Doin’ It Bloggy Style: life in the margins

When my mom sold her house in 2002 (the house where I grew up), I was forced to clean out my gigantic stash of anything and everything from the attic. I hadn’t lived there in five years, but the attic was still totally my domain, rife with boxes and boxes and—oh, look!—more boxes of my nostalgic junk. I had to resign myself to tossing out much of it (I’m sniffing sadly at the loss of all those issues of Young Miss and Seventeen from the ’80s), but I refused to get rid of certain things. However, I also lived in a small basement apartment, so storing the bulk of those items at my place just wasn’t doable. I did squeeze certain things, like my huge box of school stuff from over the years, into one of my apartment’s closets; everything else got relegated to my dad’s attic and garage. And although I did retrieve my childhood books and some of my old toys from the mess when Olivia entered the picture, and I retrieved my Cabbage Patch Kids with all their fabulous outfits a few weeks ago, so Olivia would have more to play with when I babysit her, nearly everything else has been fossilizing in storage at Dad’s house. Until recently.

Finally I said, It’s time to bring those puppies home. So Dad loaded up his minivan and stopped by my condo on his way to Olivia’s birthday party. And lo! What riches did I find! Stuffed animals. (Aww, Papa Smurf, Pound Puppy, Hello Kitty, and pandas, it’s good to see you again!) High school t-shirts. (Won’t I impress my coworkers if I wear my Quiz Bowl ’90 t-shirt to work on Casual Friday? That’ll show ’em.) Books. (I now really have a craving to reread all those fucked up VC Andrews books that dominated my junior high days.) One of the books is a gem my parents used to teach me about the birds and the bees (click on the images below to enlarge them and read their text). They mutely shoved this and another churchy procreation book from the 1950s at me and that was the extent of my sexual education until 8th grade health class.

Yeah, seeing that, there’s really no doubt as to why I was cripplingly naïve.

Amidst my pile of attic treasures was a box groaning from the weight of every classroom notebook I kept throughout college (minus my notebooks from my year abroad, which had to get ditched when I returned home, due to lack of space in my luggage). They’re all there, from the Public Speaking course I was forced to take my first semester of freshman year to the Women’s Spiritual and Autobiographical writings course I took my final semester of senior year.

I’ve been plowing through them, trying to decide what should stay and what should get pitched, and it’s been a fun walk down memory lane—it gives me a glimpse of my life that’s completely separate from my journals.

I found an obituary I was forced to write for myself in my Newswriting course. It says:

Jennifer L. Boyer, 18, a student at the University of Scranton, died Tuesday on campus, of a coronary thrombosis.

She was born on June 4, 1974, in Lebanon, to Leo and Susan Eck Boyer.

She was a 1992 graduate of Lebanon High School, where she participated in numerous clubs and activities, including four musicals; three quiz bowl tournaments; the environmental club; the school newspaper; C.A.U.S.E., a Lancaster/Lebanon student organization for the environment; and Tri-Hi-Y, a community service club.

She is a former employee of Hersheypark and the Lebanon Daily News, where she worked as a columnist during the summer of 1992.

Surviving, in addition to her parents, is a sister, Kristen S. Boyer, a student at College Misericordia in Dallas, and her maternal grandfather, Herbert Eck, of Lebanon.

Calling hours will be from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday at the Ficco and Son Mortuary, 1167 Lehman St.

Services will begin at 2 p.m. on Thursday at the funeral home. The Rev. [name of my then-obsessive crush] will officiate.

Burial will be in Greenwood Cemetery, Ebenezer.

That obit is so bland. I suppose we had to stick to strict newspaper style, and, as Shawn pointed out when I emailed this to him, it’s not like I had a lot of exciting experiences under my belt at age 18—at least nothing that could be printed in a newspaper. My life isn’t so exciting now, but at least my obit could offer something more than, "Well, she worked at Hersheypark. And, uh, competed in the Quiz Bowl. Where her team lost. Every. single. year."

I also found something that I must have written in class (either high school or college; there were some high school papers thrown in my college notebook box) when I was bored. It says:

When I grow up I’m going to move to England and become a journalist for an offbeat, alternative magazine. I’ll live in a loft in the slums of London at first, and then I’ll move to a cabin on a deserted stretch of grey coastline, by myself. My cabin will have lots of windows and skylights, and it will be filled with plants and books, posters and candles. I’ll have two dogs and two cats and lots of fish. There will be pillows and blankets everywhere, to make it seem homey. I will live a life of self-imposed isolation, being with people only when I am at work. When not in London, I will spend my days walking on the beach, writing, practicing photography, and fingerpainting. I will wear huge, extremely strange clothes, and I will talk to myself all the time. I will be a celibate asexual vegetarian pagan hermit.

My cabin will have a deck with a single swing on it, so that I can swing out over the ocean beneath a hundred million stars in the night. Every year on my birthday I will slash my wrists and run naked on the beach. My walls will be white, but all accessories will be forest green and black.

That’s where it abruptly ends. Hmm, didn’t exactly fulfill that destiny, did I? Although, I did live in a slum, and I do live a life of self-imposed isolation, and I do have two cats, and I am a celibate vegetarian hermit. So...yeah.

Anyway, back to the notebooks. Here are some observations from the margins of my notebooks and my life. Again, you can click on the pictures to view larger versions.

Earth Science. Proof that I missed my calling as an artist.

Ethics

Intro to Poetry. Aside from surviving my butt-bone pains (presumably I
just didn’t know how to spell coccyx), I also enjoyed
writing backwards for some reason. In French!
(And yes, I know I misspelled fatigué.)

Intro to Poetry

Christian Spirituality. I love “Mr. Budweiser Jerk.”
Also? It should actually be “I wish I were dead” (to be grammatically correct).

Christian Spirituality. I hated my priest professor with the light
of a thousand suns. He really was a homophobic ass.

Christian Spirituality. Oh, that fucking corn. I had this
hideous corn on my toe during sophomore year that required
months of treatment with a podiatrist. Eeesh.

Christian Spirituality. Again with the priest hatred!

History of Film. Tread is slang in my hometown for a greasy burnout metalhead.

History of Film. God, I love this. I love that some dude’s bobbing head
filled me with such rage. I love that the worst insult I could produce
was marshmallow. I love that I misspelled marshmallow.
Way to go, Communications major/English minor.

Russian and Eastern European Studies

On the Road. Surprise, surprise, I did not care for
the city of Scranton one bit.

Intro to Philosophy. Writing backwards again.
It wasn’t Philosophy I hated; it was the professor. He was awful!

Public Speaking. Absolut(e) hell is right! Oh it was, it was!
This was during the height of my Absolut vodka ad collecting.

Responsibility in Communication. Do I put up with all this shit
or do I plunge a knife into my heart? Yeah, good question.
Fourteen years later, maybe I should revisit that.