Normal insight.

I was once criticized by one of my professors for satirizing the conversations of normal people.

She informed me, "It's not a satire if half the audience can't relate to it."

My reply: "But I don't know how normal people think."

At first I had assumed that her questionable pairing of a man's shirt over a plaid skirt and cloth shoes, accompanied by her hypnotizing seesaw walk, would mean that she was eccentric enough to appreciate something different.

Remember, kids, assuming kills.

Unfortunately my rickety professor, the 5-minute time span between classes, and probably my raging urge to insult her terrible clothes, didn't give me a chance to explain why my writings don't appear to relate to the average American college student.

The fundamental reason: My upbringing.  That would take much longer than 5 minutes to flesh out, but well worth missing my Japanese class for.

Whatever you're probably thinking about, no, that wasn't the case.  My unique upbringing was not due to problems, but choices.  

Somehow, when I was still too young to know how to fucking swear, my father decided to abandon the luxurious realm of the normal and enter into the empty barren fields of the degenerates.

And for fifteen years, that's where he's been, and his family reluctantly followed.

Hence, my memories are warped into parallels, but not replicas, of the lives of the children defined as "average."

Instead of going to Chuck E. Cheese's with friendly schoolmates on a Saturday, I'm going to 7-Eleven with a slew of underprivileged, street-smart kids who are unsupervised much of the time.

I'm sitting in the front seat with the window wide open not in the my dad's new Honda faux-leather-clad SUV, but a 90s style Dodge caravan, with the seat belt buckle broken off.

I'm not sitting on Santa's lap, but on the mushy, cushiony thigh of the hefty, toothless-smiling man from the IHS down the street.

In my family, the mother worked and the father stayed with the kid.  And time with Daddy meant visiting others, whether outside or inside, delivering necessities, listening to their problems, asking what else they needed.

Well, he did the work.  I just wandered off, sat around, or waited in the car and pretended the surrounding trees were broccoli. 

And through all this, we had a home.  We had full stomachs.  We had cable.  We had dial-up internet service.  We just had other people to think about other than ourselves.

And now it's been fifteen years.  Lessons learned and burned into my brain:

- Possessions are like toothpaste.  You only need a little bit.

- It's not enough to not do drugs.  It should be rephrased to, "DON'T EVEN TRY DRUGS."

- Never settle for mediocrity, not in terms of wealth and success, but of character and morality.

- Trees are NOT giant broccoli.

Now it's been fifteen years.  And my upbringing has left me quite alone in a world that says, "Screw the needy!  Worry about yourself!  Work your ass off, do whatever it takes to get rich, until you die!"

So living among the so-called "average" is a daily struggle.  I try to talk to them, act enthusiastic about their lives, laugh nervously.  But it's engagement in social activity, so I just deal with it.  For those who are not categorized under "average," it's different.  They may seclude themselves, have strange habits, and curse at the sky, and somehow I feel a stronger connection towards them.

This is the lifestyle I've been assigned to.  And apparently, that puts a cripple on my "relatability" status as a writer, according to Professor/Dr. __________.

So obviously my audience is not going to consist of the average American college students, and they read Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey.

Well, I guess I'm on the right track, then.

(Click on the link,
 http://zionipuka.bellstrike.com/, 
to see the real deal.)