Ramblings on Skating
So Jon and I accompanied three of my nieces and nephews to Classic Skating the other night, and maybe it's because I haven't been skating in over 15 years, or maybe it's because people in Utah feed their kids Malt O'Meal at every meal, but I don't remember kids being so small. At least I don't remember being that small, but I've been 5'11'' since I was 14, so maybe I skipped being that small altogether.
I know for certain that Robbie Hawkins was not that small. Robbie was my first real live human boyfriend, as opposed to the entirely imaginary David Hasselhoff look-alike boyfriend, Brock, with whom I'd often play in the backyard. Brock was my imaginary boyfriend for a good decade, and he was sometimes personified in a full-length body pillow that I would spoon on Saturday mornings as I watched "Land of The Lost" and "Saved by the Bell."
Robbie, the boyfriend of flesh and blood, was 10 years old and we were in the same 5th grade class. He always wore a maroon member's only jacket that you could tell he wore everywhere, even to bed at night. He had great teeth, a smile so perfect that you knew he wasn't ever going to need braces, and not needing braces was perhaps the sexiest thing a 10 year old boy could do. What made him totally unique, though, was how his face looked like it was being systematically colonized by a totalitarian regime of freckles.
We started "going together" one Saturday afternoon after we ran into each other at the local skating rink. He was there with one of his freckled cousins �apparently the freckles were totalitarian and imperialistic � and I was there with my father, who at the time was in the middle of a brutal divorce from my mother. I spent the entire afternoon horrified that they would play that Foreigner song "I Wanna Know What Love Is," because I didn't want Robbie to see me or my father crying while wearing skates, I would have just died.
At school the following Monday Robbie stopped me in the hallway before class and told me very seriously, "Your father looks like a good man." I had no idea what he meant but I knew right then that I totally wanted to go with him. And so we started going together, not particularly anywhere, sometimes near the monkey bars on the playground, sometimes by the water fountain by the boy's restroom. We once walked all the way around the football field, and that was the farthest I would go with a boy for at least another seven years.
We never once talked on the telephone or even held hands. The only thing ever really exchanged between us were his drawings of a female superhero who was supposed to be me. Throughout the few months we went together the superhero's boobs got bigger and bigger, a feeble attempt on his part, I suppose, to encourage my own boobs to start sprouting. Little did he know that my boobs wouldn't take the hint for another 11 years when I would return home from a semester abroad in England 20 pounds heavier and two boobs closer to womanhood.
Sometimes I wonder about Robbie, I wonder how things turned out with Ren�e, the really short girl he went with after me. I wonder how their skate date went the week after he and I had to stop going together, if she fell on her face or slipped on her fat ass, that two-faced scheming whore-bitch.
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brittney said:
Renee have boobs?
01.29.03 - 09:33 AM / 1Katie said:
The scary thing about rollerskating rinks is the fact that they still play the same music from 15 years ago. You feel like you've never left. Except for the fact that you can't believe you actually skate around in a circular motion all night without being bored out of your mind.
01.29.03 - 09:37 AM / 2Paul Gutman said:
I went to an all-boys school, so going with someone at the jungle gym was tough. I do remember, however, skating in a macho fashion to Fleetwood Mac's 1987 classic "Little Lies."
01.29.03 - 09:54 AM / 3Funtime Ben said:
I'm sure RenÈe's super-hero totally sucked anyway.
01.29.03 - 10:16 AM / 4Cory said:
I knew a Robbie once. He sat bare-assed on bubble gum. It took him a pair of scissors and Gumbyesque joints to remove the offending Bubblicious. He was twenty-five and liked to draw superheros.
01.29.03 - 10:17 AM / 5Yahmdallah said:
My first girlfriend wrote me an "I Like You" note which specifically pointed out that she didn't LOVE me, but just liked me a lot. If I still had that thing, I'd frame it. It was a masterpiece of loving equivocation.
01.29.03 - 10:21 AM / 6B said:
Superhero Dooce are u gonna share those drawings someday to all of us?
01.29.03 - 10:36 AM / 7April said:
You have such a unique way of describing what is normally so mundane. Totalitarian AND imperialistic? I will never look at freckles the same way again.
01.29.03 - 10:51 AM / 8Ariel said:
The first time I heard about "going together," it was from a friend in fifth grade.
Her: I'm GOING with Josh.
Me: Going where?
Her: [scoffs] You know. GOING.
Me: ...To the bathroom?!
That was the dirtiest thing my 10 year old mind could comprehend.
01.29.03 - 11:09 AM / 9Zan said:
Yikes - the skating rink - oh so many memories of Fleetwood Mack and Blondie songs and that good ol' "shoot the duck" manuver we had to learn in order to win free passes and soda.
Then I remember bringing rollerblades to the rink and getting verbally acosted by the Patrick Swazye lookalikes, the wanna-be-tough, rink refs for having wheels that allowed me to go so much faster than they could go that I was kicked out of the rink.
I never went back.
But I still have the rollerblades.
01.29.03 - 11:33 AM / 10darsella said:
why did you and robbie have to stop going together?
01.29.03 - 11:46 AM / 11anna #2 (there is another anna, right?) said:
one of the most humiliating things that has ever happened to me was when i was in fifth grade and i was equally in love with two different boys who just happened to be best friends (a habit i unfortunately didn't grow out of for many years thereafter) and somehow they found out and decided that they would both ask me to "GO" with them at the same time one day after school.
it was also april 1st, and the gales of laughter and simultaneous chorus of 'april fooooooools!" that followed their perfectly planned social execution still rings in my ears to this day.
i can, however, roller skate backwards.
take that, ya' bastards.
01.29.03 - 11:52 AM / 12dooce said:
Robbie and I had to stop going together because his very Baptist mother found out that he was going to the monkey bars with a very Mormon 10-yr old, and she thought I might try to convince him to start storing wheat in his attic.
So, officially, I blame the Baptists.
01.29.03 - 11:55 AM / 13KDunk said:
i think this web site kicks my fucking ass. well done.
01.29.03 - 12:00 PM / 14Sarah B. said:
When I went home in 4th grade and told my parents I was going with Matt B., my dad got very concerned and said, "Going where?"
He was totally Baptist too, only his mom worked for Planned Parenthood, and he had 7 sisters and every single one of them got pregnant before finishing high school, so I totally got the pick of the litter with old No Thumb.
01.29.03 - 12:02 PM / 15Craig said:
I usually avoid trying to remember things from this far back, because even today they embarrass me. Even though I am thinking to myself and nobody else probably remembers, I get embarrassed.
01.29.03 - 12:03 PM / 16Sarah B. said:
Just kidding about calling him old No Thumb.
01.29.03 - 12:03 PM / 17Heather #2 said:
They still play the same music?! I'm so going roller skating this weekend!
Dude, Anna "#2". You can't do that with your name. Let's call you Dos Anna, or Anna Squared or Anna II.
I'm feeling a little "out of the spotlight" when you add the "#2", and I hate feeling "out of the spotlight".
01.29.03 - 12:10 PM / 18allisonic said:
My rival in elementary school/junior high is now living in the same po-dunk town, 50 lbs. overweight, and working at Bojangles. Oh yeah.
01.29.03 - 12:12 PM / 19allisonic said:
Oh, my fucking two-faced scheming whore-bitch cheerleader was Beth Keatley.
01.29.03 - 12:14 PM / 20antisocial diva said:
"two-faced scheming whore-bitch"
they always are.
01.29.03 - 12:16 PM / 21kate said:
Did you people really say, "going with?" Nerds.
01.29.03 - 12:16 PM / 22Janna said:
Slightly off topic, Dooce, but is your new picture thing supposed to be something? Maybe this is because you post about poop a lot, but it looks to me like an off-kilter large intestine. Or maybe the stomach-duodenum pair. Nice.
01.29.03 - 12:18 PM / 23anna jr. said:
heather #2 - how about anna jr.?
will that work?
i totally understand by the way.
01.29.03 - 12:21 PM / 24Kirstie said:
My 4th grade love interest, R.J., ditched me in favor of some little ho named Kimmy (by which I mean, he stopped holding hands with me in the lunch line and started holding hands with Kimmy, instead), and when I (outraged!) confronted him about it, he told me very earnestly that he had decided he didn't want to marry me anymore, he wanted to marry Kimmy, but he would still, you know, take me out to football games and stuff.
01.29.03 - 12:22 PM / 25Kevynn Malone said:
My first girlfriend collected dead moths in her pencil box.
01.29.03 - 12:23 PM / 26Vera said:
In 7th grade, luck would have it that my class went to the ice skating rink with the 8th grade class that my boyfriend Daniel was in. Oh, the excitement. I was convinced that my teacher knew about my undying love for Daniel, and that's why we were going with his class. Unfortunately, Daniel, like Brock, was the imaginary kind of boyfriend, so I had to resort to telling dirty jokes in the back of the bus to get his attention. Needless to say, we never went together. Anywere.
01.29.03 - 12:35 PM / 27aubs said:
My first 'going with' experience was with Ethan Foster, the hunka hunka burnin' 3rd grade love who called me and asked me to 'go with' him after the whole 'accompany dad to the barber shop, spin around in the chair too much such that they asked me what I wanted to do with my hair, thus ending up with a mullet' debaucle. (which, for the record, made my mom shriek, cry, call her gay hairdresser and the only salvation was to chop off the remaining mullet, leaving me with a parted-in-the-middle short Mary Lou Retton 'do with feathered sides.) Anyhoo, apparently Ethan LIKED Mary Lou and thus asked me to go 'with' whereas I, while being completely smitten with said Mr. Foster, told him 'no' repeatedly on the phone while he asked 'why? why?' and cried. Denying my own love just because I was afraid to tell my parents I liked boys just yet.
What a wimp I was.
01.29.03 - 12:44 PM / 28bearclau said:
I remember the first time I got 'asked out'. I was in the 5th grade and Brian Vanderstreet called me. He was in the other 5th grade class, but we hung out on weekends because our younger brother/sister played soccer on the same team together.
Anyway, he called me and asked, "So, you wanna go out with me?"
Me, like the dumbass I was and didn't understand the question, replied "Go where? I don't know. My mom probably won't let me."
To which Brian answered, "Urrr...ok...???"
The next day I found out that he asked out two-faced scheming whore-bitch Dawn Stevens. And when I finally realized what 'going out' meant, I became obsessed and wanted Brian even more.
01.29.03 - 12:49 PM / 29Otter said:
Land of the Lost and Saved by the Bell in the same childhood? Wasn't Chaka like from the 70s and Screech from the 80s?
01.29.03 - 12:55 PM / 30