True Confessions

Ok, time to come clean. I'll tell my secrets if you tell yours...

I come from a long line of babushka wearers. This is my dad and granddad modeling the ones my mom just made for me. One is red and the other one is green, but now I forget which was which. I am in second grade in this picture. My mom used to make babushkas for me out of yarn and she'd crochet into them those 1" diameter sequins that you usually see on purses from the 1960s. So when you wore one, you could keep your hair tidy, your ears out of the wind, and you could signal in visual morse code from the tops of mountains by letting the sun reflect off the sequins, provided it was a sunny enough day.

This is a Milk Bone dog treat. When I was eight, my brothers dared me to eat one. I ate three. And no, it hasn't been forty-two years since I ate my last one. But I'm not ready to tell you how long ago -- or not so long ago -- it has been.

I never wash my hands for 20 seconds. Sometimes I don't even wash the backs of them either. And I have never, ever turned off the faucet with a paper towel. Unclean, unclean.

There's a lot of talk about bullying in schools. There are a lot of kids who suffer from being bullied, and the best advice is still to use words, tell an adult, walk away. But when I was in first grade, I beat up every boy in my class and told each of them that I'd humiliate them by telling the whole class they'd been beaten by a girl. I was smart, I was fat, and my mom cut my bangs too short, so I took a pre-emptive strike. I was the bully.

This is a Thomas Kinkaide painting. I hate it with the white hot intensity most people reserve for mass murderers, Satanic rituals, empty toilet paper rolls and static cling.

But I don't hate it as much as I always hated Pippi Longstocking. Kinda always wished that monkey would take a chunk outta her neck.

I LOVE Velveeta. I consider half a block as a serving.

To most people this is a dodgeball. To me, its a Post Traumatic Syndrome trigger. I can still hear the thunk of it against my head, all these years later. Sometimes I still dream about it, wake up with a headache. Damn elementary school recess!

Mom, even though I said I liked your lima bean soup, I never did. Sorry.