Who am I? (ongoing)
Well, we know what I call myself online; which, I suppose, is a decent enough start to things. Now, let's look at the sort of things that make up a person.
Are we or are we not the sum of the experiences that we lived through? What does what we learned as children, teenagers, young adults, and at other stages in our lives impact the lessons that the world tries to educate us in?
Yeah, that was mostly rhetorical.
I'm not any more or less complex than the next person, I don't think. But, I've never really looked at things in my past in anything close to resembling detail, so bear with me if I digress into tangents now and then.
So...Education and Habitat...
Alright...I begin in Penn, just outside of Harrisburg, to parents who's families are solidly based in that state. We move out to California pretty soon after I was born, because I was born in July and my sister was born the following August in San Diego. The two of us apparently have a tight and loving relationship for the first three years, until April of '69 when we have moved to Portsmouth, Va and my other sister is born. The following July, we are in Albany, Ga and my brother is being born.
Can we say upheaval and disruption of home life? Maybe. I'll have to say, I don't really think of it like that. The first time I can recall being adversely affected by a move was in eighth grade.
We had stayed in Ga from after my brother's birth and my entering kindergarten until November of my third grade. We then came to Norfolk, Va but I finished out the school year and then we moved across town into military housing. This meant a change in school zones, but it was to one of those border areas, which meant that some of the people I'd gone to school with the previous year were actually in my new school as opposed to the school I would have gone to had we not moved.
(Later, I would encounter even more of my old 3rd grade classmates, as the neighborhood next to housing went to the same junior high school...yes, I went to junior high, middle school is a fairly recent concept. )
But, again, I went their for 7th grade, then we got into new housing in Virginia Beach, and I attended a brand-new junior high for 8th grade. That was kind of cool, until I came home one day (shortly after acquiring my first actual girlfriend) and discovered we were moving to California in, like, two months....
Life in California lasted three years...Feb of 8th until Jan of 11th...and then we were back to Virginia Beach where I finished high school, visited during breaks while going to college, and then moved back to after failing to come up with a thesis and finish the coursework for my master's degree on time.
It's not that I didn't have anything in mind, it's just that I couldn't get myself focussed in time to make the combination of school and working to make ends meet come together in such a way as to allow me to do both and still write what they wanted me to in something approaching the schedule of deadlines that the school had established for me.
I may go back for the higher degree someday, but, right now, I'm sort of biding my time and raising my kids until they are old enough that I might consider doing something with my bachelor's degree. Retail sales and (assistant)management are nice enough, but if I'd wanted to really have a career in business, I'd have a business degree.
Are we or are we not the sum of the experiences that we lived through? What does what we learned as children, teenagers, young adults, and at other stages in our lives impact the lessons that the world tries to educate us in?
Yeah, that was mostly rhetorical.
I'm not any more or less complex than the next person, I don't think. But, I've never really looked at things in my past in anything close to resembling detail, so bear with me if I digress into tangents now and then.
So...Education and Habitat...
Alright...I begin in Penn, just outside of Harrisburg, to parents who's families are solidly based in that state. We move out to California pretty soon after I was born, because I was born in July and my sister was born the following August in San Diego. The two of us apparently have a tight and loving relationship for the first three years, until April of '69 when we have moved to Portsmouth, Va and my other sister is born. The following July, we are in Albany, Ga and my brother is being born.
Can we say upheaval and disruption of home life? Maybe. I'll have to say, I don't really think of it like that. The first time I can recall being adversely affected by a move was in eighth grade.
We had stayed in Ga from after my brother's birth and my entering kindergarten until November of my third grade. We then came to Norfolk, Va but I finished out the school year and then we moved across town into military housing. This meant a change in school zones, but it was to one of those border areas, which meant that some of the people I'd gone to school with the previous year were actually in my new school as opposed to the school I would have gone to had we not moved.
(Later, I would encounter even more of my old 3rd grade classmates, as the neighborhood next to housing went to the same junior high school...yes, I went to junior high, middle school is a fairly recent concept. )
But, again, I went their for 7th grade, then we got into new housing in Virginia Beach, and I attended a brand-new junior high for 8th grade. That was kind of cool, until I came home one day (shortly after acquiring my first actual girlfriend) and discovered we were moving to California in, like, two months....
Life in California lasted three years...Feb of 8th until Jan of 11th...and then we were back to Virginia Beach where I finished high school, visited during breaks while going to college, and then moved back to after failing to come up with a thesis and finish the coursework for my master's degree on time.
It's not that I didn't have anything in mind, it's just that I couldn't get myself focussed in time to make the combination of school and working to make ends meet come together in such a way as to allow me to do both and still write what they wanted me to in something approaching the schedule of deadlines that the school had established for me.
I may go back for the higher degree someday, but, right now, I'm sort of biding my time and raising my kids until they are old enough that I might consider doing something with my bachelor's degree. Retail sales and (assistant)management are nice enough, but if I'd wanted to really have a career in business, I'd have a business degree.