From: bifemmefatale pt 2

[maevele]

2. Tell me about where and how you grew up. that is such a broad question, shit.

I don't much remember the first couple places I lived, after my dad died I know we moved down to madison and I think we went back up to the country for a year in between? but when I was three we (me, my mom and my grandma) moved into the apartment on the south side of madison that I stayed in until I was 17. It was a shitty little apartment in an 8 unit, in a pretty poor neighborhood that was never as bad as people acted like it was, until it got bad near the end.

We were poor and my mom drank, not gonna lie. But living in a "crappy" poor neighborhood had it's benefits, because there were built in friends. There was always at least one kid within a year or so of my age living right in the building, sometimes a couple. And we had the girl building on our block. after the very first, all of my in building friends were girls, and most of the time the kids in the other buildings on my block were boys. so if I went out of my building, 80% of the kids on my block were boys. I say this like there were tons of kids, but it was never more than a half dozen or maybe 8 kids in my block at a time. After third grade, I was the only girl on my block, one of only three white girls in the neighborhood, five kids on my block. By 6th grade, I was the only kid on my block besides the ones young enough for me to babysit. But it was still a lot more kids right close than my kids have, it seems. there are kids on our block, but they are always in their own yards.
I hung out a lot with the girl across the hall, who was a bully, a couple years older than me, and once locked me in her closet. She stayed til I was in 5th grade. last I hung out with her I was like 17 and she was still getting me into fucked up situations. I got back in touch with my actual best friend from my building through facebook, but we have nothing in common now.

Jeez. I could ramble on about my childhood for hours, and I've hardly touched on anything.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

Hey FYI I think you've got some whacked facebook virus, unless there actually is a totally fabulous work-at-home opportunity you want to tell the world about. (And I would think if there were, you'd have mentioned it here in some detail.) You've left messages on a couple of walls about it.

[sophy.livejournal.com]

From 7th-12th grade, I lived in a duplex which resided on a street with pretty much all duplexes and other small apartment buildings, the majority of the neighborhood being duplexes, townhome rows, etc. And yea, there was much more of a neighborhood like presence there than in any of the single-home type neighborhoods I've lived in. Something about all being pressed up against one another makes people more a part of eachother's lives or something, maybe? The apartment complex I live in now has a definite neighborhood feel to it, too. All the kids are always roaming around the parking lots and little park areas together. I rarely saw two kids together in my previous single-home neighborhood!