blood is thicker than water, but peanut butter is thicker than blood

Since I emotionally don't have the tools to deal with the fact that the sky is snowing its balls off right now, ON MARCH 30TH, I'm taking a walk down the sunny side of memory lane, where the temperature mostly stays above 65 degrees and I don't have to deal with minor annoyances like wind-shield wipers and wearing socks.


I've mentioned my love of summer camp before and I think it's safe to say that it effectively made me into a geeky, 'girl power,' tie-dye loving freak. Amazingly, I still have a successful social life and due to my extreme awkwardness, vastly competitive nature, and fairly strict social upbringing, I'm sometimes told I come off as intimidating and unapproachable, which couldn't be further from my own actual perception of things, but hey-o, I don't hate it.


My sister, nearly three years younger than I, is similarly blessed with these qualities. Minus the tye-die loving freak part, that's all mine. Although, just to be clear I'll have you know that I actually work the power-suit and pumps look and I like to keep drum-circle Sara limited to certain area of my life, if you know what I mean.




When I was a senior in high school, my sister, Beth, was a freshman. PSH, more like FRESH MEAT. Bahaha.  Okay that wasn't funny. Anyway, we were both on the Cross Country team. Except, I was like, a senior, and like, totally varsity, and she was significantly lower on the totem pole, because duh, FROSH. It's kind of a tough thing to build up your image or popularity level or status or whatever bizarre pissing contest it is in high school and beyond for three years and then have a family member who actually knows you and the fact that you cry during the fucking movie previews and also uses the bathroom after you at home where all the number twos go down. It's an intrusion. Or, it can  feel like one.

There's no mystery.


 It was high school, it was cross country, in Indiana. This wasn't exactly Laguna Beach or 90210 or Gossip Girl. Again, cross country. Not a headline sport. But whatever, I had the team of girl and guy runners and we all sat around together on Friday nights and ate carrot sticks and watched Forrest Gump or Sandlot if we were in season, while the rest of our fellow student body was robotripping or getting busted for throwing corn husks at semis from the overpass.  It was vaguely cult-like, as most sports with semi-talented athletes are.


And boy, did we have some hot ticket events of which to look forward. One particularly exciting highlight was TEAM CAMP. Team camp was when we stayed IN THE DORMS of a college campus twenty miles away from our hometown for three nights and basically gorged ourselves on each other... and running three times a day. And sometimes swimming. And playing ultimate frisbee. And having ping-pong and basketball tournaments in which everyone, even the most uncoordinated, were required to participate. ALSO, the talent show.

Oh, the talent show.

Senior year summer team camp talent show, it was the 'cool' thing to be in as many skits as possible, or maybe that was just me. I'm not sure on that, I just know I was in several talent show acts, but that was maybe just because of my compulsion to win and so I felt being in as many of the acts as possible would up my chances.  The senior ladies coreographed a dance WITH PROPS and MATCHING OUTFITS to the tune of Video Killed the Radio Star. Style, bitches. Also particularly memorable is the skit I'm about to share with you and the reason for this post.

It's called Peanut Butter and Jelly.

And if I may say so myself, it was a crowd favorite. Even if we were scammed out of the highest honors.


Right, so Peanut Butter and Jelly.



The premise of this skit is to act completely stoic the entire time. It's to be treated with a sense of gravity and artsy pretentiousness to the crowd, who is hopefully losing their shit and laughing their asses off. One person is Peanut Butter and the other is Jelly. Essentially, you just go back and forth smearing the ingredient you're assigned on the other person, naming the part as you do it, taking turns until you're both miserable, sticky, messes. We used entire over-sized jars of each on one another, and if we're being honest, I wouln't have hated having two a piece.

My Sister and I attended the same summer camp, albeit at different points in the summer, as children. We'd both witnessed said skit, and been amazed by it as wee lasses. So, in an effort to be less of a bitch to my little sister, the newbie on the team trying to gain some notoriety,  I decided good old Beth and I should perform this together. It's kind of the perfect skit for sisters to do, because nobody knows how to be malicious like closely-aged sisters know how to be malicious to one another.



Our version when something like this:

Me: (Smearing peanut butter on Beth's pig-tailed locks) Peanut Butter hair gel!

Beth: (Playfully ringing my neck with jelly) Grape Jelly necklace!

Me: Peanut butter tube socks!!

Beth: Grape Jelly Sleeves!!

Me: Peanut butter lip gloss!!.

Beth: Grape Jelly blush!!

Me: Peanut butter eyeshadow!!

Beth: Grape Jelly underwear!!!!!


Grape jelly underwear. ON STAGE. It was totally on after that. I'm not kidding, we had an all-out war. The camp counselors we'd seen perform this skit as children were friends, so they hugged it out at the end. A third counselor had run out and rapidly threw a loaf of bread, slice, by slice on them and proclaimed 'Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich!!!!!!!' And they bowed it out and it was met by overwhelming applause, by the fourteen and under crowd.


We were NOT met by overwhelming applause right away. We were sisters, and shit was getting serious, seriously out of hand.  The other high-school aged members of the team had NO idea how to react. Perhaps it was weridly erotic for the male members and we didn't really think it through. My coach nearly LOST. HIS. SHIT. about the mess we made, us failing to realize just how fucking sticky everything was to become around us. Plus, we started getting legitimately pissed at each other and my friend Jessica ended up akwardly running out with the loaf of bread and kind of breaking up our shoving and condiment flinging as she doused us with bread.


In the end, we gave each other the one-stage hug, but like, the kind where you squeeze so hard that you're actually trying to hurt the other person without making it super obvious.



Crickets.



AND THEN, WAIT FOR IT.


The ROAR of applause. Weird, confused, oh-shit-what-just-went-down, 'that was fucking awesome,' applause.


God, do I love the sound of applause.


In the end, our coach was seriously furious about the skit and how we weren't *exactly* forthcoming with details prior to performance (um, we knew he was going to say no, and it's obviously better to beg for forgiveness.) and purposely didn't include us in the applause level judging to determine a winner. AND we had to scrub a nasty dorm common-area for a unreasonably long time. However, the clean-up did allow us time to make ammends and bond over the fact that we just made total fools did the most badass skit ever, together.



Beth and I already knew we were the real winners. You know, sisterly bonding and blood being thicker than water and stuff.


I think there may actually be some pictures of this circulating around still, so I'll see what I can do in the means of evidence. Oh, shit.


Xo Sare

PB&J and Gumballs.

Meh.


I'm not really feeling it today, kiddos.


Just to bring things up to speed, I signed up for the GRE last night. I feel real heavy today.




I'd like to say something along the lines of "I need a Xanax," but since I've never actually had one, I don't really know if that would make me feel any better whatsoever. But, judging from the way everyone raves about prescription drugs, I'm thinking that's a bandwagon I may want to hitch a ride on for a while. Until shit gets expensive, because I don't have any money at present time.


SIGH.


I'm bad at being poor. I mean, I was good at it in college, but all I really had to do was pay rent and pay to get myself drunk on the weekends. Better times. I guess I'm really not even that poor, I do make well above a 'living wage,' whatever that means. But, I have needs. I get hungry now and I want to eat something other than gumballs and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.


Which for about four months in colllege, I did subsist on PB&J and gumballs.


Sophomore year, I was living with the laziest girl I've ever met and the damaged girl who let her coke dealer move in with us. She kicked him out on weekends when her boyfriend from home would come up. There wasn't a whole lot of dialogue going on between us. Lazy roomate ended up getting her masters as Stanford in Molecular Genetics. Damaged roomate dropped out and went back home to her mother. I haven't spoken to either since we lived together. So much for forging last bonds, eh?


We had a cute little apartment right off campus with a screened-in porch, that was its best feature. People could come and get bamboozled with me on the porch without disturbing the two shut-ins. It was a total slum and we overpaid dramatically for it, but I didn't care. I fucking loved that place because it was mine, I'd work forty hours a week and take twenty hours of class a term and not bother with sleep a lot of the time so I could still get drunk with my friends.


Hardcore, eh?




Anyway, around spring, I think it was April, I finally broke up with the boyfriend I had had virtually since I got to college for the last time and it was a little rough. As in, he had paid for all of my food and booze for almost two years and now I was fucked. Something had to give, and I obviously still had to get drunk, it was college.


I'd eat two PB&J's twice a day. Once a week I'd treat myself to Subway. I've never looked better. I was always hungry, but I got better grades that term than I ever had before and ever did again. I was a total shit-show. All the sudden I had time to spend with my girlfriends and we'd do stupid crazy shit like busting every liqour/wine bottle from the year on the mantle in the middle of the street while screaming. I was underage and reckless and when the cops came I fled while the officer tried to get my friend Courtney's number as she swept the glass off the street by the dim glow of his squad car's headlights. I'd walk home alone at night at four in the morning drunk as a skunk, skipping, daring the gangbangers I shared the sidewalk with to 'Fucking try and start something with me."


I was in bad shape.


Jordan, ex-college-boyfriend had, near the end of our relationship, bought me a HUGE box of over 1000 gumballs at Sam's Club in an attempt to make me happy. He knew me well, I adore gumballs, but it didn't work. For months after our breakup I'd scatter candy dishes of green and yellow gumballs around the apartment in a feeble attempt at hospitality. I hate green and yellow gumballs.


All good things must come to an end. In June I left for New Hampshire, where I taught little JAP's to kayak. It was a good summer. I spent six hours a day on the water and ate at a buffet three meals a day. I got paid to sing at campfires and preach girl power. I didn't drink, didn't need to. I snapped out of my crazed lifestyle for a while. It was kind of nice.

I still got crazy when I went back to school in the fall, but never like I did that spring.
I can't buy a huge box of gumballs and then live on a loaf of bread/jar of jelly/can of peanut butter each week anymore, but at least once, I could. And I did.




Something about living that way is okay when you're in college that's not okay when you're three years out, use more of your paycheck to pay bills than to play, and stop drinking heavily on weeknights.


I think...... this may be... nah....... well, maybe....... growing up?




Sometimes I miss that me.

XO Sare