If you ask my mother, she’ll tell you I was born in the state of misery. I was, of course, born in the State of Missouri, but this verbal play summarizes my beginning and subsequent life events. The day before I was born, a plague of locusts descended upon our little house in Springfield, nearly scarring my mother into labor. At the hospital, my mother was forced to have an epidural, and my father was forced to clean her bedpan. As my mother went into labor, an audience of medical students joined the doctor to witness my prophetic delivery, much to her dismay. As my parents approached the nursery window to collect me and take me home after I was cleaned, they overheard the crowd whispering to one another like clandestine lovers “what’s wrong with that one, why is it so red?” “It looks like a demon child.” These hushed comments were directed towards the baby in the back, with a full head of dark curly hair and the skin of a sleeping Wisconsinite on the beaches of Cancun, badger red from thousands of scratches. The name on the front of the plastic bin read “Lauryn,” spelled with a y.
When the girl next door traversed the yard to inspect the new arrival and entered our house barefoot my mother asked “where are your shoes?” To this she replied “I ain’t got no shoes.” It was then my mother demanded we move. Two weeks later we were in Colorado, and thus marked the beginning of my colic. After several months I finally stopped crying and started to become mobile and vocal. It is said that the best liars believe their own lies, and I was my own most fervent disciple. My active imagination and subsequent mastery of speech allowed me to tell stories, which my mother classified as lies and dealt with accordingly. The only praise I received for my epic tales was a good grind of Irish Spring against my molars and by the time I was 7 I had probably consumed at least 5 bars of soap. Day-dreamy and prone to indulging in my reveries, at a young age I became a romantic. So mesmerized by my own inward thoughts, I became a Don Quixote-esque fool in my quests for adventure. The shriveled and blackened key I once placed in a light socket, believing it to be a portal which would open up behind a secret waterfall, still lies in a drawer in the front hall table. If it weren’t for the circuit-breaker, I’d probably be dead. But no amount of Irish spring, spankings, or time outs could extinguish my creativity, and instead forced me to recline deeper into my hallucinations. At school other children viewed me as spacey and odd, and the constant moving from place to place (6 times in the first 5 years of my life) made it difficult for me to form friendships. Plagued by a persistent social and physical awkwardness, things did not improve during my teens. My only consolation was the discovery of the blues. Albert King and I have much in common. Although his soulful black voice and rapturous guitar riffs are far beyond me, I too was born under a bad sign. Albert saw the upside to our misfortune, crooning “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” After him, I discovered a plethora of blues musicians, because if anything, misery loves company, and misery was my state of birth. My predilection to live in my head and an acquired “theory of mind” first sparked my interest in what was to become my major and inspire my life’s ambitions. What would it be like to live in someone else’s mind, to understand their world so completely, and become so immersed in it that the lines of whose world is whose blend more perfectly than my fantasies superimposed over my reality. If you hadn’t guessed, I’m a psychology major.
Like the magic portal which has yet to unlock itself in the light socket, books served as portals into other worlds for me, and I ventured through many, most especially the classics. I had often felt like a historical anachronism, misplaced in time. Why was I not alive in the time of Jane Austen, or of F Scott Fitzgerald; and if I was born just 20 years earlier I could have heard one of my favorite poets, John Cooper Clarke, recite before a Clash concert. Perhaps it was yet another consequence of being born under a bad sign. Through my paper journeys I discovered the most marvelous novel, whose title could also title my life: La Vida Es Sueno by Calderon. No English translation of this Spanish book could fully interpret the profound questions and philosophies it professed, and so I decided to learn Spanish, my second major. From this philosophy came others, and eventually I stumbled upon a missing piece of my soul, and my true purpose in life: animals. To say I harbored a deep love of animals would never do justice to the incessant war of begging and imploring I waged against my parents for a dog. I was apparently quite persuasive because we currently have adopted two dogs into our family, the two eternal loves of my life, Oliver and Murphy. My dim understanding and great awe of our fellow earthlings has led me to a simple conclusion: I love them, so I don’t eat them. From this an entire way of life enfolded, and it is my current belief that no one should eat creatures which have thoughts of their own. This realization has propelled me into animal activism, the most depressing and dismal struggle, a sure losing battle against the up-most unethical delicacy so ingrained on the palate of human culture that it will take generations to make right. It would be easier to just not care, but that is impossible for me. It’s things like this which make me wonder: a spiritual calling to higher ethics, or born under a bad sign?
My luck seemed to have reversed and inverted itself when I first met Jacob, the mysterious boy with tattoos and tight pants who told me I looked like Juliette Lewis and licked paint off my leg in art class. It was love at first lick. To have found my soul mate so early in life atones for all my previous tribulations. Withholding the tales that lie between these two events, I find myself in London, still walking down the road less traveled by, wondering what other journeys I might discover (or invent). Perhaps the time of my bad sign is over, or perhaps it never really was a bad sign to begin with.
