Remember That Time When...

I needed a binder for some last minute train cramming today, and my infamous maroon binder resurfaced after years of hiding underneath my old school books.

All the schedules from TNT in the late 90's are still meticulously glued onto each binder page, scattered amongst the old essays and journal entries written in a 6 year old's large, loopy script, and of course unforgettably the innumerable pages of the absolutely random but completely patented The Dress Up Game™.

I remember starting my schedule collection... I decided that it was crucial to keep them to show to my grandchildren in the distant future, and for about a month hopscotched through the maze of cockroaches in the middle of the night to take down the day's schedule from the corkboard. Then the next day I would take them down to the classroom and make quite an affair out of gluing each paper to a new page, and then writing meaningless nonsense all over it. I think it was a sort of power trip.

Exhibit A:

Ahh, I felt so clever when I discovered that I could incorporate the "project" at the end of the innocent sentence into a declaration of Love - the Pete Loves Heaven Project, oh the moment I wrote these words down went down in MC classroom history.


The next day I decided to go a little bigger, a little broader. My Little Reasshurings was very much a scandal - I was airing everyone's dirty laundry, and who wouldn't be ashamed of loving Pete one day and then suddenly switching to the Mysterious Joe Character the next? Hussy! - and I believe that was the start of my career in journalism.


I just love the progression; notice how small I started out, only to get heady with my success and overstep a bit, and then as though finally realising that I'd gotten in over my head, went general and just decided that Love Was In The Air and that was that. Epic.

Really, the person who said that one's teenage years are one's most emotionally convoluted and generally eventful never lived the life of a child in a combo home. I don't think anything I'll ever do, excluding perhaps hard drugs or running for the presidency, could hope to top me being co-creator and co-owner of a thriving bank and a separate business funded by said bank... at the age of 9. Really.