she speaks poniards, and every word stabs

And now a sordid tale, replete with such lunacy and self-absorbed freakishness as to amaze even lunatics and self-absorbed freaks as myself.  Let me tell you a little story about the nerdiest (and perhaps craziest) thing done by me, ever.

Freshman year in high school, I took a course Medieval History which required us to complete an imagined family history and coat of arms and various other geekery.  Heidi Sakuma, with whom I had bonded over our mutual malaise, misanthropy (If you think *I* am caustic, you should meet this girl…or at least the girl she was in high school.  Her dirty glare could peel paint.), and an all-consuming passion for both Christian Bale and the rock opera, had the bright idea to extend this fantasy family out of the classroom and into a…creative project, of sorts.  We had this giant backstory and incorporated all sorts of fictional characters and whatnot into our sordid little clan and filled pages upon pages with esoteric team-written stories.  It was our version of fan fic, I guess you’d say, only I don’t because, well, that’s nerdy, even for me.  I found a couple of (yes, there is more than one) our “Family Albums” in some boxes the other day and man.  Oh, man.

An excerpt from our “Family History:”

After the tragedy at the barricades, Johnna (Heidi) and Micaela (me) were distraught.  Very distraught.  Extremely distraught. So overcome were they by their distraughtedness that they felt compelled to be distraught with other people, namely:

And then there is just a list of pretty much everyone in the world that we, at the time, thought was awesome.  We only ever truly loved our second husbands, Enjolras and Grantaire, of course.  Then came the aforementioned tragedy at the barricades.  Remind me never to get involved with revolutionaries again, okay?

For the life of me, I can’t tell you a) why I kept all of these things and b) why, oh why we created them in the first place.  I must have been really, really bored in high school. Our stories even began to develop this weird meta-narrative, you know, our present day personalities started encroaching into the stories.  At one point (and I remember this happening), we were writing something and couldn’t agree on what a character should say, so the character said “Crap, they can’t agree on what I’m supposed to say.”  A couple of years into it (yes, we did this for all four years of high school), I had a crush on this guy that Heidi hated (well, she says she hated him, when in reality, she had a big old crush on that football playing moron too) and I wanted to work him in to the family—so she did, but she insisted on making him a stupid, abusive asshole, which, in real life, he pretty much turned out to be. 

One of last things we wrote came on the heels of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.  We decided that we wanted to bring some new husbands into the mix, only we both wanted Vitaly Scherbo.  Since we couldn’t both have him, she got Vitaly Scherbo and I got Vitaly Scherbo’s Evil Twin.  Right.  Because that was way less weird.  Our final literary endeavor, The Scherbo Twins Trilogy (pt. I: Natural Born Gymnasts; pt. II: Pulp Gymnastics; pt. III: Gymnasium Dogs) somehow roped in Mr. White and guns and fascists and all manner of bloodshed to ensure that the twins won the All-Around Gold and that Heidi and I prove ourselves to be All-Around Crizazy.

I think it worked.

Comments

[Avi]

Whoa. You got my nerdiness beat stone cold.

[Annie]

What? Since when do you post about something besides ANTM?

And OMG, NERD!!!

Do yuo have soft copies of the stories? You should totally post them.

[jordan]

isn't vitaly scherbo like 5'5''? what happened to your height requirement? i thought you had to be 5'11'' to ride that ride.

[Cassie]

so, why did you get the evil twin and she got the normal twin?

[Jessica]

This is all very Heavenly Creatures. And therefore, more hot than it is nerdy.

[Kim]

Ok, you win, hands down. All I have is a tandem poem summerizing Crime and Punishment written in Physics class which included a stanza "Dounia pulled out a little revolver/And thought it was a problem solver/She tried to shoot, but missed each time/She couldn't hit him if he paid her a dime."

[Jonas]

Overachiever. The rest of us nerds just stuck to writing our own roleplaying games. Typical man\woman , mechanics\narrative divide I supposes. Tho I did read a few novels in the near patented TSR style by some aspiring nerdwriters.

Are you going to serialize these fictious exploits for us? (please?)

[rira]

re: ahe's 'stories' oh my gosh -- i'm not sure words describe what i'm feeling.

re: kim's poem -- i remember that poem, and i believe my response at the time was to roll my eyes and call you a dork. so now i take this moment to roll my eyes and call you a dork!

ps: i thought we read crime & punishment junior year which would have made it chemistry class w/studerbuddy, not physics.

[Ahe]

Cassie, I don't know why I ended up with the Evil Twin...but reeally, are you surprised? Heh. And of course, the evil Twin had a goatee. Because all Evil Twins have goatees.

Jessica, nice, very nice. I'm going to go with me as hot Kate Winslet as opposed to big nerd.

Kim, NERD.

Jonas, hell no.