tell me a story...

I remember my good friend Danielle in high school asking somebody that once in that cute little nasaly voice of hers. I don't recall who she asked or why, but it's one of those random memory flashes that makes me smile whenever it pops up. Once in awhile I ask someone to tell me a story and I am usually able to coerce a pretty good one out of them.

I have quite the vault of stories in my memory. There's one from my husband involving an iguana running through the gravy bowl one Thanksgiving, another involves a friend of mine's gross misuse of a nebulizer. A personal favorite from my father's unruly youth involves his execution of an entire chicken coop with his BB gun. Most recently, I acquired a humdinger of a story over a bowl of nachos, but I think I'll keep that one filed way in the back so I don't run across it too often. Too bloody. However, all these stories and the dozens of others I have heard have one thing in common.

None of them are my own.

Yes, I suppose I could go off and kill some innocent farm animals if I so desired. I could do some tequila shots and cause some trouble that I may or may not be able to remember after the fact. I'm in my twenties, pretty good looking when I put my mind to it, so I shouldn't have any problem going out into the world and doing something worthy of the ten o' clock news or dinner conversation, at the very least.

So why am I always the one asking for good life stories instead of sharing my own? Frankly, I have none. Or not many that will hold anyone's attention for very long. This has been one of those small and stupid problems I've been grappling with since childhood. Specifically, it reared it's ugly head sometime in my fifth or sixth grade English class.

Those damned personal narratives. Worse than the annual compare and contrast papers or the ever-popular report on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Never has an eleven-year-old stared so blankly at a sheet of wide-ruled paper, never has writer's block struck someone so young. Don't worry, I am keeping all this in perspective. Most kids wrote about their family trip to Orlando, minor bodily injury, or catching a big fish at Lake Malone. Man, I couldn't even come up with anything to compete with that. So I decided to put my creativity to work and just conjure up something believable. The one I recall most vividly is about how five-year-old Amanda used the process of elimination to figure out what crayons were. Over the years, I've discovered a few flaws in this fake autobiographical account:

1. I showed a great deal of promise as an artist from a very early age, a talent I most certainly inherited from my mother, who was an artist herself. No self-respecting parent in the 1980s would have denied their child a cheap box of Crayolas. It wasn't my purpose to make my mother look like an idiot in the story, I just wanted to get a passing grade and move on to the next form of literary torture.

2. The story took place on the school bus, on my way to my first day as a bona fide kindergartener. I don't really recall the events of that day, but I'm pretty sure my mom would have driven me to school that day (both of us probably emotional wrecks) instead of dumping me off on the bus. For the reason I would have been an emotional wreck, see #3.

3. I'm told that I was a rather "stress-prone" child (well I'll be danged) and "acted out" by refusing to eat, among other things. I would imagine little bitty Amanda, after being shoved onto that clunky bus bound for Olmstead School, might have undergone mild to moderate stress. It is unlikely that I would have tried to eat my crayons in a crude attempt to figure out what they were.

I wonder what grade I got on that. I hope that Mrs. Whatsherface at least gave me a little credit for creativity.

The point here is, I guess, is that I feel sort of dull. I know I can be entertaining when I want to, and have even been called "hysterical" by a handful of people I consider to be highly intelligent. Life, I am learning, is not all about just talking about your life, it's about living it. I'm just concerned that I'm doing too much working and whining and philosophizing and not enough living.

Oh, and blogging. I need to do more living and blogging. I'll make a note in my daily planner about that.

Bah humbug season is FINALLY over so I hope that I will be able to stop in here a bit more frequently than I have lately. But if it's still a bit more sporatic that you'd like, just know that I'm out there somewhere trying to live the life I've been given so I can assemble some jolly good stories for you to read. And they'll definitely be my own.