Fortunate Things in the Life of Myself

I just posted blog a few minutes ago, and as I always do, I read through it again to hopefully catch any typos that I missed while writing it, and decided I need to have a post about all the good things in my life.

My relationship with my dad is a lot better than it has been for the last few years, though it still has its rough days.

My dead-beat sister is looking to get her life in some sort of order. She wants to transfer to IUPUI and become an elementary education major. This also means that I'm totally going to graduate college before her.

I didn't gain any weight over winter break, and have lost another 2 pounds since I got back to campus.

I auditioned into an a cappella group and got in. Rehearsals have been a little rocky, but fun and we've got a really sweet blend. I noticed a few of my tendencies from music sectionals in high school have resurfaced, which is hopefully going to prove to be a good thing because I plan on putting a lot of extra time into this group.

I've made 12 really cool friends from the previously mentioned a cappella group.

As unsure as I've always been about my major, I think I belong in the theatre, and I've been getting a lot of support from my friends about it.

My confidence as a vocalist is a lot higher than it's ever been in the past.

I love music again.

A friend asked if I would be willing to brush back up on my keyboard skills, because he needs a basic keyboard player for his band, but more so wants me for vocals.

People seem to love my hair more than I do. I get compared to John Mayer now and again, but I get compared to a character on True Blood named "Alcide" at least 3 times a week.

-Yeah, so what if it's vain, the amount of pride I take in my appearance? I don't care.

I gave a kick ass speech in my COMM 210 class, and I'm pretty sure that I became a class favorite of the instructor.

I made a blind friend! His name is Blaine. I help in my large lecture class on Mondays.

The friend that I want to move to LA with stopped smoking pot.

I have a generally good life.

Groanings of the Fortunate

I need to vent, rant, complain, bitch, and all of the above about my life.

For starters, something that actually happened just this morning apparently, that I noticed on facebook. My father had a picture of Julie, my sister, talking on the phone in the living room that he put up in August of 2009. This morning, at 9:48 this morning, my Aunt Julie, total cunt, posted this comment:

"Interesting...appears as those a piece of furniture that you swore to me you didn't take is in the photo. I knew you were not telling truth anyway."

Last time I posted, I mentioned the death of my grandfather maybe 20 days ago. My dad was the first to arrive in Kansas for the event, and it quickly became WW3 with the siblings assaulting one other over this and that. By the time the rest of the family had made it into town, a truce had been called. I flew back to Indy, leaving my parents behind in Kansas, where I assumed the fight would rage on. My dad made an incredibly kind gesture to his two sisters, as they were given rights to the house, which needs an enormous amount of work done before it's fit to see the market. My dad and my uncle offered to give them a portion of the money that would come from the estate sale for repair costs, so that it wouldn't all come out of pocket. My uncle offered X money, to which my sisters thought my father would refuse. My father doubled X in his offer. Last I had heard, everyone became much closer from this event, my dad was in fact able to get one of the Chinese mirrors that was hanging in the house, and everything was good.

Stupid Cunt Aunt Julie had to go looking to pick a fight, it's not like this is something that you just happen to see in your newsfeed 2 1/2 years after it's been posted, she went looking for trouble, looking to start another fight. My dads response to that was to take a picture of the living room, showing the bookcases in full, making it obvious that they aren't the bookcases she thinks they are, that they don't even match one another, and that they came from his old office library. He put that picture on her facebook wall, a classy response, in my opinion. Classy enough that I'm tempted to request my dad to be my friend on facebook, on a very limited profile view, of course.

That was that, it wasn't even something I had initially planned to bitch about until I saw it.

One of the things that pisses me off the most is people who complain about their lives publicly, I'm not sure why. I know that this very moment, I'm complaining about my life, but it's not on a platform that 500+ other people will be subjected to having it in their newsfeed. People that complain about being single, people that whine about another broken heart from their 10th relationship of the year, people who think their life is impossible beyond comparison, people who whine that applications for college and jobs and internships are too hard, people who are clearly underage and complain that a shot tastes gross but they took 6 anyway, people who make their life out to be harder than it is to gain attention and sympathy for their shortcomings. The list goes on and on, and it's not even the people that might just post about their shitty day, it's the people who I can constantly count on to have this kind of status on any given day.

Everyone has troubles like that, so what makes you think that yours are any more special? I could switch gears on my social media forums and bitch about everything.

My first girlfriend cheated on me, which then caused me to turn a shoulder to the thought of another relationship for quite a long time as well as screwing me up pretty decently when it comes to relationships, and when I finally thought I had hit my stride, opened myself back up, gotten it right, it blew up in my face.

Some nights I just sit around in my room, hoping that someone will text me inviting me somewhere, because I hate planning things.

I try desperately hard to stay in touch with all of my old friends because of how much they mean to me, but I look at my inbox and every conversation with them is un-replied, making me assume that I'm just bothering them by texting them.

I don't even have people in my life anymore that I feel like I can tell all of this too, which is why I tell it to a computer screen instead.

My mom had a brain tumor over 10 years ago which has drastically changed the lives of my family.

My dad has diabetes that causes tons of swelling, has bad joints, and numerous other afflictions, making me the primary manual laborer when I'm home.

My sister has epilepsy, sleeps for 12+ hours a day, and has never moved away from home.

The previous three were diagnosed within 18 months of each other, and pretty much signified the moment that I had to grow up and act like an adult, because there wasn't a childhood to be had in this household.

I feel like I can reasonably say that I have more than my fair share of things to bitch about, which is what really pisses me off. That the people I see complaining the most are complaining about the smallest little imperfections in their lives, things that I wouldn't even notice seem to ruin their day. I just don't understand how people function like that.

It's so much more enjoyable to focus on the good things going on in your life, and to share a positive outlook on life with everyone you know.

I really kind of hate this post now, because it's essentially everything I hate seeing on facebook and twitter, and I kind of don't want to post it, because this doesn't correspond correctly with the image of myself that I broadcast to the world.

Clear Skies on a Childhood Memory

I'm going to assume that for the 10 people that know my blog exists, and the 4 that remember it and read it, you probably know me pretty well. I'm gonna bank on that, because this is gonna be one of those kind of super personal posts that will dive kind of way back into my past that I don't ever talk about.

Winter break ended for me a week ago.

I have not returned to campus yet.

I mentioned earlier, that I went to Kansas for Christmas. If you didn't see that post, I spent the week around Christmas in Kansas.

I was spending my Friday evening with Q just catching up and goofing off, trying to make sure he's still got some kind of role model and someone to keep him accountable, because I worry about that guy. We had ended out at Shamrock Springs to look at stars and listen to music. We managed to find that I still had my Once Upon A Mattress CD, and we both remembered the words and choreography to most of the songs. We talked about his life, and things that are fair and things that are unfair. I thing I managed to get him a date, but I don't know how that panned out after he left my guidance. It was around 12:30, I believe, when my phone rang. It was my mother.

My parents had planned to leave early that Saturday morning to drive to Kansas to see my grandpa, who will be called Bobo from here on out because he wasn't my grandpa, he was Bobo. Well Bobo took a turn downhill on Wednesday, I believe, and had stopped eating and drinking, and was sleeping for most of the day with the help of many drugs. My parents were going to drive down to visit him. Just after 11:30 pm on Friday, my Bobo died in his sleep. Thinking about it now, because of the time change, I got word of it pretty quickly. My mom wanted me to come home and get packed.

I went to start my car, and of course, my battery died. I called a handful of people I had previously warned that they were on my list to give me a jump, because I frequently go listen to music in some back parking lot and kill my battery. I started on the second round through and I got a hold of Kaylee who came and gave my car a jump. I told her my news, then went to take Q back to his car.

I'm going to fast forward through the packing, the drive to Kansas, reading The Hunger Games, locking the keys in the car, and other little adventures. There was a 2 hour visitation with family on Tuesday. Tuesday night, my cousins and I went out to the farm with a family friend, Mark.

Mark moved into the house on the far end of the lot when I was just 4 years old, and he's seen me grow up. That house is the house that my great-great grandfather built when he lived on, and ran the farm. That house is also the house that my Bobo was born and raised in until he was 3, though they didn't move far and still ran the farm. There's another big area, all enclosed with massive trees, better than any fence you could build. My dad owned this land and built a house on it. This house was the house in which I grew up.

My cousins and a family friend and I all went to Marks house, stopping to get some Smirnoff, Jack Daniels, and a case of beer. One of my cousins didn't drink, another cousin and the friend had more beer than anything, another one had some mixed drinks, and I had a few very stiff drinks.

-Side note: My mom apparently had been telling my aunts, uncles, and cousins that I'm pretty beast at making mixed drinks, despite my legal age of being 19.

The rest of them also had some pot they went on and did, I politely declined, though I stayed in the room and thus required laundry very promptly because I didn't bring a large number of clothes. But enough of the background story, I'm here to talk about my importance to the Steele name.

My great grandfather and my Bobo had both been born and in that house and on that land. My dad owned a large segment of the land, where he had built the house, my childhood house. I'm the 3rd generation of Steele men to be born and raised on that land, despite my moving when I was 9. There were only three of us born on that land, and all three of us sport the initials of JKS, and have the middle name, Kenneth.

I had known all of that before, but I had never really put all of the pieces together before that night, and after a few stiff drinks, that was a heavy heavy thing to hit me. I also know that I was supposed to be named James, but my family didn't want me to, as my Bobo had named his first born son James Kenneth Steele, and it died while it was an infant. It's one of those facts about our family that we don't ever talk about. My Bobo was James Kenneth Steele, and I'm fairly certain his father was James Kenneth Steele as well. But given it seemed a bad omen to name me after a dead infant, John was a respectable substitute. And on June 10th, 1992, I became the 3rd member of an important bloodline, what nobody knew then is that I would also be the last to be born with those honors.

Before I knew any of this, I had always had a lot of pride in my name, and I knew it was incredibly important that I pass my name down, mostly for the fact that Julie would most likely not provide suitable children to bear the Steele name, let alone JKS. And so I now take even greater pride that I will pass down my name, while avoiding the name James for one more generation, and my first born son will be Jackson Kenneth Steele. I will not budge one bit on this fact with my wife, especially now after knowing the importance of my being.

That's kind of an overview on my name and its history. There's more though. That farmland was all supposed to fall to me one day. Not all of it exactly, my aunts and uncle own bits too, but I would have been given the controlling portion of the land, and my son would have been the 4th member of this Steele Elite.

And another thing that just hit me, I'm alone in this group.

But that land had more than just historical and family importance like it did to my cousins, it was my childhood home. I spent a fair amount of time in the old garage where my Bobo would always have a car in there that he was working on. I used to sit on that floor and roll marbles around. My old playset was still standing in the corner of the property, though the roof had long vanished. I took some pictures of it, even though it was dark, they're pictures just for me. I got to look at the driveway where I learned to ride my bike. I walked around the shop and saw where I always knew to find those rolly-polly bugs, as I called them. I could see inside the kitchen window, someone was watching me walk around. I remember one time I spilled a whole container of quaker oats on me, and my mom tossed me outside and told me to shake it all off on the patio, then sweep it out into the grass. Julie and I used to pick these little flowers that were purple, and I'm pretty sure were weeds. On spring days, while my dad was at work, my mom would be on the riding lawn mower and mow the whole yard, which took easily 4-5 hours, my sister and I would clean the inside of the house. The windows were always open on these days, and I can still smell that warm summer breeze mixed with grass trimmings. And there was the stair banister that I got my head stuck in when I was little. And all the fun I had on that staircase between setting up my hot wheels tracks down it, or sliding down it on an inflatable air mattress. I remember that the closet from the nursery connected right to my parents bedroom. All the christmas decorations were stored in the crawl space under the stairs. I remember falling asleep in my dads triangle, which would be hard to explain. And I remember hearing my Bobo just walk into the house on any given morning, and the distinct whistle he had when he did so, every single time.

I remembered all of that, and tons more, kind of all at once while I was out there. And then I thought about how much fun it could have been to grow up out there. The awesome sleepovers I could have had on the far end of the property in tents. The crazy parties I could have thrown. The yard work I could have done. All the time I could have spent star-gazing in that perfect sky in the middle of nowhere.

I really am a true Steele. I got to learn a bunch about my Bobo, as well as my Nana, after they both passed away. My Nana loved reading and loved Britain and English culture. She was a great cook as well. She loved kids and teaching too. And my Bobo loved jazz and big band swing. They played several big band songs at his funeral, including In The Mood. And he loved being outside and growing things and working with his hands.

I don't have a lot else to say on the matter, and there really isn't a good stopping point other than one more old Bobo-ism.

Pipe Squike,

Tube Squeak.