Hello and happy almost 2026!
I am taking a break from the radio this evening and resting up as I prepare for the NEW YEAR! I will be back on January 5th with my first show of the year!
I want to first say “thank you” for an excellent first year of music. Broadcasting and radio have always been passions of mine, and it has been really awesome to pursue that passion through this site! I never really expected to have regular listeners who participate so much in the show, and I can honestly say that it is those listeners who make the show what it is! Thank you for every song request, every question, every playlist name. The interaction adds so much meaning to what we have been doing here.
On the show, I get a lot of questions about love and relationships, and I have recently begun reading the book “Everything I Know About Love” by Dolly Alderton. The book is a wonderful series of personal essays in which Alderton explores the topic of love (self-love, friendship love, and romantic love) through the lens of her past relationships etc.
I’ve been inspired to copy Alderton, to bite off of her if you will… so I’ve started a project that I intend to post on the site in parts weekly. I’m calling it (as you saw in the title) The Comprehensive History of My Romantic Life as a Bisexual Woman of the 21st Century (catchy, right?).
It should go without saying, but all names are changed. Please do not take it upon yourself to track any of these people down. If you think you see yourself within this piece and you have something to say about it, feel free to email us at staff@bottlerag.org and let me know how I did.
Without further ado, I present Part 1:
Jake and Fernando
Jake Puuwai-Puuwai and I were in the same class in kindergarten— the half day class. Our time at school ended just before lunch, and that time was consumed with organized play of different kinds. Inside, there was the play house, the soap-lab, the art studio, and the library; we rotated through the stations and did each prescribed activity with unique groupings day by day. Any learning we did happened in the form of songs (for memorization) or stories (for morals and character building).
Outside, the playground was free, though there was only one activity that kindergarteners took part in— the boys chased the girls.
I don’t recall a time when any of the boys actually ever successfully caught one of the girls… I don’t think that was the point. They were more like my mom’s little dog, Mable, who chases bunnies in the back yard any time the opportunity presents itself. Mable, being routinely fed an array of fancy-organic dogfoods and being roughly the size of a cotton-tail herself, has no need to make a kill of that caliber. She chases them out of pure instinct and love of the game, but when faced with the opportunity to actually pounce (which she is, from time to time), she instead flees, yipping in the other direction.
I didn’t have a crush on Jake in kindergarten, so my memories of him alone that year are few and far between. The one memory of him I do have is one of him chasing me. We stood across from each other, a metal dome of a jungle gym between us. My first thought was to climb, but he mirrored every move I made. I couldn’t dart in either direction, because he would be close behind me. He was more cunning than me, even if I believed I was faster, he had a look about him in the moment like he sensed my every move before I made it.
All I could do was look at him. His skin was tan and his eyes were dark and clever. His hair was brown too, but in the sun, it glistened with auburn highlights— he wore it up in impressive early-2000s spikes. He dawned the unofficial boy-uniform, a t-shirt and the basketball shorts. I was seeing it all for the first time (though Jake’s appearance would remain consistent with this for the next decade or so).
It was only by a fluke-fakeout that I was able to evade him and hide beneath the play structure. This was the inciting incident, I would say.
In first grade the crush truly began to take form, in an official capacity. There several things I liked about Jake:
a.) He was roughly the same height as me (which isn’t and wasn’t easy to come by, as I’ve always been on the short side).
b.) He was quite smart, and specifically good at math (I have always valued merit).
c.) He was the fastest kid in our class and he would go on to be the fastest kid in our school.
d.) He was always nice.
After it came to be that Jake was my crush, I remained devoted to him for several years on. All the way up until fourth grade, I was fawning over Jake across playgrounds and classrooms, writing him love letters confessing my affections to him, and challenging him to races and various other small competitions, all in the hope of capturing his attention for just a small part of the day.
Despite my creative and whimsical efforts, my advances were in vain. Jake’s heart belonged to Hannah Smith, his best friend’s twin sister.
For a time, this reality was devastating to live in. How could I reconcile that my one true love, Jake Puuwai-Puuwai would never feel the same way about me as I did about him? How could I move on if there was no one else in my school with the agility or the aptitude to capture my single-digit heart? I would go on feeling this way, mourning a young love that never was, until my older cousin gave me advice that I would never forget: “Just pretend you don’t like him.”
I returned to school after hearing that advice with a new goal. I, M. Milkweed, acting prodigy and recipient of one (1) performance ribbon at the 2008 DPS Shakespeare Festival for my performance of the scorned Helena in Act 3, Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, would give the performance of a lifetime: I was going to act like Jake Puuwai-Puuwai was not my crush.
It was the performance of a lifetime, indeed. Although my charade did not ultimately fool Jake into falling in love with me, it did fool me into falling out of love with him. By the end of fourth grade, I was over my crush and on to bigger, better things.
My next crush didn’t come until sixth grade. His name was Fernando Enriquez.
It’s safe to say, I was actively seeking out a boyfriend at the start of the year. I was reasonable enough to agree that elementary school was a little young to start dating, my distance from the Jake-situation gave me such perspective— but now that I was in middle school, things were different. I had different classes that I went to throughout the day (nevermind if they were still with all the same kids), I had a cellphone with a touch-screen and a texting keyboard. Finding a boyfriend was the next natural step in maturing into teen-dom, and I was sure I was ready to take on the responsibility. It was just a matter of choosing who it would be.
I had been holding out for one curly-haired boy from my elementary school, whom I saw at orientation, to show face during the school year. As the weeks went by and I coped with the fact that the curly-haired boy was not going to appear, I had to look for other options.
Fernando was a boy in my class (the advanced class). He was fairly quiet and well-behaved. He always wore a benevolent smile and he seemed to get along with all the kids in our class equally. He felt like a good choice for a few reasons:
a.) He had brown hair (and a bowl cut?).
b.) He had glasses (I also had glasses).
c.) He was good at math and pretty good in all his other subjects too.
d.) He was nice.
He was not exactly the same height as me, but he was only an inch or two taller, so I didn’t really mind that.
When making moves on Fernando, I started with the love-note (a tried-and-true method, promised to deliver desired results, so far, 0% of the time). However, when a close friend of his advised me to try to get to know him more, I was forced to move on to a more forward-thinking approach.
As I toiled away, thinking of ways I could try to “get to know” Fernando more before making him my boyfriend, the gods bent the universe’s goodwill in my humble direction. Fernando and I were grouped together for a project in art class, and to make things even better, the assignment was to create a thirty-second stop-motion-animation film. My heart could have soared through the ceiling on that day, it seemed the stars were all aligning in my favor. Not only had I been presented the opportunity to “get to know” Fernando in a more intimate setting, but he would also get the opportunity to see me obliterate the creative process, as SMA was (at the time) one of my passions.
Our group came up with a compelling piece about a little orange cat going absolutely sick-o mode on a ball of yarn, destroying his living room in the process. Though our team faced a fair share of complications over the course of production (as all promising-film crews often do), the film ended up being named one of the best to come out of the class. Our art teacher rewarded each of our members with tiny plastic Oscars to commemorate our cinematic achievements.
After the project was over, I approached Fernando again, with new-found confidence after our group’s success. I told him that I really enjoyed doing stop-motion with him and that I wanted to do more animation outside of school… like a sort of “stop-motion-animation-club”. He loved the idea, and so our meetings commenced. “SMAC” met four times before the end of the school year.
Going into 7th grade, I think Fernando and I could have turned into something real, had it not been for my teary confession to him in the second week of school that I was moving across the country to live in South Carolina.
To be continued
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