Okay, just a brief and messy paragraph.. don't want to get deep into my personal life on the internet...

Me
Hi, I'm a 14 year old boy. (SHOCKING ISN'T IT?) I live in Hawaii. Yes, where the pineapples grow and where the people live in grass huts. I'm very quiet, (SHOCKING ISN'T IT?) but I'm not anti-social. I usually go out anywhere with my friends on the weekends, but not on weekdays. (where I do homework and it's too late to go out so I play Pokeymonz) I need to try to get out more and get... a life

The Bads
My life was fortunately... dare I say normal. Yes normal... no broken bones, no car crashes, no bad injuries, not even smoking weed. I could think of nothing bad that happened in my life. The worst thing that happened to me was that my parents tried to divorce, but that didn't happen. (Thank God)

Goals
I'm thinking of joining school clubs and join the wrestling team just to be more social. I really want to learn how to skate and do all those fancy tricks, but first... I need a new board... but I don't have money... ANYWAYS... I want to go to a good college. I also need to eat way more (I'm skinny as hell, but not anorexic). The goal to reach these goals is to.. stop being lazy.

Oh. I'm addicted to Pokemon (even though I suck at it) and the internet in general, and I want to quit... like Black Armor... but... it's hard.

WARNING. TOO LONG; DO NOT READ. I AM THE KING OF TL;DR. SKIP THIS POST.

Hi. My name is Jaryd Tercenio. I live in Irvine, CA. I'm 6'0", mostly Filipino (also mixed Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Hawaiian), and fairly athletic. My hobbies include writing fiction, attempting to compose music (and failling), playing basketball, and watching movies. I have a logical mind, but I am more than happy to brush it aside in favor of my romantic impulses. More than anything else though, I am an IRC addict. How did I get here? Read on...

I don't know much of anything from my early childhood at all. I don't actually know if I was conceived in or out of wedlock, since I have no idea when my parents were married. I just know they divorced sometime between my first and second birthday. From that point onward, until near the end of high school, I was legally forced to move to my other parent's house every Friday. Most of my life was defined by that bizarre custody situation; I couldn't participate in any extracurricular activities, I couldn't celebrate holidays with my whole family, I couldn't make any close friends, and so forth. They're both full of horror stories about each other from those early years, too . My mom tells me that my dad was a lazy college dropout, never paid bills, disappeared to mysterious meetings all night, played horrible pranks on her, and was headed nowhere in life. My dad told me that my mom's father was a bank robber, that my mom was a stripper, and that every time I spent a week with her I got sick and lost 10 pounds. I know that I had some severe inner ear problems, some kind of eating disorder (took me two hours to eat anything, and I'd throw it all up an hour later), and I had serious speech problems. How I got through those years, I don't know.

When I was with my dad, in my pre-kindergarten years, I spent the whole day with my grandparents at their house while my dad stayed in his bedroom to make business calls. My grandfather was always very encouraging, and taught me about things like reading, money, cooking, baking, and such practical things. My grandmother spent the day playing games with me, and she taught me how to read, how to do math, and all the academic things that no 3-year-old should need to know. I'm still the only person I know who was reading the newspaper and who could name all the presidents before starting preschool. Still, I was very attached to my dad, and the highlight of my day would be when he took fifteen minutes to come downstairs and play Sega Genesis with me. My dad met his next girlfriend when I was three, and we'd go visit her at her apartment somewhat frequently. They married when I was four, and I honestly don't remember much before that. Apparently my new stepmother never got along with my grandmother, because my grandmother didn't think she was good enough for her son, but I didn't learn that until my teenage years. After their marriage, life with my dad was fairly normal. I got to spend good time with my whole family, I started and excelled in school (my elementary school teachers STILL remember me and think I'm a genius), and my parents moved into their own house when I was eight. I became best friends with the kid across the street, I rode my bike to school every day and played with the neighbors every afternoon, and all in all, it was a pretty picture-perfect childhood. I was a good kid, never got into trouble, never acted jealous or greedy, never fought with anyone. I was actually a runway model for Saks Fifth Avenue fashion shows, when they were showing off their childrens lines. Life was simple there. My first baby brother was born when I was 7, and my second when I was 9. The only twist in my life is that they raised me to absolutely HATE my birth mother and everything she stood for. It worked.

When I was with my mom, in the early years, I shared a room with her at my grandparents' house. Most of my day was spent watching TV, drawing, playing with Legos, or playing Sega Genesis. My mom worked most days, and she was out every night looking for someone to marry. Whenever she did find someone and started dating, she'd take me along and we'd move into the guy's apartment, and I'd sit on the floor in some extra guest room "sleeping" while my mom was somehow busy all night. I've spent at least a couple weeks living in various cities all over southern california because of those early years. I never had any friends, so I remember spending most of my time completely alone. I had nothing but my books and my Legos to keep me company, which probably led to me being the introvert that I am today. My highlights were the weekends, which I spent entirely at my cousins' house. Their dad was a successful engineer, so they had everything- the huge house, too many toys, all the coolest games, everything I ever wanted and didn't have. I had a lot of bad daycare experiences there, probably because the area we lived in was really poor, compared to my dad's city. I almost died of a fever in one daycare center, and the teacher just locked me in a dark room to punish me because she thought I was misbehaving. She tried to tell my mom that I was speaking another language (lol Asian stereotype) and that's why they didn't know, but I don't actually speak anything but English. My mom met her final boyfriend and husband-to-be when I was five, just barely in time for us to move in to his condo before I started kindergarten. It wasn't until about this time that I actually got to know my mom, because I never spent any real time with her before then. I was already enrolled at a school in my dad's city, which was a 20-minute drive, so I was late to school every morning, but other than that, things started to head towards normalcy. They married when I was eight. Still, every Friday when I had to go to my mom's family, I would kick and scream and raise a fuss because I was supposed to hate her. During the week, I'd get along fine with her. Then every Friday when it was time to leave again, I had to rush out the door and not say bye to her, or else my dad would get mad at me. In short, one of my families was ALWAYS pissed off at me. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that set the stage for the rest of my life. It was shortly after this that my mom and new stepdad started making some good money, so they spoiled the shit out of me and bought me everything I ever wanted. I was a totally happy kid materialistically, but somehow I never felt emotionally tied to them. In an odd twist of fate, it was also around this time that my aunt and uncle got divorced, and suddenly my cousins were the ones in the position I had been in before. One cousin went on to be an ultra-introverted genius child, and the other had five years of heavy alcohol and drug abuse, and a proportional amount of time in hospitals and rehab.

Elementary school was extremely incompatible with my split family. My parents would get upset whenever I'd bring my schoolwork or flyers to the other house, so I decided the only logical thing to do would be to hide all my papers from both families. This was fine for unimportant stuff, but it made report cards a pain. Thankfully I was a straight A student, so no one could say I was just afraid of being punished for bad grades. I was just afraid of being punished for being my mother's son. I was also the kind of kid that got an award for something or other constantly, and every time I got recognized at an assembly, both my families would show up, fight over who got to keep the award, and make a huge scene in front of the whole school. The worst incident was in 4th grade, at open house. My parents ran into each other in the class room, got in a huge fight, yelling at each other and at my teacher, my mom grabbed my shoulder hard enough to bruise me, and I was so traumatized I didn't talk again for almost a week. I ended up seeing a number of psychologists over the next two years, but they all said the same thing- I was so emotionally reserved that I would never talk to anyone. They gave up. Seventh grade came around, and I was so emotionally screwed up that I never talked to my parents. I would have been a total outcast at school, if not for my intelligence (study help) and my basketball talent. All my friends were the typical jock type, though I wasn't too close with any of them. Toward the end of that year, it finally occured to my parents that maybe I'd be less fucked up if I had a stable environment and just lived with one family all the time. My dad and stepdad took me to meet at a restaurant and forced me to pick one side or the other. Naturally, it was utterly impossible for me to just drop one side of my family forever, so nothing good came of that day. It just led to my parents getting too pissed off at me to talk to me for a week or so, which led to me becoming more emotionally fucked up. After that day, I just closed off my heart to my parents and basically stopped loving them. I still played the part of a good kod and stayed out of trouble, but I didn't have any emotional ties to anyone. At the very end of the year, my mom's side finally moved to the same city as my dad, which is where my school was, so I was no longer dependent on them to take me to school either.

The place I saw as my salvation was this summer camp that I had attended for the past few years, and where I started working as a volunteer counselor in training the summer after 7th grade. I think the only reason I didn't close off completely was because of the joy I got from connecting with those kids. There was one girl I met there who was 4 years younger than me, but had lived a very similar childhood as I had. Somehow though, she was a much happier person than I was, and I wanted that. We became very good friends over time, and looked forward to meeting again every year for the next five years. I think it's because of her that I stopped believing that my custody situation was a dead end, and that I could become a better person if I wanted it badly enough. Between her, and all the other great times I had there over the next few summers, I learned to be a much happier person, and to believe in hope and innocence again.

My freshman year of high school was pretty normal, compared to the rest of my life so far. I had already grown into the habit of never sharing anything with my parents, and I was able to handle school just fine on my own. I made some good friends, did well in classes, and never got in any major trouble. Didn't drink, didn't smoke, nothing. I spent an unhealthy amount of time on the internet, losing my innocence in all the usual ways. I discovered GameFAQs, I discovered IRC, I saw the Trinity, I wandered into 4chan and LUE and SA... Yeah, you know the deal. I also had some interesting adventures with cyber sex that year, but lol... Let's not go there. Sophomore year was pretty much the same, except that I started dating. My first girlfriend was a great girl I met at camp, lots of fun. Not very pretty, but it didn't matter much. Lasted three months, no major heartbreak. My second girlfriend lasted two months, but the fallout from that led to an eight-month fight and led to our group of friends splitting in different directions. It was through our breakup that I met two of my three best friends, and my current girlfriend though, so no big complaints from me. The other big change in my life was that I started going to church, mostly out of curiousity. I was raised beliving in God, but I had always feared religion because I was taught that God hated divorce and I thought that my shitty life was me being punished for my parents' sin. Strange, but true. I'm not sure what effect, if any, going to church has had on me. I have always lived my life by the Christian values, just because I share the same moral values. The only exception is that I am completely open to sex. I just was never able to bring myself to accept that God is supreme, or that Jesus was relevant to our lives.

Junior year started off the same way, but after a couple of my teachers called home to say I wasn't doing well in class (I was doing fine; they made mistakes in grading), my parents decided it was time to try that 7th grade one-home bullshit again. The only difference is that this time, I didn't really give a damn. It was decided pretty fast that I would just live with my mom, because my mom would have put up too much of a fight the other way. I would miss my siblings (by this time, I had two brothers and a sister on my dad's side, and a brother, a sister and one more on the way on my mom's side), but I'd learn to live with that. After the split, I felt almost totally independent. I didn't care about my mom's family enough to spend any time with them, so I was out all day and most nights. I finally got to get involved with all the extracurricular stuff I missed out on in my younger years, like martial arts and music and sports and shit. If I was ever at home, I was locked in my room and surfing the internet. It was around this time that I got deep into Ragnarok Online and Gunbound, and I rediscovered GameFAQs and fell in with the RSE community. In real life, I fell in with all the smart and nerdy kids, but that wasn't a bad thing in any way, because the nerds were the cool kids at my school. Our athletics are decent, but our school's real pride is its high test scores and grammy-winning music program.

Senior year was when I met my current girlfriend. She's my ex's best friend, and she started talking to me to find out the truth behind our breakup (she cheated on me, and she thought I cheated on her although I never did). we decided to get into a 'practice' relationship that was meant to end when I graduated, but obviously it didn't end as planned. The other big thing for me that year was that I was continually fucked over by my school. My attendance records were constantly being screwed with, so I ended up getting stuck in detention at least once a week. It got to the point where it wasn't even punishment anymore, but more of a free hang-out time with some cool people. More importantly though, somehow my SAT scores were never sent properly. After I learned that the school fucked up the score distribution the first time, I paid extra money TWICE to have them re-sent to my schools of choice. I didn't find out until summer that the schools never got my scores anyway, which led to me being rejected from all the good universities, despite being overqualified. I got into one of my safety schools, UC Riverside, since they accepted me despite not having any test scores at all. Yeah, that's how fucking overqualified I was.

I started off college pretty normally. I lived in the dorms, had a good social life, did well in my classes, and all that. I think it's worth mentioning that despite going to a huge party school, I still never drank. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I didn't keep coming home to visit my girlfriend all the time, but I still had a pretty good time overall. My grades slipped a bit my second quarter because I felt comfortable with college life and stopped being so uptight about classes, and also because I took 22 units instead of the usual 12-16. Apparently that was enough reason for my parents to pull the plug on me though, so I was forced to drop out, get a full-time job, get a place to live, and pay for my own junior college classes.

I started working at Arbonne International in April 06, and I moved into my own apartment in June. My planned roommates bailed on me at the last minute, so I ended up with a $1250/mo rent. I was working 63 hours a week so I could make all my payments (rent, car, insurance, utiilties, credit cards, school), build up my savings account, and have enough left over to go out on dates. On top of that, I was taking a full class load at night. Needless to say, I was beyond tired. If nothing else though, at least I could say that I was proud to be keeping up my own home. December was when I discovered the Diamond board on GameFAQs, and most of you know everything that's happened since then. I took on some roommates, they robbed me and ruined the place, I went into a depression, quit my job, blew most of my savings, put on thirty pounds from overeating and never exercising, and moved back in with my parents. I went though some rough times with my girlfriend, but we were starting to heal. I got another job, lost all that excess weight, tried to become my old happy self again, and did all I could to help her heal from the trauma. Just as I thought things were coming together though, she moved to Taiwan to finish her schooling. It's not as sudden as it sounds... It was always an option for her, and after all that had happened over the past year, we thought it best for her to go back to Taiwan because it's cheaper, faster, and because she'd have a chance to grow as an individual without being totally dependent on me for all her happiness.

August 2007. I haven't been able to really eat or sleep at all since my girlfriend left, I've been falling behind in my schoolwork again, for the first time since Riverside, and I've realized that over the past couple years, I've managed to alienate almost all my friends because I spent all my time with my girlfriend. I got fired from may last job for falling asleep at my desk, I've been constantly sick due to lack of food and sleep, and I can't even afford the gas to visit my few friends because they all live 50 miles away. In the past two weeks, I've at least started to move back towards a normal life. I've been applying for jobs, trying to catch up with school, and making an effort to connect with more peope so that I actually have friends again. I've also devoted a lot more time and energy to understanding religion. I'm still too much of a skeptic to accept anything blindly, but I want so badly to be able to believe in something. Most of my friends are devout Christians, and I've seen the kind of peace and solace they feel from faith alone, and I want to know how that's possible. Finally, it still seems strange to me that I've come this far without really knowing the love of a family. I'm trying now more than ever to connect with my family and create those long-absent bonds, but I've had little success so far. It's only hit me in the past year how much I feel the pain of losing contact with my dad's family, and that's something in my life that I regret (although it wasn't my fault) and that I someday hope to remedy. I'm just afraid of losing a second family in the meantime, even if they don't mean very much to me right now.

Still, because I haven't filled in all that empty space in my life yet, I do have a lot of free time on my hands. That's why you see me on IRC all day and night. I have nothing to do, most days. I have no reason to wake up in the morning anymore, so there's no reason not to stay up all night. Sometimes, talking with some of you people is all I can do to keep myself on the right path and not sink back into depression again. Being broke, jobless, friendless, and bogged down with bills to pay isn't the easiest life to live. It's too easy to just give in to the pressure, but I can't afford to do that again, not if I ever want to live the life I want to live in the future.

QUOTE (tpx_vengeance @ Oct 3 2007, 01:25 AM)

WARNING. TOO LONG; DO NOT READ. I AM THE KING OF TL;DR. SKIP THIS POST. Hi. My name is Jaryd Tercenio. I live in Irvine, CA. I'm 6'0", mostly Filipino (also mixed Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Hawaiian), and fairly athletic. My hobbies include writing fiction, attempting to compose music (and failling), playing basketball, and watching movies. I have a logical mind, but I am more than happy to brush it aside in favor of my romantic impulses. More than anything else though, I am an IRC addict. How did I get here? Read on... I don't know much of anything from my early childhood at all. I don't actually know if I was conceived in or out of wedlock, since I have no idea when my parents were married. I just know they divorced sometime between my first and second birthday. From that point onward, until near the end of high school, I was legally forced to move to my other parent's house every Friday. Most of my life was defined by that bizarre custody situation; I couldn't participate in any extracurricular activities, I couldn't celebrate holidays with my whole family, I couldn't make any close friends, and so forth. They're both full of horror stories about each other from those early years, too . My mom tells me that my dad was a lazy college dropout, never paid bills, disappeared to mysterious meetings all night, played horrible pranks on her, and was headed nowhere in life. My dad told me that my mom's father was a bank robber, that my mom was a stripper, and that every time I spent a week with her I got sick and lost 10 pounds. I know that I had some severe inner ear problems, some kind of eating disorder (took me two hours to eat anything, and I'd throw it all up an hour later), and I had serious speech problems. How I got through those years, I don't know. When I was with my dad, in my pre-kindergarten years, I spent the whole day with my grandparents at their house while my dad stayed in his bedroom to make business calls. My grandfather was always very encouraging, and taught me about things like reading, money, cooking, baking, and such practical things. My grandmother spent the day playing games with me, and she taught me how to read, how to do math, and all the academic things that no 3-year-old should need to know. I'm still the only person I know who was reading the newspaper and who could name all the presidents before starting preschool. Still, I was very attached to my dad, and the highlight of my day would be when he took fifteen minutes to come downstairs and play Sega Genesis with me. My dad met his next girlfriend when I was three, and we'd go visit her at her apartment somewhat frequently. They married when I was four, and I honestly don't remember much before that. Apparently my new stepmother never got along with my grandmother, because my grandmother didn't think she was good enough for her son, but I didn't learn that until my teenage years. After their marriage, life with my dad was fairly normal. I got to spend good time with my whole family, I started and excelled in school (my elementary school teachers STILL remember me and think I'm a genius), and my parents moved into their own house when I was eight. I became best friends with the kid across the street, I rode my bike to school every day and played with the neighbors every afternoon, and all in all, it was a pretty picture-perfect childhood. I was a good kid, never got into trouble, never acted jealous or greedy, never fought with anyone. I was actually a runway model for Saks Fifth Avenue fashion shows, when they were showing off their childrens lines. Life was simple there. My first baby brother was born when I was 7, and my second when I was 9. The only twist in my life is that they raised me to absolutely HATE my birth mother and everything she stood for. It worked. When I was with my mom, in the early years, I shared a room with her at my grandparents' house. Most of my day was spent watching TV, drawing, playing with Legos, or playing Sega Genesis. My mom worked most days, and she was out every night looking for someone to marry. Whenever she did find someone and started dating, she'd take me along and we'd move into the guy's apartment, and I'd sit on the floor in some extra guest room "sleeping" while my mom was somehow busy all night. I've spent at least a couple weeks living in various cities all over southern california because of those early years. I never had any friends, so I remember spending most of my time completely alone. I had nothing but my books and my Legos to keep me company, which probably led to me being the introvert that I am today. My highlights were the weekends, which I spent entirely at my cousins' house. Their dad was a successful engineer, so they had everything- the huge house, too many toys, all the coolest games, everything I ever wanted and didn't have. I had a lot of bad daycare experiences there, probably because the area we lived in was really poor, compared to my dad's city. I almost died of a fever in one daycare center, and the teacher just locked me in a dark room to punish me because she thought I was misbehaving. She tried to tell my mom that I was speaking another language (lol Asian stereotype) and that's why they didn't know, but I don't actually speak anything but English. My mom met her final boyfriend and husband-to-be when I was five, just barely in time for us to move in to his condo before I started kindergarten. It wasn't until about this time that I actually got to know my mom, because I never spent any real time with her before then. I was already enrolled at a school in my dad's city, which was a 20-minute drive, so I was late to school every morning, but other than that, things started to head towards normalcy. They married when I was eight. Still, every Friday when I had to go to my mom's family, I would kick and scream and raise a fuss because I was supposed to hate her. During the week, I'd get along fine with her. Then every Friday when it was time to leave again, I had to rush out the door and not say bye to her, or else my dad would get mad at me. In short, one of my families was ALWAYS pissed off at me. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that set the stage for the rest of my life. It was shortly after this that my mom and new stepdad started making some good money, so they spoiled the shit out of me and bought me everything I ever wanted. I was a totally happy kid materialistically, but somehow I never felt emotionally tied to them. In an odd twist of fate, it was also around this time that my aunt and uncle got divorced, and suddenly my cousins were the ones in the position I had been in before. One cousin went on to be an ultra-introverted genius child, and the other had five years of heavy alcohol and drug abuse, and a proportional amount of time in hospitals and rehab. Elementary school was extremely incompatible with my split family. My parents would get upset whenever I'd bring my schoolwork or flyers to the other house, so I decided the only logical thing to do would be to hide all my papers from both families. This was fine for unimportant stuff, but it made report cards a pain. Thankfully I was a straight A student, so no one could say I was just afraid of being punished for bad grades. I was just afraid of being punished for being my mother's son. I was also the kind of kid that got an award for something or other constantly, and every time I got recognized at an assembly, both my families would show up, fight over who got to keep the award, and make a huge scene in front of the whole school. The worst incident was in 4th grade, at open house. My parents ran into each other in the class room, got in a huge fight, yelling at each other and at my teacher, my mom grabbed my shoulder hard enough to bruise me, and I was so traumatized I didn't talk again for almost a week. I ended up seeing a number of psychologists over the next two years, but they all said the same thing- I was so emotionally reserved that I would never talk to anyone. They gave up. Seventh grade came around, and I was so emotionally screwed up that I never talked to my parents. I would have been a total outcast at school, if not for my intelligence (study help) and my basketball talent. All my friends were the typical jock type, though I wasn't too close with any of them. Toward the end of that year, it finally occured to my parents that maybe I'd be less fucked up if I had a stable environment and just lived with one family all the time. My dad and stepdad took me to meet at a restaurant and forced me to pick one side or the other. Naturally, it was utterly impossible for me to just drop one side of my family forever, so nothing good came of that day. It just led to my parents getting too pissed off at me to talk to me for a week or so, which led to me becoming more emotionally fucked up. After that day, I just closed off my heart to my parents and basically stopped loving them. I still played the part of a good kod and stayed out of trouble, but I didn't have any emotional ties to anyone. At the very end of the year, my mom's side finally moved to the same city as my dad, which is where my school was, so I was no longer dependent on them to take me to school either. The place I saw as my salvation was this summer camp that I had attended for the past few years, and where I started working as a volunteer counselor in training the summer after 7th grade. I think the only reason I didn't close off completely was because of the joy I got from connecting with those kids. There was one girl I met there who was 4 years younger than me, but had lived a very similar childhood as I had. Somehow though, she was a much happier person than I was, and I wanted that. We became very good friends over time, and looked forward to meeting again every year for the next five years. I think it's because of her that I stopped believing that my custody situation was a dead end, and that I could become a better person if I wanted it badly enough. Between her, and all the other great times I had there over the next few summers, I learned to be a much happier person, and to believe in hope and innocence again. My freshman year of high school was pretty normal, compared to the rest of my life so far. I had already grown into the habit of never sharing anything with my parents, and I was able to handle school just fine on my own. I made some good friends, did well in classes, and never got in any major trouble. Didn't drink, didn't smoke, nothing. I spent an unhealthy amount of time on the internet, losing my innocence in all the usual ways. I discovered GameFAQs, I discovered IRC, I saw the Trinity, I wandered into 4chan and LUE and SA... Yeah, you know the deal. I also had some interesting adventures with cyber sex that year, but lol... Let's not go there. Sophomore year was pretty much the same, except that I started dating. My first girlfriend was a great girl I met at camp, lots of fun. Not very pretty, but it didn't matter much. Lasted three months, no major heartbreak. My second girlfriend lasted two months, but the fallout from that led to an eight-month fight and led to our group of friends splitting in different directions. It was through our breakup that I met two of my three best friends, and my current girlfriend though, so no big complaints from me. The other big change in my life was that I started going to church, mostly out of curiousity. I was raised beliving in God, but I had always feared religion because I was taught that God hated divorce and I thought that my shitty life was me being punished for my parents' sin. Strange, but true. I'm not sure what effect, if any, going to church has had on me. I have always lived my life by the Christian values, just because I share the same moral values. The only exception is that I am completely open to sex. I just was never able to bring myself to accept that God is supreme, or that Jesus was relevant to our lives. Junior year started off the same way, but after a couple of my teachers called home to say I wasn't doing well in class (I was doing fine; they made mistakes in grading), my parents decided it was time to try that 7th grade one-home bullshit again. The only difference is that this time, I didn't really give a damn. It was decided pretty fast that I would just live with my mom, because my mom would have put up too much of a fight the other way. I would miss my siblings (by this time, I had two brothers and a sister on my dad's side, and a brother, a sister and one more on the way on my mom's side), but I'd learn to live with that. After the split, I felt almost totally independent. I didn't care about my mom's family enough to spend any time with them, so I was out all day and most nights. I finally got to get involved with all the extracurricular stuff I missed out on in my younger years, like martial arts and music and sports and shit. If I was ever at home, I was locked in my room and surfing the internet. It was around this time that I got deep into Ragnarok Online and Gunbound, and I rediscovered GameFAQs and fell in with the RSE community. In real life, I fell in with all the smart and nerdy kids, but that wasn't a bad thing in any way, because the nerds were the cool kids at my school. Our athletics are decent, but our school's real pride is its high test scores and grammy-winning music program. Senior year was when I met my current girlfriend. She's my ex's best friend, and she started talking to me to find out the truth behind our breakup (she cheated on me, and she thought I cheated on her although I never did). we decided to get into a 'practice' relationship that was meant to end when I graduated, but obviously it didn't end as planned. The other big thing for me that year was that I was continually fucked over by my school. My attendance records were constantly being screwed with, so I ended up getting stuck in detention at least once a week. It got to the point where it wasn't even punishment anymore, but more of a free hang-out time with some cool people. More importantly though, somehow my SAT scores were never sent properly. After I learned that the school fucked up the score distribution the first time, I paid extra money TWICE to have them re-sent to my schools of choice. I didn't find out until summer that the schools never got my scores anyway, which led to me being rejected from all the good universities, despite being overqualified. I got into one of my safety schools, UC Riverside, since they accepted me despite not having any test scores at all. Yeah, that's how fucking overqualified I was. I started off college pretty normally. I lived in the dorms, had a good social life, did well in my classes, and all that. I think it's worth mentioning that despite going to a huge party school, I still never drank. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I didn't keep coming home to visit my girlfriend all the time, but I still had a pretty good time overall. My grades slipped a bit my second quarter because I felt comfortable with college life and stopped being so uptight about classes, and also because I took 22 units instead of the usual 12-16. Apparently that was enough reason for my parents to pull the plug on me though, so I was forced to drop out, get a full-time job, get a place to live, and pay for my own junior college classes. I started working at Arbonne International in April 06, and I moved into my own apartment in June. My planned roommates bailed on me at the last minute, so I ended up with a $1250/mo rent. I was working 63 hours a week so I could make all my payments (rent, car, insurance, utiilties, credit cards, school), build up my savings account, and have enough left over to go out on dates. On top of that, I was taking a full class load at night. Needless to say, I was beyond tired. If nothing else though, at least I could say that I was proud to be keeping up my own home. December was when I discovered the Diamond board on GameFAQs, and most of you know everything that's happened since then. I took on some roommates, they robbed me and ruined the place, I went into a depression, quit my job, blew most of my savings, put on thirty pounds from overeating and never exercising, and moved back in with my parents. I went though some rough times with my girlfriend, but we were starting to heal. I got another job, lost all that excess weight, tried to become my old happy self again, and did all I could to help her heal from the trauma. Just as I thought things were coming together though, she moved to Taiwan to finish her schooling. It's not as sudden as it sounds... It was always an option for her, and after all that had happened over the past year, we thought it best for her to go back to Taiwan because it's cheaper, faster, and because she'd have a chance to grow as an individual without being totally dependent on me for all her happiness. August 2007. I haven't been able to really eat or sleep at all since my girlfriend left, I've been falling behind in my schoolwork again, for the first time since Riverside, and I've realized that over the past couple years, I've managed to alienate almost all my friends because I spent all my time with my girlfriend. I got fired from may last job for falling asleep at my desk, I've been constantly sick due to lack of food and sleep, and I can't even afford the gas to visit my few friends because they all live 50 miles away. In the past two weeks, I've at least started to move back towards a normal life. I've been applying for jobs, trying to catch up with school, and making an effort to connect with more peope so that I actually have friends again. I've also devoted a lot more time and energy to understanding religion. I'm still too much of a skeptic to accept anything blindly, but I want so badly to be able to believe in something. Most of my friends are devout Christians, and I've seen the kind of peace and solace they feel from faith alone, and I want to know how that's possible. Finally, it still seems strange to me that I've come this far without really knowing the love of a family. I'm trying now more than ever to connect with my family and create those long-absent bonds, but I've had little success so far. It's only hit me in the past year how much I feel the pain of losing contact with my dad's family, and that's something in my life that I regret (although it wasn't my fault) and that I someday hope to remedy. I'm just afraid of losing a second family in the meantime, even if they don't mean very much to me right now. Still, because I haven't filled in all that empty space in my life yet, I do have a lot of free time on my hands. That's why you see me on IRC all day and night. I have nothing to do, most days. I have no reason to wake up in the morning anymore, so there's no reason not to stay up all night. Sometimes, talking with some of you people is all I can do to keep myself on the right path and not sink back into depression again. Being broke, jobless, friendless, and bogged down with bills to pay isn't the easiest life to live. It's too easy to just give in to the pressure, but I can't afford to do that again, not if I ever want to live the life I want to live in the future.