Hello! Yes, I am actually doing something that is involved with my life, as this book was originally intended for. I do enjoy the silly joke segments, and I know all of you do too, but I thought maybe I should start sharing some stuff about myself again more extensively. I'm pretty sure there are people that are thoroughly interested in hearing about myself, even though I'm surprised anyone would. I have no idea how long this segment will be, but I'll go on for as much as I need to. So, let's begin.

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As most of you might know by now from the very first chapter of this book, I am Hispanic. This is important because literally the entire region where I live is comprised of 90% of Hispanic people. I live in the state of Texas in what is known as the RGV region. This region is heavily flourished with Hispanic culture and, so far, still depends on it to this day.

I'm a millennial baby, born in 2000. I'm pasty as fuck and smol, as I've stated before too. My childhood consisted of living in two seperate houses; with my mom and with my dad. (I still have yet to post a Home Life pt. 2, the one with my dad, but that one is still complicated to this day and there's no easy way to sum it all up.)

I'm gonna state this right now, with my mom I grew up on Tim Burton movies, Happy Tree Friends, and old, creepy or quirky PS2 games (anyone remember that The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy game? That was mah shit, mang). I also grew up on music like Depeche Mode, Slipknot, Ramstein, Tool, you name it. That was mostly my mom.

I loved watching Disney Channel, and yes...I loved Hannah Montana at one point. What little girl didn't? At an early point in my childhood, my mom and my ex-step dad always moved around from apartments to relatives homes in a hunt for a proper house. They finally had that proper house for eleven years until, early 2016, my mom had to sell it and I now live in an apartment (it's not so bad).

Oh yeah, I fucking loved Care Bears and had the old ass cartoons. I was one of the kids that was still influenced by the 90s, so most of the stuff I liked was from that time. I had Spyro and stuff, like who even remembers that??? I sure as hell didn't for a while.

With my dad, it was mostly the same, except my television entertainment ran on plain cable TV and DVD movies. With him, I could watch Family Guy and South Park, the whole works! We had collections of movies, enough that we had two floor to ceiling shelves to hold most of them. I was super into My Littlest Pet Shop and a whole bunch of other girly stuff.

Omg, I remember I had the first NintendoDS and it was sky blue. I had some pretty good games on there, one of the best probably being Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks but I never finished that shit because I got stuck at one part... I also had the Hannah Montana: The Movie game (yes there was a fucking game) and when I finished it, for some reason I couldn't do a New Game. Like, what the hell?? At the end, everyone knows she's fuckin Miley Cyrus and shit and she's stuck in her granny's house in Tennessee because paparazzi would swarm her if she left. So all I could do was fuckin change my outfit, walk around and that's it! Granny was like "oh don't go outside, blah blah blah" fuCK YOU GRANNY. LET ME SEE THE DIGITAL WORLD OUTSIDE. WHO EVEN MADE THAT GAME AND WHY DID THEY MAKE IT SO THAT IT WAS A ONE TIME THING AND BLAM GAME'S OVER YOU CAN NEVER PLAY THIS SHIT AGAIN?!?? OH YEAH, HERE'S THIS BIG HOUSE AND YOU'VE GOT ALL THE OUTFITS THAT YOU'VE COLLECTED THROUGHOUT THE GAME BUT YOU CAN'T. FUCKING. LEAVE.

*cough*

Ohhhh, and I also had a pink Gameboy Advance SP!! I loved that thing! It was the best! I played Super Mario on that thing and...and other games like...idk, Tetris? I didn't have a single Pokemon game for crap, which is weird because I'm pretty sure those were most of the well known ones... Uhm... I don't remember a lot of the games I had. But the Gameboy was still badass! Toted that thing around like a queen. Always felt this sense of joy when I saw those rainbow colors in the tiny, square screen say GAMEBOY. Mmmmmm.

For most of my childhood, my dad and I lived with my grandma. She's a nice, light skinned Hispanic lady like me, who barely spoke English so it was and still is awkward to talk with her. My dad and I had sleep in a room together and, as weird as this may sound, we slept in the same bed together even until I was 10. It was me, him, my grandparents, and one of my aunts most of the time. My dad has worked at Best Buy for as long as I could remember and would buy me really cool movies and nice things. I still have an old Samsung Galaxy tablet, which people mistake for a phone because of how small tablets actually used to be back then. Now it's slow as fuck and barely usable, but I still kept it.

I messed around with my dad's old clunky Acer laptop a bunch and would play flash games on there. Who remembers a game called Poptropica??? Dude that gAME WAS THE SHIT. REMEMBER THAT SODA MACHINE AT THAT CARROT ISLAND THAT CHANGED YOUR HAIR COLOR BASED ON THE COLOR OF THE SODA???? I SPENT HOURS AT THAT THING.

When I was getting into anime, I watched a bunch on his laptop. Stuff like Bleach (which I could never finish), Shugo Chara, DNAngel, and more. My first outlet was YouTube but eventually Netflix came around and I watched more there. Now I bathe in anime everyday.

Stepping away from my dad, my grandparents (his parents) were always pretty cool. My grandpa was never at the actual house a lot because he lived and worked most of the time at a small ranch. He grew fields of palm trees and what have you, had his own average greenhouse and owned a tractor and some warehouse storage. It was a big place with a tiny house. I still remember that place. The floor was literally just concrete, some of it broken up. The rooms were small and the ceilings were low. No AC, just fans. My grandpa had a big clunky TV for watching analog channels, mostly watched Telemundo. As small of a house as it was, it still housed my grandparents and their kids, which are: my dad, his older brother (an uncle I barely see anymore) and my four aunts. Yeah, it was pretty cramped. But that's how they lived for a while until my grandparents bought this nice house with a huge plot of land. That house is the one I lived in with my dad for the longest time.

My grandpa is a fine example of what the Hispanic culture was back then, and still is today. You could mistake him for a black man for how dark his skin is from the long hours of working on the fields as he grew up. Now he's retired and staying with my grandma. The ranch that I visited with one of my aunts is now gone too; replaced with strip shops or something. As "grimy" as it was, it was a fun place to be. My aunt and I helped raised a momma kitty and her tons of babies, which eventually had babies of their own as they got older. I would explore the greenhouse row by row and even wander out on the fields behind that. At some point though, I got scared of adventuring there so I just stuck to the greenhouse and the actual house.

My grandma's house has a huge plot of land; enough to grow more palm trees and orange trees and grapefruit trees and lime trees and just a shit ton of trees. I loved hiding under the giant orange or grapefruit trees when I was younger, until a hive of bees eventually scared me and my younger cousins away for a while. There were also cacti too! I remember that I would pretend to be an explorer out there, running around and jumping on trees like a monkey. Oh, there's also this olive tree that's still there that would hold white flowers. I would always pick them from their little stems and carry a bunch with me back inside, where they would wither away and die on my shelf and I would be sad. Sometimes I climbed parts of the chain link fence around and would get my hands dirty because, what else would you expect?

I loved the times when my grandparents or my dad would bring back fresh fruits. For the longest time, and I think I still mix them up, I thought cantaloupe were melons and melons were cantaloupe. Cantaloupe were the ones that I LOVED but I called them melons and my aunt would be like "it's a cantaloupe" and I would be like "it's not an animal in the safari, it's a fruit, duh". I liked having the cantaloupe diced up and bite sized but what was the fun in that? Instead my dad would cut up big slices and I'd tear right into that shit until I came down to the thin green part right before the skin. My cheeks would be sticky n stuff (don't take that out of context). Ahh, I miss mauling cantaloupes apart...

It was always somewhat lively at my grandma's house. Things are different now though. I miss walking down the hall, coming into the living room and seeing my grandparents watching Telemundo novellas together. Now, they sit around in the dark doing nothing. My grandma is practically blind now and can't handle a lot of light. She's had to have a toe amputated due to diabetes. My grandpa is alright, but he still has to watch out for his blood sugar and his hands shake worse now than ever. He used to be a big, plump man and I'd always pat his big belly like a bongo. Now he's skinnier, but not too skinny. Still, my grandparents are still chatty with each other and with other family members too. My grandma talks and talks and talks to you, even when you're talking with someone else. She was always a very dramatic woman. She loves kids though, so a big family with a bunch of kids was a fuckin dream for her. So far, my dad is the one with the most kids, which I don't think anyone really expected but no one can really complain about it.

Back to my mom, kinda, it was always pretty fun with her too. There came a point (probably when I was hitting puberty hard) where I shut myself off from everyone in the house and never talked to anyone. Like I stated before in Home Life pt. 1, I've barely started up an open relationship with my mom just late 2015. It's still in a weird process.

When I was younger, I would spend time with my grandparents on my mom's side too (I still do). I actually call my grandma Nana. She never liked being called grandma because it made her feel old. And because she always took care of her children's children like a nanny, Nana was appropriate. And I call my grandpa Tata.

Man, with my Nana, I always remembered the old VHS tapes. I had Space Jam, Austin Powers movies, that Casper movie. Those were some good days..! My Nana would make fideo a lot, which was always a good eat. Fideo is always a common thing with Hispanic people, at least in the region where I live. Haven't heard about fideo from any other place with Hispanics as a majority. Ugh, and don't get me started on that Mexican rice, oooOOOO MAH GAWD THAT STUFF WILL FOREVER BE GOOD. I HAVE LIVED ON THAT. MY WHOLE FAMILY HAS.

And yes, tamales are and forever will be a fully common Hispanic thing. I love the chicken ones, they're so good. And my relatives give me crap about how I eat them with ketchup. So?! I'm eating them aren't I?? It's good shit. Why don't you put down your salsa or guacamole or jalapeños you've got there and try some with ketchup?? Slow down on the heartburn there, buddy.

For a long, long time, my Nana's dad, who I called Welo, lived at her house. There was a separate housing area connected to the main area where he lived for a while with my younger uncle. He only spoke Spanish too, and was kind of dark, but not super dark. He did that chewing thing that old people do sometimes, and he had one of those rough, hardy laughs. They were loud too. He'd sit on his recliner most of the time watching Spanish tv channels. But he hung out with me too. My Nana's house always had a pretty big yard, but it's not as garden-like as my grandma's. Welo would always watch me as I ran around outside and would sometimes play some soccer with me. There were these weird pipelines that came out of the house and had a blue plastic tube attached to them. I'd always step on the blue tube and squeeze the water out, forcing it to make a weird squirt sound and create a little puddle where the tube ended. That was fun.

Nana had and still has two lines for hanging clothes out to dry, and she still does that method to this day. There's a shed where my Tata would keep all of his tools because he was and still is a type of mechanic (works with a lot of semi-trucks). Short story: I remember my younger uncle named JC dared me to crawl under the small space between the shed and the ground because it was on like stilts or something and it was scary but thrilling. He always made me do scary stuff because he was an asshole like that sometimes. I can forgive him though, he was a teenager when I was a kid, and teens are assholes to their younger relatives. I know because I was an asshole to my younger cousin for a time until I realized I was being a piece of shit and stopped.

Back on track, Welo would also pick me up from elementary school for a time, and he'd let me stick my head out the car window like a dog. It was pretty fun, but eventually I had to stop or else we'd get in serious trouble.. But he was a cool dude regardless! He and I even collected soda cans to take out back and crush them with this weird pole thing. I'd place the cans on a cinder block and he'd crush them flat. When all of the cans were crushed, he'd put them aside to recycle them later. He was rad even if I couldn't understand what he was saying most of the time.

I forget how long it's been, maybe four years ago, he passed away. I don't remember from what, I think he was just so old, ya know? Near the end of his life, he was always in bed at my Nana's house. My Nana tried extensively to keep him alive. He had always taken pills for as long as I could remember but he went through a lot more stuff than just the pills. It got so bad that doctors started predicting when he was going to die. I couldn't visit him before he passed, but I heard a lot from my mom and my Nana and my aunt. Apparently, the door to his room kept opening and my mom got frustrated and mad because she had to keep closing it. My Welo, who was mostly unresponsive, suddenly told her to stop closing the door and to let in Wela, my great-great-grandmother and his wife, who I never ever got to meet because she passed away a long time ago. He had been quiet for a while, until he told everyone there that he was gonna be seeing Wela soon. As weird as that story may sound, it still meant something to me and especially to my Nana, my aunt and (sorta) my mom.

The day that I had to see Welo dead on his bed, I cried a lot. Over the years beforehand, I drifted away from him and a lot of other things related to my early childhood. I was always interested in my cellphone and stuff, and never talked to anyone all that much. Seeing him dead on his bed, in a house that is still a big part of my life, hit me hard. Looking at it now, it was kind of a reminder that my early childhood was gone and that it wasn't coming back. I felt bad for never interacting with Welo as much as I used to, and sometimes it weighs me down to this day. Everyone was pretty much distraught over his death and I think, for the first time in my entire life, I saw my mother cry and I held her and cried with her too. She never cries. Ever. It made everything even more heartbreaking than it already was. She never held me the way she did on that day either.

The funeral was depressing, as most funerals are supposed to be...I think. It was the first one I ever went to. I remember placing rose petals on Welo's coffin and walking away, feeling worse. Ha, my mom was even one of the coffin carriers, and she kept a somewhat straight face through most of the ceremony. Ah, even the drive to the cemetery before was super, super silent, which I guess is normal. That kind of silence is a distinct one, one that shouldn't be endured but will eventually have to be. Afterwards, a lot of family members gathered at Nana's house. As weird as this may sound, we actually had music and we barbecued and people chatted and were happy. It was a big contrast compared to the post-funeral parties you see in the movies where people don't wanna talk at all and everything's really quiet. That's how it was but I wasn't exactly social at the time so I stayed in my Nana's room, messing with my phone.

That event is long gone now but it still means something to me. Welo was a cool figure in my life and to have him gone meant, like I said, that part of my life is really gone. No more crushing cans for recycling, no more soccer out back, no more sticking my head out of windows in his car. Wherever he is, he's at peace now with Wela, who seemed like a cool lady from what I know about her. But, having Welo pass made me scared for my grandma on my dad's side. She has a lot more health issues and, as I write this, she is or was currently hospitalized for a high/low blood pressure. She's been sick, and is practically always sick. I don't want that day to come where my dad calls me, choked up saying that grandma is in the hospital dying or has already died. But I know it can and will eventually happen, and I feel bad knowing that I haven't interacted with her a lot over the past few years too. She's another big part of my life and I would be really devastated to see her go. Man, I remember she would help me fall asleep when I was scared or staying awake at night waiting for my dad to come home again. And recently, maybe just last year, she gave me this jewelry/music box that plays You Are My Sunshine, and has a quote on a mirror on top saying:

"My Granddaughter, Always remember You are More Courage than you think, Wiser than you know and Loved more than You could imagine."

I think the purpose of the mirror is so that when I look at the quote, I can look at myself too. And I just--

I'm getting emotional. I'm literally crying right now. Eeeegghh.

I really don't mean to suddenly get all sad and dark on you guys. I know this is supposed to be about my childhood but, my mind goes places, ya know?

There are things that I miss about my childhood and things that I could do without. And there are also things that should have been but never were.

Uhm... I don't know.

It was fun, ya know? I see pictures of myself and see all of the stupid shit I did as a tiny child. There's so much more that I could tell you about, but I don't think I can write about them for too long. It's just so much. It's been a wild ride growing up. It was fun, but I'm not a tiny child anymore. It's nice looking back on the past, but never healthy staying in it. Just gotta make the most out of life and hope I make it far.

Man...to think this entire segment came from me eating a cantaloupe slice at my mom's a few weeks ago. Weeeeiiiirrrdddd.

Welp, that's about it for this! If you stuck around through this entire chapter, good on ya and thank you! I know this is probably weird to read but my writing is different when it comes to stuff about myself. I don't plan this shit, I just talk and hope what I say makes sense. But I'm glad I could share this with you all. Maybe you could share some things about what your early childhoods were like? Idk, give it a shot.

Thank you, and I'll see you all in another chapter.~*

Bye!