The timeline of my life up until this point is as follows:

1066
Norman conquest.
Invaded England. Stole all the toothbrushes. Neener!

1940
Axis and allies.
Put on a beret and sneered across the Maginot line. Got blitzkreiged. Fled!

1973
Little fluffy clouds
Born in Las Vegas, Nevada. Details surrounding this event are hazy at best.

1975
Descartes, I love you...
Became self aware. I distinctly recall tossing an Oreo in the toilet. When asked "why", responded: "Because I wanted to".
In yer face, Dr. Spock!

1976-1977
The "penny" years.
I used to walk around everywhere with a surgical mask affixed to the top of my head. I called them my "pennies". Otherwise a calm and thoughtful child, removal of my penny would cause me to throw spectacular tantrums. This is too crazy to make up. I think my parents thought I would grow up to be a doctor someday. The first in a long line of disappointments.

1977-1991
North to Alaska!
Spent the majority of my formative years in a small town in Alaska. Admittedly, labeling Eagle River a town might be stretching the definition of "town" a little bit. It's akin to firing 300 rounds at a squirrel who chased off some chickadees from the birdfeeder, and saying "maybe that was a bit overkill". Yes, I'm talking about you, mom. A Pizza Hut was built there in 1989, though.

Got my first computer in 1987 - a Compaq 8086. Played a lot of Hack. Still do. One of several spectaculary nerdy exploits I have an affinity for.

I was an awkward teenager. Having braces for 5 years did not help. I generally avoided my peers and concentrated on school. I can trace the beginnings of my philanthropic misanthropy [1] to this time period. Sadly this trend has never fully reversed itself, but I did manage to get a scholarship and to this day have great teeth!

Other highlights of this time period include:
  • 1979 - Got a Pulsar doll [2] for my 6th birthday. Cried because I wanted a Chewbacca doll.
  • 1981 - Ran over by a snowmobile and lived! Holy shit!
  • 1982 - Became Wonder Woman. During this time I would not respond to my given name, only "Wonder Woman" or "WW". The first of several identity crises.
  • 1983 - Decided to move to Sri Lanka and marry Simon LeBon
  • 1984 - Decided to scrap above plans and join the A-Team instead
  • 1985 - First noticed my "spider senses" tingling
  • 1986 - Went to my first concert: Kool and the Gang!
  • 1987 - Saw the movie "Dr. Strangelove - or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" for the first time. Found Dr. Merkwürdigliebe strangely attractive.
  • 1988 - Learned how to crush metallic objects just by looking at them
  • 1990 - Got my first car, Rhonda [3]. I loved that vehicle.
  • 1989-1991 - Routinely alarmed my parents by dyeing my hair various bizarre shades. Note: this was the extent of my rebelliousness.

1991-1995
Amandla!
Free from the clutches of the icy north, I went to college at the University of Oregon. Switched majors approximately 47 times. My hair went through even more changes. Eventually decided to concentrate on foreign languages. Oops. Apparently it didn't occur to me that I would have to get a job after school was over. The ability to say "do you want fries with that" in Russian, German, French, and Italian was not comforting. (Although, now it's a neat party trick!)

I should also mention that I would spend my summers working on factory fishing trawlers out in the Bering Sea. Can you say 'suck-ass'? I thought so.

1995-1996
The lost year(s)
I'm not entirely sure what exactly I did during most of this time period. Nothing terribly important, I guess. I think I worked in a restaurant for a while. I spent most of my time feeling somewhat melancholy about the state of my life. This led me to spend an inordinate amount of time with my computer - specifically on IRC. Met some people I could relate to. Terrorized some others. Some of these people I have never yet met in the flesh but still talk to daily. I think these years could classify as a "rut".

1996-1997
dot.second.circle
Answered an ad in the paper for an internet startup called Big Planet in Portland at the tail end of 1996. Thus began my career in technology. It was a tech support job and I was actually fairly good at it. Too bad I hated it -- I never could let go of that misanthropy thing cultivated so many years prior. Business wasn't good, however, and the company had few (paying) customers. I found that I had a lot of time on my hands, so one day in the summer of 1997 I installed Adobe Photoshop.

1997-1999
Erlichtung!
I somehow found my motivation and got really good with coding and graphics. Got promoted out of tech support and started designing websites in earnest.

Big Planet effectively closed down in the summer of 1997 and became a multi-level marketing company (read: pyramid scheme). Our assets were bought by a telco company called Convergent for some reason. I stayed on as a designer getting paid next to nothing. I also started working on this website around this time.

Eventually left Convergent and became art director of a health portal site. Made some better pay. Bought a new car. Adopted some kitties from the humane society (Trotsky and Sakharov). Scored a killer apartment.

1999-2001
Rise and fall of an empire
All good things eventually end. This also applies to ludicrous business concepts. WebMD ended up shuttering it's Portland office in mid-2001. I, however, made out like a damn bandit with my severance. This was my financial come-uppance. The down payment for a house still sits in my account waiting for the right listing.

2001-present
Survivor guilt
Interesting times indeed. After WebMD I immediately found employment with Xerox as a UI engineer. How this differs from website design, I'm not entirely sure, but the title sounds much more impressive.

2001 redux
Also Sprach Zarathustra
A glowing fetus in the stratosphere... a black alien obelisk rises from the desert. My God... It's full of stars!

  1. Philanthropic misanthropy - of or referring to the seemingly hypocritical notion that you can harbor great disdain towards the bulk of humanity while still believing that capital punishment is a blight on our civilization.

  2. Pulsar doll - An unnaturally tan, male doll that wears a red and black jumpsuit. When the jumpsuit is removed, it is revealed that Pulsar's chest is made of clear plastic - allowing the posessor to see all of his guts inside! A button on Pulsar's back activates the realistic pulminary system, causing his innards to pulse and move about as the button is depressed and released. He also had a removable brain pan that revealed a computer chip. I think Mattel was trying to pre-condition children that being microchipped was ok -- hell, it was super extra cool!

    "Hey kids! Don't YOU want a brain chip just like PULSAR?" Yeah, it's totally extra super killer!!! Playstation 2 comes out this Christmas!

    Clearly a conspiracy.

  3. Rhonda - a beige 1983 Honda Accord belonging to my sister and I from 1990 to 1998. A great many of my young adult memories revolve around that car - dodging herds of caribou at Lake Louise, driving the 3400 mile Al-Can to Oregon, camping in the Wallowa wilderness in the summer, midnight runs to Portland loaded with drunk friends to go to the Church of Elvis. Rhonda had over 340,000 miles on her when she finally succumbed.