A mite late, this week’s Friday Five comes from Mojave Sixty-Six, who asked:
…what are five things that have happened in your life that you can now say “well, it’s certainly funny in retrospect….”
Here are five moments I can look back on and laugh at, now, though they seemed almost unbearable at the time…
- Two words: bowl cut.
- I’m 14. It’s my birthday. I’ve decided we ought to rent The Exorcist and watch it at my birthday party sleepover. It scared the hell out of me, and the other boys at my party decided I ought to sleep on the cot in the basement, instead of on the floor like the rest of them. I had visions of the cot bouncing and flopping and me being possessed. Y’see, I’d read that the movie was based on a true story, in some pulping ostensibly nonfiction book. (Huh, wahaddaya know, according to IMDB that’s roughly true.) It was a night of horror, that birthday night. Damn, I’m spooked out now just remembering it.
- I once sent a pathetic “I think I love you but I know you don’t love me but I need to say it anyway,” email to a friend. She didn’t teply for weeks and when she did I took the “yeah, I can’t love you” very personally. It was all very easily understandable given what I’d gone through that summer to have such an unbalanced emotional reaction to a female friend being nice to me, but it was still hard for me, all the same, to get over the embarrassment. We’re grand friends now, if a bit out of touch much of the time.
- One of the last meetings by the disgruntled employees of last place I worked in Canada. The girl who was holding us together was fired that day or the next day for “ruining morale”, when she did the opposite. I was being told my employer was trying to mess with the government by keeping her family members fully employed (5 days a week) while everyone else was going to be down to 3 days a week. We were all depressed, and had lost one cheer-bringing employee form the office to a better job. I had barely enough money to fly home for Christmas, and didn’t know what to do. A few weeks later I was to be in Korea…
- Ever been completely broke in a foreign country in which you were not residing? (See #3 of this previous F5 entry.) Try that experience when you’re not the only one depending on the money that was stolen, when you’re leaving the city the next day, when it’s New Year’s Day and you’ve no idea if you can get a refund in time… It’s horror, sheer horror.