Story of my Life

I don't know why I feel like writing this today, but here is a brief retelling of the events in my life that have led up to the exciting events of today. Maybe I just wanted an excuse to talk to third person about myself.

Once upon a time there was a third child in a family of six, living in Ontario. She had a lot of middle child issues--a desire to strike out on her own and be unique, a talent for mediating conflict and a sensitivity that is upset by anyone's strong emotions. But she also possessed a lot of other traits that broke the middle child mold.


From age 2-8 she lived in a community of townhouses. It was a childhood of waiting at the entrance of said townhouse complex for the school bus so that she could play with her friends who went to school and staying out in the playground and later the whole complex until dark, playing grounders as well as cops and robbers.


It was a good time. A time of bicycle wheels and scooters (my scooter was a big one with tires instead of those tiny wheels and so it was never cool, even though, looking back, mine was awesomer and more efficient). And then it ended because one thing led to another and suddenly we were sitting in the Daisy Kingdom (my room in the basement) with my mom saying how we were moving to British Columbia and I'd make new friends and have new adventures and it would be fantastic. I don't think I believed her but I was too young to have formed my mind on that yet.


We left Ontario in February 2003, travelling in our angry white minivan (it had a weird eyebrow-like thing on the hood) with out tent trailer behind us. We fled South to the purported warmth and then West through Texan beaches and New Mexican sand dunes. We went to alien museums in Roswell and ghost towns in Arizona. We had adventures, like my mom had promised. In every picture from back then, I am doing some absurd pose like an eight year old's portfolio for America's Next Top Model, not that that information is strictly crucial to this story.


Settling into our lives in BC, we moved around a bit until we found our current home. Girl Guides gave us friends and Surrey Connect gave us homeschooling horror stories. It was good. We weren't nomads anymore, however enjoyable that had been. The band broke up after a surreal and hilarious scene and it was okay, parents finding themselves residing in two different places. Not as emotionally crippling as some movies would have you believe.


Teenagerdom came. Harry Potter 7 was released. Books became life. Blogging became a norm. Travelling was a lot of fun. Life went on.


That girl, no longer eight and beginning to understand the shortcomings of her middle childness, did not know that the summer she was sixteen years old (learning to drive with a ton of psychos out there) a friend would invite her on a trip to Florida to go on a cruise of the Caribbean. She didn't know that she'd sit there not really reacting because it didn't seem real and did these things really happen in real life? Like, what?

Yeah, that is correct. I'm heading out to sea in two weeks. (This can't be real. Inception is getting to me and I'm dreaming and in a second Leonardo is going to walk into my room and I'll know this isn't real... or not.)