Who I Was

March 1, 2009
Camp Johnson
13:17

Well, I'm going to have to start from the very beginning with this instead of just jumping into where I'm currently at in my new life. Unfortunately, I don't have access to my computer right now, so I can't post any handy pictures of me being a retarded civilian. Ok, not all civilians are retarded, I just was before I joined. I'll post some good pictures of that in the future when I get some facebook access.

Anyway, back to my life story. Don't worry, I'll skip a lot of stuff.

My Life Story - Abridged

It was a dark and stormy night in Milwaukee when I was born. Actually, I'm sure it wasn't. It was December 9th. Yeah, I'm a Sagittarius if that means anything to you. It means nothing to me, so let's move on. A couple years after I was born I moved to Malta, Illinois, which is right down the road from DeKalb, of recent school shooting fame. FUN FACT: DeKalb is where barbed wire was invented! I think we lived in Malta for about two years where my dad preached at the Lutheran church. I forget which one. I went to preschool in Rochelle, Illinois. After that we moved to Champaign, Illinois because my dad was given the job of being the pastor at the LCMS (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod) campus church, and because my parents hated DeKalb. I didn't know that at the time, but I know now.

So, life in Champaign as a five-year-old... Do I remember much other than going to school? Yeah, but most of it's playing with Legos, so we'll skip that. I started going to St. John Lutheran School where I met a good friend of mine in kindergarten, Brendan, who I'm still really good friends with.

I can't remember where this train of thought started, the question was probably posed to someone near me, but I started recently thinking about what the defining moment of my life could've been . I think it may be a few events, but when I thought about it I realized what the very first one is. This event occurs at some point between first and fourth grades. The setting is the parking lot behind St. John. I remember that while in elementary/middle school our activities changed from year to year at our post-lunch recess (or maybe it was the morning one, I don't remember), which was only about 15 minutes I think. At the time it seemed like hours. We only got around 15 minutes to eat lunch, too. Well, the recess phase we were in at the time was soccer. If I can recount the order, the games went from soccer, tag, flag football, four square, and basketball as we got older. There were probably more, but this was a soccer time. I don't remember how the game was going, who was winning, or who was playing except for a few people maybe. I don't remember who it was either, but someone kicked the ball and there I was springing into action to go get it. I never played soccer in the junior leagues in Champaign like most of the other kids at the time, so I had no idea what I was doing. But there the soccer ball went, rolling across the black pavement. Of course someone from the other team was running for it too, but I was going to beat them there, or was I? We reached it at the same time, and both kicked at the same time. Except our foots hit each other, and it hurt pretty bad for a 5 - 8 year old. Whoever the other person was went down to the fetal position pretty fast. I may have hopped for a second before I reached the fetal position, but not before everyone playing and a teacher (who will not be named, yes I still remember who it was) ran over to our position, which was at the edge of the parking lot. See, things like this happened all the time. When someone got hurt during recess, everyone and a teacher would gather around their position. The students just had nothing better to do and the teacher was making sure if this kid was even hurt or not. Well, I hit the ground as everyone was gathering around where we were. Except, they all gathered around the other kid. I remember lying there, my foot really hurting from being rammed into another object of equal velocity, and no one noticing. The crowd had gathered not ten feet away from the other injured one, their backs turned away from me. I remember being totally in awe and angry that not even the teacher saw me lying there. "Oh, are you okay?" "Where does it hurt?" they asked the other student, but I was hurt too and not even a teacher or student from anywhere else outside noticed me curled up on the ground. Eventually I just manned up and limped away while the other pussy probably got carried all the way back inside to our joke nurse's office. I'm not even sure if we called it that or not. It was just the school's secretary that put a Band-Aid™ on you. That specific event made me realize that life sucked and nothing was ever going to go my way. I wouldn't ever stand out or be great at anything, and if I was no one would notice.

I think this is when I first had the desire to be a Marine, but I can't be sure.

The rest of my time at St. John was pretty unremarkable as I remember it. I ran on the cross-country team for four years and totally sucked. I did track for one year and hated it, but I specifically remember winning a 400m race and taking second place in the event, probably because I never really won anything else. I played basketball for four years, and again, totally sucked. I made eight points in four years. Part of that is because I never shot and when I did it didn't go in. I made less points in those four years than the autistic kid a grade below me did in his. Ouch.

During 8th grade, I realized I really enjoyed making movies. I'd made some joker ones with my cousins a long while before, but I made some actually amusing edited shorts with my friends. Music and everything. I still enjoy watching them now. I'd say 8th grade is when I realized I wanted to make movies for the rest of my life.

Well, next thing I knew I was in high school. Our graduating class was something like twenty kids at St. John. I was one of five to go to Central High School, and the only male from my class. All my pals Rory, Brendan, Sam, Jaron, Patrick, Ben, etc. all went to other schools. Rory, Brendan, and Sam all went to Centennial High School which had, still has, and always will have a very childish rivalry with Central. Central is the low property tax district school in Champaign and Centennial is the high property tax district school. I heard something like whites were a minority at Central a couple years ago. I don't really care. My time at Central was also pretty unremarkable. I did track 'n field again my freshman year at the behest of a good friend of mine, Matt Feickert (who I hope isn't pissed to be mentioned in here).

Matt deserves his own paragraph. He has his own frickin' day for heaven's sake. That's not a joke, he really does, and he never knows when it is when I ask him. I need to put it in my phone. Anyway, Matt actually went to St. John for kindergarten and I knew who he was, but he was in the AM class as I was in the PM class. I guess teachers don't want to deal with more than so many 5 year olds than they can handle, so they split them up. He switched to a Catholic school until he went to Central. I met him because we were both in marching band and I've only known him since 2003, but I feel like I've known him my whole life. I have another friend like that too, Sean, but we'll get to him in a second. Matt was like one of Central's uber students along with some other kids from his same middle school. The nuns really know how to teach I guess. He ranked 1 in the class (or 2 I don't know, it was high) and had a weighted GPA of something like 5.6. Now don't go and crap your pants. 5.0 is a perfect GPA at Central high school, not 4. Matt's also an Eagle Scout, of course, and he belongs to some other really charitable organizations which I can't remember at this time. He's my best friend and sometimes I feel like a shitty friend to him. He's one of those guys that will help you with anything you ask and then some. He also likes to explain to me the things he's studying which go completely over my head because he's the next Einstein. He'll probably be popping up in this blog a lot.

NOTE: If you're pissed about not getting your own paragraph, bitch at me and I'll write one for you!

Where was I? Oh yeah, Matt got me to join the track team and I screwed up my foot by getting achilles tendonitis because I hadn't run for so long. I believe I ran in five races the season and lost all of them except one where I beat a fat kid. Score!

I didn't do much extracurricular stuff at Central other than Band. I marched for three years (which made boot camp drill oh so easy) and played in the concert bands for the whole four. I wasn't in any clubs. I did track again when I was a senior. I wanted to do it when I was a junior, but I had a job, we'll get to that too. Anyway, when I was a senior I got shin splints and only ran in like four races this time. The only people I beat were like the freshmen and sophomores on my own team that just weren't as tall as I am.

The good thing about Central was that I met a few good friends there. I say a few because I honestly did not meet that many new people there, especially in my class. I think people at Centennial are easier to get to know and people at Central put up some walls. My opinion.

When I was a junior I just couldn't impress my mom any longer until I got a job, which ended up being at County Market. I worked as a bagger for a year and a half and a cashier for about the last six months. It was a soul sucking place. I was pretty pissed by the time I was finishing my second year there.

Also, when I was a junior in May, I got really really really lucky. My mom sings in choirs with a lot of artsy liberal people that are involved in other things around the community. One of them so happened to be a woman who worked at a theater in Urbana doing props. Well, Mark Roberts, a guy who writes and produces for Two and a Half Men, was coming back to film a play he'd done at this theater: Welcome to Tolono. He's actually from Tolono, so it wasn't some random Hollywood guy trying to discover America's rural side. I was able to get a job (volunteering) on the movie as a Production Assistant. It was the first movie I worked on and an incredible experience. The movie is actually really good, and seeing my name on the screen in a theater was pretty rewarding. I got a picture with the director which I can put on here when I dodge these stupid internet filters.

The next year, the summer of '07 after I graduated, I worked on another movie. I'd worked as a production assistant on a semi-pro short called Near Miss, which is on youtube, so this was my third experience on a professional movie set. This time I got to be the props master and in charge of all the props. It was a really crappy experience. The conditions were awful. I mean, we found ourselves out in the woods near Mahomet in July totally disgustingly dirty. Conditions and organization were so bad that after something like five people quit, there was something of a mutiny and we had a day off for a little reorganization. Well, a couple days and a scene of my horrible acting later, the shooting was done and I was in college.

I started at Parkland Community College in August planning to transfer to SIU Carbondale the next year to finish my degree in film. During the latest film I had worked on I put my two weeks in at County Market because I was given a job offer by a photographer I was working with at his gallery. I thought that'd be pretty cool and he was a really nice guy. I quit the job at the grocery store and had an interview at his gallery, not with him, with someone who didn't know me at all, which wasn't fair. I wasn't really prepared to talk to her, I wanted to talk to Larry, the famous photographer who I was fairly good friends with at that point. Now, keep in mind I was living in an apartment in my church, not paying rent, but I had to buy all my own food of course. I wasn't making any money and I'd just paid for all my classes and books at Parkland. It wasn't a fortune, but it was most of my money. No parental assistance on that one. Two weeks later and no call back from the art gallery, I got pretty upset. They didn't give me the job for some reason. I even found a craigslist post for their gallery trying to fill the position I'd been offered. I found that maybe a month later and got pretty angry. I mean, the guy knew I was a hard worker because he worked with me on the movie, so I'll never know why I was out of a job.

During the first semester of school I got pretty depressed. I didn't really tell anyone about this and I tried to hide it by not acting any differently than I normally did. Not sure if it worked or if people noticed. I mean, I've never really told anyone this, but I was really depressed during that first semester. I even got into credit card debt because I had no job. I applied at a couple places and couldn't get hired. I finished the first semester without earning a single cent except maybe some odd jobs, I don't really remember. Wait, that's not true.

Well, during October I decided I'd become a member of the Public Access station after speaking with the old manager of it who came to speak at one of my classes at Parkland. I had my crappy slinky movie play on Halloween, the one I'd worked on for like...two years. At some point in November I asked Jason, the guy who signed me up for my membership, if there were any openings and I got hired to be a camera operator. I almost crapped my pants since I hadn't been earning money since at least August if not July. A couple weeks prior to this I'd submitted an online application at the local ABC news affiliate and just kind of forgotten it. I got a call from their Operations Manager and got hired. I think I did crap my pants that time.

Haha, stupid Best Buy. A month or so earlier I'd lied on all their personality questions on their online application so they'd actually offer me an interview. When I went in for the interview the guy I was supposed to talk to told me that I wasn't dressed well enough and even told me he might get in trouble talking to me for the way I was dressed. Granted, I was wearing shorts. But still, I got hired at TWO TV stations. I think that's better on my resume than Best Buy, but you be the judge.

I worked at WICD ABC Newschannel 15 from January through August and UPTV Channel 6 from late November through the same time. They were both pretty fun jobs and great experience, even though I don't want to go into TV. I met a good friend of mine, Justin, at Channel 15. He's going to make a great journalist someday. The guy knows everything about sports. My boss Jason at UPTV also became a pretty good friend of mine once we finally started partying together.

My second semester at Parkland was a lot different. I was working two jobs and had 18 hours of classes whereas I had no job and 14 hours the first semester. I ended up with three A's and a B the first semester and four B's and two C's the second. I somehow squeezed a girlfriend into the second semester for two months but I was too stressed to handle it so it didn't last. I ended up really hating school that second semester instead of hating myself the first semester.

One day I was leaving the school after my last class and Marine recruiters were standing at a booth. I didn't talk to them because I didn't want to get sucked into anything, but when I was driving back to the apartment a spark went off in my mind. I was going to enlist. I didn't know when, if either before or after college, but I was doing it. I still wanted to make movies, yeah, but I was going to be a Marine at some point.

Before the Marine epiphany, I'd met a good friend of mine named Sean in my TV class, which was a waste of time. He's one of those guys you feel like you've known forever. He always wants to do something too. If you feel like going out, call him and he probably already is out. You can just go and join him for a fun night. Sean and I traveled up to NIU to do a documentary involved with the recent shooting. I don't feel like explaining the whole thing, but we traveled to DeKalb by ourselves with a camera. I got lost on the way back because I was driving and took a wrong exit. Talk to Sean about it, his story will probably be more interesting because I pulled him into it. The whole thing fell through. I sucked him into another project of mine which we ended up writing together after I finished the first draft, and the script turned out pretty good. We geared up to shoot over three days during spring break with a couple parts not even cast, which was a mistake, but I didn't care. All I had on my mind was Marines. Finish school and join. I'd decided to do it first and then finish my degree and pursue my career in movies.

I was so distracted that I didn't give a crap about the movie and it never got finished. It's probably my best directing work too, which is a shame. I knew a lot more about what I was doing than with the other shorts I'd done, I was just so distracted. I didn't care, and no one else involved cared, so it just never happened after the two days of shooting we did. There were some people that did a lot of work for it, and I apologize to them.

Having been fed up with school and work, being totally apathetic towards my own creativity, and feeling like a worthless piece of crap, I went to the recruiting office the Friday of spring break.

The pictures are all nabbed from google images. I won't sell any of them I promise!