I was hoping there was a preexisting thread for funny/interesting personal stories, but if there is one, I couldn't find it (kindly direct me to it if I just missed it please!). I come from a long line of storytellers, and sharing and hearing stories is one of my favorite things to do. This is a thread for any and all stories that you'd like to share! I'll start (cw for animal death). When I was just a wee lil squirt (I think 7 years old?), my dad decided that I was at the perfect age to go bear hunting. As in, actually tracking and killing a bear. So we get up on a Saturday at 4 am, drive to the tiny town of Del Rio, TN (about 1.5 hours away) and meet up with 13 or so other guys. Turns out I'm the only child there; sure, one or two of the men brought their teenage sons, but I was the only one under the age of 14 (and the only girl). So things were going great! I got to play with the hounds and stuff until it was time for The Hunt, then I got to chase 10 dogs through the woods for an hour! I think a lot of the men didn't know what to make of a tiny little girl enthusiastically sprinting through the undergrowth, ready to physically fight a bear. A couple of them gave me snacks, which was awesome. And then I got to see a full grown male black bear from only ~30 ft away! Which was probably the highlight of the whole thing for me personally. Afterwards, (warning this is kinda morbid) I got to play with the dismembered bear paws while it was being butchered. We got like 8 lbs of bear meat it was great.
My parents used to go on ren faires a lot and of course they took me along. Tiny whimsy among a crowd of big fancy people! One of the big people was an orc. He had a sword. Tiny whimsy wanted to learn how to swordfight! So tiny whimsy bothered the big orc. "Teach me to swordfight!" - "No." - "Please!" - "...ok ok" So the big orc gave tiny whimsy a sword, and charged. He wanted to make it easy, so he made slow motions, sword high in the air. This also meant that he was wide open. So tiny whimsy looked at him, looked at the sword, and then stabbed him right where he was open. The orc looked at the sword. The orc looked at tiny whimsy's parents. The orc said "I don't need to teach that kid anything."
I have a few good ones from my Tumblr, lemme grab 'em. Spoiler: The Marshmallow Incident When I was in 8th grade, my school had this assembly thing where a “representative” from each grade (7th through 12th) would come up and play a game. The game, in this case, was essentially a fusion of Chubby Bunny and Jeopardy—they’d ask the group a trivia question, and whoever answered it (correctly) first won the round, meaning everyone else had to put a marshmallow in their mouths. In order to win, you had to be the last one standing—the marshmallows were not allowed to dribble out of your mouth, and if you answered any questions, they had to be intelligible. The prize awarded to the winner was the remainder of the bag of marshmallows. I was always really fucking eager to do shit like this, because I’m kind of an attention whore and always have been, so I volunteered to represent the 8th grade. Now’s a good time to note the size of these marshmallows. They weren’t those pansy-ass cocoa marshmallows—these were honest-to-fucking-God campfire marshmallows, about an inch long. This is important. Now’s also a good time to mention that I have really crappy reflexes. This is also important. The game started, and I quickly discovered that my reaction time simply wasn’t as good as everyone else’s. I knew all the answers, pretty much, but I couldn’t raise my hand fast enough to actually answer them. You’d think this would get me out of the game early, right? WRONG. Keep in mind that if the marshmallows began to dribble from your gaping maw, you were out. This disqualified a good chunk of the group fairly early on, since these were pretty damn big marshmallows. And for some reason, I was a really determined 8th grader, so I just kept shoving marshmallows into my mouth like a fucking champ. I might have given up on answering questions at some point—it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was the only one who never did get to answer a question, but I was able to hold so many goddamn marshmallows in my mouth that I was still one of the last two standing. The only reason I didn’t win was because my opponent had answered a lot of questions and thus didn’t have a mouth full of ‘mallow. As we were all exiting the assembly, a girl came up to me and said, “Anna, you do realize you managed to fit twenty-three marshmallows into your mouth, right?” I had not actually realized this. I had lost count. I don’t even remember who the winner was—just that he was a boy, and that I think he was an 11th grader. What truly stands out to me is the fact that for the rest of 8th grade, I was the fucking Marshmallow Girl, and I basked in that glory. THE END. Spoiler: The Time A Kid Brought A Fuckton Of Weed To School I don’t have that many truly funny stories about myself from high school—a few from middle school, such as the time in 8th grade where I managed to fit 23 full-size marshmallows into my mouth in front of my entire school, but not terribly many from after that. So instead I’ll just tell you about this one girl I went to school with. In junior and senior years, there was this girl, who I’ll simply call Ty, who was the embodiment of everything wrong with our generation, in that she seemed to only be capable of talking about weed and booze and would constantly talk about how “rasta” she was despite being pretty fucking white. She was bleach-blonde, her tan was borderline orange (pretty clearly fake), and she was a complete ass to me at all times. You can probably picture her, as I’m pretty sure every high school has at least one kid like that, probably an entire clique of them. If you’re wondering why I’m describing her like this, it’s because I think it makes the story I have to tell kind of speak for itself. So we had a class, humanities, which lasted a good chunk of the day (I went to this hybrid homeschooling program thing so class schedules were a bit funky) and had a break in the middle for lunch and stretching your legs and such. And somehow, one day, the entire class—all nine or so of us—ended up sitting at one table. And Ty opens up her backpack and pulls out a pencil case, saying “Hey, look what I got!” And she unzips the pencil case, and inside it is a truly ridiculous amount of marijuana. At school. In a very public place. Less than ten feet from the door to the classroom. I can’t make this shit up. I had asked her a few times before where she actually procured her pot, and she’d refused each time. I later learned that she was scared I’d rat her out. Given the fact that I was a bit of a teacher’s pet and also dating the TA (before you ask, he was only about two years my senior, so it’s not like I was dating someone out of my age range), this was not an unjustified fear in theory, but the truth is that I doubt I actually would’ve said anything, and I certainly didn’t in this case. (But hey, if my high school humanities teacher sees this post? Ty totally brought a fuckton of weed to school once.) She also once got really mad at Jeremy (the aforementioned TA) when he tried to explain to her that Rastafarianism wasn’t just The Sacred Art Of Getting Turnt or whatever, and one other time in that class we had to do a collage and she turned in a really shitty collage of Bob Marley, because of course she did. I genuinely wonder if there was anything to her persona other than smoking copious amounts of ganja, because that was all she fucking talked about. Apparently she’s been in and out of rehab since graduation, which is a really depressing note to end this story on and clearly I wasn’t thinking this through, but it does go to show you that even if you’re the biggest fucking loser in your graduating class, you still might be better off today than the girl who brought a pencil case full of weed to school. Spoiler: Spoiled Fundie Roommate Asks Acey If She's Had An Abortion (Apropos Of Nothing) I only really had one roommate, and she was this annoying uber-rich girl from Beverly Hills who embodied basically every awful spoiled brat stereotype you can imagine. Like, at one point our toilet clogged, and she complained about how back home she would’ve just gotten the maid to fix it, and the boy who had come over to help us unclog it and I both stared and said “wait, you have a maid?” and she just said “you don’t?!” And this is a girl who claimed “oh, but I’m not actually rich,” but she always had the nicest fashions and was just this spoiled asshole. Anyway, here’s a story about her. So she was also this hardcore Christian with some pretty strong fundie leanings, and one time she asked me, out of the blue, if I’d ever had an abortion, to which I just sorta stared at her confused and said “uh no??” (Which was and still is true, but why would you even ask that, what the fuck.) And she said “WELL DON’T EVER GET ONE, IT’S ENDiNG A LIFE“ started spouting all this pro-life bullshit and I’m just sort of sitting there trying to figure out what even set this girl off, because there was literally no fucking context. This never came up again and she dropped out of school midway through her freshman year because she decided she didn’t actually care about art. The moral of this story is that your roommate might suck and I’m really sorry about that. Spoiler: How I Accidentally Got MAD Magazine Banned From My Elementary School Pictured here is the cover to the June 2003 issue of MAD Magazine. I was an avid MAD reader in my youth, and often brought my copies to school to read during recess and lunch. And naturally, I did so with this issue, in (I think) the latter half of fourth grade. Might’ve been early fifth grade, but that’s not the point. Point is, I was in elementary school. As you can no doubt tell from the cover, this issue riffed on the X-Men movies. And as anyone who knows a bit about those movies knows, Mystique is portrayed as nude. There are no “bits” showing–no nipples and no genitals–but she’s definitely not wearing clothes. Now, given the fact that there’s nothing explicit there, I figured there’d be no issue with me bringing it to school. After all, I brought MAD to school all the time–this was really nothing new. What I hadn’t counted on was that one of the girls in my class who was less than fond of me–we’ll call her Ariana, since her real name is very distinctive and I’d rather play it safe–taking this particular issue as an opportunity to get me in a bit of trouble. I was sitting at the lunch table, reading my magazine, and Ariana was, unbeknownst to me, peeking over my shoulder. And as soon as she saw Mystique there, in all her Barbie-doll-nude glory, she flipped the fuck out. What did she do? She told the principal that I had a magazine with naked ladies in it. Now, she wasn’t wrong, but she omitted pretty much every other bit of relevant information. The principal confiscated the magazine to see if it was appropriate, and for whatever reason, she deemed it to be too risque. And since that particular issue had A Naked Lady, she concluded that MAD Magazine was borderline pornographic, and banned it from the school entirely. And that’s the story of how I indirectly got my then-favorite magazine banned from my elementary school. I probably have more weird stories, but this should give y'all a good fix of Weird Acey Shit for now. :P
I'm not sure how funny this is, but it's definitely one of my favorite stories to tell about my mom. Spoiler: long middle school story So, one of the middle schools I went to had a system for their electives-- you were on a track where you'd take a different one each quarter, and you were randomly selected to be put on a track. There were no options to choose. You got what you were given, and you just had to deal with it. (The logic, I assume, was that by exposing kids to a bunch of different things, they could decide what they really wanted later in high school. Or something.) But for a 'randomly screened' series of rotating electives, there was a suspicious disparity in gender. Boys got shop class and latin and an extra gym elective. Girls got home ec and an intro to music class. And this was a 'randomly screened' disparity of 80:20 in a lot of cases. (Some background: my mom was a sergeant in the Air Force, and grimly determined to tear apart institutional sexism with her own damn hands if she had to. She's an absolutely tiny woman, but much like all short people, that only puts her closer to hell. Where the rage lives. There was so much righteous anger in my mom's delicate body.) So, I've just gotten my schedule for the year and I am devastated. Because the track I ended up on had no art classes. I didn't really care one way or another about what I did get, but not having any place to draw for an hour hurt me in a my tiny sixth grade soul. My mom on the other hand locked onto that Home Economics course listing and saw red. (It didn't help that my best friend was a year older and had run into a similar problem last year-- he wanted to be in a Home Ec class and got told that boys didn't do that sort of thing. So she had some numbers to work with.) Still in uniform, she drives up to the school with me, and literally marches up to the principal's office. The man inside knew the fear of god (or more aptly, my mother) when she came in there spitting fire, me ambling along behind her. But he tried to stand his ground! No, it's randomly selected. No, it's set in stone. No, we're sorry, there's nothing that we can do to get your daughter into an art class. And my wonderful, wonderful mother looks at this man with utter contempt and asks him whether she should bother going to the school board or if jumping straight to the governor's office would be better. She gave no shits! She would have, with absolutely no shame, dragged this as high as it could go. This man was terrified and it showed. In the end, I never did go to art class, but mostly because I found out my best friend was going to be in the same tracks as me. And putting the fear of my mother into the principal worked out, because they threw out a potential expulsion (over a bullshit reason) the moment my mom walked into the building. But man, having my mom go to bat so damn hard for me was probably one of the most uplifting things I'd ever seen.
