1980s blow by blow

Donut day at work and Jeff was nice enough to stop by Top Pot and pick up a couple dozen fresh donuts. I had a filled donut covered in powdered sugar which I ended up getting everywhere, including my keyboard. We made a joke about using a business card to line it up and snort it, which reminded me of a great childhood story.

I grew up in the 80s. My siblings are 15, 12 and 4 years older than me so I was brought up with exposure to things my friends weren't, including MTV and HBO. I always thought the girls in the HBO movies were so cool with their giant shoulder pads, long, dangly earrings and vials of cocaine. Yep, I just said that. I obviously didn't understand what it was. All I knew was that the pretty, cool girls in the movies my family watched all had tiny vials of white stuff they would line up and snort. And I wanted to be a pretty, cool girl too.

So at 5 years old I decided to start using my pixie sticks as mock coccaine. (My mother had something against letting her daughter get the real stuff. Buzzkill.) I would dump it out onto the coffee table, and while watching Dumbo's Circus and old Disney cartoons, use whatever I had around to line it up and then snort it, just like the pretty, cool girls on tv.

I have to say it was never enjoyable. Straight sugar up the nose is painful, even to a 5 year old that could throw themselves down a hill riddled with rocks and twigs without batting an eye. It was also nothing that I would ever do when anyone else was around, except for a few times when I could get my sister to join in. Yeah, she was 9 and should have known better but she's always been a follower and I've always been the crazy leader.

Needless to say, I stopped doing it shortly after I started. I was never meant to be a pretty cool girl with a drug problem. I actually only stopped after I saw some girl do it off the back of the toilet and I realized then and there that it was disgusting to put anything that was on the top of the toilet tank into my body no matter how big their shoulder pads were or long and dangly their earrings.