when i was in my pre-teen years i started this notebook with one of my best friends at the time. just a spiral bound notebook that we wrote our inner most feelings in (i.e. "i hated lunch today", "do you think he looked at me? circle yes or no", "my hair is horrible today", etc.) clearly the most important stuff life had to offer which we then passed back and forth to one another. like one giant year-long super note!

i found it not too long ago when i was going through my things. it was really dumb. but! in the very front of the notebook i saw that we put the top five boys we were "in love with". you know, people we'd never meet. anyway! it was one of those things that when i saw it immediately transported me back to the moment we made it. i can remember what the room smelled like. and what i was wearing. and how we were sitting. and i remember that she was in love with nick from the backstreet boys. she LITERALLY believed she was going to marry him which i thought even at age eleven was pretty absurd. she cried hysteric tears upon hearing the sound of his voice. but she had this massive list of boys she "loved". and they were boys. aged 16-19. and i remember what a hard time she gave me for all of my choices. which were very hard for me to come up with in the first place as i found loving strangers to be a pretty fruitless effort. but she mostly thought they were ugly, or lame or old. which they were definitely the latter. the youngest person on my top five was twenty-eight years old and one was our old man teacher. it was at that moment i was forever branded the old man lover and she never let me live it down.

so in thinking about this very subject i have created a semi-comprehensive visualization of all the young and grown men i'd never meet but still thought about almost constantly!











jonathan taylor thomas - age eight
jonathan brandis - age ten
brandon and dylan! - age ten
devon sawa - age nine
joseph gordon levitt - age eleven
paul mccartney - age eleven through fourteen
fox mulder - age eleven through infinity
john cusack - age sixteen through forever
adam franklin - age nineteen through the rest of my life

so basically i started out liking boys who very closely resemble girls and then transitioned into loving grown men at around age eleven. who knows what happened.