Biography

For those of you who can't stand a story with out end....
Alan was born young. As he got older, he aged. After a while, he got old enough to call it maturing, since he didn't like the
term ageing. Before long (relatively speaking), he got even older. Then he died.

If you don't mind a little uncertainty, you might like the following biography better....
I was born young, and then got old. I didn't remember much at first. My first memory was around 5 years old, when I watched our carport being filled in with concrete. You see, we were building our own house out in the country. When my parents had me they needed a place to store the little guy, and for some reason, decided that an unfinished house was better than a 30 foot airstream. Or maybe they moved in before I was born. But the fact remains that they moved into the house, and ever since work on it came to a standstill. I can still remember, at age 10 or so, when I got a door for my room (at least they put doors on the bathroom a few years before that).

But I was already on my way to becoming different, without the help of an unfinished house. At an early age, and just in time to keep me out of school, Virginia passed laws allowing parents to home school their children. This was big stuff, and many people moved into Virginia just so they might have the chance to keep their kids away from all those nasty (insert something non religious , and sinful here). Lucky us, we already lived in Virginia ( I had all my life), so we could take advantage of the law with little work.

Mainly home schooling was an exercise in avoiding work. My parents wanted me to learn math. I didn't. They made me do math problems, I faked the fact that I did them. They wanted me to read, I faked the fact that I had done my reading for the day. This pattern followed most of my home schooling life, and I think they knew it, too. At 14, I decided math was just no fun, but since I had to do something, I would do 5 math problems a day from my algebra workbook, the only work book I even bothered to do at all.. 3 years later I finished algebra 1.

While I wasn't doing math (and math was the only school work I did at all), I was doing one of a few things:

• Telling myself stories. If you haven't done it, you don't know just how much fun it is to make up a story that has no real point, no real plot, and no suspense at all. It was all very ritualistic, which just goes to show you that I really like rituals. I had story places where I would walk around, while making up the story. We had 70 acres, but I liked streams, so I usually messed around those. I spent so much time with this endeavor that I actually managed to change the path of our pitiful stream, sometimes drastically, much to the dismay of my parents. To this day you can still see the paths I wore, and the rocks I moved while coming up with the latest and greatest story about nothing.
• Reading. Not that you can tell anymore, but I loved to read, and did it all the time. I would go to our little library, and when I left, could barely carry all the books I had checked out for the next two weeks.
• And most important, playing with the computer. I liked computer games, they usually had much better stories than I could come up with (ouch!), and they were kind of interactive. My parents thought I spent too much time doing such stuff, so I branched out, and started programming, at first in C, and later in C++. I found out that anything computer related was interesting, and pretty much enjoyed my hobby to the extreme.

Quite the hard working and brilliant kid I was. Barbara and Howard (I never called them Mom and Dad) wanted me to do something productive, maybe even college. So at 16, I took a single class at the crappiest campus (it was an old bank) of the local community college. The campus was a true representation of the class I was about to take.

It was American history. History has never excited me, and I just didn't care to learn about it. Specifically, the dates that things I didn't care about happened. And the teacher was pretty much an example of what I had been missing all my life; she was a high school history teacher, night watchmen, and for the first time, community college night class teacher (all at once, too). Miss Dowthat (or however she liked to spell it) was boring, dumb, and condescending. Not that I really dissevered better considering my attitude, but a better teacher could have changed it.

But as much as I hated the class, I hated working on putting a new roof on our house even more (it was the 3rd one in 15 years, 1st one I helped to put on). Somehow doing anything indoors was preferable to working on a hot roof, pounding nails. So I got an A in the class, and hightailed it away from New River Community College (Christainsburg Bank Campus) and on to Virginia Tech.

Tech, you gotta love it. I do. And they seem to love me, judging from the number of A grades I have received (100%). I guess that goes to show that you don't really have to formally study anything before age 16 in order to be ready for college. Chew on that, and consider all the wasted time of the poor kiddies in grade school. Tech may not be the best university in the world, but it is damn good, and I certainly did not have any problems there after my minimal education. Lack of problems or not, I did not stay at Tech. Like most students, I went to college not knowing what I wanted to do, but that was 2 years ago. Now I know for sure, I want to major (or, as we say @ Hampshire College, do a DIV 2) in Cognitive Science. Tech did not offer this new age major, so I left. Now is that any way to treat a place that has given you an A in ever course you have ever taken there? Actually, yes, if you think that college should be challenging.

For those of you who might doubt it, everything written here was done so for a well crafted reason. What fine reading :-) And for those of you who think this is even slightly accurate, buzz off. Perhaps all the events recounted really did happen, but not quite the way I have explained them, above. I really believe that there was nothing wrong with my home schooling, or how I grew up. But just saying that would not be very interesting, now would it? Finally, the prose was written with the expectation of jumping about, back and forth, with lots of useless detail added. I like it that way, so there. Read some of my college application essays for examples "good writing".