Junior High Expose

Stop me if you've heard this before...

I used to play sax - the alto sax.

My mouth has been outfit with a whole catalogue of orthodontics – I had a retainer, “bionater” and spacer – to correct my horrendous bite and a cavernous gap between my two front teeth. These devices have rendered me unable to pronounce the letters “J”, “Ch” and “Sh” without (in my opinion) sounding like Ottawa Senators GM Bryan Murray, thus ruling out many perfectly fine baby names.

I also used to eat spoonfuls of icing sugar, brown sugar and chocolate chips from the baking cupboard, and then I would run around until I was dizzy and fall over. One summer I would get up every morning and do aerobics in front of the television (with Hal Johnston!) and then I would make myself a giant jelly omelet in our new convection oven/microwave (it was a recipe that came with the oven). Some days I would stir up enough pancake mix to make about a dozen, and then cook them all in the same pan; we called the resulting half-cooked doughy mess “pan buckets”. Often I would eat an entire pan by myself.

I used to wear my sweat pants pulled up to my knees, daily, with my super high striped gym socks underneath. Sometimes this ensemble was complimented with a silk shirt from Stitches – always untucked. Around this time, I had racing stripes shaved around my head, which was typically covered by a ball cap that I had to pin down in the back with a safety pin because my head was so skinny that it would resemble a big puffy chef’s hat otherwise.

I hope to God that my child is not as scattershot dorky and randomly retarded as I was. My mother has gone on the record as saying that if I hadn’t been getting good marks in school she would have been convinced I had ADD. I don’t disagree.