when i turned rotten

talkin' bout shaving...a little while ago during a semi-serious beer-drinking session, the conversation turned to middle school awkwardness and typical female rites of passage, such as shaving one's legs for the first time. i remember this particular event very clearly because it was minorly traumatic. it was the summer before fifth grade, and i secured a manual razor and hit the showers. pretty much the first thing i did was slice the shit out of my knees -- both knees. shaving wounds being so superficial that you often don't even feel them still bleed a lot, though, and when i was ten, this accident was the first i'd had involving water and blood. of course i thought my injuries were, like, infinitely worse than they actually were; the water helped turn the shower into a scene out of carrie and the fact that i felt no pain was really distressing, since i could only assume that i must have inflicted such intense nerve damage upon myself that i had lost all below-the-knee sensitivity. after my mom assured me that, no, an entire vein had NOT fallen out of my leg, i began to chill the fuck out. something had changed, though. maybe i can chalk that moment up to the very instance that i became my own biggest problem, the most unintentionally destructive thing in my life; maybe there's something to be said for shedding a little blood being a metaphor for loss of innocence. whatever the case, after that moment, not only did i think i was tough for some reason -- i also thought i was a total badass who knew that the world was a bloody, godless, scary place. yeeaaaahhhh.

anyway, summer carried on and my knee wounds began to heal. i also got better at shaving. on one memorable evening, as i was still rocking some crucial scabs, my older sister and i accompanied our mom to a bible school recital in which our younger sister was performing. because of my preadoloescent crisis of faith very shortly before this event, church was probably not the greatest place for me to be. the older sis and i parted from the herd and made our way to the choir loft, where we were gloriously the only spectators. we had a great view of the church, for sure; down on the altar, we could see the twenty or so kids in the first-grade vbs class, with our baby sis front and center, the tallest kid in her age bracket by a foot. i can't emphasize enough how freakishly large she was compared to the other kids; she was easily a focal point, and this fact we exploited. when she was little, she would do anything we encouraged; in this case, she chose to imitate various obscene gestures we directed her way from the balcony, where we remained invisible to the audience. somewhere in the video archives of suburban new jersey home movies, i like to think that some parent has a tape of a tall, gangly kid breaking the choreography of her scheduled bible school performance to flip off some unseen hecklers and snarl and gesture through the entire performance.