KMS: it ain't just hair product.

Aight. (I'm allowed to say that; you'll see in a moment).

It is well into Valentine's Day, my sweet BF is practically in another time zone, and I think I am getting a cold (my glands are getting junky) -- so this wasn't the world's greatest HAPPYVD in Madgeland -- but it's okay -- true love is very comforting and that means, in so many words, that these kvetchings don't matter.

That's why I'm going to tell you about KMS, or, where I went to middle school.

Think brick building; three stories. Kind of inner-city, yes? It was across the street from an adult motel, and that street was busy busy. On the inside - there were lots of children. Children from Eastern Europe, Russia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. Children that didn't give a shit about school and children that did; children that were popular and children that were not - you know, it was middle school. Children were mean. Aaron D. said to me, "Man. Your two front teeth are so far apart I could drive a Mercedes between them;" Daniel C. said, "Here is your self-portrait, Madge." Oh, there I was, with brick walls for breasts. Flat. I only hoped to have boobs like Kelsey S. someday: "my boobs are like the size of oranges, cut in half." Despite this - I really didn't have it so bad. Once, when I was in the 8th grade, a girl in the sixth grade was abducted by a stranger and taken across the street to the adult motel and was raped and sodomized until she was able to escape out the bathroom window.

Yuck - this is Valentine's Day! But KMS is on my mind. This was where I spent three formative years - being mean to a kid named Robert G. Only, this wasn't how he remembered it. I didn't go to the same high school as most of my fellow KMS classmates; they went right and I went left. So I don't know what happened to most of these kids - but I do know what happened to Robert G. because he e-mailed me when I was at college years later. How he found me, I'll never know. He said, "I think that I loved you in middle school, that I can truly say I was in love with you. You were so nice to me." It did wonders for my guilty, bratty conscience --but you can understand it was a little creepy, too. He's like a meteorologist now or something.

My sixth and eighth grade teacher, Mrs. T., was a spit-and-clean-the-overhead-type. Eww! But she was a grandma, and I knew this and loved her for it; she was the only teacher who came to me when my grandma died and offered comfort. Most of the other kids hated her - but I could understand they were naughty brats, and that she was grandmotherly and deserved more of me. Also, she genuinely liked my alliteration assignment.

I had a teacher all three years named Mrs. J. She had hair down past the backs of her knees. Once Tony C. asked her if she listened to a band called Crazy Horse and she laughed real hard. She also smoked, and when I was in middle school, teachers smoked right in their breakroom, and she smelled just like the breakroom smelled when I walked by it as the doors opened. She taught me a lot about tolerance and like a weirdo, I sought to please her by buying a pair of clogs my eighth grade year. In the sixth grade, it meant so much that she knew I was against Desert Storm. But we all were - we even staged a protest and walked out of school to downtown Portland. "Hell no! We won't go! We won't go for Texaco!" But just as I was about to leave the school - I was teetering on the steps - and go with the others downtown, the principal stopped me and said I wasn't making a good choice. I was free to demonstrate against the war, yes and fine, but I shouldn't leave the school. So I stayed. And a lot of my friends got busted by their parents.

Tina D. was having sex in the sixth grade, but I didn't know a lot about that. She had a boyfriend named Jericho J. and I had a hot crush on him. Tina D. was a New Jersey girl at heart. Jericho J. at least knew my name.

Happy belated VD.