I’ve watched American Horror Story on F/X for the last two seasons, often covering my eyes with my hands and peeking through the fingers. I’m not a fan of the horror genre, but this series is also clever, weird, and even bitingly funny at times.
1. At age six, my personal hell would be standing around the piano in music class, and being too afraid to ask the scary substitute teacher if I could go to the lavatory. Then I would pee in my pants right there, and have to go to the nurse’s office to change into a pair of avocado-green corduroy highwaters. Cell phones hadn’t been invented and my mommy wasn’t home to bring me my own change of clothes.
2. At age eleven, my personal hell would be being dumped by my BFF for a new BFF. Then I would have to watch the two of them being all giggly and BFF-y in the middle school cafeteria, while I tried to use my tongue to unwedge the piece of peanut butter and jelly sandwich that was stuck between my braces.
3. At age thirteen, my personal hell would be Chorus class with the aforementioned braces. I would now have eight – yes, EIGHT – rubber bands hooked around those braces because my teeth were a hot mess. Four of those bands connected a top bracket with a bottom bracket, so when I would open my mouth to sing loudly and clearly, the bands would snap and shoot across the room like slingshots.
4. At age eighteen, my personal hell would be 8:00 am classes Monday through Friday, while my college roommate’s first class was at 1:00 pm every day. She would just be getting out of bed when I came back to the room at 11:00 am.
5. At age twenty and ten months, my personal hell would be the first two months of senior year before I turned twenty-one. Hell would not start until Thursday night at 10:00 pm or so, when everyone else hopped into cabs and headed to the bars downtown. Hell was made bearable by the angel visiting in the form of my boyfriend who hung out with his (five months) younger girlfriend.
6. At age thirty, my personal hell would be walking up to the liquor store cashier and paying for my purchase without being carded. The jerk wouldn’t even play along and ask for my i.d.
All of these hellish scenarios may or may not have actually happened.
Okay, they happened.
Fortunately, I’m having trouble coming up with more recent hell scenarios. I know it’s not for lack of embarrassing situations; I certainly have my share of those. But I’m less prone to catastrophizing now that I’m old mature, so any situations I would write about would just seem petty. Or they would be too real, and I’m not going to go there.
But I’ll give you one more.
7. At age older-than-thirty, my personal hell would be stepping miles out of my comfort zone and starting a blog that just sat there, floating on the Internet, lonely and pathetic.
That scenario did not actually happen. So thank you.
What is your tongue in cheek version of hell?
On the season finale of this year’s Coven, the witches had to leave the corporeal world and then return to their bodies as part of a test. Each girl visited her own personal hell. One witch’s hell was the fast food chicken place where she worked, with a never-ending line of customers to serve. Another’s was her boyfriend breaking up with her, over and over for eternity. The child actress-turned-witch found that her hell was being in a live NBC production of The Sound Of Music, playing Liesl instead of Maria.
What would my own personal hell look like?
I suppose it would be different at different points in my life. I’m not asking seriously, because that’s just too morbid and depressing. Although Coven depicted hell as where one spends eternity, it really was just an uncomfortable situation that could not be escaped. Regardless of your religious beliefs concerning the afterlife, I’m asking you to give me some creative license and look at hell in this more mundane manner.
1. At age six, my personal hell would be standing around the piano in music class, and being too afraid to ask the scary substitute teacher if I could go to the lavatory. Then I would pee in my pants right there, and have to go to the nurse’s office to change into a pair of avocado-green corduroy highwaters. Cell phones hadn’t been invented and my mommy wasn’t home to bring me my own change of clothes.
2. At age eleven, my personal hell would be being dumped by my BFF for a new BFF. Then I would have to watch the two of them being all giggly and BFF-y in the middle school cafeteria, while I tried to use my tongue to unwedge the piece of peanut butter and jelly sandwich that was stuck between my braces.
3. At age thirteen, my personal hell would be Chorus class with the aforementioned braces. I would now have eight – yes, EIGHT – rubber bands hooked around those braces because my teeth were a hot mess. Four of those bands connected a top bracket with a bottom bracket, so when I would open my mouth to sing loudly and clearly, the bands would snap and shoot across the room like slingshots.
4. At age eighteen, my personal hell would be 8:00 am classes Monday through Friday, while my college roommate’s first class was at 1:00 pm every day. She would just be getting out of bed when I came back to the room at 11:00 am.
My alarm didn’t go off until 7:30 – plenty of time to roll out of bed and stumble to my 8:00 class. But it still sucked.
5. At age twenty and ten months, my personal hell would be the first two months of senior year before I turned twenty-one. Hell would not start until Thursday night at 10:00 pm or so, when everyone else hopped into cabs and headed to the bars downtown. Hell was made bearable by the angel visiting in the form of my boyfriend who hung out with his (five months) younger girlfriend.
6. At age thirty, my personal hell would be walking up to the liquor store cashier and paying for my purchase without being carded. The jerk wouldn’t even play along and ask for my i.d.
All of these hellish scenarios may or may not have actually happened.
Okay, they happened.
Fortunately, I’m having trouble coming up with more recent hell scenarios. I know it’s not for lack of embarrassing situations; I certainly have my share of those. But I’m less prone to catastrophizing now that I’m old mature, so any situations I would write about would just seem petty. Or they would be too real, and I’m not going to go there.
But I’ll give you one more.
7. At age older-than-thirty, my personal hell would be stepping miles out of my comfort zone and starting a blog that just sat there, floating on the Internet, lonely and pathetic.
That scenario did not actually happen. So thank you.
What is your tongue in cheek version of hell?
Ok…all of those are bad Dana…EXCEPT the one with the alternating schedules with your room mate! THAT is a good situation! When you are just getting back to your dorm, they are just leaving, so that means you can NAP IN PEACE! I would take advantage of that! 😉 Let me see what mine would be…oh…Age “now” and having my children alternate the stomach virus every week. You know how contagious those bugs are, and my daughters always catch from each other and I have to deal with the vomit and diarrhea from one child one week, and the other child the next! I HATE vomit!
I can’t even remember if I napped when she was gone – how sad is that? And your hell sounds horrible – why can’t children synchronize their illnesses and get them over with all at once?
Personal Hell? Huh. Um, so we’re not talking ACTUAL Hells that have existed? I mean we are because you did, with the whole peeing your pants, having to wear ugly too-short bell-bottoms, peanut-butter braces and an um idiotic schedule in college (me too by the way). So, um.
Let’s see. Oh every time I go to the mall looking like crap, I see an ex-employee of mine who is always like “OH! So um, you’re a mom now!” And um, ok the blog silence would suck, as would the internet being broken, as would showing up at BlogU and everybody laughed at me because I’m so old?
Yeah, those would suck. But the Blog U think isn’t going to happen, especially if you stick close to me. 😉
Nothing was worse than having early classes when your roommate didn’t have any until later.
Ugh. I know. Although she hated starting so late. I think the next year we both wised up and picked late morning classes.
My own personal hell would be to have to wear a bra 24/7.
Ooh, that’s a good one, Beth! I mean a bad one. You know what I mean.
HA! My own tongue in cheek version of hell? Probably the internet breaking down, or someone telling my accent is horrible! (Not a native speaker of English, but I have been told I speak better than many of the native speakers – my husband loves my accent, I am very self conscious about it)
I love accents of any kind – I’m sure you sound wonderful! Honestly, there are so many different regional accents in the US, and some sound nicer than others. I suppose it just depends on what sounds good to your ear. I would never tell you your accent is horrible, and if the internet broke down I would be in hell with you!
Hmmm I guess my version of hell in this sense would be an unsecure, not so content version of myself constantly caring about what everyone is thinking about me. Everyone around me in Arizona and the family members at home who may or may not be talking about something I shared with them over the phone. 🙁 It feels so good to not be in that place anymore. Great concept to make us think, Dana!
I’m glad you’re not in that place anymore, Brittnei. It’s liberating, I’m sure. And I’ve found that people aren’t thinking about me (in a negative way) anywhere near as often as I think they do. Everyone has their own stuff to worry about!
American Horror Story = so disturbing and scarily addicting. 😉
I know! Looking forward to seeing what craziness they come up with for next season.
This is really cool (except all the hells – me no likee) and a great kind of post to do. I feel like I learned a bit more about you, my friend 🙂
My hell would be if the internet broke. forever. *shudders*
Oh, that would be horrible! It would be so much harder to talk to YOU!
HAaaaaaHeeee.
Superb.
(Smiling in Minnesota) at your originality and humor.
And about #7. This would happen if one did not promote & produce & work her ass off to write something outstanding (like you do)
Lets see, one of my personal hells would be to awaken and not have words to write. OMGGGGGGGGosh.
Fabulous post.
Thank you so much! Yes, yours would be a personal hell for me too. But I suspect that’s not going to happen for you!
I think I just experienced a version of my own personal hell this past week while I was in Vegas with hubby on his work/pleasure trip. I went down to meet him for dinner one evening and he/we were grabbed by his boss and two customers who insisted on going out for sushi. I HATE sushi – as in it makes me want to vomit. Finally made it through dinner without losing my own dinner on anyone and then they decided we should go to a bar called the Bourbon Room where I sat in the super smoky atmosphere for FOUR HOURS where the group grew at one point to about 15 men associated with the work event. I was the only woman there and had the “pleasure” of watching all of them have far too much alcohol. When I thought it couldn’t get much worse, hubby’s boss grabs me by the hand and drags me onto the dance floor. The song playing ??? Sweet Child of Mine by Guns-N-Roses. And we didn’t get back to our hotel room until after 1:00am. Yeah. It was bad.
Ugh – that sounds hellish. I hope that was the only bad part of your weekend!
This is so awesome! OMG that first one is hysterical. You poor thing!!!
My personal hell was yesterday on my spin bike for 2 hours (one of which was teaching class) and riding 50 miles, inside, on a spin bike with sore legs, ass and crotch! Sorry – TMI!!
I don’t think I would be able to walk after that, Allie. I biked a little over 20 miles and my legs were vibrating all night. If I had peed in my pants at that point, I doubt I would have even noticed.
Oh so funny! I’m just experiencing the not being carded hell and I’m still in shock. Once I asked the cashier if he wanted to card me just to make sure. I don’t go to that package store anymore. In my head I’m still 21 and I wake up everyday wondering how I got my family, job, and bills to pay. Time goes by too fast!
Jenny, I am nowhere close to 21 and I still feel like that in my head! Then I look in the mirror…
My hell at 10 – walking home from school after 5th grade and having to pee so badly (I hated to use the bathrooms at school) that I peed myself before I made it home!!
Another pee story – what’s with the two of us, Kim? Thank you for sharing that with me:)
I love this and may steal it as a blog prompt if you don’t mind 🙂 I am so sad for the little girl who peed her pants but she was rewarded with the angel boyfriend so I hope it all makes some kind of cool you went through hell but you got some guy to give up a night out for you. Plus your blog rocks and continue to grow so that is one level of hell you didn’t have to live through
Steal away! It’s funny, my mom didn’t remember the peeing in the pants episode – clearly it wasn’t as traumatic for her. I’m thinking one of your personal hells would involve hockey maybe? As in not being able to watch. I love how passionate your FB posts are about the sport!
My husband always jokes that hell is an endless traffic jam with red lights and incompetent drivers stretching on for eternity. My idea of hell is dancing in public. This mama does NOT have moves like Jagger. And can’t those darn cashiers just play along?!
Really – no public dancing? I love to dance. I agree with your husband; I have no patience for traffic. I really should practice some kind of deep breathing when I’m stuck because I get myself all agitated.
I can bust out the moves for dance parties with my girls, but I have to be very, very inebriated to cut loose in public. It’s funny because I’m not a very self-conscious person, and I’m the first to sign up for any kind of public speaking. But dancing? TERRIFYING!! I just plain suck.
Very funny, Dana! I found myself relating to your horror stories…that 11-year-old scenario! Ugh. I’m prone to less drama too. I must be more mature. And no longer being asked for Id 🙁
I know – it stinks! I remember thinking how awesome it was to be carded and actually be legal. Going to the liquor store has lost all its excitement.
Tongue-in-cheek version of hell! Ok, I like it.
I think might would be waking up suddenly, so suddenly that my heart pounds, to dealing with my sick children. Not very sick because that is less tongue-in-cheek, but like.. vomiting sick.
Oh yes. That’s it for me.
And you have that vomit-fear thing, right? That would suck. It is horrible to be woken up in the middle of the night by a sick child. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen very often!
Too funny Dana! I can relate to far too many of them. Once in college, I fell asleep during a marketing class and the teacher asked the girl next to me to hit me over the head with her newspaper. How embarrassing. Of course I shouldn’t have been asleep (it was a small class not a lecture hall) but I was still mortified. I didn’t fall asleep in his class again. My hell right now would be the same thing with my blog, thankfully even though I’m not big, at least I know some people read it and I’m not talking to dead air. I don’t know if I could go on if I was talking to dead air for too long. That would be horrible.
It really would. There seems to be a movement by some bloggers to turn off comments and connect on social media instead, but I can’t do that. It may be less work than responding to comments, but I would feel too disconnected. I care more about the connections than the shares/stats. So thank you for “talking” to me!
My personal hell would be to go to a blogger network-working event at a trendy bar full of trendy young 20-somethings looking all trendy in their cute spring outfits where I know no one. In an effort to try to talk to people I try to crack terrible jokes about everyone being on Instagram that even I realized made me sound like a huge nerd. This may or may not have happened the other day….
Oh, Bev – I’m so sorry! That sounds very uncomfortable. It takes guts to go to a networking event, though – I’ll give you props for that.
Oh, it’s fine! I just felt super out of my element. Makes me really look forward to the SITS event tomorrow here in Boston, I think that is much more my scene!
How fun! I think there’s an event in Baltimore in the fall and I would love to go.
Oh the horror. I wasn’t even there and I want to hide. Good for you for going and surviving, Bev 🙂