Here is a sad story with a satisfying ending.

I waited some time before posting this, and passed the story round to a small number of people whose opinion I needed before I was ready to share it with you, my friendly Internets. Even for me, it's pretty intense on the personal side, but I just felt ready to have it on the blog, at least for a while. Though I may take it down after a bit.

In retrospect, I'm still not sure exactly how I did it. But it went something like this: one of my friends has sent me a few recorded stories, and I really liked listening to them, and so I tried it out on my own, about something that happened to me in my green years. Now I was really boneheaded in going about this, in a technical sense, and it was absolute hell for me to get the file down to a manageable (!) 15MB ... so in that respect I was true to form, fumbling my way through with buckets full of error.

But as for the story itself: I didn't script it, I just thought about it for a while and spoke it into a mike. It was one 'take', though I paused frequently. And strangely, it just came out right.Not that there isn't some odd stuff about it. Generally—typically—I talk fast; and I knew that talking fast wouldn't help telling my story, so when I recorded I made a heroic effort to slow myself down. And somehow as a result, that made me sound a little funny. There is one part of this story where I utter the word 'motorcycle' in a way that no one has ever uttered the word 'motorcycle' before. So that alone justifies the eleven minutes it would take you to listen to this story, which is called:

Smart girl.

Warning: this story has what the TV people call a 'mature theme' and contains a teensie bit of 'strong language.' Put the earphones on if delicate ears are within smacking distance.

Comments

[redclay]

good girl. now show me how to do it.

[Bob]

What an asshole. I've tried to teach my daughter that guys like that are out there. You meet someone, your hormones are telling you that you've gotta have him and your brain doesn't have a chance. You're not thinking of safe sex, you're just thinking of SEX. Maybe you were prepared, but this was that 1% of the time it didn't work. He won't care, and you're stuck with the consequences.

When I was that age, I never could figure out why guys like that always got the hot girls. Once or twice I tried warning a friend that the guy she hooked up with was a jerk, but....

[anne]

i like your voice. i'm sorry that happened to you.