I was a childhood conman.

I was told to "blog something, FCOL" by my dad. Once I determined that FCOL wasn't something I should feel insulted at, I dug this gem out. I've been working on it a while, but I really don't have anywhere to go with it.

I am not a very interesting person, from a fictional standpoint. I mean, I can be occasionally pithy, and I do like to do things like wear wigs and sing spontaneous choral pieces (when enough friends of a similar mind and intoxication level are present), but I'd be straight-up screwed if I were a character in a novel. I have a very supportive middle-class white family with strong morals that would love me even if I ran away, shot up a butt-ton of meth-laced fruit loops, got pregnant and tattooed, cut off a toe in a drug-induced paranoid high, changed my name to Sunshyne, and became a lesbian hipster who ate other people's pets. Now that's love, people. Hipsters aren't generally accepted.

Image from LATFH

Part of that might have to do with the fact that I already have a tattoo, my mom apparently did drugs and went by Sunshyne in college (when she was a hippie backup singer), and my dad just REALLY REALLY wants grandkids, but most of it is love.

Anyway, back to the point - I'm not tragic enough to even rate a last name in a fictional adventure. I not only know my birth parents (and having a twin brother kind of makes it impossible to pretend I was adopted), but my mom's incredibly detailed genealogy projects mean I can trace my ancestry back 4 or 5 generations on my dad's side, and all the way back to the time of Columbus on my mom's side (His name was Samson Mason. He was a pioneer of justice and equality in a time of general raping and pillaging. Actually, I have no idea 'cause records aren't that detailed. His name was Samson, though, which seems a bit ill-fated to name your child since the dude started out blood-thirsty and donkey-abusing and ended up blind, bald, and in a bad BDSM situation after an interim of sex with heathens. Which actually, Samson Mason was around when the Native American nations were being universally labelled as "heathens" in a stunning display of ethnocentrism, so that kind of pans out if he's the side I get that 1/50th Cherokee blood from.). Also, I don't have superpowers that I know of. (Go waaay back to the beginning of that last parenthetical. It's a list of what I don't have, remember?)


I'm not particularly filled with angst, I don't suffer from anything other than the standard fits of depression that don't seem serious enough for medication since I'm still in the "college" age-bracket and that apparently is normal, and nothing particularly life-shattering has happened to me yet.

So basically, I'm a bit boring.


Child!Me was intensely aware of this. I read a lot, or was read to a lot depending on the story (Watership Down, not just for slightly horrified adults anymore!),  and that crap just doesn't fly with your standard hero or antihero. Even Disney movies knew that no one rooted for the little girl from the modestly affluent family with both parents living and loving - I was already set up for success, what the heck would I need a fairy godmother for? I knew I was doomed to be a secondary or tertiary character, maybe the "plucky best friend" if I was lucky.

If I was REALLY lucky, I'd be a plucky best friend who is also a hobbit.

That wasn't gonna fly. (I may have had weird "middle child" issues, even though I'm only middle by two minutes.)

My solution to this dilemma was to lie like a rug. Also posing dramatically.

you can apparently buy this photo? I'm sure that's legit.

On the bus in the morning, I'd sit next to the window and gaze out the window with what I imagined was a slightly wistful, melancholy expression, as if something suitably momentous and life-changing had happened and I was reminiscing on happier times. I'd practice what I thought of as a "forgotten smile" - you know, the kind that books have written out as a smile that "lingered on her lips" as she thought of other times.

I was sooo dramatic. Everything I did, I'd imagine someone else paying attention to and thinking to themselves, "that girl puts up with so much. I think she deserves fame and fortune because she is so self-effacing and generally awesome.*"

When a normal thing would happen in elementary, I'd do my best to blow it way out of proportion and maybe hint that I have an unfortunate home life (which was a dirty rotten lie). I partially blame my dad, 'cause he'd lie to us all the time to teach us to never trust the man.

Scene: Kindergarten lunchtime, cafeteria. SADIE enters stage left, bearing a tray with the decimated remains of a delicious lunch that didn't have to please both parents who are too dang excited to sue the school board as well as school boards who don't understand the difference between non-fattening and unpalatable. She dramatically (one might say, "gallantly") heads to "JAWS" - the place where all trays go to die (or get washed. whatever).

RANDOM OTHER KID: Hey Sadie!

SADIE (with a studied air of nonchalance): Oh, hey Random Other Kid.

ROK: Wow, you must have really liked that lunch - it's all over your shirt!

SADIE (sudden, overblown dismay): What?! OH NO! This shirt is BRAND-NEW - my parents are going to KILL ME.

ROK: It... doesn't look that bad. It's really kind of a tiny stain, actually.

SADIE: No. SERIOUSLY. My parents are going to KILL ME. DEAD.... maybe with A HAMMER.

ROK (backing away nervously): ooookay...

I carried this over to my interactions with my friends in the neighborhood - friends being a fancy name for whichever new neighbor was closest to us in age. (Funny thing, we never seemed to keep the same set of neighbors for more than a few months at a time in our "old house." It may have been our fault. My family takes a special kind of tolerance, and this was before any of us kids were old enough to be elsewhere very often.) I'd frequently just make crap up - and the other kids were either that stupid, or I was that awesome, 'cause usually they'd completely believe me.

One time, I got my my fellow first-grader to believe that I had this rockin' awesome swimsuit that had straps that literally stapled to my back. And that I had the scars to prove it.

I was wearing a backless swimsuit at the time, and the chick believed me anyway. I am a master of deceit.

Which is probably why Loki is my favorite.

Later in life, (after we moved to the "new house" and suddenly had suburbia everywhere instead of a cul-de-sac that was technically in the pseudo-ghetto where dead bodies occasionally show up) I convinced a sixth-grader that my twin brother was an alien, and my original twin sister Claire had been abducted immediately after birth and we had it all on tape, but whenever anyone watched the tape they promptly forgot what they had just seen - except me. I basically invented the Silence from Doctor Who.

No, I swear - it's on the tape! Her name is Claire!

Of course, these skills are still crazy awesome in real life applications. I always had the most believable excuses for turning in papers late (or really, so unbelievable that it had to have actually happened), and I helped a friend escape English 101 one time by texting him that his brother had been in a car accident, which he only got away with because I had a full follow-up story for the next week of class when that one guy inevitably asked how the brother was doing.

If only I could turn this skill into a lucrative superhero power.

* Yeah. I know. I still am generally awesome.