If you don’t know what’s going on by now… pay attention! I’m about to turn 21 and making excellent decisions. Read here & here.

SEMINOLE DRIVE

I thought I was being really grown up when I decided to move in with my boyfriend and his best friend, whom for the purpose of this narrative I will refer to as Shane and Malcolm. I thought having my own kitchen and leaving the “real world” culture of Alice street was the mature thing to do… hindsight, my friends, hindsight…

Shane didn’t have a job or any tangible means of supporting himself and Malcolm worked part time at the college arcade and part time selling dime bags to the college kids that hung out at the arcade, because I was just scraping by selling dusty souvenirs to lost tourists the only place we could get was a dark roach infested townhouse that was mostly inhabited by section 8 families, living on subsidies and spending their days shouting to each other through the thin walls of the complex.

This was also the first time I lived with boys in close proximity and it was a real eye opener, one time I remember Shane got so drunk that I woke up to find him peeing on my computer (a classic Apple2 E circa 1986)… We had a powder room with a stackable washer/dryer  next to the front door and it was so full of dirty clothes ALL.THE.TIME. that no one ever used it as a bathroom.

But above and beyond the grooming habits of 21-year-old boys the most annoying thing about the townhouse was that it was located directly behind the post office. I could literally long jump to the back door and I don’t jump very far. But despite this I never got my mail correctly – I got a lot of other people’s mail but hardly anything of mine, this was super inconvenient because it was about this time that I decided I needed to go back to college and I was applying to school – through the mail because it was 1996 and that’s what you did.

Not all was bad though – it was in this filthy townhouse that Ruka entered my life, walking in through our back patio and staying with me for the next 19 years. By the way the back patio sounds nice but I could never go out there because my roommates had filled it with furniture they found on the side of the road or fished out of dumpsters – furniture like old lazy-boys that were never meant to be outside – it was like a bulky waste dump that was home to a number of wild animals.

While living there I finally left the crappy gift store at the mall and got a job at a hair salon that I could walk to – this not only gave me slightly more money but also eliminated an hour long bus ride everyday (still carless!) I could be at the salon in 5 minutes – on foot. Of course the salon would eventually go down in history as the worst job I ever had because I worked for a misogynist a-hole who never learned my name and only referred to me as “girl”, but at the time I was thrilled to get out of the mall and help pay my boyfriends bills. Like I said… hindsight.

to be continued…