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Original post by megan

A bunch of neighborhood kids were at the top of a steep, snow-covered incline, arguing over who had the idea to stand up on his sled and use it as a makeshift snowboard. Each boy insisted he had been first to come up with the brilliant new sport, a solution to the too-many-kids-not-enough-snowboards conundrum.
When I was seven, I also thought I was the first person to stand up on my sled. I called it “snurfing.”
The great narcissism of youth convinces you that you’re the first person ever to experience the thrill of whatever it is that you’re doing. It’s like you invented this awesome new thing–be it snurfing or sex.
As you get older, there are fewer and fewer firsts. And you realize that everything has already been done before by someone else and the best you can do is make the old feel new through your own unique point of […]

Original post by megan

Look at how psyched my brother and I are. WE. ARE. PSYCHED. SNOOOOOOOW! YEAH!!! This is the BEST DAY EVER. We’re gonna go SLEDDING on the GOLF COURSE! WHOO-HOO! And we’re gonna build an IGLOO FORT in our front yard and a SNOWMAN who we will still call FROSTY even if we have to improvise with a ROCKS and STICKS because we don’t have a CORNCOB PIPE, a BUTTON NOSE, or COAL because who has that stuff lying around the house anyway? And we’re not gonna come inside for hot chocolate until we can’t feel our feet anymore because it’s SNOOOOOOW and SNOW is the BEST and WE ARE SO PSYCHED!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’ll try to recapture this enthusiasm when I’m shoveling my walkway.

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Original post by megan

Yeah, I know it’s Wednesday. But it’s also my birthday so I can break the rules of my own blog if I want to. So this is the very first photo of me ever taken. I got it about a half hour ago from my parents who drove across Jersey to take me out to lunch for my birthday. They came bearing four garbage bags bursting with hundreds of loose pictures and dozens of photo albums spanning a century of family history. They want me and my brothers to scan and label these photos for posterity. This is a momentous task because every other photo inspires peals of appalled laughter and conversation that goes like this:
Me: OH MY GOD.
Dad: That’s some hair right there.
Me: And the outfit? Why? Seriously. WHY?
Mom: But that was the style…
Me: Egad.
ETC.
Obviously, this photo is free from such scrutiny.

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Original post by megan

This is my first grade photo. I know. The hair.
The level of layering going on here is just…
staggering.
First grade is the first year of my life that I can remember very well. Fortunately I have no recollection of anyone at Bayville Elementary School taunting me unmercifully for the haphazard, home-cut hair. Actually, I was very popular in first and second grades, a point of fact documented at the end of my second grade journal when I wrote, “I was very popular this year and last year too.”  Things started going downhill socially in fourth grade, but fifth grade is when I totally lost whatever mojo I had and didn’t get it back until like, oh, I don’t know, my senior year of college.

It’s probably no coincidence that first grade is when I started writing down stories with titles like, “What if All The Vegetables Started to Dance?”  in the I […]

Original post by megan

This is my third grade class photo. The blouse was silk, the vest was velvet, and though you obviously can’t see them in this photo, the culottes were tweed and brown.
That’s right. Culottes. 1880s newspaper delivery boy knickers updated for the 1980s. Modern pantaloons.
The three elements of this outfit–blouse-vest-culottes–were never separated from one another. Never did I wear the blouse sans vest under my baby blue monogrammed sweater*. Never did I wear the vest over my Cheryl Tiegs brand plaid blouse with ruffles down the front*. Never did I wear the brown tweed culottes with my purple, teal and magenta batwing velour sweater*. BLOUSE-VEST-CULOTTES. It’s as if the whole outfit would self-destruct in a conflagration of bad fashion if one element was removed from the ensemble as a whole.
*Not hypothetical. These are actual descriptions of clothing I once owned and wore and will perhaps post on this blog in the […]

Original post by megan

When I was in 5th grade I auditioned for a variety show called RAZZLE DAZZLE ‘EM at a local community theater. For the try-out, I sang the trenchant, big vibrato ballad “Don’t Cry Out Loud” made famous by a singer named Melissa Manchester that I don’t expect any of you kids to know about. The sheet music was totally not in my key and it was kind of an inappropriate song to be sung by an eleven-year-old. Not inappropriate as in like, porny, but lyrically speaking it’s not a song an eleven-year-old could really sing with any authentic feeling…yet if done well I guess it could’ve had a haunting effect kind of like The Langley Schools Music Project’s version of “Desperado.” I chose “Don’t Cry Out Loud” for two reasons: 1. My mom liked it. 2. I was very familiar with it because it played on WOBM all […]

Original post by megan

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Original post by dreamhost

But as you can see* the picture didn’t upload properly. The World’s Greatest Webmaster has been trying to fix it all week. (Apparently it’s a WordPress problem, not a MegMessedUp problem, as is often the case when it comes to things technological.) So the general idea is that I’ll upload random pictures from my youth and write a little about them. I think I’ll do this on Fridays because I like the alliterative flow of the words (retro)photo Fridays and also because I hope I’ll get enough writing done on BUMPED at the end of each work week that I’ll be able to take time out to do this without feeling like I’m screwing myself priority-wise.
So this is me at eight years old, tap dancing my heart out in my final recital for Miss Nonie’s School of Dance which I attended for four years even though I wasn’t very graceful […]

Original post by megan

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Original post by dreamhost