PSAs from the p-a-s-t

Oh, how I remember all of these...this first one I used to find especially terrifying on Saturday mornings. That was when I used to see a lot of these...



The dad in the next one doesn't look cool enough to smoke weed in front of his kids. At least, enough so that this aspiring drummer would pick up on it. And sheesh, talk about defensive. Easy, junior.


Here's the one that everyone knows—brain on drugs=fried egg. However, it bothers me that he says, "THIS is drugs." It's the whole subject-verb agreement thing, I think. I mean, if the man poured oil into a pan and said "THESE are drugs," I think it'd still sound weird. Maybe if he said "This is an example of an illegal substance."


And hahaha...this next one I SO remember. "I'm not a chicken, you're a turkey!" And I have to agree with one of the commenters on the youtube page: Who would offer pot to a nine year old? Maybe if you smoke weed and then watch TMNT, it'll make more sense. Still, if one of the turtles told ME to stay off the stuff, I know I'd take it seriously.


Re: the below video: Pee Wee Herman is a GREAT role model. I think they use the same "serious" music noise on this one as the swimming pool one. It reminds me of the opening for A Current Affair which can hear here.


This next ad I don't remember personally, but I've seen it before on something else, I believe. I love how the singing pills rhyme "serious," "delirious," "fear of us," and "dangerous." Once the pills start talking to you, it's probably time to lay off the hard candy.


This is just...awful. These people have no rhythm. At all. God, this sucks.


And here...the REAL kids on the block..."walter dos drugs."




But she DID party all night! Who lied?

And now, with all of those, I leave you this, one of my favorite childhood memories regarding anti-drug PSAs. I remember watching this cartoon feature in school every year. Where else can you get Winnie the Pooh talking about smack and crank? Awesome.

tell me what you want, what you really really want

There are some things that I miss so very much about my childhood. Being virtually worry-free, having my summers all to myself, and quite possibly the best part of all—sleepovers.

Two of my gal pals came over this weekend and we had the best time ever. We started out by going to the Bessemer Flea Market. and while there were several amusing characters and entertaining finds, I was, at best, slightly let down. We went from there t purchase supplies for the sleepover—sodas, snacks, and the quintessential slumber party food: pizza. We also made yummy spinach artichoke dip, watched Girls Next Door on DVD, and played Mall Madness. The one thing that was slightly different about this girls' night from those of my school days was the fact that we each had a bottle of liquor to help the party along. It was a lot more fun when we made up dances to Spice Girls songs with a slight buzz.

If only I could take a day or two to spend as my childhood self...it's so nice to think about not having a care in the world. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'd do it all over again. There are things I would different if I knew then what I know now. But chances are, I'd probably make all the same mistakes.

snow big deal

So this weekend, we got some snow. Finally. Everyone was waiting for it, though I was still not quite certain it was even cold enough to snow. But snow and behold, there it was, covering my apartment complex on Saturday morning.

I remember talking to my mom, either the day of or the night before, and she said, "I saw on the news that ya'll are supposed to get some snow this weekend. Have you been to the store? Do you have enough supplies?"

The first words out of my mouth were, "Yes, mother. I have milk and bread, and a jug of water in the fridge."

Then I stopped myself. I don't even know why I said that. I'm not particularly fond of milk, and I don't have anything to put in between the bread in the first place. Why does every feel the need to run out and get bread and milk as soon as the weather gets bad? We've been doing that since before I could remember.

presents from Christmases past

It's funny to me when I think about how things change as far as what we get for Christmas each year.

I remember one year in particular, I can't recall how old I was, but all I wanted was the McDonald's Happy Meal Magic fry maker and cookie maker. It was part of this whole set of toys that was said to recreate actual McDonald's food (!).

Lo and behold, my wonderful parents (or was it Santa?) bought me both for Christmas that year. My cousin, Nathan, also received part of the set, and we could wait to set up our own makeshift McDonald's in my parents' kitchen.

To say I was disappointed would be an understatement.

I don't know what I was honestly expecting, but imagine my childish surprise upon discovering that the "french-fry maker" didn't make french fries at all. (Maybe I thought that they would package a child's toy that allowed children 6 & up to dip potato strips into hot grease. I don't know.)

Instead, the "french-fry maker" consisted of running a piece of crustless white bread through a shredder of sorts. You were then supposed to sprinkle the "fries" with "seasoning," or a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. Not like fries at all.
But at least they tasted good. Not like the "cookie maker." Talk about disgusting.

The manufacturers of this item, I believe it was Mattell (I'm praying to God neither contained lead paint), thought they could fool innocent young children by including an exact replica of the McDonald's cookies box for the user to store their homemade treats in, therefore making it look more like the real thing.

It sure as hell didn't taste like the real thing.

The so-called "cookies" were made by grinding up a graham cracker, mixing it with water and I think chocolate chips, and then pressing it into the shape of a beloved Mickey D's character.

Water, graham cracker crumbs, and chocolate chips. Yum.

I think there was also a McNugget maker and hamburger maker (I don't even want to know how), a milkshake maker (it used milk and instant pudding...wouldn't that technically be a pudding maker?), and a drink fountain (as simple as it sounds, I believe.) However, after that one Christmas, I became a jaded little third-grader and discontinued my desire for the Happy Meal Magic set. (For those interested, I found a few of the sets up for bid on eBay. Good luck!


Here it is, folks. The McDonald's Happy Meal Magic cookie maker. In all it's glory. I love that they have an example of the graham cracker going through the grinder, and then wow! cookies emerge from below.


The McNugget maker. I can at least understand making cookies from crushed-up grahams, but I really don't know how one might make anything at home that might remotely taste like chicken. This scares me. That albino girl and Asian boy sure don't look taken aback in the least, though.


Then there's the hamburger maker. The girl on the box looks so EXCITED! She literally can't wait to eat that thing that looks eerily like a drop of fecal matter. I kinda wish I would've gotten this one for Christmas because now, my interest is piqued.



Front and back view of the shake maker. I wish I would've read the print on the front: "Make delicious shakes you can drink that look like McDonald's shakes!" Maybe then I would not have been so disappointed.
I also like that they include a checklist on the back of the box for the ingredients.


And the drink fountain. The seller for this item on eBay says this about the product: "McDONALD'S HAPPY MEAL MAGIC DRINK FOUNTAIN. MAKE DELICIOUS THIRST-QUENCHING DRINKS THAT LOOK LIKE McDONALD'S DRINKS!"
Wonderful. Not just any drinks, but "thirst-quenching drinks!" And make drinks that "look" like McDonald's drinks? Why would you want a drink that "looks" like a soda, when you could just pour the soda in? I understand that the novelty is in the fact that it's a dispenser, but seriously? Probably the lamest of all the Happy Meal Magic toys.

marching to the beat of a different crayola

There are so many things that stick out to me about my school years, especially kindergarten.

I was in Mrs. Barton's class, along with about half of my graduating class. Little did I know, many of the same kids with whom I used to spend hours gluing pencil boxes together and trading crayons would be the same kids I would stand beside as I tossed my graduation cap high into the air outside of Wallace Hall a mere 13 years later.

But I digress.

I remember crawling up into Mrs. Barton's big orange chair, which always seemed to be so much bigger to the 5-year-old me, and reading to all the other kids from my latest library book. Among those selections were such literary classics as One Fish, Two Fish and Stone Soup.

I also remember being Mrs. Barton's special assistant and getting to go on errands and such during naptime while the rest of my juvenile classmates sleep on their plastic fold-out mats, pretending to nap.

I felt invincible.

One of my favorite times, however, was when we were given papers on which I was able to use my favorite things of all – crayons.

I loved to color. One of my most treasured gifts as a kid was this special Crayola turnstile that you could put your crayons on and gently spin when you needed to view the full array of your crayons, all right there at arm's length. It even had a sharpener built in. Perfection.

I remember slapping a kid (I still remember his name, Frankie) in the face because he spun my turnstile around so hard that all the crayons went flying.

He deserved it. And it would have been much worse had the teacher not stopped me. God help Frankie if I ever run into him in a dark alley…

And again, I digress.

One day, the teacher passed out a coloring sheet to all us eager kindergarteners. I was ecstatic. For this was no ordinary coloring sheet…oh no. It had special rules and directions. Kind of like a puzzle.

My specialty.

There were caterpillars on it, I believe. Or maybe ladybugs. Whatever. They were bugs that crawl. The amount of legs makes no difference.

There were rules such as, "Look at these two bugs. (I did.) Color the bug on the left orange, then color the bug on the right blue. (Piece of cake.)"

Moving on.

"There are 10 bugs here. (Duh, I could count.) Pick two colors. (I chose red and green – Christmas colors!). Color seven bugs one color, and color three bugs another color. (Child's play, I said to myself.)"

I set to work. I started first with my green crayon. One green bug…two green bugs…and so on until I had colored seven green bugs…or so I thought.

Being ever methodical and OCD, even as a child, I put my green crayon away, right then. I didn't want to risk losing it, or breaking it, or even worse – having someone steal it. (The worst thing I could do was to let my precious green fall into the grimy, grubby hands of Frankie.)

I set out to coloring my red bugs with my freshly sharpened red crayon. One…two…three…four…wait a minute.

Four?

There were only supposed to be three red bugs.

Apparently I had begun on the seventh green bug, but something distracted me (as usually it did), and I had forgotten to completely color the last of the green bug.
But I had already packed my green crayon away…I didn't want to have to get it back out again.

I looked from the page, to the crayon in my hand, back to the page again.

Eh.

I decided that I would just do what I thought was the most logical thing.

Rather than go through all the trouble of getting out of box and unpacking my green crayon again, I would simply fill in the white spots with my red crayon. It would look nice and complete, and no one would be the wiser. Besides. My teacher would see that I had started coloring it green and merely topped it off with a touch of red. She might even be impressed. And I had stayed inside the lines the whole time. After all, I was the colorer who had won coloring contests at the local K-Mart. I knew what I was doing.

Anyway – I was one of her favorites. Right?

So I did it.

Imagine my shock when the teacher passed our papers back out and I had less than satisfactory marks on my paper.

It took me years before I realized what I had done wrong.

I guess the moral of the story is, don't take shortcuts. Because in the end, you'll only be left with a red-and-green bug and a sad face.

At least, that's what I got.

my sister rocks

I love childhood memories.
And I especially love those memories that are attached to my older sister, Autumn. Having a sister has definitely made growing up so much more fun, although there were many times that I thought I hated her and wished I never had a sister.

But I never meant it. Most of the time. My sister has grown to be my best friend.

When we were kids, we used to ride the bus to school every day. (Up until they rezoned the bus routes and we had to ride Coach Sherrill's bus instead of Ms. Elrod's bus, and we were instantly transformed into 'car riders.') For a long time, we even sat together. As a child, I felt as if she protected me from all the evils on the bus.

And oh, were there evils on the bus.

After a little while, we had assigned seating on the bus. And it was awful. I remember sitting in the back half of the bus while the high school girls used to talk about things that would make my third-grade ears burn. And on those frightening days when my sister was sick or for some reason didn't ride the bus, I had to face it all alone.

Oh, the bus.

But I digress.

Every morning, my sister and I would rise from our bunk beds (which were later disconnected and placed side by side), get dressed, eat a quick breakfest (for Autumn, a raw hot dog; for me, a strawberry Pop-Tart with no icing), grab our lunches and go wait for our bus.

I remember on one fateful morning, around 645 or 700, we were standing, waiting. After a moment or two of pensive thought while staring at the ground, my sister turned to me.

"Look at that rock," she said, pointing to it with her toe. "It looks like a penguin."

I squinted, careful not to drop my fluorescent pink Tupperware lunchbox. "Really?" The rock looked like a teapot to me.

"Yeah," she said, almost daring me to challenge her.

And since she was almost five years my senior and everything she said to me was gospel, I nodded my head. "You are so right."

Not to be left out and desperate for my sister to think I was cool, I quickly scanned the ground and found a rock that was pretty much like all the others, rounded and ovally-shaped, perfectly smooth and protruding from the ground.

"Whoa, look at this one," I said, tapping it with my foot.

Autumn leaned closer, then asked, "Yeah? What is it?"

"It looks like a whale," I said proudly, obviously pleased with my find.

"Which part looks like the whale?" Apparently she was not convinced.

I knelt down and ran my fingers along the smooth, arced surface. "Right here. It looks like a whale's back."

My sister scoffed, and I straightened back up. Then she said, "I know what we should do. We should stand on our rocks every single day while we wait for the bus. And one day, the kids on the bus will start to notice that we stand in the exact same spot every day, and they'll wonder how we do it. No one will know that we have these rocks to hold our places. I'll bet even the bus driver will notice."

When she got finished talking, she smiled and assumed her position on top of her rock, the penguin-slash-teapot. Ever the dutiful little sister, I stood on top of my whale-rock, waiting for the bus to come and take us away.

And so we did, every morning, for the rest of that school year.

I kept waiting and waiting for some one to notice, flashing a knowing smile at my sister as we climbed aboard our yellow chariot.

"How do you two do it," they would ask. "How do you stand in the exact same spot, every single day?"

No one ever did.

reduce, reuse, recycle

Every since I was a little girl, my father has always taught me not to be wasteful. He was always telling me, "Don't leave that food on your plate. If we're paying for it, you're going to fnish it all" or "Heck no, don't throw that away! We can save that [insert various object] for later!" or "Wrap that chicken finger up in a napkin and stick it in your purse! I'm not too proud!"

A simple trip to the local fast food joint was an opportunity to stockup one's car or truck for simple emergencies. As we would sit to dine on a feast of hamburgers and french fries, he would grab a huge stack of napkins.

"But Dad," I would say, "we won't possibly need all those."

"Summer Michael," he would reply, "I''m gonna put these in the truck later. They'll come in handy one day."

As so it went with napkins, ketchup, assorted jams and jellies in little packets, salt, pepper, you name it. I was conditioned to either leave the surplus items on the edge of the table by my mother (that's another blog entirely, see "slow down so I can ketchup") or take them with me, as directed by my father.

Just last week, I was eating lunch with a friend. We had both taken a rather large stack of napkins. With my father's words echoing in my head, I decided to bring the leftover napkins along for the ride as we ventured back out to the car. I carelessly tossed them in the backseat, and I briefed my passenger on my father's pearls of wisdom. We placed our to-go cups filled with our beverages of choice in the driver's and passenger side cupholders, respectively, and headed off to our next destination.

Several days later, napkins forgotten but waiting wordlessly in the wings (aka, the backseat of my car), I was on my way to work when I noticed the other to-go still in the cup holder of my car.

As I went to pick it up, I was unpleasantly surprised by a soggy and disintegrated cup bottom. I muttered several words of disgust and emptied what was left of the drink into the parking lot, tossing the tattered remains into the back floorboard. My cupholders were now filled with a murky brown liquid.

Upon doing tossing the cup remains, I saw a flash of white peeking out at me. The napkins! Silently thanking my father for instilling within me his frugal and thrifty principles, I proceeded to soak up said liquid with the napkins. A few minutes later, problem solved!

So many things I have gleaned from my parents, and this has truly proved to be one of the most fruitful lessons.

high school

High School

It's so weird to me...here recently I've been getting all these adds and stuff from people that I went to high school with. I mean, it's only been like three years since I graduated, but it feels like forever. I remember thinking that some of these people I might never see again, but with all this new technology, it's entirely possible.

I guess I liked high school okay. I mean, there are definitely moments I choose to forget and times where I just wanted to scream! (And probably did.) But I had some good times, too. I loved being on the yearbook and newspaper staff, I loved seeing a lot of the same people everyday, and I especially loved getting to see all my close girlfriends and hang out with them. I miss you guys! I remember thinking that when we graduated, things would never be the same. And they haven't been. Some of us have gotten married, a few have moved away, some have had children )not just my girls, but everyone I went to school with). But I don't think things changing is a bad thing. Not at all. We just grew up, that's all. Most of the people I graduated with I have known since kindergarten. We are from such a small school and a small town; we all knew everything about one another.

And now it's getting closer to time for me to graduate college. At least, I hope. And that means that a lot of the class of 2003 are getting closer to entering the world and trying to figure out we want to do, as if we haven't been doing that for the past three years anyway. Whenever I see people I went to school with, I alwamys like to see how they've changed, how they've stayed the same. Then it kills me for people to see me and say that I haven't changed a bit. I feel like a completely different person. My first reaction is "What!?!?! I cut my hair!" (Which, coincidentally, is what I seemed to be known for, and it has grown back out, and that's kinda stupid). But also, I feel so much different. I moved out. FINALLY. I am trying to take control of my life. i think differently, I talk differently, I believe in a whole new way of thinking. But I guess a lot of it is inner change. Like I said, I grew up. But sometimes...you do want to return to that immature way of thinking. Not just high school. Way before that. like, elementary school, when we were just kids, and everything was so simple.

Anyway. Just a thought. I miss my friends.