How I Was Made for Chasing Boys: A Fourth Grader's Story

It was during the first half of the eighties. I just began puberty. Billy Idol was in, Madonna just started, and Sixteen Candles was in the making. I hadn't begun wearing any make-up but I knew I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be liked by everybody. But particularly by this one blond hair blue-eyed boy fictionally named Guido Scardapello. Guido Scardapello was a trouble-maker, a bad boy. He just turned 11 in my fourth grade class but I saw him as a man. He was taller than all the other boys. He was cocky, obnoxious, but playful. I watched him all the time. I told my mother and friends all about Guido, Guido, Guido. I met him in the third grade, but the hormones didn't start kicking in until a year later. During the winter around January, I kept looking at him when we lined up to go to the school buses at the end of the day. He was wearing a black ski mask. Earlier, I was inspired by a jersey he wore. On the front it said something about Disco being dead and Rock n' Roll being in. On the back of the shirt, it said "The Fly." So in addition, another reason I liked him was his charisma. So going back to being in line, I kept staring at him while he was mouthing off about something and then caught me staring at him. He came up and hit me on the shoulder, "Hey, stop looking at me! You're UGLY!" I remember my face heating up and I nearly teared. I was so embarrassed and ashamed. He was cruel. Well, eventually I got over it. I saw the boy every day. Miss Anzelone, my teacher always condescended him in front of the class. She'd get into one of her big lectures about pride. "Guido does not have any pride. So n' So does." It only turned me on. A boy with no pride. So one day either in the spring or fall we were outside at recess. Chase was the game. So it was either the boys chasing girls or girls chasing boys theme of that day. I was happy to hear that it was girls chasing the boys. We were on monkey bars and the boys would jump at us. I remember jumping down and running after any random boy. Then I saw Guido. Suddenly I felt a rush--so good that I began to have so much energy. As I took my first steps towards Guido he began to run. I couldn't remember if he had a smile on his face, but boy, I was feeling an unbelievable high. For the first time, it was a high so pleasurable that I didn't want it to end. I claimed, and owned the feeling. And I ran after him as if he were my territory. He was the prize. And I would feel like on top if I ever caught him. I couldn't remember if I tagged or grabbed him that day in 1983, but it was a foreshadowing event that had set my calling for the rest of my life. Chasing boys was fun. Chasing boys made me high. Boys chased me, who cared? That was boring. I wanted to be the pursuer, the chaser, the hunter. He could keep playing hard to get, but with my special skills, one day, I will get him to surrender. Well, that's all for now. Coming from a woman of the 21st century. The days of only men chasing women in my book are long gone...

How I Became a Writer Part 2

YES! I GOT PICTURES!

I'm so sorry I had made everyone wait for more than a month for the part 2 of How I Became a Writer. I was so busy feeling my way around all these sites, learning the tricks and trades of adding friends to designing Myspace backgrounds.
So we left off around the summer of 1989 when I was sixteen years old. That was twenty years ago to be exact minus 40 pounds off my body then.
When I thought writing about my imaginary boyfriend "Brad" was exciting, I couldn't imagine my first real experience with my first love a month after without putting it down on paper! It was called "The Summer Dude". I never typed it, never saved it on a computer but I made one copy from my spiral notebook. It was when I had my first kiss and my parents didn't like him because he wouldn't take me out on a real date. The second boyfriend I had was six months later when starting to write about how I met him, began dating him, etc. I never finished it, but here's me around the time after we broke up, but we we're seeing each other on and off.
It wasn't until the turn of 1991 when I snuck off to see him at his house on my bike. He already was out of high school and I was a senior. I wrote about the thrill of sneaking out to see him because he was kind of "bad". I had the TV Show Twin Peaks musical theme playing in my mind. Later in the spring I jumped back into comics. I wrote about real kids I knew in high school who were a group that got picked on. They would leech onto someone more popular and depicted him as a leader. He was actually a punk skateboarder who turned reborn Christian. Imagine how funny that got! Never bothered to publish it because I used real names and would get sued.

High School Graduation, June 1991. Hopewell Jct., NY



My parents were so worried about me with boys. They didn't see nothing yet once I went away to college. When I began going out I was introduced to the term "hooking up." Everyone was using it! And everyone was doing it! And I was the "follow the in-crowd" type of girl. Not taking it to extremes like spoiled girls from Rockland County or Long Island doing multiple guys in one night. So my first semester I wrote about the two guys I had hooked up with. Again with a spiral notebook and never bothered to type or publish that one either. The next four years of college was a big time out for me on writing stories. But what I did do was the what is called today, "blogging". On a spiral notebook. I'd write about my political views on feminism, dating, and the unfairness of double standards between men and women. This was an area where I felt most passionate about. I thought then I would become an activist and wanted to advocate freedom of experession for women, expression of all kinds. Above: November 1991, in a bar in small college town Delhi, upstate New York Further Down: June 1994, Vahalla, NY. Notice beeper (pre-historic cell)Note: old pictures get scratchy!

1995: College Senior
By the time my last boyfriend of my life in New York State left me burned out and broken-hearted I developed a crush on one of my classmates. Even though we never went out, his cute face and cocky behavior turned me on. Which lead to the next era in my writing life . . . coming next!