 Tsk tsk. Kids smoking at age twelve. How sad.
I don't know how I came to feel so passionately about smoking. You'd think something traumatic had happened to me when I was a child... like those stories you hear of parents burning their kids with cigarettes or ashing in their kids' hair or something crazy. But nope, my parents didn't smoke. I don't remember any of my friends' parents smoking either. My grandparents did, but rarely in front of us. Maybe that was the key. Since I was never around smoking and because my family treated smoking like something bad that needed to be hidden... I learned it was something that I was supposed to hate.
And I'm glad I learned that early. To this day, I've only tried a cigarette once... and I was drunk and only took like two hits, so it didn't really count, right? I went through a phase in college where I enjoyed smoking cigars... but cigars, to me, weren't as gross as cigarettes because they smell good and you don't inhale the smoke. But I'm over that... and now I'm happily and healthily smoke-free.
Unfortunately, my underexposure to cigarettes has led to some slightly embarrassing situations. One of these times was in high school. I was a senior and was tutoring a freshman in French. He was flicking and flipping his pen as I taught him. I thought it looked cool so I asked him how to do it. Nonchalantly, he responded, "Just pretend like you're ashing a cigarette." I gripped my pen between my fingers and went along with it like I knew what the hell I was doing... and... proceeded to violently fling my pen all the way across the classroom. Ughhh I felt like such a square. But he probably wasn't surprised. Seniors who stay after school to tutor probably do not participate in any type of smoking.
Another time was a few months ago when one of my coworkers brought a pack of candy gum cigarettes to work. When he handed me one, I noticed one end was shaded brown... and I couldn't remember for the life of me which end you put in your mouth. I tried to remember all the pictures and movies I've seen of people smoking... tried to think of all the people who used to smoke at the bar (when you could still smoke at bars)... and drew a complete blank. Nervously, I shoved it my mouth and quickly chewed the whole stick. Problem solved.
The most recent time was five minutes and two paragraphs ago when I asked my friend who used to smoke in high school if it's correct to say I took two "puffs" of a cigarette. He told me to use "drags" or "hits" instead. I've never heard anyone say "drag" in my life except maybe on TV and I've always considered "hit" to be a term more related to recreational drugs. But apparently people who know what they're talking about definitely do not say "puff". Who knew? So, I went with "hit". At least I've heard people use that word.
   Yes, Rachel got mad at me because I said the D's house was a split level. Rachel lived in a split level house and apparently thought hers was the only one in the neighborhood.
Her house was the kind where you walk in the front door and are immediately confronted by two sets of stairs, up or down. The D's house was slightly different. The entrance opened right into the living room/kitchen/dining room part of the house and then over on the side were stairs down (to the family room) and stairs up (to the bedrooms).
I considered both to be split levels but for some crazy reason, Rachel was offended by this suggestion. She probably got mad at me and made me apologize for being wrong. Seems like that happened a lot.
Well in your FACE, Rachel, because my good friend Wikipedia describes a split level as:
The front door opens directly into what is usually the formal living area. This mid-level floor houses Living Room, Dining Room, Kitchen, and has a short flight of stairs leading up to bedrooms, and another short flight of stairs leading down to informal living areas and garage. Ha! And it gets better! Turns out Rachel's house was actually called a "split entry":The entry is between floors. The front door opens in a foyer or entry area located in a wing off the main house. From the entry, a short flight of stairs leads up to the top floor and another short flight leads down.
So who deserves the apology now, huh? It's only like 13 years later. There's still time. I'll be waiting. Man, I wish we had the the Internet and Wikipedia back then!
---Okay, okay... if you checked out that Wikipedia entry yourself and are on Rachel's side of the fight (jerk), you'd be quick to point out that it does say...
In some regions such as the Northeastern United States, the term "split level" is used to refer to a bi-level house with a split entry. This style of house is also known as a "split foyer." This is a two-story house that has a small entrance foyer with stairs that "split"—half a flight of stairs go up (usually to the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms) and half a flight of stairs go down (usually to a family room and garage/storage area). So dammit. I guess we were both kind of right. We just didn't know which definition we were arguing over. Still wasn't cool for her to get pissed over it.
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And this has probably been more than you ever wanted to know about split level houses, huh? I promise this knowledge will be useful next time you get in a fight over suburban architecture.
Here is the third clip from the segment where "callers" sang Christmas songs on my fake radio show. Of course, it's another awful parody. What else did you expect? Something tells me some of those lyrics got added or changed during the course of oral tradition. Do they even make sense? Did I even think about what I was singing? I was like ten... I guess I didn't care.
Oh and I hope you enjoyed that awesome impromptu key change in the middle of that clip. Yikes.
  Oh Waldameer. Good ol' Waldameer. For those of you who don't know, Waldameer is an amusement park in Erie, PA. I use the term "amusement park" loosely because Waldameer consists mostly of what most people would consider permanent fair rides. Think of all the shitty rides you see at any county fair... just built slightly sturdier and cemented into the ground. And at Waldameer, you don't have to worry about the rides being disassembled and taken away at the end of the weekend... you can count on them always being there. When I was growing up, the best rides at Waldameer were the Scrambler, Tilt-A-Whirl, Paratrooper, Sea Dragon, and Whacky Shack. The sole roller coaster was older than my parents... so I think you can imagine how thrilling that was.
Even though my description of the park sounds disappointing, I used to love going to Waldameer. I'm pretty sure it's a huge part of every young Erieite's childhood. Every school held a picnic at Waldameer at the beginning of summer. People had birthday parties and family reunions at the park. I'd say in an average summer, I'd go to Waldameer at least twice a month. And although I think most of the rides are lame now, I couldn't get enough of them back then.
There have been a lot of changes to the park since I was a kid and Thunder River, I think, was the first big step in the right direction. Waldameer had always built a new ride every year, but they were usually just new fair-type rides. Borrring. But Thunder River was a big jump. It was by far the biggest and most modern ride in the park. It replaced the previous 1920s-built log flume whose highlight was a pathetic four foot drop... which actually was slightly exciting because by the time you got to it, you had been floating along for what seemed like 30 minutes travelling at a slower pace than the average walking speed of someone who was also born in the 1920s.
So now you understand my EXTREME excitement over the addition of Thunder River.
Since Thunder River, Waldameer has continued to add more exciting rides which I'm always surprised to see in the "lame" park I grew up with... including three new roller coasters (one which is legitimately kickass).
I could go on and on with memories of Waldameer (throwing up after riding the Paratrooper in 5th grade; my best friend Meghan, fully aware of my motion sickness, leaning all her weight into the side of our Tilt-A-Whirl car while innocently claiming she had no idea why we were spinning so fast; winning a stuffed animal lion from a midway game and naming it after Rider Strong; my sister getting kicked out of the park for spitting from the Sky Ride; frantically running around the carousel to claim the awesomest "horse" which was actually a dragon; the delicious french fries from the Potato Patch)... but I think this entry is long enough!
P.S. "I LIKE Pauly Shore!" Hahaha. Where the hell did that come from? I was probably watching too much Encino Man again...
Just wanted to write a quick post and apologize for being such a bad blogger this week. I feel so bad, but I've been really busy (eating, mostly).
Tuesday night, Dave, Julie, and I made home-made spaghetti, meatballs, and sauce. It turned out really well... I was impressed!
Every Wednesday I cook with Michelle and AJ. This week we made "brinner" (breakfast/dinner)... blueberry french toast and sausage/wild mushroom frittata.
And tonight, Bob and I went to a sushi-making class. It was AWESOME. Yummmm.
So, lots of late nights cooking this week and not enough time to blog.
Unfortunately, the next two nights don't look very promising either. Tomorrow night, I'm heading home to Erie. And then after I see my cousin's new baby girl Saturday afternoon, I'm coming back to Cleveland just in time to go to a party.
So... hopefully I'll post on Sunday! Sorry you've had to wait so long... but trust me, the next diary entry will be worth the wait. It's so random and I want to spend time commenting on it!
Thanks for understanding... ;)
This clip is from the same segment as the last clip I posted... where "callers" sang Christmas songs on my fake radio show. Hopefully, you'll remember this parody of Joy to the World from your childhood too...I can't believe the horrible songs we used to sing in elementary school about our teachers! If that one wasn't bad enough... what about this one?
"Glory glory hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
I bopped her on the bean
With a rotten tangerine
And her teeth came marching out." Or possibly the most graphic teacher song I remember:
"On top of Old Smokey
All covered with sand
I shot my poor teacher
With a green rubber band.
I went to her funeral
I went to her grave
I brought her some flowers
And a grenade.
I read in the paper
That she wasn't quite dead
So I bought a bazooka
And blew off her head." How did we get away with that kind of disrespect? Do kids still sing this stuff today? Even though I wasn't a violent child and I didn't take any of it seriously, I can't imagine it'd be tolerated with all the school shootings that have occurred in recent years. I have friends that are teachers today and if some little brat said this kind of stuff about them, I'd want them in detention for life. I suppose no matter what, kids have always and will always say dumb things. But I dunno, that's a tough one.
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P.S. I used to love those Sideways Stories from Wayside School... but curiously, a quick wikipedia search revealed that there was no character named Bobby in the books. Interesting.
  At some point, I decided it would be fun to have sleepovers in my family's car. Other friends would set up tents in their backyard. But I didn't have a tent. What I did have though, was a Taurus wagon.
In the wagon, you could fold down the back seats and close the rear-facing seats in the "way back" (as we called it) to create a flat area just big enough for two 12-year-olds in sleeping bags. I'm sure this is exactly what Ford had in mind when designing the car.
Sleeping in the car felt like an adventure even though the car was parked in our garage in the middle of suburbia all night. I don't remember how my friends reacted when I asked them (or told them?) to sleep in the garage instead of my bedroom. Maybe they thought it was different and exciting too... or maybe they went home and told their mothers, "I don't think I want to sleep at Krista's anymore." Well, I must have "camped out" in the car a dozen times with a handful of different friends before my mom stopped letting me for fear the car would combust in the middle of the night. And that was that.
Maybe I should have just asked for a tent for my birthday like my sister Kasey did a few years later. I'm sure she wanted it just for sleepovers. But my mom thought Kasey had a serious interest in actual camping and to foster her new hobby, bought her tons of camping supplies... lantern, camping stove, dishes, etc. in addition to the tent. It was so thoughtful of my mom, but that stuff has sat, unused, in our basement for almost ten years now. :( Kasey did use the tent a bunch of times though... in the backyard of course.
This a segment where I offered to take callers and allow them to sing Christmas songs on the air. A surprise celebrity (voiced by me) called in but had to go before getting a chance to sing.Isn't that the cutest image ever? Big muscley Arnold with an armful of warm fresh-scented laundry. Awww.
At this point, I guess I was no longer a fake DJ for the real Jet-FM 102... but I was a fake DJ for the fake radio station KFM (the K obviously stood for Krista). I also made up the very fake phone number: 1-800-KFM. Last I checked, phone numbers needed 10 digits... but whatever. My station was so awesome it only needed 6.
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I want to apologize for sucking at posting as regularly as I used to. Things have gotten really busy at work and my social life is just craaaaaazy lately. Haha okay, that's somewhat of an exaggeration... but I promise you, I really am posting as often as I can! :)
   Geez, normally my spelling wasn't that bad in sixth grade... so what the hell happened in this entry?! Ment. Ressisted. Finnally. Extreemly. And my favorite, my multiple tries at "peninsula": pininsula and pinninsula. For some reason, I had no problem spelling the peninsula's French name "Presque Isle" in the last entry... but the word "peninsula" itself was clearly more challenging. Hmmm.
061 and 062 were the names of the two sixth grade "companies" at my middle school. We had most of our classes with just the kids in our company and the only times we saw people from the other company was at lunch or in classes like gym, music, art, etc.
Maybe you're smart and figured it out from context clues, but the part that got cut off on the second page said that Doug gave me a note to give to Suzy.
It probably made me feel really tall to see that Chris' girlfriend, who was two years older than me, was only a centimeter taller. But really, I was just barely 5 feet tall at the time. I probably wouldn't have been so concerned about my height if I knew then that I'd grow to 5'7" by high school!
In honor of the current NBA playoffs (go Cavs!), here's a commercial I made for Dick's Sporting Goods... where apparently basketballs are free!For those of you who live in Erie, I'm sure you realized Dick's isn't actually on Peninsula Dr. I'm not sure why I chose that road... as an nine year old, I probably didn't know very many street names other than the ones in my neighborhood and of course, the one that led to the beach.
        Well, it looks like I never used my fail-proof "You wanna climb trees at my place?" pick-up line on Doug. Bummer. Maybe I would have had more luck if I had.
I needed to inform Doug that my dad no longer had a mustache because, for some reason, Doug often used to draw cartoons of my dad in class and he must've still been drawing him with a mustache. After my dad shaved his mustache though, Doug stopped drawing the cartoons. I guess without the distinguishing characteristic, a cartoon of my mustacheless dad wouldn't look any different than a cartoon of someone else's mustacheless dad.
The woman who complimented Lianna and me after the concert was Doug's mom. Aw.
In my notes, did you notice my 'clever' P.S., P.P.S., P.M.S. progression? I probably thought I was so funny. But really, how stupid. At that age, what did I know about PMS? Not much more than Doug did. To this day, guys I know are still creeped out by anything period-related. So, I've gotta imagine that reference made 12-year-old Doug pretty darn uncomfortable. And I was trying to get him to like me? What was I thinking?
But that's nice that he acknowledged that we had been friends since first grade and told me to C/M AAF!
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