I can't believe we've never done blood!

Hmm. I will have to ruminate on this for a while, but Aimee! Loved yours.

And Deb, god, 18. There's a girl here at work who's 18, it's her summer before college, and she's sweet and innocent and doing makeovers with her friends and watching "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" and thinking it's all right.

I'm thinking that 18 was 15 years ago now, and I was learning about teeth during sex, and hangovers and cheap booze and betrayal and myself.

I'm always amazed at what 15-year-olds are supposed to know. I was a clueless, amorphous lump until I hit college, when all the anonymous facts finally got a framework to relate to.

College was an ephipany for me; I met people who actually thought I was interesting and smart and funny.

High school was a fiery pit of hell and blunder.

What Erin said.

High school was why I immediately saw the metaphor in Buffy. I would have rather dealt with a giant snake.

Maybe I was just a late bloomer, but I don't remember any hormonal dramas associated with high school, at least on my part. The high school Peyton Place shows and movies just boggle me. Maybe my classmates were seething in a cauldron of sexual urges and activities, but all I ever felt was an odd sort of detachment with the suspicion that I was missing something. It never occurred to me that guys and girls were getting up to anything together.

I actually don't regret this. By the time I hit college I was able to rationally consider what I wanted to do with guys instead of just getting washed away in a flood of lust.

Blood Drabble

By the time I sit down, half of the party is there. These are women you hear before you see, especially when it's time to celebrate.

They all order without restraint- wine, beer, a cocktail. This is a party after all. My mother's eyes are on me.

"I'll have a margarita, too. Salt, on the rocks."

I don't want to look at her, but I know what she's thinking. Blood always tells.

I was like Connie, probably. Except looking for people who Would Appreciate Me...maybe this is it? I haven't changed as much as I would like.

The "school epiphany" thing always fascinates me, because my life was so very much down a different road. By the time I was eighteen, I was a hundred and three. In certain ways, I had to make myself get younger as I got older. Travel helps with that, a lot of it.

One thing I was very naive about at eighteen was suicide. I didn't know you were supposed to slash vertically, so I went horizontal. Deep, but it slowed things down. The water got pretty frickin' pink, though.

Sail, I can't donate blood for that same reason, even if they'd take my blood without the other reasons to not take it (allergies, et al). I moved back to the States in 1981, but we were back and forth to Europe seven or eight times between '81 and '93. And we're carnivores.

I was still fairly naive at 18. But not like this little girl -- damn.

I couldn't be a cutter. OD'ing was the way I tried, and it was accidental. I (morbid much?) crack myself up remembering my friend J. telling me about how I froze the ER doc out: "Even fucked up, I am smarter than you! Don't PATRONIZE me, you asshole!"

Of course, then I walked into a wall, so maybe the impact was negated.