The Middle Kingdom

We have just recently cleared out the room in the middle of the house that used to be my step-dad’s office, (thank god, it was a nightmare in there) and dubbed it: The Den. My family used to be so ghetto. We used to hide our small, boxy television set in the linen closet and when we wanted to watch a movie, one of us would have to drag it out of the closet, find the dvd player which always seemed to change location, and set it on a chair in front of our couch while the organic popcorn was popping in the distance. Pretty soon the old, boxy “T.V.” broke down as well as the dvd player and we started to watch movies on one of the family laptops. The screen being not all that much different in size as the old T.V.

This past year, my mother and step-dad decided that we would be slightly less “ghetto” while I was off at boarding school having the time of my life. (Not sarcastic) They bought something that surprised me so much that I just didn’t know what to say. 
A new television. A FLAT SCREEN TELEVISION. WHAT”S UP WITH THAT??!! When did we become modern? When did be become “normal”? When did we become the sort of family that owned a television that didn’t come from the caveman days?? I didn’t know how I felt about this. I didn’t know if this was a good thing that we were now so modern and tech-y. I was weirded out to the max. But then, when we started to watch movies again I realized this: We were still keeping our (FLAT SCREEN) television in our linen closet… Did this make us more weird, or less? It was quite hard to tell. 

This went on all summer and when friends came over I would drag the huge thing into my room and it was weird. We were those weird people that bought a fancy, nice, relatively expensive television and were ashamed of it.

 Now… Now that Peter, my step-dad is out of the middle room, my mom decided that a change was going to happen: We were going to be (RELATIVELY) normal. It was a shock when she transformed the room into a den with a nice futon, a desk, lamps, flowers, and of course, the television. Although, the television is hidden away in a huge wooden piece of furniture like they have in hotel rooms, it’s better. My friends were surprised by how normal our new situation is. So now it’s much easier to sit down with our bowl of ridiculously organic popcorn and watch a good movie. In our Middle Kingdom.

Like normal people?