I didn't grow up with technology, not that I really used it when I had it. I knew about the internet. At first my sister and I shared an old beige casted computer, that we put on my yellow and white dresser; my brothers, Ricky and CJ shared one in their room, too.There wasn't many parental controls or restrictions to what we could find see, or watch. After a few incidents, wherein my parents realized there was a mistake butnot realizing how to fix it,they took the personal computers away, and replaced them with one family computer with two accounts;we didn't know the passwords, but the wound had become an infection. Trust and peace began to rot away, much like my paternal grandmother's foot. When I was young, my dad said it was because of a garden accident she neglected; a decade since her death was when my dad confessed that she was a drunk. Alcohol that started at an occasional party or a way to cope with something he never asked about. With websites like YouTube, free game websites, and disc games, usually tycoon simulators that my dad played. With a timer dictating when we had to let others on after an hour, I spent most of my computer time playing puzzle games and listening to music on Youtube. CJ was always on RuneScape, and even convinced our mom to buy his memberships sometimes. Ricky spent most of his time watching videos and playing different free games.My sister was never into playing video games; she had social networking acounts to stay in contact with her friends in a way that has since died out in general; She would download a lot of songs and theater performances and load them onto empty discs in a process called "burning", which she then played in her cd players. I was never good at playing video games. I was never good with the hand eye coordination, to the point Ricky would solve the fighting scenes and I played through the stories.
Surprisingly, I didn't start reading until just before highschool. We had books at home, but I never could immerse myself with them, even movies were difficult to keep my mind interested. I knew how to read, how to speak properly, how to spell words, but my handwriting suffered immensely, on rare occasions I couldn't read my own pen. In primary school, there were signs of mylack of understanding in many situations. The schools quickly separated my classmates and I almost the whole day
My cousins, who bore their father's surname, Stroh, lived in a hoarder house for most of their lives. The house that was built by our grandfather, owned by our gandmom, Grandmom Bonnie, in which such collections began. They had a lot of the newer technologies that I coveted. I was often jealous and a bit bitter about my own mom having an ipod, even more frustrating that she never used it for herself and wouldn't risk letting any of us personally use it. There were times when I would visit their house, find an utterly broken phone, and hide it in my pocket, hoping that I could somehow charge it or get it to work. I often got caught doing these things, and my answer usually stayed the same: They had so many that they wouldn't miss a dead one. They had multiple laptops, ipods, touches, ds's, games, and accessories, that were scattered and in a constant state of clutter to such an extreme degree that was certainly illegal.
It was in sixth grade that I got my first phone. I only had a certain amount of minutes, and I often had to go without. We lived in the trailor off Marshall Mill Rd. in Malaga; the park of lots fitting in and around a loop of dark concrete; There was a hill on the furthest end of the loop, which raised the road above a set of train tracks
My sister, Livy's mother, has never been a hard worker. She has weak survival instincts*, when her ignorance and disconnect from actually making hard decisions could cost everything. Growing up, I learned through punishment of as spanking that I should not blame others for my actions. One day, my sister used lipstick to draw hearts and leave kiss marks on our home's bathroom mirror. I thought it was a cute thing, so I joined. When our mom came in later, she must've called our dad while he was at work because when he got home, he sat us all down in the livingroom. I panicked and stupidly asked to use the restroom, whereupon I used lipstick under the basin to write a lie: that CJ had done it. When I opened the door, our dad stood right there and brought me in front of everyone by my wrist. He bent me over his knee and started smacking my butt. It was so long ago that I don't remember