No one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends.

Apparently the Hollingsworth family motto is "Disce ferenda pati," which translates to "Learn to suffer that which must be borne." Great! Our family motto is basically "Life sucks and then you die."

The past few days since my trip have been pretty quiet, but I'm trying to post more often, so I'll share something I wrote a few years ago:


After failing to consider the caffeine content of Starbucks ice cream, I am sitting at my desk, staring at the stack of papers that goes largely unnoticed during waking hours. As I reach for the pile, thinking for once that I will be productive instead of catching up on my reality TV, an old picture falls out—the old picture that everyone has, the one that makes you think back to your adolescent years and cringe.

As far as I can tell, there was no special occasion, so I can only assume my mother had deemed my appearance worthy of documentation—and certainly not because of my staggering beauty. I am 11, tall and gangly, resembling a newborn giraffe. My outfit is a cornucopia of late-eighties horror: a tacky denim shirt; a denim skirt over what should be leggings but appears to be pants (or perhaps my little chicken legs weren’t enough to fill out the leggings); white patent dress shoes; and two socks on each foot, one pair powder blue, one pair baby pink, with a blue foot and pink cuff on the right, and, of course, vice versa on the left.

But the most cringe-worthy moment of all is not my appalling outfit or my rangy, gawky body. In evidence of an adolescent’s nonsensical tendencies, there I am, in my dress shoes and skirt, perched atop a bicycle. It’s a wonder I wasn’t more popular.

I’m not sure how the picture came to rest in my to-do pile, but every few years it inexplicably pops up. Sometimes it makes me feel better about my current self, other times it has the opposite effect. Nevertheless, I fear I will forever be haunted by the low point of my own physical appearance.

Thanks, Mom.