The year was 1985.  We had a Hollywood actor as our president.  The 49ers were still a force to be reckoned with.  Back to the Future showed us that eventually we’ll all have flying cars, which will almost certainly be fueled by garbage.  Yes, it was a magical year, and it was the year I emerged into this bright and energized realm.  On May 17^th, if you want me to be exact.

     At the time of my birth my mother and father were living with my grandmother.  My father would go off to work and my mother would be busy cleaning and cooking for the entire house.  So what did this mean for me up until the age of three?  “Here son, watch Star Wars five times in a row,” or “Here’s a Nintendo, spend your day playing games.”  And that I did.  Yes, being an only child has its benefits, but sometimes it’s nice to have someone to talk to.  Alas, I would be scorned if I did not mention my infant sweetheart, Daphne.  We would play together, eat ice cream together, spoon together.  My mother assured us we would one day get married.  But that never happened damn it, and here’s why.

     I was somewhere around three years old when my mother decided she had had enough, whatever that meant, because I didn’t understand then and truth be told I still don’t quite understand now, as I’ve been told several different versions of the story.  What I do know is she packed our bags and our neighbor drove us off on a grand adventure to move to Medford, Oregon.  As if from a movie, when we were driving down that first street away from my grandmother’s home my father stood in the middle of the street waving goodbye, and I looked out the back windshield waving back at him, not understanding that I wouldn’t see him very often at all from that point forward.

     We found a small house in Medford Oregon, in winter I believe.  My mother put me in daycare, where I mostly stayed away from the other kids, puzzling over toys by myself.  You could say I’ve been a bit of an introvert from birth.  But, on closer examination, I’ve often wondered if the way I was raised caused much of my introverted qualities, but I digress.  When I came home from daycare could you guess what I did?  That’s right; I played Nintendo, or watched television.  There was a kid about six years ahead of me age wise that my mother tried to help me befriend, but that didn’t work out.  No, in our little old house in Medford I was a loner.  But hey, I didn’t care.  I had the screen to keep me company.

     Then, when I was five, we made the big move to Ashland, Oregon, only about thirty minutes away.  We moved into a nice little house on a beautiful little street.  This, my friends, is when things started getting better, I’m happy to tell you.  You see it turns out the street we were living on was crawling with kids, amazingly most around my age.  We would run through the streets playing hide-and-go-seek, water balloon fights, squirt gun battles, you name it.  Then, for reasons I’m honestly not sure about, we moved across the street.  The new house was bigger, that could have been why.  Needless to say my friendships were only growing, with at least ten of us kids on the street, and my mother enrolled me in the Waldorf School.

     Things went on like this for quite some time, until one dark and strange night.  One of my schoolmates Alex Williams was with me when we heard strange noises coming from the house next door.  We stood there, on the side of the fence, listening to something whimpering and moaning.  We became convinced it was a dying animal and ran inside telling my mother.  She went next door to investigate, and what she found was not a dying animal but an elderly woman named Elva who had just had a stroke.  After that I don’t recall much, but I do believe I saw the ambulance that wheeled her off.

     After this experience my mother talked to Elva and her relatives and they said she would be welcome as a caretaker for Elva.  My mother prayed on this decision, so she always tells me, then accepted it.  So we packed all our things and moved next door into Elva’s house.

     Here we lived for many years, for much of my childhood and all of my teenage life.  During this time a lot of exploration was taking place.  My mother continued getting me instruments and lessons for things like the violin, the piano, the guitar, everything you can imagine besides the one instrument I really wanted to play: drums.  I went from being the overweight kid in the class (in the Waldorf School you had the same class throughout all the years) to being on the swim team and getting into excellent shape, to becoming overweight again.  Then, in seventh grade, in a meeting that I apparently missed, the entire class decided that I was the class loser.  Now, we all know how vicious kids can be towards each other, but let me assure you, these kids were brutal.  So brutal in fact that I lost all self esteem, became incredibly insecure with myself and began retreating behind the television screen again rather than spending time with my old friends on the street.  After half a year or so of this brutal treatment I started skipping school.  My mother would drop me off in front of the school and I would simply turn around and walk through the field, because walking aimlessly down the city streets was more desirable than going into that cramped classroom full of hateful kids.

     After half a year or so of this I decided enough was enough and transferred from the Waldorf School to Ashland Middle School.  While I certainly wasn’t a popular kid, I can tell you my brief time at Ashland Middle School was a much more positive experience.  Then, after barely passing my classes, I graduated to Ashland High School.

     Of course, after the brief positive experience of Middle School, High School turned out to be a terrible experience.  In fact, I hated it so much I even wrote an article to the local newspaper which they published telling of how our High School was adherent to a prison.  Gray, bland and uninspiring.  Teachers who looked more depressed than the students.  A deafening bell that buzzed and shrieked when it was time to move to the next rectangular gray block with the next corpse trying to teach algebra, or when it was time to eat some more delicious gruel and play the game of choosing which table to eat at to prove your popularity or lack there of.  Of course, let’s not forget high school is happening during a period where kids are going through one of the most confusing and strange times of their lives, a cesspool of hormones and puberty induced emotions.

     A year and a half of that prison with chalkboards was all that I could take, and so, following two of my friends Perry and Ian, I dropped out.  I was fifteen when I did this.  After that, it was downhill for a while, for all I did was stay in my room on my computer and play games all day and all night.  Rarely bathing, never getting exercise, rarely seeing the sun.  Over the span of a year I ballooned to over three hundred pounds.  But hey, I got really damn good at Counter-Strike!

     When I was sixteen, Elva, who I had grown to consider as a grandmother, passed away.  Some weeks after the funeral me and my mother packed our bags and moved to a little house at the top of a steep hill.  Something happened then, and I’m not sure what inspired it.  Perhaps Elva’s death gave my maturity a kick start, or perhaps I just realized it was time, but I decided it was time to pull my life together.  First, I put myself in the GED program.  Then, I stopped eating anything with excess fat and started drinking nothing but water and began walking for an hour every night.  After about a year I lost one hundred and thirty pounds bringing me down to about one-seventy.  I got a job at the local theater and launched my own online business, which, believe it or not, was based around one of the games I was previously “wasting” so much time into.  Needless to say, this online business brought me over a hundred thousand dollars.  Talk about the ultimate middle finger to all those claiming I was wasting my life away on those games eh?

     By the age of eighteen I had moved into my own apartment, owned my first car, was running two websites, was enrolled to start at the local university in the fall and had already obtained financial stability, all before I was legally allowed to buy a Pabst.

     By the age of nineteen I had officially started schooling at the university, majoring in computer science.  This was also when my online business largely ceased to be profitable and I made the last minute decision of becoming roommates with a guy I had just met named Reid.  He was a friendly enough guy, yet could I warn my past self: Chris, watch out, Reid’s a douchebag.

     We lived together for a year, then he ran out leaving his share of the rent and all the bills in my lap.  Oh well, I still have his couch.

     Up until the age of twenty-four my primary focus was school, and in June of 2009 I graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science in the Software Programming Track and a Minor in Business Administration.  In my last quarter, taking twenty units worth of senior classes, I got straight A’s and graduated on the President’s list (boo-ya!).

     Then it all came down to the big decision.  Around the age of seventeen or eighteen I had decided that after I graduated from college I would be moving back to California to be closer to my family.  For you see, Oregon, despite the friendships, had always felt very lonely to me.  Thanksgiving would usually consist of me, my mother, and possibly one of her friends.  The vast majority of my family lives in California and from the ages of three to twenty-four I usually only saw them a few times a year.

     So what was so tough about the decision?  The love of my life, Kylie, who I had met eight months prior, did not want to move to California.  We had broken up by the time I graduated, but a large part of me still wanted to be with her.  Indeed, we broke up two weeks before I planned on proposing.  Let it not be thought that my mother or friends didn’t play a factor in making it a tough decision, because trust me they did, but during those few months there was a heated battle waging between my heart and my brain.

     I’m happy to tell you that my brain reigned victorious and I now reside in California, much closer to all of my family.  I see them much more often than I did before, and it feels great to finally have a family life.  What about my heart you say?  Well, it’s now happy that it listened to my brain.  After the dust settled and my heart slowed, I realized how dysfunctional and emotionally unstable the relationship Kylie and I had truly was.  Now I’m a bachelor.  Don’t get too excited, I’m pretty damn picky.

     Now I sit here, alone in my two bedroom apartment, sitting behind a screen, within closer radius of my family.  Sort of brings things full-vicious-circle eh?  Though I love my family very much and seeing them lifts my spirits, loneliness is seeping back into my soul.  But I’m sure I’ll be okay.  Let me just put Star Wars back on, then everything will be fine.