Resetting 2017
Greetings! I'm Josh. A long, long time ago I started this blog as a way to chat with family and friends about my life in college without having to actually call and talk to them one at a time. It gave me an outlet to vent about my frustrations and surprises, and I got to know a lot of interesting people. Then, after a few years, people started to drift away from Livejournal for a variety of reasons... Policy changes at LJ... Migration towards Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram... Graduating from school and having jobs, children, and whatever else that leads toward having a more boring life and less time to write besides.
Well, you know what? I'm back. The only thing I've consistently done on this blog in the past few years is my annual New Years meme, and it turns out I've actually lied on one of the questions this year. I don't normally do New Year's Resolutions, but after some brainstorming with my wife, we've agreed to a few. And one of them is: journal again.
So, I feel like I need to reintroduce myself to the world. Hardly anyone reads my journal besides spider bots anymore and most of my current friends haven't touched their LJ in years, but maybe when I have a new body of work I will attract a few new followers. So! Allow me to tell you a little bit about myself.
I was born on the Ides of March in 1984. That's not how I normally introduce it, but when you mention that your birthday is March 15 you quickly find out how much people know about Julius Caesar.
That makes me 32 years old currently, a fully-fledged adult by any measure. I have a steady job, I am married, and as of yet I have no children, although you might not recognize that just by wandering around my house. My passions, in order of acquisition, are video games, board games, anime, and my wife. I fell in love with videogames at 4 years old, and with board games as a young child. I stumbled across anime club during my first week of college and never looked back. I met Stephanie during my Senior year, and got to know her over that summer and during my Super-senior year.
I'm one of those people who suspect they have Asperger's, although I've never been diagnosed (and I understand that diagnosis has been going out of vogue lately). I'm weird and shy and I don't "people" well at all, but I am also polite, kind, gentle, and intellectual.
When I say intellectual, I mean that I devour subjects. I usually end up with very little practical knowledge at the end of the process, but I love to learn anyway.
I can write some. I haven't, for a while. I am creative but I don't have a strong drive to create. I am a computer programmer by trade (at a boring, regional insurance company in a city full of boring, regional insurance companies). I have a double major in Computer Science and English. I also have a minor in Asian Studies and a minor in Women and Gender Studies.
And now you know why it took me five years to finish college.
Why Women and Gender Studies? Well, it's a long story, partially told in the archives of this journal. (With a Live Journal account and friends-only access, you could read a lot more about it) The shortest explanation is that I identify as androgynous--someone who is not gendered strongly as male or female. Put another way, I reject traditional gender roles. This was something I fully realized about myself in college, and it put my entire life up until then into perspective. I do not go to church, but I was brought up Southern Baptist. Now, the churches I grew up in were very liberal for Southern Baptist churches, the kind that actively debated whether or not to stay in the Southern Baptist Conference after the "great conservative takeover." Still, we can say that gender identity was a foreign concept to me until I stumbled into the minefield.
It probably goes without saying that I am a very politically progressive person. I cheer on LGBT causes and it gives me great pain that there is so much further to go before they will be totally accepted. It frustrates me to listen to coworkers on the other side of the cubicle divider natter on about politics, but I know better than to get involved.
What else? We have two cats; one is scared of strangers and the other hates strangers. I listen to video game music more often than pop music, and we collect gorgeous nerdy art from anime/game conventions and kickstarter. We have a board game room and a working arcade machine (Snow Bros, 1990). And I've got 51 more journal posts to make this year, so leave some topic suggestions in the comments!
もう一度、よろしくお願いします