no boys allowed in the room!!!!

I wasn't a horse girl, I never really grokked that stuff. I was a bike girl, and a sci-fi girl, and a marching band girl, and a whatever-my-dad's-doing-in-the-garage girl.

So basically I was kind of a boy.

gtfo

the same bff sabrina (the one who dated ryan) and i had our best friend break up over different sci-fi tastes - she liked Anne McCaffrey novels, which just seemed to me like girl/horse stories, except the horses were dragons, and i wasn't really into that. I think I liked more dystopian stuff that was more "serious."

xp to tza Yeah, I have found most of this thread incomprehensible even tho you of all people know I am a giant hair-curling gurl in adulthood. I don't post here much; just checking in today, I guess!

Laurel, please post here more! I don't want to be the only non-horse girl.

horses aren't really a girly thing tbh

i mean irl horses, pictures/models of horses maybe

not exclusively, but ...

I wasn't a horse girl, either. There's a picture of me somewhere sitting at the fifth grade lunch table with Donna the Horse Girl and she has a horse notebook in front of her and I have a copy of Stephen King's Firestarter, which pretty much sums me up, childhood-wise. The juxtaposition, not the book. Try as I might, I am still unable to set things on fire with my mind. :(

ha - that reminds me of roxy's posts that started us on the topic of young adult novels!

yeah i was def not into horses at all. they scared me.

i never "got" science fiction but i don't think it's for boys really

I did love those Anne McCaffrey dragon books. I had the whole series, and the parallel "Harper Hall" ones too. Mostly what I loved about them was the lack of conservative sexual mores because I was sure I was never going to kiss/date/sexor more than one person in my life and it was going to be the one I married and I was pretty in despair about it. But hey, what can you do about God's will?

well - most of the girls in our class weren't into it except me & sabrina.

On other other hand, as joshea is sure to point out, I got to drive a dune buggy. So maybe it evened out.

you were cooler than me - i did logic and math problems with my dad, when i wasn't making up elaborate sci-fi epics with barbies with sabrina.

l u know ilu!

I was pretty wild about Anne McCaffrey, too.

xp - logic and math and Barbies are also cool!

Yes, we did logic problems at the dinner table, and also "Think of words that include the syllable '-round'" (ie around, surround, roundhouse, quarter-round, etc) sort of family competitions.

we played "i'm thinking of a word that rhymes with" games on long road trips - my dad's West Virginia accent was kinda a handicap in this, because he believed that "since" and "fence" rhymed.

People in books that I read were always going on about the Beauty of Nature, and communing with the woods, and getting a spiritual charge from wilderness, and blah blah blah. I remember sitting in a tree and trying to feel something, but nada. I guess when you live in the country it's hard to find the outdoors remarkable?

because he believed that "since" and "fence" rhymed.

Haha! I like this. We sang songs in the car -- rounds and hymns and folksongs and show tunes from all of history that my mother knew. She had a song for every occasion (still does).

I don't even know where half of them come from, tho I bet I could google.

"I love you a bushel and a peck / a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck" <--- why I knew that a "peck" was a unit of measurement

lol that's like how where i grew up "pin" and "pen" rhymed!

xp - that's from Guys and Dolls, i believe.

tza - according to my dad, pin and pen also rhyme.

I really really wanted to be a top rollerskater and have a satin jacket that would billow out with the wind. Unfortunately for that dream, I wasn't allowed to go to the roller rink much b/c the kids there were too "rough" and because it cost money (sending us out to play in the woods was free).

i was a cat girl - i drew cats on everything when i was a kid. i think i also liked stories about large families where there were a lot of kids, because i was an only child. but maybe the large family thing was due to me liking epic things with a lot of characters. i was also really into greek mythology.

would like to be a top rollerskater and have a billowy satin jacket right now

I know! Someday I would master the cross-over cornering maneuver and then I would be So Cool.

i can do that maneuver! or i could when i was 10. /braggin 2010

I had a book on how to draw cats. I was really into it.

Still can't rollerskate, though.

yeah, I can't rollerskate either - there was a period in high school where my friends were into rollerskating, and I went with them sometimes, but I was horrible at it. And there was this guy, Steve, who wore hypercolor shirts and might have had a crush on me, and who I then threw non-dairy creamer at and hit him in the face, and I think if he had a crush on me before, he didn't after that. I forget why i threw creamer at him.

I think I accepted that, no matter how many "Learn to Draw!" books the Scholastic Bookclub offered, it was an art, inherited only by the elite, and beyond my abilities. I went with origami instead.

we used to have rollerskating birthday parties. they were the best. now the roller rink is like, meth central :(

tbh i can't believe it's still there!

i'm still a pretty good rollerskater iirc

got my own skates, no big deal

I'm pretty sure that both La Lech and Jenny would have been out of my league in coolness in jr high.

I'm so glad we're (nominally) grown-ups now.

with better haircuts and fashion sense.

Naw, girl. I was generally well-liked and didn't get stuffed in lockers or anything, but I was too poor/fat/smart/non-athletic and then later stoned to be in the popular clique.

i was totally not cool in jr high. for example: remember how i said i went to all girls school? i didn't know a SINGLE BOY from K-7th grade. no cousins, no neighborhood kids, no brothers or friends with brothers, no boys at all. it's difficult to impress how weird this was, but it was true.

in 8th grade, i went to public school. on the first day, in homeroom, these boys whose names started with R or S (hence in my homeroom) descended on me because i was new. i just sat there, terrified. from that moment on, i was not cool. i was weird. i went from being an affable and sort of weird 12 year old to being a totally withdrawn, bored, terrified, antisocial 13 year old. what else did i have to do but listen to records and rollerskate by myself? that doesn't mean i was cool. i was quiet and weird.

Well, if you say so. I probably would have thought you were kind of tough, though. xp to Jenny

if anyone had bothered to get to know me, maybe i would have been kind of cool?

Single-sex schools with no non-school integration makes for a WEIRD LIFE for SURE.

The healthiest person who went to an all-girls school that I know is actually Australian. I think they do it differently there. Also, she got to be in some kind of quasi-military Junior Cadets program in which you actually FIRE WEAPONS and PARACHUTE OUT OF THINGS and get to order around boys of your own age. I can't think of a single thing that would have been more fun at age 14.

went from being an affable and sort of weird 12 year old to being a totally withdrawn, bored, terrified, antisocial 13 year old.

Aww - that was me going from 6th grade to junior high - except I was 11. That was the same time that sabrina and i stopped being friends. I think my one friend in 7th grade was this girl Christina, whose brothers were in a gang, and she admired my stubborn resolve to chew gum in class no matter how many times I got detention for it, because i thought it was a dumb rule.

Here's a question/discussion for you all. I frequently feel like I was more "myself" in early and mid childhood, say ages 8, 9, 10 -- and then went against all my personality traits and instincts for the next decade. For a long time, most of my mental "adulthood", I've felt more like myself at 10 than myself at 20, 21, 22, and maybe even older than that.

Does anyone else agree/identify with the statement that their adult mental/emotional journey is about getting back to being 10? I was a good 10-year-old.

yes! I was talking about this with my mom a few weeks ago! She was talking about how the thing she loved the most when she was 10 was getting to sit in the office of her dad's meat company and play with the 10 key calculator and have all these salt-of-the-earth men around that told dirty jokes and funny stories, and how her current job - which she really likes - is kinda like that.

I feel like, in a lot of ways, my adolescence was a betrayal of my more confident, more practical childhood persona; somehow I knew MORE about the important stuff when I knew less about the world.

Of course I had religion helping me undermine myself, but there's plenty of other things that'll do it for you too.

But yeah - I think there've been a lot of articles about this - focusing on girls - how they're really self-assured and awesome when they're 9-11, and then they start having a lot of the standard problems associated with teenage-ness and become unhappy/insecure.