I'm also feeling restless and tense. The weather alarm has been blaring every five minutes, even though I stopped checking to see what it wanted about twenty minutes ago. I'm happier not knowing about the storms, I think. This afternoon, when I was talking to Tech-Lady, the tornado chaser, about something unrelated to the weather, and her computer screen kept flashing in the background with weather maps and excited messages from fellow tornado chasers. I decided not to ask for details.

So I sit here in the relative silence of my apartment, staring at the computer screen until my eyes can't handle the strain anymore, at which point I go and taunt the guinea pigs (who really would prefer to be left alone, preferable with a bowl full of carrots) by petting them. Repeat ad nauseum.

A small part of me almost wishes that a tornado would come through my neighborhood; at least I'd have something else to do, if cowering in the bathtub can be considered an activity.

You know what kind of masochist I am? Perhaps it's that the boredom of the night has driven me completely around the bend; maybe it's a cry for help. I may very well regret this later, but I'm about to show you my past. It's not a pretty sight; consider yourself warned. Here we go!

Let's start with little Carrie in the fifth grade. I wish I could say that my mother dressed me like that, but it would be a lie. The truth is that she actually fought with me to try to make me change my clothes for school picture day, and I insisted on wearing this little number. Mind you, this is the same dress that I paired with two different colored knee socks and braids to make a Pippi Longstocking costume just the year before. I knew that it was an ugly dress, and I wore it anyway. I have no good explanation for this fact.

The Pippi costume was actually for a report. Everybody had to dress up as the main character of their books, so most of the girls did Little House on the Prairie and such, while the boys did books about sports heroes. I was the only one who deliberately made myself look like an idiot, complete with a bright orange wig with braids that stuck straight out from my head. The teacher loved it so much that she paraded me around to the other classrooms. I was still being teased for that report for years later.

Skip ahead five years. My clothing tastes calmed down a bit, but I've begun wearing the Enormo-Glasses. These, as opposed to the fifth grade dress, were my mother's idea. The idea was that the vast vertical length of the frames would counterbalance my too-round face. I don't know whether it worked, but I must say that while I had never heard one person tease me about my facial shape, I suffered dearly for wearing these glasses. I was blind as a bat without them, though, so there was no chance of my being able to go without them during the day, as did some of my more fortunate friends.

Oh, and wouldn't we all just love to be able to go back in time, find the person who first came up with the idea that a poof on the top of one's forehead should be considered trendy, and strangle them to within an inch of their life? Do you know how long it took me to get that my bangs into that particular style every morning? About forty-five minutes. Forty-five freaking minutes. A huge bottle of hairspray every month, and two different-sized curling irons. And that was assuming that the elements cooperated with me. I want that time back! Oh, what I could accomplish with those precious minutes...

I can't even look at the third one without wincing, and I'm sure that you're not able to either. This is a shot that should never have been taken; the photographer should have stood up from his stool and said, "I'm sorry, I can't do this to you; come back in a few years when you've realized just how bad you look right now." I might have been a little embarrassed right then, but I would bless him for it now. Same godawful glasses, note. That hair was not my choice; it was a stylist accident. I had only asked for a slight wave. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

Oh, and did anybody else ever have to wear this oh-so-trendy Jazz Band uniform in the eighties? I know I can't have been the only one to have suffered through it. I remember the year we got these; everybody was thrilled, since it meant that we'd no longer have to wear the heavy, polyester marching band jackets. Instead, we got to look like waitresses in a cheap nightclub.

You know what? I'd be curious to see if anybody can beat that picture in sheer hideousness. Seriously, if you think you've got a worse one than this, and care to join me in revealing it to the world, either send it to me or post it and send me a link. I don't know that anybody could actually judge the pictures, but it might be entertaining to try.

Now we come to the final photograph. I actually don't mind this last one. The dress is wall-papery, my legs are oddly colored, and I've got a bizarre pink bow in my hair, but I'm skinny! Look at my face! Look at my arms! That was the most slender I've been in my entire life. Mom took this shot in my senior year of high school, but I had bought that dress for my eighth grade formal. It fit me better five years later than it did for the first dance. I had never felt better about my body than I did in that moment.

The sad part, though, is that the dance for which I was all dolled up in this picture was cancelled due to snow. My date, at whose school the dance was being held, didn't bother to check on it, so we drove through the snow in our fancy clothes, and found an empty, dark gymnasium. I was crushed; he was relieved, since now he could go home and watch basketball. We didn't date for much longer after that.