(no subject)
Well guys.
I know that it's been a very long time.
But I am posting! A very nice anonymous poster suggested I write about myself. And since I've felt so depressed and lonely lately, I figure that sharing things about my life will make me feel better, even if people don't read this or don't really care.
So I'll start from the beginning.
My dad was born in Tacoma Park, Maryland, on December 2, 1954. For you pop culture entousiasts, you'll recognize that date as Britney Spears' birthday, although my father looks much better with a buzz cut. Also, he has a mustache, this rendering me unable to ever date a man who also has a mustache. My father's father, Mack O'Dell, was one of the first agents to work for the FBI. While my father's family moved around the tri-state area, he continued to chase criminals around Appalachia. He was an adamnant admirer and friend of J. Edgar Hoover, despite Hoover's dress-wearing and MLK-hating policies. There's a picture, famous in my family, of Hoover shaking my grandfather's hand. My grandmother is holding my Aunt Diane and pregnant with my Uncle Mike, and John Edgar fucking Hoover is holding my dad, who was only about three years old at the time. My grandfather retired from the FBI after 47 years of service and went on to involve himself in county and municipal governement work. He's obviously fully retired now, and spends most of his time using his applying his governmental knowledge to send out racist emails about Obama and forwards with bad jokes and pictures of puppies in hilarious situations.
My grandmother, Anna Lee, was and still is a passive-aggressivist.
When I talk about my dad's family, I always try to cushion the blow by trying to water it down. I remind people that my grandparents were staunchly Catholic, but I've never really found an effective way to sugar-coat the facts. So I'll just come out with it. My grandparents had eleven kids in thirteen years: Dean, my father and the oldest; Diane, Michael, Linda, Thomas, Craig, Paul, Steve, Mary, Helen, and John. They are the reason that I have 42 cousins. All in all, there are 68 people in my dad's immediate family.
Sometime in the mid-sixties, my grandparents with their growing brood moved to Athens, Ohio. My grandparents still live there, in the same house. My uncle lives there as well, across town with his fiance, much to my grandparents' shock and horror. You might recognize Athens as the site of the country's fifth-biggest party school, Ohio University, and that's where most of my aunts and uncles and a few of my cousins went to school. My dad notably spent eight years there; going to school, then taking time off to work as a telephone operator, then going back to school, then taking more time off to be a roadie for his friend's band, then going back to school and finally recieving his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1982.
That's pretty much my dad's early life. After that, he went to Cincinnati, where he met my mom.