My life (or something like it) - Summer 97
Before I start my Summer of 97 narrative, which will likely be back to the month by month recount I had been doing before, I wanted to cover something that didn’t particularly fit in to the linear style of my narrative.
As I had mentioned before Terry and I had foregone with protective measures since a few months after we got together. So it probably won’t be surprising to inform you that between then and the Spring of 97 I had about 3 or 4 pregnancy scares. For some reason I couldn’t give you the exact month or timeframe they individually happened, only that I know I was driving by the time the first one took place and that the last time was at some point in the Spring of 97, by which point I had an Modus Operandi for dealing with these things.
The first one was a bit scary. I wasn’t sure how to go about getting a pregnancy test, except to buy one at the store, so Terry and I pooled our money and got one at the grocery store. Which had the added comedic element of us buying the thing mostly with quarters. Nothing embarrassing about that. Nope. I wasn’t pregnant as it turned out, and it also turned out I was just late because I’d been so freaked out at the possibility of being pregnant. But I still abhorred the feel of condoms and didn’t know how to go about getting on the pill, so we continued on as we always had.
By the time the second one happened I’d been tipped off to the location of my local Planned Parenthood, and I would end up getting tested there for the remainder of my pregnancy scares. On one hand I liked PP, because they were free and didn’t want to know anything about me. On the other hand, I was kind of disturbed by PP because they encouraged me to lie on my forms so that I could qualify for free coverage in their clinic and so they didn’t have to notify my parents I had been there. (The first time I went there I had been 17.) They made no effort to encourage me to start using protection, nor to take advantage of their ObGyn services. I would have to learn nearly two years later from a friend of mine that I could have gotten the pill from them, likely for free. Uh, thanks guys.
So, when I say I’m not a big fan of Planned Parenthood, know that it comes from experience, not from any kind of conservative brainwashing. I cannot speak for all of their offices, but the two I have been to in Orange County had no interest in helping me make good reproductive decisions, nor did they so much as blink an eye at the fact that I came in there about every six months with another pregnancy scare. It was just – here’s some paperwork, just say you live alone and don’t work, don’t put your age down, here’s a cup to pee in, no, you’re not pregnant, have a nice day. It’s like they’re the McDonald’s of pregnancy tests.
Anyhow, on to the far more interesting tale of the summer that would change my life forever (in a good way for once).
Sometime in mid June I found myself in the parking lot for the Disney Hotel with Terry and our friend P. I don’t remember why we were there or how the subject came up, but we had latched onto the idea of going to Vegas. Just because we could. I advocated just taking off right then and there, just for the sheer “to hell with the world” feel of it, but got talked down to earth and instead we made plans to leave the following Friday.
In the meantime we invited along our friend Brandy and decided to meet up at our “Wienie Day” Wienersnitzel. (For some reason this particular Wienersnitzel sold all you can eat chili dogs, in every menu variation, at a cost of $2 on Fridays – we dubbed this magical time of cheap food “Wienie Day”) So, stuffed to the gills with cheap hot dogs, we headed out to Vegas with me and Terry in my truck and Brandy and P in her car.
Our trip wasn’t very exciting. We drove to Vegas, trying to stay together as well as we could (remember this was before the age of cheap cell phones), meeting up for dinner by the world’s biggest thermometer, then getting a room at Whiskey Pete’s at Stateline, before heading into Vegas proper, where we were so tired we just ate a snack at the Pink Pony at the Circus Circus then went back and crashed. I don’t remember doing much of anything the next day except eating at the buffet and hanging out, and then we headed home just in time to make it to our friend Ian’s birthday party at a local game store called Darkstar (which was owned by the parents of another friend, Donny).
Now Darkstar was cool because it was a comic book store, but they also sold movies and books and related toys and all kinds of neat geeky stuff. They also did well with the Beanie Baby craze, which was still in full swing during that summer. But the best part was that they had this cool second half of the store that had rooms filled with computers where you could have LAN parties, so Donny’s parents let us have the run of the rooms for the night for Ian’s birthday. So we stayed up well into the night eating pizza and playing C&C Red Alert and other games I don’t remember because I had just driven back from Vegas and was really tired and did I mention I had to work the next day at, say, 7 in the morning? (Sleep? Who needs slee…. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)
I know I made it to work and back home without crashing the car… and that’s all that matters because I don’t remember anything else.
Then, either the next week or a couple weeks later, Terry, Brandy, Rob and I went to Ozz Fest. Again. Except different this time because Brandy and Rob were coming along. Unlike the previous Ozz Fest which had been awesome despite Terry’s stupid jealousy rants, this Ozz Fest was a special kind of torture. Before we even got there Terry and I got into a fight because Terry had gone out with David and company the night before (which was becoming a habit) and they had gone to Rocky (even though Terry and I had gone to Rocky exactly once and Terry said he hated Rocky and refused to go with me after that) and stayed out way too late and Terry had found out that his friend Dan from the haunted house was friends with David and wasn’t that funny and something was implied about them picking up on girls, which made me really mad, but I’d already paid for the tickets, so I went with Terry anyhow. Then, the bands were not as good as they had been the year before. I would like to say for the record that Marilyn Manson, much as I love some of their work, sucked live. And they really obviously lip-syched. Which I actually wouldn’t have minded, except their show was not very interesting, except for the part where nearly every goth girl in the place flashed MM their boobies. I blame much of this on the fact that a good third of the people there were there to see MM, and the hard core Goths just aren’t that much fun to go to concerts with (I have heard rumor this is not true of the Cure or VNV Nation, but I haven’t seem THEM live, so I couldn’t tell you first hand). Speaking of which, Brandy and Rob were hard core Goths, and they weren’t much fun to go to concerts with. It was hotter than hell at that concert (once again at the lovely Glen Helen Pavilion), and they both insisted on constantly wearing their trench coats, (unlike my stylish and functional Doc Marten, cut-off Dickies, boy-beater combo), then complaining about how hot it was, then trying to filch water off of me once I revealed that I had 4 bottles stashed in my Dickies’ pockets. (Cargo pants are a must have of all day concerts.)
And, of course, Terry felt obligated to whine the entire time. He had started doing that a lot lately, and it was getting on my nerves. He even complained during Black Sabbath. So we went home finally, and we lost Brandy and Rob on the freeway home and we were supposed to meet them at the Denny’s by my house and it took them forever to get there because they took the wrong freeway and Terry was complaining some more, and finally we all went home.
Sigh. I think it was around this time I was starting to really reconsider my relationship prospects, but when you get nearly two years invested in a relationship it’s hard to walk away over something as seemingly trivial as “this person is being really annoying”, but as June rolled into July, things only continued further downhill.
As I had mentioned before Terry and I had foregone with protective measures since a few months after we got together. So it probably won’t be surprising to inform you that between then and the Spring of 97 I had about 3 or 4 pregnancy scares. For some reason I couldn’t give you the exact month or timeframe they individually happened, only that I know I was driving by the time the first one took place and that the last time was at some point in the Spring of 97, by which point I had an Modus Operandi for dealing with these things.
The first one was a bit scary. I wasn’t sure how to go about getting a pregnancy test, except to buy one at the store, so Terry and I pooled our money and got one at the grocery store. Which had the added comedic element of us buying the thing mostly with quarters. Nothing embarrassing about that. Nope. I wasn’t pregnant as it turned out, and it also turned out I was just late because I’d been so freaked out at the possibility of being pregnant. But I still abhorred the feel of condoms and didn’t know how to go about getting on the pill, so we continued on as we always had.
By the time the second one happened I’d been tipped off to the location of my local Planned Parenthood, and I would end up getting tested there for the remainder of my pregnancy scares. On one hand I liked PP, because they were free and didn’t want to know anything about me. On the other hand, I was kind of disturbed by PP because they encouraged me to lie on my forms so that I could qualify for free coverage in their clinic and so they didn’t have to notify my parents I had been there. (The first time I went there I had been 17.) They made no effort to encourage me to start using protection, nor to take advantage of their ObGyn services. I would have to learn nearly two years later from a friend of mine that I could have gotten the pill from them, likely for free. Uh, thanks guys.
So, when I say I’m not a big fan of Planned Parenthood, know that it comes from experience, not from any kind of conservative brainwashing. I cannot speak for all of their offices, but the two I have been to in Orange County had no interest in helping me make good reproductive decisions, nor did they so much as blink an eye at the fact that I came in there about every six months with another pregnancy scare. It was just – here’s some paperwork, just say you live alone and don’t work, don’t put your age down, here’s a cup to pee in, no, you’re not pregnant, have a nice day. It’s like they’re the McDonald’s of pregnancy tests.
Anyhow, on to the far more interesting tale of the summer that would change my life forever (in a good way for once).
Sometime in mid June I found myself in the parking lot for the Disney Hotel with Terry and our friend P. I don’t remember why we were there or how the subject came up, but we had latched onto the idea of going to Vegas. Just because we could. I advocated just taking off right then and there, just for the sheer “to hell with the world” feel of it, but got talked down to earth and instead we made plans to leave the following Friday.
In the meantime we invited along our friend Brandy and decided to meet up at our “Wienie Day” Wienersnitzel. (For some reason this particular Wienersnitzel sold all you can eat chili dogs, in every menu variation, at a cost of $2 on Fridays – we dubbed this magical time of cheap food “Wienie Day”) So, stuffed to the gills with cheap hot dogs, we headed out to Vegas with me and Terry in my truck and Brandy and P in her car.
Our trip wasn’t very exciting. We drove to Vegas, trying to stay together as well as we could (remember this was before the age of cheap cell phones), meeting up for dinner by the world’s biggest thermometer, then getting a room at Whiskey Pete’s at Stateline, before heading into Vegas proper, where we were so tired we just ate a snack at the Pink Pony at the Circus Circus then went back and crashed. I don’t remember doing much of anything the next day except eating at the buffet and hanging out, and then we headed home just in time to make it to our friend Ian’s birthday party at a local game store called Darkstar (which was owned by the parents of another friend, Donny).
Now Darkstar was cool because it was a comic book store, but they also sold movies and books and related toys and all kinds of neat geeky stuff. They also did well with the Beanie Baby craze, which was still in full swing during that summer. But the best part was that they had this cool second half of the store that had rooms filled with computers where you could have LAN parties, so Donny’s parents let us have the run of the rooms for the night for Ian’s birthday. So we stayed up well into the night eating pizza and playing C&C Red Alert and other games I don’t remember because I had just driven back from Vegas and was really tired and did I mention I had to work the next day at, say, 7 in the morning? (Sleep? Who needs slee…. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)
I know I made it to work and back home without crashing the car… and that’s all that matters because I don’t remember anything else.
Then, either the next week or a couple weeks later, Terry, Brandy, Rob and I went to Ozz Fest. Again. Except different this time because Brandy and Rob were coming along. Unlike the previous Ozz Fest which had been awesome despite Terry’s stupid jealousy rants, this Ozz Fest was a special kind of torture. Before we even got there Terry and I got into a fight because Terry had gone out with David and company the night before (which was becoming a habit) and they had gone to Rocky (even though Terry and I had gone to Rocky exactly once and Terry said he hated Rocky and refused to go with me after that) and stayed out way too late and Terry had found out that his friend Dan from the haunted house was friends with David and wasn’t that funny and something was implied about them picking up on girls, which made me really mad, but I’d already paid for the tickets, so I went with Terry anyhow. Then, the bands were not as good as they had been the year before. I would like to say for the record that Marilyn Manson, much as I love some of their work, sucked live. And they really obviously lip-syched. Which I actually wouldn’t have minded, except their show was not very interesting, except for the part where nearly every goth girl in the place flashed MM their boobies. I blame much of this on the fact that a good third of the people there were there to see MM, and the hard core Goths just aren’t that much fun to go to concerts with (I have heard rumor this is not true of the Cure or VNV Nation, but I haven’t seem THEM live, so I couldn’t tell you first hand). Speaking of which, Brandy and Rob were hard core Goths, and they weren’t much fun to go to concerts with. It was hotter than hell at that concert (once again at the lovely Glen Helen Pavilion), and they both insisted on constantly wearing their trench coats, (unlike my stylish and functional Doc Marten, cut-off Dickies, boy-beater combo), then complaining about how hot it was, then trying to filch water off of me once I revealed that I had 4 bottles stashed in my Dickies’ pockets. (Cargo pants are a must have of all day concerts.)
And, of course, Terry felt obligated to whine the entire time. He had started doing that a lot lately, and it was getting on my nerves. He even complained during Black Sabbath. So we went home finally, and we lost Brandy and Rob on the freeway home and we were supposed to meet them at the Denny’s by my house and it took them forever to get there because they took the wrong freeway and Terry was complaining some more, and finally we all went home.
Sigh. I think it was around this time I was starting to really reconsider my relationship prospects, but when you get nearly two years invested in a relationship it’s hard to walk away over something as seemingly trivial as “this person is being really annoying”, but as June rolled into July, things only continued further downhill.
Labels: MLOSLI
posted by BurgandySkies at 10:18 PM
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