The Day I Talked To Meredith And Got Rid Of My Cold And Found Out Crystal Is Moving To Baltimore And Wrote A Brief Autobiography

Today I saw Meredith and she was medicated and sad and told me she has lesions on her brain. I'm not even sure what that means, but I hate the way it sounds and I'm almost too afraid to research it on my own. She's got a great support system around her of customers and friends who love her, but not the health insurance she needs to get anything major done. And this sounds pretty major. 

Otherwise, I made a few phone interviews this morning for the 10/10/10 Global Work Party events this weekend, which went well. Also published my article about the Ghost Train. 

And for whatever reason, I felt like running through the story of my life, so here it is: 

I was born in Palo Alto. I don't know or remember anything about the place, but I hear now that it's pretty nice and expensive to live there. Stanford was nearby. I lived in Menlo Park with my mom and visited my dad in Redwood City. My grandmother was the principal of my preschool. Then I went to Oak Knoll Elementary while living on Oak Knoll Lane. This is where I had my first pets, my first friends, and fell in love with Jurassic Park. There was a traumatizing bee-sting in there, somewhere, and there's a photograph of me feeding baby Jessica a bottle. At my dad's I remember an old Macintosh, my grandfather watching the Twilight Zone, and playing Sega between rounds of imaginative adventures with my micro-machine toys. Then grandpa died, mom got a job in Sacramento, and it was time to leave the Bay.

From Oak Knoll and the YMCA I went to Charles Peck and the school-bus. I remember living at Kathy's house and spending afternoons with the neighbor kid, Garrett. He had a nice family and a terrifying giant dog named Whitman who was the source of many adventures as we ran for our lives seeking shelter on the roof of the backyard shed. With Garrett I lied about having a girlfriend, played at lot of Ocarina of Time, and went trick or treating. School, meanwhile, is a hazy memory of math tests, Mr. and Mrs. Hepner, four-square games, and a crush on a girl named Jordan. Life, in the meantime, put my mom and I in various condos and apartments, including the Woodside Apartments where I once was accidentally locked outside and I cried. 

Then came middle-school at Winston Churchill. Here I made my first seemingly permanent friends among classmates. Paul, John, Zach, to name a few. There were school dances and uncomfortable moments of intimacy. I remember a crush on Margo. I remember being in the IB program. I remember Mr. Dolan's Spanish class and Mrs. Dunkel's history class. The first time I tried hummus. Elsewhere in life, my mom married Steve and they had Loren, my half-sister. We lived in a house on Woodleigh lane, for a while. My eighth grade class went to Costa Rica for 13 days during the summer after graduation, which was awesome. Also, due to her reappearance in my present-day life, it's noteworthy to mention that Aly was around during this time, though I can hardly place her face in any distinct memories. 

Then Steve went crazy. They got divorced. We moved to Auburn and my mom got a new job.

Placer High School was nice. Beautiful campus, friendly staff, good memories. I quickly lost sight of my middle-school friends, due to distance, and slowly made new ones. Freshman year was tough because most of the Auburn kids knew each other from their local middle-schools. So it took a good while to meet anyone. Kevin was my first friend. Then Garrett, then Parker, then that posse. Hanging out in the gym. Playing GTA III. I was in and out of nerdy groups, sporty groups, and smart kid groups. I weaved between cliques. No one knew who I was and so I was constantly trying to invent myself. Then came Sean, Derek, Matt... But most importantly, then came the Plymouth Neon. My first car. My first car stereo. And soon after, my first car accident. Learned my lesson. I remember the cafeteria. Pizza bread. I remember having vending machines around and a job that gave me money to buy stuff from them. Courthouse Coffee was born out of an old red and white house that served as my home for a while. We tore that place apart, gutted it from the inside out. Then the new science building was finished. I took a psychology class and bluffed my way through. Iven, Sarah, Melanie, and the Junior Prom that led to my relationship with Amy. My first real girlfriend and the teenage love that followed. The trip to Ashland where Dexter taught me how to smoke pot. Some of us went to Ashland twice. I remember Mr. Fox and Janus and Pre-Calculus and playing cards in Art Class. Working at Ikedas. Open-Campus and Taco Tree and being the TA for Krizman during the first season of LOST. I built a computer for my senior project and wrote a paper about Google, before they ruled the world.

High school was fun.

College was better.

For some reason I decided to go to Sonoma State. Amy freaked out because I changed my mind about getting an apartment with her, but Nancy saved the day with the idea that she and Amy be dorm-mates and I do the same with her boyfriend, Bryce. We knew each other, but not as friends. Not yet. So we moved away from our hometown and our parents and ventured to Wine County two hours to the west. This was the beginning of a four year vacation from the real world. Yes we had jobs, yes we had classes, but it was so contained, so secluded, so self-sustaining... We had no rules and no guidance, other than our own willpower. No bedtimes. No diets. Bryce and I had girlfriends to keep us on track, but that only worked so much, and for me it only worked for so long. Amy and I broke up in the middle of our freshman year and I tried and failed to pick up smoking cigarettes. Bryce and Nancy are now married.

There's almost TOO much to remember about college. My two years at Aroma Roasters. The trips to Bodega Bay. The loft apartment on McBride. Drugs, alcohol, videogames, the stuff board, the rearranging of furniture, the projector, the cafeteria, the market. Kayla, Emma, Sarah, and Megan. Trips to San Francisco, and the hotel parties. Ashley. A summer trip to Seattle. Visits home when I realized how quickly I was growing apart from the past. My basement pad, first summer back. Financial aid checks. A new computer. A new TV. The Jeep Cherokee. I even got back together with Amy again, but that ended, again. My time at Aromas could take up an entire chapter on its own. So much weed. So many good memories. There was that time I stopped a homeless man from stealing my bike. The time I should've gotten a DUI. The time I took a bus to school for a while and hated it. I do miss my creative writing classes. I am glad to have a degree, even if it's an English degree.

Then I met AJ. We moved together to Carmichael. She went to ARC. I commuted to work in Auburn at my grandma's coffeeshop for under-the-table minimum wage. She found out I'd made out with another girl when our relationship started, then things never really recovered. We survived for a while. We got cats. Money got tight, bills got stressful, and the relationship grew cold. So we got a dog. Then my grandma sold the business and I got fired by the new owner. I picked up two new jobs, got stressed out, and broke up with AJ.

Now I live in Midtown on my own in an old house down the alley from Old Soul, the one job I kept from that two-job period. I also have an internship with Sacramento Press, just for the hell of it, although I think that's the best thing I've done so far with my English degree.

Sean is still around. He went to UCLA but he's living in Auburn with his parents right now and so we hang out occasionally. Less often now that I live forty minutes away (he used to keep me company during the slow hours at Creekside Cafe). Jessica, who I was housemates with as a kid and was housemates with again after leaving AJ, is my one lifelong friend that I'll never lose touch with. I'm stumble-buddies with Bryce, who is now going for his Masters degree. Bravo. Amy's doing well, I imagine, with her current boyfriend, Nick, and they live somewhere north of Santa Rosa. AJ is apparently seeing someone new and still lives in Carmichael with the cats and the dog. Everyone else from my past is floating in a gray realm... I know they're around, but they are all living their own lives in different cities on different paths, and sometimes I text them to say hello, but usually it's a long time between those moments, and sometimes I feel bad about that but usually I'm too busy to realize. That's life, I guess. It never stops until it's over.

Oh, and Steve just got out of jail. My sister went to see him over the weekend. She's 12 now and hasn't seen him in five years. I can't even think of the last time I saw him. My mom and her live in a small house in Auburn that she's renovating. She is about to start commuting to a new job in Roseville. My sister just got her first cellphone. My grandmother, having sold the coffeeshop, now lives in Truckee in a big house she is renovating to rent to skiers. I don't know where my aunt and her family are. Santa Cruz, I think. My uncle, Brett, lives in New York with his wife, Megan. My dad is in Redwood City, with my other grandma, and I gave up playing phone tag with him about a week ago but I think everyone's doing alright.

Personally, I'm doing great. I have slowly become a real individual. Making my own decisions, taking care of myself, and absorbing the world with a curious attitude. I know I need a better job. I know I need to take care of my debt. But as long as I can make one good connection with another human being each day, as long as I can come home at night and say that I accomplished something, and as long I feel like I've made some positive step towards a fulfilling life... then I'm just cherry. 

- Left to Fry