I’m not sure if I mentioned this, but back in January I applied to be one of the 20sb Community Managers, because of my inability to understand how important that emotional-wiggle-room thing is. If I have an extra 5 minutes in my day, that means that I am free to take on more things, right? Right.

Wrong. But I’ve spent the last two weeks talking about that, haven’t I? I’ve done this because one of the perks of my descent into self-pitying train wreck has been an attempt at reviving this blog. Now that Snark Squad is consistently doing 5+ posts a week, it seemed reasonable enough that I could stick to this MWF schedule here, especially considering that it is exponentially less time consuming to talk about myself than TV shows and shitty books.

These thoughts are related, I swear. Since it’s nice to take a break from whining about my big self-inflicted struggle, and since I can’t fathom how to post three days a week without whining about my big self-inflicted struggle, I’m going to start working my way through the 20sb blogging prompts. (FULL CIRCLE! HUZZAH!)

The request for childhood stories is possibly my favorite prompt and one that I’d like to fill several posts with. As I just ventured back across the country, it seems exceptionally timely.

When my family moved from Chicago to LA, I had just turned 4. My mother flew with my brothers, while my father and I drove, beginning my infatuation with Route 66. Few things make me feel more loved by my father than the way he excitedly tells stories from this trip. Mostly, it’s clear that he had the sort of paternal blindness that led him to believe that I was the cleverest child in the history of children.

The reality is that a lot of these stories are actually about the fact that I was an ignorant little kid who didn’t really understand what was happening, but was pretty excited about everything ever. (OH MY GOD NOTHING HAS CHANGED. TWENTY YEARS LATER AND I AM THE EXACT. SAME. PERSON.)

We stopped at a Burger King in Amaraillo, TX. If you’re like most Americans (or if you’re, you know, not American) and can’t actually contextualize this information, this is around the halfway point of our Chicago-LA journey. This Burger King had a playplace, and that was really all it took to make me know that it was magical and that I would need to have my birthday party there.

My parents have a lot of stories about the hilarity of having a short-sighted, easily distracted child. Probably because it was funny and cute because DUH little kid don’t know shit. I wonder if they knew that this would be an everlasting truth about me.

When we first left, my father had mentioned that we would be staying in a hotel on the trip. I have heard no corresponding stories about me having a particular fascination with hotels at that age, so I’m going to go ahead and assume that my dad telling me this was in and of itself my reason for being excited. Regardless, within an hour of leaving our old home, I saw a hotel off the freeway and asked if that would be the one we would stay in. SO MANY HOTELS! SO MANY POSSIBILITIES!

My dad’s favorite my-kid-is-goofy story from this trip happened when the car broke down or got a flat tire or ran out of gas. Something happened which made it cease to continue moving and I don’t know what because I was a child and that part of the story isn’t about me. A super helpful cop drove us to the next town to get help. He was talking to a mechanic-or-maybe-tire-guy-but-probably-not-a-gas-station-attendant-so-I-guess-that’s-out while we waited in the car. Apparently, I had noticed that the cop had a gun. As soon as he got out of the car, I turned to my dad, wide-eyed and said, “Dad! He has a shooting stick!”

I was not, I’m told, concerned by this. I just felt it was a thing he should know. “FYI: I spot a gun. You’re the dad so you’ve got this one, right?” My dog does this. He barks about things, but once we acknowledge that thing is there, he usually calms down. I imagine his thought-process is something like this: “HUMANS! LOOK! LOOK AT THIS THING THAT I DO NOT UNDERSTAND! … All right. Thank you for looking. It is now your problem.”

That’s the most annoying part of being an adult. I have to be the one to work out the thing that I do not understand. There’s nobody for me to turn to and say, “Go look at that and solve it for me, please.” It doesn’t work that way now and it sucks.

But it has its advantages. My parents didn’t feel like driving over a thousand miles so that I could celebrate the birthday of my dreams at that magical palace of burgers in the Texas panhandle. We were living in Missouri when I got my driver’s license and as soon as that happened, I made pretty frequent trips back to LA. Spring break my senior year fell just before my birthday. I made the trip to LA with my little sister, because my parents are the most chill human beings in the history of parenting.

And so, 14 years later, for my 18th birthday, I collected that Burger King crown. Because there was nobody to tell me I couldn’t. Being the Solver & Decider of All The Things isn’t entirely awful.