Gifts and Me

 

When I wrote my post about the most precious objects that I own, I should have included these. These are my Space Spoons, given to me by my friend P (the one from my freshman year group I wrote about earlier) for my fifteenth birthday. They are the characters from Star Wars, Return of the Jedi more precisely, made out of various plastic utensils. Because P rocks - I mean, who would of thought of this kind of stuff?

 That 'script' that I talked about before - my friend J and I began to film it. At first we used ourselves as actors, but that quickly proved almost impossible. She didn't want to be onscreen (as I recall, tho this later went away when we did The Show) and we didn't really have any costumes besides Princess Leia. So film switched to action figures, but we didn't have all those right ones either. So we switched, finally, to the Space Spoons. We got only a few pages into the script.

From left to right: Greedo, an Ewok, a Jawa, Yoda, Bib Fortuna, Jabba, the Twilek Dancing Girl, the Rancor Master, Lando, Princess Leia (in a combo of A New Hope buns and her Return of the Jedi chain bikini), C-3PO, R2D2, Luke, Chewie, Han, Obi-Wan, Boba Fett, Darth Vader, a Stormtropper and The Emperor.

The detail, the care, the time that went into these spoons - that's what makes them one of the most amazing gifts I've ever received. My boyfriend gets me some great gifts - I love the thought he puts into them, so many of those would go on the list as well. The Barbie house I spoke about before was a gift, so that would be on there. The trip to Hawaii I've described before was a gift, that as well. My laptop was a gift from my parents, my friend S gave me a beautiful gown I'm quite fond of. My friend C has given me some fun ones throughout the years.

Anyway, it's easy to feel pretty lucky when I think about all the nice things people have given me over the years, but it's the ones with thought behind them that I really appreciate. I think I'll go read a book now, one that was given to me by a friend.

Video Tapes and Me

When I think about what's under the bed, this is usually the first things that comes to mind. Yes, that's right, it's a box of roughly fifty video tapes.

When I was small, Sesame Street, as I understand it, came on while I was in kindergarten (or maybe preschool) (perhaps they didn't run it twice a day in my neighborhood at the time) and so my mom would tape the show. Or maybe I just liked watching the episodes over and over. I've never known a time where I (or my family) didn't own a VCR - I learned how to program it quite young. Anyway, once I graduated from Sesame Street to Duck Tales, my mom began taping a lot of that. So I have several episodes of Duck Tales still, with their awesomely ridiculous and totally nostalgic 80s commercials. At this point, I also own Duck Tales on DVD, so I have been able to rid myself of some tapes.

That has been a 'to-do' of mine for the past several years - watch them and either purchase the DVD, so I can own in it an more permanent (though not permanent) format, watch it and then put the DVD on my Amazon wish list, so I can at least remember that I would like to own it again someday, or watch it and throw the tape away. Because it's going to be ridiculous enough carting around DVDs soon enough, what with that Cloud and all - I really can't be this far behind.

So last night, after taking this photo, I busted out a tape. It said "Disney cartoons and Laugh-In." It turned out to be about a cartoon and a half from a Wonderful World of Disney Valentine's Episode (it was on NBC back then!) and the 25th Anniversary of Laugh-In, which my mom taped (and presumedly watched) in 1993.

I'd never seen an episode of Laugh-In, but luckily this special spent most of it's time showing clips instead of just interviewing Goldie Hawn. I had heard the show was edgy, but, man, they got away with a lot. They spoke about the government and Vietnam in ways that, if a comedian or a show wanted to say those types of things about the messes we're in now, it'd have to be on HBO. They also successfully predicted in 1968 and '69, in their Future News segment, that Reagan would be president in twenty years and that the Berlin Wall would come down in 1989. Quite impressive.

So I stayed up late and watched the whole thing. One tape down! ... Forty-nine to go! ...

Star Wars and Me

Star Wars has come up a lot in this blog. It's the reason I started working (see 'Work and Me' Oct, 2008). I mentioned the Princess Leia buns I'd been known to wear my freshman year of high school in my popularity post from last month. And I spoke about it in my books post from January. It used to be a big part of my life. It still is, to some extent.

This is my box of 'Star Wars Insider' magazines. I subscribed in the spring of 1997, shortly after seeing the re-releases of the films, which were my first time seeing them (that I remember. I have a vague memory of seeing a film with a desert in it that looked a lot like Tatooine, but I remembered it as a Star Trek film). Any magazines from before that time period were ones that I purchased from the Internet or at a convention. Now I'm ... not quite sure what to do with them. Unless you frame them, there's no good way to display magazines, and I already have a ton of posters if I wanted to do that (none of them are up at the moment...). I don't really want to sell them - I'm not super hard up for cash and they're not in mint condition anyway. Reading old magazines is always a little strange (with the exception of most National Geographics). So they live under the bed.

Oh, and there's also that 'Time' magazine, with an article about 'Start Wars' with all these lovely quotes by George Lucas, back before he started making what most people think are questionable choices about his work.

After I saw 'A New Hope' on January 31st, 1997, I thought it was a good movie. It was fun and I had a good time.My feelings about it crept up slowly. Or, sort of slowly. It wasn't love at first sight, but by the time 'Empire' came on screen two weeks later, my hair was in those Princess Leia buns.

I saw the movies A LOT in theaters. I started writing what my friends and I called 'The Script' - or something of a parody of 'Star Wars'. It's full of immature jokes, bad puns and just overall silliness. By the time 'Return of the Jedi' was re-released on March 14th, I was up to 57 hand-written pages. The script was my main creative outlet until my junior year, when the prequel came out. Around that time I started watching Conan - see post: The Show and Me.

My last entry is on August 29th, 2005, noting that the last prequel has been released. Page 319 is where it ends. But my love for 'Star Wars' never will.

Horses and Me

Moving onto the other side of the bed, there is a large container mostly filled with old stuffed animals and doll clothes. Additionally, there is a shoebox, within which there are a few art projects from childhood, a few random frames and this horseshoe.

The horseshoe was given to me by my best friend from childhood, B. When I was three and B was two, our fathers met at a conference, and got to talking. They found they lived not too far from each other and that they had daughters of roughly the same age. The early years with B are kind of a blur. I do remember that when she started sleeping over at my house, she asked that her older brother stay at the house as well. I believe he slept in the living room. I had no such requests being older, and an only child.

She lived in a two (three?) story cabinish looking house in Saratoga. Her room was on the lowest level, you had to take stairs down from the living room. At one point, I think she fell down those stairs - I wasn't there at the time. One day, I remember, we saw a bug in the overhead light fixture in her room, so we decided the best thing to do was to get a broom and jump on the bed with the broomstick handle hitting the light cover until it broke. Why, I'll never know. Children do crazy things like that when they're young.

I do recall playing a lot of some sort of Sesame Street board game while having Disney's Pinocchio on in the background. Her backyard extending into the woods behind the house. It was altogether pretty rocking.

But when she was four, her parents got divorced. Her mom stayed in Saratoga, her dad moved to northern San Jose. At some point, B got really interested in horses, and her mom shared her interest.

So B started going to a stable a lot. And often times I would go with her. This formed pretty much my only encounter with horses.

My mom is not a fan of horses. Before I was born, she had been kicked by one. She was always wary of me visiting the stable. I had to promise to wear a helmet and such.

B eventually bought a horse, an Appaloosa. Often I would just watch her ride, and I definitely went to more than one of her shows. I was envious of her beautiful ribbons, but never actually had interest in doing anything horse related myself.

I'm almost finished reading "Animals in Translation" by Temple Grandin and it is so interesting. Lots of insight about horses and things. Stuff I wish I'd known when I had more contact with animals.

I still can't say horses particularly interest me. I love all animals, but horseback riding has always been right on the edge of scary for me (lack of total control), plus it always makes my butt hurt.

The Show and Me

Alright! We've reached the last of one side of the under-the-bed. Keen observers will see that there is in fact more under there that I have yet to discuss, but those boxes are full of personal/financial-type documents that I will, shocker, not be sharing on my blog.

This plastic container is full of every document I have that relates to "The Show." I've discussed some of this before, but in the summer between my junior and senior year, I began watching Conan. I don't even remember how I came upon that red-haired man, but suddenly there were many nights where I stayed up 'til 1:30AM or taped the show. Probably taped more often - I did work at a preschool at the time. But come August, it was quite apparent - I had to have my own show. My two best friends were in agreement, and wanted to be a part of it. One of them had interned at our local cable access station, and knew that getting a show was plausible. But we were so determined, we would have just done it in my living room if having our own half hour of local access wasn't possible.

But, lo and behold, I was given the time slot. And so in November, we shot our first show. The format followed Conan's - opening, monologue, first sketch, first guest, second sketch, second guest. We had a house band - namely, a fellow Conan-lover friend of mine. My co-host was one of my best friends, the other directed the show. I produced, and wrote and was the host. Some of the sketches were roll-ins (pre-taped bits), some were in-studio. Our audience was my mom and our friends - that is, the ones that weren't operating cameras.

We did ten shows before the following fall, when I (and several others) left for college. The following summer we did two more. The shows still exist as video tapes and a few video files my mom converted.

The way I accomplished having a show and taking AP classes in my senior year of college and working as a nanny after school four days a week was - well, I think I had a lot of energy. The show was taped (live) once a month, and so I would spend the two weeks leading up to it working on the scripts, and the roll-ins, getting guests, and writing monologues. During this time, I would generally neglect all long-term homework. Then for the two weeks after we taped a show, I would catch up on my school work again. I did this until the summer, when I was only working as a nanny.

Would I do it all over again? Oh yes. A thousand times yes. I would now, even, but the cast and crew are so spread out, it's impossible. And with the Internet expanding, everyone can (and, it seems like, does) have their own show. But this was back when cameras weren't on everyone's phones (which no one had anyway) and having one's own show was novel. I miss it. In many ways, it reflected, and made me, who I am today.

Looney Tunes and Me

This box contains boxes. Because that makes sense, right? In here, I have three bobble heads, all from giveaways at Dodger games. I don't want to get rid of them, I don't want to display them. So they live in this box.

Underneath Gagne (oh, I have fond memories of Gagne-such a silly guy) is my box for my old cell phone. Supposedly, I am supposed to keep my old cell phone in case my new one dies. But I'd like to recycle it. We'll see what happens with that.

In the Looney Tunes box are old day planners. It used to be a shoebox for a pair of Tweety Converse.

The thing is, I've never really liked Tweety. But I did like Converse. So I wound up with those shoes. This was like, middle school, mind you, so back in the mid-90s, when, for some reason, the Looney Tunes got really big again.

But I've always loved Looney Tunes. Even if most cartoon shorts make references to things I did not get at the time. On Saturday mornings, I used to get up early and find my parents cancelled checks. Then I would take them and a notebook out to where the TV was and add up all the amounts while watching Looney Tunes. Why? Honestly, I haven't a clue. It was like how small kids play school sometimes, but I skipped past school and went straight to accounting. Which isn't to say that's a particular passion of mine. I'm not bad at numbers or math - but why I was so into those checks ... well, I am somewhat intrigued by small, rectangular pieces of paper - which is why I have saved so many of my Metro tickets.

But I digress. Bugs Bunny is just so smart. And he always gets the best of those with less than upstanding intentions. My favorite cartoons are the absurd ones. The more absurd the better, like Duck Amuck. The cartoon I really want to see is Porky in Wackyland but it has yet to show up in any of the episodes that I've been DVRing from time to time on the Cartoon Network. But I will wait ... or eventually give up and buy the Looney Tunes collection with this short when I am feeling particularly flush with cash.

I've always enjoyed Looney Tunes more than Disney cartoons, probably because the humor is more 'out there'. Disney occasionally hits on things more my speed, like The Emperor's New Groove, Lilo and Stitch, or Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Okay, now I've made myself just curl up and watch movies. Drats.

The Old Gang and Me

Interesting box ... the clay piece is a self-portrait, probably from sometime in elementary school. I think I made my lips gigantic on purpose. The plastic thing sticking up in the back is my name plate from a company I worked for back a few years ago. The horse painting is one of those things where I don't know where I came from - I've just always had it. Similar to the blocks I blogged about last, I used it in my Barbie house, as a large painting that dominated the living room. There's a shell of unknown origins, which has now joined the others in the bathroom, and a cork and a screw top. Those got thrown away - I'm not sure why I had them.

But the photographs are of my 'group' from my freshman year. The one on the left was taken during our freshman year of high school, when we were very close. The one on the right is the same six people, tho sitting in a different configuration, four years later, sometime around our graduation.

When I arrived in high school, I hadn't gone to the feeder middle school, so I knew absolutely no one. By the end of the day, I'd found a fun, nice set of girls who were friends and were accommodating. I hung out with them initially, but I also found several other girls who, like me, had not gone to the feeder middle school. Two of them, A and M, had gone to a different middle school and recently moved, just like me. The other, L, had been home-schooled until this point.

I wrangled two of the girls from that group I'd met on the first day away and suddenly, there were six of us. Three of us were in band together, some of us shared classes, but I think what really interested us was we were all social misfits. A had a lot of energy, same with P (from the initial group), though of a different sort. L was adjusting to going to school, M was from a different racial background from the rest of us. J (also from the initial group) was sort of finding her place - she and I became the closest, but she left school in our junior year.

The six of us hung out at lunch, after school, weekends, holiday breaks, and all that summer. But when we got back to school that fall, things were a little different. We started to move off in other directions, pursue friendships that were closer to our own interests. M and J and I stayed close, but the others drifted apart from us. These things happen, and I wasn't especially hurt by it. I still feel privileged that for one year I got to be a part of such a strong and supportive group.

Blocks and Me

I have had these blocks for as long as I can remember. There's something very special about them. I've busted them out every so often throughout the years, and whomever I'm showing them to, be they 1 or 40, they get pretty stoked about them. They're wooden and just the right weight. They're colorful. And there's just the right amount of exciting, differently shaped blocks to make them rare (such as arches, half circles, and very long rectangles).

If you look closely at that yellow block towards the front of the photo, you might notice that it has some marker on it. This is because I decided as a child that these blocks were the perfect size for Barbie TVs. Several blocks have this design, because it was easy to misplace the specific block with the markings along all the other ones. One or two of them even has a design on the side to make it resemble a VCR.

When I was very small, between one and two, some of my parents friends owned some crazy, much more complicated blocks. There are photos of me standing next to towers that my parents had built with their friends (because it was the early 80s and people did stuff like that). After the photos, my parents would encourage me to knock down the towers, as they were done with them. I've been told I was quite hesitant, but eventually convinced to do so. I, of course, loved it.

Similarly, my dad used to work in an office where one of the conference rooms had a wall that was covered in white board. So at a holiday party, I was given a white board marker and told that I could go ahead and color on the walls. I wasn't buying it - I had been punished for this exact thing before, at home. But after a lot of convincing, I put marker to board and had a good time.

I don't remember either of those events, but what I do remember from visiting offices where my dad worked was that I used to steal sugar cubes out of the break rooms. They were such a dichotomy - the sugar was tasty and came in such a cute little shape, but on the other hand, the sharp corners cut my mouth. I still remember how those break rooms smelled - like old coffee and white board markers.

Old Clothes and Me

I definitely wouldn't call myself a hoarder - a lot of my old things are gone, lost in the several moves I've made or photographed and then given away. But I do keep a couple of containers of old clothes/costume pieces around, and this is one of them.

That's my old sweater from when I was in elementary school. There's a chance I wore it in middle school too ... I didn't really get a good grip on fashion until college, if I'm being honest with myself. Life was a lot of mismatched clothes for me, my mom kind of let me go with whatever I thought was best - so generally I picked three colors that I wanted to wear that day and then wore them, even if those weren't the only colors on the pieces of clothes themselves. This led to some of that bullying/not being very popular in those days that I wrote about before.

Below that you can see a bit of orange. Those are the pants I wore for an Oscar costume - I was Mr. Ping, from Kung-Fu panda.

There's a bit of dark blue - that's from a Halloween costume my mom made me in middle school, based on the Egyptian Barbie that I had. It was quite the outfit, and I wore it again in high school, as I think I stated in my Halloween blog post.

There's also an Episode One hat - that is, Episode One of Star Wars. I don't remember the purchasing of that hat. If given the option now, I wouldn't. I was 16 when The Phantom Menace came out and although I saw it nine times in the theater, like any devoted fan, I was secretly disappointed. It looked pretty cool, but it was nothing like the originals. It lacked soul. I used to own a The Empire Strikes Back hat, but it was lost some time ago. I would wear that over this hat, although I haven't really had/found a baseball hat that I would like to wear in some time now. Just as well, it's better to opt for fuller coverage.

Besides that, there are bits and pieces from college improv teams, mismatched halves of pajamas, and a shirt covered with poetry that I had to create in my high school English class. The container is a nice, dust free trip down memory lane.

Hawaii and Me

I mentioned this before, in my post about Tiki Culture, but when I was fourteen, my grandpa took me to Hawaii during my spring break. In this box, I keep items from that trip. Brochures, post cards, notes. My notes are about what we did each day. On my first day I say we arrived at the airport and my grandpa's friend met us with leis. "Real ones," I note.

I remember the smell of Hawaii the most. It smells lovely there, a hint of flowers, a hint of ocean and lots of fresh air. I remember us going several times to breakfast at a real greasy diner joint. I grew up on breakfasts of frozen waffles, meatless sausage and a slice of cantaloupe. I did enjoy all those items, and I'm grateful for the effort my mom made, what with my cholesterol and all. But suddenly I was having bacon and eggs and as I note "good hash browns," which, if I had to guess, were probably fried in butter instead of olive oil.

We drove around a lot in a red convertible that my grandpa insisted on getting. I spent much of my time concerned about the lack of a roll bar. He hated it when I slammed the door, but the door weighed more than me, what was I supposed to do? Anyway, we visited the restaurant he had gone to many times with his wife, a woman he married in the 70s, whom I knew and liked - she died when I was eight.

We went to the beach of course, several times. At one point I swum out to a "rock, far away, nice" I note. I remember my grandpa telling me to be careful, there could be undertow and I could get sucked under. I disregarded him, thinking that I was young and strong and a good swimmer, I could outrun any undertow. In retrospect, the warning and subsequent thoughts are ironic - that summer I would go to the beach with my friends and get caught in the undertow, barely making it out of the water. I was right, I could outswim it, but it cost me my love of being in the ocean.

At the end of the fifth day, after I visited Pearl Harbor alone (my grandpa was not interested), we went back to San Fransisco, flying first class. My grandpa told me I the next time I'd visit it would be with my "boyfriend" - not having one at the time, I guessed he meant in the future. It turned out he was right - I did visit in 2007 with my now ex. But that's another story.