1996

I have been thinking back on my 18th summer a lot lately. In fact I have written out a basic short story on what happened when I chose to go live in a van on the "mean streets" (ha ha ha) of Salt Lake City with my then boyfriend, Worm. I plan on posting it on here next week, after I have reread it, and possibly edited it as well. I know you are all interested in what kind of whack job kid I was, I mean I chose to live in a van in the Mormon capital of the USA. I chose to have no money, no food, no shower for almost 2 months. I can't even imagine what I put my mom through, oh wait, I can, it was preparation for living in denial that she later perfected whilst my brother, Ender, was in Iraq.

In the story there are things that I rarely confess, things you may not know about me such as I used to smoke cigarettes, sometimes 2 packs a day. I drank so much coffee that my pee smelled just like coffee. I have done drugs*, and I didn't like them. I chose a path that wasn't frequently traveled because I wanted to. I had no good reason, I had a loving family, I had good friends, I am mentally stable and aside from a few weeks of depression here and there during my life, I have always been mentally stable.

Just a few years after I came home, the movie SLC Punk! came out. I was still in my total punk rock frame of mind, but was never a political punk. I think that if my friends had been pot smoking hippies, I would have totally followed that philosophy because it was more what I personally was about (not the pot smoking I don't like that). I am not an angry person, nor am I violent. I don't like mosh pits, and I avoided them at all cost at punk shows. I was always the "Sober Sister" at desert parties because I didn't like to drink, cigarettes and coffee being my drugs of choice. At the end of the movie, Stevo "sells out" and grows up. I knew, even then, that some day I would do the same. I knew that most of us grow up and become something that our teenage self would have despised, it is part of life.

*I routinely thank God that I didn't die because of or become addicted to the drugs I did. It wasn't much, I was always fearful of addiction. I NEVER tried heroin, thankyouverymuch. I don't think that any of that made me a better person, but I felt that I needed experiences to fill me up, when many of my peers were filling up on faith and education.