i was smarter when i was 9 years old

when i was a kid, i had a black, spiral bound notebook, that i carried with me everywhere. i found it recently and in it were lots of ideas and drawings. mostly of dresses (1950's style, of course) and ideas (like the great idea of having a contraption that you put on the end of a tube of toothpaste so that it would flatten the tube as you pushed it up). yeah, i know it exists. but i was the first one to think of it. i just didn't have the ability to execute.

on the front of it, i wrote in sparkly gold marker "make your life extraordinary" and then put stars all over it. i remember looking at it and thinking "wait. i don't want my life to be EXTRA ordinary." (as in, really REALLY ordinary). so then i underlined the "extra" part of the word twice. i remember feeling horrified that in my attempt to negate the "Extra" part of "extraordinary", i had only called further attention to it perhaps making it somehow prophetic.

i look at my life now and wonder if i did myself in when i was only 9 years old. that somehow i had chisled in stone the fact that my life will be not only ordinary but super duper ordinary.

how depressing. i wish i were 9 again. i knew everything about everything i needed to know. tiger fish, sea anemones, how to spell "auxiliary", the capital of norway. i knew enough to know that when i was an"adult" that i would be extraordinary. now, 2 decades later, i am too dumb to execute.