My Life in Pictures: The White Room [dun dun DUN!]

Lucky for us, I've got a story to draw about today! It is short and sweet and sure to make you believe that I am a dork.

The time when I legitimately thought I was going to die.

My family owns a beach house here along the Oregon coast. It is a place of refuge from the drudgery of daily life and the noises of suburbia/city life. The Ericksen's Beach Abode houses family reunion, birthday celebrations, and even a Christmas morning or two. We have created many memories and look forward to all of the memories our family will make in the future. People come from all around America to also take refuge and enjoy what our little beach home has to offer.

However, I am slightly scared of sleeping there.

My life is such so that I had to get used to sleeping in noisy situations. Oldest child, roommates, traveling, living next to a busy road, etc. In fact, I now can only sleep with background noise. I can't be the last person to go to bed because it's too quiet in my apartment/house. I sleep with the window open so that I hear the cars/dogs/nature noises. I take comfort in people snoring in the next room over. This is my problem with our peaceful beach house. It's a little too quiet for this city girl. No cars. Well-insulated walls. Quiet neighbors. Even with the window open at night, it is silent. That gets into my head and I can't sleep at the beach house. I look forward to big family reunions because I get to share a room with someone. Get the picture? If not, I drew some for us.

A couple of trips ago, I begged my sister and mom to let me sleep with them, but they are those weird people who like the solitude and silence of sleeping in the beach house. Weirdos.
So I sucked it up and charged my iPod, ready to create noise and sleep like a big girl all by myself in the White Room (it's called that because white people like to name everything).  The White Room is the second scariest room in the beach house, next to the Red Room, which is freaky just in its name, but that's for another post.
Here is what normal people see when they see the White Room:

And here's how I see it: 

The first night, I'm delaying my sleepless night by reading and following my family around as they get ready for bed, which is their favorite activity to do with me. I finally decide that it's time for bed and should stop annoying hanging out with my family, so I get ready for bed, which includes making a sweep of the room to make sure there are no murderers. You know, like every normal adult does. I'm half-bracing myself to see something in one of the nooks of the room, so you can imagine what would happen if I were to actually see something. 

Well while I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, my loving mom and sister, who know of my fears and heighten them by forcing me to sleep by myself, decide to not only make me sleep in the White Room, but then think it would be funny to hide in my closet. So I come back from the bathroom, make my sweep, then get to the closet. I open the closet, and this is what I see:

I scream bloody murder, scramble like a skittish cat who can't get traction on the wooden floors, and bolt out of the room. I collapse onto my mom's bed, in tears, heart racing. My grandpa stumbles into the room, still working on his pants, ready to kill the person who could possibly make me scream like that. By now, I realize that the two demons in my closet were actually my super supportive mother and sister and so I start to calm down. 

This is what they claimed they did:

..but we all know how it really went down.

Needless to say, I slept in my sister's room that night.

you make me feel like I'm living a teenage dream

My family has a crawl space storage underneath the house.  The summer before the fall when I left for college, my parents reminded me that my brother was in need of my room when I moved out, so I had to not only pack for school, but pack up my entire room.  I was OK with that because I was ready to move out and move on.  My crap is now in that crawl space under the house.  Now that I have myself and my things all in one place, I decided to organize my things yesterday.  WOW what a walk down memory lane!!!! T-shirts from girls' camps, knick knacks from grandma throughout the years, books.  I found my tassel from when I graduated high school and my senior year yearbook.  And ooohhh the pictures. Pictures, pictures, pictures.  But one thing that made me laugh out loud was finding my old CDs and one CD in particular.

Let's go back to the seventeen-year-old Michelle.  Involved heavily with the music department at Tualatin High School: the pit in a musical, top instrumental ensemble of the school, Encore outside of school, piano competitions, etc etc.  In wind ensemble and we were performing a piece where, instead of my usual spot in the front with the flutes, I got to sit at the piano near the trombones in the back.  I liked this set-up because I got to flirt with the boy who played stand-up bass, who also sat near the back with the trombones.  I thought he was the cutest boy in the band and, therefore, I didn't have a chance.  Or so I thought.  I found out later that he would move the piano closer to him before class started so that we could talk during rehearsal.
A few months and a band trip later, I was convinced he was in to me, too.  But he was moving SOOO SLOWLYYY and I was getting to the point where I was like, ok dude let's do this thing.  We had gone out for the first time a few months earlier after we discovered that we both were craving ice cream at the exact moment while we were chatting on MySpace (may it RIP...).  Since our ice cream trip, we had established a tradition of watching "The Office" each week.
One week, he turned the TV off at the end of an episode and turned to face me on the couch.  That night, I (finally) had my first kiss and left my first boyfriend's house.  I was smitten and boyyy did he make me feel soooo good.  Nearly every time I saw him, he would call me beautiful or cute.  I would sometimes catch him looking at me and he would say something like: "Sorry, I just really like you."  I mean, easy on the cheese, nacho man!  But I loved it and I loved him.
To top it off, he was in a band.  Seriously, every girl's dream.  To this day, I really think he's a great musician--that's my unbiased opinion.  I was his little local band "groupie."  I went to all of his shows and hung out with the bands afterwards at Shari's.  He would introduce me to the other cool musicians as his girlfriend and would not be ashamed to kiss me in front of them.  After school, I would go to his house and he would sing to me and we would play guitar hero.  His band, Finding Lenny, never took off after high school (or so I think), but they saved up and carved out a record.  I still remember the day he showed me the album for the first time and he said, "Read the 'thank yous' section."  It reads: "I thank...Mom, Dad, and Rachel for their love and support, my girlfriend Michelle, our families, Jon Foreman, and Matthew Thiessen."  Guys, I beat Jon Foreman and Matthew Thiessen and that's a big deal in our music world!!!
Smitten.
This brings me back to my day in the crawl space.  I laughed when I re-discovered my eclectic taste in music, particularly in high school.  I also laughed with glee because I found my copy of "Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times," by Finding Lenny.  As I re-uploaded the CD (I deleted the CD soon after this relationship ended because my dramatic teenaged self was too torn up to just hear his voice!), I remembered the times at Shari's, the weekends when I would wait until the last possible moment to leave his house before I was too late for curfew, the lunch dates.
You were my teenage dream.