Ummm, yeah. This should be fun. I hate talking about myself. Maybe I'll fill this part in later, eh?

2004.08.19

Ok, might as well write a little something here, I've been putting it off long enough. I'm not going to try to write any award winning literature here, so this will mostly just be a "bullet point" list of interesting details about me (to the extent that anything about me is interesting, that is), in roughly (very, very, rough) chronological order.

• I was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on July 20, 1973.
• I grew up in the vicinity of Shallotte, North Carolina. Shallotte is a small hick town about 35 miles south of Wilmington. The most notable thing about this town is that it's about halfway between Wilmington and Myrtle Beach, SC.
• I went to Union Primary School from Kindergarten through 3rd grade.
• I met my friend Scott Anderson in Kindergarten. We're still friends, even though we don't see much of each other these days. That makes him my oldest (in terms of years of friendship, not age) friend.
• I don't think I'm still friends with anybody else that I remember from elementary school.
• It was a long bus ride from my house to Union. I hated the trip, the school, and most everything about going there.
• My mom read to me a lot as a kid, and I could read a little when I started Kindergarten. I attribute my life-long love of reading at least partially to that influence. I read a lot as a kid, and I read a lot now as an adult.
• Ms. Wilson was my 2nd grade teacher, and she was probably my favorite teach for many years. Maybe she still is.
• I don't remember the names of my Kindergarten, 1st grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade, or 6th grade teachers. But I don't think I liked any of them very much, except for the lady in 3rd grade. I wish I could remember her name.
• I went to Shallotte Middle School from 4th through 8th grades.
• SMS was closer to home, but I still hated the bus ride, and convinced my mom to drive me to school the majority of the time.
• One of my teachers in 6th and 7th grades was Peggy Sweat. I pretty much hated her back then. Bitch.
• Ms. Letino was my science teacher in 8th grade. She was pretty cool, one of my favorite teachers over the years. May have something to do with the fact that science was my favorite subject, or maybe not.
• I was very non-athletic back in those days. I hated P.E., because it inevitably meant suffering through yet another game of kick-ball, or dodge-ball, or some other "sport" that I hated. The only sport I was interested in during that part of my life was BMX bike riding.
• Somewhere in that 6th / 7th grade era was when I first discovered BMX, and met a guy named John Cox, who was pretty much my best friend for the next 6 or 7 years, or thereabouts.
• As a kid I like to read Sci-Fi mostly when I read fiction. I also liked detective / mystery type stories a lot.
• I remember reading a lot of the following: Tom Swift books, Encyclopedia Brown books, The Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew mysteries, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories, Three Investigators stories, etc. I also remember liking The Great Brain, and those Mad Scientists Club stories.
• My favorite TV shows were Doctor Who, Star Trek: TOS, Salvage 1, and BattleStar Galactica, when I was really young. Later I remember liking Knight Rider, Airwolf, Blue Thunder, Max Headroom, McGyver, Dukes of Hazaard, and The A-Team.
• I watched a lot of wrestling as a kid. The phony pro-wrestling stuff. It was fake, but it was fun, and I think that I still carry some lessons with me to this day, that I learned from that. That is, the guys that I idolized back then where the guys who overcame adversity, never gave up, and kept battling no matter what the odds where. And that mindset pretty much describes me, to this day.
• I hated Hee-Haw. Fucking rednecks.
• I can say "fucking rednecks," since I am myself a redneck. Not so much by choice, but by virtue of having grown up in Brunswick County, NC, and living out in the country most of my life.
• I mostly disliked living in a very rural area. I think that feeling really started to kick in around High School era, and for many years afterwards, I couldn't wait to get out of Brunswick County.
• High school was a weird time.  I was always considered "advanced" due to my scores on the standardized tests, but I really didn't care much for school, so I didn't usually make good grades.
• I flunked Algebra I, Civics, and English my freshman year.  Not because I couldn't do the stuff, but just because I had other stuff on my mind and didn't really care.
• In High School I was something of an outcast, and somewhat the stereotypical nerd/geek. I was really shy up until my senior year, not particularly athletic, etc., yada yada.
• Despite that, I wasn't quite at the absolute bottom of the social pecking order, and was friends with at least a few people from each of the different cliques.  I had friends who were preps (yeah, I know, hard to imagine, huh? Fucking preps...), the ROTC/Military Brat clique, the surfers, the red-necks from Ash and Grissettown-Longwood, the jocks, everybody.  And that's been me throughout my life... always flitting around the edges of all the different groups, able to "fit in" as necessary on a part-time basis with anybody... but never quite being a full-member in good standing of any group.
  
• My grades were OK, if not excellent, my sophomore and junior years.  But my senior year I really decided I just didn't give a fuck, (lots of reasons behind that, some of which will probably never get posted here) and blew off everything except the couple of classes I *had* to pass to graduate.
• I pretty much always knew I'd wind up going to a community college first, and transferring somewhere, so I didn't even bother taking the SAT in H.S.
• My senior year, I passed Chemistry and Physics.  That's it. Didn't even really pass English, strictly speaking.  I was failing the regular section pretty badly, but they had this night-school thing, so I went to night-school the final 6 weeks of the year, and made up the English credit so I could graduate on time.
• Night school was actually kinda fun.  The instructor (I can't remember who it was) just had us go to the library, get a book, and write a book report. I did Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and then Orwell's "1984."  Reading 1984 had a powerful effect on me, and some of that still lingers with me even to this day. 
  
•