User Profile

felt the need to update this steve-style.

from childhood through high school i was always busy with things my parents suggested I do, not things I really wanted to do. examples: piano lessons, boy scouts, sports, japanese school on saturdays. I ended up enjoying a few of those things but never really had friends until college. plus, as i was finishing elementary school across town, i was forbidden to play with the neighbor kids who were 'unruly'. if you can imagine, i didn't have much free time as a kid. i didn't socialize or break out of the house much. so i turned inward to books, staring out the window, and computers. I didn't play baseball or basketball very well from the start, but liked soccer. having glasses didn't help. not a healthy childhood but not bad like having divorced parents or dead parents or worse problems other people have to deal with early.

i made friends in college for the first time. seems strange, don't you think? discussion section, living in the dorms and volunteering for clubs, these are the places i met cool intelligent people. Berkeley life was easy. I studied political science because i liked history books since junior high, and somehow i got into alternative politics in high school. I didn't play sports in college, much like high school, and to my regret. but nowadays I've been trying to make time for basketball and soccer during work hours... I've been teaching in Japan now for over a year at a private English school and also for two cities in Saitama.

Before Japan, I'd graduated during the dot com bust and searched high and low for a Real Job. They still were handing them out, but I had no real grasp of how difficult it would become for many people to find work between May 2001 and the coming winter of discontent. I also hadn't interviewed much or thought of work after school (oops) so I had to catch up quickly. Working retail for a few months was great. I felt some status deprivation because I had a 4 year degree. I realized that a degree is nice but experience is far more important. Worked my way up the company ladder to become a buyer assistant, only to quit right before I could've become a buyer myself. More, I walked out into the world of unemployment again.

After quitting a steady but low-paid and slightly retarded job with too much inane paperwork, I worked retail again. I cannot for the life of me sell a vaccuum. Or spell the word. Meanwhile, I moved away from home for the second time but for real this time. Lucky for me, I got into a profitable dot com filled with interesting people and out of the halfway house. I lived in some anal Boston dude's 1BR living room on the couch for $500 a month. We just didn't mix. But it was great to live somewhere on my own terms and I loved jogging to 24hour fitness way down the street late at night and working out for a couple hours... I also got a new car at this time but it was a ripoff. My station wagon was dying left and right. Although I was able to borrow Anna's civic, I needed a new commute ride. I got an ex-rental corolla and got into modding the world's most popular catepillar of a car. Moved in with a friend near berkeley campus and picked up carpool buddies for the 1-hour 980-880-peninsula drive. Carpooling is a good thing. But like roommates and girlfriends, they don't always work out. That's life. Better to try new things than stay in a rut though. I played Ultimate a few times on campus too, didn't really get into it. Busy? Anyway, the .com job started to stink so i looked for a socially redeeming job. And here I am. a flash in japan.

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And now I'm searching for a similarly satisfying job back home.

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