Friday five semi-double take.

I had iTunes on random last night and I heard a song that took me back, so to speak, and so tonight I was going to post five songs on mix tapes from cute male friends in high school that I misinterpreted as meaning "I'm interested in you" but really they were just saying "hey you should hear this, it's a great song," in no particular order... but I could only remember three songs, and I probably threw away or burned or otherwise destroyed the tapes over the years so there's no way to know what the others were but dammit there were many... but here are the three I could remember:

• Somebody - Depeche Mode
• Found - The Beloved
• Lovesong - The Cure

(One step closer to this... but several vodka shots short.)

For the actual Friday Five - five activities, scents or tastes that remind me of childhood, in no particular order:

• Swinging my feet - I do this at the gym when I'm on the arm press thingie, because I have to put the seat up high so that my arms are pushing at the right angle... and as a result, my feet don't touch the ground, so in between sets I kick my feet out one at a time (and if I'm in a really good mood, I whistle along with whatever's blaring in my ears from my iPod, which just makes it even more childlike) - try it, it's fun
  
• Swinging in general - there's nothing like flying up high in the air and swooping back down, only to go up even higher the next time and dare yourself to jump... when I was in college I visited my cousin and we were walking around his neighborhood talking about all this depressing shit (mostly about how I was depressed, I imagine) and we ran across this little park with swings... we swang and swang and swang and I remember expressing to him that I hadn't been that carefree in a long time... so now I try to swing whenever the opportunity presents itself
• Going barefoot - I hated shoes as a kid, I hate shoes to this day... I wear them because I have to, and whenever possible I wear flip flops or sandals, but as soon as I get home the shoes are OFF... and if I step onto a grassy knoll or a forest valley, my shoes are off almost immediately
  
• Peanut butter ice cream - there was this ice cream place in the local mall where I grew up that had THE. BEST. PEANUT BUTTER ICE CREAM. EVER... it was the first peanut butter ice cream I'd ever had, and the only kind I ever wanted after I tried it - basically just vanilla ice cream with big globs and swirls of peanut butter in it, not like that Ben & Jerry's stuff where it's a blur of vanilla and peanut butter flavoring - this was hard core straight up PEANUT BUTTER in the ice cream... when I get a craving I grab a pint of french vanilla, let it melt for a half hour or so, add in globs of peanut butter, stir it, re-freeze it and then eat it later - but I have yet to recreate that ice cream experience and the store, natch, is now gone
  
• Swimming pools - I can't even begin to count how many hours I spent at the neighborhood pool as a child... almost all our family photo albums have pages and pages of us at the pool as kids, and I still remember when I took swim lessons from the hot lifeguard Andy, and he was trying to teach me to tread water and I ended up butterflying from one side of the pool to the other, and he was all "that was GREAT! only next time, try staying in the same spot" and I felt so dumb... anyway, any time I smell chlorine, I am five years old stubbing my toe as I eat my frozen Reese's Peanut Butter Cup in the hot, humid July sun (Snickers bars are also excellent frozen, by the way)
  

(OK! One step closer to something out of this book, but several shots of courage short.)