teenagers

2. Stutter. I can be on the phone for hours with my best friend, but if confronted by a cute guy, wham! I get power outage, my brain is short circuited. You'd be lucky to get anything out of me besides "er...um...uh..." and a ton of blushing.3.Stumble. I trip over my own feet. Yeah it's easy to do that when you're five feet seven and gangly, but I managed to make the dance teacher cry when I was five years old. Or even worse, I knock things over and spill things over and spill food.

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]

I'm kind of over getting told to throw my hands up in the air,So there.

Don't tell me I am the best, because then I'll get too confident and embarrass myself. But, don't tell me I am not good enough either, because then I'll doubt myself and give up. Just believe in me, and tell me I can do it then I will.

Me: __ refuse to attend Support Group.__om: __ne of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.__e: __lease just let me watch America__ Next Top Model. It__ an activity.__om: __elevision is a passivity.__e: __gh, Mom, please.__om: __azel, you__e a teenager. You__e not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.__e: __f you want me to be a teenager, don__ send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.__om: __ou don__ take pot, for starters.__e: __ee, that__ the kind of thing I__ know if you got me a fake ID.__om: __ou__e going to Support Group.__e: __GGGGGGGGGGGGG.__om: __azel, you deserve a life.

She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood proves conclusively that it is not.

How stupid that all I have to dois grow two squishy lumps and suddenlyI'm man's best friend

Well, most of us think the __erchant of Venice_ is a porno script. On a more personal note, I__e decided on pizza for dinner.

I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven't a clue.

Listen, we__l come visit you. Okay? I__l dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful __ay_ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we__l write on your white-room walls. We__l write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.-James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")

It__ easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way__eality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed__e they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe__ave stayed with me all these years

Kids are more advanced these days. The teenage years now start at 11.

I was born into chaos. I didn__ know what peace felt like.

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy.

I learned something important that night. You shouldn__ try to stop everything from happening. Sometimes you__e supposed to feel awkward. Sometimes you__e supposed to be vulnerable in front of people. Sometimes it__ necessary because it__ all part of you getting to the next part of yourself, the next day.

Being classy is my teenage rebellion.

Raw, freezing magic detonated from her outstretched hand with the sound of a thousand thunderclaps.

I'd always assumed Beth and I would be friends forever. But then in middle of the eighth grade, the Goldbergs went through the World's Nastiest Divorce.Beth went a little nuts.I don't blame her. When her dad got involved with this twenty-one year old dental hygienist, Beth got involved with the junk food aisle at the grocery store. She carried processed snack cakes the way toddlers carry teddy bears. She gained, like, twenty pounds, but I didn't think it was a big deal. I figured she'd get back to her usual weight once the shock wore off.Unfortunately, I wasn't the only person who noticed. May 14 was 'Fun and Fit Day" at Surry Middle School, so the gym was full of booths set up by local health clubs and doctors and dentists and sports leagues, all trying to entice us to not end up as couch potatoes. That part was fine. What wasn't fine was when the whole school sat down to watch the eighth-grade cheerleaders' program on physical fitness.