oh make me over
i'm all i wanna be
a walking study
in demonology

when i listen to hole, i remember my eighth grade year. what an odd year that was. i really don't remember that much of it, other than the fact that i was an angry adolescent. it was painful. i didn't have very much self-confidence... that was before i realized that true coolness comes from within, and if you have the confidence in yourself to be strong then you can handle anything. but no, i was an amphibian then. a tadpole. i was starting to sprout legs, but i still had that hideous tail that made me want to hide in the corner.
i remember more than anything just being angry. liking boys who would never like me back. i remember mom telling me that i dressed like a pearl jam reject, in my flannel and baggy jeans. i remember abusing my albuterol inhaler. i remember skipping athletics almost every day spring semester to go with stephanie and play with the animals in mr. allison's room. what a liberating discovery it was that they didn't take attendance in that class, or that you could slip between the cracks and get out without anyone noticing.
eighth grade is the year i usually overlook when i remember my past. ninth grade and seventh grade stand out so much more: seventh because of the "nathan drama" and ninth because of that excruciating moment when i asked jason burns to the backwards prom and he looked at me like, who the fuck are you? eighth grade... it just wasn't. it wasn't exciting, it wasn't fun, but it wasn't terribly painful either.
i think that's the year i was closest to hitting rock bottom though. i think that if my parents hadn't had such a close eye on me i would have started smoking pot and drinking. of course, at that point, i thought that those two things were the epitome of bad-assery, but no one i hung out with did either, so i suppose i was fortunate in that respect.
eighth grade must have been the year i went trick or treating with barbara and abbi as two hippies (abbi and i) and a psycho four-year-old (barbara, who else?)...
ohh, that was the year that barbara cast the love spell on brian at the colorguard sleepover... and had a stalker for the next six years. that incident, as well as a few ouija-board-related incidents at abbi's house, totally freaked me out.
i wore black fingernail polish. i wanted to be a freak. i wanted kurt cobain to still be alive. i wanted to fuck spencer rex. now, he's a used-up drughead, still in high school. he skated. i wished i could skate. i wanted to be an outcast. i wanted to be tortured.
i wrote a shitload of poetry that year. bad poetry. poetry i always meant to put to music, but it just didn't work. the poetry of someone who wishes they hurt, but really doesn't. someone who wants to be misunderstood, just so they can yell at their parents, "you just don't understand me!" the problem was that they did. so much for my plans to be a starving artist.
i think i wanted to be courtney love.

oh look at my face
my name is might have been
my name is never was
my name is forgotten