Wednesday
"Carpe diem, mother fucker!" was a phrase Brandon and I started saying to encourage each other and ourselves to quit worrying and being indecisive and just do it.
It's been a little while since I wrote anything in secret writing.
I haven't been thinking about Gaby for a long time, but since I kissed her yesterday, I haven't been able to get her off my mind. To explain: I kissed Gaby to see how she would react. To my surprise, she kissed me back. I've been trying to figure out why.
Whooboy. I remember that. We were sitting next to each other on the stairs by the entrance to the school -- the ones that went up to the LD classrooms. The light there was bright but diffuse, in contrast with the rest of the entrance area. I can't remember what we were talking about, but it was probably an argument over emotion and stuff. I told her to close her eyes and she did, and I leaned over and gave her a peck on the lips. She reflexively kissed me back, and then was just sat back stunned. I don't remember what happened after that; she probably got angry and left. And I rekindled my infatuation with her for awhile longer.
I read this hear and think, Duh, of course you couldn't stop thinking about her. Meanwhile, I was still dating Nikki, and probably crushy on another couple girls. God I was such a mess. It's a wonder I got anything done with all the romantic whiplash I was giving myself.
Thursday
Linda and Ardee were Park District employees; Linda was the manager and Ardee was mostly the security guard, but was put in charge of the concessions stands that year, for some reason. I called to make sure I had a job at the ballfield concession stand that summer. I worked there every summer of high school -- it was an OK job that paid decently, and I was manager, essentially, from sophomore year till senior.
Ardee was an extremely pear-shaped woman who spent most of her time in a small-body Toyota or Nissan pickup, driving around the park watching for kids sneaking over the fence after cutting school (which was on the other side of the train tracks from the park) or smoking near the little petting zoo or whatever. She had a spiked mullet and coke-bottle glasses which she claimed she wore to see better than 20-20, not because she was blind without them. She and her "roommate" (what? I barely knew what a lesbian was back then) lived near the middle school, so I saw her sometimes when I went to visit Mike. I thought she was kind of weird, but she would drive over to Bell's Apple Orchard in Lake Zurich a couple times a week in the summer and buy a dozen apple cider donuts for us to sell in the concession stand, so she was OK.
I think Jill's "yearbook birthday" meant we were going to celebrate with a cake in yearbook class, which was first hour. Not sure about that. I am sure that the "unofficial field trip" to see Jungal Book was pretty easy to arrange, because it fell into my open hours.
Oh poor Jeff. The guy was just so used to being picked on that anything would set his defenses off. "Does anal retentive have a hyphen?" was my way of poking him when he was getting anal about something in Phelan's logic and rhet class. Jill and I were somewhat shocked that we had to explain what anal retentive meant; it was a fairly common term, we thought, but somehow he'd never learned what it actually meant. When we explained it, he completely agreed that he was anal, and understood that it wasn't necessarily an insult -- hence this comment. (And really, being anal retentive isn't always a bad thing. Also: it doesn't usually take a hyphen.)
The note about the color of my eyes is something that'll pop up a few times in 1954. I have green hazel eyes now, but occasionally when I was younger -- say, high school through college -- the color of my eyes would sometimes shift into the blue range. It wasn't simply an inference or contrast with what I was wearing, either. It seemed more influenced by my moods and the time of day. The later it was, the more likely they were to be blue, for some reason.
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