I think someone keeps stealing time from me. I always think I have more time to do things during the day…and then I keep coming up short. What’s up with that?

So this past weekend I ended up at the mall. It was a “necessary evil” trip…unfortunately, it didn’t include Kira Nerys or Odo (and if you get that geek reference, I’m imaginary high-fiving you right now). My part of the necessary evil was that I needed to take one of my watches to the jeweler for a new battery.

I hate malls. HATE them. It’s not just the overwhelming sense of so many people crammed like cattle inside one building (although that has a huge role in the enmity, since I do hate people). No, this hatred springs from the well of teen angst that drilled into my soul many, many moons ago.

Remember when everyone who was anyone in the teen safari was a mall rat? It was the cool place to be seen, the replacement hangout when skating rinks began to slowly fade into the ephemera of former awesomeness.

I remember when we finally got our own mall. I remember going there with my parents when it first opened. It was the summer before I started high school. I was a fat, fashionless introvert with acne and no self esteem. I was the hippopotamus to the mall rat lions. Teenagers can smell internalized inferiority like dogs can smell fear.

Going with high school friends made the mall slightly less traumatic. So did losing a lot of weight and no longer dressing like I was a lost member of the Von Trapp family. In fact, I dropped all color from my wardrobe minus black and purple. Lots of leather. Lots of silver jewelry. Lots of black nail polish. And, of course, this was the period of my life that gave birth to the aforementioned “sideways rooster comb.”

[Okay, this is a sad tangential moment for me: I saw a photo the other day of a famous person who styles their hair in a way similar to the sideways rooster comb. The famous person was Conan O’Brien. Whathafu?!? Seriously, see the front of his hair in this photo? Imagine this slightly higher, with bangs down to his eyes, teased out on the sides, and long in the back, but pretty much the same color. I don’t know who to feel worse for: my teenaged self or Conan O’Brien.]

Still, I knew I was a poseur. I was a private school honor society nerd to whom the public school life was as alien as Q’onoS would be to a Bajoran (it also didn’t help that I made jokes like this back then, too). I was less cool than public school band members (at least they went to a school big enough to actually have a band).

It wasn’t all bad. I had my little school clique. I had my Smurfy blue Chevette. I had Suncoast and Waldenbooks, both places wherein I would sequester myself for hours of uninterrupted geekery. But to this day the mall represents all those worries and fears that only seem important when you’re a teenager, but continue to haunt you well into your dotage (I am, after all, now untrustworthy according to Bob Dylan). It’s silly, I know, but these are all the things that flood over me the instant I near a mall. Apparently, I still carry around a kernel of internalized inferiority.

Want to know the real kick in the pants? I ended up forgetting my watch at home. So I hid out in the Borders Express for a while (this is what all Waldenbooks have become in this area), bought a Star Trek novel, and scurried out into the fresh air and sun before the mall rat pheromones even had a chance to permeate my clothing. Strangely enough, these pheromones smell exactly like Sbarro pizza…

Whoever said that you can’t go home again, I’m here to say bollocks! You most certainly can go home again. I do it all the time! Okay, maybe not all the time. I’m sure my mother would argue that I don’t do it quite often enough (of course, if she had her way, I would still be living with my parents, thus fulfilling the ultimate nerd stereotype).

I departed from the safety of the lair bright and early Friday morning, and remained off the Interwebs grid for most of the weekend. It was a delightful break, as it always is. My parental units still reside in their undisclosed North Carolina location, so I got to go Southern for the weekend, which is always a treat. First stop, of course, was the nearest Sonic, to satiate my Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper lust. Also, while down there, I replenished my supply of Cheerwine as well as sought out another six-pack of the official beer of the lair, White Wolf Golden Ale. I tend to enjoy the darker, richer side of the beer spectrum, but this is actually a pretty tasty ale (which was a great surprise, considering the fact that I only originally bought a bottle because of the obvious attraction to the name).

Oh, rewinding a little: Cheerwine is one of the staples of my childhood memories of summer vacation. That and Sundrop were the two drinks that we always brought back with us from visiting my grandparents. Not necessarily because they’re unique (Cheerwine is a cherry soft drink and Sundrop is a less syrupy Mountain Dew), but just because we couldn’t get them here in the Old Line State. Still can’t (although I found a store near my office that sold Cheerwine for a while).

I remember the summer when we couldn’t find Cheerwine. It was the second most traumatic summer vacation of my youth, surpassed only by the summer I was bitten by a dog. Yes, I love Cheerwine that much. It wasn’t until years later that I realized why we couldn’t find Cheerwine. Remember the red dye cancer scare in the 80s? Cheerwine was colored with that dye, just like the red M&Ms. Thankfully, Cheerwine wasn’t gone from our lives as long as the red M&Ms were.

For those of you who found your way back to the lair from my Angry Blogger^TM days, you’ll be happy to know that my lovely Doodle-Cat, Mr. Data, is still chugging along. He’ll be 17 years old sometime in June. He looks a bit more bedraggled than he once did in his glorious fluffy kitty days, but I love him to death. He’s my sweet little gutter rescue. He’s a lot surlier than he was, but that’s allowed since he is now officially an old man. He just wants to be left to sleep on a comfy chair positioned in the afternoon sunlight and to be tolerated when he bites your elbow when he wants you to feed him or turn on the faucet in the kitchen sink. Nothing unreasonable, right?

This was also the trip that I finally decided to sort through all the boxes and bags that my parents transported with them from my old room when they moved. I had originally packed everything up in a hasty, half-assed sort of way, promising that I would go through everything once they were settled in their new place. This was almost five years ago. There was a lovely patina of attic dust all over everything (as well as the slightly mummified remains of a field mouse hidden beneath the piles of trash bags…eek!).

I was honestly surprised at how much fun I had going through my old stuff. I didn’t keep a whole lot from my adolescence, but I kept a lot more than I remembered. And, of course, the bulk of what I kept was delightfully geeky. I took plenty of photos, which I suspect will make excellent submissions for future “Flashback Friday” entries.

I also found two remnants from my high school days that I had completely forgotten I’d saved: my varsity jacket and my graduation cap and gown, complete with my National Honor Society collar (which still looks to me like one of those toilet seat sanitary rings you find in public restrooms). Yes, I was a geek/jock hybrid. Of course, at a school as small as the one from which I graduated, everyone sort of had to chip in and wear a multitude of different hats just to keep the ship from sinking (as if that would have been a terrible thing).

Strangely, I couldn’t find either my homecoming queen tiara or my senior yearbook. I must have them stored somewhere here in the lair. Where, though, I’m not quite certain…”Just hang a right at the Gates McFadden hypospray shrine, go straight until you see the Todd McFarlane Masters of Horror statues, then take a left. The tiara and yearbook should be somewhere around there, near the geek chic T-shirt rack.”

Of the high school things I found, I think the only thing that gave me a twinge of reminiscent joy was my varsity jacket. I loved that silly thing, with its pleather sleeves and all the pins on my letter. Here’s Loba Geeky Confession Number 8,648,097: I used to imagine that the bars were like TNG collar pips. As you can tell here, by the end of my high school sports career, I had reached the Starfleet rank of Captain (to go with the “real” Captain pins I earned). My increasingly creaky knees will attest to this ranking.

I suppose I should end this entry. I’m getting ready to break the 1,000 word barrier and all on utter silliness about my weekend. I will, however, leave you with the following as my parting shot. This was stuck to one of the drawers on my dad’s tool chest. It’s something he typed up while playing around with an old label maker that he found in his garage. See? I come by my geekiness quite honestly 😉

I have been promising my old blog posts. So here they are, still residing where many of you already knew them to be, at think.lobablanca.com. I used to call that blog “incite.thought.” I think I should have called it “Terminally Pissed” (and not in the drunk sense of the word).

I was an angry mofo through most of these posts. Hulk angry. As you’ll be able to deduce, a lot of it was Bush-related fury. Some of it was religion-related fury…and some was government (federal, state, and local)-related. Still, that was a whole lot of fury. It’s no wonder I once called it the “blog of Dorian Gray.” I can’t imagine what kind of wolf I would have been if I hadn’t been dumping all that venom somewhere.

It is true that my anger remains to a certain extent. However, I have tempered my outlook on many subjects, dropped certain viewpoints and altered others. We are an ever-evolving species after all. Also, apathy does wonders for dulling anger. Perhaps this new blog should be called “incite.meh.”

I suppose I’ve linked to these posts anyway because…well, hell, I spent almost 4 years blathering on about various things (sometimes even posting funny or happy things). And even though I don’t feel that way about several things anymore (or even agree with some of what I wrote back then) I guess those entries and feelings should somehow be acknowledged.

Plus, I know it sounds strange, but I kind of want all the posts made about my beautiful Jodie girl to remain out there for people to read. She was the best dog in the whole world (IMHO, of course) and, even though she was taken from me in an utterly horrible way, I guess I want others to see what I was so blessed to see every day for a little more than 8 very short years. She had the soul of an angel and a punim that could have made even the Grinch’s heart melt.

So there you go. Read if you’d like. Ignore if you’d like. Comment you cannot. E-mail you can. Talk like Yoda I will. Smile you may 🙂