Sorry about that. You can defriend ginger_feed and friend sparrowblog.

I have migrated (with all of the posts and comments here) to sparrow.blog – I know, I know, I keep dragging you lot around, but I promise, I’m settled this time.

I’m feeling like that’s me, right now.

I’ve been hearing a lot about people I used to go to school with, lately. Like my biffle from elementary school, Katie Crowell. Well, I now know thanks to my mother, she’s now Kate Williams, she lives in Carlsbad, and she has a pretty good business going for her. She went to college, she’s gotten awards, and she makes some pretty good money doing wedding photography – GORGEOUS wedding photography, at that.

And what am I doing? I’m 22, still don’t have my GED, never went to college, and the longest I’ve held down a job was for a week shy of a year at Walgreens. Making more than minimum wage, sure, but not by much. I want to sing and I want to act and I want to write, but as much as I don’t want to admit it, I’m really only barely this side of average on all three.

I have a roof over my head. I have someone who loves me, who I love more than life. I have friends who care about me. And I appreciate that SO FUCKING MUCH.

But I was raised to believe, though I KNOW it’s ridiculous, and it was never said in so many words, that people who drop out of high school and get GEDs are LOWER than high school graduates. High school graduates, and especially people who at least TRIED college, are BETTER. Which is ridiculously hypocritical of me, because anyone I know who has a GED and didn’t try college? I don’t give a shit. You do what you want, what makes you happy. If it was a financial thing, then how was it your fault? You’re no less smart or talented or awesome. But when it’s me, it’s different.

And I HATE it.

And I know that it’s my life and my choice and that just because I really dread the thought of going to college doesn’t make me a loser or less of a person or a failure, but… just for the moment? It feels like it does.

I’m going to go… cry for a while.

LoudTwitter: Letting me spam the internet without even trying.

LoudTwitter: Letting me spam the internet without even trying.

LoudTwitter: Letting me spam the internet without even trying.

So a little while ago, I was having one of those dreams. The funny thing was that I KNOW I’ve had this dream before, even if I didn’t remember it. It wasn’t quite the same, but it had the same basic characters and premise. It ALMOST seemed like a sequel to the first dream, which I must’ve had YEARS ago, except that it opened exactly the same. I made a point to get up and come write out what I remembered right away, and I actually managed to capture the plot.

So, here was my dream.

Three teenagers – a small geeky boy, a larger, quite intelligent hacker boy, and a tomboyish girl who loves video games – use some cool technology to break into the house of this older woman who somehow has a beta copy of some game they want, even though she can hardly work a computer. There are discs everywhere, so the big kid starts to try to think of what the old lady would do when she came in (as she just got it this morning), which includes a moment of getting up and leaving thinking “where are my glasses?” because the kids saw her glasses on a trinket shelf in the hall on their way back to the office. While they’re searching, the cops show up, because apparently there was a silent alarm system. The cops are trying to break down the door, and the girl is trying to get the boys to leave, and they’re both not coming. She ends up jumping out a window into a slimy run-off pond behind the house, to hide. (For some reason, this time, the girl had a teddy bear with her when she jumped in. Don’t ask me.)

In the end, it turns out that both the boys got out fine, without having to jump into a slimy, gooey pond, and they laugh at her a bit when she shows up to their clubhouse so much later than them (because she had to wait for the cops to leave before she could sneak out). The big hacker kid managed to find the game, much to everyone’s delight, and they play it happily.

Now we get the overhead shot of their town, which is smallish and wooded and on the beach. Probably mid-to-Northern California. The girl, during the summer, works with her single dad at his little beach shop/hand car wash. She mostly does the car washes. Both of the boys help out regularly, and are mostly paid in free snacks, though they get some money, too. It’s a couple weeks later, and there’s some issue with the water lines on the property, which means that the car wash is down. Some rich tourist type comes through and DEMANDS a car wash. The girl’s dad says that literally, the only way he’s getting a car wash is if he pays extra for them to take it down to the self-serve car wash by the beach (which is working fine) and wash it there. The tourist guy, being all entitled and shit, says fine and that they’d better do that, then, hadn’t they? And pays in cash about twice what the dad would’ve charged him anyway.

So he pays and the girl (despite being only 15 – it was, like, two blocks – drives the car over to the self-serve. The boys come over, having seen her as they biked to the shop, and they chat a bit. Apparently, because hacker boy is a genius, he’s found a way to copy and burn the game from his computer. They have a list of names and emails of people they’re going to ship to, they just have to figure out how to charge, because what’s the fun in doing this if you haven’t made money?

While they’re talking, the girl’s dad shows up, having apparently run all the way there. The kids hide the list when he shows up. He asks them if they got their hands on the game and were planning to sell copies. They look a bit shocked. Turns out rich tourist guy was some sort of “security agent” employed by the game company, and (because this totally makes sense) he was going to find the people who took the game and lock them up for a very long time, as well as anyone who was planning on buying. The kids, understandably, freak out and say it wasn’t that big a deal, they were gonna charge, like, $5 mostly to cover the discs and the envelopes and the postage and stuff. The dad looks at the list and groans, because they WROTE IT OUT and then whips out a piece of paper and a pen and copies it down… incorrectly. Incorrect names AND email addresses, so that these guys won’t find anyone. He asks if they have a copy of the game, and the big kid pulls out the original. Dad takes it, and stuffs both into his pockets, telling the kids to hide the original, and not to leave until the guy’d got his car back, otherwise he’d be suspicious. And then he reminds them that they have to take the car back and pretend that they hadn’t seen him.

And then he takes off. The kids, very confused, finish washing the car, and the girl dries off and drives it back, playing perfectly innocent about her father being missing. The guy smirks, like he knows what that means, and goes off to call someone. The girl closes the shop and the boys show up, having biked. They have a little conference in the back room, trying to figure out what the hell’s going ON, before someone goes out front to get cold drinks and sees four guys in suits identical to the first guy coming towards the shop. They freak and slip out the back, and end up running down to the beach and, after a moment to make sure the big kid had written the list in his waterproof pen (as he had kept no record of the emails on his computer), swim as far out in the ocean as they dare, so they can almost hardly see land. It’s the middle of the day, so it’s not like they’re gonna get lost. This way, none of the suits will see them. The current washes them parallel to the beach (and a little bit towards it) and they wait until they’re pretty sure they can see the woods where the stream that leads to their clubhouse is (it’s so very hidden in the middle of the woods, though it’s really this little two-story wooden house with two rooms (one up, one down) and an outhouse, that amazingly has power, though it’s sort of iffy sometimes). They swim in, and stumble up the stream to their clubhouse, where they sort of flop and pass out from exhaustion.

When the girl wakes up, both of the boys are awake and listening to the radio – there’s something about her dad being captured, and them being accomplices, and they sort of just listen wide-eyed before the girl asks quietly, “What are we going to do?”

End episode, end dream.

I am so weird.

LoudTwitter: Letting me spam the internet without even trying.

LoudTwitter: Letting me spam the internet without even trying.