That One Word

He was the most physically perfect human I had ever seen in real life.

Yellow blonde hair. Baby blue eyes. A chiseled face that couldn't have turned out more beautiful had it been crafted by a meticulous sculptor.

But he was filled with hate.

In middle school, that hate was directed at me.

You see, Jake was the most popular boy in school. He was at the very top of the food chain. Even his cool friends didn't seem as cool as him. None of them, not even the beautiful cheerleaders, could match him in the looks department.

It was my first day of eighth grade. I had just transferred from another school. Because of our last names, Jake had to sit next to me in homeroom. He took one look at me and sneered, "I have to sit next to the squaw, great."

I was so stunned and mortified, I didn't even correct him that I wasn't Native American.

Jake seemed so repulsed by the mere presence of my face that he couldn't help his outbursts every time he saw me, whether it was in class or in the hallways.

I had dandruff. My long brown hair was ratty. I was weird. Shut up, what you are looking at squaw?

All his words.

Of course, I wasn't the only victim.

Other kids were disgusting for being "fat." Another girl had "Muppet lips." The boy sitting behind us in homeroom "smelled" because he was "poor."

Out of all his insults, the one that had the greatest and most long-lasting impression on me was when he glared in disgust at my face during homeroom one day and called me "ugly."

It broke my heart.

Nobody had ever called me that to my face before. It confirmed my biggest fear, the one gnawing at the back of my mind since elementary school. I was ugly.

It's amazing how one insult, no matter how untrue, becomes your truth. Your shrunken confidence allows it to scar you, to brand you.

A billion people afterwards could tell you you're the most beautiful woman in the world, but you'll never believe them. Because when you were 13, the most popular boy in school called you ugly. And you believed him first.

A year later, in high school, Jake and I didn't have any classes together and he eventually moved on to mocking the physically and mentally handicapped kids. When he passed me in the hallways, he pretty much forgot I even existed. I was relieved.

My dad's job was transferred to another state and I moved away at 16, never to see Jake again.

But I still see Jake's face and hear his words when I want to forget them. I don't believe people when they say I'm attractive. Instead, I see Jake telling me otherwise. Even now, in my late 20s.

I don't know what angers me more: the words themselves or that I allowed those words to destroy me.

I was visiting a childhood friend at the hospital a couple days ago. She had her appendix removed.

I was sitting by her bedside, reminiscing about people we used to know in middle school, when she suddenly exclaimed, "do you know about Jake?"

I looked up, startled.

"Know what?" I asked.

She pulled out her iPhone and showed me Jake's Facebook profile. I had never seen it before because, obviously, I would never friend request him.

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

Jake is gay.

Not just gay, but he's an entire fruit salad.

Photos revealed him kissing a haughty looking male model next to a Fashion Week runway, drinking a pink cocktail on a sandy beach, and straddling a pole at a gay bar. His interests include "poodles," "fashion," and "cuddling." A status revealed he's "here and queer and you bitches better get used to it." He lives in New York City and he works for Vogue.

During high school, Jake always dated the cheerleaders. It never occurred to me that he really wanted the football players.

Seeing the de-closeted Jake in front of me, on that little screen, didn't change my opinion of him. That look, that mean streak, that blinding arrogance, remains in his icy blue eyes. He might be gay, but he's still Jake.

He's still the boy who ripped my heart out and left it bleeding in my hands with one little insult.

And I still haven't put it back.

I hope one day I do.

Because I want to believe I'm beautiful.

Oh, Frankie!

When I was in middle school I had virtually no self-esteem.

Of course, I wasn't alone. But when you're 13, it feels like it.

I had been a really cute kid. But then things drastically changed. My teeth grew in severely crooked, thanks to a gum surgery (a benign tumor was removed). My front teeth grew in sideways. When I opened my mouth I looked like a freak. I stopped smiling when I was nine.

I hadn't grown into my nose yet. It was wide and had a hump and not at all like the dainty little upturned noses my blonde peers flaunted.

My hair was long, stringy, and frizzy. The humid south Florida weather promised I would never see a good hair day, no matter how many products my mom gave me.

I was pretty damn miserable.

I had crushes on boys, but they were pretty cruel to me when they found out. One popular boy even shouted "woof!" when he discovered I had the hots for him. If that doesn't shatter a sixth-grader's self-image, I don't know what does.

I suppose you could say being an awkward, unattractive pre-teen developed my character. I became extremely sarcastic. I didn't have many friends. I holed myself away at home, spending weekends writing humorous stories and fake magazine articles on the computer, instead of going to the mall with other girls my age. The Jennifer you know today was founded on that time period.

But I desperately wanted a boy to like me. I didn't even want a boyfriend. I just wanted a boy to LIKE ME. I wanted to feel pretty. I wanted to feel like I wasn't the biggest loser on the planet.

On the first day of seventh grade, that changed.

Frank, the new kid, sat next to me in algebra class. He was cute, in a non-threatening sort of way. He didn't use hair products and he didn't dress like a douchebag. He wore flannel. He had a strange accent. He had kind eyes.

I cracked a joke in class, and while my other classmates stared at me blankly, Frank laughed. Not at me, but at my joke! I couldn't believe it! It was a miracle!

Later that day in the cafeteria, my friends and I looked up to see Frank holding his lunch tray, hovering over us.

"Can I sit here?" he asked.

I nearly knocked my milk over the table, I was so eager to make room for him.

"Everyone here seems really superficial," he said, narrowing his eyes at a group of popular girls applying makeup at the next table. "I'm from New Jersey. I'm not used to palm trees and all these fancy houses."

After the girls I was sitting with went to hang out in the sunny quad, Frank and I talked. He was so easy to talk to, which surprised me. Other than my cousins, I didn't have much experience talking to boys my own age.

We became fast friends. He ate lunch with me every day. He laughed at all my jokes. He talked a lot about New Jersey. He was clearly very homesick. I didn't mind though because I didn't know much about the east coast. I found it all very interesting. I couldn't imagine not going to Disney World every weekend. I couldn't imagine a beach without palm trees. It all seemed very odd and exciting. Industrial and cool.

We started hanging out after school. I even went to a school dance with him, as friends, and taught him the Macarena. I couldn't believe Frank had never done it before! It was like hanging out with a Martian! Even President Clinton knew the Macarena!

And of course, from the moment we became best friends I knew I was madly in love with him. I had never been treated so nicely before by a boy who wasn't a relative. He made me feel so special.

Suddenly, my life changed.

My parents took me to Bennigan's for dinner during a weeknight. I should have known something was up because we only went there for special occasions and never during the week. I was halfway through my delicious hot wings when my parents dropped the bombshell.

We were moving to Nebraska.

Haha wait, what?

My dad had been offered a much better job up there in Omaha. One he simply couldn't turn down.

I was devastated.

I awkwardly parted ways with my friends. Saying goodbye to Frankie was the hardest. He promised me he would write.
And guess what. He did.

For a month, we wrote each other once a week. Neither one of us had e-mail back then. It was all snail mail, which, looking back on it, made his correspondence even more impressive.

But I was miserable in Omaha. I thought about Frankie all the time. I slept with his letters underneath my pillow. It was torture knowing he was there and I was here. That I was in love with him and he didn't know.

So, I decided I needed to tell him how I felt.

I recorded myself singing "Don't Let Go" by En Vogue onto a cassette tape and I mailed it to him.

It seemed like a really good idea at the time. It seemed so rational!

I didn't take into account that my singing voice sounds like a dying cat. I didn't realize that my wailing "there's gonna be some LOVE-MAKIN', HEART-BREAKIN', SOUL-SHAKIN' loooOoooOoove" was severely inappropriate.

After I mailed him the tape, I never heard from him again.

I was crushed.

At the time, I couldn't figure out why. Didn't he like me back? Wasn't my message obvious? Did he not like R&B?

I was flummoxed.

Of course, looking back now, I realize that I pretty much made the worst decision in the history of the world. And I laugh hysterically thinking about it.

Oh, man. Poor Frankie. I wish I could have seen his reaction when he hit play. I must have scared the shit outta that poor boy.

I wonder if he still has the tape.

Where's Rachel?

When I was a little girl, my parents quickly learned that sending me to my room as a punishment was, in fact, not a punishment. I loved my room. All my Barbie dolls were there.

So, when I got in trouble, they started sending me to the home office.

At first it was boring. But after rummaging around on the desk, I discovered a massive carton filled with pens and pencils.

 

Putting my twisted imagination to work, I began to play with the writing utensils like they were dolls. Each pen and pencil had a name, a personality, and a family. For example, the blue pencil, David, was in love with the State Farm pen, Denise. But he was already married to Megan, the chewed up red pencil. The faded pink eraser was their daughter, Lindsay.

The pens and pencils in that carton were an entire village. It was like a soap opera, filled with family drama, romantic scandals, and even a random bank robbery when an erasable pen stole a bunch of paperclips at gunpoint.

I was so caught up in the little world I had created that I started to prefer playing with the pens and pencils over my own Barbies. I would rush home from school, running straight past my bedroom, into the office and dump out the carton of pens.

The anticipation was killing me. Would Rachel, the Yellow Pages pen finally realize that her husband, the Dr. Epperdink MD pen, was cheating on her with a pink highlighter named Gwen?! Was Rick, the black Sharpie, going to get cold feet at his wedding with Sarah, the red Bic pen?

I couldn't wait to start the show!

One evening, I dumped out the carton, ready to play, when I let out a gasp.

Where was Rachel?!?

RACHEL WAS MISSING.

I scoured all over the office. How did she disappear?

I ran into the living room, where my dad was watching the news.

"Where's Rachel?" I demanded.

He looked up, perplexed.

"Rachel who?" he asked.

"Rachel, the, the, pen," I sputtered, in panic. "The Yellow Pages pen! Where is she?"

My dad stared at me.

"The Yellow Pages pen?" he repeated, blankly. "That pen wasn't working this morning. The ink is out. So I threw it away."

I shrank away in horror.

"You what?" I whispered. "You threw her away?"

With tears streaming down my face, I ran back into the office.

"Where are you Rachel?" I wailed, digging through the trash can. "I'll find you! Oh my god!"

She was nowhere to be found. I ran into the kitchen, rummaging through that trash can, throwing garbage all over the floor, desperately seeking out the Yellow Pages pen.

My parents ran into the kitchen.

"You're making a mess!" My dad roared. "You better clean that up!"

Finally clutching the discovered Yellow Pages pen, now covered in ketchup, I glared up at him.

"You killed Rachel," was all I could manage to croak.

My parents stared back at me, speechless.

Then they had a long talk in the living room.

They came back into the kitchen and told me I was no longer allowed to play with the pens and pencils.

I was devastated.

To make their point, they hid the carton from me in a locked desk drawer.

That moment marked a changing point in my life. Staring at the locked drawer, I realized that playtime was over. It was time to grow up.

I moved on.

But I never forgot.

And now sometimes when I look at a pen, for a split second, I think I see her personality stare back at me and she winks. And it jolts me back to life.

But then it fades away as quickly as it appeared.

My Restaurant Reviews

This might come as a shock to you, but I'm quite the jet-setter. One day I'm in New York City, the next I'm in Los Angeles. Sometimes all in one day.

During my recent travels, I stopped by a few restaurants that I really enjoyed. I decided to share my reviews of them, in case you ever find yourself in the area and decide to go.

Enjoy!

The Max, Los Angeles

If you love flashy neon colors, retro designs, and all-American food, you seriously need to stop by The Max, which is over in the Pacific Palisades.

The prices are reasonable. The food is simple, but it's good. Burgers. Fries. Milkshakes.

The back story of the place is pretty quirky as well. It was opened by a magician, and sometimes he'll come to each table and perform a silly little trick and crack stupid jokes. But it's all in good fun.

The only downside is if you hit the place up after 2 p.m. it tends to get overcrowded with obnoxious teenagers from the nearby Bayside High School.

The afternoon I was there, a few of them came out of nowhere and randomly held a dance-off, which delayed my food from being served by 23 minutes. I was SO annoyed.

Here is a crappy cell phone pic I took of the scene:

Peach Pit, Beverly Hills

I have a soft spot for old-school diners, so when I stumbled upon the Peach Pit, I couldn't have been more delighted.

Again, you're looking at all-American food, but it's absolutely delicious and hot off the grill. The interior is very retro and there's even a jukebox.

My server, Brandon, was super cute and even flirted with me a little, which made me kind of uneasy later on, because I found out he was in high school (he looked 26).

Here's a crappy cell phone pic of my server and the owner:

Central Perk, New York City

Sometimes, it's just nice to get away from Starbucks. So, when I found myself in Greenwich Village one day, I decided to try out a popular local coffee shop, Central Perk.

Before I even ordered my coffee, I was already impressed. It had such a cozy, yet vibrant atmosphere. The couches were comfy. The coffee mugs were huge. The place was filled with attractive people around my own age.

I was a little taken aback by the sour-faced barista, Gunther, who took my order with undisguised sarcasm.

I was in such a good mood after leaving the place, I even tipped a pretty blonde hippie who was singing about smelly cats in front of the main entrance.

Stay tuned for my next restaurant review post, where I'll detail my visits to Shooters, Krusty Burger, and Bluth's Banana Stand.

Will you visit these places?

What are your favorite restaurants?

Welcome to the Dollhouse

"You think you're hot shit, but really you're just cold diarrhea."

Sometimes I wish more than anything that I could teach a class on pop culture. I feel this desperate need to educate young adults on the books they should read, television shows they should watch, movies they should see, and celebrities they should know about.

Especially when I encounter gob smacking moments, such as discovering that the guy working in the CD department at Best Buy has never heard of Elton John or the teenage follower who confessed on my blog she prefers not to watch movies that were made before 2000.

Today, I'm going to educate you on a film that I truly believe every person should have on their "to watch" list: Welcome to the Dollhouse.

Director Todd Solondz basically shoved his hands into the grimy bloody intestines of the 1990s adolescence experience and made you smell it.

It's the most frustrating as fuck movie to watch, and yet it will tug at your heartstrings for the rest of your life.

The 1995 movie revolves around Dawn Wiener, an ugly duckling suffocating through seventh grade. She is bullied mercilessly by her classmates. Her parents favor her pretty little sister. The guy she's in love with barely knows she exists.

Not only will the plot rip apart your heart, but the film is littered with profanity-laced verbal gems that will have your head reeling.

Even if you aren't an unattractive white middle-class 12-year-old from New Jersey, you know one thing for sure when you're watching this film: You are Dawn Wiener.

It is a film that not only defines a generation, but projects the reality of adolescence.

In other words, you don't have to be a 90's kid to feel like bawling your eyes out when Dawn is denied a slice of chocolate cake at the dinner table.

In honor of Welcome to the Dollhouse, I let the middle school part of me create a little collage:

What do you think?

Have you seen Welcome to the Dollhouse?

Summer of '96

When I was 12 years old, I begged my parents to let me be a junior counselor at a summer camp a couple hours away from town.

Shockingly, they said yes.

The sprawling ranch was in south Florida, near an Indian reservation. There were horses, goats, pigs, rabbits, and other farm animals.

The camp's mascot was a gigantic pot belly pig, Big C, who was gentle as a lamb. He would roam around the ranch, to the delight of the younger children. It was tradition for anyone who saw Big C to shout out "Big C comin'!"

When I was introduced to my bunkmate, Brittany, I was in complete awe. With sun-soaked blonde hair, a gorgeous face, and a bored expression, she was like a 13-year-old Heather Locklear. When she lit up a cigarette inside our cabin, blowing the smoke through a cracked open window, I knew she was the coolest girl I'd ever met in my life.

Even Brittany's background was glamorous, at least for a generic upper-middle class girl like me. Her father was in prison. Her mom was a bartender. Brittany said words like "fucking-A" and "bitchballs" which I had never heard anyone my own age utter aloud before.

She decided we were going to be best friends and I went along with it. Unfortunately, being bffs with Brittany meant I had to alienate myself from all the other junior camp counselors at the ranch. They all despised her. She never gave them the time of day and when she was forced to talk to one of the other girls, she usually spoke with condescending coolness.

"These other girls here are so fucking-A!" she would groan at night, flicking her cigarette out the window while simultaneously reading Seventeen. "Thank god I have you, Jen."

After a couple weeks of being at camp, Brittany convinced me to sneak out of the ranch almost every night. We would climb the bulky wooden fence and run out in the fields towards a cluster of large trees. Even though I was terrified of heights, I would allow Brittany to coax me up a tree and sit in the branches, gazing out at the stars or the faded lights of the Indian reservation in the distance. I would never climb up as far as Brittany. I would stare up at her, with envy, wishing I could be sitting on the top branch, with my blonde locks flowing in the wind.

One night, we huddled together on a lower branch, and watched in awe as a group of American Indian men, wearing nothing but jeans and cowboy boots, herded a pack of horses in the field right beneath our feet.

Everything about Brittany seemed so grown up. She might have been 13, but she acted 16, at least.

"God, just looking at that tree makes me horny," she once said, pointing to a weeping willow across the lake. "Doesn't it make you horny?"

I nodded enthusiastically, not having the slightest idea what she was talking about.

Another evening, she made me pierce her upper left ear. She already had her ears pierced, but wanted a third hole. Our laughter turned to shrieks of horror as I stabbed her ear with a pin. She had to wear her hair down for several days, to hide the grotesque swelling. Every time I apologized, she laughed.

With a week left into camp, Brittany's school friends showed up one night, with some older boys, in a rusty blue Mustang. Brittany left with them and didn't come back until around 3 a.m.

The next morning, I went to breakfast and immediately noticed something was wrong. Kids were crying. The older camp counselors, college students, were whispering to each other. Some of the camp leaders, the adults, were pacing back and forth, looking stunned.

When I found out the news, I was speechless. Apparently Big C had been slaughtered at the ranch that night. Someone, or some people, had attacked him and cut him open, spilling his guts out. His blood had been splattered and smeared all over the campground.

I felt dizzy with nausea that someone could be so cruel to such a beloved pet. Big C was such a gentle creature. He never would have hurt anyone. He loved everyone. He was so trusting. I went into my cabin and threw myself on my bed and cried. Who could have hurt Big C?

The police were called in. Camp was cancelled. With only a week to go, the ranch owner was so devastated, she couldn't even finish the summer. All events were cancelled.

Brittany had become so attached to me that summer, that she ended up persuading her mom to pay out-of-district tuition to send her to my middle school, about 45 minutes away from where she lived.

I wasn't terribly thrilled by the news. I had cooled our relationship since camp ended. For some reason I felt weird around her now. I didn't find her that entertaining anymore. I certainly no longer wanted to be like her.

Her transfer to my school eventually worked out for her, regardless of me. She instantly became close friends with the popular kids in my school. I rarely saw her in the months before I ended up moving to Nebraska.

In the back of my mind, I always knew what had bothered me about the night Brittany had come home. I always knew why I had severed our friendship without offering her a solid explanation.

The night Brittany had come back from hanging out with her wild friends, she'd reeked of an extremely strong, musky odor. I couldn't pinpoint what it had been at the time. But now, I'm almost certain: it had been blood.

But it hurt too much to put the pieces together. So, instead, I let them fall.

Once in a while, when I think of the summer of 1996, I don't really dwell on Brittany, or the friendship we once shared.

I simply remember lounging on a cold tree branch, feeling a soft breeze run through my hair, watching the horses gallop below in the star-freckled moonlight. Basking in a taste of stolen freedom. Wondering if that's what heaven felt like.

My Dinosaur Childhood

When I was a kid, one of my favorite television shows was Dinosaurs.

My parents and I used to watch it every Sunday evening. I always looked forward to it. My impression of the baby character was so uncanny, it made me the most popular girl in my second-grade class. All my friends would beg me to contort my face and screech, "I'm the baby, gotta love me!"

Well, the other night, after fondly recollecting happy childhood memories, I went on youtube to refamiliarize myself with the show.

And after watching ten minutes of an episode, only one thought raced through my mind:

WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING?!?!

The show is awful. It is creepy. It is wrong on so, so many levels. I can't even comprehend how it got passed by network executives.

How did my parents let me watch it?! What is wrong with them?! It makes me question their parenting skills.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, because you were fortunate enough to be born after 1990, here is the premise:

A family of average American dinosaurs, the Sinclairs, live together in a charming little bungalow. There is a mom, dad, teenage brother, teenage sister, baby, and grandma. They are blue-collar. The dad is lazy and watches too much television. The baby only gets pleasure in making everyone else miserable, bonking the father on the head with a frying pan, and shoving his face with food. The grandmother is a bitch. The kids are too cool for school. The mom is frustratingly naive.

For a family show, it took on some pretty eye-opening topics, such as sexual harassment, homosexuality, religion, racism, masturbation, and drug abuse, to name a few.

If I remember correctly, and um, this is a spoiler alert, the last episode pretty much results with the family's demise as the ice age kills everybody off.

Seriously. The entire cast dies.

Here are some memorable Baby Sinclair scenes:

...have you said "wtf" yet??

What do you think? Did you ever watch Dinosaurs growing up?