Up until half-way through middle school we lived in a small little house, complete with second-floor "attic" and a basement, and a fence in the backyard that seperated us from the "projects". I grew up with a wide diversity of friends, usually avering around 3-5 years older than I was. My two best friends were Jeremy and Anna.

During these years I spent most of my time alone; not because I wasn't popular, but because I simply chose to spend much of my time by myself. Girls didn't find me all that enticing, perhaps because of my withdrawn nature and perhaps because I was a tad nerdy. Not to mention the fact that later on in this time frame I began to put some meat on my bones.

My friendships changed, due to the crossover from elementary school to middle school, and this may have also contributed to my self-imposed "exile". In retrospect, who can say. As all children must endure, I experienced my own long line of embarrassments. These experiences ranged from the day that I accidentally farted in Sixth Grade Literature Arts class and was laughed at all the way to the boy's restroom where I cried my eyes out to the continuous months that I was forced to endure jeers such as "Chunky" and "Fatty" as I made my way past the co-curricular hall towards P.E. class.

And that was how I made my way through the first two years of middle school. Then, in the beginning of the summer following my Seventh Grade year we moved. I found myself uprooted from all of the friends from my childhood neighborhood and placed into a "better" neighborhood, as they called it, in a nice little Tri-Level house.

Life was interesting after that, because I didn't really make any further friends based on location. One huge positive result of the move was that I now lived within four to five blocks of both my dad's parents and my mom's parents, a fact that brought me much closer to all of them.

The remaining years of middle school were remarkably similar to the kind of humiliation and ridicule that I'd seen throughout elementary school, though something strange happened within me as I quickly approached the promise of high school.

I learned to fight back.

No fist fighting mind you; I didn't just up and start walking around the school wailing on all the bullies and anti-nerd police. No, my instinct to fight was a more intellectual one. I gained a smartass, cutting wit that I started using against those who would take their pot shots at me.

I guess the biggest change for me was that I no longer cared what everyone else thought of me. And to anyone else who has ever experienced this realization, you know how liberating it can be.

But again, I digress.

High school came and went with few monumental trials or triumphs, save the day i got my driver's license and became old enough to blacken my lungs and pay someone else a lot of money to do it. I would like to note here that out of my entire immediate household (mother, father, and brother) I am the only one not currently addicted to cigarettes.

Closing this portion of my growing years, I took the summer preceeding college and I relaxed. No job. Of course this time also marked the months following my parents' divorce . . . did I say nothing monumental happened during high school? Huh, imagine that. Things really started changing in my life at this time, of course.

Fast forward a little bit. I start my classes. It was during this first year of college that my mother experienced what I would call the greatest and most shocking of her rebellous years.

Few and far between were the weekends that I would come home and not find a party in progress, often with kids that were my own approximate age. Oh, did I mention that my mom started dating and living with a guy who was two years older than I was?

Yeah.