The Good Ol Days

There's the good ol' days of childhood for me, and there's the good ol' days of early adulthood before I moved out on my own on Halloween 1996, and they both tie in as I sit here. Either way, I'm longing for a time where adult responsibilities like rent and bills and employment were not concerns of mine like they are now. The childhood days are on my mind for no reason whatsoever. I found myself humming "All Night Long" by Lionel Richie in my head, and it reminded me of 1985, when I had a serious crush on Tangela Green, a little curly-haired black girl whose mother was friends with my dad at the time. Didn't know what that feeling was that I had in my heart when we were driving away from their house after a day of playing around, but I remember "All Night Long" playing in the car and a distinct yearning to go back to Tangy's house and play with her some more if I didn't do anything else ever again in my life. What can I say--I had a major thing for curly hair back then. Plus, Tangy was very nice to me, and as it is today, a female treating me like a human instead of something toxic has always made me feel a yearning to spend all my time and attention on her.

The good ol' days of early adulthood would be when I moved in with my uncle and started doing adult things for the first time, like dating and socializing. I was still very green--actually, I'm still green today--but I was happy to live a life while having a roof over my head and not having to worry about bills and such. I am very close to going back to those days. I officially gave my 30-day notice that I am leaving this apartment by February 1, and because I haven't found a job yet, the leading option by a wide margin is for me to go back with my uncle. There's a reason I moved out of his place eventually--a man's gotta have his space, so I'm not ruling out changing up and finding a place to live if I can find a permanent full-time gig within the next couple of weeks. I'm going downtown tomorrow to talk to yet another temp agency, and I'm e-mailing back and forth with a couple other employers trying to feel them out. But when I start attending college again in two weeks, I'm going to have to have a job firmly in place at that point, or else I'm going to let my uncle know that I will definitely be coming back. January 17 is the date that the spring semester starts, and it's a perfect point in time for me to decide exactly what's gonna happen. My uncle will need a couple of weeks to empty one of his sons' bedrooms for me, and I am not going job and apartment hunting and attending classes four nights a week, so if I don't have a job by then, it's adios to having my own place for quite a while because I'm not moving all the way there just to get up and move again in a month. It's the best thing I can do for myself, letting someone else worry about those adult problems while I study and earn a degree. I've resisted it all this time trying to keep my apartment in order to please the women or potential women in my life. But that's part of this new me that I'm trying to be--not worrying about doing what makes women happy and doing what's best for me. Believe me, I shook in horror last year at this time when CBOE fired me and I wondered how it would look if I chased after these internet hos while living with my folks. But right now, women are the last thing I need to worry about. It won't be easy to know that I can't host 3-day FuckFest weekends, but in my mind I am well aware that it shouldn't be a priority anyway. And hey, maybe I'll meet someone who wants to get to know me regardless of my living situation. What a wonderful scenario that would be.

A few personal education tidbits: It appears that this full-time schedule of classes for the upcoming semester costs more than the financial aid that I was supposed to receive covers. It looks like I owe $300 more. I'll have to talk to the school about it. Nothing is clear as far as this aid goes; all of the correspondence that I have received calls the aid an "estimated amount," so I don't know exactly how much money I should be bitching about. As for the classes, you can go back to last spring's semester and read about my adventures in English 102 with this faggot French-Haitian teacher who thought, with a few exceptions, that the entire room of students was beneath him and his standards, and you can go back to the fall semester of 2004 and read about the math teacher who was pleasant enough but had such a thick Hispanic accent that I found it nearly impossible to understand him. Well, I didn't care whose classes I signed up for when I made my upcoming schedule, just that it fit my preference of two night classes on Monday and Wednesday and two for Tuesday and Thursday. My creative writing class? Yep, Mr. Gay French-Haitian 2006. My statistics class? Yep, Mr. Incomprehensible. Should be very interesting to say the least. But really, I'm not going to care. It's 17 weeks, and I am so focused on completing this second half of my associates in the next year plus and moving on to my bachelors studies that I'm not going to let anything get in my way. Bother me and piss me off somedays, sure. But when that happens, I'll just have to break out my vinyl records and play some "All Night Long" and some Prince and drift off into the good ol' days for a while. That, or play some Madden and pretend that the New York Giants are really the Gay French-Haitians.