I even attended Space Camp in Titusville, Florida and Huntsville, Alabama once at the age of ten and again at twelve using money from my bat mitzvah. I knew how intense the training was and the kind of rigorous physical demands it made on one’s body to be able to be an astronaut. I was weak, with tiny spaghetti arms and a peanut-sized frame. Still, I dreamt of going into space.
Covered in impact craters and named for the god of war, Mars has definitely been through some sh-t. If it’s your favorite planet, you’re strong and rugged. If you’re a girl, you identify with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or the chick from Little Giants. If you’re a guy, you wear a camouflage hat even when you’re not hunting.
A sophomore, Jillian was 5 1/2 months pregnant. Recently, she’d failed gym for not participating and the school had wanted to know why. She’d broken down and told them the truth.
“What 17-year-old boy doesn’t want to spend his summer shooting machine guns and rocket launchers?” Private First Class Joe Lazzerini says excitedly. When I laugh he adds, “Hey, I’m gay but I’m still a boy. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, ‘It shouldn’t matter if you’re straight, only if you can shoot straight.'”
Since we’re performing at night, our days are empty. Unless we want to blow stacks of cash and our dignity at Dollywood, there’s not much to do. If we get bored, I think, maybe we could go get pedicures together! It’d be so fun! Every city has at least one salon, and nails are like math — the same in any language. “Would you ever get a pedicure?” I ask him.
I see the small pumpkins at the supermarket and cradle them like pumpkin babies, cooing and pinching their bumps and curves. I see a full-grown one carved to look like the old man from ‘UP!’ and I feel compelled to BBM a million pictures of it to everyone I know with a dippy caption like, “UP-MPKIN! Get it?! So cute, omg.”
The gaming started in my school’s computer class. My private elementary school had a whole room full of thick, gray monitors: the kind that went blue with white robot text when they stopped working. The room was a narrow sliver off to the side of the library and we all sat in tiny chairs back to back, facing our screens.
Did you know if you put your ATM password in backwards it alerts the police that you’re being robbed? Did you know that sugar causes cancer? Did you know that dialing *677 tells you if the unmarked police car trying to pull you over is actually a rapist?
This week marks another Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish New Year, and lately, I keep thinking about the overtness of that swastika-spray-painting hate crime. Most of the ignorance I’ve faced for being Jewish since then has been driven more by the power of words than by violent or disturbing deeds.
A local as-yet-unrecognized child prodigy, 8, cried herself to death after her parents wouldn’t let her have just one more packet of Gushers before bed. She loved Nancy Drew books, the movie Harriet the Spy, and her unicorn wallpaper.