Life's Story
Sep. 13th, 2005 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walbournA recent post by a friend reminded me that a lot of people will find or read this journal and have no idea who the hell I am. I also doubt 99.9% of them will have the interest to read 2+ years of posts. Even if they did, I only started this journal at the age of 33, and while I strive to be honest with things I put here I'm not treating this thing as a true diary. Many aspects of my life are opaque to the reader here, and perhaps that is for the best.
Still, a background story might be interesting, or at least informative.
I was born in Texas--in Austin in fact--but since my father was career Air Force (eventually trained as a Physician's Assistant) we moved around a fair amount. From age 1 to age 5 we were stationed in Tokyo, where my brother, Todd, was born. Then we went to Wichita Falls, Texas for 4 years, Fort Worth for a year, back to Wichita Falls for another 5 years, then San Antonio where I went to high school.
I grew up your basic day-care/latch-key kid. Lonely, intellectual, a bit distant. Because of the regular moves (happening in the middle of the school year for a few of them), the isolation of 'on-base' life, and a smart-mouth I tended to have a very small circle of friends. Mostly those boys that either were themselves displaced and new, or often the trouble-makers. I had a series of slightly sociopathic male best-friends that culminated I think in a bit of distance between me and other men--certainly a lack of trust and a distaste for typical male behavior.
Another result of the constant moving was that I never really got into a 'track' at school. I bounced between the regular's and honor's classes, sometimes missing some specific requirement due to the differences in school programs. In high school I finally got primarily into honor's track classes, which actually challenged me enough to make me work to learn something. I still stayed in a few regular's classes, and could do nothing and get a high B or low A. This meant I missed the grooming honor's kids got for the PSAT, and the scholarship money that followed, but did take a lot of Advanced Placement/Honors classes in English, Computer Science, and Chemistry. My arithmetic skills were pretty weak as well, having nearly failed 7th grade math. Mostly it came down to not thinking memorizing multiplication tables was a valid use of one's time, particularly when a computer could do it trivially.
My brother and I were very different growing up; we had a strong sibling rivalry and dislike for one another as 'friends' from the start. He was the 'perfect child', and I suffered all the stumbling of a first-child for young parents. And I say he was the 'perfect kid' with absolutely no sarcasm. He really was the perfect child. While I was a good student, he was a driven student and in fact never got a grade less than A on anything starting in 6th grade. He echoed my father's narrow world view, even to the point of shocking him at one point in his venom towards those at the edges of society. For the record, he's a nice guy after some exposure to the wider world, sleep depravation at the university, picking a career he loved over his early love of money, and realizing that he was in fact gay.
I was never close to my father, and my mother and I locked horns a lot. Through a combination of personality conflicts between us, my mom's career (she is a Registered Nurse and both my parent's worked full-time jobs) causing her to be overstressed, and some hormonal medical conditions, there were some damn ugly verbal fights between us. It didn't help that mom's mother is in fact a crazy germophobe. The greatest source of friction in our house was the required massive house-cleaning effort every two-three weeks. Dad became really good at cleaning a kitchen for 2-3 hours in a row. I can say that after I moved out, they started hiring a maid and things were much smoother in the house.
While my brother excelled at everything, I was your more typical geek. Science was my best subject, and was pretty good at doing the minimum best-effort in my other classes. I despised gym. My favorite toys as a young kid were an erector-set, legos, a chemistry set, and a series of electronic 100-in-1 kits. At age 9, I was shown an Apple ][ by a friend-of-the-family, and I was entranced. I went to a computer programming course in basic, and at age 11 my parents bought my first computer: an Atari 800. The majority of my childhood after that was spent immersing myself in the world of computer technology. My best friend at age 14 was Bill, a guy in his mid-20s I met and chatted with at the San Antonio Atari User's Group on a regular basis. We collaborated on a number of programming projects over my high-school years, and he and his wife Meg (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
maggiemaepisces) were a source of support in a fairly estranged situation with my parents.
My other passion was Scouting. My brother was in the Club Scouts, but I frankly thought the whole thing was stupid. A badge for learning to flip? Feh. My dad took me out to see some Boy Scouts camping at age 11, and I was hooked. I joined up, became an overly driven patrol leader, and made it through the ranks to Life (one before Eagle) in minimum time. Then the Scout Master of my troop was arrested for child molestation--which looking back on it as an adult, I was not abused personally but I have no trouble believing it was true given some of the situations. We moved shortly there-after to San Antonio, and I joined a new troop. I lost interest until we started a High Adventure Explorer Post for the older kids. I met my first girlfriend, Trina, there because it was a co-ed group. In fact, I think I could have met my second girlfriend there too except I was stupid, but that's likely a story for another time. Let's just say that I established a pattern of emotional devotion in long-distance relationships that only strengthened already strong depressive tendencies. Anyhow, I eventually got around to finishing my Eagle badge largely motivated by the desire to work at Philmont Scouting Ranch--which basically required all males applying have an Eagle badge--in the hopes of seeing said long-distance first-girlfriend again for the summer. It was naturally a catastrophe, but the Philmont experience was a good lesson in some hard facts in life.
As I approached graduation from high-school, my alienation from my parents was growing extremely painful. I had access to loans to attend collage and some small support directly from my parents, but for the first year or two I would have to live at home. Lots of the usual arguments, and the 'you will get a job' ultimatum. Over the years, I had spent more and more time with Bill & Meg. They offered me a place to live while going to school in San Antonio, and one night I basically snuck out. I still recall my mom's bitterness over the issue 4 years later at college graduation. Anyhow, the first year at University of Texas at San Antonio was reasonably productive. Bill, Meg, and I were heavily involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and we spent a lot of weekends at events.
Lots of stuff happened, none of which I really want to get into detail about--saoba can attest to the good times, and far too many of the bad times of those years--, but by the end of the year Bill & Meg moved to Houston, split up, and I tried to move to Houston to live with a girlfriend I had met going to University of Houston. By 'tried' I mean I moved, couldn't find work or any way to afford to live with her, and after a few weeks moved back to live with my folks--who graciously bailed me out. We broke up in the process, although as often happened I wasn't really informed until some weeks later.
So I got a job, did another semester of work at UTSA, meet and eventually broke-up with another girl--this one certified crazy as she had checked herself in and moved to Anaheim with her father near the end of the semester--, and I finally made it to University of Texas at Austin living in the dorm. UT was great, the dorm life suited me well, I met a lot of life-long friends there (onyxlynxx, hackard, happytester, hdan, juliarandolph & danamongden, and roninjedi among them).
Shortly after moving to Austin I started datingappleang. When we graduated, we moved in together and we got married in 1994. I lived nearly a decade of my life with Angela, and for a long time we were best-friends. I introduced her to the Texas Ren Fair, the SCA, and many of my friends. She introduced me to Melissa Etheridge (starting a life-long obsession with women's music), the life of a Rocky Horror cast member (which thankfully only lasted a few years), and we shared a philosophical bond in a love of science, paganistic religious views, and the theory of polyamory. I honestly miss a lot of those years, the familiarity and sense of companionship, the close-knit bond of friendships hard-fought, and hard-won.
I started my full-time employment career working at Vibrant Graphics, a company co-owned by a friend from college,danamongden. I had promised myself to go back to get a masters at some point if I could, and Vibrant Graphics offered to pay so I started a master of science program part-time. After a few years there, I started a game company, Charybdis Enterprises, with another friend, hdan, his wife Christy, and our friend Tim. Going to graduate school part-time, and working full-time as a owner of a small business, were sources of immense stress and uncertainty for me and appleang throughout the mid to late 90s.
Our best friends for many of those years wereonyxlynx and Scott. We spent so much time together, we hardly saw anyone else. We briefly tried the 'open relationship dating' thing with one-another, which ended badly. They drifted out of our lives for many years after that, only to resurface when Kirby and Scott broke-up. We kinda repeated the pattern with a friend from Angela's work at the time (she worked at Bookstop and then Barnes & Noble for a good long while), Kim, and her husband Greg. For a lot of reasons, I fell for Kim really hard. Unreasonably, stupidly hard. It was a tumultuous relationships, and juggling so many things I was bound to stumble. It all started to fall apart when Kim broke things off, she and Greg eventually split, and after a few months of dating again she called it quits.
A deep depression followed that consumed all my joy, and passion for years to follow. Angela and I separated in early 98. Charybdis had been on the brink for years, and we finally shut it down in late 98 although we did manage to pull out a third project that cleaned up all the debts while we got out of our lease obligations. I finished graduate school with a whimper in 2000--I ended up begging a C for an incomplete to graduate. I finally felt I had the energy to start therapy, which was reasonably productive for a year or two. During that time I worked for a company called Kinesoft Development until they shutdown in 2001. As a distraction and a way to focus my tendencies to mental obsession on pointless things, I started doing a lot of RPGA gaming, a hobby which brought me a lot of friendships and good times over the fairly isolated years since my divorce and move to Seattle.
Around then, I meet Andrea, a cute, dark-haired PhD chemist finishing up at UT. We dated for 4 months before she moved to Portland to work for Intel, a job she had accepted before we started dating. Working in the game industry greatly limited my choices, so the closest I could manage was Seattle. I got a job offer from Monolith, accepted it with a relocation offer, and the job was rescinded due to layoffs. My recruiter forced them into finishing the relocation, and I moved here anyhow in the hopes of finding work. Frankly, I also hoped to finally put behind the ghost of the woman I still missed day-in, day-out. By then Kim and I had a friendship burdened by one-sided love, and it twisted us both. She felt sorrow and regret over breaking my heart, and I had a broken heart that was inconsolable. All the trust and connection I valued so much had been destroyed, and no doubt she thought her choices were for the best.
I did eventually find an excellent job working for Beep Industries doing a fun little Xbox title, Voodoo Vince. Andrea couldn't take the long-distance thing after about 8 months--during which time I think I visited her 14 weekends and she came up to Seattle twice--, and staged as dramatic and messy a break-up as possible. I don't think it would have hurt quite so much if it hadn't left me feeling like a relationship based on honest communication had been painted with the brush of every bad relationship she had ever had in her past leading up to me. I'm sure it didn't help that she has a fundamental belief in being unlovable thanks to her own 'family of origin' issues. The obvious effect Kim had on me in the months leading up to the move didn't help. Not having moved to Portland no matter the consequences to be with her didn't help--never mind that her couch was already occupied at the time byroyalbananafish. Still, I'm grateful to her for giving me something concrete to work in the future for during the difficult choice to pull up a decade of roots and move 2300 miles to a town where I knew no one, rather than continuing to languish in the pains of the past.
After Beep finished Vince and had to let go of everyone, I moved on to Sierra, who in turned shutdown, and I landed my current job at Microsoft--the game industry is a bitch. I still have "Kim issues" to this day, but once I settled in to my new life in Seattle it's really just been a label for my fear of living alone the rest of my life. Still, I've got all the debt from those messy years paid off, a rewarding job, and a handful of close friends here in a place I feel is home. I just wish I didn't feel like I was running out of time to find a nice alternative girl who (a) gets me and we 'click' and (b) is actually available and interested in building a life with me.
Updated: Enhanced with some links and a few minor edits.
Still, a background story might be interesting, or at least informative.
I was born in Texas--in Austin in fact--but since my father was career Air Force (eventually trained as a Physician's Assistant) we moved around a fair amount. From age 1 to age 5 we were stationed in Tokyo, where my brother, Todd, was born. Then we went to Wichita Falls, Texas for 4 years, Fort Worth for a year, back to Wichita Falls for another 5 years, then San Antonio where I went to high school.
I grew up your basic day-care/latch-key kid. Lonely, intellectual, a bit distant. Because of the regular moves (happening in the middle of the school year for a few of them), the isolation of 'on-base' life, and a smart-mouth I tended to have a very small circle of friends. Mostly those boys that either were themselves displaced and new, or often the trouble-makers. I had a series of slightly sociopathic male best-friends that culminated I think in a bit of distance between me and other men--certainly a lack of trust and a distaste for typical male behavior.
Another result of the constant moving was that I never really got into a 'track' at school. I bounced between the regular's and honor's classes, sometimes missing some specific requirement due to the differences in school programs. In high school I finally got primarily into honor's track classes, which actually challenged me enough to make me work to learn something. I still stayed in a few regular's classes, and could do nothing and get a high B or low A. This meant I missed the grooming honor's kids got for the PSAT, and the scholarship money that followed, but did take a lot of Advanced Placement/Honors classes in English, Computer Science, and Chemistry. My arithmetic skills were pretty weak as well, having nearly failed 7th grade math. Mostly it came down to not thinking memorizing multiplication tables was a valid use of one's time, particularly when a computer could do it trivially.
My brother and I were very different growing up; we had a strong sibling rivalry and dislike for one another as 'friends' from the start. He was the 'perfect child', and I suffered all the stumbling of a first-child for young parents. And I say he was the 'perfect kid' with absolutely no sarcasm. He really was the perfect child. While I was a good student, he was a driven student and in fact never got a grade less than A on anything starting in 6th grade. He echoed my father's narrow world view, even to the point of shocking him at one point in his venom towards those at the edges of society. For the record, he's a nice guy after some exposure to the wider world, sleep depravation at the university, picking a career he loved over his early love of money, and realizing that he was in fact gay.
I was never close to my father, and my mother and I locked horns a lot. Through a combination of personality conflicts between us, my mom's career (she is a Registered Nurse and both my parent's worked full-time jobs) causing her to be overstressed, and some hormonal medical conditions, there were some damn ugly verbal fights between us. It didn't help that mom's mother is in fact a crazy germophobe. The greatest source of friction in our house was the required massive house-cleaning effort every two-three weeks. Dad became really good at cleaning a kitchen for 2-3 hours in a row. I can say that after I moved out, they started hiring a maid and things were much smoother in the house.
While my brother excelled at everything, I was your more typical geek. Science was my best subject, and was pretty good at doing the minimum best-effort in my other classes. I despised gym. My favorite toys as a young kid were an erector-set, legos, a chemistry set, and a series of electronic 100-in-1 kits. At age 9, I was shown an Apple ][ by a friend-of-the-family, and I was entranced. I went to a computer programming course in basic, and at age 11 my parents bought my first computer: an Atari 800. The majority of my childhood after that was spent immersing myself in the world of computer technology. My best friend at age 14 was Bill, a guy in his mid-20s I met and chatted with at the San Antonio Atari User's Group on a regular basis. We collaborated on a number of programming projects over my high-school years, and he and his wife Meg (
maggiemaepisces) were a source of support in a fairly estranged situation with my parents.My other passion was Scouting. My brother was in the Club Scouts, but I frankly thought the whole thing was stupid. A badge for learning to flip? Feh. My dad took me out to see some Boy Scouts camping at age 11, and I was hooked. I joined up, became an overly driven patrol leader, and made it through the ranks to Life (one before Eagle) in minimum time. Then the Scout Master of my troop was arrested for child molestation--which looking back on it as an adult, I was not abused personally but I have no trouble believing it was true given some of the situations. We moved shortly there-after to San Antonio, and I joined a new troop. I lost interest until we started a High Adventure Explorer Post for the older kids. I met my first girlfriend, Trina, there because it was a co-ed group. In fact, I think I could have met my second girlfriend there too except I was stupid, but that's likely a story for another time. Let's just say that I established a pattern of emotional devotion in long-distance relationships that only strengthened already strong depressive tendencies. Anyhow, I eventually got around to finishing my Eagle badge largely motivated by the desire to work at Philmont Scouting Ranch--which basically required all males applying have an Eagle badge--in the hopes of seeing said long-distance first-girlfriend again for the summer. It was naturally a catastrophe, but the Philmont experience was a good lesson in some hard facts in life.
As I approached graduation from high-school, my alienation from my parents was growing extremely painful. I had access to loans to attend collage and some small support directly from my parents, but for the first year or two I would have to live at home. Lots of the usual arguments, and the 'you will get a job' ultimatum. Over the years, I had spent more and more time with Bill & Meg. They offered me a place to live while going to school in San Antonio, and one night I basically snuck out. I still recall my mom's bitterness over the issue 4 years later at college graduation. Anyhow, the first year at University of Texas at San Antonio was reasonably productive. Bill, Meg, and I were heavily involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and we spent a lot of weekends at events.
Lots of stuff happened, none of which I really want to get into detail about--
saoba can attest to the good times, and far too many of the bad times of those years--, but by the end of the year Bill & Meg moved to Houston, split up, and I tried to move to Houston to live with a girlfriend I had met going to University of Houston. By 'tried' I mean I moved, couldn't find work or any way to afford to live with her, and after a few weeks moved back to live with my folks--who graciously bailed me out. We broke up in the process, although as often happened I wasn't really informed until some weeks later.So I got a job, did another semester of work at UTSA, meet and eventually broke-up with another girl--this one certified crazy as she had checked herself in and moved to Anaheim with her father near the end of the semester--, and I finally made it to University of Texas at Austin living in the dorm. UT was great, the dorm life suited me well, I met a lot of life-long friends there (
onyxlynxx, hackard, happytester, hdan, juliarandolph & danamongden, and roninjedi among them).Shortly after moving to Austin I started dating
appleang. When we graduated, we moved in together and we got married in 1994. I lived nearly a decade of my life with Angela, and for a long time we were best-friends. I introduced her to the Texas Ren Fair, the SCA, and many of my friends. She introduced me to Melissa Etheridge (starting a life-long obsession with women's music), the life of a Rocky Horror cast member (which thankfully only lasted a few years), and we shared a philosophical bond in a love of science, paganistic religious views, and the theory of polyamory. I honestly miss a lot of those years, the familiarity and sense of companionship, the close-knit bond of friendships hard-fought, and hard-won.I started my full-time employment career working at Vibrant Graphics, a company co-owned by a friend from college,
danamongden. I had promised myself to go back to get a masters at some point if I could, and Vibrant Graphics offered to pay so I started a master of science program part-time. After a few years there, I started a game company, Charybdis Enterprises, with another friend, hdan, his wife Christy, and our friend Tim. Going to graduate school part-time, and working full-time as a owner of a small business, were sources of immense stress and uncertainty for me and appleang throughout the mid to late 90s.Our best friends for many of those years were
onyxlynx and Scott. We spent so much time together, we hardly saw anyone else. We briefly tried the 'open relationship dating' thing with one-another, which ended badly. They drifted out of our lives for many years after that, only to resurface when Kirby and Scott broke-up. We kinda repeated the pattern with a friend from Angela's work at the time (she worked at Bookstop and then Barnes & Noble for a good long while), Kim, and her husband Greg. For a lot of reasons, I fell for Kim really hard. Unreasonably, stupidly hard. It was a tumultuous relationships, and juggling so many things I was bound to stumble. It all started to fall apart when Kim broke things off, she and Greg eventually split, and after a few months of dating again she called it quits.A deep depression followed that consumed all my joy, and passion for years to follow. Angela and I separated in early 98. Charybdis had been on the brink for years, and we finally shut it down in late 98 although we did manage to pull out a third project that cleaned up all the debts while we got out of our lease obligations. I finished graduate school with a whimper in 2000--I ended up begging a C for an incomplete to graduate. I finally felt I had the energy to start therapy, which was reasonably productive for a year or two. During that time I worked for a company called Kinesoft Development until they shutdown in 2001. As a distraction and a way to focus my tendencies to mental obsession on pointless things, I started doing a lot of RPGA gaming, a hobby which brought me a lot of friendships and good times over the fairly isolated years since my divorce and move to Seattle.
Around then, I meet Andrea, a cute, dark-haired PhD chemist finishing up at UT. We dated for 4 months before she moved to Portland to work for Intel, a job she had accepted before we started dating. Working in the game industry greatly limited my choices, so the closest I could manage was Seattle. I got a job offer from Monolith, accepted it with a relocation offer, and the job was rescinded due to layoffs. My recruiter forced them into finishing the relocation, and I moved here anyhow in the hopes of finding work. Frankly, I also hoped to finally put behind the ghost of the woman I still missed day-in, day-out. By then Kim and I had a friendship burdened by one-sided love, and it twisted us both. She felt sorrow and regret over breaking my heart, and I had a broken heart that was inconsolable. All the trust and connection I valued so much had been destroyed, and no doubt she thought her choices were for the best.
I did eventually find an excellent job working for Beep Industries doing a fun little Xbox title, Voodoo Vince. Andrea couldn't take the long-distance thing after about 8 months--during which time I think I visited her 14 weekends and she came up to Seattle twice--, and staged as dramatic and messy a break-up as possible. I don't think it would have hurt quite so much if it hadn't left me feeling like a relationship based on honest communication had been painted with the brush of every bad relationship she had ever had in her past leading up to me. I'm sure it didn't help that she has a fundamental belief in being unlovable thanks to her own 'family of origin' issues. The obvious effect Kim had on me in the months leading up to the move didn't help. Not having moved to Portland no matter the consequences to be with her didn't help--never mind that her couch was already occupied at the time by
royalbananafish. Still, I'm grateful to her for giving me something concrete to work in the future for during the difficult choice to pull up a decade of roots and move 2300 miles to a town where I knew no one, rather than continuing to languish in the pains of the past.After Beep finished Vince and had to let go of everyone, I moved on to Sierra, who in turned shutdown, and I landed my current job at Microsoft--the game industry is a bitch. I still have "Kim issues" to this day, but once I settled in to my new life in Seattle it's really just been a label for my fear of living alone the rest of my life. Still, I've got all the debt from those messy years paid off, a rewarding job, and a handful of close friends here in a place I feel is home. I just wish I didn't feel like I was running out of time to find a nice alternative girl who (a) gets me and we 'click' and (b) is actually available and interested in building a life with me.
Updated: Enhanced with some links and a few minor edits.
