In seventh grade I met my new best friend Alana Heumann in my Bat Mitzvah prep class, which was basically where we went once a week in addition to Hebrew School to learn how to read and pronounce our haftorahs.  Unimportant!  What is important is the special bond I shared with this chick Alana.  Usually I wouldn’t post someone’s last name, but as you’ll see quickly, it’s an important joke in this story.

Alana and I became friends fast, and quickly decided we were actually alien friends from another planet.  Her name was Luca and my name was Balooba.  We used to say Alana Heumann:  Heumann’s just a coverup.  (See how humorous and necessary that joke was???)

It seems kind of tame, but I have to tell you we went all out with this alien crap.  We were from the planet Skiddy Bop Owooga in the galaxy 34543ERR.  We had special alien songs about our friendship with one another.  And we had our own language.  An elaborate translation chart from the English alphabet to our alphabet was made using gel pens!  I did think I was pretty hot with my gel pens.  Oh, and we got really mad when anyone else called us by our alien names.

I even wrote a children’s book for an assignment that year based around the Luca and Balooba characters.  If you are friends with me in real life, I highly suggest you ask to look at it.  It’s quite entertaining.  Also, according to the back page it’s a New York Times #1 Best Seller!!

Yeah, I was kind of a weird kid.

This is a story I am not proud of.

So…As a junior in high school, I was rather obsessed with one Dominic Monaghan.  Most commonly known for his role as the lovable heroin addict Charlie on Lost, and more recently seen as a the arrogant, in-way-over-his-head Simon Campos on the short-lived (but much better than V so why the hell did it get canceled?) FlashForward, I fell in love with this man for his portrayal of Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I can’t help it.  I am passionate and I get obsessed with things easily.  I’ve calmed down quite a bit since high school, but I still get obsessed with things.  Just not quite so…scarily.  My dad used to say that I’m obsessed with being obsessed.  He was right, in a way.  But Dom Monaghan was probably my biggest obsession ever.  I still have the framed Merry and Pippin poster in my bedroom to prove it.

Now here’s the weird part.  That year on Dom’s birthday I decided to go all out.  I…made a T-Shirt.  I still have it.  Look, I just took a picture!

…And I made cupcakes.  With blue Ds on them!  I wish I had pictures to prove this, but I took them on an old phone and never saved them on the web, unfortunately.  And I just handed out these D cupcakes to people…for Dom Monaghan’s birthday.  Man, people must have thought I was some crazy psycho stalker.  Most people didn’t even know who Dom Monaghan was.

That’s really weird, right?  I love my parents dearly, but why on earth did they let me do that?

If I met my high school self now, I think I would be afraid of her.

Occasionally, I like to buy these sugar-free Ice Breakers sours in mixed berry, strawberry, and cherry.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the sugar-free candy, they come in a small, flat round pack about the size of the palm of your hand.  There are two tabs on the top of the pack.  One is labeled “to share” and the other is labeled “not to share”.

For as long as I’ve been buying these things (random times over the past year or more), the “to share” side opens to reveal a small opening, perfect for a person to take one candy for themselves.  The “not to share side” opens half the pack so you can take a bunch or offer to your friends to dig in.

My question is this:  Why have they not caught and fixed this small labeling problem yet??

When I was a freshman in high school I had my first really big crush on this sophomore Jason.  Jason had a girlfriend.  He was also kind of Gothic and bordering Pagan, but…that is completely besides the point.  I was “finding myself”?  Heh…

Well anyways, me liking Jason a lot and hanging out with him all the time and taking yoga only because he was taking yoga, this all went on for a long time.

One day Jason IMed me really excited and said he just found his set of tarot cards!!  Could he do a reading on me?

“Why not?”  I replied, skeptical.

I wish that I could recreate for you the actual tarot reading, but that was many, many years ago and I don’t have it saved.  However, the general gist was that I had a huge crush on someone and there was something in the way.  He said several sentences, all which related to my feelings towards him.  All ridiculously accurate in their vague sort of tarot way.

And I was blown away.

The next day in Honors Biology* I told my friend Sonya (who of course knew every detail about my crush on Jason and heard about it daily) all about the magical tarot reading and how amazingly accurate it was.

“Oh, honey.”  She said.  “I may have done something bad.  I sort of accidentally told Jason that you like him.”

To which I replied, “… … …”

Basically, I figured out quickly that the tarot reading was just Jason’s ploy to get my feelings out in the open so we could move on as friends.  Pretty elaborate, no?  Kind of sounds like something someone would do in a movie.

In retrospect, it is absolutely hilarious that I did not realize immediately the tarot reading wasn’t real.  For starters, it was over the internet.

Got me over my crush on Jason, anyhow.  Too deceitful for my taste, no matter what his reasoning.

*It is important to my self-esteem that I make sure you, the reader, knows I was in Honors Biology, and not just regular Biology.

I usually sleep through texts and/or phone calls, but if it’s the right point in my sleep cycle, they can wake me.  This morning around 7:50am I received 2 text messages that woke me.  I still had about an hour before my alarm went off, so I went back to sleep.  I can only imagine that this explains the dream that occurred in 60 minutes of rest that followed:

I was in a room with a bunch of older adults, like in their 50s.  And I was talking about how parents/adults don’t like text messaging and barely use it.  They all got very angry and started arguing with me.

I responded by saying, “Well, maybe they like it, but they’re usually not very good at it.”  Apparently dream me is very dumb and doesn’t know you’re not supposed to further insult someone who is already agitated by your previous insult.  This of course caused extreme uproar, and one woman shouted out:

“Tell that to John Q!”

What does it mean????

Bonus Story:

One of the text messages I received was from my brother.  Here’s how that went:

Andy:  They say it’s your birthday.

Me:     Who says that?

Andy:  They.

A little more shameless self promotion.  Please check out my new web series, Lemons!  You won’t regret it!  And if you do, I can give you the formula to travel back in time and stop yourself from watching it.  Although you will have already seen it…  Paradox.

lemonstheseries:

Don’t forget to check back at 2pm TODAY.  Melissa and I are opening our lemonade stands!  You should all come buy some cool, refreshing lemonade from me so Melissa feels like a customer-less loser.  Also, mine tastes better.  But really I just want to be able to laugh in Melissa’s face.

Your favorite saleswoman,

Marla

Please everyone check out my super awesome background and header created by the wonderful and very talented graphic designer, Emma Passarelli.  She’s amazing, someone hire her.

I promise to post a humorous life story sometime tomor…this week.  For now, just wanted to give a hardworking, talented, lovely human being some recognition for her work.  Just wait til you see the Lemons logo she made.  It’ll bottle your mind.*

*Mind-bottling: It’s like when your mind’s in a bottle.  Fun fact:  This is something I say often, which you may or may not know is a reference from Blades of Glory.  What I must now tell you is that I have never seen Blades of Glory nor do I have any interest in seeing it.  I am merely quoting the one funny line in the trailer.

Shameless Self Plug:

Lemons: A brand new web series about Marla and Melissa, two twenty-year-old girls who open up rival lemonade stands across the street from each other.

When life gives you lemons, make a web series.

Coming to a computer screen near you at the end of July!

Be sure to check it out: LemonsTheSeries.tumblr.com

I just switched the calendar to July (sadly, leaving one Kenneth Ellen Parcell behind), and that’s when the realization hit me that my birthday’s coming up.

I don’t have a lot of regular things I get excited about.  I’m not religiously affiliated, so while I do receive “Chanukah” presents, it doesn’t have a holiday-like feel for me.  I don’t get that December buzz that most people get.  To me, it just means it’s cold outside and I hate the cold.  The presents I get, while usually awesome, never come on a specific date.  We’re just bad at that in my family.  We go for big (a direct result of having two older siblings with real-person jobs), but we’re always a month or so late.  We do do the traditional “Jews see a movie and then get Chinese food” Christmas Day thing, and I do really look forward to that, but not all month, you know?

New Years Eve is all about traditions.  I find that everyone has that person or group of people that they always party with on New Years, but my people fell away from me at the beginning of high school.  So I end up with nothing to do.  (Although, admittedly, this year me and my siblings had a New Years Eve Game Night and it was the best New Years ever!  So I may now have a tradition, finally.)

Since college started and Halloween became an excuse to party (really, like college students need an excuse for that), I’ve stopped being excited for that as well.  Drinking too much and dancing just isn’t my idea of a holiday.  Especially when you could find somewhere to do that any day in college, and most Frat parties are themed in some way.

Thanksgiving.  Oh, Thanksgiving.  We don’t have a lot of family that lives close or we’re still in touch with, but all my favorite relatives come over on Thanksgiving.  Still, it’s a holiday all about eating, and that is a completely different blog post, but let’s just say it’s more anxious for me than exciting.

Tomorrow’s Independence day.  To sum up its importance to me:  I’m working a double shift.  9am - 11pm.  Yeah, that’s my fourth of July.

But for some reason, my birthday always gets me really excited.  It’s a day all about me, it comes once a year, and consistently it is the one thing I cannot wait for.  Even when something goes wrong, my birthday always manages to be a really fun time.  I honestly don’t know why, but I’m glad my birthday hasn’t lost the magic.  I’m turning 22, but still I feel like a child with giddy anticipation for that time to come.

I hope that feeling never goes away.

You know those Windex commercials where the birds fly into the window because it’s so clean they don’t realize it’s there?

That’s happened in my family room.  Twice.