A little about me...

I figured a good way to start my entries would be to tell the condensed version of my life story. So here goes...

I was born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1983. For the most part I had a fairly happy childhood. By that I mean that I was raised in a middle class suburban family and nobody beat me up or molested me. My parents divorced when I was eight or nine years old. I had a strained relationship with my father from that point on and it never really recovered. More on that later.

When I was seventeen and a junior in high school I enlisted in the New Hampshire Army National Guard. This was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. The army taught me strength, self discipline, attention to detail, and provided something I had been sorely lacking for a long time: good male role models. I learned a lot about myself and about being a man in the five years that I served, but by 2005 I had begun to resent the level of control the Army had over my life. I transferred to the air force side of the National Guard (which is technically still the military, but only just barely) and served another three years giving me a grand total of eight years time in service when I was honorably discharged in November of 2008.

While I was in the process of transferring I did something naive young soldiers often do: I married the wrong person for all the wrong reasons. More on this later. The one positive thing to come out of my marriage was my wonderful son, who now lives with me full-time and visits his mother on the weekends.

When my son came to live with me I quickly realized that at my current level of education it would be impossible to make ends meet. I went through four or five different jobs in the space of a few months and every single one ended one of two ways: either I couldn't make enough money to survive, or I couldn't schedule my work around childcare arrangements. It was at this point that I made the decision to go to college. I am currently enrolled full-time in a teacher-preparation program and hope to someday teach high school social studies. In my spare time I play guitar (badly), read like it's my job, and I've recently discovered my love for renaissance faires.

Well that's all for now. Some of the issues above will be explored in their own separate posts at a later date simply because this is my first entry and I prefer to keep it short and sweet.