Coloring Competitions

[1996] 11yrs old. 

Coloring Competitions have really gone out of vogue since the 90s. Apparently they're not good for children's souls or whatever. I won a few of these competitions and my soul's just fine (for your big fat information). 

One was at the Gatton Video Ezy in 1990 with a promotional poster for a movie called "Bingo" and another was a ticket to the circus. Let me preface this with the fact that I have always, and will continue to, passionately hate the circus. 

There's something about a free ticket that compels you to do things you would otherwise never do. Entering the big top, I knew the excursion was a mistake, but my Mum and I took our seats and waited for the show to begin. In the meantime, the girl in front of us regurgitated her entire bag of popcorn - so we moved. 

Like an all-knowing eye, that popcorn vomit stared at us from our new seats. I told my Mum that I could still see it, and we moved again. A third location proved that the vomit was following us, and haunted to our very bones, we left. 

Never to go to the circus again. 

This is your life now.

[2012] 27yrs old.

I buzzed the doorbell on an apartment building in an upscale neighborhood in San Francisco. Waiting, I looked around awkwardly. Still waiting, I had no idea why I was so nervous. Five minutes later, a woman with a black eye silently marched down the hall stairs holding the hand of a red-headed preschooler. She opened the door for me.

Solemnly, we took to the ascending stairs and found ourselves in the apartment. The walls were scratched as if they'd been keyed like a car door. The curtains were ripped off the rods, and cupboard doors were dangling by a single hinge - if they were lucky. The floor was a sea of broken toys, with a shore of discarded chicken nuggets.

"The kid punched me in the face," the woman confessed, "I need to call his Dad, he locked us out of the bathroom." The freckle-faced boy smiled, and laughed maniacally. He grabbed the phone from her ear, and respectfully addressed his father:

"When ya comin' home, asshole?"

(This was the first day on the job as a Behavior Specialist.)

The Drought

[1991] 6yrs old.

My sister stood at the faucet with her hands covered in liquid soap. She turned on the tap, and nothing came out. Arriving home after a family vacation, we quickly found out that we had no water. As we sat in the car on the way to my Dad's work depot, Megan held her hands out with her sticky fingers splayed, which served as a reminder of the solemn realities of drought.

Filling up water bottles and showering at the depot, we returned home and my parents called the man with the water truck. I don't remember how much it cost, but I do remember that the remedy for extreme drought was to buy the water we so desperately needed from the sky. He brought it from another city, and transferred the water to our big cement tank.

During those years, our dams dried up and we only took bubble baths on rare rainy days. Our toilet flushed with recycled water and we didn't care that it was always brown with dirt. In times of struggle, you learn to make do with what you have and treasure what you've got.

The Millenium Bug

[2000] 15yrs old.

"Make me a coffee in the millenium mug, please darl!" my Dad would ask. The fifteen-year-old me knew how to make a terrible java, so to my delight, these requests were few. As the water boiled I looked at the supersized mug my parents had scored for $2 at Crazy Clarks. Pfft. Y2K was a total rip off.

I remembered, days before, driving to a raging New Year's Eve Party at a local Brisbane Lawn Bowls Club. When your Dad is a musician, New Years Parties are wherever he has a gig - usually somewhere with poker machines, cigarettes and beer. On the drive, Jennifer Lopez's "Waiting for Tonight" was on the radio.

When the calendars clicked over from 1999 to 2000 would the world come to a grinding halt? Would our cars and cash registers think it was 1900 all over again? Would our economy come crashing down with the glitch in our computerized matrixes?

No, no it would not. The only useful part about the Millenium Bug was the merchandise, not the least of which was my Dad's favorite mug - full of the disgusting brew that is Nescafe Blend 43.

Unisex Haircuts

[1992] - 7yrs old.

Swinging my legs from an old wooden bench, I bit off Bubble O'Bill's frozen gum ball nose. I was sandwiched between my brother and sister, in the alley behind our Dad's work. He owned an electronics store in the bustling metropolis of Gatton (Australia) and we spent our afternoons eating junk food before playing Commander Keen on a sale-able IBM.

In the echoey, tiled alley was a hairdresser shop with sign saying, "Unisex Haircuts." While chewing on those tasteless gum balls, I would spend time wondering what "unisex" meant - and why people were so open about getting theirs cut. Surely, unisex haircuts were something Joey Jeremiah should be teaching me about on the currently-age-inappropriate Degrassi Jr. High.

I licked the ice cream off the popsicle stick, without my Mum seeing (she had some irrational fear of tongue splinters) and wandered into the store. In the back room were computers so old that all they could do was word-process, so I pretended I was a published author and wrote my prolific memoirs.

I can't know for sure, but I think it said, "When I grow up I want to be Jennie Garth."