Let's change it up

I'm no author by any means, but I do like the fact that I have a voice.  At the very least, I can hear the tone in anything I go back to from the past.  Maybe it's only because I'm the one who wrote it, or maybe I do have that flair in my writings.  It seems a bit overly solemn, but not quite depressing.  And I love to foreshadow.  I hadn't really noticed it much until I was looking at some things earlier today, but it made me think back to how I probably have always done so.  I also never really seem to drop a point dead.  That can be a bad thing, as I like to run stuff into the ground sometimes, but it also can be a good thing.  It makes for easy segues.

I don't think I will keep going on with an autobiography like the last couple of posts.  Background stories are nice, but honestly if I talk long enough everything will come out anyway.  It did help me get the ball rolling to just have something to talk about.  Something a bit more vanilla than congressional law or religious history or quantum physics.  I could just as easily talk about those things; I have spent more time learning about random things like that than I have learning about myself.  For the time being, let's just suffice to say that after I moved back to Arkansas, I got to know a cute girl I thought I already knew, she became my wife and an awesome mommy. I have a little redhead who has me and the whole world wrapped around her finger.  I went crazy.  And I came back.  Now I have just started working full time repairing computers, and I turn 30 in less than a week.  Time flies.

No Sleep Tuesday

Home from work: 11pm

Ambien and ready for bed: 12am

Up again after no sleep: 2:30am

And I leave for work at 7 in the morning.  It may be an interesting day.

Until then, what better to do than update my memoirs.  To understand why someone feels how they do, you must first walk a mile in their shoes.  Lame jokes aside, it normally is a true saying.  If you can empathize with someone, you can normally at least relate to their opinions, even if you do not agree.  So let's continue delving into my past.

I left high school with amazing standardized test scores, along with a 3.99 GPA.  I honestly could go to any college I wanted, most of them for free.  I'll admit it was fun getting large legal envelopes in the mail with YALE plastered on the side.  However, I really had no desire for more schooling.  I had just spent 13 years proving to teachers I already knew whatever they were about to teach.  I also really had no aspirations or goals at all yet.  My parents and guidance counselor would not accept no for an answer, though, so I went to one of the two schools that required no essays of how I will be a great person, nor other such nonsense.  The first was North Texas, the second was Florida State.  I decided to live closer to the beaches.

Classes were more of the same, though much less rigid.  I still wasn't "learning" anything.  I got pretty jaded to the whole system and ended up just going to classes in which I had friends who would keep tabs on me.  I aced Spanish 1/2, Golf, Oceanography, Trig, Precalc, and Music Theory, and received whatever grade they tend to give people that don't show up to those other classes.  I never looked at my final transcript of that year, but it was enough to know I wasn't going back to school there.

I did love the area, and after my first round of taking anti-depressants, I saved up enough money to move to Tallahassee.  I had no plans, but just wanted to be my own person somewhere.  I guess to prove to myself that I was more than just my parents' shadow in Smalltown, AR.  I don't really know, it just felt like the right thing to do.  I stayed in touch with some friends from my freshman year, got some crummy retail jobs, and met a girl who I soon asked to marry me.  We were engaged for a couple of years, but no wedding.  There were too many issues with me getting worse depression, her family hating me, she was projecting hate onto me from somewhere else entirely (have ideas, but for her sake I won't say, as I am probably wrong), and so many other things.  

Between an old roommate ditching and leaving me to pay full rent on a townhouse, plus a naive, lovestruck boy spending entirely too much money on jewelry and dates to save something that was never going to last, I went flat broke.  Walking to work, living with your ex'es family, looking forward to Hamburger Helper broke.  I finally gave up on my little experience and moved back home with my parents, who also loaned me the money to get out of debt.  Very much appreciated but self esteem was at an all time low.  I had revolving prescriptions for different anti-depressants, but nothing really helped.  It was pretty dark, but I at least was in a place were people cared for me.  It took way too long to realize how important that could be.

Prologue

Everyone has a story.  Too many people's stories are about all the turns, right or wrong, that have led them to why they are unhappy.  This rings true to me even with most happy people.  Others, their stories aren't stories at all--just a resume of sorts: a list of accomplishments, a wallet of family portraits, times, places, and so many facts.  Facts are good, but if you want to truly know something, you must be about to understand the "why" and "how" of all of those facts.  I'll try to provide you a little of both.

I grew up in Malvern, AR, pretty uneventfully.  Great parents, two older sisters who found their place in life as my torture.  Amazingly good in academics, below average in anything athletic.  I do remember being the youngest person to finish the 1 mile "Fun Run"--I think I was 4.  Not certain the age, but I remember I got my name in the paper for being special.  First of several times.  In a small enough town, you get to be main front page article and photo if you try just a little bit.

School was laughable for me.  I understood without being taught, I tutored others in classes I was in or had not taken yet, I even was set up to be the inspiration to read for a class four grades higher than me.  I just never was challenged.  At all.  It was years later that I began to see that as a bad thing.  Until then, I joined and captained our school's Quiz Bowl team to compete against other school districts.  There's one of those front page news photo ops right there.  We even won district and regional before we got pulled from entering state competitions.  We weren't taking it seriously enough, it seemed.  I filled the rest of the time playing Tetris on a graphing calculator.  Oh how I wish we had iPhones back then.  It may have eased the boredom some.

By the time I was a Senior in high school, I was totally going through the motions.  The year I decided to not practice at all was the year I made it to All State Band as an alternate on saxophone.  I had one teacher who knew I was always tired, so she occasionally let me sleep under her desk where I wouldn't get caught.  My final research paper I did on quantum physics (half as a joke and half because I knew I needed some form of challenge).  I did all the research, had all my notes, but refused to write the paper because everything I had found was based on some very flawed theories that were 80 years old at the time.  When it came down to the option of writing and turning in a paper a month late or repeating my senior year, I decided to wing it.  The teacher still said it was one of the best written papers she had seen.  Oh, I need to find a copy of that paper.  Now, fifteen years later, it looks like some physicists are proving I was right.

I had all of this, plus test scores to back it up: 34/36 composite ACT with perfect Reading and Science; 1480/1600 SAT with perfect Mathematics; similar pSAT and ASVAB scores as well.  I was definitely socially awkward though.  I had friends, that was never a problem.  I wasn't popular, but most people liked me.  I had a girlfriend through most of high school.  Even if we really didn't like each other, we still liked the idea of having someone else there.  And of course, I had an unshakable crush on a girl for at least 4 years but never asked her out.  I haven't spoken to her since graduation, and don't even know where she lives now, much less what she is doing.  I did, however, end up marrying her cousin though, and didn't know they were related for a long time.  That will be a future tale.

Entrance Only

This place is going to be for myself mostly.  The main thing I am looking for is a place to put thoughts and ideas into text.  Hopefully I can even organize it after that.  I smart enough that I could learn most anything.  I'm interested enough that I will do hours of research on anything, seemingly at random.  I've learned enough that I have opinions floating around everywhere in my mind.  So many, in fact, that many times they totally disagree.  A simple enough problem, except I tend to think things through well enough in my head to justify why those original opinions (or hypotheses, etc) would work.  Then, the further I go down one path or thought, the blurrier the opposing path gets, until I forget why I think something may be true or may work, but I have this gut feeling that I just need to pin down to get it all right.

Maybe if I stay at keeping things posted, this will be that board I need to start placing those pins.