Today's sentiment: Recollecting.

I’ve been writing a lot about my childhood lately. I talked about staying up late, wishing I had other people to play games with, and how I wound up studying math. I might as well write about it all some more.

I tend to think of my childhood as starting when I was 8 and ending when I was 20. I was 8 when my family moved to Baltimore from a small town in Pennsylvania, and I was 20 when I dropped out of college and went to Boston. During that whole time we lived in a single house. Whatever my life was like before moving there feels like some kind of categorically-different dreamworld, which is more like a “pre-childhood”. It’s hard for me to reason about that time.

Within a few years of moving to Baltimore, my mom and dad both very quickly began to hate where we lived (for mostly silly reasons), but they bought the house at the peak of the housing bubble, and even a decade later, there was no way to get out of the mortgage without losing a lot of money. Or something along those lines. I only really started thinking about the financial aspect many years later, after I’d already left it.

So we were stuck in that house. Which was fine. It had two floors and a basement. When we moved there everyone was very excited because my sister, brother and I would all have our own rooms. Before that my sister and I had shared a room.

After we moved, my brother, who is six years older than me, essentially had the entire basement as his room. I talked a little bit about this is in my essay Descent. I was very interested in everything my brother did, but he found me annoying. For the three years that he lived with us in that house, I was very rarely allowed into his room.

My brother had a lot of close friends who were girls. They had dyed hair and ripped jeans. Whenever my parents asked where they came from, my brother would say he met them on Myspace. To 8 year old me, it seemed cool to be a guy who is friends with a bunch of girls without being romantically involved with them in any way. This only seemed cooler and cooler as I got older. The song Platonic Planet didn’t yet exist, but if it did, and if I had actually heard it, I’d probably use that phrase as some kind of slogan for this wonderful world of friendship I imagined. Of course I’d find out many years later that this was all an illusion. My brother told me he’d take all the Myspace girls to the empty parking lot behind the Owings Mills mall and make out with them. He talked about how they were all “white trash”. It made me feel a little sad to hear this. Whatever platonicity the was was only an act for my parents, and the truth was something far more typical and depressing.

I first started staying up late when I was in elementary school. I had a little lamp that clamped onto my bed frame, but I couldn’t use it while my parents were awake, since it was too bright. They’d see the light and ask me why I’m still awake. There were street lamps outside my window though, so if I kept the curtain open I’d have enough light to read. I’d wait for my parents to go to sleep, then turn the light on so I could play my Gameboy. Once I got a DS in fifth grade, everything became much easier.

One of the first DS games I got was Animal Crossing: Wild World. It was the reason I wanted a DS. My brother had Animal Crossing for the Gamecube, but I’d only seen him play it when we went to Florida to visit my grandfather. He brought his Gamecube, because how can one live for a week without video games? There was only one TV in the house, the one in the living room, so my brother had no way of keeping me from watching him. The game seemed so dark and mysterious. Maybe it was the pulsating gyroids. Maybe it was the horn hat. Maybe my brother’s house was just poorly lit and had lots of weird stuff. Those moments with the game stuck with me for months and years afterwards. When I saw the coverage of Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS, I’d stare at the pictures, seeing this as my chance to finally enter that mysterious universe.

I didn’t have many games for the DS. I played Animal Crossing Wild World way more than its designer’s could possibly have intended. I played it under the assumption that I was playing the inferior version — that the true Animal Crossing experience remained locked away on the Gamecube, inaccessible to me, despite there being a Gamecube 20ft below my pillow, at all time plugged into my brother’s television. My brother assured me that Wild World was the superior experience, though I never quite believed him.

I remember my first several weeks with Animal Crossing, hardly being able to do anything in the game because the shops were always closed when I played it. It was a game of finding things to do in this somewhat empty virtual world. I talked to every villager over and over, to they point that they complained I talked to them too much. I picked all the weeds. I sent letters. Then I gave up and started time traveling. I think my brother had planted the idea in my head, since he had mentioned time traveling when playing the Gamecube game. I would often race myself, counting the seconds it took me to exit the game, shut off my DS, turn it back on, navigate the system menu to the date and time settings, beam myself forward in time, then shut off my DS one more time so I could reboot the game. I'm not sure I've ever spent so much time with a game, existing in its world, doing the same things over and over occasionally catching glimpses of something new and surprising, like a new fish or new bug. Even then, I have a long list of aspects of the game I didn't properly experience. For some reason, I didn't play the game in the winter much. I've seen the New Year's celebration, but only because of time travel. Just as I suspected the Gamecube Animal Crossing was better than Wild World, I gradually began to wonder whether or not my Animal Crossing experience was tainted by all the time travel. Cheating was what allowed me to play so much of the game, but it eventually became a truism to me that the game I was playing was some mutated alien Animal Crossing that I was doomed to be stuck on, from the day I first changed my system clock.

There was a certain habit I settled into each night. I’d play Animal Crossing beneath the covers, instead of reading like I used to. Then once my parents were asleep, I’d pile my pillows up against the wall that my bed was against (in my mind, turning my bed into a sofa) and sit upright. That feeling of freedom once my parents were asleep was always so invigorating. Now the night could truly begin. That feeling would form the prototype — the first high — that all my later cravings for the night would be based on. Back then I was only really staying up until midnight or so, but it felt so late. By the time I was in middle school, I was regularly saying up to 3am on most week nights, and waking up at 6am for school. I’d feel terrible all day long, but it was worth it for those hours — which felt so long back then — where I could do anything. I’m sure that’s the main reason why I’ve turned into an adult with

After my brother moved out I got his room. This was temporary. I stayed down there for middle school, then moved back upstairs for high school. Then I went back down, then back up, then back down. My memories are all a bit jumbled. I was never satisfied with either room. The computer — originally my brother’s computer — was in the basement, and the basement was farther from my parent’s gaze. I could watch Gundam at 1am down there and freely engage with the internet. But the upstairs room was smaller. Or should I say cozier? I was still stuck with the choice Tom Nook presents you in Animal Crossing Wild World once you pay off your first mortgage: “How do you like your house?” You can say it’s small or you can say it’s cozy. No matter how you reply though, Tom Nook tries to convince you to upgrade your house to something bigger. Why did I always proceed with the upgrades? Why didn’t I just settle with the tiny house I started with? I suppose opting for ever larger and larger mortgages felt like the you proceed through the game.

Nevertheless, the existence of that choice presented room for an equation to grow in my mind that I’d never considered before: Small = Cozy. I kept finding myself wanting to return to life in a tiny room. I still feel that way now. When I briefly lived in Wisconsin and was looking for apartments, I was disappointed that no matter how cheap the apartments I looked at were, they were all so big.

Moving to Wisconsin was my first time living alone. I stayed in a hotel for a few days then moved in to the cheapest place I could find during the short period of searching. I didn’t have any furniture, only my backpack. I bought a blanket and a pillow from target so I could sleep on the floor. On the way back home I suddenly noticed the mailboxes at the front of the building. I remembered the landlady had given me a mailbox key. I opened it. It was empty. The previous tenants, who had finished moving out that morning, must have emptied it before handing the key over. It dawned on me that this mailbox was all mine, that no one but me and the postman would see the inside. I could start using it to engage in correspondence across the world.

In the end, only three people ever sent me letters, and only one of them sent me letters on a regular basis. It was nice to have a reason to buy stamps and interesting stationary though.

I haven’t written any letters while living in China. I’m not really sure how the postal system works here. I mean, I assume one buys stamps and puts envelopes in the mail. But how many stamps? And who would I write to? Maybe finding a penpal can be my new mid-term goal.

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