Cootie Catcher

Not for the faint of heart, or those who are easily offended/grossed out. Let that be a warning to you...

I was rooting through old boxes in my garage – a lot of paperwork and junk that for some reason seems really important at the time you put it in the box, and then two years, five years, ten years later is just a great example of how self-important and untalented you are.

Most of the “paperwork” I found was from around 8^th grade and early high school – I put “paperwork” in quotations there because not even someone as pathetically self consumed as myself can justify calling regurgitated Limp Bizkit lyrics and hand written transcripts of Adam Sandler audio sketches “paperwork” without putting quotes around it. This is actually how I spent my time as a thirteen year old girl... getting high and writing out all the words to the shitty things that I thought were funny or bad ass. Aside from the drivel – there were some pretty funny little gems hiding in that box.

This piece is called Cootie Catcher – which is what I grew up calling those little origami fortune tellers that we all played with in grade school. Also known as Chatterbox, Salt Cellar, or Whirlybirds... to wrong people. I found a Cootie Catcher that I made in either 7^th or 8^th grade – can't be sure – but it contains some of the best and funniest little tidbits to ever come out of my face. I am sincerely proud of how retarded I was (and continue to be).

Before I share with you all the awesome fortunes I came up with – I should first explain that I was originally raised in Sacramento, which by all accounts is a fairly large and diverse city. My parents moved me to what was then a very small, very stinky, agriculture (meth) town of Manteca, which is Spanish for lard. Not a joke, look it up. I was immediately the focal point of small town ostracizing as the only person to ever listen to rock and roll music in all recorded history of the entire county and surrounding areas. This is a gross exaggeration. It's gross. Ew.

My first defense to this abuse was my extensive arsenal of verbal insults. I would come home from a particularly teen-angst inducing day at school and take pen to paper to bolster my artillery. I'd write paragraph-long insults that I would memorize and then blurt out at just the right moment in a confrontation that probably started with someone asking me if I was a boy or a girl – or telling me I dressed like a dyke – or asking me if I thought I was cool because I wore a wallet chain. Yes, I did. I thought I was very, very cool actually. Small town kids understandably have a hard time coping with a big city kid making them feel stupid, and there is nothing that makes a kid feel more stupid than being caught with no come-back in a verbal throw down. My experience is that when you leave a mean kid speechless, all they have left is physical violence.

So, while this Cootie Catcher that I found was most assuredly created and used solely for the purpose of making the few friends I did have laugh – It definitely brought back some great, and painful, memories of just what kind of kid I was.

Okay – so if you've never used one of these Cootie Catchers... Origami Fortune Tellers... it starts with four choices on the outside of the doo-hickey. The player chooses one of the four quadrants, and the operator then spells out or counts out the choice by opening the paper doo-hickey as many times as the choice calls for. Seriously, if you're not following by now – just YouTube this shit and figure it out.

 

The four choices on the outside of my Cootie Catcher are:

1: Man

2: Weed

3: Poopy

4: Shut Up

 

 

I'm not even sure how to start analyzing that. Man, Weed, Poopy, and Shut Up.

 

I guess 'Man' just because it's a short word, and as a new stoner I was probably saying things like, “Man... these Combos are makin' me thirsty” a lot more than I was used to.

 

'Weed' was an obvious choice, and would probably make an appearance as a choice on the outside of a Cootie Catcher if I made one right now. 'Poopy' – see reasoning for Weed. And 'Shut Up'... well, just Shut up and read the rest of the story.

Once you make your first choice – the second and third choices are just numbers. I didn't get very creative on that part. But in my defense... the entire Cootie Catcher is colored in with water color paints and is actually quite artistic... so, I guess I exhausted my creativity there? No... the creative part is within... just like your new-age high school art teacher always told the kids that were failing Introduction to Basic Art.

The insides of a Cootie Catcher contain eight different endings to this choose-your-own-adventure style game. This is the part where I admit that Cootie Catcher as a name makes much less sense than Fortune Teller.... but Chatterbox? Salt Cellar? Whirlybird? What the fuck? C'mon. Usually they contain a mix-up of positive and negative endings, falling somewhere in between “you will marry your biggest crush!” and “your momma's so fat...”

So, those are examples of what usually goes on the inside of a Cootie Catcher...

Here are the eight “Fortunes” one could be Fortunate enough to hear when they complete my Cootie Catcher game:

1: May the lice of a thousand camels infest your pubic hair for 40 days and 41 nights

2: Fuck You! You are a horrible festering scab on the nut sack of society and when you are finally picked... you will puss and bleed forever.

 

3: You smell like poop. It's almost as if you have been confined to a tiny room your entire life and must shit where you sleep and you just learned how to do a somersault! Stinky!

4: Wouldn't it be weird and gross if someone used poop to slick their eyebrows down and make them darker? … well... You do that!

5: I know where you live and at night while you are sleeping I sneak into your room and wipe boogers on you!

6: Someday you will be walking down the street and a big scary person will run up to you and hit you in the mouth. Then when you're on the ground they will take off your shoes and poop in them... just because you're ugly.

7. Your mom is a whore. She sleeps with a lot of people. A walking STD that woman.

8. Your nipples will get a violently itchy rash. They will burn with redness and you will scratch them til they bleed and you won't have nipples anymore... just little scabs. You're gross!

These were written by a 13 year old girl. I am already so out of touch with my once self that I am (pleasantly) shocked and (delightfully) appalled at the language used by such young people. I have nieces older than that – and do you know how hard I would laugh to hear them say some of this shit? I like to tell myself that I never once threw the first punch in the many school yard brawls and Wal-Mart parking lot beat-downs that I was involved in – however, I do think my mouth may have signed me up as a participant.

I'm really glad I was cleaning out that box of bullshit adolescent “paperwork” and found this little Cootie Catcher gem.

 

It's ironic that the contents of the box have actually evolved into a way more legitimate form of paperwork by being typed up by some asshole with writing aspirations (me). See? I didn't even have to put quotations around it that time.