Tell Me Your Origin Story

I have no good newborn baby pictures of myself, because I was born asphyxiating and via forceps, because the nurse didn't want to bother the doctor with my delivery on the doctor's lunch break. Until the age of two I lived on an egg farm because my father was duped into taking a "promising" job as a "farm manager". I once was responsible for breaking the main feed line for the chickens, which cost my father a day's salary.

By the age of 3, my parents began to realize that I was really advanced mentally for my age. I taught myself to read via Dr. Seuss books and Sesame Street. My mom was so proud she taped me reading through "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" for the first time. She couldn't figure out how to stop the tape, though, so the end of the tape still has her saying "Oh shit, it's still taping!" We had a psychiatrist relative who gave me IQ and intelligence tests. I can't say exactly what the scores were (don't remember), but they rated extremely highly. By the age of four I asked my mother to teach me to write in cursive, so I had a daily workbook which I used to learn cursive, addition, subtraction, and the like.

In school, I was given the offer of skipping a grade, but instead chose to skip ahead just in math and stay the same everywhere else. This had the effect of ostracizing me from both groups. By 6th grade, everything was easy enough that it took very little effort on my part to do all the work, so I'd get marked down for lack of effort. Since my brothers had to work for much less payoff, my parents rewarded everything on effort. So they'd get rewarded for C+'s and I'd get punished for A-'s. It wasn't that I didn't give effort, it just took very little to get everything done, so why waste it? So at that point I just stopped trying altogether, since I felt nothing I did was good enough. Apparently that was all it took for many classmates to lay into me for all my other shortcomings.

I'd been blessed academically, but I was never a physical aficionado. I was a very late bloomer, so I was really short and heavy come middle school and high school. I loved to participate in sports, but was never really coordinated for it. My sports highlight as a kid was making the all-star team in little league for leading the league in batting average (and then hitting a double in the LLWS sectionals), despite other parents not thinking I deserved to be there. My sports lowlight was being forced to play football in middle school to "toughen up". I had a terrible coach who instructed us on ways to cheap shot the opponent, regularly let the players get into fights with other teammates, and treated me like hot garbage personally. I was the heaviest kid on the team, and once I actually tackled the coach's son in a head-to-head drill (it was basically wrestling with football pads). As I was walking back to the line, he told his son to not let me get away with that and he cheap shotted me in the back. After that practice, I finally gave up and told my parents that I hated everything about football. I didn't want my dad to think I was a quitter, so I had stuck with it for 3 months to that point, hating every minute. Unfortunately, I had the exact same coach the following year for baseball, which proceeded to ruin baseball for me too.

The weirdest thing that ever happened to me was when I was middle-school age. One day, when I was in middle school, I was walking along a double set of tracks with my best friend when we saw a train coming up one of them. He walked well outside of both tracks, and I was walking on the tracks, about 20 feet behind him. I have no specific memory of what happened next, but the next thing I knew I was standing about 50 feet clear of him, well off the tracks, and there was a speeding passenger train on the other track. I have no idea how I got over there, and neither does he. It's a weird unexplained phenomenon, and it's as if I somehow teleported there. I know it sounds stupid, but he was sure I was dead when it happened, because he didn't see the train coming, and when he saw it speed by I was way in front of him. I have no connecting memory between being on the tracks and being well past him standing still.

Socially, I was always hanging with the wrong crowd. My three best friends in middle school all eventually got in trouble with drugs, with two of them getting arrested and the third getting expelled and moving across the country. I've never touched a drug in my life aside from alcohol. I knew they were doing it but didn't want to be the square that turned them in. They accepted me for me when nobody else would, and I'll always be grateful for that. I had the nickname "Pillsbury Dough Boy" in middle school, and basically just shut down completely around everyone outside of my close circle of friends. I got in trouble twice in school, once by jumping a guy from behind and dragging him down to the asphalt (the guy who coined my "nickname"), and once by throwing a sharp chunk of ice about 50 feet and hitting a taunter square in the back. Apparently not acceptable. I had such a low opinion of myself in middle school and high school, that I had a crush on one girl for seven years, and couldn't tell her how I felt because I thought just being associated with me would ruin her reputation, and I couldn't bear to do that with her. Of course, to naive middle-school me that meant to shadow her and wait for a chance to talk to her alone so I wouldn't ruin her life (yes, in hindsight I know that's really creepy and why she was never alone). By junior year of high school, I was actually finally into puberty and quite well built from playing soccer and tennis (since football and baseball had been ruined for me), but I still felt fat, short and worthless.

My first date was on senior prom, and the girl I asked was the only one I actually felt comfortable talking to. At the prom, though, she was getting jeers for being there with me, and she avoided me most of the night. I took her home and never really talked to her again. By the time college rolled around, I decided I was going to be bitter and distance myself from everyone so that nobody could hurt me or affect me, and I'd cut off all contact with everyone from high school. I made up stories about things I did in school so that people would think I was not to be fucked with.

That lasted about a week, though, until I saw the girl of my dreams. She was a gamer, extremely hot, and actually interested in me. Unfortunately, she was dating a friend of mine at the time, so I didn't pursue it overtly. Once that ended, though, I made what moves I was familiar with (which apparently consisted of pretending not to be interested and making her make the first move). We actually became decent friends, and she set me up with a date on Valentine's day because I was too chicken to do anything about it. The girl I went out with wasn't too interested, so it went nowhere (which was still to that point the best date I ever had). Late that night, though, she actually made her move on me and kissed me during a viewing of the Princess Bride. I was on cloud nine for two years after that point. My whole life revolved around this girl, and I spent every ounce of time I could find with her. It was everything I dreamed it could be. We went ring shopping, planned weddings, planned futures, everything.

Junior year in college rolled around, and I had a great circle of friends, half girls, half guys, all paired up. I was enjoying school and social life for the first time in my life. Everything was perfect in my world. So, I finally decided it was time to move my relationship forward. I was going to ask this girl to marry me, and we'd talked about it all the time. One night that fall, though, while we were right in the middle of...things...she told me that maybe we should slow things down a bit. I asked her what she meant by that, and she never told me. Three days later, she got drunk and slept with another guy. Two weeks after that, I tried to talk to her and she had quietly gotten another boyfriend (a roommate of a friend of mine, which is how I found out). She started abusing alcohol, and was quickly destroying her life with her new guy, and I just had to sit and watch it happen. She never told me why I wasn't good enough for her, but when I told her I was concerned about her drinking, she slapped me and permanently cut off all future interaction with me. A year later, when I finally had started to move on, she cold called me. Told me she was getting kicked out of college, and really wanted to see me once more before she left. I, being the naive person I was, thought that meant getting back together. What it really was, though, was that she, drunk and with her boyfriend, told me that I owed it to her to forgive her for the hell she put me through. That I'd never be happy again unless I did that, and that I should just want to see her happy if I really loved her that much. I couldn't say anything, and just left.

It destroyed me as a person for a long time. I gained about 125 pounds, stopped doing anything but the most necessary studies, and just barely finished my course amount. I never even technically got a diploma because of a discrepancy about a core requirement that I didn't care enough to fight over. By this time I hated the whole world, and swore I'd never open myself up to anyone again. I'd just make shit up to please whoever wanted to hear it. I landed a job as an electrical engineer at a large auto company. It started out fine, but my lack of work ethic and care eventually caught up to me and I got fired shortly before 9/11. So, for 9/11, I was sleeping at home, bored of life, jobless and bitter at the world.

However, that's (fortunately) not the end of the story. One Christmas night, my family had gone to Florida, so I was simply chatting online. I chatted with a girl from the area I grew up that was really into sports and video games. We chatted for hours every day about everything, and for the first time in a long time, I wasn't afraid to be open and honest about my feelings, mostly. She was in much the same situation as I was, for different reasons. We agreed to meet the next time I came home to visit family. We hit it off immediately, but hid our relationship from our "real lives" for a while, just because it felt so different from real life. One day, after going to a baseball game, while I was taking her home, she blacked out in the car and I couldn't get her to respond lucidly. I took her home and introduced myself to her parents, telling them we needed to take her to the hospital. We took her to the ER, where nobody would look at her for hours until I stood up and yelled at the front desk. That was the first time I met her parents, and the first time we admitted to anyone that we were together.

Three years later, I was finally ready to think about marriage again. I was going to get a ring right away this time, and not delay my feelings or my thoughts. So, three days after I bought the ring, I went back out to where she was at college at the time. I couldn't wait even a day, so that night, even though it was pouring rain, I surprised her and told her that I needed to talk to her alone outside. She took that to meant I was dumping her, because I am so smooth that way socially. When she finally realized what I was actually doing, she was already bawling and finally happy enough to say yes. Afterwards, she made me call her parents first and "ask" for their blessing, which I fortunately got.

Since then, I've experienced the two happiest days of my life. Both were wrought with their own kind of peril, though. My wedding day happened to work out to be on my birthday. Two days before the wedding, her grandmother had severe medical trouble and had to go into intensive care. She missed the ceremony, and my wife could only think about that during most of the wedding day, crying most of the time going down the aisle because of it. The rest of the day is really a blur of happiness, but that's what sticks out most to me today. The second happiest day didn't start out that way. My wife had been feeling terrible for a few weeks, and couldn't figure out what was wrong. We went to see a doctor, who gave her a pregnancy test. It came up positive. My initial spoken reaction was "Oh shit...", not because it was bad news, but because it was such unexpected news. She did not see it this way, and wouldn't talk to me all the way to the OB doctor's office. We got her checked in, and the doctor examined her and said either she was much further along that we initially thought, or there were two. So, we immediately got whisked off to the lab for an ultrasound. She got hooked up to the machine, and I went in and they searched. What they found was one baby, 22 weeks along, and it was a boy. So, that day I went from being concerned about a sick wife to expecting a baby in four months. It was a great day.

When I was a little kid I'd say I was pretty normal. I was a pretty good reader at a young age, but other than that nothing special. When I got to first grade, I first kinda realized (or at least thought) that I was really smart. I'm sure I was somewhat bright, but I also went to a Jewish day school so I don't think the curriculum was particularly tough. I remember being able to breeze through everything without any effort. Throughout elementary school I would get check plusses or whatever the good grades were, but at the same time I would get in a lot of trouble at times. I had quite a temper and temper tantrums were a relatively frequent occurrence (sad to say this lasted throughout middle school). Also, I would often just sit in my room and read comics or some other book rather than doing homework. I think I ended up being about 2 months behind before the school every bothered to call my parents. In the summer, I went to a Jewish sleep-away camp which I loved with all my heart. I went there up until I was too old to be a camper anymore. I would've been a councellor but alas, the camp shut down the first year that I could.

I wasn't a physical kid at all. I didn't like excercise and I had pretty shitty eating habits. I was really skinny though because I just had a fast metabolism or something like that. Of course, that has since caught up to me and I'm now what I'd describe as kinda fat, but not obese.

The most notable aspect of my life is probably that I went on a lot of vacations as a child. My parents loved to travel and they simply took me and my brother along for the ride. I've been to all the continents except australia and antarctica, and other than Europe I've been to them all multiple times. Those trips were something I didn't truly appreciate until I was older though, as I kind of grew up thinking they were commonplace.

By the time middle school came around, I'd say I had gotten a lot more cynical. I was the perfect example of why you should not just let a young kid watch south park without any sort of talk beforehand. I had learned all the swear words, but didn't have close to the maturity to know the times to whip them out. Eventually my mom said that I wouldn't get in trouble if I swore in front of her as long as I didn't in front of people who would get offended. Turned out she's a major swearer herself.

I also didn't treat teachers with close to the respect I should've. I was at the small Jewish school still and the staff was pretty sharply divided into the teachers people liked, and the teachers people didn't. While I still did generally well in classes, I would still go to the principal's on a pretty regular basis. Of course, same as elementary school, I didn't put much work into classes and while sometimes it came crashing down on me, I generally could pull out a good grade.

Towards the end of middle school, I couldn't wait to get out of there. After getting in something of a fight with a fellow classmate, I was just pissed off. Even though I had never been to any other school, I knew that I couldn't handle going back. I would've begged my parents to let me change schools if they had a high school. I told myself and most of them that I didn't want to interact with them after graduation and for the most part I've stayed true to that. It was made much easier since I wasn't going to the same high school as any of them.

The one other really major event that happened around that time was my parents telling me and my brother that they were getting divorced. It was a brutal thing for me and I did not handle it very well. I was a wreck for a while, but I realized that a lot of time had passed and my parents still were living together and went back to sleeping together. However, they did fight a lot and I just figured that they were only going to stay together until I was out of high school.

Of course, wanting to leave middle school so much came to bite me in the ass. Without question freshman year of high school was the worst year of my life. I went from being with basically the same 10 kids for 9 years to being in a class of about 100 kids, only one of whom I knew (and we certainly weren't close friends). For the first, and really only time in my life, I was a victim of bullying. This one guy and some of his friends decided for whatever reason that they didn't like me and wanted to make my life as miserable as they could. The only thing was, they never tried to beat me up so I couldn't really complain. The only time anything physical happened was when I got so pissed off at him (he got a lot of people to just refuse to acknowledge my existence in any way) that I just tried to attack him. Of course, I got my ass handed to me. Luckily I didn't get in any actual trouble for it.

And just coinciding with the social issues was the realization that I couldn't breeze my way through school like I used to. After having maybe 1 c throughout elementary and middle school, I had 3 after one quarter of high school. My grades never really improved that year, and I'm still convinced that I only got through geometry because the teacher didn't feel like doing the paperwork failing me would've required.

Sophomore and junior year were very similar. The guy who hated me admitted he didn't really know why, and apologized for it. My grades weren't great but they weren't horrible. On the other hand, I didn't really have friends in high school. Basically I had my one old friend that I've known forever and if he was busy, I'd spend the whole day in the house. I went an entire weekend without going outside a few times. My free time basically became internet and watching sports with my dad (which while fun, was every night). I did have my first kiss after sophomore year, but it was an incredibly humiliating pity kiss.

Luckily I finally did something that has made my life so much better towards the end of junior year. I asked a girl to prom. Her response was "well if this guy I like doesnt want to go with me, then sure." While nowadays I'd take that as a no, I was happy to have a chance. And luckily the guy didn't want to go with her. While nothing ever happened between me and that girl romantically, she happened to be someone who made plans with everyone which basically gave me a circle of friends. Coupled with having my own car, I had a real social life.

Senior year was a great year for me. I had friends, finally did well in school. There were just two big issues hanging over me. The first was college. Luckily I had the idea to become a journalist. The only thing I was really passionate about was watching sports so I figured a job talking about them would be a good idea. Unfortunately, my dad had a talk with me about how he wasn't sure that I'd get into college but if I didn't, I'd be dead. I would've especially been terrified except I did end up with a good SAT score so I figure that'd get me into most of the schools I applied to (I underestimated the selectiveness of state schools severely). By the end of it, I got into 4 schools, got rejected from 3 and sent to a satellite school by penn state, which was my number one non-reach school. Thankfully, I did get into the University of Missouri, which is where I am now.

The other big issue was girls. Going to a small school, I never really did much with girls and had no idea how to get one. While I did have that kiss, it was very pathetic. I can't emphasize that enough. However, as the year went on, I started to like this one girl and thought we were hitting it off. I ended up asking her to prom and she eagerly accepted. One thing lead to another and we ended up going out, and save for a one month breakup when going away to school, we're still together to this day.

My college story hasn't been particularly interesting (even less so than what you just read). I have friends, I party, and I've done a long distance relationship. However, the girlfriend ended up transferring out here (she went to the school in town and hated it). I've also made the deans list both semesters so I'm hoping I've really turned it around academically, even though this semester is looking tough. The one negative is that my parents did end up getting divorced, though I'd been expecting it for so long that it really wasn't a huge deal. They both seem happier for it and are still friends. Alas, this is the end of the story for now. However, the next year is undoubtedly going to shape my life, as I'm contemplating a change in majors, though thats a story for another day.