Sunday, 12 May 2013

The End of My Streetlight-Climbing Phase

It all started when I went to a park one day and saw one of those fireman's poles and thought to myself 'I could probably climb that.'
So I took my shoes off and sure enough, climbed up it. After that, every time I saw a pole, no matter where I was, I would climb up it. Pretty soon I had graduated from fireman's poles to streetlights,  and my parents, seeing my determination, gave up trying to stop me.
But it all ended when, one day, I went with my mom to my sister's swimming class, which she had in an outdoor pool. Right by the pool there was a lamppost that I immediately decided I had to climb, and my mom just let me go ahead and do it while she sat by the poolside watching my sister.
But while I was still halfway up the lamppost a thunderstorm broke out, and all the kids were immediately evacuated from the pool, just in case lightning struck the water. My mom started frantically calling up to me, telling me to climb down, obviously worried that if lighting hit the lamppost I was climbing I would be electrocuted and die.
So there I was, clinging onto this lamppost by the side of a pool in the middle of a thunderstorm, with my mom calling up to me, telling me to come down, and me refusing to come down 'until I'd reached the top'.
Anyway, my mom eventually managed to coax me down, and the three of us found shelter from the storm. But after that, I never climbed another streetlight again.

Sunday, 14 April 2013

My Completely Un-Inspiring Coming Out Story

So I was in the car with my mom singing ‘Standing on the Corner’ by Dean Martin (the lyrics go ‘standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by’, in case you didn’t know) and my mom told me it was weird to hear me sing that song.
So I got angry and told her ‘women can like other women too!’ And she said ‘well, it’s not like you do’, and I just very easily came out with ‘well, yes, actually, I do like women.’ (We’d had this conversation once before about marriage when I’d almost come out with it, but for some reason I just hadn’t been able to; but when she contested my right to sing Dean Martin somehow it just came out really easily. Ha!)
Then there was a silence, after which she asked me a few questions; and about five minutes later we were talking about what groceries we needed to buy. (Which just shows how completely my family doesn’t care about this kind of issue.)
I thought that’d settled it, but after singing ‘Standing on the Corner’ a few more times around the house my mom kept on getting angry with me; and I thought she might still have a problem with me liking women. But it turned out the whole thing had just been a misunderstanding on my part from the very beginning; my mom had never had any problem with me singing Dean Martin because women can’t like women or something. It was just because, whenever I sing Dean Martin, I do it in this really weird deep voice, and with my already bad singing I must’ve sounded like a complete lunatic.
So I basically outed myself over a complete misunderstanding when I didn’t really need to.