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Being born in 1984, I’m a bit of an “old guy” by some standards as I’m steadily approaching middle-age. Blah. But anyway, I grew up in a country suburb of Dayton Ohio with a mostly standard family: both parents at home, two older sisters and one younger brother (each of us about 2 years apart in age). I had my primary schooling with a relatively small student body as part of 36-student graduating class. The school was also predominantly black with me being the only white male in my class. I was a rather shy/quite guy in school, but I did have three very close friends during that time who all helped shape me as a person:

Lamar was on the same bus route as me and lived a pretty short bike ride away. We actually didn’t start as friends, but I think we were officially friends by the 3rd grade. I would go over to his house all the time, play video games and ride bikes around together. I think he showed me my first ever porn video. XD He was like part of the family and would go with us on some of our camping trips. We even worked at some of the same jobs before we both left Ohio. I sadly don’t talk to him much these days. I should really reach out to him more and catch up.

Mike, I’m not 100% sure when I became friends with him. I think I met him through Lamar and we kind of gelled so naturally that it’s hard for me to really remember when we “officially” became friends; it just felt like that was how things always were. I definitely know we were close by 5th grade, though. He really helped get me into anime initially, telling me about Sailor Moon being shown on early morning weekday TV. One of my favorite times in my life was when my room caught fire the night of high school graduation and I lived at Mike’s house for a few weeks. I still talk to Mike sometimes, mostly back and forth in MAL profile comments. I really need to visit him and Lamar sometime soon, as they both live in the D.C. area these days....

Matt was a bit of an anomaly when it comes to my old circle of friends. First, he was the only white guy other than me. Then, he joined our school pretty late and didn’t become our friend until the 7th grade. He also did not graduate with us as he moved away during the 11th grade if I remember correctly (again, I was the only white guy in my graduating class). However, despite the shorter time as my friend, he was just as close and influential to me as Mike and Lamar. Just as with those two, there were times when I practically lived at Matt’s house. He got me into Wicca, D&D, and JRPGs. Matt even helped me get my first job and was a big reason for why I ended up joining the Air Force later on. He had joined the Army right after high school and told me that if I were to ever join the military, that I should join the Air Force. While at the time I thought I’d NEVER join the military, that advice stayed in the back of my mind so when I felt like my life was at a dead end, off to the Air Force recruiter I went! Sadly he is the friend out of these three that I’d lost contact with the most, having pretty much no contact with him for years. I should really try to reach out to him again some time.

So after high school, I went straight to college. Those were some rather odd two years for me. I went to Eastern Michigan University almost entirely based around these two things: they offered Japanese courses and gave in-state tuition rates to Ohio residents. I lived in the dorms and had one of the worst roommates ever during my first year. I won’t go into too many details, but I will say that I literally wanted to kill him at one point and said as much to my mom over the phone and kind of scared the shit out of her (I felt pretty bad about that); and he was such a fucking slob that I ended up cleaning up after him and had to use bleach to clean black sludge out of the trash can (I personally never ate any food in my dorm room and sure as fuck didn’t piss in 2 liter bottles and leave them in the closet like he did....). ANYWAY! I partially blame the bad roommate for giving me a bad start on trying to be a social person in college and I never really recovered from that. I had absolutely no friends at college and ended up focusing on distant relationships with old friends and socializing on internet chat rooms.

In between my first and second year of college I had my first almost-girlfriend, if you want to call that a thing. She was a girl I liked who went on a few of the same organized camping trips that my family did. We got pretty close, hung out a few times, even almost kissed once when I was over her house but I was too nervous to actually do it. I thought things were going really well and I was totally in love with her. Probably my first true love beyond a series of crushes that I had during my mandatory schooling. I think she really liked me a lot, too. However, when it was getting time for me to go back to college for my second year and considering that she was about three years younger than me, the girl suggested that we not try to continue things romantically and that was that....

My second year of college was a little more “interesting” than my first. I had less shitty roommates (had different ones during my two semesters of the year) and I got a part-time job at a bowling alley. The job was a bit of a mixed bag. Some nights I loved it, while other nights it was some of the most soul crushingly stressful moments I’ve ever experienced (especially during college nights). But overall, I think back on that job fondly. I did some of my first ever karaoke there! During my second year I also had my second almost-girlfriend, this time with a girl I met online. I had really fallen for her and began talking to her a lot on the phone. However, something eventually happened and it was revealed that she was younger than she claimed to be online (possibly younger than my previous almost-girlfriend) and also that she was mostly just fucking with my mind/emotions as an experiment or something, maybe.... “It’s Complicated” didn’t even begin to describe that “relationship”.... I even had money saved up at one point to go visit her, so I probably dodged a bullet in finding things out before I went on that trip. Although this whole situation was rather shocking, I don’t think I was as freaked out or mad or whatever as I maybe should have been. Finding out the truth (or at least most of it) ended up being a relief to me, kind of made sense in some ways, and I moved on pretty quickly.... Anyway, leading up to finding this out was rather stressful and contributed to a decline in my academic performance and I decided that I’d drop out of college after that second year.

After college, I worked a few basic jobs while continuing to live with my parents in Ohio. I worked at a car dealership, an assembly line for TV tubes, and two different shipping hubs. During the first of those two shipping hub jobs I was seriously making plans to move out of my parent’s place and get my own apartment. However, when I got two speeding tickets within a rather close timeframe of each other during my commute to work, the cost of those tickets kind of made me realize that my job wasn’t that great and wasn’t going anywhere. That’s when I decided to join the Air Force. So yeah, off to the recruiter I went and at 21 and a half years old I shipped off to basic training. The Air Force was basically my “get well plan”, giving me a way to make a living on my own, acquire a trade, pay off my two years of college debt, and have a way to go back to college. I planned on just doing a 4-year enlistment and I stuck to that. My stent in the Air Force was a nice experience, though a little bland. My first and only duty station was Holloman AFB in New Mexico and I never went on any deployments (not that I really wanted to deploy anyway). I got placed in the Financial Management career field, so other than a few exercises I was always working in an office. I did meet a few cool people, though. I was particularly close with my friends Dan, Weasel, and Jared, guys that I’d play D&D with and watch anime and just generally hang out. Good stuff.

But yeah, back to relationship stuff, I was a pretty late-bloomer when it came to romance and such. I never kissed a girl or dated anyone for real while I was in high school or college. I did end up finally developing my first real relationship while I was in the Air Force, ending up with a long-distance girlfriend who I happened to meet through an organized camping trip thing in Ohio during some of my visits back home (just like my first almost-girlfriend). Things were mostly nice. She was a fellow anime nerd and I ended up moving into her northern Ohio apartment after I left the Air Force. However, things eventually fell apart a bit on my end and I felt the need to end the relationship. To this day, I kind of feel bad about how I ended things. I sent her an email explaining my feelings and how I felt that we should break up. And I sent this email while we were both in the apartment, just in separate rooms. Kind of a shitty thing to do, but the relationship just began to feel empty to me and I didn’t think it was worth continuing. Again, this was pretty much all on my end of things and I mostly blame myself for our relationship falling apart. I was very late in beginning to look for a new job when I was getting ready to leave the Air Force and didn’t have a job or go back to school when I moved in with her, so I pretty much just sat around in the apartment most of the day while she was at work, just living off of my savings/terminal leave pay, then applying for unemployment. I really lacked direction and in retrospect I think that is part of what contributed to my feelings of emptiness. Also, I should have communicated with her more to try and work on the relationship. But, it is what it is! Can’t change the past....

So after about 5 months of living with my first ex-girlfriend, I was contacted out of the blue by one of my former co-workers in the Air Force. She said that the squadron was getting some contract positions and that I was pretty much a shoe-in for one of the slots if I wanted it.... So it was back to New Mexico with me!! And I’ve been in New Mexico ever since! Professionally, I went from being a contracted employee, to getting hired on as an actual civil service government employee for the Air Force, and went up the ranks to now be the base Accountant. On the personal life side, I got a new girlfriend damn near right after I moved back to New Mexico! Things were pretty good. She was somewhat-casually into anime and I got her more into it. And I was somewhat-casually into tabletop gaming and she got me more into that (largely introducing me to modern boxed board and card games, as I was previously only really into tabletop RPGs like D&D and Pathfinder). We got married in 2012, but things didn’t stay good forever. Irreparable issues came up in our relationship and we got divorced.... Then we got re-married to each other and then got divorced again for good in March 2018, though we had “separated” earlier in 2017 and just stayed officially married until the end of the year to make taxes simpler.... We were actually still good friends for a while, though we eventually drifted apart as people do. She goes by spazirae here on MAL and she’s remarried to someone else now which I'm happy about.

After the divorce, I’d gotten really close with my friend Davy Wagnarok who became my main board game buddy and bull shitting pal for a number of years. That was really nice to have someone to game with and talk to about various things. He was easily my “best friend” for a while. We worked on making our own board games before, though it’s more of a hobby for me while he eventually got hired by Level 99 Games to make that his real day job! Sadly, he eventually moved to Albuquerque (a 3.5 hour drive distance) so he can work in the physical Level 99 offices instead of teleworking which made it hard to hang out a lot. We eventually drifted apart, again, as people do, for more reasons than one....

So for a while, it was just me living in a house by myself with two little dogs, watching anime and reading manga and playing games and doing other hobby things as often as I can to make my life outside of work as pleasant as possible. Right before the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, I began to try online dating. Perfect timing! After a few half-way decent connections, I started seriously dating a girl who happened to live in Albuquerque like Davy! Things were going alright, with us visiting each other a few times a month. But it ended up falling apart in a somewhat messy way (although we eventually reconnected briefly via Discord again to get a bit better closure).

After that break-up, I was pretty miserable. Again, not being able to hang out with Davy often and not having many other friends in the area and not much luck romantically really took a toll. I eventually gave my job an ultimatum that I had to get the hell out of the area and that I was going to move back to Ohio in early 2022 even if I didn't have a new job there. After my commander failed to get something set up for me in the area, they actually agreed to let me stay on as a permanent remote worker! Nice thing that COVID set up some good teleworking infrastructure and proved that we can still be productive in that format!

So in 2022 I ended up moving back in with my mom for a bit, helped her out with some bills and paying for some home repair while I was there. I was talking to a few different people from online dating, but nothing panned out until I connected with my current girlfriend (and fiance!!) Suzu and I’ve been living with her in Columbus for a little more than a year now and things are great! We watch anime and play board games whenever we can, although she also ended up getting me into FFXIV (the MMO) and that ate up a LOT of our time. XD

But yeah! I’m finally updating this in April 2024 (after realizing this was previously at least 4 years old).... And that’s most of the basic things that pertain to my personal life! Don’t know if anyone cared about stuff in that much detail, but there you go!