I hate running.  If you’ve been here for a while then you already know this based on this post…or this post. Running for me is like being a cat and having someone draw me a bubble bath. At first, I thought it was because I can taste blood when ever I run. It’s like I’m bleeding from my lungs. Then I considered the fact that I used to smoke as the reason why running for me is like the plague.  However, as we all know most things that shape our adult life can be traced back to early child hood trauma or as I call it Seventh Grade. 

Seventh Grade and my middle bully.

J. Quacking Bush the First.

As if this time in life isn’t rife with so many tortuous obstacles but the world has to give you a   J. Quacking Bush the First of your very own for all of seventh grade.

You try so hard to fit in at this time of life and every time you make a step forward into the “inner circle of cool” something makes you take about five giant steps backwards. It could be something as simple as what you bring for lunch. Or what you bring your lunch in. Why on earth would the kind of lunch bag matter for a child trying to fit in at lunch time?

Again, I ask why on earth would it matter? A brown bag is a brown bag right?
Of course a GIANT brown lunch bag would be better than the cute tiny lunch sized bags that all the other kids parents bought specifically for their cool kids to bring lunch to school in.  A GIANT brown lunch bag couldn’t cause any added anxiety to trying to blend into the cafeteria at lunch time unnoticed, could it?
It certainly wouldn’t cause a life long aversion to paper grocery sized bags that lingers on well into adult hood.
Why would it?
It’s just a GIANT. BROWN. BAG.
WE WERE ALREADY RECYCLING… IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES.
For crying out loud, my parents were just really progressive.

Lunch itself would be enough to send me spiraling off to the nurse where I would feverishly suck on the thermometer and then rub it in my hands to get the mercury to rise because trying to find a nice empty table to eat my lunch out of my GIANT paper bag was not the worst of the situation. Every lunch was accompanied by J. Quacking Bush the First staring me down and taking her wing and making a slicing motion just under her waddle. A gesture meant to get my adrenaline going, I am sure for recess, directly after lunch.

If I managed to eat my lunch I would scarf it down as quickly as possible then dispose of the evidence, evidence being the brown bag that was large enough to fit  J. Quacking Bush the First in, a thought that I wish had occurred to me back in the Seventh Grade.

*sigh* Hind sight is 20/20.

Invariably I would end up finding my way out side to the playground hearing what I thought was my heart pounding inside my head in preparation for play time. Much to my dismay it was the slow pounding of the gigantic flippers of  J. Quacking Bush the First bearing down on me. And with a quick look behind me, I was off for the better part of an hour running my fucking ass off until the bell rang.

Down hills.

Up hills.

By teachers.

Through dodge ball games.

I probably could have set myself on fire and no one would have noticed the game I was playing with  J. Quacking Bush the First. The game I like to call “Run, Run For Your Little Life Because When  J. Quacking Bush the First Catches You It’s All OVER”.

It all makes perfect sense to me now.

 Running feels like dying a slow fiery death by bully.

Somewhere around the ninth grade after a terrible bout of mononucleosis where they thought I might actually have leukemia but was really just the “kissing” disease (which was comical in and of itself because I don’t think I had ever even kissed anyone but my parents up until then and maybe that one strange uncle that made everyone uncomfortable when he was around) 
I found my self on a bus full of evil 14 year old monsters who I was terribly afraid of being around because they were either bullies or THE BOY who had rebuffed my subtle 14 year old advances and by subtle I am referring to the time prior to this that I asked a friend to tell him I liked him to which he responded that I was too short.
So naturally the next day I went to school in a pair of wooden heeled platform candies and extremely tight very sheer cotton lavender Sergio Valente jeans.
You know the shoe’s right?

I’m thinking my parents had no idea that I left the house in a pair of shoes that have been sexy since 1980. Or that my pants were that tight. Or that the reason I put these things on was in a valiant effort to lower my self esteem another notch to gain THE BOY’S attention only to be completely ignored.
Not even the cover girl ocean blue eyeliner I smuggled out of the house and put on in the girls room would make him look my way.

Back on the bus on a field trip to somewhere as horrifying, no doubt, as the bus ride itself, a rousing  game of truth or dare broke out and that’s when I sunk down as low as possible  in my seat so as not to be noticed. Come to think of it I may have tried to sit under the seat. I certainly was SHORT enough to do that.  I am convinced when you are trying not to be noticed it’s like all the lights get turned down and the spotlight comes on and finds you underneath a bus seat and people are daring THE BOY to french kiss you which was making me want to throw up because, like I said, the only thing I had kissed was my parents, and maybe Davey Jones on the TV screen while watching  The Monkees.

Oh and that poster of Erik Estrada.

Yes.

I kissed a poster of Erik Estrada.

More than once.

Shut up.

 He’s still got it.

Fourteen year olds are horrible  relentless things I must say because, soon I found my self with my lips pursed, my tongue ever so slightly sticking out of my mouth with THE BOY ferociously licking my entire face so much that I think he was trying to lick my skin off.

French Kissing was definitely not for me.
Ever again.
Even more so because he then told everyone that when we kissed, I spit in his mouth.

*Blink*
*Blink*
*Blink*

Uh, how is that even possible?

Apparently he eventually decided that he really enjoyed short girls who spit in his mouth.
(Kinky at 17 who knew anything like that even existed.)
Because years and years later, three to be exact, I actually started “going out” with THE BOY.
Which consisted of driving to parks and sitting on picnic benches while he desperately tried to lick the skin off  of my face all the time.

 I guess my spitting llama technique  must have haunted him in his dreams for all those years.

He was very passionate and I was very, um how do you say it…completely nonsexual.

Also extremely fond of the skin on my face so I ended up “breaking up’ with him.

At the time I was working a very high profile job in the fashion industry where I spent my days avoiding dusting shelves and folding sweaters in a mall store called Chaps.

CHAPS???

What the hell was going on in the 80′s, it was all like sex and drugs or something and I was like a 17 year old little girl who played with tiny fake mice (because I hated dolls)  who lived in a giant unfinished doll house all day long alone in  my bedroom. 

I was a late bloomer.

Well THE BOY would stand vigil directly outside of Chaps staring at my every move. Every shift. Every damn day until I had avoided doing so much fashion work that I got fired.

And I am pretty sure that was the end of him.

Or that I completely made this all up because I’ve scoured three years of high school year books and I find no evidence that he even existed.

Or maybe I just can’t remember his name.