Unearthed last night, a list of things that my friends and I apparently thought were hilarious or poignant when we were 16 or so years old.

Prismism rules!
It’s worse than that, it’s physics, Jim.
Don’t rookydoo around.
The purple pane of glass and velvety cat balls
Communism is evil!
Good Heavens! (oh no, not the infamous Good Heavens clerics!)
Convert to Bert!
Death by stereo
The Cube that Killed the Kremlin, and Broccoli Abuse
I never heard that word before, Your Grace.
Everyone wants to know what gives, but I know where the tarantula lives.
748-1414
Bert and Ernie (NOT Ernie and Bert)
Get Your Sofa Away From Me
SAY NO MORE!
Don’t crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers.
Ice cream has no bones.
Live in a swamp and be three-dimensional.
Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Art is the only way I can run away without leaving home.
It’s only forever, not long at all.
You can make an object go through space, but can you make space go through an object?
Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.
Rumor: Ronald never takes a leak.
It’s true! It’s true! The clown has made it crear!
Now the oboe may be there to greet them
That is not the way to play croquet.
As you wish.
I think I am, therefore I am… I think.
Paul is an ambidextrous walnut.
They are not the hell your whales.
Hi! We’re your stickmen slaves!
Negative signs make a difference.
You can still hear Beethoven, but he can no longer hear you.
Roses are red, violets are blue. Some poems rhyme, but this one don’t.
Roses are red, violets are blue. I’m schizophrenic, and so am I.
Go to hell. Go directly to hell. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.
Sam the Amoeba: Sam and his brother were quaffing, they split their sides laughing, now each of them is a mother.

In which I out myself as a complete and total nerd:

As I mentioned two posts ago, I was saddened to learn that Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, failed his saving throw vs. death on Tuesday. I spent the entire four years of my high school career (why do they call high school a career, anyway?) immersed in D&D with my girlfriends. We did not have boyfriends (I’m sure that comes as a real shock), and so we’d spend nearly every weekend and some weeknights playing.

I don’t think that we really played the same way that most other people play D&D. We weren’t sticklers for the rules, or calculations and charts, and we definitely didn’t have little figurines to represent our characters. Our characters had definite personalities and extraordinarily complete backstories, and while we still did a lot of normal D&D adventuring, we preferred to play “Personal Happiness.”

“Personal Happiness” resulted in me having, to this day, an entire file box full of scribbled notes from one character to another. During sleepovers, or evenings at each others’ houses, or even during school when we were supposed to be doing algebra or chemistry, we’d write notes back and forth to each others’ characters. Each conversation would have its own sheet of paper:

B.P.- How’s life?
-Selina

Selina- Alright. How about you?
-B.P.

B.P. – I suppose it’s okay. The kids are driving me NUTS. N-V-T-S, nuts! Nevermind. I got a cat. All black, named Macbeth.
-Selina

Selina – I’ll take the kids if you’d like.
-B.P.

B.P.- If you want ‘em for a while, it’d sure be nice.
-Selina

Selina – Okay, I’d like to have them.
-B.P.

B.P.- How’s the love life? If you don’t mind my asking, that is.
-Selina

Selina – Nonexistent. And you?
-B.P.

B.P.- The same. I’m surprised Kook Sul hasn’t asked me to marry him lately.
-Selina

Selina – I think he gave up.
-B.P.

This was essentially a pen-and-paper precursor to instant messaging! And yes, most of our Personal Happiness conversations revolved around love and relationships – the very things none of us were experiencing in real life. For what it’s worth, Selina was my cleric, recently divorced from Sarah’s character B.P. (Black Panther), a half-elf/black panther shapeshifter.

It was seriously like a four-year soap opera.

Geeky and pathetic as it may sound, I think that the intensive imagination that this required helped develop not only my creativity but also my writing skills and my skills at relating to people. I haven’t always had good people-relating skills (okay, maybe I still don’t!) and D&D really cemented my relationship with my girlfriends. We are all still good friends today, twenty years later, and who knows if we would have been as close as we are if it weren’t for RPGs.

A couple of other notes: We always wrote out our marching orders at the beginning of adventures, and the title always was “Marching Order (smooth, like a little froggy’s bottom).” Why? I have completely forgotten, but I’m sure it was for some hilarious reason. Also, in the marching orders we had columns for name, class, rank, and hit points – the usual stuff – but also a column labeled “V/NV,” which I believe stood for “Virgin/Nonvirgin.” Clearly this was important to us!

This was my favorite character, Bradley Dale, named (not so secretly) after someone I secretly was in looooove with in high school. Click for larger images.

And we weren’t big fans of charts full of numbers, but we did keep a few:

The Magna Carta was signed in 1215.

If I remember nothing else from high school history classes, that one will stay with me until I die. Why? I have no idea. But all my friends from high school remember the date too. I imagine it was drilled into us in order to meet some test objective. (That, and “Communism is evil.” Love those sweeping generalizations!)

And now it’s up for sale!

Doc’s been feeling somewhat decent the past few days… relatively speaking, of course. He’s woken up without much of a headache, and that is a nice change. It usually hits later in the day but I don’t think it’s to the degree that it has been recently.

He says that the Depakote is doing really weird things to him. Before, the headaches would come in long waves, kind of like a sine wave that went really high in intensity for a while, then would dip somewhat lower for a while. Now the headaches come in shorter bursts that don’t get quite as high or as low. Both amplitude-modulated and frequency-modulated. Also, it’s like the cluster and the migraine and the Depakote are in a 3-way knock-down drag-out fight inside his skull, and one of them usually will have dominance for a short period before one of the other ones takes over for a while.

He has to gradually build up to taking 4 pills a day. Tonight he starts on week #3 (3 pills). Should be interesting to see what happens when he’s on a full dose.

Saturday we had a good day. Spent a lot of quality time together, I went to Molly’s wedding shower, we went out to the movies to see “Stardust,” which was quite surprisingly good and then later watched “The Constant Gardener” from Netflix, and we ate takeout for dinner.

At Molly’s shower, I saw a girl that I remembered from high school but haven’t seen since 1990. She and I had a class together and we sat together every day and goofed off the entire year. She was a year younger than me but she was one of the “cool kids,” the ones who occasionally cut class, probably smoked and drank, and generally had a much more developed social life than I did. But she hung out with me in class, talked to me, seemed to like or at least accept me. I definitely remembered her for that, and occasionally wondered what happened to her. I didn’t know that Molly was friends with her younger sister. She now has three kids, including a 2 week old baby girl and a 3 year old boy who knows all the words to Johnny Cash’s entire repertoire, and is as funny as ever. She said that she remembers me, although I’m not sure that’s actually true. She may have said it just to be nice. It doesn’t matter, though, I had a good time talking to her his weekend.

Today I began lunchtime yoga classes. I haven’t taken yoga in a year and a half, because I was lazy, training for a marathon, and really liked going out to eat every day instead. But I’m changing my ways now. I hope to go to yoga at least 2 out of 3 times per week, endeavor to cut back on my seriously out of control diet-Coke habit (by not drinking any before lunch time, for starters), and to continue my healthy diet changes. I’ve already stopped eating all deli meat (turkey, ham, roast beef, etc) and have cut way down on my meat consumption in general. I’m trying to eat more fruit (breakfast smoothies help a lot with that). More changes probably to come, but I think these are good goals to start with.

Anway, after yoga I felt fantastic all afternoon, as I usually do when I get those endorphins going in my bloodstream. I am certain that tomorrow I will barely be able to move! But I should be used to it after a week or so, I think.

My friend Kim sent me this link yesterday. This is my long-lost high school friend Brad Robertson, with his wife. I’ve occasionally wondered what happened to Brad after high school but he never came up on any Google searches.

None of my other friends and acquaintances ever knew what happened to him either, even the ones involved in theatre (like he was). It was like he had fallen off the face of the earth. So it’s good to know he’s …. well, not dead or anything …. and actively working in theatre too.

Hi Brad! How are you? You probably have no idea who I am since my name’s not on this blog anywhere (hint: tall Katy with the curly hair). It’d be great to hear from you.

I just read a story on cnn.com about the Croatian government’s reaction to discovering sugar packets in some cafes with Adolf Hitler’s face and Holocaust jokes printed on them. This is completely appalling, especially considering Croatia’s past ties to Naziism. Sometimes words fail me, and all I can think of is: PEOPLE SUCK.

But it did remind me of something I’d completely forgotten about: when I was in high school, my friends and I would write things on sugar packets when we were out at restaurants, and then replace them in the container on the table. I don’t remember anything specifically that we wrote, but it would be things that we thought were funny, or clever, or cryptic. Jokes, weird phrases, or good fortunes. We wanted the next person to find that sugar packet to be either pleased, or confused, or both.

In 1990, Rob Wilson and I spent weeks creating a sculpture to enter in the White Rock Lake Floating Sculpture Festival.

We were so proud of it. We were allowed to leave art class to gather materials, so Rob drove us around rural east Plano, where our high school was located, until we found a stand of bamboo growing by the roadside (seriously, bamboo growing wild in Plano). We had the windows down and the cassette deck was blasting Henry Mancini’s “The Pink Panther Theme.”

We cut down bamboo, and later cut the fish out of foam core, painted them, hot-glued scales onto them (cut from a roll of transparent pale blue 2″ plastic film that Rob brought in), tied our bamboo together into a cage-like structure on top of a raft, tied the fish inside, added colorful streamers, and tossed it into the pond outside the art building for a test run. One corner of it was a little bit underwater, but other than that, we had ourselves a floating sculpture!

A week or so later, we hauled it down to White Rock Lake and quite ceremoniously, in front of a large crowd, heaved our Fish Out Of Water into the lake…. where it promptly sank to the bottom.

We were so embarrassed that we simply left. We didn’t stick around to see the other sculptures or to wait for the judging (where we would quite certainly have received the “Least Floaty Floating Sculpture” award). However, in our defense, we were competing against a pool of much older and more experienced established artists. We were just a couple of 17 year olds with some bamboo and hot glue.

We have a little video of the making of the Fish Sculpture… if I can find a way to get it off of DVD and onto YouTube, I’ll post it.

On an unrelated note, doesn’t the school look like a prison??

The summer before I left for college, I was seventeen years old and I decided that I was going to dye my hair. I’d soon be leaving home, going to a new place where no one would know me, and I wanted to reinvent myself. Nobody at college would know that the real me was a socially awkward, ugly, fat, unpopular nerd — or at least that was how I thought of myself (and I was convinced that the entire world was intensely watching and judging me, pointing and laughing and hating me. Ah, how tiny our worlds are when we’re teenagers).

I wanted my new mature college friends to think I was cool and funny and outgoing. Maybe even a little new wave (or “goth” as it was starting to be called). And changing my hair color was step one of my grand plan to be somebody else. Looking different might make me feel different, and I’d be able to act accordingly.

The question was: red, or black? I loved red hair, had always wanted red hair, was secretly in love with a boy who had red hair. But black… that would be intense. Dramatic. I’d get noticed, and I’d definitely be seen as “one of those Cure fans,” which I was. But with my natural curly blond hair and nearly six-foot stature, I was about as far from a waifish black-clad eyeliner-wearing Goth chick as one could be.

I tried out black hair once with a can of nonpermanent Halloween hairspray paint. As you can see from the blond traces in this photo, I needed far more than the one can that I had. This was my Robert Smith costume. I actually went out in public dressed like this, wearing a black turtleneck and black bodysuit with suspender-style straps and stirrup leggings. Seriously. It was the ’80s. I guess I was trying to pretend I didn’t care what people thought of me when actually it was all I could think about. I do give myself credit for having the balls to try it, though.

In the end, I was too chickenshit to put permanent black dye on my hair, so I went with red.

I have had various shades of red hair for the past seventeen years, ranging from light strawberry blonde to dark coppery auburn. A couple years ago, I got highlights for the first time and have been getting those ever since. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Sometime in the late ’90s or early ’00s, Kathryn helped me attempt to give myself highlights. I guess we did something wrong because they didn’t take, except on the shaved part of the back of my head where we just slapped all the extra lightening cream just for grins.

As of yesterday, I have chocolate brown hair with light blond streaks. This is a first for me. I’ve been leaning towards brown for about a year now, and my red shades have been getting darker in the interim.

I’m extremely happy with it. I think that dark brown looks natural on me, which is not surprising considering that I look a lot like my mom, who has dark brown hair.

I don’t color my hair for attention anymore (thank god I grew out of that stage). And it’s not really to cover up the gray, of which there is more and more every time I look. In fact, I wouldn’t mind the gray showing through. I just don’t like my natural dull dark blond. I suppose at some point I’ll quit coloring my hair. I’m not sure that I want to be 70 years old with a dye job. We’ll see how it goes, I guess.

I met Eeyore when we were both sixteen. He worked at a bookstore with one of my close friends, G., and they began to date near the beginning of our senior year in high school. They dated for most of our senior year. He went to the rival high school and would often drive 20 miles across town to sit at our table during lunch.

I should explain that, as a teenager, I was tall, shy, socially awkward, nerdy, overweight, and smart — all of which conspired against me to make me unpopular in the way that only high school social structures can. Luckily I had a very close group of smart and nerdy girlfriends, and up until this point we didn’t really have any boys in our group of friends. The other girls seemed much more relaxed around boys, but I was VERY nervous and awkward and though I tried to play it cool, I had absolutely no experience whatsoever in dating or even being friends with them.

So when Eeyore paid attention to me, I was on cloud nine. He talked to me, he laughed at my jokes, and he kissed me on the forehead at lunch as he was leaving to drive back to his high school. It didn’t help that he was drop dead gorgeous and had more charm than should be legal. But I also knew, of course, that doing anything other than silently desiring him would be a Very Bad Thing, so I was a Very Good Girl about it all.

In fact, the most questionable thing that ever happened between us was a couple of slow dances in the middle of the night, in the street, in the dead of winter, to The Cure’s “Disintegration” album through G.’s open car window, at HER urging because she wanted to go inside and he wanted to dance. I thought, well, if she asked me to dance with him so she could go inside, then that’s not really doing anything bad, is it? And dancing is all that happened.

Shortly before we graduated, G. discovered that Eeyore was cheating on her, and their relationship ended in a messy and painfully awkward breakup. I say “awkward” because the three of us went to prom together (I think that I was technically going “stag,” but perhaps it was actually that he was taking both of us; who knows) but by that time she had already officially dumped him. They went anyway because they’d already bought the tickets. So not only did I feel like a third wheel in this dysfunctional evening, I was both trying to console G. who was immensely sad and having a terrible time, and trying to pretend that I had no feelings for Eeyore. I certainly should have felt nothing but anger and contempt towards him because he had cheated on my friend, but the teen hormones were a-flowin’ and his charm, grin, and beautiful red hair and freckles were permanently lodged well underneath my skin.

Someone once told me that being smart has nothing to do with relationships.

A couple of days ago I got a Nastygram from a girl I went to high school with. I was not friends with this girl but knew her by sight and reputation, and have thought about her maybe twice since graduation sixteen years ago. I mentioned in a blog post several years ago that she popped up in a dream I had, in which she and her friends were rude and ignored me the same way that they did in high school.

Anyway, this woman apparently Googled herself, found that blog post, and sent me a rather defensive and insulting email, which made it clear to me that she recognized truths about herself in that dream. She gave me a mini-life story and said that she’s changed since the 1980s.

If this is the case, I’m happy for her, in the same way that I would be happy for any complete stranger who has worked to become a better person.

But I’m not sure why it mattered enough to her that she was compelled to write and insult a complete stranger for an opinion formed half a lifetime ago and long forgotten. Doc thinks that she just doesn’t want anyone to dislike her, which I can understand, but sending the type of missive that she sent me isn’t particularly going to help change my mind.

Kathryn and I had a huge throwdown fight in the Quad-C Theatre parking lot last night with a couple of Rocky Horror Puppet Show bouncer chicks. Doc and Brett stood on the sidelines and cheered for us. I was a little nervous because they looked tough, what with the fishnets and the dark eye makeup and the bored attitude, but apart from my black eye and a bruise on Kathryn’s cheek, we totally kicked their asses. And then we did the Time Warp on their unconscious bodies. And all because they wouldn’t let us into the theatre after intermission with our little vending machine goldfish cracker snacks. NOBODY tells me to leave my goldfish at the front desk!! I loves the fishes, ’cause they’re so delicious.

So, yeah, apart from THAT, we had a great evening! The Rocky Horror Puppet Show was fantastic. The only real downer was that they didn’t allow you to throw anything at the stage. (Thus the goldfish debacle described above)

Amazing costumes. Fantastic singers. Incredible scenery. And puppets. Oh yeah.

Sitting in boxes on the sidelines were life-size-ish puppets of Cher, Jesus, Hitler, Gene Simmons, Michael Jackson, Bart Simpson, Mr. T, the Beatles, Tina Turner, President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Batman, Spiderman, Abe Lincoln, Wonder Woman, Harry Potter, Stevie Wonder, and more that I can’t remember. They slowly filed in to their seats as we got closer to showtime, and would occasionally interact with each other (i.e. Wonder Woman going down on Harry Potter)…

The part of the Narrator (where’s your fuckin’ neck?!) was played by a guy doing a GW Bush impression (where’s your fuckin’ brain?!). Rocky was a ten-foot-tall puppet painted gold, worked by a guy on stilts and four other actors who worked his arms and legs. I love how they made no pretense of hiding the actors working the puppet.

Most of the cast was… to put it bluntly, mostly-naked-eye-candy college kids. Frank had an absolutely textbook-perfect male body, although his textbook-perfect six-pack did not become visible until late in the show when he removed his corset. His costuming was fantastic, especially his thigh high red vinyl boots. The actress who played Columbia had the squealing down to a T. Most of the actors — well, the main Transylvanians, anyway — had small puppets of themselves attached to their costumes in various ways. The guy who played Eddie was great, although not in the play for very long, and they got around the problem of the motorcycle by having him wear a motorcyle-themed codpiece, complete with handlebars. Brad (holy shit, it’s Superman!) and Janet (dammit) were quite good as well.

Two of the sideline-puppets, who were probably supposed to be the film critics from the Muppet Show, were miked — well, the actors controlling them were miked — and they would shout out a lot of the audience participation parts. Audience members did too, although Doc, who knows the whole thing backwards and forwards, didn’t end up doing a lot of the shouting because the lines he learned in Wichita are somewhat different than the lines that we learned here. And he was outnumbered! But he did sing along to every song, which made me very happy. Aaah, what a voice. :)

The cast also did some minor interacting with the audience… they could time their lines so as to give enough time to people shouting things at them. When we shouted, for the fourth time, “Castles don’t have phones, asshole!” at Brad, he turned to the audience and said “It’s in the script!”

I loved it and highly recommend seeing it… except this afternoon’s performance was the last one. Oh well — maybe they’ll do it again or tour it or something (do college theatres tour???). I don’t know how it works, but hopefully someone has written down all the stage directions and taken extensive photography of the sets and costumes, so that another group could perform it sometime, at the very least.

Oh, and I went to high school with the director, Dane Hoffman. My most vivid memory of Dane is of him coming to school in a Superman leotard, complete with red jockey shorts worn on the outside. He was brave.

For no reason whatsoever, I have decided to return to normal capitalization rules in my posts. I used to, then I quit for a while and have been doing all lower case for a long time now.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the increase in frequency of my use of IM. It’s easier in IM to use all lowercase, since you’re typing quickly in realtime, usually with no time for spellcheck. I bet if you drew a graph and plotted my IM use with my lapse in using proper capitalization rules, you’d find a correlation.

Oddly enough, I find that when I’m using e-mail at work, I can type in upper & lower case without any problem. I wouldn’t want to go all-lc at my co-workers. Except that I do use all-lc on my IM at work. I guess that’s OK; it’s more accepted to not bother with capital letters on IM than on e-mail. E-mail seems more “official.”

“E-mail seems more ‘official’”… I guess that it’s all relative, isn’t it? LOL

I only had to go back over this post and correct ONE capitalization error! Yay for me!

By the way, yes, I am at home on a Friday night. Hey, I’m 33, it’s been a long week. Tonight I watched “The Fifth Element” on our new widescreen HDTV, and right now I’m taking a break from filling in my check registers in Quicken. Later I’m going to go make some popcorn, get a Diet Dr. Pepper, and watch another movie before bed.

Tomorrow night we are going to see “The Rocky Horror Puppet Show” at Quad-C Theatre, directed by none other than the one and only Dane Hoffman (actually he’s NOT the one and only, I just googled his name and found several people that are decidedly not him.) I went to high school with Dane, and I remember him as being very sweet, and nice to me (lots of people weren’t…), and kinda kooky, and he most definitely did not give any kind of a fuck what people thought of him. Case in point: he came to school one day dressed in a spandex Superman leotard and cape, with red underpants on the outside. Just for the hell of it, I think.