About
Your host
Origins
I was born in Northwest Texas in the 1970’s. It was a dusty place and I don’t remember anything about it. My parents returned there from the Middle East where they had been been working for a very large international construction and logistics company. Owing to my impending birth, they returned to the states and I was born with Texas dust under my feet versus Mesopotamian sands.
The first memories I have are those in New Orleans, where my parents moved us to next. I remember the Spanish moss, the boats, the sea, the Mardi gras parade, the cake with a baby Jesus. Living on the north side of Lake Ponchatrain I remember my next door neighbor, our vegetable garden, the long grass in the summer. But my dad’s work situation changed again and I found myself spending my youth in Houston.
I suppose that all youths follow more or less the same trajectory, birthdays, pizzas, riding bicycles ( i didn’t get this until later than most, I don’t know why. It was that pedaling backwards thing ). I grew up in another vast field of suburban homes where kids were grown to make good grades, taken to soccer, and most had access to a car on their 16th birthday. Back then downtown Houston was forever and a day away, and thus we were relegated to our own suburban environs most of the time. I grew up skinny and asthmatic and allergic to pretty much everything endemic to Houston. It wasn’t fun.
I’ll spare you ruminating over teenager-dom. Suffice it to say I went through an exceedingly mopey phase of life that, I really don’t think I’ll write about: not because I’m shy about it, but more because when I write sentences on the topic I feel like a Morrissey song and, lacking Morrissey’s mordant wit, it becomes exceedingly tiresome for anyone else to read. It also feels too cliché: not popular (but not horribly maligned), good with computers, good writer, liked books, liked to play guitar, appreciative of my few friends - some of whom I have to this day.
Who I wanted to be and what I ultimately have become began to unfold rapidly when, in 1995, I matriculated to The University of Texas at Austin. For the first time, it felt like i could breathe and I could find more people motivated to know about and do the things that I too was motivated about or interested in. Ultimately my experiences at Texas involved travel, good friends, ski trip, trip to Mexico, study abroad, falling in love, seeing Prague at Christmas, and two degrees. Ultimately at Texas I found the welding of my interests into the me I was seeking to create: literature, philosophy, and technology. If you read my blog posts you’ll usually see one of the three peeking through and, when I think I’m at my best, all three.
In October of 1999, I was asked by Cisco Systems to come out to San Jose, California interview to do something. During the visit the air was crisp, the flowers were strong, the world, so very Californian. I decided that if I were offered the job I’d give California a go. The day after my return to Austin I found a FedEx on my doorstep next to my New York Times offering a job. I took it.
And what can be said of the zeitgeist of that time? Wealth was pouring down the highways, the traffic was ridiculous, capital was being condensed from the ether itself. How could I resist the lure of that, what with my terrible ambition disease.
Fast forward 6 months and there I was, living in the South Bay. A box full of junk hauled across a desert, renting a crummy room in a crummy house trying to figure out how to survive in a world so entirely removed from my realm of experience.
Through my years in the Bay I traveled up and down the peninsula. I was looking for myself, looking for some sense of direction, trying to figure out what this experience was, being out of college, being on my own, and being somewhere entirely elsewhere. This site came to exist while I was in my “let’s try living in San Francisco” phase. You can chart my progress from the first post on this site as I worked through those questions.
Ultimately life took a major change in 2005 when my girlfriend and I started slowly absorbing one another’s life. Ultimately our union has precipitated many changes, including the one that has be working on this section of text on an overcast day in Austin, Texas.
After years of the Bay, we decided to try a different lifestyle, and so now here we are in ATX. I don’t know where we will go next or what adventures may be found, but I thank you for stopping by to check out these recorded years of my life.
