ode to athena

athena decrime aka decrizzle aka amy smith has been a part of my life since 2005.

we met when i tried out for the windy city rollers. she was one of the first people to talk to me at the recruitment event and she hand picked me from about 30ish "skater tots" to be a part of her team.
she captained me for 3 years and i guess we started to get close which is par the course when you are around someone for 4-5 days out of every week.

i don't know what the turning point was though, where we went from being skating buddies to real life friends. it was probably when we started taking trips together for travel team about two years ago and realized that we were really the only people we could stand being around in confined quarters. whatever it was that made that friendship blossom, she is now one of my best friends and someone i would do anything for.

this year has seen it's share of ups and downs for us and somehow we have weathered all the storms. in all honesty i'm thankful because i'm not sure what i'd do if she wasn't around.

no one would really understand how she lights up my life but...
things like telling me i IM like i talk...thus making me uncontrollably laugh like she always does...
or indulging me when i'm having moments of mental clarity
listening to all my bullshit and giving me advice that only a black woman living in a white woman's body could lay down
telling me i'm prettier and meaning every word of it
saying things like "her hair looks like a weave" and not thinking twice cause she knows it will make me smile

as you can tell a true friend in ever sense of the word

she's smart, beautiful, witty, hilarious, dependable, honest, hardworking, dedicated and more fun than almost anyone else i know...

i'm not even doing her justice here but you'd have to be lucky enough to know her to know exactly how amazing she is

<3

phone fun

11.29 handlebar breakfast intensity

11.28 gabe doesn't like pictures

11.28 sophie makes a bed

11.21 sophie loves the playground!

11.20 kai time = best birthday present ever

ramirez jr.

park, ice cream, a killer wipe out and a bumped head = a good friday

so that's where she gets it

when i was really young...toddler age...i used to take showers with my parents
they used to switch off and on who got to clean me each day and that seemed to save them lots of time when getting ready in the morning...
my mom told me that it worked for awhile, until one day i pointed to my dad and enthusiastically called out "what's that?"
what that was...was the end of showers with my dad

so as adolescence rolled around, my dad no longer lived with us but not much had changed around the house...

nudity was sort of a free for all...walking around naked in my house was pretty commonplace...shutting the door when using the bathroom or taking a shower was deemed unnecessary, as well as some sort of punishment, as you were left with no air circulation

as i grew older i used to have questions about it...talking to friends I sort of didn't understand why other people had no idea what their mom's boobs looked like...let alone why when it was just them with their families, they shut the door when they had to pee...

i guess it would have been different had my dad lived with us or i had siblings...then there would have been boundaries...

i used to attribute the lack of "nudewareness" to my mom being a euro...but upon further investigation, it turns out that my grandmother, the OG EURO, used to stroll around nude at their house all the time...completely undaunted by any social taboos that might have followed here in the states.

as i got older and my boyfriends got older, sleeping over people's houses became a total crap shoot to what to do.

although i never got many complaints about it being 2 in the afternoon and me watching episodes of Law and Order in the buff, when it came to peeing, i often got a mix bag when it came to needing to shut the door or not...

when i moved out of my house the situations became even more restrictive...even walking around in my bra and underwear wasn't an option...i often yearned for opportunities to run around the house naked/semi clothed without anyone noticing...

when opportunities arose (and there were few, seeing as at one place I had 3 roommates and at the other i lived with a non-local) i would take full advantage! No one could make me shut the door to pee, no one could make me close the door to that hot steamy bathroom when i showered and they definitely couldn't make me towel dry...air drying is so much more satisfying!

but when i moved back home, a lot of what i thought was normal had changed. i had lived on my own for a couple of years and started to develop the same sort of ideas about nudity as everyone else. funny thing is, NOTHING had changed here...my mom still adhered to the lane/ramirez rules of old and freely walked around like it was 1990!

for a while i got really uncomfortable...not understanding what her problem was...i mean for god's sake, i'm 25...you could put on a bra! we even had arguments over it...me pressing the issue that i had grown too old to see her butt and that i didn't yet need to know how my body was going to progress as a menopausal adult.

then of course i got to thinking...thinking that the whole world had screwed up this really awesome thing i had going in my house...

what the world is missing out on by their fear and embarrassment is having a really open relationship with the people they care about. i'm not suggesting that leaving the door open when you pee is going to get you a heart to heart, but knowing that i'm that comfortable with someone, comfortable enough at age 25 to walk the hallways of my house nude tells me i can tell my mother anything.

she doesn't flinch when i tell her to look at my boob cause i notice what appears to be a birthmark i never saw before...she doesn't get all weird cause it's my boob...she's seen em before...and when she asks me if she looks weird naked cause she's worried about dating again, i don't think twice about reassuring her...

i don't know...maybe the meaning is lost and i can't put it into words...but when it comes down to it...this is who i am...and as i've found out many times before...you can't change it...you just embrace it...