As I sit here heating up leftover pasta, listening to the soft, deep, rumbly,
VRSSHHNNNN of the dishwasher, dealing with the annoying, aching pain from my surgery, wishing that things that need to be removed eventually were bred out of the gene pool, and imagining how simply
amazing this dish of noodles will taste in all of it's saucy, three-day-old, soggy glory, I've come to realize:
I don't know what to blog about.
I could type endlessly about stories of when I was a child, and it would get me no where. I could tell you all about the time there was a duck stuck in the chimney, but what fun would that be? I could explain to you the night that I saw Santa Claus and decided that I wanted to be a reindeer hunter when I grew up, or I could tell you about the move. You know what, yeah, that sounds okay.
I'll tell you about the move.
A few years ago (read: a little more than six), I moved roughly 350 miles away, from the hustle-and-bustle city life of Northern Virginia - where you can find hookers and crack dealers every thirty feet starting at 6PM, it takes an hour to get to a grocery store that's 10 miles away, and whites are a major minority - to a quiet little town in Pennsylvania - in which it seemed no one had ever seen someone of African American, Mexican, or really anyone other than Caucasian, descent, where five cars behind one another at a stop light was heavy traffic and where you can still find whores and crack dealers every thirty feet starting at 6PM.
As you may be able to see, this was a huge change for me. Drastic.
Moving from the big city with hardly any life other than the people who live there and their pets, to a tiny town that people have only heard of maybe once in their lives (or once a year, but then they forget about it three days later)? There's a difference. A biiiig difference.
It all started when my mom started to see this guy. They started out as friends, and things progressively...progressed. Soon they started dating and after awhile, they decided they wanted to get married. Okay, cool. I didn't really like the guy, he was an asshole, but whatever made my mom happy, you know? Ohhhh poor 11-year-old me. I never thought that things would turn out the way they did.
Which included moving. States away. Five hours. To a place that I had only been once before, when I was forced to go - on the busiest day of the year, no less - and had to stay in a dank hotel room which smelled of week-old taquitos and burnt rubber. Where you could hear people having sex three doors down. That was an experience I did not enjoy, to say the least.
Of course, I knew what sex
was, and what it was
for, but I never knew about the sounds that could possibly be made while engaging in such an activity. And so, my little self was terrified with the thoughts of monsters coming to unleash their pent-up rage and frustration on the little town and everyone in it - more importantly, myself. I decided that had a monster shown up, I would use my little brother as a diversion and make for the car.
I didn't know how to drive, and it obviously wasn't (and still isn't) legal for an 11-year-old to drive a car, but who would question such a thing if a monster was on a rampage? Wouldn't everyone be busy fleeing from monster-wrath?
Either way, that night had been forever burned into my brain, and moving to that little town meant we'd have to stay in a hotel until we looked at and picked out, and bought a house, and until we got all of our stuff moved from our old house to our new house...or at least our beds. Until that point in time, though, we'd stay in that same hotel.
Luckily, instead of the two-bed, one-bathroom room with the table, tv, microwave and mini-fridge, we were able to rent one of the 'penthouses' - which is just a one-floor 'house' - since it was me, my mother, my younger brother, soon-to-be-stepdad, and my mother's parents all staying in the same place. So, it was pretty cool. There were two bathrooms, three bedrooms, a fold-out couch and a bigger kitchen and mini dining room.
So, basically, my brother and I had more room to run around and destroy stuff, and just generally be nuisances.
We managed to break a lamp, two mugs, and a chair.
The chair was on accident.
Anyways, 8AM to 5PM the next day was basically spent driving around town looking at houses. I was excited until about...10AM. Then I got bored, cranky, moody, and generally pissy. I didn't get much sleep the night before (due to more sex monsters), and though I did have pancakes at the breakfast bar in the hotel, it wasn't enough to heal my young mind from the 'show' I heard the night before.
I loved seeing new places, but I hated having to stay for roughly 2 hours in each house; especially when they were about 2,000 square feet and my little legs could wander around every nook and cranny of something that size and have my curiosity satisfied in about twenty minutes, as long as my mother didn't yell at me to stay close and to not wander off.
We went through probably 6 houses the first day, yet my mother and her fiance had decided that they didn't like any of the houses enough to want to place an offer. That was all cool with me, though, since all of those houses looked like shacks and smelled like rotten mangoes. However, it also meant that we'd have to continue driving around town, looking at many, many,
many more houses until we found one that everyone (read: my mother and her fiance) could agree on.
To be blatantly honest, all of the houses we looked at sucked. Completely, utterly, sucked.
But, we finally found a house.
Whenever we walked into the house, I was amazed. Tile floors, pretty paint, and everything sparkling brand new, unlike the rotted-wood siding and floors, and peeling wallpaper that all of the other houses we went to see seemed to have. Sweet kitchen, open floor plan, awesome gaming room basement. Hell, my little self was in HEAVEN.
After seeing the first floor and the basement, it was time to go upstairs. A loft greeted us...along with a giant extra room over the garage that I instantly claimed as mine, had we bought the house (which we did wind up doing), and my brother cried about it. He got the next room we saw - a baby yellow bedroom. Fit him well that day.
Long story short, my mom and her fiance were very pleased with the house, as were my brother and I, so we decided to buy it.
Beautiful and brand-new, and 4,500 square feet, the guy who was selling it's fiance left him right after they finished having it built. So, everything inside the house, spare a few things of his own possession that he had left to move, came with the house. Awesome. Fully furnished house. This meant that I got to keep my mom's queen-sized bed, as the house came with a king-sized in the master bedroom. I was pumped.
So came the time that we had to haul everything from our old house to our new house...a ten to eleven hour round-trip drive. Luckily, most of the times my mom's boyfriend or my mom drove up, I had to stay with my grandparents, since I still had to attend the beginning of 5th grade, so I didn't have to sit through 11-16+ hours a day in the car. However, I did have to sit through 6-7 hours a day of elementary school, so I don't know which would have been better.
I did have to go with them a couple times on the weekends, though...and definitely the final move. That was the drive during which I decided I would forever refer to the PENSKE moving system as EKSNEP. I was less of a loser then than I am now.
We finally got to move into the house in late October, so I missed about a week of school from my old class because my mother decided that the last couple of trips, she would make my brother and me suffer through instead of letting us stay with my grandparents.
It was with good reason, however; because of the move, we'd have to change schools, and she'd like us to know exactly where our classrooms would be (even though we went from attending a multiple-hallway'd school with multiple rooms of every grade and a different room for everything to a single-hallway school with one classroom per grades K-5 that used the cafeteria for a gym, music room, auditorium and the art lady came to your grade room once per week for class. It was another big change for me.
Anyway, we got a little tour of the place, starting with my brother's grade 4 class. We didn't get to talk to anyone besides the teacher, who only said a few words to my mother, younger brother and the school's principal before a kid threw up on another kid and they started to fling it at one another, each yelling that the other threw up, and that the other started it.
Basically, his room was full of idiot crotch-loaves that threw fits like monkeys whenever something happened...whenever anything happened.
Luckily, we were excused by the principal to continue up the single-hall to the end, where my fifth grade class awaited. Knocking on the door, we were greeted by who would be my teacher for the rest of the year.
He would be my teacher for the rest of the year.
Now, after having nothing but female teachers for everything but maybe a music or gym class now and again, suddenly having a guy teaching me my main, needed...things...for school was kinda scary for me. He was a pretty nice guy, though, so it (mostly) quelled my fears (I still wasn't looking forward to changing schools). I even got to look into the classroom - which was filled with 26 students staring back at me - to see what it looked like.
After the whole ordeal was over, we went shopping and then returned to the house, eating a nice hot dinner and watching some TV. Soon I got tired, and went to bed, happy as hell that it was Monday and that my mom wasn't making me attend my new class until the next Monday. Because of her wedding and shit.
That Saturday, my mom and Robert (her fiance) were getting married. I got to travel around with my mom and her friend to get her ready for the wedding (hair and nails and stuff like that) earlier in the day, so it was pretty
fun boring.
The worst part, though, was the wedding itself. I fought my mom because I didn't want to wear a dress (I absolutely hated dresses and still do, in fact), and fought her so long and determined-ly that she allowed me to wear a suit instead.
Fuck, I looked so badass.
Anyway, sitting through the ceremony was a nightmare, so I entertained myself with a hope that there would be zombies stumbling up the hill to my house and I could be an 11-year-old hero, but I would keep a zombie as a pet and name him Angelo, and he would be my butler and bodyguard. However, none of that happened, at the end of the ceremony I got awesome food and tasty cake (leftovers which lasted us a week or more afterward) so I sucked it up and sat still, but still thought of how awesome it would be for zombies to suddenly invade. I was glad when it was all over and everyone left, because that meant I could dick around playing games on my N64 while my brother whored about the Xbox without any of our guests thinking I was even
more of a hellchild than they had already come to believe.
The day was finally over, though, and I was so exhausted from being carted from the town to different cities and back again for my mom's 'makeover', and having to deal with the ceremony that I laid down in bed.
Laying in bed, though, I suddenly started to think about something.
In order for me to be here, on this planet, my parents would have had to have sex.
This is perfectly normal and shouldn't be surprising to anyone, but it suddenly dawned on me that my mother had given me her old bed. Where my father and she used to sleep. I don't think she had gotten the mattress changed, and even if she had, she had a husband (who obviously was her boyfriend) now.
I realized I was sleeping on the bed where I was MADE, and I wasn't too happy about that.
I still sleep there every night, though, and my mother and Robert are no longer together, so I'm happier (like I said earlier, he was an ass). And I often think, that maybe if I keep the same bed, I can freak my own kids out someday. I'll change the mattress and all, but they won't know that.
I can't wait.
