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I was born in southern California, but only lived there until two years of age. I actually have a few vague memories of the time. My parents were making money doing various side jobs: raising lovebirds, babysitting children, maybe others. One day a stray lovebird came barreling into the house through an open door and knocked itself out on a mirror. One of the girls we babysat would cry until she puked. I don't remember if my parents had regular work at the time, but I do remember being unsupervised much of the day so most likely they did. I remember experiencing an earthquake, being astounded by how the milk in my sippy cup swayed side to side and playing red light/green light (or maybe toddling around thinking I was playing) with neighborhood children. I can't remember his name now, but I brought one of those kids with me as an invisible friend when we abruptly moved to an unpopulated area of Missouri. We lived there on a hill in a demobilized, partially remodeled mobile home. It was a 15 minute walk to our only "neighbor" who, fortunately, had young children. My first best friend was a girl named Sara, redheaded I think. Her little brother may have been strawberried. I remember playing alone most of the time, nontheless, as my older sister and I did nothing together but fight, and Sara's house was a long walk throuhg tick-infested woods away. I also remember spending more time with my father during this period than any other time in my life. Years later I would learn he had been unemployed, and that we had moved there as much to escape increasingly violent SoCal as a he had gotten a contract as a farmhand--which dematerialized after we moved halfway across the country. By the time I was six I clearly understood that my mother hated my father, and loved my sister more than me, but I had no idea why. When I was eight, we moved to slighly-less-rural northeastern Oklahoma, where my mother's extended family was based. Back then I would recieve letters and birthday money from my paternal grandmother, who lived far away in Hawaii--neither she nor my father ever made mention of any aunts or uncles or cousins and it never occured to me to ask. We spent a few years in one neighborhood, then moved to another when I was in the 2nd grade. My parents surpised me, picking me up from school in a U-Haul out of the blue. I was actually pretty happy about it, as I was having a horrible time in school, unable to make friends and falling behind in spelling. Our new house was smaller than the old house, but my parents had managed to actually buy it with some help from my maternal grandmother. Across the street lived an older boy who became my new best friend. At first we crashed toy cars and made castles from blocks together, but eventually he taught me to steal and smoke cigarettes. He had a go-kart and his father was a well-armed ex-marine (most likely a dishonourable discharge) who was married to a classic southern homemaker--they might have been infertile, as he was adopted. We got into every kind of trouble; I often blamed him for things I had done because I was a coward. School didn't get much better, although I began to get straight As for a few years. In my new school smart kids got bullied worse than strawberried kids, and I developed the peculiar habit of being late almost every day. I can't explain how this happened, except that my whole family seems to suffer from OCD in one way or another. Sometimes I wasn't getting ready for school because I had to watch some show (I didn't necessarily enjoy watching those shows, but felt I'd rather not miss any continuation of the plot), other times I'd be waiting in the car while my mother went back to the house four or five times to check something or pick up something; many days it was as much a mystery to me as anyone else how it took three or four times as long as could be expected to get from my house to school. As the bullying got worse, so did my performance in school. I still aced every test, but stopped doing homework in the fourth grade. By the time I graduated elementary school, I had learned to trust only people outside my peer group. In Jr. High, however, I made my first same-age friend who generally was not setting me up to be humiliated. I also continued my friendship with the boy across the street, which had escalated to "gang" membership. There would be five of us at its peak, who considered ourselves a branch of the Crips--all of us were white. Between eighth and ninth grade some of us splintered off to join the "born again" movement--myself included--which was an ill-concieved and short-lived experiment. Mostly it turned out we intended to use youth groups to meet girls, but there were better ways to meet girls who would actually put out. By High School I was smoking pot again, quit Boy Scouts, and began to dress fully goth; my family moved to a bigger house in a better neighborhood as well, effectively ending the dubious friendship with the boy across the street (who was now busy working, etc), but it was really only a few minutes walk away, so we still found time to make trouble now and then and I made other, even more dubious friends my own age. High school was somewhat liberating, although still in the midst of an oppressive 99.9% white rural town. My parents had been through a lot with my sister at that age, and seemed to take more of a hands-off approach with me. She relocated to California for a few years, which gave me a chance to actually communicate with my mother. My father spent nearly all of this time at work or in a deep, exhausted sleep--which had been his custom since we moved to Oklahoma. A year in to High School I quit band on principle, which continued to nag at my subconcious for the rest of my life. Nothing had been more fun than band in 7th grade, and it was intensely fun. I wasn't much of a 
et player though, and--while on vacation, despite calling several times to remind him that I would come back, and signing up for eighth grade band formaly--one day the director decided I was quitting and wrote me out of marching formation. When I came back from vacation, he was surprised to see me show up for practice--althogh I had spoken to him on the phone myself to tell him the exact date I would return. He said it was lucky though, because he'd lost a few clarinet players as well, and although there was no place for me in the et lineup he'd let me hold a clarinet and pretend to play while walking around on the field. He just took a kids pride and crushed it like that. I didn't quit alone--his best tuba and french horn players left with me. We joined choir instead, which turned out to be almost as fun--even though it didn't benefit from an additional "sport activities" budget for playing halftime shows at football games. Choir also afforded me the opportunity to end being bullied once and for all, not to say I wouldn't be humiliated many times over in the years to come.
One day in choir, a jerk was poking me in the back, trying to get a reaction out of me. I gave him one. I turned around, and shouted at the guy "Alright, you want me pissed off I am. You think you can kick my ass? Then do it, right here, right now. I'm tired of your shit asshole. I know I won't win, but if you want a fight then lets do it right the airwolf now. Come on!" There were seventy or so students in the choir and the director, all of them looking at us. He backed down. He didn't have the balls to respond in front of anyone, just wanted to get away with bullying me on the sly thinking I'd never make an issue of it (to his credit, this was the only available means of making an issue of it: the school faculty were complicit in the system of bullying, discrediting and surpressing students who complained to teachers or parents and promoting students who bullied others by fixing their grades--you'd like to think it's not true, but this is Oklahoma and High School football players on roids literally ruled the entire town as they were the only thing seen as an asset. They couldn't be charged with crimes, even if they did get arrested; they couldn't be held accountable for failing classes, because they have to get a chance to play in front of college recruiters; and they absolutely would not be accused of bullying, even if they were, because the school based its reputation on theirs). It had to be loud, in public, and witnessed by enough people that no one could doubt my story. It didn't end the system of bullying in the school, but it got me an exemption--they realized I'd stand up for myself from that point on, bloody nose and broken bones or whatever. The choir director didn't ask us to leave class or meet in his office after or anything; he just let it go. We were back to singing in a moment. I know, it all sounds incredibly gay; it was even more gay than that to live through, trust me. Also during my second year of high school I got into computers pretty seriously. I did a whole lecture on VRML for the Computer Orientation class (the second one I had to take because our shitty school system had newly implemented one during Jr. High and then newly implemented one a few years later in High School) before accelling in CS1 and CS2 (used to get into competitions with another student for who could write the assignmets with the least number of lines; we made some for loops you wouldn't want to think about--his family ran the only ISP in town). Outside of school things were still rather shit. I had been in a garage band with some goth friends, and played a couple of memorable shows (for audiences of about twenty people), but it turned out they took themselves very seriously and wanted me out because I wasnt as "good" as they were (two of the four actually went on to be semi-professional musicians; maybe there was something to it). It was a humiliation beyond belief--to be rejected by the most rejected people in the whole town. I also got braces--about four years too late--which were put on by a dentist who ended up going to prison for taking pictures of girls when they were knocked out, and my mother finally confessed that my sister was sired by a different father. She described him as a wild, hippie surfer guy and never said that she loved him more than my father, but I finally understood our family dynamic for the first time. My guess is that she got pregnant by my father in order to force a marriage to someone she saw as more stable (he was a Navy medic at the time) but that she didn't account for my father not planning to be married and have kids at that time in his life or maybe I was a complete accident, but either way my existence ruined things for them and she felt more comfortable blaming him than herself because she never really loved him to begin with. They still haven't divorced, even though I told them they should--when I was 16. By senior year I had become something of a social conduit, the only person who could stand between the four or five genious kids in special classes, a small contigent of goths, bullies who'd come to terms with not being able to assault me anymore, and the larger student body which consisted of various other minor cliques. I also had a friend whose overt sexual behavior toward me started numerous rumors about us that very much enhanced my reputation. In fact we did end up having sex, my first time (when I was already 18), and she was very accomodating to my embarrasing performance; we also had sex another time that was interrupted by my parents. That would be the only sex I had in High School, at a time when sex was paramount to all social aspects of life. I had been working part time since I was 15, first frying chicken for a competitor to KFC and then washing dishes for a bistro, but the best work-like experience I had at the time was actualy Stagecraft class in the theatre at High School. I learned to work light and sound boards, make stage props and decorations, and all kinds of other greatness; plus being in Choir I could take on-stage roles as well--although the lead parts were reserved for "sponsored" kids (whose parents made donations to the school or were otherwise disgustingly popular, and not necessarily talented at all). Between that, the CS classes, and the lessons I'd learned in Boy Scouts years earlier, I took on a jack-of-all trades attitude. I can't do everything, but I can figure out how to do anything pretty quickly. In 2002, I graduated. After one more summer of part-time work, I managed to get into a university about an hour away from my home town. I say 'managed' but I was about ten points over the required ACT score with a 24 I got the morning after staying up all night after having a car wreck on the way to a first date with a girl that went really well despite having to call my parents after to tell them I'd lied about going over to a friend's house and wasn't even in town, etc. I chose the university I went to mostly because several of my friends were also going or already there (I had more friends that had already graduated than in my own class). Within the first thirty minutes of arriving at the university, I was invited to a party (right in front of my who family, who were helping move my stuff and didn't need to know I intended to go to alcoholic parties). The first two years were packed with pure awesome, except for my performance in class. The classes I went to were alright, but I was often to hung over or burnt out to make it to many others. I picked up a hippie girlfirend within a week and a tight circle of ne'er-do-wells to call friends even faster. We did everything wrong; it was awesome. The University had to make new policy regarding the use of over-the-counter medication on campus because of us. They didn't make new policy regarding the use of illicit drugs on campus, but we did a lot of that too; and off-campus. We became something of a presence in the only electro-nightclub in our corner of the state (maybe one of only two electro-nightclubs in all of Oklahoma at the time) for our enthusiastic dance team (myself included) and extremist narconautism. Two years of this nearly burned out my cerebral cortex; got me busted by housing staff for use of marijuana in the dorm; and nearly kicked out of school altogether. I spent third year taking online classes and running a party house with a roomate. Ours was the alternative to the frat nonsense happening just down the street. No one was ever raped at our parties, though nearly all attendants were most certainly drugged. It was like an immobilized Furthur with somewhat less altruistic liberation and somewhat more self-destructive recklessness. What I remeber of those times is pretty good, even the time I had no money and nothing to eat but a jar of peanut butter. All good things must come to an end however, and at some point I realized that a life of heavy intoxication and part-time work would lead to suicide. I made a mission of getting back into school and graduating with a decent GPA. It took work, and bold disregard for the rules. I made the Dean of Student Affairs a personal friend--set out to do this specific thing first--and used his influence to get fast-tracked into the school's forgiveness policy, deleting several poor grades and taking the classes over. He to referred me to teachers that could authorize using transfer classes from online universities to fill in gaps in my general education requirements (even if the classes only vaguely resembled the requirements). In fact we had some history; he'd been the one to assign punishments for me and my peers when we were caught putting "All your base are belong to us" on a university billboard--something he'd actually found to be more silly than offensive; and it was he who stood up for me when I got busted for smoking in the dorm: he arranged for an extension to give me time to pack my things and to meet with the Dean of Housing to make my case that I had done nothing harmful to anyone other than myself--which he heard, and appreciated, but made note that it came down to university policy being against the use of illicit substances in the dorm, to which I had to acquiesce (we actually had an intellectual discussion about it; wish I had recorded it, shit was deep) and arranged for a punishment other than complete banishment from the university--he had me meet with a counselor to discuss my "drug problem" for a few weeks. I think he was surprised at first that I did in fact come back to school, determined to graduate. The guy was my hero, and I think it goes back to he himself was a pothead when he was younger. Around this time my hippie girlfriend was purchased by her uncle. He paid for her enrollment in a better university and membership in the Sorority his wife had been in. This is a girl who had no interest in greek life, was doing very well in University despite her constant weed smoking, and who already had a good relationship with her parents who were pretty well off themselves. I had met her uncle just once, when I attended one of her family's get togethers (where all of them smoked pot) and took note that he called her new hairsyle "saucy" (she had recently cut it short and gotten a frizzy perm)--a few weeks later he bought her, like a piece of merchandise, and she broke it off with me immediately. Last I heard from her she was doing some kind of nude modeling for another eighty-something creep. Whatever, I hooked up with a Japanese exchange student; fixed all my grades, and felt much better about myself. I also got a job working for the University in their IT department. I spent one year working in a public computer lab, where I helped innumerable people open their email, save documents in Word, load webpages, and listen to MP3s--most of the people I helped had no idea what a computer was. Nonetheless I was fired for not doing things like checking how much paper we had every hour (which was about the same every hour) and not "taking initiative" to go on missions around campus (in which only students who'd been working there for two years were allowed to actually do things, and besides I was already maxing out the 20 hours per week students were allowed to work). Joke was on my boss, becaue I immedately got a job assisting conference classes, which was in a different department at the time (Audio/Visual or something like that), eventually this department was merged into the same one I had previously worked for and I had the same boss (who not so secretly hated me for reasons I will never understand) again. I graduated before she had the opportunity to "not renew" my contract again. We actually had one conflict at the time, where in I had fixed up a conference room so that the professor could appear on video, transmit overhead projections, broadcast video from DVD or VHS and/or screencast from a pc with constant full-duplex audio. A more "experienced" technician insisted that this was not possible, disconnected all the wires I had set up without testing anything, and recommended that she dismiss me from working on that room after I fixed it a second time. She did not end up dissmissing me (who knows, maybe she asked the professor who would have said that in fact I did make his classroom work) from anything, but made it clear that no argument nor physical proof would override her trust in the more trusted technician. Actually I have to thank her and her staff for preparing me to work in a professional field, and not just because they taught me the valuable lesson that professional adults are just as petty and stupid as preschool children, but that we all got professional photos produced in-house to attach to our resumes and we all had some business-like experience to write on those resumes on our way out of University, unlike the majority of the student body who'd never worked a day in their lives (not even to flip burgers).
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