In 1995 or 1996 my sister and I used this singing parody screensaver called “Hey, Macaroni!” as our default screensaver. I’d be down in the computer room our dad had built for us, and I’d glance over at the monitor and see it filling up with those horrible macaroni, and I’d be annoyed because I knew that the singing was about to start. But I’d usually let it play, at least for a little, because it seemed like, you know, we made our choice. This is what we have chosen to save our screen. Now we must learn to live with it. Computers were so mysterious in their early Internet days. Here is the screensaver:
Look at how his mouth is a curly bracket. Why did R.I. Soft Systems do that? Why didn’t they just make it smooth? Did they think it looked too much like a parenthesis, because they were using a parenthesis? Was a bracket supposed to seem sort of computery and hip?
The word hip reminds me that in 4th grade we had to write a poem about a kind of flower, and I chose tulip. Why wasn’t I like my best friend Jace, who awesomely wrote about an awesome black rose? My poem was about the bulb underground and here is how it ended:
…Wondering if it will be popular, hip.
Then, BANG! Out pops a tulip.
I was rather proud, and later it appeared in the Magpie II, the middle school literary thingy. When my mom and sister saw it they laughed at those lines and I told them that the poem was actually by an annoying prissy girl in my class, and damned if I knew why my name (my good name!) was on it. Almost the exact same thing happened in fifth grade when, inspired by the New Radicals song “Get What You Give” I wrote a song “in that style” (and imagined their bald singer singing it). It was called “Real Cool Day.” It was about me and a girl having “a real cool day.” In the second verse I rhymed real cool day with the line “like Jennifer Lopez, everything’s goin’ my way.” Everything’s going my way was something she had said in a song around then.
I was ALSO proud of this song, so I sent it off to some contest on Poetry.com, or to be registered on Poetry.com as a poem that nobody could steal, and where perhaps someone would notice it, either my crush or I guess a record executive. THEN THEY SENT ME A COPY OF THE POEM in an ENVELOPE WITH A TRANSPARENT PLASTIC FRONT and my MOM AND SISTER READ IT and told me to come look at this funny thing that had mistakenly been sent to me. I crumpled the envelope up in front of them and ran up to my room and hid it at the back of a drawer in my bedside table. A little while later I went down to dinner, with no one the wiser.