Twentyfree

My mom signed me up for local league basketball teams every winter between fourth and sixth grade. She was always signing me up for sports. Between soccer season and tennis season and diving and endless years of ballet I never got a break. Maybe it was just to get me out of the house because she was the one who needed a break, because it couldn't have been that she enjoyed driving me around in varying degrees of post-game sweaty teen funk. But I remember two things -- okay, three things about -- okay four things about the basketball league.

1. I needed shorts for a game in fourth grade and none of mine were clean so I cut the legs off a pair of jeans that had become too short. Unfortunately, I cut them so short that my butt cheeks showed. The next game I went to look for them again and they were gone. It turned out my mother had hid them from me. I freaked and demanded she give them back, and she did! And everyone got treated to my fourth-grade butt cheeks once again.

2. During sixth grade tryouts I was the only kid who could make a left-handed layup, and when the coach's daughter came up to slap me on the ass and say, "Good job!" she actually goosed me -- like seriously, she grabbed my vagina and gave me an evil, evil grin. (I was not wearing my butt-cheek shorts, don't tell me I was asking for it!)

3. I remember being surprised one day after winning a tough game that I actually felt sort of depressed. I should have felt great, but I didn't.

4. The next week we lost our game, and I was double extra surprised that I didn't really feel bad about it. As a matter of fact, I felt pretty good.

And that's what I was thinking when I made this drawing, that in sixth grade I learned that my external circumstances often had no bearing on my internal weather.

I know you were distracted from this very important life lesson by the image of young girls grabbing each other's private parts but you need to SNAP OUT OF IT.