About Me + My Web

The Kinda Nitty But Not Super Gritty Basics

I’m a 27 year old something or other living in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I work for a company that provides durable medical equipment for people whose bendy stuff doesn’t bend well, I love concord grapes, I cut my toenails too short when I’m stressed, and I enjoy pretty much everything about the color green.

The family's "missionary" pic

I was born in the suburbs of Chicago’s south side, and lived there with my parents and two younger siblings until 1990 when my family moved to Asuncion, Paraguay for two and a half years to be missionaries. Because I’m kind of a stubborn jerk I refused to learn Spanish any faster than absolutely necessary, and so did not begin to really pick it up until about 6 months before we moved back to the States. Luckily I had the opportunity to speed this process along by attending a Paraguayan school in the afternoons for the first semester of fifth grade, my final semester in the country.

I often daydream of going back to Paraguay for a visit, knowing full well it will be so different than it was when we left in Decemeber of ‘92 I’m sure I’d hardly recognize anything. Maybe if I could just get together a good group of folks to enjoy the trip with me… Any takers?

When my family came back to the States I returned to my old school in Palos Heights, Illinois for a year and a half before my dad’s employer transferred him to Milwaukee when I was 12. I spent 7th grade at one school, and 8th-12th at another. Sometimes I feel jealous of friends who were able to attend the same school, or remain in the same school system, from kindergarten through 12th grade, but honestly: I wouldn’t trade my experiences in switching schools for anything.

I stayed in the Waukesha area to attend Carroll College (now Carroll University) where I studied English and Secondary Education, which as all Carroll SecEd students know is actually code for “Elementary Education but we let SecEd folks sit in and listen for thousands of dollars a semester on how to deal with conflict resolution in 9 year olds without ever addressing the realities of a high school classroom.”

Needless to say: I quit that program. Didn’t get up the guts to do it until half way through my third year, but boy am I glad I finally wised up. I picked up a second major in Theatre instead and never regretted it.

If the reality was as gold-tinted I might have stayed.

I graduated in ‘04 and almost immediately began working for a roofing company and performing in shows. It was also during this time that I bought my beautiful car, Joy, a Toyota Matrix which I love love love. Two roofing companies and 4 shows later I moved to Canyon Country in Santa Clarita (pictured), California, about 30 miles north of Los Angeles, where I lived with friends and worked for a production company that taught me to love both sushi and Microsoft Outlook in ways I’d never previously thought possible.

I could only stand about a year and a half’s worth of California before I had to call it quits, however. Maybe if I’d've had another digit or two at the end of my yearly earnings I could’ve found a way to make it work, but in the end the fact of the matter seems to be that while you can take the girl out of the Midwest, you can’t take the Midwest out of the girl.

I’ve been back in Wisconsin since Christmas of 2006 and am doing everything possible to enjoy the most I can out of every day here. There was so much I couldn’t afford to do during college and shortly thereafter, and so much I didn’t think I could do after that. And then I was off to California and nothing here was an option anymore. I feel a lot freer to actually have fun in my own world though now, so I’m trying to do just that. :)

Finding Me on the Web

It’s almost creepy how many websites have got the goods on me.

Some of the profiles I’ve set up over the years have been only been for the sake of connecting with one particular person or another, so I don’t actually use them all that much. Others of them I keep very “friends only” so if you attempt to connect with me there and I turn you down it’s nothing personal, I just have to find some way of keeping these darn friend lists a manageable size…

Amazon: My Amazon wish list. If you don’t have one, get one. Fun and awesome.

Facebook: If we’re not friends, don’t bother. If we are, or were, g’head and hit me up on the Book.

IMDB: I am as surprised as you are that I ever got onto this site, let alone more than once. It is the weirdest page on the entire internet that has anything to do with me, so I *must* list it.

MySpace: Ah MySpace. Facebook’s older, less mature, white trash sister. Yep. I’ve got a MySpace page. Two actually. I had one back when it was just, you know, *what people had,* but then joined Facebook a couple years ago and never looked back. I eventually locked my first MySpace page and started tossing friends overboard in favor of a public MySpace page (the one linked here) which I figured I could use as a place to post my resume, show pictures… A free personal acting website, if you will. Too bad I can’t get myself to ever bother logging into the damned thing to update it. It’s just not what it used to be anymore, is it?

The Nerdfighters Ning: “A place where nerds gather and play. We fight to increase awesome and decrease suck. What more is there?” Not one o’ the smartest kids you’ll find there, but I have a strong penchant for balancing random things on my head, love the Harry Potter books, and rarely FTBA, so I figure I can still fit in. Go Team Unicorn!

Orkut: I joined this because some time in 2008 I got an email through it from a girl I went to church with in Paraguay about 19 years… Holy crap. I’m old enough to reference- with clarity- things I did 19 years ago. Yowch. Anyway- about 19 years ago I went to church at CFA of Loma Pyta with Lourdes Gayoso and her family and somehow she found me via Orkut. Cool, eh? Unfortunately my Spanish is pretty rusty so I wasn’t able to say much in my response, but there it is. A connection to someone I missed. I didn’t actually add anything to my profile there, though, until March ‘09 when her younger sister friended me through it as well. Crazy, crazy world…

Polyvore: This place is either positively *Squeeee* City, or it’s obnoxious and a little irritating to even just know it exists. I fall into the first camp, which actually surprises me a bit since shopping and fashion aren’t all that important to me. I love piecing together detail work and daydreaming about how much cooler I’d be if I looked, dressed, and acted totally differently, however, so maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised how much I enjoy this site…

Twitter: Twitter. I’m on it.

YouTube: I *heart* YouTube so hard. Seriously. My early videos are absolute nonsense, and even after I learned how to go about cutting things out they’re often still a great big pile of suck, but man I enjoy the crap out of making and posting them and am so glad it exists and is free. Favorite YouTube channels? The What The Buck Show, the Vlog Brothers, sxephil, meekakitty, Periodic Videos, Red Fence, Penn Says, nigahiga, and Reason TV.