So... Welcome?

Um. Hello.

So ... you found it. My blog. Hi.

My name is Shady. I live in the state of Colorado. Apparently we lost a pretty important sporting event. I think it had to do with football? I'm sorry.

If you are a previous follower (dad, english teacher, carrot bestower, chicken man, etc) I must now alert you that I am going to have to step up my game. Are there athletic blogging thimbles for typing? I'll have to look into that.

What happened is my mother found my blog.

She then shared it on her facebook page (of which I do not have) which resulted in this site now being filled with ALL OF HER FRIENDS WHICH IS SO COOL.

When I started this blog, it was sort of just me standing in a corner talking to myself, as usual.

Then some people showed up. Like, two, three, six, here and there.

So I sort of just kept talking to myself and figuring stuff out and telling stories with my back turned to the audience. Because it's really important to tell things the way they are, and it's hard not to lie when you know people are listening. So I closed my eyes and stood in the corner and kept talking.

And, a year later, I think hey, maybe it's time I turn around for a second, and I see

How did my mother make so many friends? I do not know. Facebook is generally a mystery to me.

So, after accepting the fact that I had been spotted and staged and must now perform, I decided on a list of things to do in order to appeal to my audience and avoid further embarrassment. 

With help from the stats bar, this will, from now on, probably be the best blog ever. (Note to previous followers: I was planning on a Homecoming Hindsight sequel for the Sadie Hawkins assembly, but I think this time you're going to have to use your imaginations.) 

So, to distant relatives and newly found adult friends, welcome! I will now post adult-y things about taxes and car insurance and we will all have a lovely time. 

Welcome to my blog.

-The Tree Monster

Ironing My Future

I was on my second cup of tea and I don't even really like tea and it was finals week and I should have been studying but instead I was ironing.

I am the only person left in the family who irons. Everybody else just stopped wearing clothes that required it. And the ironing board is just barely holding on to the wall with half a screw and I wait until the house is dark and quiet before starting because I don't want a kid to come dashing through the hallway and get burned.

And it was on this night when I ironed a crease in a shirt where it wasn't supposed to be and shouted

Then, it dawned on me.

It isn't that I am absolutely sure to fail. It's just that it's likely.

But this world doesn't really seem to appreciate most of these things.

There it was.

The night before finals.

The loophole.

I could marry a businessman.

This is what happened in my head that night:

Ironing? Totally useful.

(sometime in the future)

It was brilliant. All I'd have to do is get really good at ironing - I'm talking apron, oven mitts, the whole deal - and be able to pull off trophy wiving, and boom -- total success. Totally not homeless.

The only problem was - well, there were a lot of problems.

I'm not exactly a natural trophy wife. There are a lot of factors involved.

These are all things I am bad at.

I could be perfect at ironing, right? Like, totally pro. No creases. Ever. And then there'll be some guy in a flannel someday start telling me about his favorite authors and I'll have to say, "I'm sorry sir, but ONE of us has to marry rich. Or at least end up halfway successful. Somebody's gotta sell here. I'm sorry dude. Have fun with your wood carving career though. You're really interesting. And your shirt isn't ironed properly. But that's okay because you're an artist and it's okay for you to have creases in your shirt."

I continued my ironing that night with a new sense of purpose and a new set of goals. All I have to do now is get really good at enslaving men with my good looks and charm, and then the ironing will be like a surprise. Like a hidden talent. And I won't tell him until the day after the marriage papers are signed and all of his shirts will be perfectly ironed and he'll say,

"Shady, did you do this? Did you really do this?"

MORAL: There is no moral because I no longer need morals. I am going to marry rich and nothing is going to stop me.

(Just kidding. I couldn't ever really marry rich because I can't even do the tricking-you-into-thinking-I'm-pretty thing. I don't really even iron exceptionally well. Also I passed most of the finals and probably won't end up homeless. Don't worry, Christie. There's always the postal service.)

Stolen Words

Words have labels on them.

They have names.

And I have a habit of stealing them.

I notice the words appear after being around certain people for certain amounts of time. Some people pick up traits, or habits, or gestures, or - in my case - strange and specific phrases.

I will notice myself speaking differently from year to year. Not only because of words I pick up from books, or the internet, or from just getting older, but they are very specifically not mine. They may seem familiar. They may seem ordinary. But the thing is, I know exactly who they belong to.

People in my life primarily live on in these words which I continue to use after they leave.

To me, the words have faces. They have cracks in the sidewalk and a flower that isn't mine. They have a swingset in the rain and a bump on my head. They have a glistening eye-roll and a smile and a light shrug of the shoulders.

Every time I find myself, for the first time, picking up a stolen word, I swallow it and step back, astounded from where it came. As if whoever I said it to will gasp and point and whisper That's so-and-so's word. ...How do you know so-and-so? Where have you been lurking?

It's like crying at a funeral you weren't supposed to go to.

But every time, whoever I'm talking to just acts like it's mine. Like, "Oh, that's a weird thing to say. Haha." But it's okay for Shady to be weird, so they let it go.

Here are some of my own personally stolen words:

You wouldn't tell the difference, right? Okay, maybe for a few, but overall the words seem to be mine. They don't seem like they've come from specific individuals and bad habits, right? You see what I'm saying?

I'm telling you though, words have labels.

I'm probably stealing already stolen words here. They've got as many names etched into their letters as a retired library card in the back of a worn-out book.

So, maybe it isn't really stealing. Maybe it's more like... borrowing.

Either way, we all do it.

MORAL: WORDS LAST LONGER THAN PEOPLE, AND IF YOU HANG AROUND WITH TWELVE-YEAR-OLDS WHO SAY 'FLUBS' ALL THE TIME, YOU'RE PROBABLY GOING TO BE AT SOME CLASSY WEDDING SOMEDAY AND SAY IT AROUND A BUNCH OF CLASSY LADIES AND LEARN THAT YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T HANG AROUND WITH TWELVE-YEAR-OLDS WHO SAY 'FLUBS' ALL THE TIME.

Knight With Paper Towels

This morning I awoke with the sudden urge to save the day. This day. Today.

I'd forgotten about that time I became a knight and have since had this strange inner responsibility to help people. But the thing is, helping people is hard. Putting coins in a plastic box is one thing, but finding people - real people - who truly need it, and who you're actually able to help, as a teenage girl, without possibly being harmed in some way? Helping is really hard.

But I needed to save the day. I needed to.

And I didn't. Not even a little bit, all through the morning and afternoon.

The last class of the day was Economics. No one learns anything in Economics, because 1) It makes no sense, 2) The original hired teacher had a baby and left us with a very kind old retired teacher who doesn't ever use the white board and talks like he's murmuring you to sleep, and 3) We get to sit where we want.

This is the phenomenon that has occurred in the Economics room since changing seats:

I wondered why I was so aghast at this transition, until I realized I sit here:

The teacher kindly refers to the line of desks against the back wall as "Murderer's Row." This is not really because we are all that awful, but because of the terribly good behavior of the boys and girls at each other side of the room.

Imagining they would all have soo much to talk about, being around their own gender, and soo little learning going on, they ought to be a happy chorus of giggles and goofs.

This is not what happens.

They are very quiet. And very bored. And try to pay attention and can't. And they hate the class and everything in it.

Then there is us.

I think it would do us all a bunch of good to say, before I start, this is a pre-IB classroom. The prestigious, intelligent, hard-working brilliance of the next generation. Seated here. In this class.

Murderer's Row is segregated, not as much by gender as by conversation.

The blue square sitting next to me is named Martensen. Martensen loves. A lot.

Today Martensen brought pizza.

An entire Ziploc freezer bag of pizza and a bowtie he'd found on the floor. I wore the bowtie and he ate the pizza and things went very smoothly for about thirty minutes until he started laughing.

We spend most of the class laughing, and were used to joining in, whether the joke was funny or not. Martensen forgot how. Martensen kept laughing. Martensen could not stop.

After a while we became concerned. "Marten, calm down now," the musicals girl said.

"Martensen." The math puns kid put his hand on his shoulder. "Breath in..."

Martensen breathed in.

But then the math kid went back to doing his work, and Martensen did not breathe out. He waited for further instructions until the laugh bubbled and boiled inside him and erupted in a sudden and tragic display of outright hysteria.

Laughing, crying, drooling, banging his head against the desk, he lost it. At first we tried laughing. Then it wasn't funny. It was just very disconcerting.

"Marten - Marten, are you okay?"

It was then that Marten started bleeding from his nose and promptly left the classroom without another word.

Thirty seconds later I noticed several texts on my phone.

"Hey do you think Marten's doing okay?"

"Oh. Um - I'll be right back."

It was an easy save, right? Get to the girls' bathroom, get some paper towels, knock on the boys' bathroom, hand him the paper towels, boom - saved. Knight in shining armor.

Except I never use the school bathrooms around that area and couldn't understand that the boys' bathroom is always right next to or in front of the girls'.

There was hurried wandering from one hallway to the next until I finally found the girls' bathroom, ran in whistling the Indiana Jones theme song, got the paper towels and left down another hallway, before returning to find that Marten was directly next to the restroom I had just been in.

A girl was playing on her iPod in front of the restrooms. She looked at me, looked at the paper towels, and responded to my pointing by saying, "He's in there."

I knocked on the door a few times and nothing happened. Guys went in, and almost immediately came back out with a sick kind of look, until eventually I called his name. He opened the door, smiled broadly despite the blood, and took the paper towels.

The sink was red and the floor was spotted and no one else was inside.

He returned almost immediately after I did with an entirely different dilemma.

His clean white shirt was now spattered with the blood of angry men and his tear-stained face of hysteria was still in full bloom. After a difficult changing of shirts, he wiped the emotion from himself and apologized for the outburst.

"Don't apologize for bleeding," I told him.

"I was laughing but I think I meant to cry..."

"That's okay."

"I'm sorry you had to save me."

"I'm a certified knight. It is my honor and privilege to do so. Emotional instability aside."

"Thank you for being my knight with paper towels."

Thank you for being my knight with paper towels.

I think I feel a pin being made for this one. Or better yet, a name-tag.

MORAL: We should always help wherever we can, even if it's doing really stupid stuff, like holding open doors and letting people ahead of us in line at the store. Chivalry isn't always found in steel-plated armor atop a strong-legged stallion. Sometimes it's found in a friend in a bloody bathroom.

Old Friends and Bad Liars

wild night

Those are arms.

Boyfriends and Whales

I've never actually been 'asked out', which is something most students ages 5-10 have been. I'd like to think it's not because I am undateable in the eyes of a third grader, but really just because I'm not the kind of girl one would think to date.

Of course, it happened to everyone at some point. A cute little note passed under a desk, slipped into a lunchbox, stating in cute little handwriting something equally cute such as "I like you" or "Will you be my girlfriend?" And I was always such a magic-killer I'd say there's no point to being someone's girlfriend unless you get married or something, and no one should get married because marriage doesn't work.

Granted, this was the same kid that got dragged out of kindergarten for actively shunning the belief in Santa.

So I guess you could say there's this piece of my childhood missing. And I never really felt it was there, of course, until yesterday.

Things are always getting thrown at me. Usually on accident. And though I always pick up every piece of paper I come across, I have learned that most of the carefully folded and crumpled notes students throw to one another have nothing inside once you open them. Plus you look really stupid while doing it.

So I turned and looked and saw one very wide-eyed, very frightened boy and one laughing-mouthed, excited-looking friend.

I ripped a piece of paper to throw back. (Spanish is a very boring class.) Just as a thought, right before launching it, in case they might think to open it, I drew a whale.

And, a few seconds after throwing it, heard this:

"Oh my god. Oh. My god. How did this happen. She didn't OPEN it? How could it not have worked?! Our tactics were so certain to succeed! The plan was so sure! Oh my god!"

So I frantically searched under the desk until I found an almost invisible little folded up scrap of paper which read, with all the eloquence of a prince...

This really isn't the kind of thing that happens to me. I had no clue how to react. So I drew another whale and threw it back.

And got a second attempt:

And sent this:

And got this:

And sent this:

At one point, one of the pieces of folded-up paper hit the kid sitting in front of me, causing such a loud and sudden panic from the three in the back of the classroom that he quickly and nervously gave it back to me.

Class was almost over and I was very confused. This is because,

1- Keegan is a complete stranger,
2- No one ever wants to date me anyway, and,
3- This kid would probably run and cry if a girl held his hand.

And as I packed up, I overheard the friend coaching this Keegan kid:

"Dude. Dude. Dude. You have to go over there."
"I can't!"
"You have to get an answer OTHER THAN a whale."
"No."
"It's the only way, Keegan. She can't answer with a whale drawing if you ask her in person."
"But what if she does?"
"It's a chance we're willing to take."

After the bell rang I called Lafflin for advice.

He explained the situation of the whales to his mother, who was laughing loud enough for me to hear, and asked her what I should do.

"She said to be honest."

"Tell her she is very wise."

There is only one way to be honest.

MORAL OF THE STORY: When you can't say yes and you can't say no, say sea mammal.