This is the mad cake. Notice how many candles and how high the flames are. I thought I was going to burn my hair off.
Anyway, I realised last night when I was about to sleep that I'm startlingly close to 30. I knew this before, but it seems more realistic now I guess. Then 40 is only 10 years away. 10 years ago I was 19. It's kind of mind boggling, hard to grasp.
I'm still fine with being 29, mind you. I just feel more geared. I need to figure out purpose and focus my life toward something. I suppose one could argue that I realised this prior to last night, since I did make this blog and part of the reason was to figure it out.
My mom was sad that she wasn't mentioned in my last two blog entries, though I was already considering putting her in the one where I talked about my birthday. She was there, after all. For the record, my mom and I live together. It's an awkward thing to describe but it's pretty normal. We're kind of roomates. When you tell people that you live with your mom, they assume that you're a waste who sleeps under their parents roof. Or that your mom lives with you because of various reasons, such as health. This isn't the case with me.
We move around a good bit for various reasons. I'm not exactly sure when I found out about my sister, but I knew about her when I was 10 or 11 (I told my band teacher that I had a sister, but said her name was Metallica. I was a weird kid).
It turned out that my dad had never actually divorced his first wife, which you would think would make his marriage to my mother nullified - but no! Turns out, polygamy is illegal, but they don't seem to do much about it or care unless someone presses charges. The marriage to my mother was very much legal, so life goes on.
When I was 13 years old I got to meet my sister for the first time. I was a short, fat, awkward girl who hadn't really come to terms with reality yet. My sister was a tall, thin, gorgeous 16 year old who was way too wild. This is kind of beside the point, but it's important to point out that I idolised her and emulated her.
My upbringing was always kind of different from other people's. I was raised being more open minded than most people. (Or, more aptly, most people in hick southern towns at the time.) My random creative urges were never stifled and I was allowed to express myself in any way I really wanted. My mother was a hair dresser when I was a little child and had gone to beauty school before my birth, so she not only allowed me to express myself but also enabled it.
She gave me a mohawk when I was fifteen and dyed my hair an assortment of random colours such as green, blue and pink. She took me to get my first piercing and didn't freak out when I came home with my first tattoo. You get the idea, she didn't stop me from doing what I wanted to do when it came to my manner of dress or my body.
They were also stoners. I didn't really understand that pot was against the law or "wrong" until I was eight years old. I suppose I had some vague sense that it was taboo, due to the secrecy of it all, but I clearly remember my 'Aha!' moment when my best friend at the time told me that her parents didn't smoke those kind of cigarettes and looked at me as though I was slightly dangerous.
Here I need to make a small interruption, I should clearly say that I don't think that the exposure to drugs damaged me in any way. It's pot, not crack. I feel that it went a long way toward forming my personality and my sense of self, as well as how I view the world and authority in general. I don't consider any of these things to have stunted me, and I feel that I'm a well rounded, healthy person.
Until I was fourteen, at any rate. When I was fourteen years old my mother was arrested for possession with intent to sell. My father has four brothers, three of which smoke(d) pot also. My mom would often drive to Georgetown (which was about 45 minutes to an hour away) to buy the "merchandise" from a friend, then she would later distribute and be reimbursed. It's not really what my definition of what selling is, but apparently the exchange of cash counts even if there's no profit involved.
It was a pretty hard time and obviously a very crucial one for me. Problem was, the police didn't just happen to pull her over and find it. One of my uncles had gotten angry with her about something and called them with a "tip". I'm not sure if it would have made a difference if she had been caught in some other way, but it definitely changed my life having happened like this.
Before this point I was extremely close to my cousin, we were only a few years apart. Her father was the one who called in the "tip", however, so that friendship ended badly. We've only really talked a few times since then and not until a couple of years ago. Family is family so I've mostly forgiven him, but I'll probably never forget that he was responsible for the scars that I gained then.
It's not exactly an easy thing to happen in a small town. There was one stop light, one school, two convenience stores. The day after it happened, everyone knew. I've already admitted that I'm short and fat, and that I was an extremely weird kid. I was already teased a bit and it didn't bother me that much, but this was kind of a new level. I'm not sure it was an all together bad thing though, it made me more withdrawn into myself and gave me a tougher outer shell needed to be able to laugh it off.
Anyway, it's important to mention all of this because when my mother was in jail over the weekend, she swore off pot forever. Mostly for my sake. Ironically, this was more or less the end of her marriage. They didn't actually get split up until I was 19, getting divorced when I was 20 or 21; but this is where it started crumbling.
After the divorce, my mom started riding in a semi with a new boyfriend who turned out to be a married pathological liar. After that she went to trucking school to learn to drive one herself and did that for awhile. During this time, I was living with my father and sinking further and further into a depressive state. I drank every day, did an assortment of drugs (not all as harmless as pot), and generally moped like a moronic teenager.
Finally, my mom got overly worried about me and decided that it would be best if I rode with her in her truck for awhile. I could probably have said no, since I was either 19 or 20 at the time, but I had nothing else to do, nowhere else to go and (what I felt then) not a lot to live for. So I went. It turned out to be a huge turning point in my life. Apart from getting me off drugs and alcohol (for awhile at least), it's how I came to live in Pennsylvania with Keith.
Mom got fired from the job that she was at because she'd hit a light pole in a parking lot, without realising it. This means she fled the scene of an accident. Not very great for the insurance. We were stuck in Denver with no money, nowhere to go and a dog that we'd had since I was 11. We ended up splitting up the money and mom caught a ride back to Texas with one truck driver while I hitched a ride toward Pennsylvania with another.
Was kind of a really bad mistake on my part. I should have gone to a bus station and gotten Keith to pay for a ticket. Instead, I ended up using all of my money on crystal meth. It took me a week to get there, the guy was a sleaze ball and I didn't eat/sleep/shower the entire time. Though when I say "there" I don't mean Pennsylvania exactly, the truck driver dropped me off at a truck stop in Des Moines.
I had no money to pay for cab fare and had a moment of total clarity at how horrifying my life had become in such a short span of time. I stank, I was hungry, I needed sleep and above all, I just really wanted to get to Pennsylvania and be safe again. So I broke down, right there in the middle of the truck stop. A female trucker stopped over and asked me what was wrong and I gave who-knows-what as an explanation. She ended up giving me the money for the cab fare. Even to this day, while I can't remember her name or even what she looked like, I think that I owe my life to that random woman.
So I took a cab, then a bus, then another bus. It was pretty humiliating. One of the bus drivers told me that I smelled bad, which I did, and I had to tell him that I was homeless. He gave me a banana. Somehow I made it to Pennsylvania and Keith picked me up with his friend, whose grandmother gave me a place to stay.
Mom made it back to Texas fine (her ride was a lot less disgusting than mine was) and life was once again okay. I got a job, she got a job, we both worked to rebuild lives. A year later, I was miserable and homesick so she picked up both me and Keith and we moved to the Dallas area. We lived next door to her for several years until her boss (and then boyfriend) passed away. At that point, her new boss was making unhappy decisions and not showing much caring for those in her employ, so she quit and we moved to a neighbouring suburb/city.
So long story short, we moved in together as equals. We both pay the rent/bills/etc and do the housework. We ended up moving back to Pennsylvania a few years later both because Keith's mom had passed away and he needed to be near something more familiar and because we wanted to be around to help out his sister and their father, as they were naturally having a rough time with her passing.
And so here I am today, starting the first day of the rest of my life. Reflecting on the past and making plans for the future. I'm not sure what will come, and saying that I hope it's smoother than my past is a rather large understatement.. but I'm sure it'll be interesting, to say the least.
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