The way we were...

"Memories...light the corners of my mind...misty water-colored memories, of the way we were."

What a terrible song, but I love it anyway. Okay, I've been going through some old stuff that's been packed away in the basement since May, and I came across the "autobiography" I wrote for Mr. Coccaro's AP history class my junior year of high school. I haven't read it in a few years, so I thumbed through it and found this in the "friends" section:

"Like I mentioned before, my friends and I can pretty much entertain ourselves. We always find things to talk about and weird, quirky things to do. One time Katie and I were bored in fifth period and we were looking for something to occupy the time. I found about ten McDonald's straws on a table, unwrapped them, and we tried to fit them together. Once that was accomplished, we had a long chain of straws about six or seven feet long. Katie had some ketchup packets and she decided to see if she could blow the ketchup all the way through the chain of straws. Needless to say, it took awhile and there was ketchup all over the place (and all over Katie's clothes) but after about twenty minutes we had succeeded and a drop of ketchup dripped out of the other end of the straws. We laughed our heads off the whole time.

"Now that story's a little embarrassing but it kind of illustrates the idea that you never have to be bored, because there's always something to do.

"Besides blowing ketchup through straws, my friends and I like to go to the movies, go to the beach, go to Raging Waters, swim, walk around, sit around, and talk."

Yeah...that was me at sixteen. I just thought it was kind of funny, brought a wave of nostalgia over me. Aw, my Katie! Those were the days. We really were kind of weird. And dorky.

Geesh, I'm supposedly 16 in this picture (original found in the autobiography next to the story about ketchup) but I look closer to 12. That's Katie on the right. Nice shirt, Lizer.