Teenage me

[nabbit]

Teenage me. To add to the list here.

The closest I got to accomplishing anything when I was a teenager was attending a Graphic Design course when I was seventeen. I quit after five months as an attention-seeking strategy.
Here are the main features of seventeen year old me:

1. Hair! I had hair! In the style of "Tucker's Luck".
2. A scruffy blue jumper that I loved so much: I rarely wore anything else. The seams came apart at the shoulders, and formed two cornish-pasty-style epaulettes. On hot days, I would not remove my jumper: I would simply remove everything underneath it, and them put it back on.


3. Various badges used to hold together aformentioned gashes in jumper. Sometimes, I would use safety pins with memos attached. These days, we have PDAs.
4. Oh dear. On my graphics course, we were encouraged to purchase fancy A2 portifolios to store our oversized artwork. I was too stingy and too overtly eccentric to conform, and carried all of my papers to-and-from college between the folds of a Subbuteo Football pitch.
5. Fishing-Tackle box used to store pens and stuff. I remember masking-tape being as good as currency at college.
6. Jeans with too-tight hems. I though anything approaching flares would stigmatise me beyond redemption.
7. Hyper-tough steel-toe-capped work boots. It took a whole year to wear each pair in. Although I don't know if I was wearing them in, or if they were wearing me in.

Looking back, I don't really like the person I was when I was a teenager. I think that trying to find happiness was, for me, like those times you are looking for your keys: and you look, and you look, and eventually think, oh sod it, I give up, I'm going to be late for work. So you decide to leave the house anyway, hoping that somebody else will be home before you to let you in. As just as you are are stepping out of the house, they are right there - you find your keys - they were under your bag the whole time you were looking, you idiot. It's like the act of surrender throws them into visibility again.

If I appear to be reluctant to re-establish old friendships with people who contact me over t'internet, it's because I don't much like who I was back then, and I don't want old friends to extrapolate teenage-me to construct the middle-age me. Although I still have the tackle box. It is now used to store needles and buttons and velcro.