News Flash: It Turns out I've Been Defying Grammar Conventions Since the Third Grade. (I've been ahead of my time for yeeaaars!) (That's why I'm outside the box now; I misplaced it when I was nine.)

So it’s a little weird to be writing two blog entries in one week, especially when the first one was a monstrous three-post-in-one literary creation of epic proportions, but a lot of stuff has been happening, and there are extenuating circumstances which behoove me to write more.  These will be explained shortly. 

First of all, I’m going skydiving in two days.  Saturday.  In two days. On Saturday.  I will jump out of a plane.  A plane.  On Saturday.  In the sky.  Jumping.  My mind is wheeling so fast that these are the longest sentences I can manage.  I don’t know if wheeling is a word that fits there like I want it to, but I’m going to assume it is.  Oh, the sentences are back! 

I will definitely be writing about that actual experience eventually, but I might not get to it immediately, as I’m going to camp on Sunday.  I am working as a counselor in an awesome camp in the woods.   I will be cut off from cell phone towers, Facebook, and blogging.  I might end up starting a primitive version of the blog on a random bulletin board if I can find one.   I don’t know how I’ll survive if I can’t do that.

Because I’m about to spend most of the summer away from home, I figured I should do a little bit of organizational work at home.  As I lived away from home for the entire year already, my room has slowly accumulated everything of mine from around the rest of the house.  Then it was twisted to appear clean by stuffing all the stuff into different cabinets and corners.  It has become a pile of junk, souvenirs, personal keepsakes, and hidden important papers, all with a thin veneer of hygienic livability stretched over it and tucked in around the edges.

So my time has been devoted to cleaning and organizing.  Which means that my time has been devoted to laying around and doing very little except for stressing about cleaning and organizing. Wiiiiith occasional sporadic bursts of productivity.  Which in retrospect is essentially how my life was this last year, although with different stresses (Dang it why won’t MS Word just accept that I’m going to start sentences with ‘which’? Stop complaining, it makes you look silly Microsoft.  Like when you try to correct foreign leaders’ names. {“’Angela Merckel’? Are you sure you don’t mean ‘Merced’?” “’Pratibha Devisingh Patil’? We’re pretty sure you mean ‘pretibial devising patio’} Microsoft, Merced is clearly less of a name than Merckel, and what’s more, I’m never taking you anywhere.  You would be nothing but embarrassing in sophisticated social situations.)End parenthesis? I think? The main skill I'm practicing in my writing this blog is knowing when to cut off and end my rambling side-thoughts

So I’ve spent quite a large amount of time digging through old papers and books in my room in the last week.  I found plenty of creepy books I didn’t know existed, probably left by my brothers in the room before me, and I found a couple of acoustic guitars I forgot I had, but the most interesting things I found were relics from my past.  I found two “notebooks” of mine from third grade, and they have a good bit of analyzable material in there.  (Wow, analyzable does not look like it should be a word; it’s spelled so weeeeeird.  This carries a different meaning than “weird”)

The first “notebook” is much less of an actual “notebook” than the second one.  It’s actually a small autograph book from Walt Disney World.  There are pictures of all the famous characters on the front, and it has an abundance of pages for autographs.  I started out rather excited.  Maybe I’d find friends’ names from 3^rd grade! That’d be interesting!  Or maybe… *gasp* maybe I’ll find autographs from Mickey Mouse or Goofy!  The truth was much cuter, depressing, and a little creepy.  In that order.  The first two pages start off great.  The first is signed by my mom, and is just a cute and motherly praise of my virtues.  The second one was filled out by my dad.  Just as cute and fatherly.  This is what he said: “I hope this book helps keep memories of good times and people you meet fresh throughout your life.”  Perfectly cool right?  After this is where it gets ironic. 

The rest of the book is blank.  Apparently my brothers couldn’t even be bothered to sign it.  I guess it was during the summer, so it’s not like I could’ve just brought it to school, as weird as that would be.  I don’t know if it’s more ironic or depressing that the rest is empty.  It kind of makes it a monument to parental love and eternal optimism.  “I’m sure you’ll find someone to sign your book son, just persevere! Maybe try that guy in a Pluto suit over there!  Oh look, Bryan’s out of the bathroom, go try him!”

That wasn’t the worst part though.  The rest of the book was not *totally* empty.  At the very back of the book, when it’s not actually a real page anymore, I found more writing. My reaction: There’s hope! I managed to find someone to sign my book besides my ol’ mum and paw!  Oh wait, it’s just a creepy little schizophrenic note of encouragement.

I signed my own autograph book apparently.  I even wrote in cursive:

ThankS    PS  Youre the best!   I love you to!  Love, Michael Dickson     

Of course the last exclamation point is huge and cartoony.

So take what you will from that.  I wonder how I felt about that at the time though…  I’m sure I probably forgot about the autograph book not long after I got it, but why did I feel inspired to sign it myself?  Was that after I failed to get anyone to sign it?  Or did I do that immediately?  I guess I’ll never know.  Or alternately I'll explore that memory more with a doctor when I have my next anxious-psycho-lonely-breakdown. 

The second notebook was actually a notebook.  It’s much more conventional in other ways too actually, as it was just a notebook for me to do school assignments in.  Sadly those journals never get really filled up with writing like they should.  That’s especially unfortunate because it leaves less for me to get a kick out of now.  Also I don’t know if we were required to draw as well, but 3rd grade Michael took that initiative regardless.  Here’s a selected few of the “journal entries” and their titles.

10-23-00 My seven favorite ice cream flavors

1)Mint and Chip

2) Vanilla

3) chocoalate peanut butter

4) coffee

5) rainbow sherbet

6) chocolate fudge brownie

7) oranbubble gum bubble gum

[I was still picky in third grade, which explains the “Vanilla” choice, but if 3rd grade Michael was anything like college Michael then all I did was pick my favorite ice cream and then rack my brain to somehow come up with six other ice cream flavors (I don’t work well under pressure)].

1-162-01

(Dates are confusing when it’s all numbers.  I never know what order to put them in, you know dd-mm-yy or mm-dd-yy or yy-mm-dd or md-mpg-yt)  ( There is no actual title for this one, but it’s short so I’m just going to give it to you)

I would give away my LEGO gungan sub because I built it and it took awhile.  I really like it.  I think they would like it too.  

(Then there’s some cute squiggles and doodles which I assume construct a cohesive illustration of a LEGO gungan sub. )

(who is "they", and why are we giving them our stuff?)

(Is it weird that small funny looking LEGO aliens are more nostalgic for me than fishing and Santa Claus?)

1-18-0[lowercase o with a 1 in it; it looks like an apple]

If I could desighn a school cafetaeria it would look about how it was now, though I would have the TV on with Toonami showing and I would serve mashed potatoes, potatoes, hot dogs cheese and bread sticks.  It would also have pizza with sauce and some with no sause.  I would have computers with all games for people that were done.  there were food fights daily.  it would also have red curtains I would have McFlurrys and milkshakes.

 (It should also be noted that the final random nonsensical run-on sentence fragment was being written awkwardly around the side of a huge, very detailed but yet very crude drawing and “milkshakes” is written at a 70 degree angle away from the horizontal lines on the page.  I hope that means what I want it to mean. I don’t speak math.)

 (I'm glad to see that 3rd grade Michael also had problems with randomly switching tenses.  At least it is not a new thing.)

(The drawing shows all the pizza, computers, and a bunch of tables, but there's only one person in the entire cafetaeria[sic].  He’s sitting at a random table alone and yelling “Food Fight” in a horribly oblong shaped word bubble.)

1-[odd combination of 2 and 9]9-01   If we had no lightbulbs….

(It seems I always started writing the date before I actually knew what it was)

I would have several candles of my own to use, and every night we would light a fire.  We would use candles for supperr and everything during the night. 

(Very good Michael, that is a reasonable assumption to make.  If we had no lightbulbs we would use other sources of light.  Thanks for the insight.  This factoid will prove invaluable for college Michael)

2-26-01

My flower is called a la cocoa its stem and leaves are made of cocoa.  it smells like coffee.  its petals taste like Earl Grey hot tea with half and half and sugar in it.  The middle tastes like ginger ale.  it is endangered because its been eaten a lot

 

(I’m proud of myself.  I obviously knew what I liked.  But ginger ale? No idea where that came from.)  

(There’s also a picture beneath it which appears to be a flower with a lot of lines coming off of it.)

4-2-01 citys

1.Orlando,Florida

2.Garner, North Carolina

3.greensborough

4.San Francisco, California

5.Austin, texas

(There’s a couple of odd things going on here.  First off, what am I ranking?  Is this random assortment of cities the first ones that popped  into my head when I thought "cities"?  Three big cities and two random small ones in North Carolina.  It amuses me that greensborough[sic] is neither capitalized nor spelled correctly.)

I don’t know about you, but this has been incredibly insightful for me.  I wonder if I can detect the beginnings of my current writing style in these old manuscripts…   It’s definitely cool to see how far I’ve come.  If I had my way, however, this notebook would’ve been filled to the brim with every single thing I wrote as a kid so that I’d be able to look back at it now.  it would also have red curtains I would have McFlurrys and milkshakes.

If I find a good scanner sometime soon, I promise I will scan these pages in and put them up here.  Believe you me, my drawings are fantastic.  

I figure reminding you constantly that I *don't* have illustrations is basically equivalent to *actually having* illustrations.