EIGHT

Most of my childhood comes to me in fuzzy spurts. I see myself on my dad's shoulders. I see myself in the tiny bathroom with my dad asking me if I used the potty (using a mangled form of english, of course) I am looking at the living room. I see myself in the tiny kitchen peering at my neighbor, the one with the dead child. So you get the picture. My childhood (or at least pre-elementary school) is full of tiny youtube-like 2 second videos. Maybe this is why people like youtube so much. Because that is how their memory works. Full of short teeny weeny videos.
So my brain right now holds a bunch of youtube videos of me when I was a tot. This is the challenge then, to present it to you in written form. When they say "one picture worth thousand words" they ain't kidding.

Clicking on the link in my brain, the video playing now is of me being bundled in a car on a snowy Christmas Eve. After traveling a bit (with me probably falling asleep in the car) we got out of the car and my dad and mom said, "This is our new house!" Yeah, it's just like that movie "Miracle on 34th Street" That was a big Christmas for our family. I think I was around 4. So amazing that we were going to move out of the projects, from a two bedroom apartment into a house that had three bedrooms upstairs and one bonus room and a bedroom downstairs. My family's big wow moment, the realization that all of the four kids might actually get their own room. Now that I think about that, I think, how incredible it is compared to how people have it now.

Because nowadays, most people, or at least alot of my friends, can't afford a house. So my dad, who worked two and sometimes three jobs to provide for his family, was actually able to get a house to leave the projects. But because of today's economic situation, it's almost impossible to find affordable housing.

I didn't appreciate how hard my dad worked until he told me this story. One time, he had two full time jobs, one was an 8 hour job in the day. He would come home, eat dinner, sleep for a couple hours and then leave for ANOTHER job that lasted 8 hours at night, from 8 to 4AM. One night, coming home, he fell asleep at the wheel and hit a guy at a stop sign. My father was distraught, looking at the damaged fender of the other guy's car and started stressing out about how he was going to pay for it. I think it may have been a luxury car or something. Anyway, my dad told the other guy the reason for his sleepiness, about how he needed to work two jobs to support a family of six.

After hearing my dad describe his work day, the other guy told my dad, "Listen, forget about the damage. Instead, I want you to quit one of your jobs." So that is what my dad did. Thank god.

I take after my dad quite a bit. I tend to prioritize my life so that my work and people rank higher than my sleep requirements. Unfortunately, I have found that I am paying for it now. I think my health and my weight have suffered from the shortage of sleep. They have all sorts of studies that show if you shortchange yourself on sleep, you tend to gain weight. So that is my excuse for being a little plump. It's because of the lack of sleep. Only thing is I tend to agree with my friend who once told me, "I'll sleep when I'm dead." Sometimes there is too much life to live.