Haylookitsa Where I come from

This one isn't going to be funny. Sorry about that.

I see my students frolicking in the halls, playing out their childhood dramas, trundling through the dawn of their years and I am jealous.

For me, all acts of remembrance hold a certain amount of melancholy. Wait no, I mean a certain TYPE of melancholy. A sort of sadness that is devoid of regret but at the same time stirs the heart to nestle in ones throat. I am not sure what this is.

It does not stem from a place of loneliness. Of this I am sure, I was raised by amazing people. At this moment, my mother is in Nepal hiking in the Himalayas while my Grandmother has just returned from a cruise which circled the continent of South America. My uncle is a professional musician while my Aunt is an artist of the highest caliber when she isn't hustling for the biggest and most prestigious humanitarian organization on the planet. I have a cousin living in Israel, one working in IT after going through all manner of medical hell and a broad family whose passions include architecture, education, medicine, and travel. I come from some good fucking stock. This is undeniable.

Likewise, I have any number of friends from diverse backgrounds who are spending their lives shaping the web, healing the sick, and/or becoming amazing in every aspect of the term. I am, without a doubt, incredibly fortunate in the personalities who have had the stupidity to be a part of my life. I hope they never wise up.

No, the melancholy comes from a different place. It is a part that, I suspect, is not a place of negativity, but one which stems from a much simpler impulse. I simply miss the moments that I shared with these people.

I have a distinct memory of a friend I had in pre-school named Brian. Brian and I were best friends for a few years when I was six, well best friends as one can have at that age. We spent hours together doing things that people our age did. I even remember the outlay of his house. It was a white house with the kitchen to the right of the entryway which opened forward to a living room with a couch and a street facing window. I remember playing with hot wheels and other pieces of molded plastic on the carpet of his house. I haven't talked to him since I was seven.

In elementary school, I had another friend also named Brian. He was a Christian skateboarder, the young breed of the hip protestant movement. His family were infinitely gracious to me. I remember having sleepovers at his house where we would sit in his bathtub and stare at the stars, having no conception of the things we were looking at. His family moved to Oklahoma in 7th grade and I haven't seen him since. The last time I spoke with him was when I called him to notify him that my father passed away. I heard he was on duty as a life guard when a young man died. I am sure we would have very little (or a lot) in common at this point.

In high school, a movie released called, Batman Begins. This is a film about a young man named Bruce Wayne going through the world's longest quarter-life crisis, kicking the shit out of ninjas to try and escape and contextualize the death of his parents while dressed as bat. It is one of the best pieces of pop entertainment in the last decade. It released on June 15th, 2005. I remember this because it was 10 days before my father passed away. He was in a hospital and I was, well, I was distraught. I was distraught, hadn't slept without tears for almost two weeks, and had a mild case of feeling awful about everything in the world. Sometime during that period, a friend of mine named John called me and told me that I needed to see the new batman film. I told him that I couldn't and he told me that he didn't care and that him and his brother, Steve, were going to come pick me up in 15 minutes. I protested. They picked me up and I saw the film. That one gesture on their part established an unrepayable debt in my mind to those two. I have not told either of this fact.

My family and friends are amazing, I am surrounded by people who have no business being the people they are. Someone who I have known since third grade is currently holding it down in China while another has just started with a company in Santa Monica. Anyway, that's all I have to say. Thanks people, I'll try to live up to these memories. Not like it will matter to any of you. This does not help with the pressure.

Also, Heidi is a badass. That is all.