I was a bossy-ass child, and now I'm a bossy-ass adult

This morning at approximately 6:25 am, in a terrifying turn of events, my vehicle ended up the wrong direction on an icy road that I shouldn't have even been taking, but I was determined to prove to myself that I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, snow-be-damned.


Thankfully, I was unharmed. Even more thankfully, I didn't cause any monetary harm to my vehicle. The event didn't even really phase me at the time. I started to fishtail, I over-corrected, I didn't slam on my breaks, I merely ended up pulling a 180 before I finally stopped. I took a breath, pointed myself back in the correct, work-bound, direction and I started back out at 25 MPH.


The only thing that really bothers me about the situation is that two seconds of feeling that are never really as noticeable as when you're losing complete control of something tangible, like your car. Other kinds of control loss are gradual, even subconscious. Sure, sometimes it's hits you hard, but not in an "OMGz, this is my possible last moment on earth!!! FUCK!!! they're going to see what a mess my car is right now!" That, my friends, is the feeling I fear most in life. Yup, I'm scared to death a kind stranger will rush to my smoking vehicle and peer in the windows at my limp and lifeless body in disgust, thinking to themselves, "UGhhhhh, two McDonald's bags, a discarded sushi wrapper, two plastic containers with unidentifiable  food products in them and four empty cans of Dr. Pepper? Dr. fucking Pepper?! What a slob!"


Nearly constant, my attempts at control are often disastrous, but through some force beyond my own explanation, it only fuels my almost-primal hunger for that very thing- and it has been that way as long as I can remember. I like to think I've mellowed out some or whatever, but the truth is, I just keep scenarios that I can't control playing out in my mind how I would have had them, and ignore the real life results. Livin' in a dream worrrrrrrrld.


Let me take you back to 1997 for a moment. Eleven year old Sara had huge square glasses and a near crippling asthma wheeze.

Sooooooooooo, I was entering the phase that about 90 percent of children go through for a few years between age ten and age thirteen or so where they're just... ugly. I was not in the blessed ten percent of perpetually attractive children, I was awkward looking. I don't really know why this phase mercilessly hits so many of us, but it's kind of the little splice of life between still being an all-out kid and kind of starting to become self-aware of your own appearance and it's fucking weird. The results are often horrifying.


 I started doing my own hair before school around fourth grade and would often take twenty minutes standing in front of the mirror in my parent's bathroom, trying to wet and fine-tooth comb EVERY SINGLE BUMP out of my pony tail- sometimes I'd break into my mom's hair spray to get the desired result. I had slicked-back hair. It was bad. It was worse than bad, it was helmet hair.


AND THEN I GREW INTO THE LOVELY AND GRACEFULLY SELF-ASSURED ADULT I AM NOW AND I CAN LAUGH NOSTALGICALLY ABOUT IT. OH, ha ha ha haaaaaaaa, darling.


Right.


On the contrary, I just squirted Neosporin directly into my nostrils, at the office, in pain view, because shit is raw up in there and if they don't heal real soon I'm seriously going to go into a black-out fit of rage and literally rip my nose off of my face and feed it to Manfriend's dog, Hally. She looks like she enjoys a good nose now and then.

ANDDDDDDD we're transitioning.


It's 1997. I'm eleven. There are two 'Most Important Things' in my life and one of them is making sure I get back to summer camp come June so I can get my friendship bracelet construction and frog catching ON. NOTHING, I repeat, NOTHING, trumps summer camp. The other most important thing in my life, and something that has become an underlying theme up to present day is the need to control.


I can't exactly pinopint where this incessant desire to have everything my way started, but I am certain it was very early on. Seven year old Sara would sit in the backyard, singing songs, making them up as I went along to the animals around me- in full belief that they would become my own personal friends and pets, nuzzle me, and basically just, you know, kick it.


Opinions are actually varied on the most disturbing part of that little narrative, but I think the fact that I fully believed that the "animals" in our suburban Chicago back-yard, which included the common sparrow, squirrels, and the occasional bunny, were going to be become tame from the sheer power of persuasion in my angelic little voice is nothing short of alarming. Sadly, the elitest little bastards didn't actually become my personal playthings, giving me my first taste of control-related defeat, and thus fueling my need to have power over every situation.

Fa fa fa fa fa fastttttt forward a few years.
 Ahhhhhh. 1997. Fifth grade. Teacher's pet. Painstakingly cleaning every last spot of ink from the projection machine, organzing and testing each of the pens on my teacher's projector cart, silently sobbing to the dramatic conclusion of Where the Red Fern Grows during individual Read & Relax period after lunch. Good Times.



After school, pre-adoloscent Sara had shit to do. (The following list of actual events may leave you convinced that I would grow up to become the leader of the fascist regime, but nope, no no no, just the emotionally wrought, financially unsound, run-of-the-mill control freak I am today. Whew, what a relief!)


1. Compose congregation of neighborhood creatins... I mean children, ages 6-11 at the neighborhood field/park.


 This park was badass because it was huge and had a creek running through it on one edge with some woods and basically connected like three different little neighborhoods, and if you went all the way through it, you were at my elementary school.


2. Give moving and motivational speech on the importance of building us, the neighborhood kids, a fort in the woods by the creek. With branches. And discarded wood. And any old nails/building materials we could get our little hands on. (Where none of us actually had clearance from our parents to go....forbidden territory, risky.)


3. Delegate tasks to each child for construction, in the mean time writing a screenplay for a feel-good musical presentation for the "company" upon completion of my fortress.


 These little productions were occasionaly taped via my parent's video-camera and there is one particular show, still in my familes' VHS library, where I forced my little sister, Beth, to play the part of "White Trash Wendi with Baby on Hip." She was eight at the time.


4. Resolve common squabbles and address concerns of the rank and file.


5. Cease construction upon fortress due to an underlying theme of discontent among the crew.


6. Shift focus to assigning roles for theatrical presentation!


7. Break for dinner. Assign each member of the cast the task of finding a costume for their individual roles and to find out how many of their family members would be buying (!!!) tickets to the show.


Did I mention that not only was I a child prodigy, but also an entreprener? NO? How silly of me; I was probably just being modest! I often ended up making around four dollars for these ordeals, which I promptly pocketed despite my promises to "Buy supplies for the fort," and probably spent on something like the Waterfalls single by TLC at Walgreens, because that was the only place close enough for me to walk from my house. So apparently, I'm bossy and an embezzler, GREAT.


8. Rehearse. Insist everyone memorize their lines, as written. Throw fits and make pithy comments that will cause half of the role-holding neighborhood children to decide they'd rather go home and play in the safety of their own backyards.


9. Assemble remaining crew to build stage/set.


10. Watch the sun sink below the horizon and realize the entire thing is falling apart in my hands. Hear my father's, I kid you not, whistle- that served as a notificaton that it was time to come home.  Stomp home in a fit of rage, claiming "artistic license," without actually knowing what it means.


11. Wait approximately one week, repeat.




You know what? I can't ::actually:: believe I've been marking 'No' on job applications where they ask if I've ever had supervisory experience. What THE HELL is wrong with me? It's pretty much evident that I was born to lead.




Happy weekending, and never stop wanting more.


XO Sara

Making Bad Situations Worse Since '86

My attitude is directly correlated to the current state of the weather.

As you can probably imagine, living in the Midwest, this makes for some extreme neurosis and unpredictable mood swings. However, since I realize this about myself, I usually enjoy riding it out and choose to embrace the privilege of getting to experience all four seasons. Every year. On end. EXCEPT the four continuous months of sure-to-be-shitty weather from Mid-November to Mid-March, which is when my emotional well being is shot through the ringer and I spend an unhealthy amount of time googling idiotic things like ‘babies eating pickles’ and ‘how to make your bathroom feel like a tropical getaway.’

I genuinely pity the person who meets me on a cloudy winter day when it's 20 degrees outside and gets dark at or before 4:30 pm. It just isn’t really my time of year. However, somewhere in the midst of dreading the harsh winter upon us, I came up with the idea of a project, which we’ll call "writing," to distract me from the thoroughly bleak landscape of leafless trees, frigid temperatures, and incredibly dangerous driving conditions.

Plus, I’m a terrible driver. Trust me.  Even worse than I am at writing, if you can believe it. I rarely admit to being bad at something, and for that matter I usually simply refuse to do things I’m not good at, such as drawing anything other than trees and leaving non-excruciatingly awkward voice messages. But, since driving seems to be a necessity at this point in my life, I continue to engage myself in this particular activity, despite overwhelmingly bad reviews from virtually anyone who has ever ridden with me.

(I would however like to mention that I am actually the greatest knee driver that has ever existed, which I discovered not in an attempt to multi-task at the wheel, but rather due to crushing boredom and hours of practice.)

To illustrate what dreadful driver I am, I’ll share with you an example of how a combination of the fact that I’m practically night-blind and the quality of being easily distracted often prove to be a near-fatal combination.

It was the summer of 2005, I was freshly 19, temporarily back under my parents’ tutelage for the summer after spending an eye-opening year burning through stupid amounts of money, ODing on FREEDOM, and half-assedly pursuing a College Degree- intermittently painting my nails black like my soul and feeling woeful while listening to Bright Eyes in my dorm room and taking six or so upperclassmen to Sunday brunch every week at the dining hall on my meal swipes after a night of highlighter parties and binge drinking games. Ah, youth.

I scampered home from Ohio State for the summer and what lay in the garage to transport me from destination to destination? A monster of a vehicle. A turquoise monster of a vehicle, with a CD player and a 15-mpg fuel economy. I was driving an Astro van, everywhere. I drove the shit out of that van because no one else would, and because my parents gave my beloved 98' Chevy Malibu to my 16-year-old sister- um, can you say travesty? Don't get me wrong; a van of that size did have certain... perks. Turning radius and the ability to stay on four wheels during sudden and unexpected turns where not included in said perks.

Anyway, one sticky summer night I was toting around about five of my friends after a particularly filling meal at the local Mexican restaurant. We were probably just going to drive around aimlessly for the rest of the night and dick around on the country roads, because that’s just what we did. Every night. Wasting gas. Living the dream. In The Van.

According to my memory, I’m turning left onto a particularly busy four lane road with a median and I'm panicking internally as I often do in a battle between complete lack of any sort of patience, nighttime and therefore, darkness, and the fact that everyone was talking and the radio was on and OMG I CAN’T CONCENTRATE.

I quickly decided that I had plennnnty of time to safely or at least half-safely make this turn, and so I went for it. A lesser, or really, more patient person may not have, but what can I say, at this point I felt the van and I had bonded to the point of knowing each other's limits. I fucking punched that gas pedal as if there were no tomorrow. And there actually almost wasn’t a tomorrow- for the six of us in The Van.

Immediately after I hit the gas, one or more people may have realized what I had done and may have screamed in protest and/or horror at the sight of the oncoming traffic coming up on us hot. These panicked sounds caused me to freak out, realize my error, and again, freak out- but with no real feasible solution as to how to save our lives. I panicked. I cut the wheel in an attempt to do something, anything, and ended up on the wrong side of the median. GOING THE WRONG WAY ON A DIVIDED HIGHWAY, on two wheels.  

That fucking median, man.

Let me go ahead and clarify right now that I don't need any sort of inebriates to be an honest-to-god horrid driver, and this night was no exception. Not a sip of booze had touched my soon-to-be- stiff and lifeless little lips that night and still, I found myself carting a death wagon through the main part of my hometown in THE WRONG DIRECTION on a four-lane highway. It took mere moments until everyone in the vehicle was at high alert and gladly offering me advice on what my next driving maneuver should be. Or, more accurately, until everyone in The Van was screaming one or more variation of “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!?!!! AHHHHHH!!! GET ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FUCKING ROAD!!!” To which I promptly ramped the van over the median, with some difficulty, and proceeded to alternate between hyperventilating, screaming, and laughing hysterically to the dismay of my passengers. Or something like that. It wasn’t pretty. I just thought about it and visibly shuddered. It is a hand-to-god miracle that

1. We didn’t get T-boned.

2. Everyone in The Van at that time is still actually my friend.

3. No officers of the law were around to bust my ass for driving like reckless, impatient little brat.

4. The Van didn’t get stuck trying to make it over the median.

5. My parents never found out.

 I can say with confidence that I didn't see the median- but after eight years of driving back and forth on the same stretch of land, you’d have thought it would have just been engrained in the subconscious somewhere. Not so.  There may have been a few middle fingers and horns honked in my direction as other motorists were forced to swerve out of the way, and a few of the passengers in The Van may have vowed to never ride with me again, but we all escaped (relatively) unscathed.  

Until you've driven the wrong way on a road you spent most of your formidable years riding slash driving on, I will hold on to the “World’s Worst Driver” award. And, that was SUMMER. A time of JOY and PLEASURE, and WARMTH, and HAPPINESS. Just imagine how that little charade would have ended on a sheet of black ice. It suddenly makes a lot of sense that I was never asked to drive in the colder months.

Winter, you slay me.

SOOOOOO since I can't really afford to hibernate, or drive around aimlessly, wasting gas until I get into a near-fatal car crash this winter, I’m going to try to do something I actually take pleasure in on a semi-regular basis. And you’re looking at it!!!!!! I’ll probably enjoy writing about myself, because obviously. Let narcissism abound!

Plus, writing is a much healthier coping mechanism for the cold and darkness than impulsively moving to Chicago, without a job, in the dead of winter, and spending the majority of your time there getting drunk and wandering the streets every night while going into a mountainous amount of credit card debt. Not that I've ever tried that to power through the winter doldrums.

I'm yours until the weather breaks.

XO Sara.