It was a warm day, late summer, in the early evening. The sun was out, deep in the sky, and I had just finished packing. I had my plane ticket for Allentown (ABE) to Dayton (DAY), with return trip two weeks later, in a hip bag. I had a few sets of clothing, some CDs, a framed photo I had taken earlier that year, and a few random bits of paraphernalia; nothing particularly notable.
I had just finished applying beeswax to my hair to really spike it out; it was bleached blonde and cut to be choppy and a little long in the front. They weren’t quite bangs, but there was enough to tie off into Anime-style spike-bangs. I wore my dark brown Kikwear jeans with 42″ leg-openings, my blue/white/silver Airwalks (the later “clodhopper” style), a white t-shirt with DeNiro from taxi driver front-and-center, and my black Kikwear jacket that I thought looked rather dashing with its shiny metal zipper.
I had my mom take a photo (pictured right); It wasn’t that I thought I might not be coming back, I just felt like that was a moment that I wanted to have captured on film.
In retrospect, I may not have known it, but my decision to get onto that plane was probably the most life-changing choice I had made up to that point.
When I meet people and they find out that I’m from eastern Pennsylvania, all the way over by New Joisey, they often ask me how I ended up out in Richmond, Indiana. My usual response is either “it’s a long story” or “it’s a long story, and it involves a girl…you know…”, depending mostly on how well I know the person and how drunk I am.
So, in the interest of settling it once and for all…
I graduated high school in 1998, and enrolled immediately at East Stroudsburg University, the local higher ed. I received the Weiler-Brush scholarship, declared myself as a Computer Science major, and moved onto campus. I was basically in college because it seemed like what I was supposed to do. I admit, looking back, that I really didn’t value a college education at that point.
At the time, I was a big party-kid; I regularly attended local parties (more widely known as “raves” or “rave-parties”, although we rarely used that term), generally on Fridays and/or Saturdays, from 9 or 10 pm until 4 or 5 in the morning. I had a sizable collection of mixtapes of local DJs, dressed the part (big pants, flashy clothes, colorful jewelry), and even had some records myself. Like many party kids at the time, I wanted to be up on the decks too. My music tastes, at the time, consisted mostly of a few varieties of electronic music, and chick-rock. I was moody, had frequent bouts with depression, and was emotionally dysfunctional. Never did drugs though, and still haven’t. At that point, the only chemical I consumed was caffeine; I didn’t even drink alcohol.
My first semester in college was difficult. I lived in Minsi Hall, room 328, with another freshman named Jim. He was from the same town as one of my uncles, and it turned out that we actually knew a few of the same people. My courseload wasn’t too intense: Calculus I, Speech, Linear Data Structures, Computer Organization (a hardware class) and Intro to Political Science. Due to a number of factors, I did very poorly that semester (1.33 GPA). [Factors included: post-lunch food-comas during calculus I with a prof who spoke extremely broken English, severe challenges waking up in time for my 8am Data Structures class which happened to be in a programming language I had to teach myself on the fly, and a really cute girl that I met who liked to cuddle on the mornings that I had Speech. Honestly, it was just cuddling, nothing sexual. Seriously!] My grandfather, on my biological-father’s side of the family, died of Leukemia mid-way through that semester.
Not everything was bad, though. I met some really great people: some other party kids, other folks that liked playing video games, and I even re-connected with a few people from high school. I went to many parties, both local and down in Philadelphia (Space is the place!). I dyed my hair for the first time (Manic Panic’s “after midnight blue”, followed by platinum-blonde). I got a job working as a technician assistant student workstudy for the campus IT staff.
I think I can honestly say that in spite of how it may sound, my poor performance wasn’t due to too much partying. I just didn’t care. School just wasn’t very important to me; I had a lot of other things going on in my life that I had to figure out.
Spring semester went much better. I changed my major to “Media Communications”, having been scared off by the math requirements for the CompSci program (Calc I, II, III, Discrete, Linear Alg, and DiffEq. Nuff said. They had a pretty solid CS program there.) I lost my scholarship because my GPA was too low. My courseload was much easier, I took Piano, Fencing… um… I think I had an English class? I really don’t remember. I had spring break in Boston, MA, visiting a friend of mine; I bought $120 of records, a round-trip bus ticket, and a small amount of spending money using my first credit card (debt which I would not finally pay off for ten years).
I saw some of my favorite DJs performing down at Club Space (Union Jack, Terra Ferma, Art of Trance, DJ Venom, Scott Henry), had some adventures in NYC that involved getting lost and driving 100+ blocks down Broadway and never getting into the club, and had sex for the first time (that part was a actually a rather bad experience, I think I just wasn’t ready yet).
When the semester finally ended, I decided ESU wasn’t for me. I lost all financial aid because my cumulative GPA was too low, and I just couldn’t afford to go back. Over the course of the summer I discovered “Allentown Business School”, found an apartment, enrolled in the school (in the Graphic Design program), and did a little DJ’ing and attended a lot of parties that summer.
And I met a girl.
Ok. Full disclosure here. I admit it, I had an internet classfieds ad up on an online classifieds ad. (A very primitive precursor to match.com, but it operated a bit more like craigslist.org) I met a couple people through it, but generally speaking Internet Dating turns out to be more misses than hits. (I’ve done my fair share, I think I can say that pretty confidently)
The girl that I met actually found my ad, I say that only in my defense, as I was limiting my own searches to the PA/NJ region — I was looking for people that were within reasonable driving distance. She was from a little town in Ohio called Greenville, or as she called it “East Bumfuck Egypt.”
We talked online a lot. We talked on the phone a lot. Back then, before cell phones, you had to pay-per-minute when making Long Distance calls. She and I both bought a lot of phone cards (you could get ~$0.05 / minute using a phone card, sometimes less if the phone card was a larger initial investment) I would call her during my lunch break at my job serving tables at the Mountain Lake Resort. We sent letters back and forth.
In August, she and her mom drove out to Pennsylvania, as a vacation, to see me. It was a 5-day vacation, if I recall. I think I stayed at their hotel with them the whole time they were here (to the chagrin of my parents). I showed them around the Poconos. When the week was over, I promised that I would fly out to visit her in September.
With my 20/20 hindsight vision, I see now that this relationship was largely the product of my dysfunctional rescuer-complex; she had low self-esteem and I felt like it was my job to fix that. I even remember telling her that I didn’t know how I could love her if I couldn’t help her. Other factors involved in this were increasing static at home — I think my parents felt very frustrated because they thought I was wasting good opportunities, but at the same time I felt rebellious from always being pushed along this very traditional path to success (I am pretty non-traditional in just about every way possible). Before I got that job at Mountain Lake Resort, my dad had actually told me that if I didn’t get a job that weekend, all of my stuff would be out on the lawn and I had to move out. Perhaps most significantly, I was very much enamored with the wayfarer lifestyle — I wanted to travel and experience life before locking myself into a fixed-track to traditional success.
There wasn’t just any one reason for me to leave; even though from the outside it looks like I was foolishly moving for a girl. Really, that just happened to be a vehicle, a means to an end, a manifestation of deeper desires to strike out on my own.
The girl and I ended up splitting up after 5 months (in 2000), but I stayed out in Ohio, eventually moving from Greenville to Dayton (2001), and then up to Richmond (2002), where I’ve lived ever since. Some people I met when I first moved out to the midwest in 1999 I am still friends with to this day.
In some ways, I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted — I’ve traveled a lot, had to hunt for my own worms, and taken a very challenging path through life to get where I am today. In some ways, I think it was necessary — many of the dysfunctional emotional issues I had in my late teens were resolved in a sort of trial-by-fire war of attrition with myself. Many hours of counseling, of pain, suffering and hunger (literally hunger — I was down to 145 lbs at one point). I made a lot of art. And I came out ok. It’s hard to say how my life would have turned out had I remained a Computer Science major. Maybe I would have been more successful and affluent, but would I have been happy? Would I still be chasing after girls that I could fix?
I try not to really think about it all that much; it seems kind of silly to waste time and energy imagining if you would have been LESS happy or miserable if your life turned out differently. (It’s sort of an inverted masochistic regretfullness). I’m happy now, my life is good, and I’m thankful for the choices I’ve made that have led me up to here.
So there you go. That’s how I ended up in EBFE, Indiana.
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