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Girl Scout Goth Badge, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

I’ve been challenged by Cokane to keep up this bloggy chain letter of personal revelation, so here ya go. Five things you may not know about me. In turn, I now challenge Errin, Jennigirl, Jessica, Claudia and Brandy to throw their closet doors open.
1. My Girl Scout badges were bought, not earned.
My scouting career was cruelly cut short at age 11 when my parents decided I had to start going to Hebrew school three days a week to get ready for my Bat Mitzvah. Not surprisingly, Hebrew school sucked donkey balls, and the fact that I could no longer march with my troupe in the annual Memorial Day Parade through town made me cry bitter tears. To shut me up, my mom channeled Kyle’s mom from South Park and informed the troupe leaders that I would be marching with them in the parade even though I wasn’t in the troupe anymore. Then she went a step further and found out what badges the other girls had earned so she could buy them and sew them on my sash so I didn’t look badge deficient on the big day. When Memorial Day rolled around, I was highly decorated with badges I couldn’t identify and definitely didn’t earn. All the other girls knew my mom had bought them for me, so they made fun of me along the entire route. Being a Jew is awes.

2. I’ve never taken a journalism class or a women’s studies class in my life.
Yes, I have somehow ended up as the Managing Editor of a national feminist magazine, but I actually have a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Performing Arts Production/Management. Many have marveled at my ability to ferret out the one job that pays worse than theater. What can I say? I’m gifted.

3. My first pet died the night my brother was born.
He was a bunny named Brown-Foot. I named him that because, in my morbid four-year-old mind, if I ever needed money, I could kill him and sell his carcass to whoever was responsible for the lucky rabbits’ feet I saw vendors selling in Central Park. And if I did decide to do that, the feet would be, you guessed it, brown. As it turned out, I didn’t need to kill him. There wasn’t room enough in the world for both Brown Foot and my baby brother, so Brown Foot’s soul was sucked out of his body, and at that precise moment, he was reincarnated as Daniel. I wonder how much I could get for Daniel’s feet…

4. I got my period for the first time on Valentine’s Day, 1988.
One drop of blood painlessly fell from my vagina, leaving an adorable, heart-shaped stain in my petite white panties. NOT. By the time I got off the school bus my jeans looked like a fucking crime scene and I was in terrible, unfamiliar pain. Nobody was home but my brother, and I was so scared and freaked out by the way my mom’s super-giant maxi pad felt in my underwear I wanted to die. Now my period is old enough to drive, have legal sex, and join the army. Sunrise, sunset.

5. The day I lost my virginity, it was a “do-over.”
One summer day when I was 17, it felt like an egg-timer went off in my ovaries and I suddenly wanted to have sex, even though I hadn’t ever wanted to before. I called my boyfriend, and he came over right after I was done with summer-school chemistry to do the deed. Unforch, I got nervous after the clothes came off, and stalled by making out with him for a really long time, so by the time I was ready, he couldn’t complete the feat. I officiously re-scheduled him for the same time the next day, and because I was very goal oriented at that point, I skipped the make-out part at the beginning, so my “do-over” did the trick, but didn’t really feel good at all. Was that TMI? Oh well, whatevs.

Eye-Gore Krypt Kiddie, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

I’m coming up on deadline again, so it should come as no surprise that I’ve once again been beseiged by sick fucking baby dreams. Here’s the latest chapter:

I look around and I’m in the emergency room of a hospital waiting in line to speak to the triage nurse. In front of me on line is a family (mother, father, sister, brother) and they are all screaming at each other. Finally the dad turns around and I realize it is the family of one of my close friends who died when we were 15. I’m debating whether I should insinuate myself into their fight to say hello when I’m suddenly stabbed with crippling abdominal pain . I look down and see I’m hugely pregnant and realize I’m in labor, so I push past the family and demand medical attention immediately. The nurse takes me inside a very chaotic, creepy, dirty, disorganized looking emergency room and sticks me in a corner to wait for the OB/GYN. While I’m waiting the pain continues, becoming more and more frightening and intense unti I’m screaming. Finally the doctor comes in and says I have to “break the seal inside” before I can give birth, so she suggests I shove my fingers up into my vagina as hard as I can until I feel a membrane, and then try to puncture that membrane with my hand until fluid comes out. It’s hard to reach and very uncomfortable, but I finally get my hand up there, and as I’m poking around, I realize that with every stab of my fingers, I can hear a baby screaming inside of me. I get scared and tell the doctor, but she tells me that it’s impossible for a baby to scream while it’s still inside me and I should keep poking. So I keep poking, until I can’t stand the screaming any more, so I stop and the screaming stops. The doctor leaves and suddenly my best friend Johanna walks in. I’m so relieved to see her and I beg her to try to find LCF since he doesn’t have a cell phone. She agrees and disappears, leaving me alone again in horrible pain. After what feels like hours of waiting alone, LCF shows up and is shocked and freaked out that I’m in labor since he didn’t know I was even pregnant. He tries to comfort me but I can tell he’s totally fucked up about the whole situation which is making me feel fucked up so I leave the hospital room and go hide in a small cramped bathroom. I sit on the toilet seat, but it’s got a plastic seat stuck to it, the kind you put on for potty training toddlers so they don’t fall in, so the seat is very uncomfortable. Suddenly the pain gets much much worse, and I start to give birth there on the toilet. A big purple amniotic sack oozes out of me, and inside I can see a baby floating inside. I rip the sack open with my fingernails and all this goo pours out and then the baby floats to the surface. It’s a boy, and he’s cold and gray and still, lying lifeless there in my hands. In that instant I know that because I followed the doctor’s instructions against my own better instincts, I’ve accidentally killed my baby. The grief and pain and confusion is unbearable as I clutch the dead baby to my chest and burst out of the bathroom and into the emergency room. Blood in pouring out of me and down my legs and onto the floor as I scream for someone to help me. Over and over again I scream “My baby’s dead, somebody help him, my baby’s dead!” Finally two teenage candy-striper-type nursing assistants come over and take the baby, and start speaking to each other very melodramatically, as if they are in a soap opera, saying to each other, “What shall we do? The baby is dead!” I look at my baby now in their hands and realize it looks suspiciously like a plastic doll. I start to wonder if I’m the butt of some kind of twisted hoax, and start looking around, paranoid, wondering who’s in on it. Then I wake up, crying and covered in sweat. It was all so real this time, it took me a while to fully realize it was all a dream.