Sixteen Candles

I spent last week in Maine with my parents and our combined menagerie.  I am very grateful that my Mum and Dad allow me to use their home as a vacation retreat.  Their fancy-shmancy guest room mattress and soaker tub are quite luxurious.  I had the opportunity to visit with all of my grandparents during vacation, which is also a luxury for a 33-year-old.

While home, I got wrapped up in trying to organize family photos.  With many boxes of photos and albums in disarray, this project consumed my time and my parents' living room floor for several days.  In conjunction with the photo project, I finally moved all of my junk out of a guest room closet in my parents' house.  I got rid of some things and organized the rest into a couple of newly purchased plastic bins.  I was amused to stumble across name tags from the summer engineering program in which I participated nearly twenty years ago.  My name tag and that of my summer crush were both tucked away with my high school belongings.  Not only did I go through a pretty intense stalking phase in the mid-90s, I saved the evidence.  Another amusing find was my varsity letter.  I played soccer and basketball during my freshman year of high school, before renouncing all sports and embracing my position as the world's least athletic person.

And now to tie together my predilection for stalking and my disdain for sports in one embarrassing story.  I spent my sixteenth birthday at the aforementioned engineering camp.  When I returned home, I was distraught about leaving my new pals and my new crush/obsession.  My parents had arranged a surprise family birthday celebration for me a couple of days after camp ended.  For reasons that remain unknown, they decided my sweet sixteen would be best recognized by playing "beach volleyball" at a local playground that was nowhere near a beach.  The location did boast a net and some sand, so, yeah, my teen years were pretty much the source material for "The O.C."  In my aggressively depressed state, I was dragged to a volleyball event that I would have loathed on a good day.  As my large extended family played, I sat under a tree and publicly wept.  I still feel queasy thinking about my overwrought reaction to that volleyball outing, but my defense is two-fold.

1) Had my family never met me?  Beach volleyball?  Seriously?  I would have chosen this activity over my (pale, pudgy) dead body.

2) I was very into John Hughes movies in high school.  Very very.  As my sixteenth birthday approached and I fancied myself madly in love with a slightly older guy, I started to draw parallels between red-headed Samantha Baker's story and red-headed Samantha Me's life.  As I sat in a puddle of tears under a tree next to a sad excuse for a beach volleyball court, I kept waiting for my camp crush to drive up and for this to happen:

This did not happen.  Instead, I made an ass out of myself in front of my family and various members of the community.  But every cloud has a silver lining and I'm pretty sure my parents got me a Dairy Queen ice cream cake that year.  If you have to swallow a giant serving of disappointment and humiliation, the fudge-y center of a DQ cake helps the medicine go down.