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Anonymous
Omaha, Nebraska USA
Email Jennifer
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REPORTS:
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I was born on December 1st, 1982 in Papillion, Nebraska. It was my dad's second marriage, so I have two older half sisters name Cheryl and Sharon, who are 21 and 12 years older than me. They have lived in California my whole life, along with the rest of my dad's side of the family. When I was born, my parents were living in Council Bluffs, Iowa at the time, where we lived for about two years.
When there were thunderstorms, I remember my mom would sit with me on out covered front porch and we would watch the lightning and eat crackers and caviar, which I apparently never ate past the age of two. Also when I was two, my parents were remodeling their second story porch in the back of our house, so the porch was gone, but the sliding door onto it was still their. In the summer they would open it so that fresh air could come in. One day my dad was supposed to be watching me while my mom was in the kitchen and I leaned on the screen door and it fell off and I fell two stories. They took me to the hospital and I only had bruises, but I cried a lot because all the doctors in their white coats scared me.
When I was two and a half we moved to a city just outside of Seattle, called Woodinville. It was a nice neighborhood and there was an acre of trees next to our house. A year later a family bought the lot and built a house. My mom and I went over to introduce ourselves, and I met my first real friend Aaron, who was a year younger than me and hid behind his mom the whole time, which he now denies.
There weren't a whole lot of kids my age in the neighborhood, so for a long time Aaron and I spent a lot of time together. He had a playhouse/swing set setup in his backyard and I had a tree house with a fire pole attached. We would take turns sliding down it but whenever it was my turn, I would slide halfway down and then climb back up. I kept doing this and it annoyed him so one day he pushed me out. I was knocked out for a few minutes but I was ok. Aaron's mom bitched him out for a long time and I felt bad because the whole thing was really my fault anyway.
When I was in preschool a kid named Ian had a crush on me. One day when we were doing crafts I didn't have any scissors, so I told him I would marry him if he gave me his. He said, "Really?!" and I said, "Oh, yes!" And then he gave me his scissors.
When I was four my dad got a job at Holland America, so we got to go on a free cruise every year. We would take Caribbean cruises at Christmas time and one night of the cruise they would turn out all the lights and bring plates of Baked Alaska with sparklers in them to each table and sing a song. Since my birthday was in December we would pretend that they whole thing was in honor of me. The waiters in the dining room would make me origami frogs that hopped when you pushed on the back of them. On the first cruise we went to a place called San Blas and all of the kids tried to touch my hair because it was so golden blonde, but it made my dad nervous, so I had to spend the whole time riding on his shoulders.
My dad worked for Holland America for three and then quit because a guy in his department lived in British Columbia and they were paying him $100,000 a year under the table. That also made my dad uneasy so he quit and got a job elsewhere, which began the time of me not ever seeing him. He got a job in Houston, then Indianapolis, then Hartford, CN, then Houston again. He would come home about every other weekend. Later I found out that all my friends thought my parents were divorced because my dad was around so little.
My mom loved to go on ferry rides. I thought they were boring but the trip was always made worthwhile with her buying me a powdered-sugar doughnut. Also when I was in grade school, she would sometimes come and pick me up and take me to lunch. We usually went to Pizza Hut. Her doing this didn't seem like a big deal to me at the time, although I know realize how neat it is that she did that.
Sometimes if we had a lot of time, we would take the ferry to Ft. Warden. Along one end of the beach there were a bunch of dunes and along the other were really high walls of clay. There was a little house there called Blissful Vista, where we spent a weekend once. Around that time it got really popular and the next year when we called to visit it again, we found out it had a six year waiting list. We never went back.
At the place where I went to kindergarten and first grade, the bathrooms were coed but didn't have any doors on the stalls. This was totally traumatic for me and I never went to the bathroom at any school I went to up until high school. There were two first grade classes, one with a really mean teacher and one with a really nice, but dumb teacher. Our rooms had one of those folding plastic dividers in it. I had the nice teacher and periodically the mean teacher would just start screaming at her kids. When this happened, our teacher would get up and quietly shut the dividers, which didn't really help at all. It was a little weird. The same year I played one of the vowels in our school play of "Alice in Wonderland." All of the vowels went out in the wrong order but I organized us and my parents have it on tape. Everybody in the audience thought it was really funny.
For 2nd-6th grade I went to a different school. It was private and Christian. I was kind of a class clown and got in trouble a lot. Other times this girl, Julie, who hated me, would lie and tell the teacher that I did stuff I hadn't done; they always believed her and I got in trouble more. Julie also stole my best friend Amy from me, by telling her that I was always talking shit about her. We figured this out later and became friends for a little while, but now I never talk to her.
When I was nine, a new family moved in across the street. They had a girl my age named Katie and boy, John, who was a year older and whom I had a crush on. Katie and I went to different schools but we got to be really good friends because there were no other girls our age living nearby. We bonded over our love of tree climbing and foreign languages.
I skipped 5th grade and in 6th grade had a crush on this boy, Tim, who had huge glasses, but was really smart. I was friends with his sister, Nicole, and I thought she was the coolest person because she taught me about Nirvana and Snoop Dogg and I would sleep over at her house and her parents would let us play Super Mario Brothers as late as we wanted. I also had a friend named Desiree who was half Japanese, half Australian. Her parents worked for United Airlines and they had a really nice house with a river in the back. Nicole and Desiree never liked each other but I kept telling them that they should be friends.
Then my dad got a job in Omaha and we had to move back to the midwest. Up until this point my dad had barely been in my life at all, so when we moved, it was weird to have this extra person around the house. He was really distant and served more as a disciplinarian than anything else. At the same time, my mom was really depressed because she hates the midwest and really didn't want to move back. Also, she was beginning menopause and was pretty unpleasant to be around, to say the least. It was a hard time and a difficult age for me to not really have anyone to be close to, so I got really depressed. We lived in an apartment in Omaha while our house was being built in Missouri Valley, Ia. A year after we moved, we went back to Seattle to visit and Nicole and Desiree were best friends and ignored me the whole time. Go figure.
I went to junior high in Missouri Valley because my parents thought the small-town atmosphere would be a really good thing, but it turned out to be not really good at all. I did meet my friend Mindy who lived in the trailer park and had an abusive dad. Other than Mindy, junior high sucked. Isn't that about the same for everybody?
After two years, my parents realized the school system in Misery Valley (as my mom and I liked to call it) was terrible and I started at an all-girls, Catholic high school in Omaha. I didn't like it there at first, but started to really like it pretty quickly. We had black watch plaid uniform skirts that hid the dirt so well that some girls didn't wash theirs all semester. My first friend there was Kristen. We were in Latin together. We also had homeroom together in the art room and our desks were right next to where they kept all the old magazines, so during homeroom we would cut out pictures and make collages and stuff, which I still have.
Sophomore year we had our homeroom with the French teacher. I had one of those Secret Sender things with a TV remote control in it and we would always turn the TV on during the pledge of allegiance. My best friend sophomore year was a senior named Michelle, who also lived in Missouri Valley and who I carpooled with to school. We would hang out a lot in Missouri Valley and I had a crush on her boyfriend. His best friend Kris developed a crush on me and I made out with him (my first kiss) on the first night that I ever tasted beer outside of my parents house. Periodically I would find ways to sneak over to his house and make out with him. When I found out that he thought I was his girlfriend, I broke up with him and only saw him two times after that in my whole life. I was 15, he was 23.
My junior year we had homeroom with Mrs. Travis, who was also my religion teacher and also is a person for whom I hold a hatred like none other in the world. She was always going out of her way to be mean to me and my friend Kristen. One day in religion class we had to watch a really boring movie about St. Thomas More and I was drawing on these note cards and Mrs. Travis told me to put them away. I did for a few minutes and then started drawing again once the movie started. She came to the back of the room and snatched them away from me and said, "what do you think I am? Retarded??" and walked off. The girl sitting next to me looked at me and rolled her eyes and we started cracking up. This girl was Laura and she grew to be one of my best friends.
Through senior year I started hanging out with Kristen less and Laura and her friend's Katie and Anne more. Anne and I had a lot of honor classes together on and off and I would credit her with introducing me to any good music that I have ever listened to, other than Bjšrk, which I found on my own. Sophomore year Katie and I had had a study hall together and she would always skip to do drugs with her friend Robin, but I had still thought she was really cool and wished we could be friends. We also had Latin together all four years. Senior year she had study hall before Latin and would take naps in the school chapel. I always loved to go wake her up before class. Katie's twin brother, Tom, was really cute and I would made out with him a lot whenever I would go over to their house. This got old eventually.
This was also the year that I first really fell for someone, with the guy that my friend had set me up with for our school Christmas dance, Kyle. It turned out that he had a girlfriend, but we went to prom together anyway.
Shortly after graduation Katie and I realized that we were falling for each other. She was my first real love and we dated for all of a month before she broke up with me and broke my heart. After this I started smoking up at every chance I got, in the hopes forgetting about all of my heartache and blah, blah, blah. I hung out with Kyle a lot that summer, which worked out well because he had sold weed in high school and had plenty of sources.
For college, my friends Laura, Anne, and Andrea went to KU. I stayed in Omaha for college and Katie got a scholarship to another Omaha college. The week after classes started, Andrea's parents drove down to KU to pick Andrea and Anne up for Labor Day weekend. On their way down a man in diabetic shock lost control of his car and killed both of Andrea's parents. After that Andrea started dating Katie and moved back to Omaha. Shortly after that, I started dating Andrea's brother Andrew, who was two years younger than us. I really loved him but we were two totally different personality types and we fought more than I care to remember. I wished for a long time that it could have worked, but oh well.
Freshman year I visited my friend Mindy (from jr. high) a lot at her college, which was about 30 minutes from me. On the night of my 18th birthday we went to visit a friend of hers named Chris. His friend Ben was there and we hit it off really well, as we had the same major and stuff. Mindy and I left and I thought I would never see any of them again. While I was dating Andrew, Ben and I became really close and a few months after Andrew and broke up, we started dating.
Sophomore year Ben and I dated on and off. Other highlights were my schizophrenic roommate, a spring break in Padre, and eventually getting my own dorm room. I also managed to stop hating Katie and, although I still harbored feelings for her, we got to be kind of friends again.
Junior and senior year I really started on the graphic design track and met some really cool people. Ben and I were on again for good and my life started being more like life and less like a soap opera. Since the drama was gone by now, there isn't much that's interesting to read, other than me making the dean's list five semesters in a row. Ben and I have been dating for 2 and a half years now, and he is my best friend in the world. All in all things are good now and I guess that's where I'll end it
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