Sweeeeet

So I’m writing this post at Jiffy Lube while I’m waiting for my oil change. I’m doing it using my new iPod touch and Jiffy Lube’s wifi. The future kicks ass.

Shelter From The Storm

My mom has breast cancer. I’ve had that piece of data for 24 hours. It’s an odd thing to rattle around in the skull. The extremely good news is that she has the best type of breast cancer to get. That’s something I’ve heard and read a lot in the past 24 hours as well. I find it funny (in the way that only I find things funny). It’s like saying somebody has a really good gunshot wound. It’s technically Stage 0, which I hear is good because it means it hasn’t done anything or gone anywhere. It’s just chilling out in a duct. Success rate is about 95%. These are good things. But it’s still breast cancer.

Less than 20 minutes after I found this out, my mom and I were talking about iPods and what music we want to trade. I have and odd family. Am I worried? Yes. Terribly worried? No. And if my mom wants to talk about music, then I’ll do that. I’m the emotional swiss army knife of the family. My dad will be over-protective and over-analytical. My sister will be over-emotional. So I fill the gaps. I give her normalcy, because she wants normalcy.

I have a theory. We’re part of a lost generation. Too young to be Generation X. Too engaged and self-aware to be Generation Y. We’re X and a Half. We grew up in two decades of wealth and prosperity from our parent’s generation leading the world. We were in the shadow of Gen X and watched as they tried to re-invent culture only to see it be co-opted, diluted, and sold by the very people they rebelled against. To that degree I can’t blame hipsters. They saw what became of their elder sibling’s ‘cool,’ and they are so very afraid of it happening to their  ‘cool’ that they don’t want to share. We grew up watching our parents show us that happiness was a nice house with a decent mortgage, 2 cars, and a nice suburburn school district to send your kids to. Generation Y has bought into this. They are the definiative ‘me’ generation, lacking deep individual culture, but focused on replicating the success of their parents. Generation X, meanwhile sits back and shelters themselves as they fade into the suburbs, still bitter at their cultural defeat by the hands of Abercrombie and Jive Records. So we’re in this limbo, trying to define success as financial gain and stability, while also trying to define success through idealism and expansive world-views. To succeed at one seems to fail the other. Gen X on one side. Gen Y on the other. Who are we? We really need another Reality Bites.

Normal is sometimes hard for me to do.  But when you mom needs normal, you turn off your inner monologue. I am what people need. Whoever that is.

Oh America

Haven’t written in a while, so let’s recap. 4th of July was fun. I got to see some fireworks up close and meet some interesting people. Unfortunately my new camera lens didn’t come in the mail until two days later. Luckily I got it in time to go down to the lake for the weekend, where I promptly lost my phone. Other than that, the lake was fun and I ended up with a really awesome tan. It was nice to see the lake full for once. Work has also been nice, but we’re crunching until the end of the month, so that’s going to be a lot of fun 10 hour days.

I’m going to try to find some time to go to Austin next weekend, and then begin to schedule the rest of my vacations. I’m going to be in Kansas in early August for a wedding, and I’ll swing through Lawrence for a bit afterwards. Also on tap is another trip to Austin for ACL, and probably a trip to NYC and a trip to Portland. I should be nice and poor by the end of the summer.

I post some photography soon, once I get Photoshop installed on my laptop.

The Ups and Downs of Apartment Renting

So today I drove over to my apartment complex of choice, checked the availability, and found out that if I signed today, I could pretty much move in by the end of the week. Sweet.

Not so sweet. Let’s take a trip back to the Fall of 2004. Due to some random craziness of life, I ended up living in the basement of a house next to Yello Sub. My landlord was pretty much a slumlord. She broke my lease on multiple occasions. She never fixed the holes in my wall. There were mice. There were leaks. There was her crack dealing brother in law living above my head. So when Jack was going to study in DC for a semester, I gladly took that room in the Bungalow. I forfeited my deposit, cut off my utilities, and told my landlord she could sublease it out. Since she knew she had broken my lease multiple times over, she accepted that as the deal. Since that time, she has been run out of Lawrence and sold her various properties to other people.

Flash forward. My background check should have revealed 3 places I’ve lived in the last 2 years: my parent’s house, my friend’s house, and the Bungalow. The slumlord’s place showed up as 4. So they need contact info. Trouble is, she doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Her company is gone. She’s gone. All because she said I moved out in March instead of January. Bitch.

So now they have to call everybody and make sure I wasn’t lying. Here’s some problems: 1) Hammill has no idea who I am. I never signed a sublease. I just paid my check and he didn’t say squat. 2) My friend’s landlord in Plano hates him because when we moved out, we left a bunch of shit and he wasn’t pleased. Now explain to him I was living their without a lease or paying bills.

So my living history for the last 2 years looks like this:

1. Slum that I wasn’t actuallyliving in.
2. Sublease that I never signed at the Bungalow
3. Paying somebody I met over Craigslist to bum at their apartment while they were gone
4. Lived with family friends
5. Lived with friends for free
6. Lived with parents.

So it looks really fucking bleak that I’m going to even be allowed to rent an apartment this month, let alone anytime soon. Fingers crossed that something good happens to me tomorrow, but I don’t have that sort of faith left in humanity. The only way out of this is for my parents to sign the lease (not co-sign), and me live there and pay the bills, which they’re not going to do.

Life lesson: you make a shitty choice and it can fucking stay with you for years. In the meantime, it looks like I’m going to live in my parents’ house until I’m 40, because apparently I did something to piss off the universe.