#i was at one point extremely embittered towards the addams family bc i'd get teased but

[hislittleraincloud]

"Yeah motherfucker 😡" and "Only if I can guarantee I look like Wednesday" averaging higher than those who don't, huh. Challenge accepted, I suppose.

There are no refunds for disappointment, since I already spent all the cash on courage:

I played the cello, except mine wasn't black.

The day of this stupid school concert, my parents forced me to wear a very uncomfortable outfit that my grandmother made. I fucking hated it and still hate the memory of its itchy collar against my neck. Hated wearing dresses. Hated wearing braids. (My mother never let me cut my hair until the end of the 5th grade when I just got sick of my braids and pulled them out during class. I had LOTS of thick, raven black hair when I was a kid, so it fluffed out and was just unmanageable.) Hated smiling (you would be very hard-pressed to find a photo of me as a child with a big, bright, toothy smile; my mother liked my dimples but I didn't like her so I never showed them, and to this day she still carries one that was professionally done — awful white dress and if I recall, without braids — in her wallet).

My mother, after the first photo was taken at home, had to spray my bangs back into my hair so it wouldn't bother me when I was playing; I've always been supersensitive about such things, because even if they weren't long enough to get into my eyes, I still always felt like they were in the way.

Anyway. I was about eight years old:

If you look closely, you can see my frown:

I mean hey, the cello looks like it could have been black in the B&W photo, but it wasn't. Just a regular looking, standard basswood cello that I played better by ear. Won't say what I'd play on it at home because I'd most certainly be accused of bullshit when it's not...my father had exposed me to classical music before I picked up the cello, so I had already had my favorite songs. Well, my father and his friends/college students*.

If you're still looking closely, you can also see that I'm the only one who carried around my sheet music in a Garfield folder. Everyone else had theirs in the generic school-provided folders. I just didn't care for those, and did what I was going to do (my parents supported me through that at least...probably because the year before this, my father had to defend my individuality against a biased/racist teacher, but that's a story for another night).

So there you go. That was 42 years ago, before most of you were born.

*One of his college students-turned-professor used to come over all the time when I was a kid to do work on our house and he taught me how to play this on my Casio keyboard that I had back then

I was floored the first time he showed me he could play it — the Casio was new, I'd gotten it for my 8th Christmas — and made him teach me whenever he came by. I don't think I perfected the whole song, but I got pretty far. Core memories of music...I have a lot of them, and I don't consider myself a musician by any means. Funny enough, I was weird but was always unsettled by horror-creepy. I had to grow into it, but still loved this song when I was little. My mother hated it, which only made me love it more.

In other news, I'm so fkn hot...in here. For fuck's sake, why does it feel like the fkn Carolinas? It's so gross and weird and humid and I feel like mold n' mushrooms would just instantly sprout on the hallway carpet if my shitty manager keeps the windows closed. It's moist. It fucking feels moist. This is not how it's supposed to feel in the Bay Area in almost-October. 😭