you have your fits i have my fits

banshee beat animal collective


for my essay class we each have to write a personal essay and send it to the entire class to read. this has provided so much entertainment for me today. i wanted to post a blog with highlight quotes from my classmate's essays but as holli pointed out, it's like a high school movie plot waiting to happen: someone in my class might read the blog (because everyone is interested in what i have to say) and the truth about how rude i really am will be outed. nobody will trust me, all my friends will turn against me, and i'll be the subject of some terrible revenge pranks (ala harriet the spy). i do have some real gems though and if you'd care to read a few i'm more than happy to share in a less public forum. mackenzie does a great reading of the "happily ever never" essay on divorce (one teaser quote: "Marriage is a mirage, a trick of smoke and mirrors").

anyway. here is the personal essay i wrote. actually it's an essay i wrote two years ago that i sort of re-worked. i feel a lot less confident about it than i did two years ago because i just read a few really, really awesome essays from my classmates. i'm sharing it anyway.

it's pretty description-heavy-- bordering on sappy. for that i apologize. i also apologize for another text-intensive blog post that few will actually read. but nostalgia for parks, drives, etc has been on the brain lately so here it is.

The shock of impending graduation and the realization of the fact that I should perhaps try to be an adult (though I will always resist business casual) has left me waxing nostalgic for the times and places when it was okay to not be a grown up. The places when relationships were at least sort of about romance, even if that romance was centered on lyrics to some Death Cab for Cutie song, it still felt more meaningful than the grown up romance that too often centers around practicality or convenience. I think about the times when friends weren’t always entering and exiting my life. It was when people didn’t need “creative dating” or some elaborately planned activity to be entertained; a night sitting on the grass in the park talking about the world like I knew it all lent all the entertainment and significance one night could need. The place my nostalgia usually finds its home is in Stonehaven Park, just off of 4000 West in South Jordan, Utah.

I always remember it at nighttime in the tantalizingly warm nights of late April. Streetlights spilled round pools of light onto the grass at the borders of the hills, and the sprinklers consistently hissed on at twelve minutes-til-curfew. Sprawled on her pink and zebra striped blanket, we both intermittently reached to the Otter Pop box between us, our fingers numb and tongues rubbed raw from the countless ice pops we consumed in two hours. We mourn the loss of sell-out bands that appear on The OC as the pile of wrappers slowly grows on the grass next to us.

I used to go there as a kid too. I took an adventurous turn on my bike after piano lessons at the end of the street, and it led me to this non-descript park: tennis courts, large field, playground, disappointingly short swing sets. I found no significance in it and didn’t frequent it too often as an 8-year old; I really was too far from home.

In eighth grade, it was “their” park, the boys in my English class whose backyards formed the borders around the grass and pavement. I met one of them there. In the catwalk between two fences we feigned romance while my dog’s leash tugged at my wrist. My house was too far down the road for him to let me claim this as “my” park, but I carved graffiti in the slides and tables anyway. This same boy I pushed off the swings in first grade asked if he could kiss me under the slide in ninth grade.

She snorted, groping for a blue Otter Pop. “Don’t ever hold hands with a boy who asks you if he can first. If he doesn’t have the balls to do it himself, he is not worth your time.” I bit into the next Otter Pop, too embarrassed to admit that I had kissed him anyway.

We sat on the swings and listened for the scraping cars attempting to ease over the oversized speed bump. Drawing faces in the gravel with my toes, I pretended that I was mysterious, because this boy who had to ask if he could kiss me was starting to lose interest. He started to stay behind his fence in his backyard. I read Utopia in the damp grass of August, my rollerblades heavy on my feet. Lost in my 16-year-old pseudo-intellectuality I attempted to look disinterested. I mean, it’s not like I cared if he came out to talk to me or not.

He stopped leaving his backyard to join me.

I stopped looking for him.

Sometimes people think they’re grown up at 16.

I had never understood what people meant when they said teenagers believe they are immortal. But Friday nights eating pizza or Taco Bell on those graffiti-ridden tables under the pavilion made me feel that really, nothing would ever change. Bands, shows, and the same best friend became the focus of my background. Drinking Baja Blast Mountain Dew, we drove to the park while the pulse of the music urged by caffeine surged through our veins. With her feet on the dash, pulling the hair back from her neck she said, “Don’t you feel like running around naked in the park, and then banging on everyone’s door and telling them exactly what you think about them?” I grinned lying back in the grass. The last lines of the encore’s chorus echoed through my head while we sat in our most familiar setting. Since it was fall, there was no threat of sprinklers sending us home.

Standing toe-to-toe on top of the slide, he slipped the pop tab into my hand: an invitation for a kiss that I had slid over the school store counter after lunch. I didn’t think he understood what it meant; I thought it was a joke. I stammered as he leaned in, and my friends with Frisbees swimming in and out of the pools of light caught us in the punchline.

“We can’t go through boys the way other girls do,” she says sitting up. “What’s wrong with us?”

I sit on my hands, attempting to unthaw them from the handling of too many Otter Pops. “We make best friends out of them. So then it’s like losing something more. It’s not just losing the boy you hold hands with. It’s losing the person who will go to the store with you or come over just to watch rich people on TV. The person you make mix CD’s for, the person who doesn’t care that it’s 2 a.m. when you call to tell him about the huge lit up moose you just drove past.”

Five minutes until curfew, and the grass is getting wetter. The zebra-striped-hot-pink blanket can only take so much moisture before it starts to soak into my jeans. Secondary water makes you itch, so we move to the swing set.

Throwing our heads back on the back swing, we figured ourselves out with each stomach drop on the upswing. Back and forth, we screamed into the sleepy suburban nights, waking every last grown up neighbor. Three minutes until curfew.

By my now practical grown up standards, it’s not safe there anymore. Everyone has moved out of the surrounding houses. One night a strung out preteen chased us out wielding a fire extinguisher, and a mushroom cloud from a homemade bomb interrupted our inspection of the new playground. I no longer articulate my homemade philosophies on the swingset; I save those for research papers and impressive conversations. Fear of vulnerablitiy bars me from lying in the middle of the field and convenience tells me to drive instead of rollerblade. Going back is impossible because it can never be re-created. I am too responsible now. I can only remember here. My graffiti on the table is faded, and the slide has been replaced by a modern ropes course. I decided not to return except in drive-by tours given to out-of-town grown up friends.

We get in the car to leave, but I pause before sitting in the mess of late worksheets, textbooks, and CDs in her front seat. Graduation meant growing up. Not the fake kind where you pretend you are too mature to remember what it was like to think you were in love in the ninth grade, but the kind that meant staying in a park past 11:30 wasn’t a rebellion against sprinklers.

Once I push aside the papers and blankets and settle into the passenger seat that April night weeks away from graduation, I decide to be a grown up. Tact will replace honesty. Planned dates will replace pop tabs at the top of the slide. We drive home in silence because before I’m a grown up, that’s okay. Everything has already been said over Otter Pops and sprinklers.