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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2468281" data-attributes="member: 18832">I'll be 25 in December, born on my mother's 29th birthday. I'm the first child my parents had; I have a younger brother born in 1982 and an older half-sister twelve years my senior, from my mother's first marriage. My father was also married before, but had no children with his first wife; my parents are still together despite serious money problems in the late 1980s and now the stress of running a company together.I grew up in increasingly-more-rural suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria - by the time I started going to school we lived in Healesville, which being at the other end of the Yarra Valley from Melbourne itself was really as close to the country as we ever got. In 1990 we moved up to the northern suburbs of Sydney in pursuit of a job offer my father received from an old colleague in his industry - veterinary pharmaceuticals. That job eventually lead to my parents partnering with one of my uncles on my father's side, a colleague of his, and their wives and buying out the veterinary side of the company in the mid-1990s. My parents manage that company to this day, and I am in fact writing this post while covering the phones for them while they're interstate - they have other employees, but they're all heavily-accented, possess terrible phone manners, and don't know much about the products, whereas I absorbed a great deal of information about them through osmosis over the last decade or so.I don't really much care for life in Sydney - if nothing else, they obsess about rugby league around here, which I can't stand - but I have too many roots here to ever leave. If nothing else, I have a handful of very close friends who never want to live anywhere else and my Californian girlfriend wants to move here (specifically, even if we weren't together, she loves it so) when she graduates from CalPoly in a few years, so I don't have much choice. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />I went to a selective high school, which was good, but it was also single-sex, which in hindsight was a mixed bag. I probably avoided a great deal of adolescent angst over my appearance and crushes and whatnot, but since I get along better with women than with men it meant I had the typical geek's experience in high school - long periods of time with either no good friends (though I never lacked for someone to talk to, at least) or "good" friends who weren't a good influence (though I never did anything I regretted, I wasted a lot of time trying to fit in with the "edgy" crowd one way or another).Studying at the University of Sydney was much better. I had some problems stemming from an almost total absence of work ethic - which I'm slowly trying to correct - and I fell hard for someone who just wanted me to be her friend, but I resolved the second part of that to my satisfaction.I did that by falling deeply in love with my current girlfriend. We spent about a year talking online, "together" after five months, before she came to study at the University of Sydney. We spent a frankly awful six months together, which have had a lasting impact on my emotional wellbeing and ability to really do much of anything at all. At the end of it she flew home, and pretty much didn't talk for two years.During this period I (slowly and painfully) got my Honours degree in studies in religion. I do not recommend writing 10,000 words of your 13,000-word thesis the night before it's due, even if I did get a pretty good result. The next year, though, proved that I was in no shape to get a postgraduate degree, though I may go back in the near future depending on how successfully I can establish a work ethic for myself.Anyway, about a year ago my girlfriend and I started talking again, and from "maybe we could be together one day when she's in Sydney" we progressed quickly to "hot damn we need to be together again." Last November she visited for five days on very short notice and we made it official.We still have our problems, lots of them, but as you can probably tell she's the most important factor in my life even though she's only been a part of one-fifth of it. I have faith that one day we'll get everything working the way it should be.I define myself partly as a typical geek but the thing I think that sets me apart from the stereotype is that I'm often (violently) disinterested in some of the typical geek phenomena like The Lord of the Rings, Babylon 5, conventions, anime, and European boardgames. It might just be that I'm unusual in the context of the geeks I know - not that I would trade being part of my university gaming society for the world.I think that many of my friends would consider me a contradiction - I can be the best listener and advisor they have, but I can also be callous and refuse to take anything seriously. I tend to be liberal in my approach to social issues, bordering on libertarian when it comes to the issue of free speech and not paying mind to political correctness and conservative social mores, but at the same time I'm not actually as far from the mainstream in my personal behaviour as you might think someone with my opinions would be - I don't often drink (and I've never been drunk), I don't smoke, I don't use drugs. From one angle my life would look pretty conservative, which contributes to the "contradiction" thing.There are other important things about me which I don't really know how to put into words.</blockquote>

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