34 Random Facts About Myself

August 15, 2024February 18, 2024 valmanwillLeave a comment

Hello. I turned 34 last week. My age feels both accurate and inaccurate. Like I don’t feel 34 while sitting on my office chair with my feet tucked under my butt. But I guess I do feel 34 when I drive my minivan to pick up my kids from school. The heartburn and the back pain screams 34 haha.

Anyways, to celebrate my age I wrote 34 random facts about myself, one for each year I’ve been alive. You’re welcome.

I was born in the same exact hospital that I birthed my first child in.
Dinosaurs have been a special interest of mine ever since I was two.
One of my earliest memories is giving myself the chicken pox. I was jealous that my mom counted all of my sister’s chicken pox and so I snuck into her room when she was asleep and tried to “breathe in her germs” hahaha! Unfortunately, it worked and I got WAY sicker than she had been.
I wrote my first story at three or four. I drew it as a four panel picture on a Mac “Kids Pic” program. And it was about the chicken pox I gave myself lol. (“I got chicken pox”, “Then Mom gave me a bath”, “Then I felt better”, “The End”)
I’m the middle child in my family. I have a sister three years older than me and a brother five years younger than me.
I’ve always held my pencil “weird”. Resting on my middle finger instead of pinching it or whatever. My first grade teacher tried and tried to correct it but I still hold my pencil that way as an adult.
When I was in second grade I was obsessed with Santa’s reindeer. I wrote them each individual letters instead of Santa that year.
In third grade I purposely sat in the back of the class so I could write stories in my blue denim notebook all day instead of pay attention to the teacher. I filled that notebook and I still have it.
At 9, I briefly took acting classes but I couldn’t sing worth a dime so I never got cast in any significant roles
I started directing my own plays and performed them for all the other 5th grade classes. (This was the skit I had my friends do haha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfLdFZ4my9g )
The only time I got a ticket or a pink slip in school was when I snuck under the fence to play in the creek next to our elementary school. My mom wasn’t even mad about it. She was more mad about the girl who tattled on me.
In Jr. High, I had a red guinea pig named Joe.
At thirteen, I wrote, directed and starred in a play I put on for my local church. It was a comedy called, “The Foot.”
I was obsessed with the original Twilight Zone. I even threw a Twilight Zone party for my friends. That TV show would become a massive influence on my writing.
Took 4 years of French in secondary school because I liked this guy in my class. Can’t remember a single word and speak fluent Spanish now lol.
In high school, I wrote a full-length feature film with my friends. A low-budget student slasher. (What else?) It wasn’t very good or anything lol but it ended up being a creative catalyst for a lot of the kids who worked on that project, including me.
I got shingles my senior year. How does that even happen? Haha. The haunts of giving myself the chicken pox
One year I repeatedly got cast as a monkey in a few different plays. Type casting I guess.
I studied Classical Acting at Southern Utah University until I ran out of money and had to move back home.
One of my favorite hobbies when I was 20 was exploring abandoned buildings. One time the cops came and my friends and I hid ourselves inside an abandoned school. (oops)
I lived in various areas of Peru for a year and a half. Lima, Trujillo, Salaverry, and Neuvo Chimbote.
Twenty-two was one of the worst years of my whole life. Like the entire year. Birthday to birthday. Just horrific. I couldn’t think of a single good fact I wanted to say about this year. So I guess that’s my fact. Unlike the popular song at the time, I was not feeling 22 lol.
Coincidentally, twenty-three was one of the absolute best years of my life. Even at the time I called it “The Golden Year”. I ended up meeting my soul mate when I was 23.
I used to work in Accounts Receivable at a printer company and got in trouble for writing during work (Heh heh heh. It wasn’t funny to me at the time, but now it is.)
I left my job at the printer company and went back to school. In my Intro to Educational Psychology class, the professor said that “the things we chose to do in our free time as children reflects as close to our true selves as possible.” That’s the moment I realized how much story-telling has been a passion throughout my life.
When I was twenty-six, I began writing regularly and have not looked back since!
The first time I had ever set foot in the Phoenix area, was when I stepped off the plane to live here.
I found out my first story was going to be professionally published while I was in active labor with my second child.
At twenty-nine I had this life-changing Beatlemania phase that… never went away lol.
We moved into our first house the exact weekend that everything shut down for the pandemic.
I have three spectacular kids and I’m not just saying that. I really love each of those three people so dang much.
I published my first book on Amazon at thirty-two.
I got my first screen-writing credit at thirty-three.
At thirty-four, I still sit on my office chair with my feet tucked under my butt haha

Do I Remember the Emo Phase Wrong??

July 11, 2024July 12, 2024 valmanwillLeave a comment

I’ve seen so many nostalgic reels and memes for the early 2000s Emo phase and it genuinely got me questioning my memory. Like am I experiencing a mandela effect or something?? Because I feel like I’m remembering everything differently than everyone.

So, mostly the memes in question here are the ones that reference “The Holy Trinity” of Emo music: My Chemical Romance, Panic! At the Disco, and Fall Out Boy. And while I remember My Chemical Romance being decidedly “Emo music”, I remember all my emo friends listening to screamo. Like if someone had an emo style we joked that they listened to “Hawthorne Heights”. I remember Panic! At the Disco being very mainstream, and like the “preppy” kids were the ones walking the halls singing ‘Nine In the Afternoon’. But both Panic! and especially Fall Out Boy were considered ‘Alternative’ which was a whole different category of style.

And anyway that’s the whole other thing that I remember different. It seems that after twenty years we just categorized all 2000s teenagerdom into emo culture, but what I remember is us being very insistent at the time that they were all different styles.

True emo style was a way you could show the world that you were hardcore but sad. Stereotypically, Emo culture centered around self-harm. And everyone made a lot of yikes jokes about it. They wore black on black on black. Black box-dyed fringe, black eyeliner, black chunky skater shoes, black “girl pants” (because it took them forever to make skinny jeans for men). Kinda like old school ‘goths’, but what was super weird was you could still be a ‘goth’ and not be ‘emo’. Like trench coat vampire kid with black eyeliner was a goth not an emo. But if he suddenly cut deep-parting fringe and got a chunky metal studded belt we might be like, ‘oh, okay now he is.”

But there was an offshoot of all that, where you could still have mushroom hair and viper piercings but wear brightly colored skinny jeans instead. And that style we called “scene”. Even though they were the same cut and make as emo just in a different color pallet we were adamant that “scene kids” were a totally different thing. Scene Kids were the ones that were dying horizontal stripes in their hair and like sometimes they would wear racoon tails lol. I feel like they were the ones who popularized “rawr XD”. I also remember their music being totally different than “The Holy Trinity memes”. They also listened to screamo. But it wasn’t the “cut my wrists and black my eyes” emo songs. It was like totally unhinged random stuff. Like Hadouken! or Pierce the Veil or something.

AND THEN if you didn’t want to totally fry your hair off you could just dress ‘Alternative’ lol. (There were MANY ways to be non-conforming in the early 2000s, I promise.) And alternative kids were decidedly NOT emo. At all! Alternative kids wore random suit coats or ties over their graphic tees and like those newsboy caps. And a lot of times they had those black rimmed Patrick Stump glasses, which would later become a HUGE Hipster accessory. (Okay, I haven’t seen any nostalgic “hipster” memes. But that was such a thing in the early 2010s.)

I don’t know if this was just in my local circle or not, but there were a lot of alternative kids who were desperately trying to keep third wave ska music relevant. And some of us literally called our style “Ska”. Which was basically just alternative but with a lot of black and white checkered stuff. And we’d do that little “skank” dance thing lol.

There were also metal heads who were totally separate from all of the above, other than the fact that they too wore the big spikey belts and the chains attached to their wallets. But metalcore music was for sure not emo. Like Avenged Sevenfold or Bullet for My Valentine and stuff. System of a Down, too.

No matter which one you were though, you could shop at a Hot Topic in the early 2000’s.

In short, does all this technicality even matter? No. Do I have to be as snotty and particular as I was at sixteen? No, I do not. If the girl who grew up wearing Abercrombie polos wants to remember having an emo phase because she listened to Fall Out Boy on the radio, that’s totally valid! But listen, getting freakin’ old and seeing your high school experiences come up as vintage nostalgic memes kind of sucks. So, if I don’t get to tell young whippersnappers what it was like “BACK IN MY DAY” then what’s the fun in that?

So that’s it. History class is over. You can put Papa Roach on your iPod shuffle now and drink your Code Red Mountain Dew in the library.

We Have the Actual Worst Luck on Family Vacations

June 13, 2024February 14, 2024 valmanwillLeave a comment

I just want to have a nice family trip with my kids, is that so much to ask?

Y’all ever seen The Truman Show? The movie about a man who unknowingly grows up on a giant TV set and the only way they keep him from leaving the set is to stage all these preposterous disasters. Am I… Truman? Because for some reason the simulation is programmed to throw me the craziest vacation outcome every time. And I’m not talking about ‘Oh, we forgot to pack our toothbrushes. Whomp, whomp.’ I’m talking about like disgusting and horrifying health code violation stuff.

Traveling is already difficult with three teeny humans. Even though my kids are generally chill travel buddies, there is still a lot to consider when taking a vacation as a young family. So Daniel and I decided to try lowkey family trips now and save up for epic family vacations when they’re older. *Mommy needs a new pair of Disney cruises* But even with trying to do the most simple things the simulation was like NO! YOU CANNOT LEAVE THE MOVIE SET. GO BACK TO HOME SQUARE. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT 200 DOLLARS. DO NOT ATTEMPT ANY OTHER FAMILY FUN TIMES.

My oldest wanted to go camping, okay? So we came up with what we thought was a genius idea. We were like ‘Hey, what if we Airbnb’d a cabin a couple of hours North out of lava valley. And just pitched a tent in the backyard? That way we’ll have plumbing and a nice place for the baby to sleep. And when the boys inevitably get too scared to sleep in the tent, they can come inside and sleep on the beds.’ Brilliant. We choose a super cute cabin, reserve it for a couple of nights. Pick some activities to do nearby. And drive all the way up there.

NOTE. We did not have cell phone service as we drove through the woods to the cabin. An important detail that will bite us in the a$$ later.

We get to this cabin. Everything is so majestic and exciting. There was a literal family of elk walking through the yard. We input the code and step inside…

You ever smell a smell so weird it’s stuck in your memory forever? Well, there are three bad smells that are permanently stuck in my nose like that. 1. When I lived in Peru and the sewage pipe exploded underneath the street. 2. When I was first married, and I cooked a weird ground sausage recipe. And 3. The absolute sour onion trash smell of that little cabin.

It was so gross. And not only that, but there was bedding and pillows lying in a bundle on the floor. It was like… they hadn’t cleaned anything at all. So I called the Airbnb people to complain. COMPLETELY OUT OF MY MOUSEY NONCONFRONTATIONAL NORM. (I guess that’s what a weird smell will do to you). And just as I was explaining about the pillows on the floor the lady cut me off and was like-

“YOU’RE INSIDE? Get the hell out of there right now!”

Can you imagine anything worse coming from your Airbnb host? Then she was like:

“No one called you!?!”

“Well, we didn’t have service for the last couple of hours.”

“The cabin is full of bed bugs! We found them when we were trying to clean it for you guys.”

So yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep. We desperately tried to find another place to stay but everything was booked. Like it was a Podunk town in the middle of the woods. It had like one other hotel or something. And besides we were just icked out from the whole thing. Like we had been all over the infested cabin for like 20 minutes so we just drove the two hours home and tossed our clothes into the washer and had a family scrub down.

And anyway, you think that’s bad? That’s not even the half of our vacation stories.

You ever ignore LITERAL red flags before? Because I did! In my pretty weak defense, I have lived in land locked states my entire life. I’ve only been to the actual beach a handful of times ever. So yeah, okay, I SAW the red flag, up on the rocks or whatever. But I didn’t know that had anything to do with the beach / ocean. I kind of thought it meant don’t climb on these rocks or something.

We went to San Diego. I had never been before and it’s only a five hour drive from us. I have always, always wanted to visit Hotel del Coronado. It’s where my favorite author based his time travel novel, it’s where one of my favorite films were made and it’s also deliciously haunted (I think it inspired a short story or two from Stephen King). Just a very me destination.

We decided we weren’t going to stay at the hotel, we were just going to walk through what we could and then play at the beach there. (Because we’re saving up for Perfect Day at CoCoCay, alright? No judgies.) Now, I would just like to say that we’re not entirely stupid. Or at least we’re not alone in stupidity. Because there were SEVERAL other families on this beach okay. Like enough that it looked like a totally normal beach experience. Other than a red flag up on the rocks and a tiny non conspicuous sign wayyyy up at the hotel that we wouldn’t even see until later that evening, there was no reason for us to think anything was wrong.

Um, so we played at that beach for actual hours. Like, crawling around in the water and digging in the wet sand and everything.

And then FINALLY a lifeguard came by on a megaphone to say, “Hey, just a reminder, this part of the beach is closed today, due to a sewage contamination issue. So you probably don’t want to be in the water over here.”

We had been in there for hours. HOURS. No one said sh*t. As in, no one told us about the sh*t. Why didn’t they say anything?? Did they honestly think that we knew and just didn’t care? That we were cool letting our babies crawl through poop sludge all day? Like obviously several families were just as clueless as us. Del! Rope that poopoo area off! Megaphone that message more than once a day!

So there we go again. Stripping our swimsuits off into trash bags and having ANOTHER family scrub down.

Anyway. That’s it. That’s my oopsie poop-sea story.

Comment below your worst family vacation story. Genuinely curious if it’s possible to get any worse than bed bugs and sewage contamination haha.