Five Things

I like “getting to know you” posts from bloggers because it’s fun to find out some things you may not know about the person who authors the posts you read. So, here we go!

5 things you may not know about me:

1) I am really good at Jeopardy. See, I retain useless information and it rattles around in my brain and then Jeopardy comes on, and finally the useless info has an outlet! I may not be able to remember what I wore yesterday, but I can tell you what year The Way We Were with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford came out at the movie theater: 1973. Who carries that kind of random info in their head? This girl…

2) I have never been to another country. Although I definitely, definitely want to travel outside the US, it just has never been in the budget. But one day when I can afford it, my passport will get some serious wear and tear.

3) Bethenny Frankel did a signing years ago at a supermarket near me around the time when she first came out with her signature Skinnygirl Margaritas. She is on The Real Housewives of New York, if you aren’t familiar with who she is. My daughter and I got to take a picture with her. She is a cool chick. And her margaritas are the bomb 🙂

4) If I could go to Disneyland every day, I would. It’s not called “the happiest place on earth” for nothing!

5) I was seriously into Madonna when I was a kid which appropriately, was in the 1980’s. I may have received the plastic stretchy bracelets she always wore during the Material Girl phase, as a birthday present. And I may or may not have worn out my True Blue cassette tape. That may have happened…

5 things I know nothing about:

1) I don’t know how to change a tire.

2) I am not a technological person. Seriously, if someone starts talking about code or updating this or that, my brain turns to mush. *does not compute*

3) I know nothing about investing. See above comment about brain mush.

4) I know nothing about people’s fanatical interest in The Walking Dead. I don’t get it, but to each their own.

5) I do not know how to sew. There, I said it.

 

5 things that I believe:

1) Everything happens for a reason.

2) Not everyone is meant to stay in your life. Sometimes it is just for a season.

3) There are such things as soul mates.

4) A trip to the beach can cure a bad mood.

5) That I was right when I (nicely) told my high school science teacher that dissecting a frog, especially first thing in the morning, was not going to benefit me in any way shape or form, in my adult life. That knowledge of the inner workings of a frog is still information I have yet to use.

What is something that we may not know about you? Are there things in life that you don’t know that you wish you did? 🙂

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The Funny That Is Scooby Doo, Where Are You

Lest you think I’ve taken leave of my senses, and have started to watch Scooby-Doo Where Are You? by myself with a hot cup of doctored coffee, that is not the case. Rest assured, dear readers. 🙂 My daughter has “discovered” Scooby-Doo and now I am being forced lovingly watching the episodes with her.

Now to be fair, I totally and with full-fledged abandon, watched these Scooby-Doo episodes as a kid. As a small child, I looooooved this show! (By the way, can I just say how surreal it is to watch a show with your kid that you yourself watched as a kid? Whoa…)

So without further adieu and with absolute beloved humor, I offer the following observations about Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?

♦ Why was Velma always losing her glasses? Like, literally every episode, you can always hear her exclaim “My glasses! Where are my glasses?” Inevitably, Scooby or Shaggy would find them and give them back to her, but not before hijinks would ensue in the meantime.

♦ Does no one notice that Scooby-Doo talks?

♦ What are Scooby Snacks and what the heck are in them that will make Scooby do anything that is asked of him and why does Shaggy want to eat them as well? Hmmmm… well the original episodes are from 1969, so…

♦ Why are they always running?

♦ You would think that every single house on this show is not only a mansion, but a decrepit, falling-down one at that, which is perpetually haunted.

♦ Seriously, a talking dog? Why does no one think this is weird? Is everyone eating the Scooby Snacks??

♦ These meddling kids drive around aimlessly in a van that always seems to have a full gas tank (unless the episode conveniently calls for it not to be) Mwah ha, ha, ha…

♦ Why are Fred, Velma, and Daphne always so surprised when the culprit is unmasked? Did you really think you were dealing with a ghost? Really? This far in??

♦ Scooby-Doo can talk. Sure, it sounds like he has marbles in his mouth, but still, the dog…is…conversing. #ruh #roh

♦ Velma’s choice of clothing. I mean… All the orange and red together… Never mind the whole turtle-neck sweater with a flared skirt and knee-socks combo. Oh Velma…

So there you have it. My observations 🙂 This show still make me smile and honestly, I really do love watching it all over again with my kiddo 🙂

Do you remember Scooby-Doo Where Are You? What do remember about it?

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When I Was Younger

When I was younger, I fell in love with the written word.

Images leapt off the pages, and I found myself adventuring with Peter Pan and wishing I too, could find a handsome prince someday and be whisked away from my evil stepmother just like Cinderella.

I couldn’t get enough of the characters, the dizzying heights they went to, the grand escapes they would make.

When I was younger, I fell in love with books.

They were my escape, you see. An escape where I didn’t have to deal with the real world and the horrors that were beginning to unfurl in front of my very childlike eyes. I could burrow my way into a story, get nice and cozy and warm, and forget about the tumult that was my life.

I voraciously read all the nouns, adjectives, and verbs I could find, bending them to my will, believing just for a while, that the grandiose stories were real, and that I was a part of them.

When I was younger, books became my lifeline.

And I held onto that lifeline, as my interest in literature turned to novels and mysteries and histories of other parts of the world. As I sailed through my youth and tumbled headfirst into adulthood, that lifeline was all that kept me going some days. Escaping into the world of Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter, and believing that magic really and truly exists.

That lifeline has flowed into this prime of adult life, this season of being that I am in.

I still love books and I still love the thrill of cracking open that first page.

When I was younger, I opened my first book.

And I have not looked back…

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Things I Don’t Miss About The 80’s: The Remix

Lol, remember when remixes were all the rage for songs? 🙂 Ha, I thought that was funny.

Anyways, I wrote a post about things I don’t miss about the 80’s previously, and I thought now would be a good time to add another one, cause they are fun, and totally rad 😉

VCR’s. Yes, I know people still have them and some people pat themselves on the back that they still have a working VCR after all these years, but I mean they really were the worst. Raise your hand if you lost a precious videotape to your VCR deciding now would be a good time to eat it? Yup, we’ve all been there 😦 And then all the times the videotape would just stop playing for some unfathomable reason. And the constant rewinding of the videotape just sucked. I personally think whoever invented the DVD player was an absolute genius 🙂

My Little Pony. Oh, wait… those darn things are still here. Having a second revival… Ugh, can’t we just leave these annoying ponies back in the 80’s?

This one is my daughter’s. I have no idea what her “pony name” is.

Bad Sitcoms Who Always Had a “Lesson Learned” At The End. I am looking at you Growing Pains, Family Matters, Charles in Charge and Who’s The Boss. If you did something wrong, it’s okay as long as you learned “a valuable lesson” in less than 30 minutes. Gag me with a spoon. Seriously…

Kenny G. Apologies to those that heart his music, but it makes my ears bleed and want to hide his saxophone where he could never, ever find it.

Lee Press On Nails. Why was this a thing? No really, why? Plastic nails that used some sort of sticky waxy substance that sort of but not really, attached the fakest looking things you’ve ever seen in your life, to your nail. You hoped that it wouldn’t fall off, but it always did. It always did…

Jelly Shoes. For those not in the know, jelly shoes were some cheap concoction of plastic webbing that was super inexpensive to buy, and came in all sorts of colors including fluorescent pink (my color of choice at the time). They were these slip-on shoes that caused your feet to sweat immediately after putting them on, and because they were cheap plastic without any sort of proper sole, your feet would literally burn on the pavement the minute you stepped out into the sun. Wearing those shoes was like walking on hot coals when it was summertime. And yet, everyone continued to wear them. With sky-high bangs and permed hair probably.

What don’t you miss about the 80’s? Do you still have a VCR? 🙂

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Things I Don’t Miss About The 80’s

For those of us who grew up in the 1980’s, it was indeed a magical time. Saturday morning cartoons were the thing, not 24 hours of cartoons on dozens of channels all the livelong day, like it is now. Saturday mornings were something to be treasured and something to look forward to. Just you, a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, and Bugs Bunny.

But I digress…

There are several things about that totally tubular decade that I am glad are not things we have to deal with anymore. Such as:

The kitchen telephone. Yes, the home telephone still exists, but the 80’s version was quite a pain treasure. See, it hung on the wall and had this ab-nor-mal-ly long cord, that no matter what one did, it coiled and became this thing that hung from the receiver. Everyone would try and untangle it, but the minute the next person used the telephone, bam, the gosh darn thing would become a mangled mess again. Not a fan of those phone cords, not a fan. Speaking of which…

Rotary phones. Good luck dialing a phone number with an area code, and God forbid you mess up a number and have to start. All. Over. Again. Gah! “Did I dial 787 or 987?” “Did I dial a 1 before the area code?” You wanna know why there were so many wrong numbers dialed in the 80’s? Rotary phones, yo…

Random windowless vans. Yes, these vans still exist (unfortunately). But if you were a kid growing up in the 80’s, you were hit over the head with the fact that “strangers” drove “windowless vans” to “kidnap” you and they would try and entice you with “candy”, in order to get you to get into the “windowless van”. To. This. Day. I cannot park next to a windowless van and I freak out and will deliberately park somewhere else just so I don’t have to park next to the probably harmless person driving their cargo van.

Aqua Net. Good grief, I think all of us kids in the 80’s took out a good chunk of the ozone layer with all of our hairspray. How did we not pass out from all the fumes? And who said having bangs 3 feet high, was a good idea? Cause it’s not…

Cassette Singles. Yes, youngins, we listened to cassette singles. And you know what was annoying? The second side of the cassette. See the first side had the song you wanted, the whole reason you bought the single in the first place. But the second side, when you flipped that puppy over, was an instrumental recording of the song that you just bought. Really? Who wants to listen to a song without the words? I mean are we supposed to be putting on our own karaoke show in our rooms? WTF? Or, if your second side didn’t carry the instrumental version, it carried an “unreleased” track from the artists’ album, which was so bad, you seriously questioned even buying the whole album if this is what the rest of their music sounded like.

Ah, the 1980’s…what don’t you miss? 🙂 I wanna hear about it!

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Dear California

Dear California,

The earth shifts beneath my feet, and I roam your hills. The sun kisses my face and I feel your warmth.

Oh California, you were my first love. You breathed life into me before I even knew you. I will miss your high-speed winds, and the tumbleweeds that blew down my street when I was just a girl.

I will miss the drives down PCH, blaring the radio, drinking in the smell of the ocean. I will miss your blazing sunsets, your sandy intricacies, your aura of golden happiness.

You gave me so much happiness, California. I met my wonderful husband here and breathed life into my beautiful baby girl beneath your sun.

Your amazing opportunities allowed my dad to raise me in a quiet town nestled beneath the mountains, wrapped in 80’s nostalgia, glimmering just on the edge of big city life.

Thank you California for the beautiful memories of college. They were some of the best years of my life and I’ll never forget them.

As my recollections become mere whispers, I’ll never forget you my first love. As your sun-kissed summers become a distant memory, I will always treasure my time on your sandy shores.

I love you California, and you’ll always hold a special place in my heart ♥

Love, Mackenzie

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We Sail Through Our Youth

We sail through our youth, impatient at the pace. The pace of time, not fast enough for small hands and gangly limbs. Bruised knees, grass stains on jeans, sticky fingers, with residue jam, long ago eaten.

Partake of the sweet innocence, running headfirst at the clock that seems to be ticking so slowly. We swing higher on the swings…up…up…up. Higher, let’s go higher. There’s more than our immediate surroundings, there’s so much more.

Definitively walking with a purpose, an adolescent swagger, youth is for the others. The others who don’t know what it’s like. Friendships, make or break, life or death, double dare you, though I don’t mean it. What happens on the blacktop, secrets shared, the trivial forgotten.

Because youth, in its essence, is a mirage. We believe in pinky swears, but want something stronger. We want to be older, better. Not so awkward, not so clumsy. But before the bell rings, before the sound of pencil hitting paper, let’s dream of our youth.

Let’s look back fondly on pigtails and heads-up 7-up, because this time, this time we will never get back. We fly through our childhood at breakneck speed, paying no attention to the stop signs, briefly resting at caution signs, but getting right back up to leave our youth behind. Running faster and faster, till your chest hurts, and butterflies feel like they are multiplying in your stomach.

We sail through our youth… because it’s easier.

We sail through our youth… because the alternative is something not to consider.

We sail through our youth… because we promised we would.

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But She Knew…

Before we moved back in April, I decided to go through an old box of letters and notes that I had held on to throughout my elementary, junior high, and high school years. I was tired of lugging this box around every time we moved and also, it just felt like emotional baggage that was weighing on me.

I mean, why was I holding on to this stuff?

I spent an afternoon going through this box. Words at my fingertips, yet those very words sending me back in time. Sending me back to many things, I quite honestly didn’t want to remember.

Events I’d rather forget.

But in the midst of this emotional time capsule that I had somehow unearthed, I cam across a letter written to me by my 4th grade teacher. She wrote me this lettter, thanking me for a gift I had given her at the end of the school year. But it’s what else she said, that really struck me:

I had to re-read this a few times. What did she see? What did she know?

“Remember, don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ll be fine”.

What did this teacher see in this girl, this girl who was smart, yet reserved? Shy, yet friendly?

I think back to the 4th grade, the year that a nine year-old became a 10 year-old. I think about the events that happened that year, the upheaval in my life.

And somehow she saw. Somehow she knew.

I tried to be perfect. I tried to be what was expected.

But my eyes gave me away. When I thought no one was looking, my face betrayed me.

And she saw. She knew.

My teacher didn’t have to write what she did, but she chose to anyway. And I admire that. Because when this 36 year-old woman came across this letter, this one letter out of so many, I felt something break inside me.

Because so many feelings I had held on to for so long, that I felt no one noticed or could understand, came to the surface.

But she noticed. My teacher noticed.

The woman whose job it was to teach me multiplication tables, and introduced me to Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing, she took that extra minute and let me know that she cared.

All these years later, it’s nice to know that she saw a fragile girl, and knew that there was someone strong underneath.

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Cartwheels

I used to be able to do cartwheels.

Glorious things, really…

One at a time, several in a row. Didn’t matter. Pigtails flying through the filtered sunlight. Just for a few seconds, head upside down, world gone topsy-turvy.

Giggling, challenging each other who can do more. Green grass, lush in the wealth of summer, beckoning us to give it a try.

Those who could balance on magical hands, had superpowers. For a split second we were air-borne, shrieking in delight at our newfound prowess.

The more cartwheels, the more invincible you were.

I miss those heady days of summer. When “Go outside and play”, truly meant the world. A ticket to who knows what.

Mischief? Maybe.

Sunburns? Probably.

Memories that will last a lifetime? Definitely.

But “Go outside and play” meant freedom. So I’d tie my tennis shoes laces. Done in bunny-style ears of course, so I wouldn’t trip.

Face upturned towards the sun.

Arms up, get ready…

Time to do a cartwheel.

 

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First Time I Got Detention…

I was a good kid. A really good kid. Elementary school was a no-brainer and I never got in trouble, ever…except this one time. One freakin’ time for something I didn’t even participate in! Want to know what it was?

A food fight.

Hey, it was the 80’s. What’s a little Capri Sun spilled on your Alf t-shirt?

It was sixth grade and me and my gal pals were sitting at one end of the table and the boys were sitting at the other end of the table. There was some smack talking going on, as much as any 12 year-olds could muster. Not sure how it started, but a chip was thrown. Then another. Then fruit. Then anything not nailed to the table.

It was a free for all, full on food fight.

Did I participate? No. I was laughing too hard at the whole thing, because it really was funny.

But you know who didn’t think it was funny? The lunch monitors. They grabbed a handful of kids, including my BFF, and hauled them off to the office. The rest of us, when lunch ended went back to class.

Imagine my surprise, when 10 minutes into class, an office aide walks into our class and summons my teacher. Some whispering happens between them and all of a sudden, my teacher says in front of everybody, that the vice principal wants to talk to me. Oh. My. Gosh. She said it in front of EVERYBODY! I was dying of embarrassment! I am sure my face was about 3 degrees of red as I walked out the door with the office aide.

Now, our vice-principal was no peach. Let’s just say, she is not one of those that goes into the teaching profession because she genuinely likes and wants to help kids. Quite the opposite.

I get to the wicked witch’s office and she says to me, “Mackenzie do you know why you’re here?”

Why do adults ask this question? We’re not stupid, you know.

I told her that no, I have no idea. She then proceeds to try to stare me down. I stare back. She begins to get flustered and then says that she knows I was part of the food fight and that one of the lunch aides identified me and said I was friends with my BFF who also was in trouble for the food fight.

Are you kidding me? I’m in trouble for guilt by association???

The wicked witch continues to say that she knows that I personally didn’t throw any food, but because I didn’t REPORT IT, I am in trouble along with the rest of my friends.

Say what?

I argued with the woman, but to no avail. I couldn’t get out of detention.

So I was sent to the kindergarten area to pick up trash along with my friends who were already out there. Some girls were crying. Some of the guys were using language fit for a sailor. But everyone was kinda worried about what their parents were going to say.

I got home that afternoon and told my dad what happened. To be honest, I didn’t know what his reaction would be because I’d never got in trouble at school before. Luckily, he wasn’t mad and he didn’t like the witch vice principal either. Seriously, there is a book about Oz that’s missing a main character.

So that’s my story. See what happens when you don’t report a thrown banana peel? 😉

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