I've been here a couple weeks. I've read your posts and made a couple of my own. Guess I'll introduce myself finally.

I guess a little about myself, huh? I was born in Moscow in the mid eighties. I lived there until I was 10. I remember the nineties. Basically, if you grew up in America in the early eighties, we had the same toys. Except my slinky made me the cool kid on the block for about three months.

I lived in more or less a three bedroom condo on the 9th floor with my parents, my moms parents and her brother. We weren't poor, we weren't rich. This is just how people lived. Every friend I had, and all the friends my parents had were in this same living arrangement. I don't remember a single person who was just living alone doing their thing.

Anyway, my days were filled with running around Moscow unsupervised. I had all the public transportation routes memorized. At the age of seven I would routinely take myself to the aquarium. I just had to pay attention and get off the trolleybus at the right stop to hop onto the next one. Same for the way home. No one ever questioned if I was lost or what the hell I was up to. Imagine a seven year old in New York riding the subways striking up conversations with winos.

Other days I would try to sneak a little piece of meat outside to give to one of the stray dogs. There were always a couple strays hanging out in the neighborhood. Give one a piece of sausage and a couple scratches behind the ear and you had a pet for the day.

My best friend lived on the 2nd floor of the same building. We figured out how to open the door to the roof early on and would spend hours making paper airplanes out of old newspapers and watching them fly down. I swear, one of mine caught an updraft once and never came back down, we just lost sight of it. My friend figured it was going to space to dock with MIR.

My father was an electrical engineer back in Russia. My mother was a Russian history teacher. Not that it really mattered who you were. Everyone was the equivalent of lower middle class, lifestyle wise. They worked hard, had very little to show for it, and any day it seemed the country would collapse on itself.

My father had enough. He heard about life in America. The smarter you are and the harder you work, the more you have and the easier life is. That alone was probably the reason for the big move. Summer of 1996 my father, mother and myself flew to America.

One of my dads friends made the move about a year earlier and set us up with a room to rent on the south side of Chicago. We rented pretty much a bedroom and bathroom from an old grumpy Polish dude. We shared his kitchen and living room. It was not the best, but my dads friend explained it was like square one. Get a job, and get out. South side of Chicago in the mid 90s was not the place to be.

I went from having free reign of Moscow, to not being able to go outside alone in America. I remember not really wanting to move in the first place, and now I had no freedom. I understand now, since south side of Chicago is still pretty much the same. Oh, it did get a cute nickname though. Chiraq.

My father gritted his teeth and churned out a couple paychecks. All three of us would watch VHS tapes that taught basic English that our grumpy Polish landlord let us borrow. After a couple months my father bought a rusty beat up 1985 Ford Thunderbird and we moved into our own 2 bedroom 1 bathroom apartment in the west suburbs. Much better than square one.

The leash loosened up a little and I was once again able to enjoy most freedoms I had back in Russia. It seemed my mom was a little weary of a new country. Somehow Russia was safe, but America, she didn't trust with her child. Either way, in either country, no one lured me into the sex trade with candy and puppies.

After high school I gave college a try. Meh. Then I spun my wheels around Illinois and Wisconsin. Getting in trouble here and there for typical teen and early 20s behavior. Had a lot of odd jobs. Pretty much everything that only requires a high school diploma. Cook, waiter, lifeguard, waiter, cab driver, electricians apprentice, furniture builder, waiter, weed dealer, weed grower, weed smuggler, poker player, manager, shift supervisor, camp counselor, none of these are in any particular order. Weed dealer should be sprinkled in there more times than waiter though.

Dicking around didn't seem to bother me. Worst case scenario, I would find myself homeless. Living in my car because I was pretty terrible with money when I tried to make it without selling or growing weed. All that meant was I had to make one phone call. My trusty drug dealer would front me a quarter pound of weed. Then I would send a text to every one of my friends and other dealers who bought from me. "Back at it, hit me up!"

You'd be surprised how quickly you can go from sleeping in your car for a week to saying "fuck it, let's do it." to renting a motel room for the week later that night just to have somewhere to sleep, to letting one of your friends rent a bedroom for the next month, to moving back into a house with a first last and security deposit, your dealer long paid back and money in the bank.

Eventually I got tired of doing circles and seemingly starting over every 6 months. I would feel like I was pushing my luck. Sometimes I would have too close a call with the police. So I would stop selling and smoking altogether. I'd have some money saved, and would tell myself I could try doing something I enjoy for a living and even if it doesn't pay the best, I can get by for a while. However, I could downshift everything except my spending. The money I had saved dried up, I couldn't find a real job that would pay rent bills and put food in my gut. Back to being behind on rent.

As fun as selling was most of the time, just running around, having people over, smoking whenever and however much I wanted, there were a couple times I really hated going back to it. Probably the last two or three times. I really wanted to be normal. Girls wanted to party with someone like me, but no decent nice girl would want a relationship with me. If a girl legitimately pursued me, I would think she was retarded for wanting to be with a drug dealer.

It took a year or two to retrain myself how to handle money. Every once in a while I still look at a weeks paycheck and think how I would, make and spend that much in a single hour, on some random Tuesday afternoon.

Sometimes I would literally be walking up to my manager thinking of telling him he's a punk ass bitch and he can shove my job up his ass. Instead of doing that and then going back to selling, I would walk past him, go to the bathroom, look in the mirror and tell myself, "Yeah fuck that guy, but this is normal, you wanted normal, this is it. People hate their bosses, and their bosses are dicks, but they show up to work everyday and get chewed out to make ends meet."

That went on for a while. It was hard to swallow my pride and buckle down. Eventually it got easier. Like I said, retrained myself. Got better at dealing with shit managers. Kept telling myself money is just a number. Everyone has a number they have to get every week, two weeks, every month, every year. Doesn't matter how hard or long you have to work for it. You just have to make what you say you need.

I'm better with money now. I don't stress about the fact that there are easier ways to make it. I have not been homeless a single night in over 6 years. I have not sold a gram of weed in 5 years. I have not smoked weed in over a year. I don't frown upon, hate or judge anyone who does what I did. That shit is fun, I get it. If you're having a good time, my story wont even be a speed bump. I'm just saying I had to cut it out because my wants and desires changed. I can't have and be what I want today and do the same shit I did ten years ago.

Isn't it crazy I started this post with fun little stories about seven year old me in Russia?