At the age of ten I was skinny and tan, with eyes that turned to slits when I smiled. Sweatpants were a a wardrobe necessity, especially the ones with the buttons on the sides that I could play with, delighting at the snap! sound I made when I pulled them apart. Along with those button down gems I rocked the adidas classics until they turned yellow. My face had not yet become infected by little red mountains, but I knew I was reaching puberty when I couldn’t stand the smell of my own armpits. Other than the occasional body odor I was a cute little boy. I excelled in creative writing and absolutely detested polygons.
Like most of my peers, my home was the Nickelodeon channel. Hours were spent in front of the TV taking the subway with Arnold and wondering how Angelica could speak to both the babies and the adults on Rugrats. MTV and VH1 were also favorites of mine, back in the day when they actually played videos. My taste in music, however spanned from The Beatles to Christina Aguilera. Riding in the backseat with Yellow Submarine or Stripped in my walkman took my mind to places the car couldn’t. Ten was also the age when my parents took me to see the movie Chicago and fell in love. To this day I can remember all the words to “Cell Block Tango”, except for the part when they lapse into Russian.
As a child still young enough to be forced into playing a sport, I decided to venture away from the traditional football and join the Wavemakers competitive swim team at the Watertown Boys and Girls Club. Unlike every other team sport I had played in my child-athlete career, I felt as if swimming was something I actually had a passion for. Putting up with the spandex bathing suit and latex bathing cap was a small price to pay for the adrenaline rush I got racing up and down the pool. Making friends was easy as well, seeing as most of the Wavemakers were girls.
Looking back on my fifth grade journal, I deduct that at the tender age of ten I was finding my voice, though it may seem silly and premature now. I wrote vivid stories about countries far away, some on the map and some from my head. I even found a biography of Cher that I had written after watching a Behind The Music special on VH1. Drawing came naturally with my writing, filling sketchbooks and notebooks with pictures of pretty girls I copied from what I saw on TV. The attitude I carried at the age of ten was that of someone who knows it all, much like the attitude I have now, and thankfully some minor changes have taken place since then.
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