Thank you to those who took up the challenge. Kirtles and Kanga and Ass, oh my! The month is not over yet, so mayhaps more of you will join us.

Well I've spent the last few days totally vegetating and being an irresponsible pathetic geek. Veronica Mars is very addictive. Very addictive. I'm just happy to be obsessed with a show that's still actually on tv. I'm not exactly sure what makes it so addictive, other than that Veronica and Logan have got to be the most crushable tv characters. Well that and the weird little throw away references to people like Thorstein Veblen. Plus, to my mind, no post-coital repartee has been colder than Spike's "I love syphillis more than you." but Logan's "Listen Bessie, when the milk stops being free, I stop drinking it" certainly gives Spike a run for his money.

My blog today was inspired by seeing someone write about their first crush in a blog Kanga found. Charlton Karlowsky (although he became Charlton Pike later on). I loved this boy from grade 2 all the way to grade 6. He was blonde, brown eyed, with tan skin, and big pouty lips (which occasionally had cold sores on them, but for once I was able to overlook this). To this day I have no idea what made this boy so appealing, but I have never crushed on someone like I crushed on him. And he wasn't some unattainable bad boy, he was the sweetest dude. And we did get a small moment in the sun and today is going to witness the unbearably twee account of it.

I moved away from my elementary school after grade 5, to move to the Armpit of the Universe, but my mom and I hated it so much that she and I moved back to our hometown after a few months so I could finish elementary with my old friends while letting my dad know how serious we were about hating the new town. Huh, trying to write about moves without using city names is proving difficult. Anyway, when I moved back to my old school, I noticed Charlton was different. In fact, this difference might have started occuring in late grade 5, but this old woman's memory is getting fuzzy. In any case, I really noticed the change in grade 6, he had always been part of the popular group and he still seemed well-liked but he was hanging out alone a lot, or with another one of the boys I adored, Joel Bantham (if you ever find this Joel, I still sleep with the old yellow duck you gave me for my 13th birthday, and this duck comes with me on most trips I go on, she got quite drunk in Santorini actually, she's kind of a slut if you must know). Charlton was quieter, I still don't know the cause, but I caught the effect. One enormously sweet moment of his was when my best friend lost the necklace her grandmother had given her and he spent the entire lunch hour sifting through the gravel in the playground looking for it. Oh, I'm tearing up just thinking about it.

So anyway, the sunny moment. I find out a few days before the grade 6 graduation dance that Charlton likes me. ME! After 4 years of crushing, he actually likes me! It kind of sucks, because I know I'm moving back to Armpit just 3 days after grad, but I'm still stupidly happy. He and I have a few awkward and shy smiles in the days that follow and then it's the day of the dance. We all hang out and dance and stuff, and finally he works up the courage to ask me to dance, he was wearing something charcoal grey and a green shirt I believe. We start dancing to that horrendous Beaches rendition of Under the Boardwalk (which I still get misty over when I hear it) and it is the best moment of my young life. But the chaperones start having issues over the dance going overtime and they shut the song off early, so I don't even get a full dance with the love of my life and then we all have to go home.

This would have been tragic, but we all planned a pool party at the public pool for the day after. I got to spend the whole day with him, it was the epitome of glorious. We spent the better part of the day out of the pool, sitting next to eachother outside by ourselves, and occasionally joined by his friend Gavin. I have no clue what we talked about, just that the memory of it makes me smile. I went home that night and listened to the Beaches soundtrack over and over while bawling my eyes out and never saw him again.

Okay, in order to make myself feel better after days of geeking and now writing about crushes I had 20 years ago, here is an example of someone more obsessive than I.