I was born in West Central Coastal Humid Florida in 1980. After a typical 80s childhood spent playing with My Little Pony and He-Man and watching too many episodes of The Real Ghostbusters and Doctor Paul Bearer Presents, I was identified as gifted and sent to middle and high school at Pine View School for the Gifted. It must have been all those cartoons and Double Dare marathons.
I graduated and went to New College of Florida, earning a BA in Anthropology and Archaeology and doing a big-ass thesis on the commodification of Ancient Egypt and its sale on eBay. For fun, I had a little radio show (Yoda's Choda), performed in the dance tutorial, worked as a tour guide in the antique musical instrument room at the museum next door, and generally arsed about as college students do.
After finishing there in 2002, I went to Japan for two years on the JET Programme, like you do. I lived in beautiful Tsukui Town, in Kanangawa Prefecture, right between Tokyo and Yokohama. For fun I sang karaoke, drank, made some friends, learned Japanese, amused the middle schoolers I taught, and generally arsed about as gaijin do.
While in Japan I met a cool guy on the Internet. We emailed, and then during the summer after my first year abroad I came home to visit my family and meet said cool guy in person. That was it. Cupid's arrow gutted us both and we fell in love. Alas, I had to go back to Japan, and the following January he was sent to Iraq with the National Guard. He proposed to me via webcam that May, and by April Fool's 2005 were finally in the same country and getting married.
I just graduated cosmetology school and am licensed to work in a salon or barber shop. However, my passion now is makeup and, ideally, I'd really like to work in movies doing makeup. I'm scheduled to work on a couple low-budget horror and zombie flicks in the next few months.
I've been living off my Japan money for last 3 years, and am now working on securing a more permanent paying job and figuring out how to be a grown-up. As you might have surmised, my plans tend to meander. Save for two holiday stints serving Type-A yuppies at Restoration Hardware, I've been blissfully unemployed and enjoying married life in a studio apartment with my husband and my paintings of bucktooth jelly fish and other weird denizens of the deep.
The creatures in the paintings are the weird denizens of the deep, mind you, not my husband. He's purely terrestrial.
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