Mar

That time I crowd surfed

Back in the 90’s there was a phenomenon of dancing called “Moshing”. This is where you get with a group of people who would randomly bump into each other for no other reason than releasing pent up aggression and hormones. This was predominantly done in the teenage and young adult circuits.

One day at the beginning of senior year my friend had just announced that there would be a group performing at her church across the street. We were all excited and loved live music. There couldn’t have been a more fitting beginning to last year of high school. The night of the concert, we assembled with many local teenagers in the church parking lot to hear some grunge music. Well; Christian grunge music.

When I told my boyfriend at the time about the concert, he agreed he was going as well with his group of friends. In conversation with him leading up to the concert he had joked that I could go in the “baby” mosh pit which “is next to the actual, much larger mosh pit.” He made the comment away from me, chuckling with his friends. Unbeknownst to him this irritated me to my very core. There is nothing more I don’t like than being told I can’t do something.

When I arrived at the concert with my friends, it was hot, the sun was about to set and we were waiting for the band to come out on the stage. We began to cheer when four young men clad in orange shirts with the word “Juda” on them appeared. By the time they were in their second song, a small crowd of moshers began stomping, ramming into each other with their shoulders.

I had just been told I couldn’t do something because I’m a girl and I wanted in.

I didn’t blink when I fled from my boyfriend’s side. I ran into the sweaty cesspool of teenagers and began ramming myself against strangers. It was a strange freeing experience feeling like a pinball being struck against others who were going through their own angsty rebellion. In that brief moment running from being a spectator in my life I became a mover and shaker. We did what we did because we could. Nobody could stop us and it was incredible.

The crowd then started to give way from moshing to surfing people through the crowd on a sea of teenaged phalanges. It was very much like the scenes you see in movies where hippies, metal heads, or hair band fans are frenetically dancing and begin passing people over their heads while the person being surfed has an epiphany. In the movies the scene plays out over some poignant music of that decade in an arena or an open farm field like Woodstock. This scene played out in four to ten parking spaces.

When I looked to my left, the people launching others into the crowd were my boyfriend’s friends. He was standing in front of me to the left of them, just watching me. Not looking at him, I sensed his disapproval at what I was about to accomplish. I smiled at his friends as they put their hands down and we gave each other the signal. I ran full force, stepping into their grasp in my beloved brown Doc Martens as they launched me into the air.

I flew. In that moment I had no fear and was full of trust. I landed on a bed of fingers, with nails of metallic blue, gently rolling me through the crowd as I screamed all the air out of my lungs.

Photo courtesy of Mindy C.

The crowd gently set me back down on the ground as the music began to pick up. When I was placed on the ground, I hadn’t quite found my footing yet. The rush from being carried by a crowd full of adrenaline quickly stopped when two moshers accidentally knocked me to the ground. When I tried to get up their buttocks hit my head on the left and right side knocking me down again. I crouched in a Spider-man stance getting a whiff of something rancid. One of the gluteus maximuses had passed gas. I got up again only to be struck repeatedly by the pair of posteriors. I was able to perfunctorily wiggle my way out of the permeated labyrinth of derrieres when one of the owners of said derrieres lended a hand pulling me up. A few moments later a church official called out saying there would be no more crowd surfing.

They should have been more specific. We still moshed.

What is something you were discouraged from doing but did anyway? What did/do you do as an act of rebellion?

Feb

Pigpen

There is always that one quintessential smelly kid in class. As a substitute teacher, you don’t figure out who these kids are until you’ve visited their classroom on numerous occasions.

There is always the accidental case where a kid has been raising his hand while you have a million other kids needing your attention; because they’ve accidentally glued their hands together, have a shoelace undone or something else. By the time you’ve managed to get the kid with glue hands to tie the shoes of the other and you’ve made it around to the well mannered child with his hand up, you realize you’ve accidentally miscalculated his need when you enter the musty cloud of, “I gotta go, I gotta go!”

However in an older classroom it’s different. I’ve forgotten how smelly young boys typically are and how they just let it loose. In my household growing up I didn’t have siblings, so if I did something I had to fess up to it. Sometimes I did so proudly. In school however, it was always a different story. In school it had to be kept secret.

This year is the year I said I would own up to things and be honest. Here it is readers, I am confessing something to you that happened in 4th grade. This will help explain why I have such an affinity for this smelly child I encountered recently.

In 4th grade as in most small burgeoning schools, we were escorted to Physical Education class in an empty tiny gym. It was so new that there was not enough equipment to absorb sound. On this unfortunate day, after we had done our beginning calisthenics, we were instructed to do timed sit-ups with a partner holding our feet. My partner was a boy. You can already imagine why this was awkward for me. When the teacher officially started her stop-watch, I decided to do as many sit-ups as fast as I could. For whatever reason, back in the day, I felt I always had something to prove. Then, I was treated to a humbling. After about 5 to 10 sit-ups something had wrangled loose from deep inside my stomach and came out between my feet…with the boy holding them. The sad thing is, it didn’t happen just once. No matter how hard I tried, every sit up resulted in a resounding fog horn sound which then echoed off the floor and bounced off the walls.

As we all know, flatulence in awkward situations is funny. In this particular instance, the entire class was cracking up making it hard for them to accomplish their timed sit-ups. I had never been so embarrassed. (Until that point at least.) To this day, I don’t know if any of my classmates were sure it was me.

Now that you know this about me, it will be easy to understand why as a teacher I felt so badly for this kid in my class but proud of him at the same time.

I was busy working with another student when I saw this young boy whiz by the desks trying to get to the front of the room to work on math. Next thing I knew, one boy walked by in the same spot. “AaaAgGgH!” he screamed.

Then another boy walked by, “OH GOD!”
Then another, “Oh MAN!”

The first boy is trying to stifle his laughter, and the other three boys held their arms up to their noses, laughing, trying to block what was in the air. Raising the teacher’s suspicion, she looked over trying to hide her smile. “What is going on over there?”

The first boy replied, “Well, I farted and then the others walked into it one after the other. You might want to get the Lysol out.” I was proud because instead of trying to hide it, or act like it didn’t happen, he owned up to it. Granted, it’s gross, but at least he didn’t let the ire stack up between all the boys in class leaving them to wonder who really dealt it.

Have you ever been a Pigpen?

Jun

Underestimating the “like” button

I bet she has the confidence to whip her hair back and forth…AND “like” a boy in person!

Recently you all posted “likes” and comments on the “Note from a Former Self” article here on Diary of a Quirky Girl. Your comments got me to thinking about who else I’ve been missing out on from my past. Who had I been wondering about and what they were up to. What were they doing now?

It seems that along with technology, we live in the age of trying to go as fast as we can to get to that next moment in life. In the process we try to keep up with others but do not have enough time to post a comment. In the past, I will be honest, it used to be annoying someone could “like” something but not comment. A recent business trip to Chicago enlightened me.

While in Chicago I was in route to places at several different times and couldn’t always get great reception. When I did, I had enough time and a short window to click the like button on a friend’s page, picture or comment, just enough to let them know I was thinking about them and wanted to see how they were doing. It seems the like button is a quick way to cheer someone’s day until you can get to a place where you can leave a lengthy comment.

In my plight to catch up with friends and like things on their page, a few names popped up I hadn’t seen in a long time. Some were childhood friends from the neighborhood and one was even a crush I had in grade-school.

I was talking to my parents about memories of note passing, and how that seems to have morphed into the like button. I was explaining to my Dad about who I had recently seen on the front page of my Facebook. He was trying to remember who this person was, which is when I went into a long explanation of who they were and what they meant to me when I was younger.

Here is the story I relived for him.

My parents and I were at our local grocery store, it was 1988 and the 4th grade school year had just started. I was riding on the back of the cart while they pushed me through the aisles. We were just rounding the cereal aisle when I saw this particular boy, his sister and his mom, riding and walking with their shopping cart. Obviously good genes run in their family, they were all as cute as buttons.

When I was younger I had a hard time looking a crush in the eye. However in my head as a 8 year old girl about to turn 9, this scenario played out differently. In my imagination, my parents had been running their cart down the aisle with the tires smoking and leaving trails of fire with me on the back; as if we were in a motorcross competition to see who could get their groceries fastest. I was dressed like Willow Smith in a jump-suit of bright colors, wearing a huge smile with an un-shy personality exuding fun and sunshine. In my pea brained 8 year old imagination, I got down off my cart with finesse, looked the boy and his family in the eye, waving a large wave saying, “HELLLOOOOO!” Then I broke out into a break dance, with his family, the entire grocery store, and my family gathering around me in the cereal aisle starting out with a slow clap and finally breaking into a standing ovation.

This is what the grocery store looked like in my mind.

Sadly this isn’t what happened.

What really happened is I stepped off the cart dressed in my hot pink beach bum shirt and cut off jeans. My hair was thrown back in a pony tail because I had been out all day playing and probably looked like I had just wrestled a bear…a care bear. I didn’t want this particular boy to think I wasn’t mature or so silly I couldn’t just walk next to my parents with the cart. With my head down, I barely looked at him and said a quick, quiet, “Hello.” Then I waited for them to pass by.

Today as I think back on that moment, now I fully understand the puzzled look on he and his sister’s face. He was in my class after all, why couldn’t I just say hi like a normal kid? After they passed by, my parents asked with a smile, “Who was that?” All I could say was, “Oh he’s in my class.”

In telling my Dad this memory and what this particular person meant to me, he broke out into laughter and said I should write a blog about it. So here I am, all because of a maze of thoughts, lead here because of the simple idea of liking something.

Back then, even if we had a “like” button for a boy, I don’t think I would have had enough guts to click it. As a child I was loud, goofy and outgoing, but as soon as I “liked” someone I turned into an introverted shy kid looking at the ground. However with time, age, wisdom and technology that has all changed. I can flirt without having to look someone in the eye now, do it with a click, finesse and for all the other person knows, maybe I am dressed like Willow Smith on the other end of the computer radiating warmth and sunshine.

Were you ever originally annoyed by the “like” button? Did you ever feel like it removed the effort needed for a friendship or relationship? What has lead you from one thought to another to think of someone you haven’t thought about in a long time?

Diary of a quirky girl

Tag Archives: boys

That time I crowd surfed

Pigpen

Underestimating the “like” button