June 23, 2007
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Memories
Rereading that last entry made me realize how much fun thinking about memories is.
Once, long ago before I had breasts or knew what my vagina was for, I was very angry with my mother. I ran out the front door with the intention of passing my entire body through a hole in the front gate and running away to my grandmother's house so that my mother would know I was angry. Unfortunately, children don't have amazing amounts of spacial thinking ability around age 3 or 4 and I of course could not fit through said hole in the front gate. Instead, I got my head stuck and could not free myself before my mother came out wondering what was going on. She looked down at me and said, "Nee Nee, what are you doing?" I looked back up at her and shouted, "Runny way Ma's!!" as I was not too great at speaking yet. She nodded and said, "Are you stuck?" I tried to shake my head no, but I was stuck. She helped to remove me from the gate and took me back inside. I forgave her since she had saved me from being stuck in a fence. Later, as in when I was 14 or 15, she told me that she had been so frightened that day. If I had actually gotten out of the yard and into the pastures beyond and tried to run all the way to my grandmother's house at the age of 4 who knows if I would have been trampled to death by cows or gotten lost in the woods surrounding our farm or any number of things that could have been fatal at 4. But my mother never showed it. When she came out to the gate where I was stranded she was calm and collected. My mother is one of the strongest women I know, and on that day I got stuck in our gate I started thinking that.
When I was 5 I had my first experience with a video game. My father was playing Super Mario Bros. 3 on our Nintendo like he had many times before, but this time instead of just watching I asked to play. I played that game for hours that day...and the next day and the next day and the next day. When I got bored with it I wanted more. So my dad bought more and I played more. Soon we had a computer. It ran the DOS Shell, if anyone remembers that but me, and I played Wolfenstein until I couldn't stay awaken any longer. I remember my mother would always come in and watch me for about five minutes until she said, "Ah! I can't watch this anymore! It's making me carsick! How do you and your father do it?" Then she would wander off. I could never beat the final boss in the game and I always had to call for my dad to come and do it for me. As time progressed and our computers got more powerful and started to run Windows my dad bought more games. When I was 9ish I believe he bought Doom and I played the crap out of that game, so much so that he bought Doom II when it came out just for me. He also bought me Quake as it looked like Doom with better graphics. I played those games for sooo many hours. I would always put in my parents CD's and listen to them while I played, like Simon and Garfunkel and the Moody Blues and Fleetwood Mac. To this day when I hear those songs I am soothed and I think of shooting the crap out of aliens and demons.
My father's parents lived by a lake. They had a little beach that they had made with sand and whatnot. They had a beautiful house that was much cleaner than my own. I loved going there. My grandfather would make grilled cheese sandwiches with that cheese that comes in a big rectangular cube. I can't remember the name, but I do remember that my own parents, being that they made very little money running a florist shop, were too cheap to buy it. I loved those cheese sandwiches and I would always ask for seconds and thirds and on and on until my grandfather got tired of making them. Then I would want to watch a movie, but my grandparents were very Christian and all the R-rated movies my parents let me see when I was 8 or 9 where not part of their collection. The only "good" movie they had was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. So, every time I went to their house I watched it...three to four times. By the time I was too old to sit around and watch movies at my grandparent's house I had probably seen it over 100 times. It's still my favorite movie.
When I was in the third grade I became aware that when some places on your body were touched, they felt better than other places. I decided to explore this new discovery with a marker. It was also about this time that I discovered that boys and girls sometimes looked kind of nice and I wanted to be close to them. Overall, however, this was a very awkward time for me as I am not at all shy in any capacity and I said lots of strange things to my classmates. It was at this time that I also realized that girls did not always like other girls and I was indeed strange for having those feelings. So, in a year I went through a revolution of feeling. First I wanted everyone to know that I wanted to touch them and make them feel good and by the end I wanted to hide my feelings from everyone. It was a pretty sad time for me and it turned me into the "weird" kid when before I had been the "smart" kid. I was pretty alone. Fourth and fifth grade resulted in the same thing. I was made fun of not for liking girls anymore but just for being strange. I was still wearing matching sweat combos with kittens on them and sweater vests with stirrup pants while the other girls were learning about fashion from their mothers. Instead I was learning about computer games from my dad and how to make cookies from my mother. It was also about this time that we got the internet. I discovered pornography and chat rooms early. I had a porn folder within a week of getting the internet. I would go into chat rooms late at night after my parents had gone to bed and try to find people to cyber with since it seemed none of my classmates were interested. This change almost made it so that I could only feel sexy when I was at a computer. I stopped being interested in other people since they brought nothing but pain and I started spending more and more time with my computer and my consoles. Each new game I played was a way to become someone else. Each new porn site I found was a way to feel like I was attractive without human interaction. I was lonely. However, all through this time I had been in the gifted program. I got in in third grade and it ran all the way through middle school. I started to notice in sixth grade that the other people in gifted seemed alright. They didn't cause me much pain. I guess you could say I had friends. We didn't hang out outside of gifted, but every Wednesday morning I couldn't wait to skip three hours of class to hang out with these people who seemed almost as strange as me. I tried to date every one of them in my hella awkward way and was turned down every time, but at least I wasn't alone.
I started keeping a notebook, or I guess you could say journal, when I was in sixth grade. I didn't just write journal entries, though. I wrote poems and drew pictures and just doodled whenever I was all alone in my room...which was a good portion of the time. It was a 5-subject notebook and therefore I hadn't filled it completely until freshman year of high school. I wrote everything in it and two or three other notebooks that I kept. I wrote notes that I never delivered, how I felt about boys and how I loved my classes, but I never wrote about my feelings for girls. Another girl had come out as bisexual about the time we got into sixth grade and everyone had made so much fun of her that I was just to frightened to tell anyone. I was so paranoid that I thought writing it or making it tangible in any way ran the risk of someone finding out. So, my bisexuality was my secret and no one else's until graduation from high school. On graduation day I told my "friends" about my sexuality. A couple of them just started talking to me this summer. Wow, I sure loved growing up in a small, hillbilly ass town.
High school was pretty nice. I had my Playstation and Playstation 2 to keep me company in addition to an even faster computer...with the same slow internet. I didn't play any online games but I had lots of fun with all the Final Fantasies, Baldur's Gate, Metal Gear Solid, and Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain I could play. Things were good. I actually started feeling good about myself. All my teachers told me I was intelligent and all my classmates came to me for homework help. The addition of the driver's license to the equation meant that my friends and I went to Jefferson City all the time to see movies and buy stuff and just have fun. I would say that it was the best time in my life. I had lots of crushes and lots of disappointments in the boyfriend department, but being in a town so small I really am not surprised. I was also a little chunky back then so that could have played a role. However, I realized that I was chunky junior year and started working out and dieting and lost over 30 pounds by the time I went off to college, still on of the things I'm most proud of doing in my entire life. I also got myself a serious boyfriend for the first time junior year. Granted, he was a fat lazy stoner, but the fact that I had finally wrangled myself a boy made me feel amazing. When I graduated I would have to say that I felt the happiest I had ever felt in my life. That summer was pretty fun and I was so excited about college and all the new people I would meet and possibly have sex with.
The happiest day of my life was the first day of freshman year here at Mizzou. On that day I had the most hope for the future, the most love for myself and the most straight up joy that I have ever had on a single day. A few weeks later I started this xanga and got on facebook, so everything else is very well documented already.
So yeah, memories are great. They tell the story of who we are and how we got where we are. I love thinking about the past, the bad and the good, because everything that happened got me where I was one the first day of freshman year. Unfortunately, things didn't go as well as planned after that, but that's alright. At least I was happy at some point. I should be grateful. Many people are never happy.
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