the summer before 7th grade, we moved to the country and i started public school. this was kinda exciting cuz it was the first time i got to pick out clothes for school. i had to fight though to get into the "high" math class cuz all the kids there had taken the standardized test to get in in 6th grade when i wasn't there. the guidance counselor was worried that i wouldn't fit in with the other kids in that class, mmmmkay. "they're a very tight-knit bunch of kids, mmmkay." i told him that they were already my friends and that they were the ones who had told me about the class to begin with. after telling me that they may not still be my friends once i got into the class, he let me in. in 8th grade i did cheerleading for basketball and football. who knows why? my science teacher was all like "what are you doing cheerleading?? you're gonna jump around too much and it'll shake your brain all up and you won't be smart anymore." this is the teacher that gave me the "interplanetary award" for the student most likely to visit or have come from another planet. that year they also gave us standardized iq tests. since i hung with the upwardly mobile college- bound set, it was very important to find out what your iq was. but they would only tell your parents so everyone else's parents would call and then tell the kids. so i asked my mom to do the same. and a few days later i was all "mom, did you call to find out my iq" and she said that she had but she wouldn't tell me what it was. which leads me to think that either my iq is so high that she didn't want to tell me thinking that i would get a big head, or it's so low that she didn't want to psyche me into thinking that i wasn't smart when i'd been doing so well. to this day i still don't know. i don't really want to though. iq tests are dumb and don't really measure your intelligence and are completely biased.

in high school i did a bunch of theater, both in school and in the community. i pretty much fucked around all through high school. i learned early on that if you got good enough grades then the teachers didn't care what you did in their class. i would be doing my homework for one class in whatever class i had the period before it was due. i'd sit and pass notes with my best friend. in my ap american history class a group of my friends all sat near each other. we made up a writing language that we took notes in and also passed notes so that if we got caught passing notes we could just say that they were the class notes. this teacher was also a freak and he had certain catch phrases that he would say *all* the time in class things like "power, power, who's got the power", and "i don't profess to be an expert on [whatever we were studying at the time]". he wasn't an expert on anything. except sticking his hand down the back of his pants. he would absentmindedly do this all the time. we used to joke around saying that he must be cultivating tomato plants down there. this one day, we were talking about southern plantations and he was all like "now, i don't profess to be an expert in plantations. hell, i can't even make a tomato plant grow". well, we all busted our asses up over this and he didn't know how to handle us at all. i was valedictorian of my class and so i got to make a lil speech at graduation and that was cool. i was pissed off though cuz i wasn't allowed to walk down the aisle with my best friend cuz i had to walk with the salutatorian, who was someone that i didn't like. i got a standing ovation for my speech and i did this really embarassing "miss america" type thing, where after i gave the speech i went back to my seat and then when i looked up at the audience and saw them standing up and i all covered my face and started crying the way that the new miss america would. it always embarasses me to see that video.

i then went to wellesley college. when i first got there i wanted to be an astrophysics major. heh. i think that this was due to this intense need to prove that girls can do math and science just as well as boys cuz i was often discriminated against in high school. that summer i had an internship with the observatory on campus and decided that this wasn't what i wanted to do with my life at all. i needed something that would let me think more creatively. i sorta blindly decided that i wanted to be a women's studies major. to console my family i said that i was going to double major in political science but after taking the introduction class i decided that was much too boring. i had had a boyfriend since february of my first year. in the fall of my sophomore year i dumped him for girls and drugs. that year i helped found the wellesley women's alliance for action, wellesley's only radical feminist organization. we organized a big conference my junior year called girlcon and it was pretty cool. my jr. year i directed rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead. this experience kicked ass. i had an all female cast (since i went to an all girls school) and i did some traditional, some contemporary costuming. second semester i also made a movie about wellesley's honor code which is the movie that they show to all the first years. that year i also decided that i hated academia and that i wanted out. so my plan was to drop out, work that summer as a psychic friend for the psychic readers network, then move out to california.

the psychic friend thing did not work out. i mean yeah it was ok, and it was pretty cush, but let's be realistic folks, i'm not psychic. at least not psychic in the way that the people who called wanted me to be. i read tarot cards and i know what people wanna hear. but i felt a lil more than uncomfortable when my callers were these middle aged women looking for love advice from a 20 year old dyke who had just taken a couple of bong rips. the clincher though was that i was talking with this one woman for like 20 minutes, which is about a $100 phone call for her. and at the end of that, her final question for me was "is my housing assistance going to come through?" ouch. she didn't have the money to be talking to me, especially since i wasn't really what she thought that i was. that was the last call that i took. so there i am at home stuck with no job (and no car to get a job which is important where i'm from). california was seeming farther and farther away. i had nothing left to do but hitchhike to boston where i knew that i could stay with friends (in the dorms at wellesley) and get a job and start saving.

i was hitching from a phish show in buffalo, to a phish show in maine, and then from there to boston. this was without a doubt the most incredible experience of my whole life. i don't feel like writing about it right now, but i'm sure i will somewhere else later.

i worked for a couple of months and then decided that it would just be stupid not to graduate, especially since i only needed one semester to graduate. plus i figured that this would be the last time that all of my friends were in one place. so i re-enrolled and graduated, and hated every minute of it. but what are ya gonna do, right?

i drove cross-country to get to california, found a house with some friends in oakland and temped for a long ass time before i found the job that i have now, at medialinq.

and that's a relatively brief version of my life thus far.

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