Livhatesolives - Sometimes You Have To Be Brave

quarantine feels kinda like that area between christmas and new years where i have no idea what day of the week it is, or if i’m supposed to be going to work. AM and PM blend together. i’ve taken four naps in 10 hours. leftovers are my primary foodsource. got that weird sunday anxiety except it’s every day for the next 2 weeks

how did you get the nickname liv the polar bear?

Ooh haha that’s a fun story for me!

So, in seventh grade, every year of middle school we’d take one day off in spring to go to a Somerset Patriots baseball game, this like kinda second rate baseball team that was always playing at this one field for just an affordable fun baseball game experience! That day we went turned out to be swelteringly hot, so hot that the metal guide rails to the seats would practically burn you if you touched them too long, and the plastic seats were just soaking the heat up!

I, of course, was horribly hot and sweating the entire game because we were right in the blazing sunlight, with barely enough money to buy an overpriced frozen lemonade aside from lunch, which meant besides doing my best to have fun and make conversation, I was complaining about the heat and ducking out into the shadows of the concessions area in that ring that surrounds stadiums for just a little bit of shade.

Finally, we get back to the school and we’ve got pretty much a period left to kill where they just let the whole school loose on the track and field to play or just walk and talk until the school day ended. My friends and I decided to play catch on a more shaded, grassy, unoccupied portion right by the entrance to the track and field, and eventually the conversation meandered to “Olivia, you cannot handle heat at all,” because my best friend lived in Texas and New Orleans when she was younger and she went through like 120 degree summers, 90-100 degree weather was a breeze to her.

So then I got jokingly defensive, and insisted I was just accustomed to cold weather, and went with the argument that I’m from the Northeast, frigid winters were our norm (kinda true, I could definitely handle it pretty well when I was younger but now if it’s cold and there’s no snow to distract me, ahhhhh). And as we’re all just going in this roundabout discussion about different climates and our tolerance for them, my friend concludes that I’m practically a polar bear, all things considered! One of our friends already had accidentally gotten a nickname of “butterfly” (long story, won’t go the way you think), so it seemed fitting, she was a butterfly and I was Liv the polar bear!

And there you have it, the riveting story of my short-lived nickname of Liv the polar bear! (This was fun, it reminded me why middle school was fun too, it wasn’t all a jumbled collection of annoying classmates and...you know, middle school)

lemony snicket was really out there teaching us as elementary schoolers about grey morality, about how neither good nor bad people always get what they deserve, how being clever and kind doesn’t always guarantee you will triumph (although it’s certainly better than the alternative), how ignorant/complacent/dismissive though well-meaning adults can have just as harmful an impact on children as those with ill intentions, and how not every story has a happy and complete ending

just fooling around or what the archer would sound like sampling some of dress and delicate