Gretta of "Say It With a Smirk"

Just a reminder: I'm on "maternity leave." No baby yet, but any day now, right? In the meantime, I've got several guest bloggers lined up over the next little while to keep you entertained.

Gretta Whalen loves reading, writing, and eating shameful amounts of candy. She is a shopgirl, writing tutor, and graduate student in Los Angeles, California, where she lives with her skinny-yet-handsome musician husband. They are the adoptive parents of an ill-behaved terrier mutt, and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. She blogs over at Say It With a Smirk.

Gretta and I took way too many Spanish classes together (Viva Don Antonio!) and lived together for a short while before losing touch. I'm so happy to have reconnected with her after all this time, because she is one of the raddest (yes, it's a word) people I've ever known.

Missing: Memories. Reward for any information to fill gaping memory gaps.

Hello everyone! Greetings from the Big Easy! Well, sort of. I don’t live here. Anymore, that is. I used to live here when I was wee and my dad was just a fresh-faced med student. When he graduated in 1985, he and my mom took my two-year-old self and my four-year-old brother to Los Angeles, never to return. Let me rephrase that. Never to return with us. My parents always promised they would bring us back to the land of our birth. Twenty-seven years later, here I am in the Crescent City, soaking up my roots.

Let me tell you, nothing is ringing a bell.

I have exactly four memories of NOLA from babyhood.

Memory #1: Looking out the window and watching my playground get bulldozed. Emotion: Concern

Memory #2: Driving in the heavy rain with my mom and brother. (Apparently, this heavy rain was a hurricane.)

Emotion: Anxiety

Memory #3: Sitting on my dad’s shoulders after said hurricane as he walked through the flooded streets. Seeing a dead rat floating in the water, which in my memory, was up to his knees.

Emotion: Fascinated disgust

Memory #4: Again, sitting on my dad’s shoulders and watching floats go by during the Mardi Gras parade. Getting beads thrown to me from masked revelers.

Emotion: Giddiness

But that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Now I know you might be saying, “But Gretta, no one remembers being two. Lower your freakin’ expectations, will ya!” And to that I say, fair enough. But the problem is this: I don’t remember much of anything.

Names, facts, characters from novels — that stuff sticks to my brain like dog hair to my cardigans. But my actual life? Not so much. Friends will talk about things that happened in high school or college — important things — of which I have no recollection. I strain and push and perform figurative brain excavations to no avail. That stuff just isn’t in there. Of course, I’ve kept regular journals since I was 12 years old, but no I am not going to go back and read those. Not unless I want to descend into an abyss of self-loathing and shame for being utterly ridiculous since forever. (Do I really want to read about how obsessed I was in seventh grade with the idea that everyone was getting together for parties and taking great pains not to invite me? Middle school = so much narcissism.)

Fast forward to a conversation that happened yesterday:

My friend: Did you hear Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudekis are engaged?

Me: Oh, Olivia Wilde. She’s such a babe.

MF: Who’s Olivia Wilde?

Me: Have you seen House?

MF: No.

Me: Tron?

MF: No.

Me: The OC?

MF: No.

Third Party: Olivia Wilde wasn’t on the OC.

Me: Yes she was. She was on Season 2. She was blonde and she worked in a club. Her name was Alex, she’d been emancipated from her parents, and she made out with both Seth and Marissa.

At least I remember the important things.