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which_chickHere some entries ago, back nestled into the box of Spite Chocolates, I discussed The Horrible Pumpkin Contest, which I thought was when I was in fourth grade. It was not.
Before he went to his house in Mexico, my dad handed me a stack of papers and whatnot (he'd been cleaning out his office, an off-again, on-again project that he has been pursuing since his wife's death like two years ago) that he thought I might like. I took the papers and, er, threw them on the dining room table after I got them. For the last two months, I've ignored them hoping they would go away on their own. They did not. (I live alone with two cats. Hoping things will get handled if I ignore them long enough has not, heretofore, proven to be a successful strategy.) The fact that I tried this "method" of handling things after endless prior failures, should tell you lots about my... standard of housekeeping (Low. Low is a standard.) and also my frequent lack of reasonable executive function to deal with things like historically interesting artifacts from my childhood. *sigh*
But when I went through the papers, which I finally did this weekend because Squeaky Wheel knocked half of them off the table in some sort of high speed frolic thing, and by "went through" I mean "picked them up off the floor prior to being pissed off and throwing them in the trash because apparently they had aged sufficiently for me to be allowed to throw them out now", LO, included in the sheaf of papers was a newspaper clipping OF THE AFOREMENTIONED PUMPKIN CONTEST. How 'bout that?
Now, this is a cellphone picture of a forty year old newspaper clipping, so do not expect much, but if you would like to see (a) young me and (b) The Baller Idea, Poorly Executed in all its small-town-newspaper black-n-white glory from forty years ago, go ahead.
Also included in my dad's handover of papers were several letters (actual paper documents) that I'd written him in college, from which I have gleaned some wisdom from my college years, which... wow. That's below the cut, too.
Here's the pumpkin contest, me and my entry helpfully indicated by classy red arrows. Because I HAVE SKILLS I DO. LOOKIT me image edit. (lol)
This was published November 6, 1981. I was eleven years old.
To the left of my pumpkin entry is a misshapen thing on legs with weird googly eyes. That is my younger brother's triceratops pumpkin. Mom's note on the margin (not shown because I also clipped out the names and the school and stuff) says it's a stegosaurus but I think from the large shield thing and the visible two big horns (this whole assembly was made of cardboard), this pumpkin dino is PRETTY CLEARLY A FUCKING TRICERATOPS. (Brother-the-younger was sick and thus did not get his picture in the paper, says mom's note. Also Brother the younger called this evening to tell me about his woodpile eugenics* and I asked him straight up out of nowhere what kind of dinosaur he made for the Pumpkin Contest and he said a triceratops.)
Do note that all of the other winners were works-of-children but I assure you that there were MANY MANY works-of-moms that did not win. Also, you can see that damn near everyone else's entry made the pumpkin a head. There were A LOT of head pumpkins. (There are two Miss Piggy pumpkins in the winners because THE MUPPET SHOW, the real one, was actively running on TV at that time and it was hugely popular.) But my pumpkin was a coach (six white mice and, mom's note says, "driver rat in red coat with tails and black tricorn") and my brother's was painted green (blindingly kelly green) and made into a triceratops body.
In discussing entries and ideas for the pumpkin contest, "head" ideas were not even considered because that was 100% for sure what everyone else was going to do. Pumpkin heads have not been original since before Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Also, when you suck at execution, it's better to be doing your own thing than the same thing as everybody else. If you're not original, you'll have to go head-to-head (lol) your execution vs. theirs. If you're original, you can win on originality OR on execution. Or both.
So that's the Pumpkin Contest, illustrated. Onward to the college thing.
In a letter to my dad, dated October 29, third year of college, so probably 1990? A LETTER TO MY DAD. This was a letter written to my dad and it's 100% my handwriting, so... I definitely wrote this.
Four things it's taken me three years of college to grasp:
1. If you think your roommate is FINALLY asleep, he/she isn't.
2. If you think you're fooling anyone by staying under the covers, you aren't.
3. If you think you can be really, really, quiet, you can't.
4. A true friend sleeps facing the wall.
Wow. I had no judgment whatsoever. Like, I have NEVER had any of what normal people call tact, that's a known thing, but I was, that year, operating in a 100% Id, judgment-free zone.
My junior year of college was the year I had Simpson as my roommate and she... racked up a bodycount of fifteen guys in the first semester and those were just the ones I was in the room for, so... yeah. There were fifteen weeks IN A SEMESTER at college. (At the time I had a boyfriend and was spending a night a weekend at his place. I wasn't ALWAYS there.) It was very much a series of Saturday Mornings with "Good morning, who are you?" regarding the fellow in her bed. Overall, they were nice guys and generally good sports about the whole thing. (In what is perhaps a related note, she got pregnant and I paid for her abortion, which she reimbursed me for over the next couple of months.) But she was fun. This was back in the Old Days when people smoked cigarettes and were ALLOWED TO DO THAT in their dorm rooms. And I smoked like a damn chimney, back in the day. So they'd finish and I'd light up a cigarette from the other side of the dorm room because, well, because it was sniggeringly funny. Again, pure Id. Good times.
Dude, invariably: "Your roommate is awake."
Me: "Yeah, I am. She's got the squeaky bed. Ain't nobody can sleep through that."
Simpson: "(my name) can you take a walk?"
Me: "I guess. Lemmee throw some sweats on. Ten minutes?"
Simpson: "Fifteen?"
Me: "Ok."
Twenty year old dudes, I should mention for the record, are bloody amazing in their... resilience. Skills not so much but ability to persevere in the face of truly horrifying interruptions that might well throw one off one's rhythm? Two thumbs (and one other appendage) invariably up.
*Woodpile eugenics. In the course of having a woodpile, there are nice pieces of wood that are full size and normally shaped and they stack well. And then there are... ends and bits and weirdly branched things and knobbly bits and pieces that the splitter-mangled and so on. These are "uglies" (my word) because they are ugly. Dad calls them "toppers" because they don't stack well so they go on the TOP of the woodpile. (My uglies go on top, too. It's the sensible place to put them.) Brother-the-younger looks at these pieces of wood as... "culls" and the chore of burning them up is "woodpile eugenics". The uglies/toppers/culls do not get burned in times of high heat need because they don't pack well in the woodstove either. They are more suited to kind of burbling along a low-intensity fire, so days when it's like 45 out, those are days when it's time to burn these. So, days like today and our relatively anemic "winter". NOT COMPLAINING, mind you, but 45 is warmer than normal for this time of year. Definitely low-intensity-fire days
Before he went to his house in Mexico, my dad handed me a stack of papers and whatnot (he'd been cleaning out his office, an off-again, on-again project that he has been pursuing since his wife's death like two years ago) that he thought I might like. I took the papers and, er, threw them on the dining room table after I got them. For the last two months, I've ignored them hoping they would go away on their own. They did not. (I live alone with two cats. Hoping things will get handled if I ignore them long enough has not, heretofore, proven to be a successful strategy.) The fact that I tried this "method" of handling things after endless prior failures, should tell you lots about my... standard of housekeeping (Low. Low is a standard.) and also my frequent lack of reasonable executive function to deal with things like historically interesting artifacts from my childhood. *sigh*
But when I went through the papers, which I finally did this weekend because Squeaky Wheel knocked half of them off the table in some sort of high speed frolic thing, and by "went through" I mean "picked them up off the floor prior to being pissed off and throwing them in the trash because apparently they had aged sufficiently for me to be allowed to throw them out now", LO, included in the sheaf of papers was a newspaper clipping OF THE AFOREMENTIONED PUMPKIN CONTEST. How 'bout that?
Now, this is a cellphone picture of a forty year old newspaper clipping, so do not expect much, but if you would like to see (a) young me and (b) The Baller Idea, Poorly Executed in all its small-town-newspaper black-n-white glory from forty years ago, go ahead.
Also included in my dad's handover of papers were several letters (actual paper documents) that I'd written him in college, from which I have gleaned some wisdom from my college years, which... wow. That's below the cut, too.
Here's the pumpkin contest, me and my entry helpfully indicated by classy red arrows. Because I HAVE SKILLS I DO. LOOKIT me image edit. (lol)
This was published November 6, 1981. I was eleven years old.
To the left of my pumpkin entry is a misshapen thing on legs with weird googly eyes. That is my younger brother's triceratops pumpkin. Mom's note on the margin (not shown because I also clipped out the names and the school and stuff) says it's a stegosaurus but I think from the large shield thing and the visible two big horns (this whole assembly was made of cardboard), this pumpkin dino is PRETTY CLEARLY A FUCKING TRICERATOPS. (Brother-the-younger was sick and thus did not get his picture in the paper, says mom's note. Also Brother the younger called this evening to tell me about his woodpile eugenics* and I asked him straight up out of nowhere what kind of dinosaur he made for the Pumpkin Contest and he said a triceratops.)
Do note that all of the other winners were works-of-children but I assure you that there were MANY MANY works-of-moms that did not win. Also, you can see that damn near everyone else's entry made the pumpkin a head. There were A LOT of head pumpkins. (There are two Miss Piggy pumpkins in the winners because THE MUPPET SHOW, the real one, was actively running on TV at that time and it was hugely popular.) But my pumpkin was a coach (six white mice and, mom's note says, "driver rat in red coat with tails and black tricorn") and my brother's was painted green (blindingly kelly green) and made into a triceratops body.
In discussing entries and ideas for the pumpkin contest, "head" ideas were not even considered because that was 100% for sure what everyone else was going to do. Pumpkin heads have not been original since before Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Also, when you suck at execution, it's better to be doing your own thing than the same thing as everybody else. If you're not original, you'll have to go head-to-head (lol) your execution vs. theirs. If you're original, you can win on originality OR on execution. Or both.
So that's the Pumpkin Contest, illustrated. Onward to the college thing.
In a letter to my dad, dated October 29, third year of college, so probably 1990? A LETTER TO MY DAD. This was a letter written to my dad and it's 100% my handwriting, so... I definitely wrote this.
Four things it's taken me three years of college to grasp:
1. If you think your roommate is FINALLY asleep, he/she isn't.
2. If you think you're fooling anyone by staying under the covers, you aren't.
3. If you think you can be really, really, quiet, you can't.
4. A true friend sleeps facing the wall.
Wow. I had no judgment whatsoever. Like, I have NEVER had any of what normal people call tact, that's a known thing, but I was, that year, operating in a 100% Id, judgment-free zone.
My junior year of college was the year I had Simpson as my roommate and she... racked up a bodycount of fifteen guys in the first semester and those were just the ones I was in the room for, so... yeah. There were fifteen weeks IN A SEMESTER at college. (At the time I had a boyfriend and was spending a night a weekend at his place. I wasn't ALWAYS there.) It was very much a series of Saturday Mornings with "Good morning, who are you?" regarding the fellow in her bed. Overall, they were nice guys and generally good sports about the whole thing. (In what is perhaps a related note, she got pregnant and I paid for her abortion, which she reimbursed me for over the next couple of months.) But she was fun. This was back in the Old Days when people smoked cigarettes and were ALLOWED TO DO THAT in their dorm rooms. And I smoked like a damn chimney, back in the day. So they'd finish and I'd light up a cigarette from the other side of the dorm room because, well, because it was sniggeringly funny. Again, pure Id. Good times.
Dude, invariably: "Your roommate is awake."
Me: "Yeah, I am. She's got the squeaky bed. Ain't nobody can sleep through that."
Simpson: "(my name) can you take a walk?"
Me: "I guess. Lemmee throw some sweats on. Ten minutes?"
Simpson: "Fifteen?"
Me: "Ok."
Twenty year old dudes, I should mention for the record, are bloody amazing in their... resilience. Skills not so much but ability to persevere in the face of truly horrifying interruptions that might well throw one off one's rhythm? Two thumbs (and one other appendage) invariably up.
*Woodpile eugenics. In the course of having a woodpile, there are nice pieces of wood that are full size and normally shaped and they stack well. And then there are... ends and bits and weirdly branched things and knobbly bits and pieces that the splitter-mangled and so on. These are "uglies" (my word) because they are ugly. Dad calls them "toppers" because they don't stack well so they go on the TOP of the woodpile. (My uglies go on top, too. It's the sensible place to put them.) Brother-the-younger looks at these pieces of wood as... "culls" and the chore of burning them up is "woodpile eugenics". The uglies/toppers/culls do not get burned in times of high heat need because they don't pack well in the woodstove either. They are more suited to kind of burbling along a low-intensity fire, so days when it's like 45 out, those are days when it's time to burn these. So, days like today and our relatively anemic "winter". NOT COMPLAINING, mind you, but 45 is warmer than normal for this time of year. Definitely low-intensity-fire days
