Sunday, July 31, 2011

The Day I Tried To Run Away

Okay, this post doesn't really belong to the MAWB blog since it only involves me and not the entire Weird Bunch but heck, it's not like I'm gonna post this on my COLLEGE blog.
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When I was a kid I used to ride my scooter inside the house because it was fun, and walking was so ten years ago. As I grew up, riding my scooter eventually became rollerblading inside the house... and then to just plain walking since I got too tall--I used the word 'tall' instead of big because if I had said big then you'd get the image of a giant version if me wearing roller-blades inside a tiny house.. with my head pressing on the ceiling and everything...

Anyway, so I used to ride my scooter inside the house. One afternoon, I guess my dad was pretty pissed at something because, while scooting near a bed, I ran over a little flap of bed cover on the floor and, mind you, I rode my scooter OUTSIDE the house as well so it got kinda dirty, and my dad--unfortunately--was there to witness it being run over by the wheels of my scooter, and he suddenly blew up and scolded me and all that.

I'm not the type who talks back so I just sat on the bed, waiting for my dad to finish. After he left, it was my turn to feel pretty pissed. I practically didn't even stain the bed cover, I just ran over it. So, in my anger, I decided to run away from home.

I don't know if you still remember, but back in the old days, a recurring theme in TV shows and cartoons was a kid running away from home. The common image I get (I don't know if you get it, too) of someone running away is somebody carrying a stick and on the end of the stick is some sort of tied-up cloth holding their stuff. Well, I was more civilized than that, I grabbed my backpack.

The house was kinda busy, I think, because nobody noticed me grabbing a whole loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. I also grabbed about two shirts, and my Pokemon Pokeball game thingy. In hindsight, yes, it wasn't a well thought-out plan. I would starve in about four days, if I didn't die of thirst first. I would have no shelter. I would have no place to bathe. I had brought what little money a kid like me would have at my age then (a few P20 bills and a bunch of coins). I was too young to have a phone, so I had no way of communicating with anyone if ever I DID run away. I also didn't pack any underwear.

But not to worry because I didn't get that far, seriously. The farthest I'd reached was the clubhouse. And that is NOT far from my house. You could get there in less than a minute if you ran, and probably exactly a minute if you walked casually--and I rode my scooter so, doing the math, it'd take me at most 20 seconds to get there. Upon arrival, I sat on the cement sidewalk and played with my Pokemon Pokeball game thing.

I'll explain the Pokemon Pokeball game thing now. Well, it's this huge Pokeball, about five inches in diameter. You open it up and there's a screen on the upper half and a bunch of tiny red circle-lights on the bottom half. I don't quite remember the objective of that game, but I think it involved tilting the Pokeball at various angles. This theory could be incorrect since I doubt the tilting technology we have today as seen on iPods was not invented yet back in the early 2000's. It could just have been my childlike imagination doing the tilting...

So I sat on the sidewalk playing my Pokeball for a mere few seconds when I thought of making a peanut butter sandwich. I was stumped because I hadn't thought about bringing a spoon. That was PROBABLY what made me take the twenty-second scoot back home.

My runaway was so epically short that nobody noticed that I had even gone outside. That may be seen as a bad thing... but I dunno. By then my dad had forgotten about my scooter thing. So I lay on my bed and continued playing with my Pokeball.

So the moral of the story is something like this: don't rush into things. Think about what you're doing and why you're doing it before you grab a loaf of bread and head out the door. The reason for my runaway was because my dad got angry at me for doing something every kid will do once in his or her life anyway. And I didn't really think about the future when I decided to run away. I actually thought of going to my cousin's house in the other subdivision, but having never walked out of my subdivision before, it was likely that I wouldn't do it then. I was REALLY young. Old enough to remember, but still young. I couldn't have been older than 7. Maybe I was 6...

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