Cooties

I was working on archiving some photos this morning. It's a necessary, but monotonous task that must be periodically undertaken to keep the hard drive clean.

Suddenly Barb snuck up on me and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.

"Where was I? What was I doing? What number photo had I last copied to disk? From what collection?"

Ugh. Girls. LOL

One of my earliest memories in my life is one of my first true humiliations.

When I was in second or third grade we, of course, reveled at recess. There were all the swings, the see-saws, the twirl and pukes, and just running around playing tag, getting dirty and letting off some pent up steam.

Girls played with girls, and boys played with boys. That's just the way it worked.

Every now and then though, suddenly the girls would mass and plan a sudden Apache style attack on the boys. They would suddenly break from a huddle, run in all directions, and try to capture and kiss a boy. That's right kiss! Yuuuuccckkk!

It was typically a five-minute annoyance. I mean not even the boys could catch me at that age. Evading the girls was just plain easy.

Once I was leaning up against the school's outside wall talking with one of my friends when all of a sudden the girls' "I'm going to kiss some boy" scream went off.

I turned around, a girl jumped up and kissed me on the cheek. I turned 15 different shades of red in less than half-a-second.

If I wasn't already in horror enough, and possibly starting to suffer from a severe case of cooties, it turned even worse.

She turned around, skipping away from me, and yelling gleefully, "I kissed him! I kissed him! I kissed Jimmy Albert!"

Unsuccessfully, I looked for a hole to crawl into.

It took about two-weeks for it all to calm down, the pointing, the laughing, the "I got yous!" from my assailant.

Beyond my Mom dressing me in authentic German liederhosen, being kissed by a girl was one of my first humiliations. Fortunately I'd grow to have many, many, many more embarassing moments to come.