The very beginning, and a debut – 329

First off, today was a pretty fun world premiere, for what it is worth. Although what I should really be working on is my second movie script, I took on a fun little distraction. A random conversation at work led to speculating about various members of the team taking on superpowers. As each person became either a hero or a villain, it reached this point where I really felt like I needed to write it down. I started doing that, and it was really only about four nights work because the thing practically wrote itself.

I targeted today for its debut, since I just finished giving the quarterly presentation yesterday, and Cheryl’s birthday is tomorrow, so it seemed like good timing, and it kind of turned into a party, with pizza and cake. I saved the Final Draft version as a pdf at home, sent it to my work e-mail address, and forwarded it to everyone when I got in. I had some concerns about whether it would live up to the hype, because people had really been looking forward to it, but as I kept hearing bits of laughter erupting around me, I was reassured. It was frustrating never knowing who was at which part though.

Although it was initially conceived as a comic book, I did not have the time (or the talent) to do the graphics, so it was written as a screenplay, and could easily be adapted into a television pilot. I mean, its brilliance is as an inside joke, but maybe it could stand on its own. Anyway, now I really need to get back to Line Dancing Cinderella. (I have no skill at developing titles. Even my working titles sound stupid.) I hope to make good progress this weekend. I have promised to continue the adventures of the Bigg City Heroes, but I can’t let it take over everything. Still, it is nice being in a creative period.

Regardless, I said I would explore my romantic history, and that’s what I’m going to do. I already went over most of this in my writing therapy, but I feel like I need to do it again. Maybe part of it is that there are some differences in the writing you put out there and the writing you do in private, and so being willing to publicly air this could be significant, but also there are probably some benefits to going over things a second time, after some time has passed. We’ll see how it goes.

I started out with very traditional, possibly destructive, views. I was strongly drawn to the fairy tale construct, with the prince swooping in and rescuing the princess and then living happily ever after, except that I often then had her falling into additional peril. Maybe I was a bit of a drama/adrenaline junkie. Certainly, I was always creating stories in my head as a child, just like I do now. They were just less sophisticated. At some point I started realizing that you can’t count on anyone to rescue you, ever, and maybe I started also wanting to be the hero a little do, and do the rescuing myself.

Another part of my personality was a desire to have everything planned out, and just know how everything was going to go. So, combining that with my possibly rather arbitrary ideas about how things should be, I was going to marry the boy next door when I was twenty, and we were going to have a child every two years until I was forty, thus ending up with ten kids.

I’m embarrassed because I can’t even remember for sure how to spell his name. It was either Shawn or Shaun, but definitely not Sean. Anyway, he agreed that we were an item, so really, I was engaged when I was three, and this is also when I had my first kiss. My older sister and I were over at his place, and I told her to turn around and I kissed him on the cheek. Moving at that fast a pace, it’s amazing how much I slowed down, but we will get to that.

I truly did care for him—it’s not like he was the only boy I knew. There was another contender actually. I knew Jason from church, and I did think he was good-looking, but he was born on January 18th, and I was born on January 17th, and one of the things that I believed was that the boy should be older.

Shaun’s family moved from Wilsonville to Donald, but we still visited them sometimes. Then we moved to Aloha, and we visited less. Visits generally consisted of playing with Legos or Battleship, incidentally, we really only kissed that one time.

The thing is, even though Aloha was still somewhat rural when we moved there (there was a small cow pasture next to the cul-de-sac, and you only needed to go a few blocks to find horses or sheep), it was still a lot more stimulating than Donald. I will never forget going to visit them one time and driving by a small group watching a guy get his hair cut on the porch. Talk about your wild and crazy Saturday nights! Maybe it was the different environments, or the lack of regular contact, of just different personalities in general, but we grew apart.

Shortly before my 16th birthday, his mother called my mother to have me accompany him to a basketball game and school dance. It was going to be the night before my birthday, so technically I would not quite be 16 yet (which was our dating age), but yes, I could go, and I was excited. That’s when I learned that he was a nerd.

Technically it shouldn’t have mattered. I could easily have been considered a nerd too. Maybe it was the hick aspect. I don’t know, but we no longer had any chemistry. I did kind of start hitting it off with his friend, but then the friend’s girlfriend suddenly developed a headache, and they left. I was really ready for the night to be over. After that, I knew for sure that we were never going to get married, even though my target age was still 20.

So that was my first date, and he would still have been significant anyway, because I used him as a backup all through elementary school at least, and maybe even a little into junior high. It helped knowing that there was someone somewhere who was kind of like a boyfriend, or who had been a boyfriend once, meaning that it was always still possible. Of course, maybe that’s where I picked up the pattern of liking the one who was not around. That way, you can always look to see who is cute, but you don’t need to get involved with them and maybe you shouldn’t even get involved with them.

I did actually have one other major crush during this time period, Casey. He was in my first grade class and I thought he was very cute. We played together a lot; mainly imagination games based on Star Wars and Buck Rogers. When my family threw a Halloween party that year, he came. I would say things were going very well, but then I did something stupid. I wrote down that I liked him, and I put the paper in my desk. I don’t know why Shawna ended up snooping around inside my desk, but she did, and she told people, and from then on Casey avoided me.

Now, this had happened after I got the mean girls treatment and developed my weight insecurity, so it was easy to take it as an issue with me personally, and learn that you never let a boy know that you like him, on pain of death. Now, I am not sure that it was so personal. I mean, he did like me before, and we were first graders. Maybe it would have been the same with any girl, because girls still had cooties.

As it was, it did not change much about my outer life. I still played mainly with boys, because the girls were pretty mean and cliquish, until Jennie moved here in third grade and became my first best friend. I still was always looking at who was cute, and who wasn’t, and generally got along pretty well with most people. I was even sort of willing to try at romance again, though cautiously, and not until sixth grade. Next time: The Story of Stephen!

Okay, it’s not that exciting.