Ni Hao! Hi! :)

Hey i hope everyone had a great holiday season and New Years.

This is my first 'Blog' and i'll try to keep it somewhat professional, where i'm not flat out bitching about things. I just thought it might be interesting to give people some insight into my life, as i'm finding out a LOT of fantastic things from reading other peoples blogs. This first blog will just be a quick summary of my life, i'll probably go into specific details in their own seperate entries.

I want to remain anonymous for security reasons.

I am 23 years old, i work for the united states Air Force and that's the primary reason I don't want to be known. But also because i don't want people i know in person to hear of my blog and 'get up in my grill' if i say something that might offend them.

I was born in 1983 to a Navy family in California. within a year we re-located to Conneticut. a few years later my Father got arrested for Rape of a minor. I still am not convinced he did it, however, that's for another post. Needless to say, life was hard from age 4 and on. My mother moved us back in with her parents in upstate New York where my grandfather had retired from being a police officer in Yonkers, NY. I was raised there by my grandparents and my aunt while my Mother decided she could make the most money as a Cross Country Truck Driver. (my mother is short and not 'heavy set'.. not at all what you'd think of what a Trucker should look like. haha. )

yeah, it sounds like i'm making this shit up, but i assure you this really is the truth.

My mother did that for a couple years until one year she dropped a giant pallet on her toe.. shattering it and putting her out of a job. Until she got one closer, parking milk tank trucks at the local Dairy Creamery. (which fortunately, is right next door to my grandparents house. )

So we finally moved into our own place. and to make the story short.. we have never stayed in one place for longer than 2 years. there's always been some sort of problems with the land lord or paying the bills. more often then not we end up moving back in with the grandparents.

Then one year, my 8th grade in school, my mother gets a good job driving milk tankers across new york state and we move up to the Capitol Region in New York. We live in a duplex and a special 'community' (more on these later). it's a huge upgrade from where i grew up, probably the first big 'shock' I got to the 'real' world. (though it's just a plastic 'real' suburban world.. more on THAT later. )

So we lived there for a year and a half.. a lot of crazy shit happened. I couldn't adjust and fit in with other kids. they just took 'stuff' way too seriously. I wanted to draw, play video games and act a fool with friends. While it seemed most of my 'peers' wanted things to show they were superiour to the rest of us. With myself being an outside, this led to me being a good 'scapegoat' for others to feel better about themselves. I'll talk more about this when i do a post on High school.

As soon as I started to fit in, my mother hurt her back. she herneated on disc and ruptured its neighboring one. This put her out of work, in bed and on some severe medication. She pretty much lost her ability to remember things and was very dependant on me. My sister never really helped much, she's always been the antagonist in the family. Whereas I sit in the background and watch what she does, so i know what NOT to do. unfortunate but true.

Guess where we moved to after my mother lost her job? you guessed it, a 6 month stint back at the grandparents home. Then my mother finally got a sweet deal from a prior boss and moved into a house he had. It flooded the day after we got allof our posessions into it. Back to grandmas house! Then we got a sweet deal out of one of my mothers boyfriends friends, we moved into a trailer near the towns popular bar. wonderful. this is where i spent the rest of highschool.

It was hard to adjust to a smaller rural highschool again. Even though i had grown up with most of these same people as children, I had changed, they had changed. I wasn't used to the same 'tribal' ways of a rural area, I was used to the suburban social scheme. So, once again, I was pretty much flying solo. The one friend i had as a child was still there and we got along. However, never having left, he never learned to fight for himself. Therefor he was always the target of jokes and highschool cruelty. Don't get me wrong, I was too. But I fought back and people were scared of what i'd do to them. I never would hurt any of them, but I would defend myself. I wouldn't go to the extent of 'columbine', the worse i've ever done is thrown a bully down a small flight of stairs and then kicked him a bit. But, he probably shouldn't have been using a slingshot to shoot pennies at me and my friend, should he? I don't like violence.

I'm a pretty big nerd. lets get that out of the way and in the open. I like computers, anime, video games, Fantasy books (well written ones anyhow...) and plenty of nerdy things. I've done martial arts on and off throughout my life, whenever we were in a location and had enough money that it was possible. It kept me busy, healthy, disciplined and well balanced. I love martial arts. i'll probably save that topic for another blog as well. I also taught myself to play guitar. maybe sometime i'll post some tracks i recorded.

After high school, what is expected of modern children in less than perfect monetary conditions? COLLEGE!!! Well, my sister is almost 2 years older than myself and she completely bombed out of college. She got alcohol poisoning and then missed too many critical classes or something. But to this day, the reason is 'well, i got sick.' hmm. I went to SUNY Oneonta, a state college in New York pretty close to my house. My family wanted and expected me to be the next Bill Gates. Especially with all the "Dot Com" buzz going on. My uncle went to college for computers and he was doing alright for himself, or so the story goes. I kind of rebelled and went for Music Industry/Production. because i actually ENJOY sitting in front of the computer and editting 4 minutes of music for hours on end until i get something that i like. (well i used to like it, when I had hours to spend doing that.) But College turned out to be one of the low points in my life. I felt alone and helpless. My classes all sucked, it didn't seem like i was doing ANYTHING that had to do with music. Except 'advanced jazz guitar' which.. i was in NO way supposed to be in, yet they wouldn't let me join the beginners class. how ridiculous.

Then September 11th 2001 happened and it completely changed my perspective. up until that point, i had always been thinking about how shitty my life was. how bad "I" had it. Well, when you see a lot of kids who are from the new york city area wandering around wondering if their parents are dead you tend to stop thinking about yourself and start sympathizing.

THEN i got to see a guy get hit by a bus. that certainly was a lesson in mortality and the first and 0nly time i've ever seen anyone die with my eyes in my life.

So, not even halfway through the first semester, i was going through so many changes inside it was really freaking me out. I was online constantly, reading about who attacked us and what we would do to them. I volunteered to get stuff to send down to ground zero. I remember staying up all night long making these little red white and blue ribbons to sell and then gave the money to the red cross. The next day i made it to inorganic chemisty and i fell asleep. which isnot a good idea when you're inthe front row.. i fell off my chair and onto the 'lecture floor'. boy..that was awkward. haha.

I talked to a few of my teachers and they really had nothing to say to me. One of my teachers, a history teacher, is actually from a town where i grew up from. He plays drums and is part of the volunteer fire department in my town. So he knows my family and has known me for a long time. He told me to just do what i needed to do. My mother kept trying to play the 'shame' game to keep me in college. So.. i just hung out, played guitar, helped people as much as i could and tried to observe everything. 2001 was a crazy year and showed a lot about humanity in my opinion. the good and the bad.

I decided i wanted to do something more meaningfull with my life. The world didn't need another Producer to pump out shitty pop tunes and help perpetuate that horrible plastic culture that america is filled with. I failed out of college (actually i passed history AND inorganic chemisty, but not on purpose.. i just happened to kick ass on the tests i DID show up for.. i guess it's the nerd in me.. and almost every night watching 'the history channel' ). I decided i wanted to join the military. for the next year i went to live with my father, who had been out of prison and remarried with 2 more children. (i really wasn't important to his life.. and he wasn't important to my life. i'll do another entry on him alone.) He promised me a job at the company he was the General Manager for. Yet when i showed up, oh look at that, no job open. So i took a job washing dishes at the resteraunt down the street and another job stocking shelves in a walmart like grocery store overnight. I really didn't do anything but work those days. I'd eat at the resteraunt in the afternoon, go home.. eat an egg sandwich and sleep until 8. wake and eat an egg sandwich. work from 10pm-7am. go home and start working again at 9am. it sucked. but i made a lot of money and paid off any loans i had. I met alot of people and got some more ideas about how things should be.

wow. this is getting to be pretty long. i hope it's interesting enough that someone gets through it!

I did this for almost a year before i decided I wanted to join the Air Force. I wanted to work with cutting edge materials, travel the world, do things that noone else could do and finally to get into a position where i could maybe do something worthwhile to help people. So, i went back to NY in 2002 and helped my mother around the house while i signed up for the military and went over all my options. I enlisted for 6 years and had to wait over 6 months for a spot to be available for my career field in the military. So, ididn't REALLY get to enlist untill march 3rd 2003.

since then i've been in the military and done lots of military stuff. i'll probably share some of those with you. but this post is getting way too long. Stay tuned! i've met some funny people since joining and experienced a lot. I've been stationed in Florida and am currently stationed in Germany.

But as I'm approaching my 4th year in the military and about to put on Staff Sergeant (e-5 in the air force) I am starting to feel wornout and that i'm not achieving a lot of the goals that i actually joined the military for.

For this reason i'm starting to take more advantage of the 'free' education. I am studying for CLEP tests and looking into what online colleges will offer the best courses for me. I am trying to decide if i am going to re-enlist in 2 years. The more i get 'screwed' by the military system the more I think about getting out and going to school fulltime. There's benefits both ways.

I am currently learning Mandarin Chinese as well. I just started. Thanks to the air force I have been able to get free access to the Rosetta stone language program and that has been AWESOME. i've also used Chinesepod.com (i'll probably link to them from here.. i really like their show). I want to get a degree in either International Relations with a concentration on East Asia or get an East Asian studies degree with a focus on Chinese. Either way, I want to get a job that will allow me to put myself in a position where i can help people get together. I think that Chinese is the fastest growing language and if nothing major happens will be a super power. it's only a matter of time before chinese people and americans see each other more often and have to deal with each other more. It's happening already. but not on 'the street' level as much.

I think going to China and teaching english is a good thing to do to help foriegn people learn a little about our culture and bring everyone together. In this 'global' age, it seems like the people who are missing out on Globalizations good points are the everyday people. The businesses are flourishing and governments are making money. The people should get more than McDonalds and Starbucks from the entire movement.

Wow, that was a lot and it was with leaving a lot of stuff out. I hope ididn't scare anyone away from my posts, i just wanted to give a point of reference as to where i'm coming from with my ideas. I'll make shorter posts next time, and even include some pictures.

thanks for reading!
Zai Jian! (good bye! )