong suit yet) was priceless. Even though my older sister and I could barely stand to be in the same room half of the time, we would still get together amicably for this one thing, because it meant we’d get to spend time with Brooke.

It was some of the happiest times I’ve had with my sisters.

She calls her deck the “Burninator”.

Fast forward over a decade.

Brooke has now started a successful Pokemon card league in her college, and her friends play together almost every day. Her room is covered in posters of Charizard and Pikachu and there’s a large Meowth plush doll which sits above her bed. She’s adamantly refused to give up her favorite pastime, regardless of how immature or silly the world thinks it is.

This makes Brooke amazing.

I’m proud that she’s stuck to what she loves and has never tried to hide who she is, because it’s made her a person worth knowing. Pokemon never really became my thing, but I’ve made a point of keeping up with it. I memorize the creature names, get new cards and play the video games because it’s worth it to maintain that link with my sister. I scaled Mt. Moon, I caught the legendary MewTwo and I battled the Elite Four, all to keep our common ground.

She also makes an incredible Team Rocket member.

It takes time, it takes effort and it means I’m terribly unpopular, but if it means I can retain just one iota of that happiness I experienced as a child, then it’s all worthwhile.

So let the masses judge me. Call me what you will. Laugh at me, mock me, pretend you don’t know me, I don’t care.

I still play Pokemon because I love my sister.

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Back in 2009, I auditioned for American Idol.

It’s okay, I’ll wait for you to stop laughing at my expense…Are you done now? …How bout now? All righty then.

I managed to get a rare perspective on the mega-popular reality show, not necessarily from the front lines, but just a enough to the left to get a whole different picture than anything I expected. This wasn’t because of any major event, or some Cinderella-esque turn of fate that left me in the limelight, but rather a lot of smaller instances that left me in back row center, giggling insanely at the wonderfulness that humanity can accomplish.

As I’m not currently writing this blog from a Hollywood Studio apartment, you can guess how far I managed to get into the actual competition, but I am thrilled at the experience and would gladly saddle up and drag everyone I know if I got the chance to do this again. Is it because I’m a glutton for punishment? I am, but that’s not the case here as the whole process was painless, exciting, fun and an incredible ego-booster, and I didn’t even pass the first round.

Allow me to explain:

Auditioning was a two-day event. Registration Day, followed promptly by Audition Day.

So many excited people!

On the first day, my mom and I showed up at the Amway Arena in Orlando, Florida around 8am to register for the show, along with about 3,000 other hopefuls. There was music playing in the line (courtesy of the contestants), news cameras everywhere, and in a rare Floridian event a wonderful breeze blowing that cooled everyone off and resulted in a crowd of genuinely happy people. I had expected to be waiting in line for several hours (and had brought provisions of sugary snacks and playing cards accordingly) but in reality I was waiting for about ten minutes. Ten minutes.

Then an American Idol employee (Hello Patrick, you wonderful man!) struck up a conversation with my party and moved us over to a special shorter ADA line that was out of the sun and where stunningly attractive EMTs were standing by. If you’re wondering why I would need to be in a disability-accessible line, it’s because I have a heart condition and the combination of Florida sun + waiting in line + uncontrolled excitement makes for a rather wobbly and purple-looking Heather. The extremely attentive Patrick noticed this, due to a background in medicine, and determined that I was better off in reaching distance of the aforementioned handsome EMTs. Who was I to complain?

In this line we waited for another ten minutes tops while enjoying the company of the polite Adonis EMTs before we experienced the glory of American Idol costumer service – a one-woman registration parade who came out and took care of all of our paperwork without requiring us to traipse up several flights of stairs to the main building or continue to wait in the morning heat. I do not know how that woman managed to carry all of those stickers, papers and things without losing any in the wind (I have a sneaking suspicion the wristbands had found a convenient pocket in her bra) but with the utmost courtesy and care she took care of us in a whopping total of two minutes.

Standing in line was like attending a free concert.
Let’s pause and take a look at the math here, folks. For the three thousand people standing outside the Arena, I counted twenty employees (maybe more, maybe less) working the crowd, and yet those spectacular people managed not only to pick out those in need of help in no time at all, but safely had them on their way in less than twelve minutes. We expected to be there for a minimum of three hours as per the online instructions (even though we arrived at a slow point of the day in terms of contestant traffic) but ended up being there twenty-two minutes, a total of half an hour if you count driving, parking and staring open-mouthed at the giant American Idol sign while squealing like prepubescent children.

Now, while Registration day was all about efficiency, Audition day was a massive block party with free wandering serenades and the best people-watching known to exist.

Parking was terrible, as expected, and we were forced to walk a long way to the Arena, but when we arrived we were not pushed into the crowd of 18,000 outside who would proceed to do commercial promos and crowd shots with Ryan Seacrest for 2 hours. I’m sad I missed it, but considering all the complaining I heard about the heat it’s hardly a deep sadness. Instead, we were escorted to the ADA entrance where two overworked yet exceedingly cheery Idol employees (Mario and Amanda, King and Queen of Multitasking) were singularly responsible for over a hundred contestants and their families in wheelchairs, on crutches, carrying canes, and, in my case, slightly addled due to sheer excitement.

Even though there were only two of them responsible for the great mass of us, and contestants could not travel anywhere unescorted, we only waited about five minutes before we were brought into the still-empty arena (and blessed air conditioning) where we were the first in the stadium to be seated and were practically catered to by a butler who looked like the Monopoly man. Our comrades in arms (and one very large cast) quickly became our friends and immediately we began swapping rumors and intel on the auditions, which we were all nervously excited about.

The stadium was packed, and quite musical.
I am not a social person by nature, it is a trait I have had to learn and still struggle with, but apparently if you place people next to each other in a colosseum-sized arena and tell them that they’ll be allowed to sing publicly social interaction becomes not only natural but enthusiastically pursued. During the two hours it took people to file into the arena and take their assigned seats, I made at least a dozen new friendships and somehow picked up the magical ability to start conversations with total strangers with only a smile. Seriously, you would have to cram 70 hippies into a van with politically-charged folk music and three megatons of weed in order to get the same level of cheer and good will towards others that I saw that day.

You might think that this was because everyone knew the cameras were on and thus were presenting their best behavior. However, I would like to relate some instances that occurred not only when the cameras were off but were nowhere in sight:

1. I walked through a door and a woman pointed at me dramatically and said “Look at her! That’s the best smile I’ve ever seen!” I don’t know about before, but it was certainly a bright smile after.

2. A rehearsing girl in a corner who was struggling and slaughtering a Carrie Underwood song (and I mean ripping it apart note by note, stabbing them and leaving them in a ditch to die a horrible, slow death) was not only applauded but was then set upon by not one, but three professional voice instructors who had her singing like Miss Carrie herself in under three minutes.

3. A young man darted through a crowd and dove in prince charming fashion to open a door for an older woman wearing a medical germ-proof mask without being asked, and followed this chivalrous act with a string of compliments. (To this man I would like to say thank you. This woman is a friend and still reflects upon your actions with happiness to this day.)

4. The first person to audition and receive a golden ticket was applauded by the crowd. The first person to audition and fail received a standing ovation.

5. In a two minute walk through the concourse, I counted seven times in which I saw a complete stranger walk up to a practicing singer and not only offer their praise, but their help if the singer so desired it. There was no competition, no survival of the fittest. Every person who got through was celebrated as though they were personal friends with everyone in the crowd and the only time I heard a negative word spoken about another contestant was when these words were uttered, “Did you hear that? She was brilliant!…I hate her!” I would like to add that that comment was followed with thunderous applause from the speaker.

<Apparently reality television is the secret to world peace.
Yes, it was a forum of peace, love and happiness the likes of which I have never seen, and in some way it restored my faith in a dwindling humanity. For if we all can come together for a common goal and support each other the way I saw strangers uplifting everyone that day, then our eventual extermination by cockroaches bent on world domination might be farther away than we originally believed.

On a final note, in the off chance that someone from a Google search finds this blog and shares it around, I would like to take this opportunity to speak to some people I met that day:

1. To the woman who spent the entire day shushing me and complaining that I was making it impossible to hear what was going on (when I was speaking in a normal tone of voice in the back row of an ampitheatre filled with over eighteen thousand other people) I would like to ask that you take a chill pill. Also, I heard your daughter sing and it was quite lovely.

2. To all those who spent time and effort making signs referring to “Poker Face” only to find out that they had changed the crowd song to “Heartbreaker”, I feel your pain. I spent months diligently learning nine different songs only to be allowed to sing four lines of a chorus.

3. To the two producers who were so intent on rushing through my group’s audition so that they could go on their lunch break that they not only didn’t listen to us but actually rested on your hands and sighed: I don’t blame you for being exhausted or dismissive, especially considering how many people you have to hear, and I do not begrudge you your decision to let all of us go home empty handed, it’s your right and I’m no David Cook. However, if you’re going to tell someone that they’re just not good enough for you, common courtesy dictates that you are supposed to look at them when speaking and avoid waving your hand like you’re swatting an annoying fly. I wasn’t hurt (I had successfully completed my goal of auditioning without forgetting the lyrics in a bout of horrible stage fright) but the others in my group seemed offended.

4. To the Girl in the Yellow Dress: As comical as it was watching you grab the butt of your super-short dress with a fist and hold it down whenever you walked up and down the stairs, I would suggest wearing an outfit that did not suffer the risk of full-backwards panty viewing whenever you take a deep breath. I apologize to whatever gentlemen might find fault with this plan.

5. Finally, to the girl rehearsing in the bathroom stall next to me who started in with a full-volume belted version of “At Last” right as my cheeks hit the can, I would like to award you the LFD Comedic Timing Seal of Approval. I nearly peed myself laughing. Luckily I was in a venue that could handle such calamity.

Finally, for your viewing pleasure, I’d like to share the moment that never made it to television:

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My Dad has not always been my Dad. He’s actually my stepdad, but since he’s the only real father figure I’ve known and I love him lots, he’s Dad to me. Before Dad, however, there was the Boyfriend. My mom didn’t do much dating before Dad, since she was a single mom with three kids and had far more important things to do, but there was one relationship that lasted for a few years.

His name was Tom.

Tom was obsessed with bringing some culture and civility to our small family. He seemed to think that it was his duty to aid us in becoming better, more refined human beings, and he undertook many different projects which were supposed to accomplish this. Poor Tom did not realize that we were a lost cause.

My family isn’t trash, we keep a clean house and we’re good, kind-hearted people. We’re just terribly, horribly ill-behaved when it comes to social situations. You know that group who talks too loud, reenacts battle scenes with the cutlery and dissolves into raucous laughter at the mere thought of someone farting? Yeah, that’s us.

 

Heheheheehe…fart.
We can certainly behave ourselves when the occasion calls for it (although begrudgingly), but compared to Tom we were like mud-covered pigs that someone had scooped out of the sty, clothed, and placed at the dinner table. It was a constant source of frustration for him, and, for reasons I still don’t understand, he kept trying his best to adapt us into the polite, proper young ladies he thought we could be.

His campaign started pretty benignly, with the attempt to get the family to eat healthier. This wasn’t a terrible idea, and initially we supported him, but it quickly became apparent that Tom’s version of “healthy” was far more extreme than what we were prepared for. At first it was homemade granola instead of potato chips and grilled chicken instead of fried, and we didn’t mind because Tom was an excellent cook and made it quite tasty.

Then came the cheese sticks.

As his health quest continued, Tom found he didn’t have the time to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner for a family of five and work a full time job. He decided to go shopping, but normal grocery stores were too processed and mainstream. They didn’t have the real, natural health food that Tom sought. So he found some back alley farmers market and proceeded to buy up a large quantity of the “healthiest” food he could find.

I can’t tell you everything he got, because frankly I still don’t know what half of it was.

It was mushier than this…and more green.What I do remember was the absolute removal of taste from most of what we ate that week. The things that actually resembled food tasted like nothing at all, and the things which looked like colored mush paste had the vague taste of parsley and cottage cheese. Despite our attempts to trade during school lunches, we went an entire week confused and bereft of anything our bodies could recognize as edible.

Now my mother, who understood that Tom meant well, spent the week consoling my sisters and me. She told us that the food was full of vitamins, that it would make us stronger and that, no, the little things that looked like mutated broccoli were not an attempt at mind control. She acted as the counselor, reinforcing the idea that change was good and we’d get used to it eventually.

Then he bought cheese sticks.

Mom’s favorite snack at the time was cheese. She would cut it into little slices and place them on crackers and she would be a fairly happy camper. Yet these cheese sticks changed everything. They looked like mozzarella string cheese, but were so rubbery that you couldn’t actually peel them. It would stretch when you bit down so you’d have to gnaw on them like a squirrel until they would snap into edible pieces. They were borderline inedible, tasted like corrugated cardboard and they could bounce about three feet in the air when slammed on the ground.

For Mom, it was the breaking point. She could deal with the bad tastes, mushy mess and the sudden dismissal of all that we had previously enjoyed, but the man had messed with her cheese. That meant war.

Mmmm, cheese!
The revolution began.

It started in secret with provisions being slowly but surely sneaked into the house until it was fully stocked with all that we desired. Of course, they couldn’t be placed in the kitchen because then he would find them, so there were fruit snacks behind the toilet, chocolate cereal under the couch and creamy peanut butter stashed in our underwear drawers. This continued until ants disrupted the washing machine Reeses stash and the dog found the Twizzlers under the TV. Then things became more aggressive.

In the middle of the night, Mom snuck out of bed and stocked all of our food into the pantry, tossing his in the process. By lunchtime, she was shocked to find his food back and hers piled neatly by the door. Then Mom would cook up a scrumptious dinner for us, but sometime between preparation and the table it would be replaced with a casserole consisting of twigs and tree bark. We couldn’t win.

She gave us permission to begin disrupting his other attempts at decorum, permitting us to belch at him on the phone and slide around the kitchen floor with pillows strapped to our feet, but Tom was unfazed and the mush meals continued.

It was time for drastic measures.

The one thing that Tom prized more than anything else was the sanctity of the dinner table. It was a time to gather in a haven of respectability and celebrate the unity of family. He would lay out the table like a formal feast every night, with more forks than we ever used and cloth napkins rolled into engraved wooden holders. He would play light jazz or classical music to set the air of a calm, quiet gathering in which to discuss the matters of the day. It was his happiest place, sitting down to a wonderful meal with his family.

It was a pipe dream, really.
Photo courtesy of fahrmboy-stock.

That was about to change.

Mom started it. She waited until he left the room to fetch something and reorganized the silverware. When he returned, you could see his brow twitching, but he said nothing. Then my sisters and I hid his food when he went to answer the phone. He searched around for it for ten minutes as we struggled to sit in silence, but he still didn’t say a word. Then he decided to put on one of his favorite CDs, Natalie Cole: Unforgettable…With Love.

This was a mistake.

I immediately began mouthing the words, singing into my spoon and overacting as much as humanly possible. I was reprimanded.

Yet while he yelled at me, my sister began behind him. She was reprimanded.

I picked up where I left off the moment she turned his head. I was reprimanded severely.

While I was being yelled at, both of my sisters began an elaborate stage show. They did not stop when they were yelled at so I joined in, playing my fork like a piano.

Turning slightly purple, Tom yelled for my mother to intercede.

There was a moment, a long moment, in which you could see the wheels of Mom’s mind cranking along, choosing her fate. Then, with a maniacal grin, she leapt to her feet just as the chorus of Unforgettable hit and proceeded to belt out the lyrics at the top of her lungs, replacing several of them with the word “taco”.

We’re sorry, Natalie!

Tom was livid.

He snatched up the pepper grinder, we assume to occupy his hands in an attempt to avoid strangling someone, and began to churn pepper into his soup as he delivered one of the most stern, dramatic lectures I have ever received. We sat, trying desperately to contain ourselves, as he scolded us for our behavior, all the while churning the grinder. It wouldn’t have been nearly as funny if he wasn’t so terribly serious about how deeply we had wronged him, so it was partially his fault that we continued to giggle spontaneously throughout his speech.

That, and he never stopped adding pepper.

He lectured us for a good twenty minutes before taking a breath and looking down at his bowl. There he found a mound of pepper, nearly overflowing the bowl as his soup fought for a place to be. His face looked like a plum that had been left in the sun and a vein on his head was threatening to explode.

We tried to be silent.

The look on his face of anger, shame, of the sheer disastrous nature of it all was what finally did us in. We erupted, banging on the table and clutching our sides as we laughed. The table had disintegrated into a pile of wheezing, coughing, sputtering children who couldn’t breathe through their laughter.

“If you can’t behave yourselves,” Tom yelled at the top of his lungs, “Then JUST LEAVE.”

We left.

Tom then proceeded to sit, alone at the table, and eat the entire bowl of pepper.
Every. Last. Bite.
That was the end of his healthy food campaign.

Scrumptious, no?
Photo courtesy of Sheepy-Pie-Stock.

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A few years back, in the great Lonestar state, I had a friend who shall henceforth be known as “Sue”.

Sue was bonkers.

It wasn’t just that she was a strong, outspoken person, she was also highly impulsive, had the attention span of a gnat, the imagination of a three year old whose been given sugar for the first time and a penchant for doing the exact opposite of what any normal person would decide to do. She had good intentions, but would often find herself in outrageous situations while on some madman’s errand to find adventure.

This made Sue awesome.

For the years which Sue was my best friend, we had several crazy adventures which usually fall into the category of “no one will ever believe this”. They usually began with something benign, like a desire to play hide-n-seek, and would end up with us uncovering some massive drug conspiracy and getting thrown off of swing sets by an irritated constable at two in the morning. Nancy Drew had nothing on us.

Oh, you found a clue! How special.

My favorite adventure started at around 8pm, after a full day of cupcakes, Catminton (our version of badminton which involved an oversized inflatable soccer ball and prolific cursing) and a strange and somewhat disastrous combination of caffeine and Dance Dance Revolution. We had decided in our obviously compromised state that we wanted to travel to the edge of my neighborhood to where there was a large, water-filled bayou and scout for appropriate film locations for our full-length parody of Pirates of the Caribbean called The Curse of the Black Squirrel (which, unfortunately, never saw the light of day). Naturally, we decided that 8pm in Texas, when its pitch black and you have to part curtains of mosquitoes to breathe properly, would be the perfect time to go to a swampy bayou and see what we could find.

So we packed up some provisions (a cell phone, two cookies, and a large stick we found in the backyard) and traipsed several blocks away from my home to the dead-end street which marked the entrance to the bayou. Now, during the daytime we had spent a considerable amount of time there. It was frequently used for airsoft battles, large games of freeze tag and the accumulation of natural materials for impromptu tree forts and assorted crafts. However, the bayou extended for several miles beyond the patch which consisted of our playground, and neither of us was familiar with the unlit area at night.

Here’s a picture of the bayou in the daytime.

Now, I’m going to pause in the story here to clarify a small point – Sue and I were adults. This all happened when we were about 19, and when I say we played in this bayou, I don’t mean when we were kids. The weekend before this excursion we had been in that same bayou with a large group of people playing a fantastically rowdy game of red rover, so don’t get the idea that we were two lost little children who didn’t know any better. We weren’t.

Anyway, we decided fairly quickly that our part of the bayou would not be satisfactory for our grand movie-making plans, so we marched down the small trampled dirt path until we got to the end of it. There, with the slope down to the boggy creek on our left (it was about eight feet from crest to bottom, but a gentle slope) and a sparse wooded area on our right, we began slogging through the tall grass, following the edge of the bayou as it curved into the distance. Sue, who was in heels and wearing a skirt at the time, expressed slight concern over the terrain, but it was determined that adventure was afoot and so we pressed ahead. We picked up a lovely conversation that was only about 70% nonsense and merrily trotted along.

An hour later, we were lost and had forgotten why we were out there at all.

A normal person would have chosen to turn around, retrace their steps and go home, but we decided to leave the edge of the bayou and take the first field/alleyway between neighborhoods up to the main road because there were flowers growing there that looked like unicorn poo. They were actually tuffs of fur that had flown out of an equestrian training facility a few miles ahead of us and littered the field, but at night they looked like magical unicorn poo and we were determined to follow them in the hopes of finding their mythical master.

Allow me to clarify another small point – we were not high. Just silly…and highly caffeinated.

You know you want one.

We followed the magical poo trail, dancing off and on to attract any stray unicorns which may or may not have been waiting to see who would be daring enough to follow in their wake, until we eventually came across the training center and encountered a loud and irritable horse who was most definitely not a unicorn and clearly wanted to bite our faces off. After that point, the magic poo wasn’t as appealing.

At this point two amazing things happened in rapid succession.

First, we met the first human we had seen on our journey. He ran out of the darkness while we were running, screaming, from the angry face-biting horse and nearly collided with us. In actuality, he was probably just a jogger wondering what all the noise was, but to us, in the dead of night, he was a hooded bandit come to steal our cookies and was to be feared. So we ran past him in a flurry of adrenaline, yelling about unicorns, and he, showing wisdom that we did not possess, chose not to follow us.

Mere moments later, we stumbled upon a large object leaning up against a nearby fence. At first we thought it was a person curled up in the grass, obviously a victim of the bandit or face-biting horse, and we sought to provide it with medical attention. Upon closer inspection, we discovered it was not a hapless, faceless dolt but rather a decorative blow mold of Minnie Mouse dressed up for Christmas.

It’s a holly jolly light up rodent!

I, being an avid holiday decorator, immediately began to celebrate our luck at finding such a rare and wondrous decoration lying, discarded, in the bayou. Yet Sue was ashen, pointing at Minnie’s base with the expression of someone who’s seen the wizard behind the curtain and is appropriately shocked and scandalized by it. Tucked into Minnie’s base, in the open section used to stake the decoration to the ground, was a small brown satchel wrapped up with string.

It had to be drugs.

We were certain of this. It was drugs, and this decoration was used as a drop off point. The bandit had picked up his money and had left these drugs here to be found. We had stumbled onto the stash of Al Capone himself and we were in immediate danger as a result.

We snatched up Minnie, drugs and all, and bolted.

In a rush of rebellious exhilaration we ran, Sue holding the satchel before her like it was radioactive, her knees nearly touching her chest as she attempted to keep her skirt out of the hip-high grass, and me, with Minnie tucked under my arm like a large, cumbersome football, trying to run and crouch at the same time so not to be seen by enemy drug snipers. We screamed along like Scooby Doo until suddenly we broke out of the field and onto the sidewalk of a local highway.

I look exactly like this when I run.

So we stood, in full view of passing motorists, panting, sagging, covered in leaves and twigs and draping ourselves over a plastic Minnie Mouse as we fought for air.

Someone honked. We waved.

It was then that we finally realized our location, discovering that our journey had taken us a whopping seven miles away from my home. No other option available, Sue adjusted her heels, I lifted Minnie over my head, and we began the trek home.

It was about one in the morning when we arrived at my doorstep giddy, exhausted and sneaking around haphazardly in a fantastic Team Rocket impression due to the looming threat of drug people showing up at any moment. It seemed terribly important at the time not to be seen, so we left Minnie on the doorstep, rang the bell and ran away.

Then screamed bloody murder as my parents showed up directly behind us.

Blathering on top of each other, we managed to tell them about the massive drug smuggling operation which we had foiled and the impending doom which was sure to fall upon us at any moment. Sue then held up the brown satchel at arm’s length, proof of our conquest over illegal activities.

With the sigh that they reserve specifically for when I manage to do things like this, my parents calmly placed the two of us on the front porch with Minnie and approached the satchel with the same confidence as someone showing a two year old that there were no monsters under the bed. My father found a knife, cut the strings and slowly peeled back the brown wrapping.

It was an elctrical plug.

We had ran fourteen miles, escaped a man-eating horse, stolen from the bandit man and amused hundreds of motorists on the highway for a plug.

So we ate cookies.

OM NOM NOM NOM.

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I’ve had a baby blanket since I was…well, a baby. It’s white with red trim and has the remnants of some long-ago washed out image of Raggedy Ann and Andy’s Circus. I no longer need a security blanket to comfort me while I sleep, or protect me from the boogeyman, but I can’t bear to throw it away or pack it into some box to be eaten by moths and slowly disintegrate over time. Today it still sits on my dresser, proudly serving as a throne for Tiggie, the plush leopard who I swore was a tiger despite all arguments or evidence to the contrary.

Technically, it’s my second baby blanket. When I was born I “inherited” my first blanket from my older sister, by which I mean my parents bought her a new one and convinced her it had super powers that the old one didn’t so she wouldn’t get jealous of the baby having a blanket of her own. That attempt of my parents to assuage my sister’s feelings haunted me for years as my sister would run around the house with her blanket as a cape saying I couldn’t play superhero with her because my blanket “wasn’t special”. Granted, when I received the thing it was tattered and contained a lovely coffee stain on the bottom corner, but as long as I wasn’t being carried off in the middle of the night by those furry things from Where The Wild Things Are I figured it was doing its job just fine.

Was I the only one terrified by these things?

After a few years, my mother decided that the lovely and familiar piece of fabric that I was dragging merrily behind me had reached the point of being dispensable, and as I think in hindsight about the giant gaping tear in it I think she might have been right. At the time, however, nothing would part me from my blanket. Zeus himself could have thrown lightning bolts at my feet and that frilly-looking man from the fashion network who used to give me nightmares could have chased me in those stiletto boots of his but I would still not have relinquished it. My mother bought me a brand new blanket (which had a strange way of mysteriously walking itself into the freezer or trashcan in the middle of the night), she brought me new stuffed animals in the hopes that I would hug them at night instead (I ended up sleeping in a menagerie of fluff-filled friends, I don’t think my back actually touched mattress for months), and even resorted to stealing my blanket and chucking it into the dumpster outside. Yet every night without fail there it would be by my pillow, waiting to protect me from the dark and smelling slightly of the meatloaf we ate the night before.

For a while, it became routine for my mother to take me out shopping on Saturdays through baby stores and children’s boutiques. It was that time in my life when I was rapidly growing out of every piece of clothing I owned so it wasn’t as if we didn’t have reason to shop, but I’m fairly certain that a main purpose of these trips was to find something that I would accept to replace the blanket which was, by that point, in two distinct and separate halves.

It’s not that other blankets aren’t cute, but they weren’t MINE.

Now I would like to take a moment in this story to note that my mother is infinitely patient with me and truly deserves some sort of velvet-mounted medal for all of the wonderful nonsense I’ve inflicted on her through the years. She tried several times to sit me down and explain that it wasn’t that she didn’t want me to have the blanket, it’s that it simply wasn’t healthy to keep the molding old thing around. As an adult I can look back and admit she was right, but at the time all I heard was “Blah blah blah Heather blah blah throw out the blanket blah blah.” There may or may not have been more blahs. My memory isn’t flawless.

However, on one miserably cold Saturday morning (I remember because I was wearing three layers of coats) mom and I went into this off-the-main-road mom and pop run antique store. My mother insists that the purpose of that outing was to replace parts of the Tiffany-style lamp that our dog had broken for the fifth time by racing through the house at breakneck speed until he slammed headfirst into a wall- the same wall he had hit four times previous – but judging by the fact that I was the only one of her three children she brought in tow I’m thinking she had some mom-sense that we would finally find what we were looking for. The store was really an old Victorian-style house that had been converted, and after dusting snow and damp off of our clothes we moved from the foyer to what was once the dining room. There it was, hanging stretched across two chairs for display, a perfect, brand-new replica of my blanket!

I remember making a noise somewhat like a small pig who’s discovered its curly tail has been set on fire before leaping over an antique coffee table to hug the thing. It was the blanket as I had never had the opportunity to see it: Raggedy Ann’s face still had color, Andy’s face hadn’t been scratched out by a blue crayon, and the Circus performers hadn’t been washed out to the point where they were no longer discernible from the train on which they sat.

I might have done this dance a little.

My mother instantly grabbed up me and the blanket with one arm and went marching straight to the cash register where the grinning saleswoman was forced to ring up the item manually because I would not remove my vice-like fingers from it.  We then went home, abandoning the lamp-bits in a fit of jubilant celebration and singing with the radio at the top of our lungs.

When we arrived home, my mother marched up to my bedroom, retrieved the old blanket and, in an epic triumphant fashion, dropped it into the kitchen trash…

…Where it stayed for about five minutes before I sneakily ran it back upstairs. It took her two months to finally throw it away (she found my secret hiding place while I was at school and actually drove it away from the house to find a dumpster) but thankfully by then I had grown sufficiently attached to the new one and I didn’t fight it…too much.

I’ve taken much greater care of the second one, and even now more than a decade later the design can still be seen, which is good considering the design is retired and there won’t be another opportunity to make a switch ever again. To be honest, I would never make another change – my blanket is one of the few things in the world that I know is unequivocally mine, something that no one can ever take from me. It’s a rather comforting thought.

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Perhaps one of the most enlightening experiences of my life began with a cockroach.

In the summer of 2005 I was living in Alabama. Not big-city Alabama where there’s a Wal-Mart every five feet and evangelists roam the airways, but rather a tiny little city buried in the country with beautiful hills, stunning flower-filled vistas and the politest people you will ever meet gathering in parking lots to show off how dirty their ATVs were.

Seriously. I never figured out why. They didn’t actually drive the ATVs anywhere, they would just take buckets of dirt and mud and cover them so it looked like they had been off spinning them through the back alley dirt roads and then they’d take them to the largest parking lot in town on the back of a truck, gather around them and talk about awesome it was to have an ATV.

What is the POINT?!

But I digress.

So on a warm summer day, my mother and I were splayed out in our living room, surrounded by box fans and the drone of the television, when our lackadaisical reverie was rudely interrupted with a scream. My little sister, Brooke, approximately 13 at the time, had been quietly reading in her bedroom when she let loose an ear-splitting wail. My mom and I rushed into her room, falling all over ourselves in the process, and discovered her standing on her bed, dancing slightly about at the fringes of her bed, was a hideous, monstrous palmetto bug.

Seeing Brooke’s distress and the source of her call for aid, my mom and I did what any mature, calm and responsible adults would do.

We both screamed like little girls and scrambled up on the bed with her.

Now, before you roll your eyes at me, you should know that Alabama palmetto bugs were created by the devil for the sole purpose of scaring the daylights out of unsuspecting people. They are massive compared to normal cockroaches and delight in jumping up (yes, they can fly) and forcefully connecting with your face. They never miss. They have pinpoint face-finding accuracy and they want nothing more than to collide with your forehead and scramble to climb up your nose. I think there’s some mandate that the first cockroach to reach someone’s brainstem wins the Palmetto Bug Olympics, because that seems to be their ultimate goal in life.

You SHOULD fear this.

So, standing on the bed, facing down our adversary, we three came up with a foolproof plan to save ourselves from the imminent doom which awaited us should we decide to step off the relative safety of Brooke’s Pokemon bed sheets. With a collective call, we summoned the family dog, Simba, a valiant chow-chow with a penchant for heroic rescues and a bacon addiction, and he galloped into the room with all the pomp and circumstance of a baby giraffe trying to rollerblade on linoleum.

He took a long moment to access the situation, then promptly leapt up on the bed with us, mistakenly believing that this was some sort of new bed game which required his participation.

Our rescue plan now on his back and demanding belly rubs, we were forced to come up with another plan. We quickly armed ourselves with the objects at our disposal. Brooke had an umbrella and one of my mother’s shoes (which had been hastily and rudely snatched from her feet), I had a nerf gun with no darts and my mom’s other shoe (which I had stolen while Brooke was grappling for the other one), and my mom bore a great purple exercise ball which had been inexplicably found in the garage.

We were not nearly this well prepared.
Photo thanks to IngwellRitter-Stock

First, we attempted to assail our opponent with the umbrella, but it seemed to be immune to light, tentative poking. Then, in a moment of stupidity, the umbrella was thrown at it. It missed.

Next the exercise ball was lobbed at the beast as forcefully as my mom could manage. It missed.

Then, after attempting to scare the intruder with the sound of a clicking nerf gun and failing, it too was tossed at the monster. It missed.

We then collectively agreed that our aim sucked.

Then the roach attempted to take flight. The first shoe was thrown as a deterrent.

It missed.

Thankfully, the roach decided that too many large, unwieldy objects were mystically taking flight and that the floor was the better option, so, for the moment, our brainstems were safe. Then, in a tight huddle, my mom and I began to discuss strategy options with the dog. Should Dad be called in for reinforcements? Would the police hang up on us? Could we send the dog for siege sandwiches?

While we debated our next move, Brooke had snuck over and was peering off the end of the bed, critically analyzing the creepy, crawly beast. Then, in an unexpected gesture, she nabbed the final shoe out of my hand, placed it on her foot, and with a big bounce off the bed landed straight on top of the roach, ending our gory battle in glorious victory.

Then, with an expression of smug satisfaction, the little girl strutted out of the room, leaving two adults languishing in our cowardice and shame while the dog licked the pillows.

The astounding thing about this particular event is that it actually had a moral, one that I have lived by from that moment forward. Don’t expect others to save you from the world. Don’t hide or run away from your problems. Face them head on and you will emerge victorious.

Go forth and slay the cockroach.

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I am a storyteller.

I’m a lot of other things too: an artist, a writer, a former and still-wannabe actor, a shower composer, a medically legitimate zombie, a werewolf on weekends, the owner of the world’s only watch-me-fall-down happy dance and an avid squid fanatic. However, all of my talents, all of my faults and every aspect of my personality boils down to a single, unavoidable truth: I am a storyteller.

I simply can’t help it. Ever since I was born things as simple as going to the grocery store became an epic quest to procure the elusive hot dog and rescue the marshmallows from the grip of the deadly cereal aisle. I see people as walking libraries stocked with stories and every party I go to I end up regaling some long, fascinating tale with a rapt audience…or someone forcefully removing me from the premises, whichever comes first.

I dream in stories. I’ve created five-act plays in full while I’m asleep, much to the chagrin of others as this can lead to talking, kicking and blanket-stealing as I complete my task. My head is a wonderland for the spoken word, with heroes and villains and anthropomorphized trash cans rushing about and begging me to share the awesomeness of their existence.

So let’s begin.

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