Year two: Acronym abuse and a brush with Nudism

The previous chapter to this is here. The next is here.

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I am my mother's daughter. We had the same smile, the same hair, the same nose. As I get older, I find that we have the same build, and the same voice. So, it's not that much of a stretch to find that we also have the same sense of humor. My mother is the woman responsible for the caustic and sarcastic bitch I am today. My aunt grew up with my mother and was terrorized by her until the day she moved out, which is unsurprising. My aunt and I have fought, and sometimes it felt like she was showing up three legs short to a horse race. I am sure she has had flashbacks to her childhood when sparring with me, because there were occasions when she had no rational reason to be that red in the face. The time she told me I was "an evil bitch, just like my mother" may have also been a hint.

Despite having both dealt with my mother for decades, it took a full year for my aunt and uncle to realise I was sarcastic. Sometimes they still miss it, nearly a decade later. This is a fact I took full advantage of during Year One, especially in regards to conversations involving my "wall" and the space heater, but also when my aunt decided to randomly give my entire wardrobe away to charity:

"I thought you didn't want them anymore!"
"I didn't. All of my clothes were on my bedroom floor, intentionally, at that exact moment, not because I was organizing before classes, but because I have plans to become a nudist. Your cleaning spree fit perfectly into my diabolical scheme. Couldn't have done it better myself, Amber."
"...You're not becoming a nudist; what would the neighbors think! Come on, we're going to the mall and getting you some pants."
"I remember pants. It seems like I had some just yesterday."

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. Their discovery that I was sarcastic occurred when they closed down the basement and moved me and all my worldly goods into the dining room for four months while they started on their remodeling spree. Just like my wall was an indicator of how much of an interest they had in my wellbeing, the amount of remodeling the houses underwent was a sign of how miserable my aunt was. She has always been under the impression that any problem in the world can be fixed through material goods, which is why I have such a nice room, and also why one portion of one of our houses was constantly being remodeled from 2001 to 2005. Any time my aunt and I got into a fight which she felt guilty about later, she would take me shopping or double my allowance. Housing overhauls were simply the next step up. I think the initial remodeling spree was triggered by me and her inability to stop blaming my mother for my existence in her life or her inability to stop acting like my teenage sister, but the rest of them can be blamed on her deteriorating relationship with my uncle.

In retrospect, moving me into the dining room is one of the worst decisions they could have ever made in regards to our domestic felicity--I was fourteen, I hadn't had a wall in a year, and the dining room was, tellingly, the busiest room in the house. The problem wasn't necessarily that I could no longer keep my mouth shut. It reflects slightly better on me to assume they were now spending enough time around me to actually listen to the words that were coming out of my mouth. So, they discovered I was a brat, and I spent roughly the next year grounded to my room, er, mattress, which had a perfect view of the television. (They're not the most critical thinkers.)

This is the year I invented the NLP, or Nice (Lau)ren Project. I have days worth of analysis about this written out in my scrabbly handwriting between the pages of a furry leopard-print journal. I decided that the way to keep us from fighting was to "make the appropriate noises and move on" when she got annoyed at me. This worked, to a point, until I finally snapped one day and started a fight that lasted for two days and ended with me being locked out of the house for almost four hours in the middle of May. In the end, I got a room back, so I maintain that things worked out for the best.

This is how I used to imagine the conversation that occurred while I got bored of standing on the front porch and wandered off to play on the swings at the local park:

"She's hard to deal with. What should we do?"
"I don't know. What if we, like...put her in an area with walls, and a door, so we could shut it and not see her."
"That sounds kind of like a room. We've never given her a room before."
"Do we have those? Room things?"
"Uhhhh....."

Turns out they did.

The first thing I did when I got to move into my room was buy a blacklight and paint the ceiling fan with rainbow reactive paint. The second thing I did was buy a Discman and start sleeping on the stairs in the middle of the day. My passive aggressive behavior had reached a new peak, though I humbly suggest that my tongue-in-cheek detailings of these antics are far more interesting to read than entries that consist solely of "First day of summer. I want to kill Fam. First day of summer. I want to kill Fam." repeated twelve times for great justice. I dubbed the new method of dealing with things the "New and Improved Fam Toleration Method," or NIFTM. I think a year's worth of listening to Y2K drama left me with an irrational compulsion to use acronyms for no good reason. This is the NIFTM:

1) Collect pillows and some sort of music

2) Find the most obnoxious place possible and get comfy: stretch out, cover as much room as you possibly can. Make sure it's someplace odd (ie: floor, hallway, stairs, front lawn, back porch, kitchen table, etc)

3) "Fall asleep"- this involves laying there and grooving to music. Just make sure you look thoroughly asleep.

4) Try not to laugh when they yell for you, look around, and then sneak off quietly when they realize you are "asleep".

5) Try not to laugh when they have to step over you to get from Point A to Point B.

6) Actually fall asleep.

7) Wake up alone in the house, thoroughly confused and wondering why your neck
hurts.

The NIFTM ended when my aunt's pregnant friend mistook me for a very fluffy blanket and stepped on me while I was asleep in the front hallway. From that moment on, I decided the best course of action was to keep my mouth shut at dinner and spend the rest of my time in my room listening to Rob Zombie. I may have also finally come to the conclusion that acronyms were stupid outside of a scientific setting. The sarcasm, however, never lessened. Instead, I began to hone it.

While I was busy discovering new and fun ways to torment my family emotionally, I was also discovering new and fun ways to torment boys. Luckily for me, my family didn't realise that I actually liked boys until Year Three. Once they did, Unc also became a common combatant during Argument Time. He insists to this day that he hoped I would be a lesbian, but his reasoning for this perverse instead of altruistic.