Sweet Valley High Nose Job

Since I'm too tired and beaten down from the busy work day to post anything original, I think I'll just make fun of my friends.

SuperSkater wrote, "Oh man. This is what happens when you try to live the like 2005 equivalent of the Boxcar children. When I was little I used to beg my mother to have milk poured over white bread for an afterschool snack. Why? Because that's what the Boxcar children had for a really special treat. And you know what? It was terrible. Snacktime ruined. So what does this teach you? Stop trying to live in a boxcar and succumb to the microwave! This is 2005! And Target is so close by! You can do it!"

The Boxcar Children had, for a special treat, white bread with milk poured over it? And you decided this was the snack for you? They were hobo children, for God's sake! They lived in a boxcar. No thanks. I think I read one Boxcar Children book ever then tossed it, likewise with The Bobbsey Twins. I was a straight up, hardcore Nancy Drew fan.

This reminds of when as a child I would read the Little House on the Prairie Series and every Christmas the girls would get so excited and hope they would get their orange for Christmas. That's it, that's all they got. Even as an eight-year old girl I remember thinking, "An orange? Gimme a break."

An orange seemed like a total drag but really, I couldn't relate at all; I did feel genuine sympathy for Ramona Quimby. I remember reading about Ramona, whose family was as my Mother would say "not very well off". In one of the books Ramona's Dad gets his bonus at work and to celebrate, he takes the family out to a fast food restaurant which was an annual treat for the Quimby family. Whereas growing up, I ate with my family at Burger King about once a week. It was kinda "our" place. My Dad hated McDonald's and was known to get into fights with the kids working behind the counter, but we all enjoyed the B-K. One year, things were so tight in the Quimby household they couldn't afford the four burgers and Ramona just got a bag of gummy worms. But then again poverty figures prominently and is indeed romanticised in a lot of childrens literature. To say nothing of the obsession this genre has with orphans, an obsession that coincided in my case with the great Orphan Mania of 1980s, and well, in our world anyone who was anyone was found growing in a cabbage patch or left on a stoop with half a locket tossed into the basket with them.

Really, this weltschmerz of being exposed to all these orphans and poverty was taking a toll on me and a few times I remember breaking out into sympathetic crying bouts as a child and oddly misguided good deeds. For a while, in the fourth grade, I slipped dimes into the coat pocket of a girl in our class whose family didn't have much money and I tried to convince my friends to do the same.

Fortunately for me, adolescence and the 1990s were just around the corner, a time when girls were encouraged to play such board games as Mall Maddness, an electronic talking game, the point of which seemed to be to buy as much as possible as quickly as possible and make it back out to the parking lot of the mall. Funny how my mother was always concerned about my brother wanting to play with violent weapon toys, yet no one gave a second thought to buying me this crap. "You've got a special clearance!" Yes!

I guess all of this is just a long, nonsensical way of saying SuperSkater, you crack my shit up.