TMI Tuesday

From the archives:

1. What was one of the best parties you’ve attended?

Probably one in college, but they do tend to blur together in my decrepitude.  Possibly that New Years Eve party with Sheri which is somewhere way back in the archives of the blog but I'm too lazy to find because God damn are there a lot of posts to go through.

2. What is your first memory of being really excited?

Honestly, anticipation of losing my virginity is one of my clearest memories from my childhood.  That said, I have vaguer memories of being excited for Christmas earlier than that, so in fairness and not to put too much importance on memory, I'd probably have to say that I remember being excited for Christmas before I was excited for sex.  But I remember being excited for sex much more clearly.

3. What was the first thing you bought with your own money?

Good Lord, I don't know.  Probably candy or something.  What is "my own money" anyway?  The first thing I ever bought with money that I actually earned and wasn't given was probably food.  I'm pretty sure I took my first paycheck and bought myself something at a restaurant or something like that.  Pretty boring.

The first big-ticket purchase I ever made was a bass guitar, at least as far as I can remember.  I had a guitar before, but I bought the bass myself.  Before that, it was probably toys (not the sexy kind) or food.

4. What story does your family always tell about you?

When I was a child, a nice lady asked me where my pretty red hair came from.  I told her, totally seriously, "The milk man."  Little pitchers have big ears (a phrase I've never really understood, since pitchers don't have ears at all) and I'd heard it said as a joke because obviously I got my red hair from my parents; they both have varying degrees of red hair, and my siblings do as well.  So it was said as a joke, a la "Redhead eh?  Well she can't have gotten it from you; must be from the milk man."

It took me years to understand why it was funny, even though I knew all about sex.  I thought they were saying that milk men somehow delivered red hair to children or something.  It would have made more sense if it were the mail man, and since we didn't have a milk man I don't know where I even got the idea of what a milk man was.  Once I realized the joke, I then understood why the nice woman looked slightly scandalized and my parents were slightly mortified.  But we laugh about it now.

I don't know if that's the story my family always tells about me, but hey, it's a decent story and it's safe for public consumption, as opposed to the stories that my family could probably tell but don't.

5. At what age did you become an adult?

I don't think I ever became an adult.  Though when I was younger I thought that losing one's virginity, coupled with getting one's period, made one a woman, that's bullshit.  And that's still not "being an adult" just being a woman.  As I grow older, I realize that sex and procreation don't make you a woman any more than having a vagina does.  Shout out to all my trans sisters out there (and brothers too; don't let anyone say you're not a man either).  Femininity isn't defined so easily.

But again, I don't think I've ever become an adult.  I'm not saying I'm immature (I mean, I certainly can be) but I don't feel comfortable in my own skin as an adult.  I feel like an imposter, like a girl wearing clothes too big for her and going to the office and lying her way through life.  I used to think that adults were people who didn't feel like that, but I'm pretty sure most people feel like that, even when they're adults by any reasonable definition.

We define adulthood by ages, but that's kind of silly.  If I had to give an age, I'd say you age into adulthood between 16 and 21 because you can legally do all the adult stuff at that point.  But you can't be president, you can't rent UltraPorn (geek test), and there are probably other things you can't do even when you hit 21.  But the law thinks of you as an adult at some point in those years, so I'll be boring and say that no matter how you feel about it, you might as well be an adult at that point.  If you don't act like it, you still get treated as one when you fuck up.

Society used to have rituals.  We still do, but we don't do vision quests, we take driving tests.  That came out incredibly glibly, which wasn't my intent, but hey, I'll embrace the rhyme.  See?  I'm not a very good adult.  I can't cope with life for shit and I make stupid juvenile jokes.

Bonus: Do you often subscribe to new comments/replies on blogs? Or do you manually go back to see if someone has responded to what you wrote?

I'm terrible: I don't read blogs.  I rarely comment on other blogs.  So I don't do either.  There's barely enough time in the day to write shit like this, let alone read other people's generally-much-better stuff.

Well that was just a fat sack of crap.  Garbage in, garbage out, I'm afraid.  You can help with that by giving me questions that wouldn't be asked of Miss America.  Email, Twitter, comment, sky-writing, whatever.  I will answer them.