smile in a wave

this kitty can sit on my lap and purr all day, I swear. I'm trapped behind the computer because she won't get up. and I don't have the stregth of character to push her out of my lap.

why do you purr, kitty? what's so good in your life? you like your sunny rooftop, your warm lap, and your ball with a little bell, and your secret missions on top of the furniture.

yeah, your life is good. and I won't interrupt it by getting up.

*******

the story of me, Part II, or Of how I almost fell off a ledge on Dec. 31, 1999 (totally nineteen, dude)

I went to University fully determined to get a fresh start. I knew no one there, so no one had to know I had spent the last two years silently banging my head against a wall and no jackass would come to ask me if I had learned already not to play with knives.

I also had kind of resolved to not make any effort to talk to people, since I pretty much had given up on them. but then miranda crashed like a jet in my lap and pretty much headbutted her way into my life. I'm glad she did. she's my best friend to this day; she's been a pivotal person in my life, the social ying to my introverted yang, and the first person to tell me it was okay to stand up to my parents. after years of enduring sermons from relatives, family friends, teachers, spiritual advisors and such about how unhappy I made my parents with all my adolescent crap, that meant a world to me.

but enough of the sappy stuff. I met a bunch of great people in the university and I finally felt like I fitted somewhere. this people read, man... like whole books! like me! for me, university was more about the people I met there than the actual schoolwork. like Joey said, it broadened my horizons like no other thing had until then. university was realizing what a whole lot I *didn't* know.

schoolwork itself was meh. I kept up during the first year with very decent grades, but I started lagging off after the fourth semester. the feeling that I was wasting time wouldn't go away. I kept approaching school like I did in high school; studying a little, improvising a lot. I did well enough, but I started wondering if that was really the way it was supposed to be. I would have probably stayed in school, if only for inertia, but then a lot of things happened very rapidly.

first, the university went on strike. that meant that a group of insurgent students seized most of the uni's facilities. second, my grandma, a true lamb in this family of wolves, got bladder cancer that year and my mom had to move to puebla, where my granny lives. my dad came around less with my mom out of town and for awhile he didn't come at all, because that was the year he started getting sick, too (he has enphysema brought on by fifty years of chainsmoking) and he had to stay sick at home.

[at around that time, too, my brother and I finally found out for sure what we had been whispering and wondering about for years: that 'home' for my dad was the place where he lived with his wife, an American Lady, and they had three other daughters, all of them much older than me. we found out from an old resume my old man left around. at the time, I don't remember either of us being paralyzed with shock or anything, but it wouldn't be until five years later or so that my ma made a dramatic pause in between two tacos to finally confess the HORRIBLE, AWFUL TRUTH. how they were *gasp* not married. my brother and I made a pause in the chewing and then rolled our eyes. yeah ma, we've known for years. now eat your taco.]

third, I met a guy. he didn't do much for me, but he insisted, we hit it off and we dated for awhile. this story involves three pregnancy tests, a few visits to the doctor, an awkward breakup and a whole lot of pink floyd and radiohead. you fill in the gaps, it's really not that difficult.

it didn't help that i was made deeply responsible of managing a house and handling my then 16 year old brother, who has always been a bit of a handful and who was putting up a special act in those times too, getting arrested, stealing stuff, etc. because those were difficult times for him too. however much he still adds to my stress levels, my brother is one of my best friends and he's the only one in my family who ever knew of the abortion. but he's also got the devil in him and he unleashed it during that year, and as I've said, everything that happened in the house, I was made responsible for, in a MAJOR way.

so yeah, by the end of 1999 I was a shaking, weeping, underweight mess. the strike at university had left me no other social contact than parties, late at night and when none of the neighbors would see me sneak out. me and my friends were on a decadent roll. I think I lived all that time on beer at nights and two cups of steamed rice every two days. my eyes opened a little when we had that crash on millenium night. nobody was seriously hurt, but it still scared the shit out of me, and those assholes kept laughing like it was a lot of fun, we wrapped the car around a tree, whee.

I got a job teaching english, so by the time the strike ended and I could go back to school, I didn't want to anymore. I had a hard time getting a job because I was too young and inexperienced, and finally this little banana company hired me, if only because they were desperate to fill in some gaps and I got the highest score in the history of the company during the english test.

I liked that job a lot. being it a banana school I had a lot of leeway to teach english in any old way I wanted, which basically means that my students had to put up with two years of stephen king, oscard wilde, tori amos, metallica, the beatles, X files and the Simpsons episodes, and a teacher that jumped on the table and pulled out her underwear at unexpected times. the panties thing, well, somebody asked me what 'lace' was and I couldn't think of a faster way to show them. good times.

on the personal side, I went out with a guy who was thirty years my elder for the better part of 2000. all I can say about that is THANK GOD I got out of that fast. given my family history, odds were that I'd become stuck there, and I know that my family feared that the most.

all of the above had been cause of great scandal and despair, not to mention disapproval, disappointment, and icy lakes of disdain on the part of my parents and the rest of the grownups. they didn't even know what to be more scandalized about, that I'd dropped out of school, that I was going out with the So Much Older guy, or that I had a tongue ring. but by then it didn't matter much to me to come home to a raging battlefield because I was gone during most of the day.

after I broke up with Abusive Old Man, a little peace ensued, and nothing much happened in the next year. I experimented a lot, but I was careful of not repeating my blatant mistakes of the past. little by little I saved some money --they didn't pay much in banana inc.-- and by summer of 2001 I had enough savings to finally start looking for a place.

but that belongs in Part iii, which I hope will be the last part of this noble, if dull, epic.