ABC

I've taken another little break.  Who has missed me the most?  (Cricket Noises) 

Anyway, I'm back, for better or worse.  I'm also starting to wonder if I'll tire of doing this someday.  The model I've chosen for this blog has been to write every other day.  I made this choice intentionally, so that I could show you the varying music that's playing through my head- and to make it a little crazy.  Who knows how long it will be before I throw in the towel, or write less frequently. 

Bored are you?  Welp, let me tell you what was playing in my head this morning.  In fact, I'll even play you a video.

Isn't little Michael just the cutest little thing you've ever seen? 

The first thing I thought about this morning as I heard this song, is one of my earliest memories of school.  I have lots of memories, most would bore you.  Since I have no shame, I'll tell you this story anyway. 

In the first grade I was almost as cute as young Michael Jackson.  In fact, here's a picture. 

After you hear this story, you probably won't think I was a cute kid.  You'll probably wonder instead how I've made it this far in life.  Most people do. 

In the first grade, I was terrified of when we, as a school, would do a fire drill.  I don't know why this scared me.  Maybe it was the loud bell that rang, followed by the announcement.  Maybe I thought it was a real emergency.  Maybe I never recovered from having watched the Challenger space shuttle explode on live television while I was in class (does anyone else remember that?) 

Well, for whatever reason, I was really really really terrified of doing the fire drill.  I swear, we did it once a week too, further heightening my day-to-day anxieties.  With such severe anxiety, I had an even more irrational fear that the fire drill would happen while I was alone in the bathroom one day.  Of course, the bathroom was attached to the classroom and I would have been fine, but in the mind of a six year-old, going to the bathroom was not an option. 

So.... I did what any other bright kid would do, I wet my pants every day.  I would do it during class.  I distinctly remember the warm feeling of pee filling my underwear and slowly finding its way down into my pants.  Then slowly it would turn cold and itchy, intolerably itchy.  When we would be released to go to recess, I remember seeing a puddle in the curves of my school chair.  When I would return from recess, the puddle would magically have "evaporated." 


I bet I wet my pants intentionally at least 10 times that year.  But here's the odd thing-  Nobody said anything to me about it!  If my teacher knew, he was covering for me, wiping up my pee and never drawing attention to it.  If the kids knew, they had the decency to not make fun of me for it (we all know kids would never do this, cruel little bastards that they are.)  And if my mom knew about it, she certainly never said anything to me, in spite of having to clean my stinky laundry.  If I was ever scolded for it, I certainly don't remember it.

So, what I learned from this experience is that it's perfectly OK to have irrational fears and to deal with them in irrational ways.  And most importantly, there is no consequence to peeing your pants.  I wonder, even now, at 33 years-old, if there were a fire drill at work, or a false alarm of some kind, if I might pee my pants out of sheer terror.