I have a friend who is dealing with an unruly teenage daughter right now.  I am the wrong person to turn to for advice about this, because I remember being a teenage girl.  I didn’t enjoy it, and as a residual effect, I don’t much like being around anyone from the ages of 13-23.  Let me give you a glimpse into my teenage years.

Things were going along smoothly until I hit age fifteen. Up until then, my biggest crises had been getting boobs in the fifth grade and the fact that while a boy named Adam R. was hopelessly in love with me, I was the victim of an unrequited crush on Jeff O., who in fact had a thing for Roxanne R., the prettiest girl in class.  (Isn’t that the way it always is?)  Jeff had broken my heart by roller skating all night with Roxanne on a class outing; I listened to the '45 of “We Belong” by Pat Benatar incessantly for months.  But really, my teenage attitude didn’t come in to full bloom until the summer when my mother refused to let me go see the Grateful Dead in concert.

She was being totally unreasonable, of course. What’s the worst that could happen to a fifteen-year-old girl alone at a Dead concert?  My mother, the smart aleck, was quick with an answer: What if I was fed a tab of LSD without my knowledge, got raped, then had my throat slashed, and Mom would be woken up in the middle of the night by the cops to go down to the morgue to identify my body?…it was all about her.  I didn’t speak to her for a month.

Mom was always telling me I couldn’t do things. Going to parties where there would be no parents but plenty of alcohol was out of the question.  Going away for the weekend with my friend Lisa and her friends Rob, Guy, and Steve was definitely forbidden. She wouldn’t even let me go shopping downtown at the store where all the hippies went without her there to embarrass me by asking if the neat-looking glass tubes they had there were some sort of fancy lamps. (But really, I was a good kid, for the most part – I didn’t know they were bongs either.  I kind of thought Mom was right on target with her lamp theory.)

As I got older, it was time to look at colleges.  Mom arranged a trip for us to take a train cross-country to combine a vacation with looking at schools.  We got to see the Grand Canyon and the coast of Malibu. She and I drove to UCLA, where I refused to get out of the car because the guy who handed us the ticket to park in the south lot had a real “attitude problem”.

My mother, who had just carted me 2,894 miles to the college I had been talking about going to since I was eleven, implied that it was not the guy in the ticket booth who had the attitude problem.  She was at the end of her rope, she said.  After all, it was not she who had wanted to take the side trip to see the house where Sharon Tate was murdered, but she’d acquiesced without an attitude, hadn’t she?  I needed to get my skinny butt and my gigantic attitude out of the car RIGHT NOW or she would show me an attitude problem.  It was the first time I’d ever seen flames literally shoot out of her eyes.  I took the UCLA campus tour.

In all fairness, I never came home pregnant nor on drugs, and my parents never got a call from the cops saying I’d been arrested.  However, as I said, I do remember being a teenager, and I can tell you this: it was not fun for any of us involved.

PS - Mom, thanks for taking me to see UCLA and for the drive-by of the Manson Murder House.  Very cool.

Jason and I have been at a writers' conference for the past few days.  While it was a blast vacationing with a bunch of dark, twisted sickos just like us, inevitably, the fun had to end.  We returned home tired, inspired, and smelling slightly of charred hot dogs.

We should have known better, daring to leave town for a few days.  The cats were the first ones to display their displeasure with us as soon as we walked in the door.  They had apparently both target vomited on the floor mat, so as soon as I stepped inside, I was ankle deep in warm, half-chewed Kit-n-Kaboodle.  I had clearly chosen the wrong moment to peel off my flip flops and go barefoot.  To further emphasize her displeasure, Wednesday immediately jumped up on the table in the hallway where I'd dropped my purse and yakked a hairball up on my car keys.

When I threatened to trade the cat in for a nice ficus, this reminded me to check on the plants out on the side deck.  We'd had a heat wave while on vacation, and I found the foxglove in a strangled, withered heap.  It had apparently put up more of a fight than the morning glories, which had wrapped their yellowed vines around a post on the deck and hung themselves from their pot.  Apparently, when I'd asked my sister to check on the cats while we were gone, I'd forgotten to request that she water the plants, too.

I decided to check on the back lawn, which was supposed to be mowed and watered by a service while we were away.  Walking in the yard, I noticed that the grass seemed really uneven in parts.  Our lawn guy is usually excellent, so I went inside to give him a call and make sure he hadn't had a stroke while on the lawnmower.  While standing at the kitchen sink, listening to his voice mail message and looking over the whole of the yard, I realized we'd probably forgotten to pay him before going away.  He'd left us a lovely two-word message, mowed right in to the lawn, indicating how he felt about this oversight.  It hadn't been easy to read while I was actually walking across the grass, but it came across loud and clear from the window (and, I'm assuming, to low-flying planes.)  I realized that not only was I not going to be able to have company with small children over for the next week, but that vacationing itself had been a bad idea.

The cats are still not speaking to us, I found a piece of fish in the garbage that I'd forgotten to dump before we'd left, and we'd accidentally left the air conditioning on upstairs, which means our next electric bill will be about $800 - just about the cost of the writers' conference fee for both of us.  

I think I'm finally starting to understand the appeal of staycations.

When I'm gardening, I often hear a sage voice in my head, instructing me on how to sow and reap properly.  No, it's not my father, the farmer, nor my mother, the science teacher.  The voice I hear is Mr. Spock, First Officer of the USS Enterprise.
I don't know why Leonard Nimoy's voice should be my copilot as I weed, but there he always is, advising me on my tomato crops and onion bulbs.  When I'm trying to weed the corn (and spotting the difference between newly sprouted corn and grass is kind of like trying to find a tick in a bowl full of watermelon seeds,) Mr. Spock is there.  "Simply pull up everything that isn't corn," he recommends.  "Whatever remains, however improbable, must be corn."
When something got at the tomato plants, and Jason cursed the rabbits and woodchucks in the yard, Spock was right there, whispering in my head.  "It simply isn't logical," he pointed out.  "The damage is to the top of the plants, not low to the ground where the rabbits are.  The logical conclusion ... is deer."
I love my Imaginary Gardening Spock.  He keeps me company as I weed and mulch, hoe and dig.  When I hesitated to thin out the lettuce, Mr. Spock was right there, pointing out my folly.  "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one," he said solemnly.  He was right.  In order to help the stronger lettuce heads survive, I had to pull out the smaller, yellowed ones. 
The ridiculousness that a fictional television character helps me make my most important gardening decisions is not lost on me. I mean, you have to ask: what does a half-Vulcan know about New England gardening techniques, anyway? I honestly don't knowhow he knows, but really, he's always right on.  I have to assume he must have studied Earth's agricultural patterns at some point in his travels.
Personally, I'm awfully thankful that Mr. Spock pops up in my head when I'm weeding (although I find it interesting that he usually waits until I'm about to pass out from sunstroke before he makes his imaginary presence known.) I'm honored that he takes the time to make sure I properly mulch the potatoes or water the peppers.  I can only imagine that he simply wants to ensure that my garden lives long...and prospers.

I am a child of the ‘80s.  I find it perfectly reasonable when actors want to be politicians.  I cried when Corey Haim died.  I do not apologize for this; it was not a bad time to grow up, and had a big influence on who I am today.  Would I be as fun-loving as an adult if I hadn’t had a Cabbage Patch Kid as a child?  Could I relate to these kids today with their Twilight crap if I hadn’t had a similar obsession with Duran Duran at their age...and as an adult?  (How is it that John Taylor manages to look better every year when he was so good looking to start with?)

Are YOU a child of the ‘80s?  Take a look and see if any (or all) of these describe you:
  

• You can remember a time when Bret Michaels didn’t wear a bandana, did wear lipstick, and you thought “Talk Dirty to Me” was the sexiest song ever.
• You thought Wacky Packages were hilarious.
• Your school had a smoking area.
• Michael J. Fox was famous only for playing Alex P. Keaton, and Johnny Depp was known only as the cute guy on 21 Jump Street.
• When you got in to a car, was no such thing as a seatbelt law or child car seat requirements, and only rich people had electric windows.
• You can recite the words to the Facts of Life theme song.
• You realized with horror that the hole in the ozone layer meant impending doom – not for the planet, but for your beloved Aqua Net.
• You remember when MTV was created, and all it aired were music videos and the occasional break for MTV News.
• Only preppies wore Izod shirts and Reeboks.  The cool kids were wearing sweatshirts with ripped shoulders and jelly bracelets, all in fluorescent.
• Your biggest headache of the week was trying to find a replacement needle for your record player.
• Coolest Concert EVER:  Band Aid.

Perhaps you laugh.  Perhaps you want to debate with me whether “Feed the World” was better or worse than “We are the World.”  But the truth is, the horrible things that Baby Boomers think Generation X will remember – the cold war ending, Reaganomics, Rock Hudson dying of AIDS – aren’t necessarily what we as adults think about when we reminisce about our childhoods.  We like to remember the good times – when David Bowie crooned “Let’s Dance” and felt fedoras were all the rage.  (Were they all the rage?  Now that I’m thirty years out of the 80’s, my memory’s not so good.)  I like to remember a time when if you weren’t sure if you liked a cereal, you could ask Mikey to try it. When said cereals came with a real prize inside.  And, of course, whenall the radio stations played Duran Duran – not just the oldies station.