Are You on the Pot?

We went to our little town’s first DARE program graduation last night and my high school buddies who dumped me after I quit smoking the weed would have been very disappointed. Yes, I’ve smoked the weed before. I quit when I reached college for three reasons:

1. The boy I liked didn’t do any kind of drugs at all (Dan) not even cigarettes, his drug of choice was Mountain Dew and skate-boarding which apparently is a sport were being fit is a bonus.

2. When I was stoned it never made me feel liberated or free. Mostly I was just paranoid, like I just knew a booger was hanging out of my nose and everyone was looking at it and in their heads they were thinking “What a freaky gross chick that girl is with her red eyes and cotton mouth and her booger just hanging out there, she’s probably a little slow, poor weird girl.” So if pot enhanced anything for me it was all my insecurities about my teenage self.

3. If I flunked a class because I was partying too much to actually do my paper I had to pay for the class again, out of my own pocket. (Not Cheap)

I found out I actually like myself better when I’m not getting high and I have more pocket money and smarter friends. It’s not that my stoner friends were dumb, it just turns out we rarely ever talked about anything other than cool things to do when you were stoned, i.e. watching movies like “The Doors”, how many pieces of bubble gum one can stuff in one's mouth without choking and why a trampoline is the greatest invention ever. In fact other than sitting in a basement giggling and throwing darts at John Anderson’s head or playing Nintendo we didn’t accomplish much when we were high unless you count all the creepy things I drew on the back of my notebooks as productive.

After sitting through the DARE program I feel seriously lucky to not have become a statistic. I could be living at my boyfriend’s best friend’s sister’s house dealing coke to the rich kids up the street to buy McDonalds for my undernourished, dirty faced, barefoot, crack baby who is standing in a pile of dirt in the front yard crying and holding a naked baby doll that’s face has been colored on with blue pool-cue chalk. Or I could be living out of a tie-dyed tent desperately selling enough Patchouli incense and hand made beads to buy tofu patties and soy milk for my undernourished, dirty faced, naked baby who’s face has been painted on with blue peace signs while she is standing in a pile of dirt at the PHISH concert crying and holding an all natural hemp doll.

Ok, I did have a glass of Pinot Grigio and some chocolate cake before I got in my minivan and rode to the school function with my toddler in tow who sat still and colored the DARE Lion’s face blue with crayon during the program. What…? It’s not like Ella plays soccer, in fact she’s going to take Karate and that's totally different – so there.