Connections

Last night I had a dream that a few friends and myself had become fed up with drama situations and decided to pack up and move to Alaska. It was a strange dream-state anagram of friends and it was a strange dream-state anagram of drama situations, I'm sure both were directly influenced by the friends I saw over the weekend and conversations I had in both Madison and Milwaukee last night. We were in a location that felt familiar but was simultaneously WI-like and tropical, and it was implied via dream-logic that the area of Alaska we were going to was not in fact cold but instead even more tropical. Our plans of flight were difficult to pull off and had to be done in secrecy because of an on-going war. When the conquesting army hit our location while we were trying to sneak away, abandoning our possessions, it turned out that I was not a concern of theirs and, actually, they were mostly people I have known through the Best Buy's I've worked at and wanted to know why I hadn't picked up my uniform and weapon so I could join in. When I said I didn't know what the hell was going on they shook their heads, said they didn't either but why should it matter, and with a few condescending remarks in jest they kept moving. Returning to my friends, now they're pissed at me. Association by proxy. I knew some of "the enemy" and therefore must be in league. Now everyone's upset with me. Deals are off. I say Fuck You and start preparing for Alaska on my own, which now involves some sort of boat. I cast off, my friends come with, but in some sort of protest they dump their belongings over the side. Alarm goes off.

Driving in Madison with my 11-year old sister Alexa yesterday I start asking her about Summer School. She's taking a cooking class and tennis lessons and she loves them both. She's a straight-A student and was very upset when she got a B on one test this last quarter. She's entering 6th grade and could multiply by fractions and solve for x when I tossed out problems like [3x-9 = 0]. She wants to be a Marine Biologist--or, possibly, she was being a smartass when she told me this, considering she added with comical enthusiasm So I can study the Great Beluga Whale! I explained to her that when I was a kid at the Madison schools you didn't take summer classes unless you had screwed up and failed some of your classes during the year, risking being held back. I told her that in grade school when I did convince my parents to let me take an Astronomy course over on the west side of town I got irritated with being held to the same expectations for tests/homework/presentations as I would in school while it wouldn't ever count for anything academically, and they were sick of having to drive me to Madison's west side and pick me up 4 days a week so we all called it quits. It's true--I didn't want to do homework or take tests unless I felt I was getting something out of it. We were paying for me to take a class that I was interested in it. The content they actually churned out was dull and basic and there was absolutely no reason for me to be concerned how they felt I was as a student: it wasn't for school. So, as such, I said Fuck it to the homework they gave me and didn't show remorse when they asked me about it. They reprimanded me and I said fine, I'm not coming back.

Lex's study habits are a complete 180 from when I was a kid. I was for sure not an A-student. However--the story goes that I taught myself to read when I was only three. This is neither true nor false--I worked at my own pace. Apparently I grew very upset at that age that I couldn't go through books on my own and my mom picked up a few See Spot Run and Go! Dogs, Go!-like books and started going over them with me. I also had a little fischer-price record player that had those read-along He-Man and Gremlins books and such, and on my own during the day I would follow the namesake and read along, and I would also take books I had memorized and try to place phoenetics to words. One day at the store with my mom I looked up at the counter and tried to sort out a word on one of the boxes she was purchasing. When I put together the Puz with the zle I got excited and my mom was pissed that I had ruined her surprise. If I had been my kid I probably would've been like Way to go, now you get nothing. Yeah, see how smart you are? Idiot.

Regardless- this is an example of how I've always been. As long as I can give the appearance of results without effort, I'm in. Back at the Prospect place I frustrated the hell out of Alex because I wouldn't tell him how I managed to put posters up at the ceiling level. At Best Buy I loved watching other employees stumble through a Netflix pitch, trying to make cancellation commitments and credit card verifications not sound so bad, only so I could find another customer within earshot and in two lines have them following me up to the register. Want some free movie rentals? Yeah there's a catch--you have to know where you live. And as a kid I was happier bringing home a B without trying than I was an A with five hours of studying. I had enough credits to graduate when I was halfway through my sophomore year and I took nothing but CP and AP classes not because it would look good on a transcript but because I didn't want to take the easy way out. It pissed a lot of teachers off and my parents off and I didn't end up with grades that would help me out much in the college-realm. But it was usually the same story. I received a D in 6th grade math in Middle School. Two weeks into 7th grade I scored the highest out of all three grades in the school on a standardized math exam so they bumped me up a class. D's went to A's and B's. They decided to make this habit so anytime I started doing poorly they went ahead and gave me more work, or something of enhanced difficulty. In 8th grade the "increased workload" policy simply became more work I was ignoring, as I spent the majority of my time not in school but at the UW Children's Hospital instead--which is a different story for a different time. Kind of.

Now, Lexi is in Orchestra, Tennis, Dance. She's the lead in plays, both school-produced and via an outside Drama class she was in. She's gone as far as she can on swimming lessons and is just waiting until she meets the requirements to be certified as a Junior Lifeguard. She's being Babysitter-certified in a few weeks and my parents have yet to consider her old enough to even watch herself for extended periods of time. She's taken TAG-classes in Advanced Reading and things like Origami. She won a competition at her school that had her perform a radio skit she herself wrote on the statewide Public Station. And she gets straight A's. In short-she's one of those kids that always pissed me off when I was in school. I hated those kids. I'm proud as shit as her Brother but if I was her age and one of her peers: I have no doubt that she would be my goddamn nemesis.

Maybe it's the 11-year age difference, what my parents learned between having a kid at 18 and having a kid at 30. I'm not sure. We are simultaneously similar and opposite, however. We are Yin and Yang. More aptly, we are Wuji and Taiji, the Delimited and the Absolute. I was independence; In the summertime I would go to La Crosse or Arcadia for weeks at a time and stay with relatives. I came to my own conclusions about religion as of the age of 6 and during the days I was responsible for myself starting at 9 or 10. Alexa tends to listen closely to my parents and adopt their points of view. She is nervous about being left to her own devices and prefers being given a track to follow or directions to consider. The second to last time I was down she made an anti-Bush crack that caught me off guard. When I asked her what it was about Bush that she disagreed with, she fumbled through an explanation of his outsourcing of port regulation to foreign interests. I pointed out that she was piecing this together from things my parents have said and that while I wasn't advocating the Bush Administration she should come to her own conclusions.

I--as the non-lifetime-movie version of the rebellious kid--ended up coming full circle to be just like my parents. I'm okay with that. Over the weekend my friends Chris and Jessica taunted me a bit about how young my parents look and act (they came to a Death Cab for Cutie show with me about two months back and came out drinking with us afterwards) and they placed my Dad at low-thirties and my Mom at late twenties. I talk very similar to my Father, both in inflection and tone, and I CAN talk about movies, shows, books, bands, work, etc with my parents and not feel like I'm "reporting in". I can only remember seeing my father inebriated a small handful of times while growing up and it was never the sort of thing to bury itself in my memory, surfacing years later to cause me great angst. It would be at weddings, if anything, and--for lack of a better description--he would be just plain silly. He'd be very excitable, happy that I was there and that I was his son, and he would start swearing liberally in good humour, as opposed to his usual four-lettter word restriction to while in excrutiating pain or when Duke was losing. As such, when my parents came out to Milwaukee for our first "get the parents drunk" day at Lakefront and Wolski's, I held great trepidation that they would frown on my affinity for The Alcohol. They had a good time, a better time on the 2nd go, and after Death Cab they met me and my friends at the bar beforehand and joined us for drinks post-show, fitting right in with us early-mid twenties folk.

My sister and I can also be peers instead of siblings. She's young but she's quick and as far as throwing down on juice boxes and forts goes--she holds her own. She loves video games and can play without handicap on Croquet now, and she tries her damndest at Frisbee Golf. My parents are satisified that I'm living on my own and paying my way; I'm not calling them up every other week looking for groceries or cash for rent, and as such they have little to hold against me. So the once every two months that I make my way to Stoughton to visit I occasionally get put into a weird position, where they're playing parents to my little sister and social peers to me. I bullshit with my dad, hear the no-holds-barred about my extended family and how they're doing from my mom, and when they have a moment of having to scold my sister it's almost like I'm seeing things from this position of someone who can do no wrong. I don't know if she sees it that way but it's a fear that I hold that she might.

So driving with my little sister in Madison, the same venture that had me spitting out math problems and random bits of trivia to test and engage her with, I asked what she would do if I packed up and moved to California. She didn't really have a response other than she'd have to come visit me often. The fact of the matter is I feel content in two situations: Oftentimes when I'm out with my friends, is the first. Not every outing, not every situation, but there are moments I'd say several times each month where I'm out with my friends enjoying some drinks and enjoying some company and I'll have an epiphany-like moment where I feel 100-percent at home and okay with the world. The other, the one that's most common, is when I'm driving. Be it coming from work or to/from Madison, if I have good music going, nothing on my agenda, and free time to think? I don't want it to end. If I was debt-free I would take a camera, a journal and my guitar and take off without a destination. Put in a couple months of wandering and then come back. I'd love to get out of the country at some point, I've never even hit the Candian border. I wouldn't do like a pre-planned and price-tagged trip out to specific countries where they show you the sights and have you partake in parasailing or any sort of hermetically sealed, packaged and polished snack-sized dilla, I'd rather just make it up as I go along. Hang out and read, fuck with the locals. Dress up in a giant fork costume and wake people up in Japanese hotels at 4 in the morning, handing out shirts that read Go Fork Yourself. Wait--that was definitely Tom Green.

This is lengthy and without form or reason and that's okay. I've got to walk out the door now, and I probably could go on and on indefinitely.

There is no connection between any of this and the dream. I wouldn't suggest anything of the sort.