Way back when…when? In fourth grade, that’s when.
That’s when I created my own website, complete with my own self-taught HTML coding and everything. I even had some dorky/ditsy site name like Neat-O-Sorts-Galore or Blue Icicle Dreams. When I say a name like that, I mean that those were the actual names that I spent a disproportionate amount of time choosing for my site. Look in my sporadically kept fourth grade diary and you will find a page of equally embarrassing, brainstormed site names with little symbols next to them indicating how many rounds of elimination each one made it through. The thing about site names like that is they don’t actually say anything about what sort of site it is. Scratch that. Yes they do. They tell the viewer, “Watch out! Prepubescent-girl-attempt-at-a-web-page ahead!” But I didn’t realize that then. Then, I thought those names were cool. Actually, I outgrew the Neat-O-Sorts-Galore one pretty quickly, but thought I was pretty awesome when I moved on to Blue Icicle Dreams, especially when it was written with a few ~s and *s surrounding and interspersed in between the words. As I mentioned, I was teaching myself HTML code then and getting pretty good at it for a fourth grader, I believe. Now, I don’t remember much of it at all, but imagine if I’d continued down that path…I could be a major computer nerd today! (Instead, I’m just some others sorts of nerd.)
Fourth grade was also the year that I started to lose touch with my then best-friend-since-pre-K. It was all because of a misunderstanding. Looking back on it now, I see that what I’d interpreted as her not wanting to be friends with me anymore was actually the combination of her social anxieties and my insecurities, but at age ten, I couldn’t see all of that. We found each other again in seventh grade, but it was never the same. We sure had some fun, creative times when we were younger, though. We found salamanders or newts in the draining troughs. We gave hair cuts made of snow to the cylindrical thing in her front yard. We threw muck at trees. We skated on a little ice rink her parents made in the backyard. We picked our noses. (Did I just say that? It’s honesty.) We went on expeditions to the moon via our refrigerator-box spaceships, complete with controls and doors and everything! (I miss those things!) I miss those times.
Fourth grade…my sister got sick and I got Sammy, my stuffed animal raccoon. My sister got forty-some-odd stuffed animals from all those concerned for her health. My parents thought I was jealous of all of the attention my sister was getting, so when my father took me to Meyer Drugstore to pick out a stuffed animal, it was their way of keeping me from feeling ignored. They basically told me so, or at least that’s what I can remember. The thing is, I was never jealous, but it was a nice thought on their part. What bothered me about that situation then was that my sister was sick and that whenever I was upset, others would automatically assume that the reason I was upset was that my sister was sick, when there was so much more to it than that. I still have Sammy, right there on my bed (call me a little girl, whatever). After I got him, I attributed special powers to his ears. They could transmit messages to those dear to me. One ear was designated to my dog, Zoey (may she eat biscuits in peace), and the other was designated to…well…everyone else! If I’d forgotten to say goodnight to someone, I’d whisper it in Sammy’s ear. When I was away at summer camp, I’d whisper to people/dog that I missed them, via Sammy. Another thing about Sammy was his nose. I put lip gloss on his nose. Why? It smelled good and was shimmery. Why else? I haven’t the slightest idea.
In fourth grade, three girl friends and I planned to perform a concert. We’d seen the Prince of Egypt and we liked its songs. I got a copy of a behind-the-scenes book that included the song lyrics, so I brought it to recess and practiced them with the other girls. We (Or was it mostly me? I can’t remember…) wanted to sell inexpensive tickets to a show that’d be in one of our garages or living rooms, where we’d sing the Prince of Egypt songs. I even made a program for it. It never happened, though. I guess the others weren’t as ambitious about it as I. If some fourth grader I knew asked me to buy tickets to such a show today, I would, if only for the cuteness of it. But then again, I’m a sucker for little people, and by little people, I don’t mean midgets. I mean little people – kids. And by kids, I don’t mean baby goats. I mean young human children. Not that I have anything against midgets or baby goats. Yes, I realize that it was very likely clear what I meant before I ever clarified it, but it pleased me to clarify.
Thought I already finished my fourth grade dealings with internet-hood? Wrong! Fourth grade was also when I went online and did things that just shouldn’t be done.
I started playing flute in fourth grade. When I was four, I took piano lessons, but all I remember from them is how the instructor would repeatedly have me put my hands on my knees because I wouldn’t keep my hands curved properly over the keys. If you gave me a second, I could tell you which key plays which note, but that isn’t because I remember from when I was four. That’s probably because I was trying to tune my flute and/or compose some uber-simple piece of music years later. Anyway, I stopped taking piano lessons because, well, I don’t know why. I just did. When I was in second grade, I learned to read music and how to play the recorder from my school music teacher’s daughter, who was still half a generation or so older than me. Before fourth grade started, I decided that I wanted to learn a “real” instrument. I’d narrowed it down to either flute or harp. As it turns out, there aren’t many harp instructors in Plattsburgh, and by that, I mean that there hasn’t been a harp instructor in Plattsburgh at all that I know of since Judy Tenenbaum moved away. So, flute it was for me. Later, an area music teacher thought it a shame that I didn’t take up something less common like the oboe, so that I could excel with it even more. I realized later that her own main instrument is the oboe, so I think she may have just been partial. Regardless, I began taking private flute lessons from Robin Cameron-Philips at the beginning of fourth grade, and the rest, as they say, is history. Who says? Oh I don’t know…the royal and all mighty They, of course!
Fourth grade, fourth grade. There’s a bunch of my fourth grade.
As a child, I was confused about mercury, the element. I had not connected it with quicksilver, but instead believed mercury to be the red stuff in the great majority of thermometers I saw. How I got that idea, I do not know. Regardless, I tended to be more careful with the red stuff because I’d heard that it’d lead to behavior like that of Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter character. Misinformed about the identity of mercury as I was, I never thought that the silvery stuff in two or three older thermometers in my house was anything to worry over. After checking my own temperature one day I believed myself sick, I was shaking the thermometer so that the silver stuff would return to the bottom. Accidentally, I hit the end of it on the edge of my bathroom sink, breaking the glass thermometer and spilling what I now know to be mercury. Not knowing any better at the time, I found the substance fascinating. I played with it, touching it and pushing little dots of it toward each other. Through those young eyes, the way the mercury looked, felt, rolled, and held itself together was fun. Eventually, I just washed, wiped, and threw away the thermometer and mercurial remnants. At some later point in time (but not too much later), I accidentally broke another thermometer with mercury in it! I can’t remember the details of the second instance, but I probably played with the stuff again. Later on, I realized that the silvery stuff was, in fact, mercury. It now seems that I’ve violated health codes and exposed myself to a toxic element! (Though cigarettes and other far less regulated things can easily do more given the right (/wrong?) circumstances.) Those two short exposures probably weren’t much, but I could’ve absorbed mercury via inhalation or through my skin. Eh. I’m not worried about it. I don’t have any of the problems associated with it… Oh wait, yeah I do!
