Men I Was Attracted to But Also Scared of, an Incomplete List

1992-2000

1. AC Slater
2. Bob Saget
3. Vanilla Ice
4. Extreme sportsmen
5. Fred Durst

At this point I’ve just started irrationally taking my frustrations out on HelloGiggles.

If there is a power animal for Summer 2011, it’s Teddy Roosevelt looking like every dirty boy I went to high school with wearing some dang activity pants (read: man capris) back at Harvard in 1876.

Also, if you’ve not familiarized yourself with My Daguerreotype Boyfriend you’re missing out on what puts the “hot” in early pHOTography.

(via mydaguerreotypeboyfriend)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

penny and the quarters — you and me

Just in case you needed a good cry.

(Source: tesslynch)

Ways We Passed the Time, 1987-1997

Your parents had a small collection of antique coffee grinders and we would sit on your back porch and grind handfuls of frozen beans, occasionally feeding them to the cat. Later that summer, your younger brother trimmed its whiskers off.

You tried to convince me that the cat poop in the sandbox behind your house was actually a collection of Tootsie Rolls.

We sat in a red cement tube on the playground and softly whispered all the curse words we knew to each other, progressively raising our voices until one of us gave up. Many years later, this would be popularized by an indy-yipster romcom as The Penis Game.

We challenged each other to rounds of pinball in my parents’ den. I beat you over and over again. You began to cry as the final ball shot into the gutter. I offered to let you keep the single quarter we used to fuel the machine.

You let me paint your toenails with Urban Decay Spare Change nail polish while we sipped contraband Pepsi in your bedroom. Later, during a dramatic break up, you explained that you would be removing the polish, thus symbolically erasing all memories of me. 

"The Cardigans: baby blue nail polish, Tamagotchi bans, buying deodorant for the first time and smelling all the options, trying to make your room look like a dELiA*s catalog, convincing your mom to let you use Sun-In, jelly shoes, gel pens, having a crush on a boy with a floppy middle-parted bowl cut, having a birthday party at a bowling alley, amassing bracelets/keychains, sticker earrings, Goldfish crackers in a Ziploc bag, dingy white cotton spaghetti-strap tops from GapKids, imagining your first kiss, comparing what shampoo brand/smell you use, practicing bubble letters."

bubblebathos

Thank you for this time capsule. Really, all of these are spot-on. But this? This is the Hard Candy jelly ring around the neck of my bottle of Trailer Trash (Seventeen said it was Dennis Rodman’s favorite). 1997 was a good year.

Waves

You fold yourself into the breakfast nook and wait for heat to rise from the vent at your feet while writing about the Internet. On the Internet. You slip the small heating pad your mother gave you after her surgery between the sheets and are sure it’s giving you cancer. Your fear of microwaves and electricity was ingrained at a young age.

You think of how cocky people who do not fear these things are. How adamant. You think of MS. Fibromyalgia. The woman on the BBC who fashioned her own protective clothing in order to escape WiFi.

You think of Richard Brautigan. Rural electrification. The New Deal.

Five years ago you stopped sleeping for a few months. Doubled over with impending adulthood, you would call your ex-boyfriend and have him explain how fluorescent lighting works.

Whispering gently from 2,000 miles away.

Tungsten-based filament. Mercury vapor. Luminous efficacy.

This is not a metaphor for anything.

You stared into the auburn glow of Sarah Bahlman’s microwave oven in 1989 wishing your parents would allow such a thing. Something so American. Even though you are American, just a different kind. You pictured microwaves as objects of idealized heterosexuality without actually grasping at what that meant, obviously, as you were five years old.

Other items on that list at the time:

    •    Kraft cheese singles
    •    Hot dogs
    •    Diet Coke
    •    Dirty Dancing
    •    The Disney Channel
    •    Pierced ears
    •    Footloose

You wanted to be a teenager in a small midwestern town and eat Kraft cheese and dance with boys. You wanted to carry a watermelon and wear Keds and dance on a log and kiss boys.

Mostly, you wanted to kiss boys.

Memory Bank

One of the bad boys in my sophomore Spanish class showed me that if you shake an unopened package of Airheads vigorously back and forth it will eventually be reduced to a nugget of viciously-flavored taffy. As an adult, I recently found out this also works with Lara Bars. Disappointingly, neither Airheads nor Lara Bars carry the lively puns of their chewy packaged peer: Laffy Taffy.

“What’s an owl’s favorite subject? - Owlgebra.”

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

When I was working at this awful restaurant the summer after sophomore year of college my boss would play two John Mayer albums over and over and over again. Like, I had to wear pleated khaki pants and an over-sized, tucked-in Izod polo and listen to John Mayer for the entirety of my shift.

I would get emotional about my boyfriend and my future all by myself while rolling baskets of place settings before the dinner shift and be like “I hope no one ever finds out about me & John Mayer right now.”

Until years later, when I put it on the Internet.