“D” is for “Daredevil” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

---

No, I’m not talking about the comic-book character or any of the iterations thereof. I’m still talking about me, here. 🙂

A lot of the people I know and love at this point in my life probably wouldn’t believe it since I’m such a lazy, cat-in-the-sun kind of person, but when I was a kid I was quite the daredevil. Nowadays I like to sit on the couch and write, curl up in bed and read or watch TV, and it’s a great bit of effort to even get me to go outside in the sun during the summer, but go back about 25 years and I was scaling everything in site and generally putting my limbs at risk on a daily basis.

Every kid thinks that they’re invincible – that’s just one of those things that the still-developing brain convinces itself of – but when I look back now I seriously cringe at some of the things that I used to do without even thinking about it. There were the common things, like climbing too-high trees or leaping from said too-tall trees into piles of not-so-soft snow. But there were also significantly more dangerous things, like doing flips and hanging upside-down from the monkey bars, or standing on one side of the see-saw and getting my friends to jump on the other side and launch me into the air. More than a few of the things I used to do make me genuinely wonder how I never killed myself, such as how I used to shimmy down the cliff face along the water near where I grew up and hop from slippery-wet stone to slippery-wet stone, looking for fossils.

The worst thing that I can think of, however, is climbing the barracks. Near where I grew up there are a number of abandoned stone war barracks that kids have always loved to explore. There’s one that lays underground, and you have to descend a pitch-black set of stairs to get into it, and there are several along the cliff that are like circular tunnels with little windows poking out to watch for approaching ships. But there’s one that is like a tower that was the most fun to explore because there were no ladders or stairs and the entire thing had to be traversed by climbing, boosting or pulling up your friends, and a fair bit of insanity.

This is the barracks in question:

For scale, see that door on the front, to the far right of the picture? That door is about eight feet tall. Now see right above the door, on what would be the second level of the building, where that long window opening is? Okay, here’s the fun part… See the third and fourth levels that are the tower bit? Well there was no access to those, so as kids we used to get up there by climbing on the ledge of that second level window, getting our friends to give us a boost, and climbing up on that second-level roof, then into the third-level window. Similarly, we’d boost ourselves from the third level window onto that tiny, super-skinny ledge, and then shimmy up to the fourth-level window.

At the time it was great fun, and I can really remember it being this amazing adventure that I wouldn’t have given up for the world, but looking back now I gasp at my own stupidity. How incredibly easy it would have been to fall from any of those levels. How easily I could have broken my neck or worse.

And yet at the same time, I feel lame as hell just speaking like that, because I can still remember it being the best. I guess even a cat-in-the-sun adult like me still has a small sliver of daredevil hiding in the back of my mind somewhere.

---

Were you a daredevil as a kid? Did you do anything back then that you look back on now and cringe about? Please feel free to leave a comment!

“C” is for “Cats!” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

---

How about a silly post for today? Cats! Let’s talk about cats!

I was obsessed with cats when I was a kid. Part of that was because we didn’t have any pets and nearly everyone I knew growing up had either a cat or a dog (sometimes both). There was a perfectly good reason that we didn’t have pets – my mom and I are both allergic to pet dander, her so much so that she can have trouble breathing – but as a kid you don’t care about logic, and all I wanted, desperately, was a cat. I had so many stuffed cats, all with names, and at one point I even had imaginary pet cats…take that as you will.

Eventually I did something that was technically very, very stupid, and went out and adopted two kittens while I was in college and still living at my parents’ house. They had a dual-reaction of wanting to murder me and also kinda falling in love with the kitties, so I survived that particular event, luckily. I also lived in that basement at that point, so that helped with the non-murder.

I named my two kitties – who were brothers – Maximus and Commadus, because I loved the movie Gladiator at the time, and shortened them to Max and Comma (and there were plenty of jokes about that, I assure you). Later on when my husband and I were first living together as boyfriend and girlfriend, we adopted another kitty we happened to find on the streets, looking for food and picking a fight with a really, really big dog. No one ever claimed her, so we ended up keeping her, and she wound up with the auspicious name “Little Bitch” because that’s what we were constantly calling her when she kept picking fights with the two boys.

Unfortunately Max died quite suddenly one night – we’re not sure what happened, but he’d been finding places other than the litter box to hide and pee, so we assume he had some kind of health problem – but Comma and Little B are still with us today. My daughter loves them, which is going to bring up some difficulties soon since they’re both at least ten years old now. I can’t wait for that discussion. Ugh.

In fact, she loves cats at least as much – and possibly more – than I ever did. It makes me see a little bit of myself in her, but also makes me groan because, as much as I’ve loved my cats, when they’re gone I don’t ever plan on getting any more of them. That’s okay though…I’ll just keep drowning her in kitty plushies like I’m already doing, and I’m sure that will keep her happy…at least until she hits college. ^_~

---

Do you have any pets? What kind? Feel free to leave a comment down below!

Memoir Mondays: Gimme!

So on Friday I explained that I’m going to begin posting “Flash Fiction Fridays” as a way to take the blog back to what it’s supposed to be: a writer’s blog. Well this is the second feature I’m adding to aid in this endeavor.

More than anything I’ve always wanted to write fiction – speculative fiction, to be exact – but just as a child must eat her veggies before she can have candy, a good writer must spend time honing skills in a variety of areas other than just the ones she enjoys most. Thus I am reserving future Mondays (which you may recognize as the crappiest day of the week) to hone my non-fiction skills by way of writing about my own life. These posts will often come with the help of prompts like the ones shared by the Daily Post, but they may also come from whatever interesting life moments may come my way.

Future posts may be a little longer and more involved, but for today I’m going to go with a quick prompt from the Daily Post that caught my eye:

Gimme
Was there a special gift or toy you wanted as a child but never received? What was it?

I like to believe that I was the kind of kid who was happy with whatever she got, but that didn’t stop me from trying to get as much as I could. Once I was old enough to understand how things really worked I would anticipate the arrival of the Sears Wish Book on our front step at the end of the summer. For the months that followed that magical catalog’s arrival I would regularly scrutinize every page, carefully considering every toy and game, and circling the stuff that I really wanted. At first I’d be very careful, circling only the things that I felt I absolutely couldn’t live without, but by the time Christmas rolled around I’d have half the catalog circled because everything seemed awesome.

Of course I never got everything that I circled, but I almost always got the stuff that I really, really wanted, and even when I didn’t I got other awesome stuff that I was more than happy with.

But there was one thing that I wanted for many years in a row that I never got. I didn’t ask for it often, because I was a strange, strange child who was actually cognizant of how expensive some things were, but I did ask for it a few times and never got it… That special toy was a dollhouse; the kind that twice as tall as the kid who gets it and comes with massive amounts of furniture and accessories.

As an adult with a child of my own, I understand why my parents probably decided not to get me one of these dollhouses. For one thing, the cost of them is outrageous, even by usual toy standards. For another thing they tend to be enormous; one such dollhouse would never have fit in my childhood bedroom, and my parents were not the kind of people to allow their living area to be overrun with kid stuff. But of course, at the time, that logic meant nothing to me, and it meant even less when my best friend and her sister got a wicked dollhouse and I had to deal with the seething jealousy.

Eventually, when I was way too old to still be pining for a dollhouse, I took matters into my own hands. My friends and I had gotten into Sailor Moon and had collected some of the dolls, and I decided that my two dolls were damn-well going to have a dollhouse. I had a closet in my bedroom that wasn’t the wardrobe type, but was actually four large shelves. I took everything out of that closet, cramming it into wherever else in my room I could, and I made that closet into a doll house. I used cardboard, craft supplies, and whatever else I could find, and constructed a dollhouse, making each shelf a different floor, and I even “built” tons of stuff for the dolls to use, like books and magazines, a TV with screens to change what was playing, and pets to make the house a home.

I won’t tell you how old I was when I built this dollhouse, but I’ll tell you that I was old enough to known damn well how childish I was being. But for a while, that homemade dollhouse made me super-happy, because I’d taken matters into my own hands and given myself something I’d been longing for for a long time, and sometimes that’s just what you’ve got to do!

Something Stolen

Something you had that was stolen.

Have you ever had something stolen from you? I’m fairly certain that everyone has had something stolen from them at one point or another, whether it was something big and expensive, like a car, or something cheap and easily replaced, like office supplies. Myself, I work in the trades, which means that I have a lot of experience with things like radios, tools, and parts sprouting legs and walking away. I even know one guy who had his prescription safety glasses swiped from our trailer, as though they would be of any damn use to the thief.

But when I saw this prompt one item in particular came to my mind immediately: my childhood bike.

It’s almost difficult to believe now that every kid who can dress himself has a $700 smartphone/supercomputer in their hands 24/7, but when I was little every kid’s pride and joy was their bike. We would ride everywhere, sometimes spending the entire day from dawn to dusk just riding around town. On grading day every year the local department stores would have rows of bikes on display because they knew any kid who had outgrown theirs would be asking for a new one. Bikes were serious business. I was on mine non-stop during certain years of my life, but like most kids tend to be, I was careless with it. I would often drop it in a friend’s yard or even right on the side of the road while I was off doing something else. I didn’t think anything of it, until one day when I came back to get it and it wasn’t there.

To say that I panicked would definitely be an understatement. I was only about 8 at the time, but I understood that bikes were not cheap and that my parents didn’t have the money to just throw around on such things. I started searching in a frenzy, certain that it had to be somewhere nearby, desperate to find it before my parents found out it was gone. I tried to enlist the friends that I’d been playing with, but they’d been called home for supper and promptly abandoned me. Eventually my own father came looking for me and I had to admit the horrible truth: someone had stolen my bike.

I’m fairly certain that I recall Niagara Falls opening up in my eyes then.

Now, it turned out a little while later that my bike was not stolen in the traditional sense. Like any neighborhood, mine had its share of kids who were rotten little jerks for the sake of being rotten little jerks. It turned out that a couple of these bullies had seen my bike laying in the neighbor’s lawn and thought it would be funny to make me think it was gone. Knowing that they couldn’t just take it home without their parents asking where the heck it had come from, they’d tossed it into the trees and bushes in the vacant lot at the end of the road. Luckily my father and a neighbor were able to find it and it was returned to me with a gentle talking to about leaving my stuff laying around.

So in the end all was well, but something like that can affect a kid at that age. For quite a while after that I was pretty paranoid to leave anything I owned unattended for even a few minutes. Even to this day I’m a little bit twitchy about things like my daughter taking a toy to school for ‘show and share’, and I blame it on the fact that this incident taught me not to trust other kids around my stuff.

Have you ever had something important to you stolen? Did you get it back or was it gone forever? How did its loss affect you? Please share!

Also, a reminder that I am running a contest throughout the month of March. For each comment you post on my blog throughout the month, you will receive one entry toward a draw for a hard-copy of my zombie apocalypse novel, “Nowhere to Hide”! Please note that in order to accept the prize, I will need you to give me a mailing address where I can have the book sent. If the winner drawn did not intend to enter the contest and/or does not want the book, I will draw another name. Please also note that obvious spam/duplicate comments/etc. will not be counted toward an entry…play fair! And good luck! ❤

The Objects of Childhood

Note: Today’s post is courtesy of a prompt from “642 Things to Write About“. Today’s prompt is: “Three objects in your childhood bedroom.”

There are a great many objects that I could choose for this post, but these are three that immediately came to mind when I read the prompt:

1. My Jumping Bunny

Quick quiz: how many of you had the jumping bunny toy as kids? It looked like a little stuffed bunny, but when you flipped the switch on his belly he would jump forward a few steps, sit back, wiggle his nose, and then do a backward flip. They were the height of a technological toy back in the day, you know. And I had one (still have, in fact, although he doesn’t work anymore) that has stayed with me my entire life. My father bought him for me literally the day I was born, and I kept him with me always. I’ve always had a thing for stuffed toys, but as different stuffies came and went, this one always stayed. I considered him to be my special bunny, because he’d been with me since the beginning, and he still holds a special place in my book room amongst a few other special stuffed friends.

2. My Super Nintendo

I’m old enough to have had an original Nintendo Entertainment System, but most of my memories of playing NES are of playing it with my cousin at his house. But the SNES? That’s all about my bedroom. By the time I got an SNES my parents had put a small TV in my bedroom, so I could actually snuggle up on my own bed and play my games, and that was the greatest thing ever. Don’t get me wrong, I was a fairly active, outdoorsy kid too, but it was just so awesome to be able to throw my pillow at the end of the bed, snuggle under the blankets, and play Chrono Trigger until I literally passed out.

3. Babysitter’s Club book collection

I’ve always been a reader, since I was old enough to start recognizing words. Over the course of my childhood my parents spent an ungodly amount of money on books for me, not only because it was a good habit to reinforce, but because I read so quickly that it was hard to keep up. Every time we took a drive over to Sydney to do some shopping (a half-hour drive) they would get me a Babysitter’s Club book, and many times I had the book most of the way read by the time we got home. Mind you I was (and still am) known to re-read books over and over again, so I did get their money’s worth, but let’s just say that in the end I wound up with quite the collosal collection packed onto my bedroom shelves. 😀

This prompt was fun…why don’t you take part? What are three items you remember from your childhood room?

Memorable Moments

Note: Today’s post is courtesy of a prompt from “642 Things to Write About“. Today’s prompt is “Re-create your earliest childhood memory.”

It’s hard to say exactly when kids begin creating lasting memories. Some people will say they can remember things that happened when they were 2 years old, while others can’t remember much before they were school age. And there’s a lot of psychological factors to consider too, such as how people tend to “remember” their childhood the way it is described to them, and can therefore be tricked into remembering events that never actually happened. Taking such things into account, it’s difficult to accurately re-create my earliest childhood memory, but I can tell you what I think it is.

It was my third birthday party. The party was being held in my parent’s basement, which had a very old-school 70’s kind of look to it at the time, with floral furniture in many shades of brown and a long, wood-paneled bar that split the main room almost completely in half. My whole family was there; my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, amongst others. My hair was pretty long at that point, pulled out of my face by a bow, and I was wearing a pretty blue party dress.

I remember playing with balloons, throwing them up in the air and trying not to let them hit the ground. I vaguely remember the cake…I think it was in the shape of a Cabbage Patch doll. I remember being asked to pose for pictures, because my entire life my dad was always taking a million pictures.

But the thing I remember the most, the thing that makes this memory stand out in my mind as my first, is when my mom came down with the cake, lit up with a number 3 candle. My cousin Tommy, who is only a couple of months older than me, proclaimed that he was going to blow out the candle, and I had a fit. I can remember screaming at him, “It’s my candle!” And he shouted back, “No, it’s mine!” Back and forth we went, screaming, “Mine!” “No, mine!” “Mine!” “MINE!”

In order to avoid a full blow kid-pocalypse, my mother held out the candle for me to blow out, and then re-lit it so Tommy could blow it out too. The next thing you knew all the other kids at the party were running over to take their turn. My mother ended up lighting that candle about twelve times, just so it wouldn’t cause a fight. And I guess it worked, because I was perfectly satisfied with the solution and my mind quickly turned to presents. Ah, the attention span of a 3-year-old.

Size Matters

Call me immature, but I chuckled a little when I saw the title for today’s assignment. I had to drag my mind back up out of the gutter, however, because today’s post is about a part of childhood.

Tell us about the home where you lived when you were twelve. Which town, city, or country? Was it a house or an apartment? A boarding school or foster home? An airstream or an RV? Who lived there with you? Today’s twist: Pay attention to your sentence lengths and use short, medium, and long sentences as you compose your response about the home you lived in when you were twelve.

———-

I grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada. The house I lived in when I was twelve is actually the same house my parents live in to this day, but it looks much different now. It is a bungalow-style house with a single floor and a concrete-foundation basement. When I was twelve we had already put the siding on – it’s a very pale green. Back then there were several large bushes in the front yard, right up against the house.

There were three bedrooms and one bathroom back then, and each of the bedrooms were fairly small. My parent’s bed took up most of the length of their room; there was barely enough room to have the dresser at the foot of the bed and still be able to open the drawers. At that time I took the smaller of the two remaining rooms because I wanted the room that looked out onto the street. For the life of me I can’t remember why…because I was a kid, I suppose, and kids are weird in the head sometimes. The room was long and thin with the type of closet that expands out into the room, taking up even more space.

The living room ran into the dining room. A wall separated them both from the kitchen, but my father busted a hole through the wall and put up a see-through shelf so that the whole area felt more open. The kitchen was all oak-colored cupboards and white appliances, and the window looked out into the back yard. The bathroom was only as wide as the tub, which had sliding glass doors instead of a shower curtain. The window in there was a textured, stained glass kind of thing meant to hide the person in the shower from the outside, and I hated it because it felt weird.

The basement walls were all jip-rocked, but I don’t think we had anything down for flooring at that point. The laundry room also housed the furnance and the oil tank. Back then you could have your oil tank physically inside your house without your insurance provider having a fit. I always thought that room was super creepy for some reason. It reminded me of something out of a Freddy Krueger movie.

One thing I remember distinctly about the house in those days was the ridiculous electrical wiring. If my mom tried to blow dry her hair while the washing machine was running and the refrigerator cut in, we’d blow a fuse. If I was watching TV in my room while mom was running the vacuum in the living room and dad turned the microwave on, we’d blow a fuse. The most ridiculous combinations of circuits would be wired to the same fuse, so that it was nearly impossible for all three of us to be doing something at the same time without blowing one. Eventually my dad snapped and had an electrician come in to fix up the box, but when I was a kid the constantly-blowing fuses were a kind of laughable truth of life.

More Random Things You Might Not Know About Me

I can totally rock a Space Invaders t-shirt.

• Most of my favorite shows are fictional stories like Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Game of Thrones, but I also enjoy a variety of different things, and one show I love is Penn and Teller’s Bullshit. I don’t agree with 100% of the things that they’ve said on the show, but I do agree with quite a lot of it, and I admire the way that they’re willing to talk about the unpopular opinions when they truly believe in that opinion.
• I can sing at least one song, without forgetting any words, to every Disney Princess movie except Brave and Frozen, and only because I haven’t watched those particular ones enough to have the songs memorized. I regularly sing said songs at the top of my lungs when I know no one can hear me.
• Moths and similar winged bugs freak me the hell out. I don’t mind them as long as they’re nowhere near me, but if they come close enough to touch me I lose my bloody mind.
• When I was a little kid I had a Cricket talking doll that I loved to death. My mom’s coworker and friend used to call me on the phone and talk to me in Cricket’s voice and for years I really believed that it was the real Cricket who was talking to me.
• I play a bit of guitar (although not that often anymore) but I am straight up phobia-level terrified of tuning the instrument. When I was young and taking lessons, my teacher had a string snap while he was retuning his guitar – a little surprising, but nothing too terrible there. Then a couple of years later I snapped a string because I hadn’t realized that particular string had somehow been wound up an octave too high. Again, it surprised me but was nothing too horrifying. But then I saw a horror movie in which a character broke a string on another instrument (I think it was a piano, but I can’t quite remember), and the string struck the character in the eye. A great deal of blood ensued. Ever since watching that scene, I can’t help but imagine myself getting hit in the eye by a flying broken string every time I have to tune my guitar. The only way I can get myself through it is to make sure the guitar strings are pointed as far away from my face as possible through the entire ordeal, and to wear a pair of safety glasses. I look like a total lunatic, but it’s the only way it’s going to happen.
• I have a major pet peeve…about actual pets. I’ve always loved cats, but I have two and it absolutely enrages me how they run after me and wind around my legs and stand in the way of my feet as I walk whenever I get anywhere within ten feet of their food bowls. I might have just filled the bowls literally five minutes previous, but if I walk too close they’re on top of me again, tripping me while I try to carry laundry down the stairs or pawing at my feet when I turn toward the bathroom instead. And it makes me genuinely MAD. Maybe it’s a bit of an anger management thing, I dunno. All I know is that it makes me want to punt them down the stairs. 😛
• I have a thing about certain scents. Some are reasonable, like the smell of sugar cookies, and some are weird, like the smell of Play Doh, and some send me straight into a nostalgia spiral back into my childhood. To this day certain smells immediately make me think about playing certain old video games or scribbling out stories in a notebook in the back of my mom’s car.
• I am not, nor will I ever be, the kind of person who worries a ton about cleaning, but I absolutely wig out when I step on stuff (little crumbs or what-have-you) with bare feet. My entire house is hardwood and laminate flooring, so I wear socks 90% of the time to avoid stepping on little bits of things that didn’t get vacuumed up.
• As a writer, I cringe when reading something that is poorly written, but – counter-intuitively – I have thoroughly enjoyed some books that were horribly written but had a fun plot.
• For the first 27 years of my life I swore you would never get me on a plane because I figured I’d either have a panic attack from the height, or get violently ill because I occasionally have motion sickness. When I finally got on a plane for the first time in order to go away for work, I experienced either. My ears popped pretty bad during the first flight, but that was it. Color me surprised.
• Once, at a wedding when I was about twelve years old, there was a big platter of nanaimo bars on the buffet table, and no one was really eating them. By the time the reception was over I had eaten a good dozen of those squares. And they weren’t small either.
• When I’m working out West I tend to eat better because all the food is provided for me and it’s pretty easy to just grab some salad fixins and a chicken breast. But once a week or so I skip supper all together, buy a huge bag of chips and some cream soda from the convenience store, and spend the night gorging and watching shows on my tablet.
• I get a strange enjoyment out of writing these “random things” posts because they force me to really think about myself and pick out the information that I didn’t even realize I was keeping to myself. 😀

A to Z Challenge Day 21: Usagi Tsukino (the Sailor Senshi)

I have yet another confession to make: I cheated a little bit on this one. You see, the character in question’s original name does start with “U”, as soon in the title, but I personally grew up watching the translated, Americanized version of the show, in which her name starts with “S” (Serena). That said, the character was an important part of my childhood, and as I grew up and discovered that the show had actually been quite hacked apart and Frankenstiened back together by American sensors I did hunt down the original Japanese version and decided that I liked it much better, so let’s just go with Usagi, shall we?

If you didn’t grow up with anime in the 90’s you probably don’t know that it was pretty huge, but also pretty regularly ridiculed. These days geeks and nerds are actually pretty popular (is that an oxymoron?) but back then they were teased and tormented, and (at least in my experience) only geeks and nerds watched anime. I caught a strange amount of flack for watching this show, let me tell you. But watch it I did, because I loved the concept of it. In the same way that I loved Spider-Man for being a teenage superhero with all the problems that entails, I loved Sailor Moon because it was about a group of super-heroines, all of them school girls. They were dealing with growing up, managing school, dating and falling in love, having fun, and all that stuff that young people deal with, but they also occasionally had to save the world. I lived for those kind of stories.

And my favorite character in the show was the titular “Sailor Moon”, whose real name was Usagi. I loved the other characters as well, but Usagi was my favorite because of how pathetic she was. Does that sound odd? Maybe it is. See, the other characters had so much strength – intelligence, physical power, strategic skills, grace, street smarts – but Usagi was like the counter to all of that. She was flunking most of her classes, was clumsy and quick to burst into tears, and was wavering on the cowardly side of the scale. For the most part she was completely and utterly pathetic.

And yet, when it really came down to it, when her friends or family were in trouble, or when someone was being taken advantage of, or when big bad evil was all set to destroy the world, she bucked up, put on her big girl panties, and saved the day. That’s why I liked her so much more than the other characters. For all intents and purposes she was the weak link, but when it really counted she didn’t let that stop her from doing what was right.

A to Z Challenge Day 16: Peter Parker (the Spider-Man)

I’ve mentioned before that in recent years I’ve gotten pretty into the comic book world, particularly with the Marvel superheroes. But Spider-Man – aka Peter Parker – is the Marvel superhero who was my first big link to the comic world, before I even really knew anything about comics.

I’m too young for the original Spider-Man cartoon (although I’ve seen it and have an appreciation for the terrible goodness of it), but there was another cartoon in the 90’s that aired when I was plenty old enough to be falling in love with superheroes. I’m certain that I saw every episode of this particular series, and went on to watch a couple of spin-off series’ as well. At one point – though I was always more into prose than comic-style stories – I began collecting a s series of comics called “Slingers”, which featured four teenagers who adopted the four alternate persona that Peter Parker had come up with during a particularly rough time to be Spider-Man. And my enjoyment of the character continued on from there, with the movies, and then the remake, plus the video games that were periodically released all through my childhood.

The biggest reason that I liked Spider-Man, specifically, as a kid is that he was a kid too. Okay, sure, he was a teenager, but still. He was a young person who had to deal with school, a social life, dating, and all that other good stuff, while also being a superhero, constantly in mortal danger and having his good name besmirched by none other than his boss. It’s always great, as a kid, to be reminded that kids can be heroes too, and Peter Parker showed that in spades. He acted like a kid, what with the goofy banter and constantly trying to balance superhero life with a social life, but he also regularly saved peoples’ lives, thwarted evil, and made hard decisions. As a kid who also loved to write and create her own characters, those qualities really spoke to me.

These days I still enjoy watching Spider-Man cartoons, especially with the company of my daughter, who even at only three years old already knows that Doctor Octopus is a “really bad guy”. Damn right, sweetie. Damn right.