A Wonderful Scarf
Have you ever noticed that when you look back on something you have entirely different views on it than the ones you had at the time? That is the thing about memoirs, that’s what they’re based on. Mine is definitely based on my reflection of the spring and summer of 2006. During that summer I had no idea that the choices I made, people I met, and places I went to would have so much impact on my life. Yet, somehow, they did. This is the story of both my unraveling and my being knit up, stitch by stitch.
There are three parts to this story. There is my unraveling, meaning my friendship troubles. Then there is some knitting with lots of mistakes that must be covered, which is my brother’s baseball season. Finally there is my being knit up into a wonderful scarf with only a few, hopefully unnoticeable mistakes. I will start at the beginning of my unraveling, my friendship troubles.
Part One – The Unraveling
I have self-confidence issues. Especially when it comes to friendships. I’m always afraid that my friends are mad at me, or that they don’t really like me, or something else like that. I always feel like I’m different than my friends, which I know to be somewhat true. I like a more diverse group of things than they do (for the most part), such as alternative rock music and reading.
My social situation was not going very well at that moment in time. Though I didn’t realize it then, the differences between my best friends and myself were coming out. We were a group of four in spring of 2006, Catalina, Geneva, Simone, and Colleen. We were all in Spanish Immersion, Simone and Catalina in the morning class, Geneva and me in the afternoon. It was like two sets of best friends that hung out together. Then Geneva and I became friends with an eighth grader named Lizee and we were like three best friends as well. Everyone was getting along fine, but then Catalina said something that changed all of our lives, maybe forever.
Catalina announcing she was going to go to Colombia in July and wasn’t coming back until January was basically the beginning of my unraveling. After that I think Simone began to cling to Geneva and me more because she knew that her best friend from the group wasn’t going to be there next year. She apparently took the most liking to Geneva, which isn’t surprising since a lot of people do, and clung the most to her. Then it sort of switched and it became Geneva clinging to Simone. At this point I was seriously tired of the people at our school being snobby and obnoxious and I was really thinking about transferring going to my neighborhood high school, Cleveland after eighth grade. I think this worried Geneva, because she’s a little shy and needs an outgoing friend to be around. That’s why I think she started clinging to Simone.
The next year I wouldn’t have Lizee either, since she was being promoted to Lincoln on the last day of school. I was going to be best friendless in my eighth grade year. It didn’t help that Lizee was being really dramatic about her current situation as well. I however, didn’t voice my fears aloud, so I could be more of a help to her. Plus, I was hoping that things would smooth themselves over by the time school was back in session in September. That’s when I met Marie.
I now know that Marie and the Sters were the reason I managed to survive spring and summer of 2006 and become the person I am today. If I had never met Marie, I never would have met the Sters, and a whole piece of my fruit pie of life would be missing. I would be nowhere near as confident with my friendships, and myself and I would probably be a complete mental wreck. I can also thank the ex-admin of the most popular Sprouse twins fan site on the web, because when she got rid of her website Sprouse-Fans.org was formed by the angry members.
During winter break of 2005 I looked up the twin, teen actors Dylan and Cole Sprouse (The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, Big Daddy). On January 14th, 2006 I joined Sprouse-fans.com and it’s forum, which is known to its members as ‘SF’. We were like an enormous family. Connected by a love of the Sprouse twins and the shadow of a past website. That was when I met Marie.
I began reading fan-created fiction “fanfic” stories on the SprouseFans forum and found one that seemed a lot like my actual life. I sent a message to the writer saying this and she sent one back saying that it was pretty much based on her life. We began to correspond and found that we had a lot in common. We started talking and gave each other our AOL Instant Messenger “AIM” screen names so we could talk more often. Marie and I called our self’s twins and best friends. And in truth we were best friends. We told each other all our problems, like when our friends or family were acting stupid or when something cool happened. We never gave away personal information about what city we lived in or any of that. She knew I lived in a West Coast state, and I knew she lived in Singapore. (They do speak English there.) That’s all we really needed to know about where the other lived. We would spend hours talking to each other with barely any pauses. We understood each other. Then Marie introduced me to the Sters, her group of friends from SF.
The Sters were like the SprouseFans forum version of the popular group. Except, they weren’t like an actual popular clique from real life or even movies or books. They were the most random, funny, weird, and nice people on the site. They were the kids who weren’t popular at their own schools, but were forced into the ‘top spot’ on the forum for being themselves. These were people that had found friends, and together, formed a sub-family on the site. They were the Sters, because they added ‘ster’ to the end of their names to create nicknames.
One night, a girl I knew as Sas (Saster) messaged me on AIM and we became friends. (We had mutual randomness.) A few days later she invited me to a private Ster chat. Needless to say, I was very excited. I wanted to be a Ster, badly. Not only because they were popular, but because I felt like I could fit in with them. I felt like maybe I would find the group I belonged to, because my current real-life friend situation sucked. I began talking to the Sters every day. It was like an addiction. I would get home as quickly as possible and go straight to my computer to go on SF and then chat with the Sters. They called me Leen instead of Colleen and came up with many other nicknames as well. The more I talked to them, the more confidant I felt. Even if things were bad at school, I had the Sters to turn to. When my best friend Geneva began to act like Simone, I just had a chat with the Sters about random stuff and I felt better. The only Ster I talked to about the actual problems in my life was Marie. Just chatting with the others had a relaxing effect on me. They were all so random, weird, funny, and fun to talk to. We just talked about weird things. Take the chat below, for example. We weren’t talking about anything really relevant to well, anything. We were just talking and laughing, and just genuinely having fun without having to worry whether the others would think we were stupid.
Saster: ah i wanna listen to AAR, buit im watchin HSM
Saster: i cant do bothc
Lysster: ahh fig ! i member reading this story !
Saster: and i dont wanan stop ham
Saster: HSM*
Lysster: it used ta be like my fav one..
Saster: HELP
Saster: HAHAHAHA
Saster: ham
Lysster: ham ?
Leenster: lol
Leenster: yes ham
Saster: well the A's right by the S
Saster: HAHAA
Leenster: ham is fantasmagorical
Leenster: lol
Lysster: not gonna ask..
Leenster: i wasn't even close
Saster: i ment HSM
Saster: not HAM
Saster: HAHA
Leenster: lol
Figster: lysssaa dduuude: it used ta be like my fav one.. thaaanks
Mariester: omg...i think i want ham
Mariester: but im not sposed to eat ham im supposed to be ona diet
Mariester: but ham is tasty
Mariester: so....tasty..........
Lysster: hahha sas & ya fig i read like half of the 2nd one.or idn how much but part of it & HAM SUCKS..
Figster: haaaammmmm
Lysster: blahhhh ham is horrible
Saster: ham..
Saster: HAHAHAHA
Saster: "that would be MEEE, OINK OINK"
Figster: hahaha
Figster: im bored like whooooaaaa
Saster: listen to AAR if your bored.....HAHAHA
Saster: sorry, still tryin to spred my AAR luv around..lol
I suppose you’re thinking “What the heck?” or “Could they get more random?” Well you have no idea. It got more random than that, but I didn’t want to make you too confused. *Wink, wink*
I had been obsessed. With the Sprouses and the Sters. I had pictures of the twins all over my locker and bedroom walls. I knew every fact about them, from favorite colors to favorite books. I knew when all the new episodes of their show were going to air, and what they were about. I hardly ever missed a single premiere. Sometimes I wonder whether my obsession with the Sprouses was fueled by my need to talk to the Sters. But I know that can’t be completely true, because I’m still a fan, even though there are never Ster chats anymore and I barely talk to any of my old friends. I think that I may always love Dylan and Cole Sprouse even though I don’t care about knowing everything about them anymore. The Sters, well I still care about them a ton. I’m just not addicted to talking to them all the time anymore. I talk to some of them occasionally, and once in a while we try and have a Ster chat. But it never really works. The Sters were like a family I wasn’t bound to love by moral obligation. Talking to them could cheer me up when I was down and it made me a more fun person because I wasn’t worried about my real life problems when my head was full of inside jokes. We had our fair share of problems on the forum and in our circle too, but they were easier to deal with when you had a whole bunch of people on your side.
As summer wore on, it became more and more evident that we were all growing up. One member was going off to college in the fall and none of us had really talked about it. We just took for granted that Brian would always be there. Then Josh and Meg, two very old, well-liked Sters, became really close. They stopped coming to chats as often and would just talk to each other instead. Eventually they just stopped coming to chats at all. In late July and early August Sas started being sort of mean to Marie and Cessy, both of whom she had befriended and brought into the Sters. I felt it was only a matter of time before Sas began to be standoff-ish to me as well. I never got to see if that would happen. When the end of August came around, some of the Sters started to go back to school. Our chats became less and less frequent and sometime in September or possibly October, they basically died out altogether.
The Sters are almost gone. A few of us tried so hard to pull everyone back together, but it was to no avail. It was over though, really and truly over. Pretty much all of us had lost our obsessions with Dylan and Cole sometime over the summer, the only reason we still went on SprouseFans as much as we did was because of each other. I was free of the wonderful burden of having a group of friends on the Internet, friends who understood me and were a lot like me, in their own ways. In short, it was awful. I felt like crying. This group is and probably will always be the greatest friends I’ve ever had. I may keep in contact with some of them, I may loose touch completely with others, but I know that I will keep the memories of all of them, and each and every one of our chats fresh in my mind. Often when someone dies people try and shield everything about the person from their mind, but what you should do is remember all the fun times you guys had together. Most likely the person who died would have wanted it that way. It the same with the Sters, even though our family has fallen apart, all of us will want to remember all the fun times and people.
Part Two – Scarf of Mistakes
In late-April, as if my life weren’t already confusingly full with two sets of friends, school work, dance classes, spring soccer, and a Saturday morning acting class, there became one more event that came into my busy schedule in that month, my brother’s baseball season. In late-April my brother had his first baseball game of the season. I had somewhat enjoyed seeing his games the previous year, but being the supportive big sister I was, my mother forced me to attend.
I went to the second game willingly, though, and almost every game after. I was pretty much hooked. Two 5-inning games a week, one on Mondays and one on Wednesdays. Some were at a school by our house (Duniway), and some were as far out as Putnam and Oregon City. However my nightly procedure on game days was the same.
My mother would pick my up at 5:50, after my dance class had ended and we would head off to the game. Usually she would’ve already made sandwiches or, as was more often the case, gotten Subway. Sometimes we had to stop and get some on the way to the game, but not often. We almost always arrived sometime in the second inning because it would take us about 20 minutes to get home. If the game were at Duniway, then we would get there between 6:20 and 6:30 on an average day. Only if the game were away, then we could sometimes be there by 6:30 if we were lucky.
This was such a big and important part of my life. I’m pretty sure I only ever missed a few regular season games. I even skipped a book club meeting to see the last game. (It was a very competitive, high-tension match against the team’s archrivals. Even though they lost that game, they had a good enough win-loss-tie record to make it to the county tournament in early July. Too bad our family missed that because we were taking a vacation to the East coast. We called during a long layover before our final flight back from the trip, and found out that we had lost. The season was over. I had been so sure that the team, the Sellwood Cubbies, would make it to the state tournament. We were planning our end of season party, a trip to one family’s River house, when the coach found out that the team still had a shot of making it to the state tournament. All they had to do was play a deciding game against a team they had never played before. They won and the season still hadn’t ended. The Cubbies were off to at least two more games!
The first game I watched with great excitement and sadness, as I knew it could very well be the last game I ever saw the team play together. I had agreed to baby-sit the next morning, and if they lost the first game, that’s when they would play their next one. If they lost both, they were out of the tournament, and the season I had loved so much would be over. They did loose that first game. I asked all the boys to win for me tomorrow, so I could see them play at least one more game. They all promised, and I’m sure they tried their best, but in the end, they still lost that second game. The day after that we went up to the River house and had our end of season party, as planned.
Now I’m sure you’re wondering what this all has to do with how I’ve changed. Well I’ll tell you. My brother and I used to constantly fight with each other, verbally and physically. During his 2006 baseball season we bonded. I would talk to him about how he played and the kids on his team. I never realized that people more than a year younger than me could be cool before then. I don’t care that people thought I was weird for hanging out with boys three years younger than me, because his team was cool. The boys on his team were fun to be around, funny, and nice. It’s a lot more than I can say for some of the people I know in my own grade. This bridge that formed between my brother and me is still there, even though it’s almost a new baseball season. The bridge will probably always be there, and I can always come back to saying that if it weren’t for his playing baseball we would probably still claw each other’s eyes out every few days.
Part Three – A Wonderful Scarf
I have one more very important piece of summer to cover, Wauna Lake. This is the most special place for me. It’s my favorite place in the whole world and I have always felt comfortable there. Maybe it’s because during the week after my birth I was there, maybe it’s because that was probably where I took my first steps and said my first words. Then again, maybe it’s just my love of water. Or was it my love of the lake that caused all the previous statements? Love is a very complex emotion. Love enters our heart and gets lodged there, refusing to leave until it is ready, like a relative down on their luck who just has to stay in your house. Sometimes you’re happy with it, and sometimes you’re not, but it’s still there, and there it will stay until it’s good and ready to leave.
In summer of 2005 I sort of messed up my life at the lake. I had always been best friends during the summer with Megan, who was my age and also had an annoying brother the same age as mine. Then I became friends with Rachel who was two years older than us. We started to hang out with two brothers, Ben and Sam, who had been good friends with Megan and me but we kind of lost touch in the years when cooties were still around. The more we hung out with them, the closer Rachel and I became, and the farther away Megan went. I sort of messed up my friendships at Wauna Lake that summer and then in 2006, I fixed them.
We didn’t go up to our lake cabin quite as much during summer ’06 because of baseball, our East Coast trip, and my parents’ work. Yet somehow I managed to create a nice group up there that included everyone. It became Rachel, Ben, Sam, Megan, and me. Sometimes cousins Ellen and Kate joined us, or even my cousin, Chip, but for the most part it was the five of us. It was great. We would organize the younger kids in the nightly games of capture the flag, a big tradition up at the lake. It’s been going on since before I was born. The kids from any of the fifty cabins come and gather on the tennis courts up at the playground around eight at night. We divide into two teams, and use life jackets for flags. (We are never in short supply, because kids under age twelve are supposed to wear them at all times when they aren’t in their cabins.) One team goes down to the parking lot and one stays on the tennis courts. There are a bunch of ‘secret’ trails and ways to get to the different teams’ side. It’s so much fun. Usually when the games are over, either because of disagreements about winning or too many people had to go home, whoever is left sits up on the tennis courts and hangs out. We make sure the timed lights are turned up their fullest and talk or play word games. If the lights go out we all scream, but sometimes we just lie down and look at the stars. Sometimes we go down into the clubhouse basement, which is ‘the kids’ room’ and play ping-pong or do puzzles. The most fun is when we go swimming.
Usually we just go to Megan’s boat dock, which is closest, or my boat dock, because I have the most kids in my cabin. A few times we’ve gone down to the main swim dock, which is big and has two water slides and a diving board. A few times the last two or three people came back with my cousin Chip and me to our cabin and we watched Satellite T.V. It’s pretty much the only time the older kids can really hang out together without having to worry about being good role-models or any of that.
Then Labor Day weekend rolled in. This is a huge deal up at the lake because everyone comes up. There’s a big competition of swimming and boating races and an award ceremony and everything. Then there’s a big party to celebrate the end of summer and all. Usually there’s either crawdad races, or a scavenger hunt. In 2004 I had won the ‘all around girl’ runner-up trophy, which was a huge deal. There were points given for every place and the girl and boy with the most points were awarded the ‘all around girl and boy’ trophies. The girl and boy with the second most points were given the runner up trophies. My older cousin, hero, and role model, Natalie, had retired (won it three years in a row) her trophy for all around girl the previous year. I was so excited to have won. I felt like I was following in her footsteps even though I had gotten second place. I was happy with it because I knew I could never beat Megan, who’d gotten first. I’ve always wanted to be just like Natalie, and this was one more step in that direction. Then in 2005, I tried pretty hard to get the runner up again, but I didn’t do the motor boat races, and I came in third to a girl named Kendall. I was a little upset, but I was okay with it because I was starting to let go of my dream of being just like Natalie. In 2006, I decided I would do all the races I entered for fun only. I wouldn’t try and win the trophy at all. And that’s what I did. I ended up placing well in lots of races, so I thought I might have a small shot at getting the runner up, but I was too disappointed when I didn’t. Now I know that I’m not Natalie. I’ve never been Natalie. I never will be Natalie.
Now I realize that I should never do something to be like someone else, or to make my family happy. They will always love me, no matter what I do, and I just need to make myself happy and they will be happy. I am so much happier now that I’ve learned this. Everything that happened in the spring and summer of 2006 has helped me to realize that I should be my own person and not care what other people think of me. This was one of the most difficult and wonderful summers of my entire life. I really was unraveled and knit back up, stitch by stitch. I’ve slowly pieced back together the sections of my life that fell apart. I know I’m still figuring stuff out, but I’m so much better off after having experienced what I did than I would be if I hadn’t. I think a place helped me too realize all this. Yes, a place.
Sitting on the bench beside the flagpole on my deck outside my cabin has become a special place for me. I can look down at Wauna and see the silver-blue clarity of life. I watch the boats drive by down below. I smell the pine trees and hear the birds chirping to each other. The wind rustles my hair and I see fish jump if I’m lucky. That is the place where I thought and still think about my life, problems I’m having, and just beauty in general. I did so much of the reflection from this memoir in that spot. Right now I’m very happy with my self, my choices, and just my life in general. It could be better, but so could everyone else’s. Right now it’s almost as good as it’s going to get.
That was really great, i had utmost pleasure in reading that. beautifully written (tres touching, sniffffffff), totally one of your best pieces. I think, if you ever had the time, it could be extended into a full memoir.
and here come the edits! lol:
She apparently took the most liking to Geneva, which isn’t surprising since a lot of people do, and clung the most to her. Then it sort of switched and it became Geneva clinging to Simone. At this point I was seriously tired of the people at our school being snobby and obnoxious and I was really thinking about transferring going to my neighborhood high school, Cleveland after eighth grade. I think this worried Geneva, because she’s a little shy and needs an outgoing friend to be around. That’s why I think she started clinging to Simone.
this paragraph uses the word cling/clung too much. could you think of a better way to phrase it, maybe omit a couple of sentences that aren't really necessary?
n late-April my brother had his first baseball game of the season.
maybe change that to: my brother had his first baseball game of the season then.
That's about it, check some grammar and spelling, but other than that... really the best you've ever done. bravo!