As anyone who has met the Hobbit of Hotness can attest - I'm pretty amazing ... amazingly bizarre. Sure I'm weird now but you should have met me when I was younger. My shit is so much more together now then it was back then. I was a grade A freak. No wonder folks on my kickball team questioned if I was home-schooled in my youth.
I'm an only child, and in my opinion fairly well adjusted. The only remnants of the lack of sibling interaction seem to be a personal space issue and an acute problem with people touching me (you can imagine how much fun this can make dating). So, in terms of being socially well adjusted, I'm pretty good. In terms of my taste in music, movies and hobbies? I'm about as fucked up as you can get. I love music that is neither of my generation nor hip. I watch TV shows that Legend of Zelda loving, morbidly obese men enjoy. And as far as hobbies? Lets just say building cities out of cardboard and hot glue ranks pretty high up there.
So it should come as no shock that one of my favorite spring breaks has to be when my mom, aunt, cousin and I drove to South Texas when I was in 2nd grade. We decided to venture down to the thrilling towns of Beaumont, Port Arthur and Galveston for a few days that hot and stormy spring. My cousin, who at that point would have been in Jr High, was over the trip before it began. I on the other hand was ready and willing to go! What I thought would be some awesome bonding time between she and I turned into her sitting in the back seat of the car, intermittently ignoring me outright or trying to scare the shit out of me (which didn't take much - I suffered from acute anxiety). My Mom and Aunt decided to take on very North East Texas/ White Trash alter egos "Tamika and Tawanda". I know Tamika was the name of a hair salon in our town that called itself "Tamika's Krazy Kuts"....which fell into the category of "Things I hate" for its HYSTERICAL alliteration of "krazy kuts". Another establishment on this list was the "Kuntry Kitchen". But I digress. So while my cousin sat in the backseat wanting to kill herself, and Tamika and Tawanda assumed the alter egos that would, for reasons we still can't figure out, send them into hysterics as they told stories of Tamika and Tawanda's lives, in character with thick southern accents, I sat in the back seat, totally happy.
What was I doing on that long ass drive, you might ask? Well, I was eating "Cheetos puffs" and listening to Paul Simon's "Graceland" album on my walkman..... for hours upon hours. I went through cans and cans of cheetos. My fingers were dyed orange from the faux cheese flavoring. I had cuts on my hands from trying to peel off the aluminum lid whilst my Tamika and Tawanda drove on gravel roads in the middle of nowhere so that they could find a historical marker. I never really ate junk food but on this trip, my mom totally indulged me. I think Tamika (mom) figured this would have been in character for her and it also shut me the fuck up.
The Graceland album however provided with with more joy than I can really explain. I've always had a penchant for music that kids my own age don't listen to. This album though - this album took me on a rocketship to the moon! I'm sure most everyone who got that album, got it for the "You Can Call Me Al" track. Not me. I was in love with the African tribal rhythms and the lyrics. I can remember sitting in the back seat of the car, head phones on, fingers coated with cheeto puff dust, mulling over the "Graceland" lyrics. I will say to this day, nothing tugs at my heart strings more than the line:
" She comes back to tell me she's gone,
As if I didn't know that
As if I didn't know my own bed,
As if I'd never noticed,
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead,
And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart,
Everybody sees you're blown apart,
Everybody sees the wind blow"
Of course, I was 8. Yeah, 8 years old. Instead of listening to hours upon hours of Debbie Gibson, The Jets, or even The Beach Boys - I chose to spend hours upon hours of listening to painful divorce laden lyrics. Totally normal. I would stop for batteries at every gas station pit stop because I had that walkman working overtime. I would fall asleep with cheeto puff clutched between my yellow fingers and my ears being turned to cauliflower as the headphones mashed up against them as I tried to sleep.
I don't remember much else from the trip other than the drive there and back. I recall seeing some gators along the side of the road in Beaumont, a "caution rattlesnake" signs at a rest stop and an incident where I started speaking like Kermit the frog when my cousin was eating frog legs and she almost killed me. But thats about it. Most of the trip is a haze of Paul Simon songs and cheeto dust.
My mom and aunt still call each other Tamika and Tawanda and will from time to time launch into character and tell stories about their alter-egos lives. Still confuses me and cracks them up. I'm still a sucker for Graceland as an album and have been known to play it in order to fall asleep. When "Under African Skies" comes on I always have a little ache in my heart for the volvo station wagon, the evil glances of my older cousin and the sweet, sweet taste of artificially flavored cheese puffs.
