Congratulations on having the most appropriate user name to the thread. 
Oh, everybody’s saying that 14 year olds should read this and maybe take the advice to heart.
But perhaps the older folks should too. A common theme I’m seeing is “I’d warn Dad to visit the doctor about those minor pains”. Yeah, if you’re a parent, visit a doctor now and then. Get your heart checked out. Get a few blood tests.
Eek. I was hoping it had been so long that nobody would remember. :smack: But thank you. Actually, I was buying booze today and I got carded. Whee!
And wow. You were in Miami, pre-Castro Cuba? That’s cool. I’m sorry you never got to go see your friend in Cuba. My boyfriend was living in Miami then as well, in Coral Gables. But he was 12 in 1957, not 14. I had no idea you were that age. Don’t know why; I just assume most people here are on the young side. Sorry about your friend who got in that fight. If it’s any consolation, I’ve never seen Fats Domino either, but I did hug Chubby Checker once. He really was chubby; I could barely get my arms around him. I think he’s dead now. Anyhow, he was really nice. Was your friend okay in the end? Anyhow, that was an interesting post.
I think I saw the snapshot you posted in one of the picture threads first. A guy gets a look at that face, he tends to remember other stuff too. 
Cary got alright, after they stuffed his entrails back inside and sewed him up at the hospital. It was several months before he was back to full speed.
It’s 1981.
I wouldn’t fail freshman history, for one thing, seeing as how I majored in it in college.
There was this girl in my grade, Amy, who I had a crush on because she had this incredible, brilliant orange-red hair. IRL I never said one word to her; maybe next go-round I’d try chatting her up.
I wouldn’t feel guilty and ashamed over being unable to pass advanced math courses (because math was easy for my older brother, and he assumes anyone who wasn’t a mental defective could do it).
I’d visit Chicago before the late '80s so I could see the last Czech neighborhood in the US (in Cicero) before the demographic changes which resulted in it becoming a Mexican neighborhood by 2000.
I’d quit piano lessons (which stopped being fun years before) and see if I could find a way to take up the zither.
Yeah. I’m old. 
Well. Not coming from money means I’d wait and consider my options as far as hitting it big financially. I’d still get beat up in school too much and as mentioned up there, it wouldn’t help to know they were all pretty fucked up abused kids who were doing the beating.
I would have pursued the same interests and pleasures, right through college but for a few key incidents. I never would have one on one particular blind date, that’s for darned sure.
I would have convinced my Uncle the true serious from the punchcard days computer Guru of what would be coming, and beg him to float me 10 grand.
I wouldn’t put it in MicroSoft. I’d put it into IBM, which rallied, tanked, almost died- and then raged back, making some very patient people astonishingly wealthy. Since I’d have a sense of when the wave would break, post- comeback, I’d sell out at the peak and retire and make art till died.
I’d stop Jeff and Steve from getting back into the car, even if it cost me my job. Steve was emotionally destroyed and Jeff was beheaded in the accident. I’d have paid more careful attention and tried very hard to get Janice help before she ate a bullet and broke everyone’s heart and soul for years. -sigh- Son of a bitch. 
Otherwise, I admire Bricker’s choices on trying to stop some gargantual tragedies but I wonder how far any of them would have gotten? A letter to NASA would have been great, but if I had sent that letter and Challenger had exploded anyway, well… I’d be afraid the Feds would be hunting for me. No good deed goes unpunished.
Cartooniverse
John Carter of Mars, I remember your writing about the young girl from Cuba before. It made quite an impression on me.
September, 1957. So, Zoe…You think you are in love, really in love. And you want to remember how it feels so that when you are grown up, you will know for sure. Well, you are right. That’s how it feels. He was really that special.
You need to spend more time with your father and let him know that your mother’s assaults are getting out of control. Yes, I’m sure.
I know this is hard to do, but don’t take what your mother says personally. It really has nothing to do with you. Replace her words with poetry or songs or what you know to be true about yourself. You’re not going to like this, but it would be better to work at your father’s store than to be alone with her.
Don’t pay any attention to what she says about your weight. 130 is just fine.
Toy with this idea for the next ten or fifteen years: Women and men should be socially, economically and politically equal.
I always knew you were a radical lefty, but now you want women to get to vote, drive cars, work outside the home and stuff?
You’ve gone over the top this time, my friend: Round the bend; Lost it; Totally apeshit (bet you haven’t heard that one in a while)
What a great idea for a story!
I’ve noticed that a lot of people are just changing personal things. I’d like to break the trend and be less selfish, but I value my freedom and sanity too much. I have no desire to ever see the inside of a questioning room, much less one occupied by several perplexed and angry FBI agents. It’s not like a 14 year old’s predictions would change any of the events beforehand, but you can be damn sure they’d come looking for you later.
If anyone believed you, you’d end up as a lab project, if they didn’t, you’d still get the woo-woo fringies hanging out harassing you and your family after the first couple of predictions. This is after spending time in the psych ward, depending on how adamant you were about trying to convince everyone.
In short, I’d love to make the world a better place, but I’m not selfless enough to sacrifice my life uselessly, and I definitely know the limits to one normal person’s ability to affect world events. If I were sufficiently dedicated I might be able to inveigle my way into a high enough office that someone would listen to me by the time of the 2001 attacks or the earlier bombings, but there are an awful lot of “ifs” involved with that proposition.
I actually don’t have too many regrets, but I would like to change some things for the better.
I’d see what I could do about my sister’s rebellion. I think she felt alone sometimes even though she pushed people away a lot. It might cost me the nephew I’ve got now, but it might also make her life a lot easier and less dramatic than it was between 12 and 17 the first time.
In a year or so, I’d start reminding my mom about breast cancer screening. She actually caught it early – it was an aggressive strain – so I don’t know if that would make any difference in the discovery timeline or not. I’d ride the doctors about doing a CT scans or MRIs to find the brain tumors that had spread from my mother’s breast cancer, so maybe they’d actually find them before it got too far. “Your bone and liver scans look clean, you can stop chemo at 6 months instead of the projected year,” my ass. It would be nice if I knew for sure that she actually understood what was going on when I got my high school diploma, and it would be nice to actually know my mother as an adult instead of losing her about a month after graduation and having the whole family fall apart soon thereafter.
Assuming that worked, one of my later changes wouldn’t need to be made: I wouldn’t trust anyone to make investments with my inheritance – even if he’s making the same investments with his money – and I definitely would stay away from US Surgical during Clinton’s presidency.
Considering that at age 14 I had a few hundred dollars saved from working at the family business (parents made sure that I learned about savings accounts and wages early through direct experience) I’d make some shrewd investments in what were then low-cost stocks. I’d start much, much earlier with financial planning and more seriously since I’d actually have some capital to work with instead of being stuck in low wage treadmill hell for several years. I would probably start my own business in a couple of years and later take over the shops from my mom when she got sick. It’s obvious from what actually happened that my father wasn’t capable of handling them on his own.
I would have “worked up to my potential” starting with taking more advanced math classes, and would have negotiated with the school for projects, reports, and tests in lieu of routine homework (which I loathe) so that I would get grades in line with what I was capable of instead of being bored into a coma half the time. I would have pushed my mother to let me take coursework that would let me graduate early. She had social problems in high school due to being 2 years ahead from the more advanced courses in Canada. Because of that, she wouldn’t let me skip any grades. Sorry mom, I know better than you about this, I would have been much happier being in college by the time I was 16 or 17.
I would learn a couple of new languages and practice the ones I know now a lot more so I’d be fluent in 3 or 4 languages besides English by the time I’m as old as I am now. Of course I’d do a couple of overseas exchange trips and as much travel as possible.
With good grades and some actual money, I wouldn’t have needed to work all the time in university and I would have been able to go to a much better school. I would have majored in something much more technical. I vastly undervalued myself to start and later, in my junior year, picked a major I could finish quickly and easily just so I could #^¢*ing graduate sometime before an MD student who had started school at the same time as me would have.
I would either avoid or win a couple of fights. I think one of them, that happened shortly after I would arrive in this scenario, would have gone down no matter what, so I would put that jerkoff and his two buddies on the ground even before the teachers got there. I’ve got half a lifetime of martial arts training that would have been put to excellent use then. They had enough of a history that they were working on expulsions prior to that anyway, so I wouldn’t be shedding any tears for them and might even be saving other kids from getting harassed. That would have nipped a couple of other unpleasant encounters I had later in the bud too.
I would get involved in at least one fight I avoided. Believe me, someone would be very grateful, and would lack a knife scar. I would put the fear of god into a guy who was abusing his daughter, if I could track him down. That would be at about the right time to keep J. from having to put up with his mental and physical nastiness for the next couple of years, though it would probably have the side effect of her never getting involved with me.
Assuming my changes didn’t drastically change things a few years later: some people say that violence never solved anything. I say that one person getting all his limbs broken would have prevented him ever having the opportunity to point a gun at my sister, thus preventing me from having to get in between the two of them. That’s being merciful; I’d rather kill him before he ever got to a point in time where he could be there and find a way to hide his body; he was a nasty piece of work and I’m absolutely sure the world would be a better place without him. The other time I had a gun pointed at me, well, I can’t imagine I’d be in the same place and time again. No better way to avoid a fight than by not being there.
I would have been more social, made a lot more friends, and would have started dating much earlier. There are a few girls I would have asked out instead of harboring a crush over. I would have befriended a couple of the girls I had dated the first time, but I wouldn’t have gotten involved with them. I used to “fix” people. I don’t do that anymore because it’s not worth it emotionally. I’d be responsible for more frequent and adamant invocations of deities names, and not a few exclamations of, “Where did you learn THAT?”
(Oh, for the people who are creeped out by the “underage” sex factor, what would you rather have: an adult consciousness with a 14 year old brain and body having what would appear to be age-appropriate sex, where no perceptible authority or abuse of position could be involved; an apparent 14 year old seeking out sex with mental peers of 30-40 years old; or 4 years of celibacy to satisfy your morals, during a time of physical development when hormone surges are so strong that they often result in behavior that in any other age group would be labeled a type of insanity? I’m not into self-flagellation, there’s no question I’d be having sex, and lots of it, during my second adolescence.)
The first couple of years would probably change my life drastically. I can’t concretely imagine where those changes would take me after graduation, aside from some generalities I pointed out earlier.