Tagged: beinglizardek

29
May
2009

DRAINED

All week I’ve been dreading attending the funeral of my friend, Carol. How do you reconcile the death of someone your own age when there is so much still to DO, so much planned, so many years of experience still to come? When you know that person didn’t want to go, wasn’t ready to go, and went in such a blindingly fast and unjust way? Maybe no one is ever REALLY ready to go, but I suspect that when you’re 90 it’s easier to accept than when you’re half that. The weather today was changeable. It kept changing. It rained...

06
May
2009

HOPE & HURTING

There’s always hope, right? In the bottom corner of the box, it sits and waits for you and springs up, as glad to see you as you are to see it, when you finally dare to lift the lid one more time. The hospital visit this evening went much better than I was prepared for and I feel so overwhelmingly grateful that maybe, maybe, hopefully, even if things aren’t looking up, they are at least looking a bit better for my friend who had been so steadily going downhill so fast this past week. It’s hard to feel anything but...

24
Apr
2009

SENIOR HIGH

OMG! I bet you thought I was never going to get my diploma! Where the hell was I? Aaaah, yes, moving from Belgium to Germany! Back when we moved to Germany, there were US military bases everywhere, all over the freaking country. Berlin still had its wall, after all. There were so many other DoDDS (Department of Defense Dependents Schools) that our sports teams didn’t even have to play against any German schools, ever. My dad was stationed at Ramstein AFB, but we lived in Landstuhl which was where the military hospital and Army post were, and we went to...

18
Apr
2009

JUNIOR HIGH

The summer before my 7th grade year, we moved overseas to Belgium. I didn’t even know where Belgium was on a map beforehand. My dad was stationed at a tiny little Air Force base named Kleine Brogel (strangely, I can’t find a translation for Brogel online…any of my Dutch LJ friends able to help?). We didn’t live in base housing, instead my parents chose to rent a house on the outskirts of a little farm village called Overpelt which was a few miles away, but we spent nearly a month of the summer before we found the house living in...

16
Apr
2009

NEARLY SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

I know the picture of Melissa Then is black-and-white which wasn’t the best choice for comparison, perhaps, but it was actually the best one I could find, and the one where you can really see the resemblance. She was 9 years old when she first starred in Little House on the Prairie and I was 9 years old in the picture below. She was born the same year as I was, only 3 months before me. We had the same color hair, freckles, brown eyes, and big front teeth: Melissa Then Lizardek Then

14
Apr
2009

UPPER ELEMENTARY

Aaah, the middle school years. These were the years where my memories started to stick and become smoother, with fewer gaps in between. There is a lot that is still a blur, however. I only remember the family across the street, for example, and none of the other kids in my classes or neighborhood. I tried long hair, and though you don’t see it in these pictures, I had glasses, though I hated them and took them off at every opportunity, and at one point had to wear a patch to help correct my amblyopia. My mom would draw eyes...

13
Apr
2009

LOWER ELEMENTARY

It’s taken me longer than I thought to start these posts. I’ve been waffling over whether to break them up or put them all together and I think that I shall break them up. Not because I want to draw out the suspense or drive you crazy but because there are things I want to say about the persons I once was at different stages and it’s a harder process than simply shooting out a couple of flippant descriptive paragraphs would be. Thanks to my mom and sister and brother-in-law for facilitating the madness! This is me in kindergarten. My...

10
Apr
2009

OMG

I got the scanned school photos from my mom and sister and I’m not sure I can bear to inflict this horror on the Internet. Why did no one teach me to STEP AWAY FROM THE CURLING IRON? EEK

24
Mar
2009

STOP LOOK LISTEN

With rushing winds and gloomy skies The dark and stubborn Winter dies: Far-off, unseen, Spring faintly cries, Bidding her earliest child arise; March! —Bayard Taylor If you don’t like the weather in Sweden, just wait five minutes—that was certainly true today. We woke to blizzardly sideways snow and over the course of the day, we had sunshine, blue skies, grey skies, rain, clouds, snow again, and sunshine again. March comes in like a lion and goes out like an LOLcat. A capricious and frivolous month, for sure. The fact that it is nearly April—April!—3 months down in the year already,...

22
Mar
2009

ATTEMPTING TO BRAKE THE AUTOPILOT

Sitting with my hands on the keyboard, I move them up, bending the wrist then dropping it again. My head is inclined, though I don’t have to look at the keys to type; typing class years ago ingrained the touch of the alphabet into the tips of my fingers. They move just so in the clickety dance to produce letters, words, sentences, whole paragraphs without any seeming gap between thought and intention. Thought, however, escapes easily or rather has never been here to begin with in this instance, once again I sat to write without the preparation of a subject....