When did I become this person?

A girl who follows not just people, but animals on Facebook. Animals with names  like”Hiccup”, “Buster” and “Penny.”If memory serves (and it still does—for the most part—in the beginning of senility, which in my case is at 43) I would have scoffed at me a mere five years ago.

2009—that’s the year I (allegedly) joined Facebook. After which I got a smart phone and then all bets were off.

I used to sneer at little doodle hearts—now I’m texting them to my gynecologist. (Okay, I’m not actually doing that, but I have to force myself not to.)

I was the wearing-all-black, punky chick who reeked of cigarettes and dreamt of lighting pyres built from hair bows and ballet flats. I got confused when my constant wish to discuss the cold war unnerved people and I suddenly found myself in therapy with “Patty,” the poor woman saddled with the health of my psyche.

Oh, the time we wasted as she tried to get me to say one complete sentence and I, instead, chose to roll my eyes and lap up the blood dribbling out from my gnawed cuticles as if it were a tasty vampiric malted.

Even after high school, I clung to my bad ass ways.

I moved to New York, but not just to the city; to Alphabet City, where the real scary shit goes down. Let’s not forget that under my steel toed boots and second hand overalls hid a suburban kid who’d been raised on whole milk and family dinners, homework hour and summers on Cape Cod.

Even when I got married and moved to the Chicago suburbs, just the mention of stuff like neighborhood Bunco, book clubs and Friday Night Fish Fry was enough to put me into a tailspin, as if I’d accidentally brushed up against some synthetic carpet to which I was highly allergic.

Ditto: water parks, Great America, anything Disney, circus’s, chain restaurants, being home before 10pm, mini vans, and malls.

So when did it happen? Where did this woman come from who waves “bye-bye” to babies in the grocery stores (not just once, but repeatedly, until the baby can no longer possibly see me, which—I now realize—is exactly what  my mother does).

Was her genesis in the obstetrics wing of Evanston Hospital, where, along with giving birth I must have had some kind of experimental cool-ectomy?

I distinctly remember going in there wearing a tight black shirt I bought downtown at Bizarre Bazar with a skull and cross bones emblazoned across the chest and coming out in a nondescript pale blue tent dress from Old Navy.

I don’t know. But I do know that this new me knows cute.

Baby elephants? Yes please.

Goats balancing on a steel ribbon? Bring it. (Thanks Way).

Two dogs named Hiccup and Penny taking a third dog named Buster for a walk? Heaven.

This clip isn’t going to win any Pulitzer Prizes, but if it makes you smile (and it will), I’ll consider this blog a job done. And I’ll even take responsibility for being the dork who blogged it.

 

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Editor: Bryonie Wise