Everybody’s Favorite by Lillian Stone EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Lillian Stone
- Language: English
- Genre: Love, Sex & Marriage Humor
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Introduction
Attack of the Madisons
If the pen is mightier than the sword, then to ten-year-old girls in 2004, the
gel pen was mightier than a flame-throwing bazooka. Gel pens, if you
remember them, were the most sacred of instruments. The nib was precise;
the iridescent ink flowed silkily onto the page, adorning dollar-store
composition books with Gutenberg-level flair. The colors ranged from prim,
reserved pink to bold, opulent silver that lent itself beautifully to fancy
correspondence.
More formal than a mechanical pencil, classier than the
philistine BIC pens wielded by hicks and hayseeds, gel pens weren’t to be
wasted on schoolwork. They were saved for communication with one’s
crush (“DO U LIKE ME EVEN THOUGH I FELL OFF THE MONKEY
BARS AND SCREAMED IN AGONY CHECK YES OR NO”), fifthgrade Student Council election propaganda (“A VOTE 4 LILLIAN IS A
VOTE 4 UNFETTERED FRUIT SNACK ACCESS”), or emergency
projectile implementation if you saw a weird bug.
Gel pens weren’t invented until the mid-eighties. Still, think of how
they might’ve jazzed up historical documents had they dawned in an earlier
era. Imagine if the Founding Fathers had asserted man’s inalienable rights
in bubble gum–scented gel ink. Think of a weeping medieval peasant
scanning a list of Black Plague victims penned in glittery turquoise bubble
letters alongside a doodle that reads “LYLAS: LUV YA LIKE A SISTER.”
Regardless, for me, gel pens were best used when writing lists. As an
obsessive-compulsive ten-year-old, I clung to lists: lists of friends, lists of
enemies, lists of my favorite and least favorite snacks, lists of things that
could kill me (“WASP ATTACK, SHARK ATTACK, BECOMING
ENGULFED IN FLAMES WHILE RIDING RAZOR SCOOTER AT
HIGH SPEEDS, STRAY COCONUT, DESPAIR/ANGUISH”).
Lists
helped me organize my short-circuiting brain, as well as my fifth-grade
obligations. The latter were few, as I represented the near bottom of the
Disney Elementary School social hierarchy. (Located in the Missouri
Ozarks, the school’s connection to Walt Disney was unclear, made even
more confusing by our mascot: the dolphin, perhaps the furthest
evolutionary link from Mickey Mouse.) For context, my cooler peers spent
their summers competing in outdoor swim leagues or camping with their
families. I spent my breaks volunteering at a nearby horse ranch called the
Branderosa, though I was deemed too clumsy for high-stakes volunteer jobs
like brushing horses’ tails.
Of course, this was 2004, and I wasn’t the only one with a shortcircuiting brain. The early 2000s sank the Western world into a
disorganized, frenzied, pre-tech identity crisis. We knew something was
coming—MySpace had just broken one million unique visitors per month; a
sentient wax aardvark named Mark Zuckerberg had just launched a website
for people who hate women. In those days, Americans had two choices:
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