12:39 - September 25, 2002
girly indoctrination
Okay, that didn't quite work for everyone, since free good remote image hosting is a rarity these days (anyone happen to have found a good one? anyone? anyone?) so until the internet stops being a bitch, click here to see me climbing.

That sweet sick heavy sleep is so beautiful sometimes, when your head is so full of goo, to use a Mikey term, that it just sinks into the pillow and the rest of your body follows suit and it's a fever-soaked thick, thick dream-filled sleep that seems to last forever. Nightmares will ruin it, but I didn't have any. And in fact, when I went to the nurse today because the girl who seems to have the same ills as me suddenly threw up in the middle of a class discussion about piety and Greek gods, she said my temperature was 97.0 my blood pressure was 100/65. No wonder everything seems thick. My entire body is slow and cold and sluggish and tired. (She also said I was 5'10", which is wrong, and 145 pounds, which I hope to God is also wrong or else I'm going to wither up and blow away.) The point of it all is now I'm on antibiotics and think everything is backwards or upside down, demonstrated by the fact that I sat outside for an hour waiting for physics to start when, in fact, it is not Thursday. And I tried to drink out of a salt shaker.

I remember the first time I was 'indoctrinated', if you will, into a girly group of girly girls. I hated it. I was eleven or twelve and at Interlochen music camp, and we were all walking around in shorts getting ready for the monthly trip to the sand dunes of Michigan, when Susan, the violinist who slept above me, suddenly pointed at my legs and shrieked. 'You don't shave your legs?' she asked incredulously.
I looked at her as if the answer was self-evident, which it obviously was.
'We have to get your legs shaved before we go,' she told me. 'The boys are going to be there too. It's the only time we get to see them apart from the dances! And you look like a shaggy goat.'
'I may look like a shaggy goat,' I retorted, 'but it doesn't matter, because I don't have any shaving cream or razors or anything to make me NOT look like a shaggy goat.'
'You can use mine,' said Susan.
'But I don't know HOW,' I whined.
'It's easy!' she exclaimed, and led me into the bathroom, where a curious crowd was forming. As I protested, she hauled my leg up onto the edge of the sink and lathered it with cream. I wasn't a very aggressive child; I tended to just stand back and watch things, but this was not going in a direction I liked. I did not want Susan to shave my leg in front of the entire cabin. I wouldn't have minded if Susan had shaved someone else's legs in front of the entire cabin; I would have watched with as much glee as anyone, but...
Yasimin, the vocalist from across the room, said, 'Don't worry, it'll feel all smoothlike.'
So I let Susan show me how to shave my legs, amidst a circle of peering eyes and whispers of 'I can't believe she doesn't know how.' I went off to the sand dunes with smooth legs that hurt when I fell in the sand, and itched when I woke up the next morning.
For revenge, I put a frog on Susan's pillow, but it hopped off and out the window before she even got into bed.

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