Valentines and Shrinky Dinks

happy whatever day

Hello! I apologize for the lateness of this email. I’m way behind working on my next book and have been using that as an excuse to surf the internet and admonish myself for procrastinating. I’m also not sure what’s coming next for this newsletter. As you might have noticed, I changed the name again. WTF, right? I know. I am indecisive.

“Weird Bookshelf” came from a string of rambling, half-crazy emails with a friend in which I tried to convince her she should start a podcast with me. And each episode, we would pull a tome off the Weird Bookshelf and discuss it. Neat, right? Well Ren, I’m ready when you are…

If you have any opinion about what this newsletter should be named, please weigh in. Chances are you make more sense than my brain. Let’s get to today’s post now.

Valentines and Shrinky Dinks

In third grade, or maybe fourth—I’m sorry, I can’t remember for sure but please don’t let that take anything away from what I’m about to share—I had a boyfriend named Mikey. Our classroom was set up so that desks were scattered around the room in groups of three, and Mikey and I sat on either side of our friend Leigh.

Not only was this my first boyfriend, this setup may have greatly contributed to my desire to be a writer. All three of us were avid note-passers.

Mikey and I passed little love notes to each other and Leigh, sitting in the middle, acted as Postmaster General, stamping each folded paper with an official stamp (no, I can’t remember what it looked like, but this was the era of puffy stickers, and Hello Kitty had just come onto the scene so chances are we used something that looked and maybe even smelled great).

Mikey gave me a Shrinky Dink once in the shape of an ice cream cone. It said he was sweet on me, and I still have it. It’s a prized possession. On the back is Mikey’s third-grade class photo, stuck there for all eternity by scotch tape almost fifty years old.

Many of our notes consisted of a series of multiple-choice questions:

Do you love me?

___ Yes

___ No

Of course it was true love.

I ended up changing schools after fourth grade. We moved from Irvine to La Palma, and I went to a different elementary school for fifth and sixth grade (I never went to the same school more than three years in a row, ever).

At this new school, I was bored. Bored AF. Like, they stuck me in the back of the room with the textbook and told me to finish it. That didn’t exactly earn me many friends. Plus, things start to get more awkward the closer one gets to junior high, am I right?

I looked around for a boyfriend. Someone who might share my love of note passing and maybe horses too. No sign of one. But one boy seemed nice and I thought sure, why not give that one a try.

I wrote him a note.

Instead of checking the yes or no box and sneaking it back to me, he showed it to his friends at recess and they all laughed their asses off at my expense.

Guess who got a talking to?

Me, for passing a note and being too forward.

How is an awkward kid, neurodivergent to boot, supposed to figure out how to girlfriend? I thought you passed notes and checked a box. That was my kind of relationship!! I did not know any better. Getting in trouble for it was the icing on the Valentine’s cookie.

i really don’t know what is happening here, but this was taken when we lived in la palma and i was attending clara j. king elementary school.

I still feel this way some days. I still feel like that awkward kid, reluctant to talk about things because it is hard, wishing I could still pass notes and handle it all through written words instead of spoken ones. Maybe this is why I love the idea of romance novels and rom-coms. In theory, love is great. In practice, I’ll leave it up to the professionals to figure out.

I do understand what love is, what it feels like to have an open heart. It’s when I apply that to people that I start to nosedive.

That said, today I’m celebrating my eleventh Valentine’s Day with someone who is even more pragmatic and logical about it than I am. He did buy us a coffeemaker the other day, so that was nice.

However you spend this weird “holiday,” I hope you have love, joy, happiness, and openness in your life. It doesn’t much matter where it comes from.

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