Expectations and Chapter 1: The Story So Far

One of the most difficult things I've dealt with throughout my life is expectations. With my 10 year high school reunion on the horizon, and randomly reconnecting with people from my childhood on Facebook, I've been thinking a lot about where I am and where I've been. I've decided to actually put this to paper, with the hope that maybe I can lay to rest some of the demons that have plagued me for so long. This will probably be a multiple post endeavor, but I want to start going through my life so that I can move forward and feel good about myself and where I am headed. In order to do that I have to figure out what I want and be able to make a path to that point. My first step on that path is to acknowledge the past but loosen its grip on my life. Major topics that I want to cover are intellectual success, social growth, and epic failure with women. No better place to start than from the actual beginning.

I was born on June 23rd, 1981. My first memories come at about age two, but they are spotty at best. I learned to read very early, sometime during my age 3 year. At age 3, I was also able to name most of the game show hosts on television, from the very easy Price is Right (Barker obv) and Classic Concentration (Trebek actually), to the more difficult Password (Bert Convy) and Joker's Wild (Jack Berry). I was incredibly voracious in my search for knowledge. I wanted to take in every possible fact and figure that I could. It was during these early years (3-6 or so) that I developed my keen interest in sports. I read the sports page every morning and devoured the statistics with true vigor. At the same time, I spent my early years making friends at Preschool and Kindergarten, culminating with my first three actual friends: Dave Epifano (my lifelong best friend, and still a friend to this day), Darren Hastings, and Brendan Kelly (not as much for these guys).

I was very nerdy and had glasses at age 5, and not the kind of glasses kids have now, but giant thick glasses that didn't help my image. I was (and still am to a large extent) a know-it-all, which annoyed many of my peers from the get go, but I was never afraid of being intelligent. I knew that I was sort of dorky but I didn't care because my love of intelligence and the attention that it brought me from my family and teachers was more than enough to ignore childish insults. Despite all this, my love of sports led me to play sports every summer for the city of Parma Heights and I loved it.

I attended St. John Bosco school from age 5 until age 13. It was my life to go there every day and I still have many memories from those days. While my brain was developing at a ridiculous rate, my social skills had not nearly blossomed to that level yet. I was a crybaby and a poor sport and combining that with being a nerd and "knowing it all," along with a sudden weight gain in third grade made me relatively unpopular, especially with girls. The guys, on the other hand, mostly liked me because I had no problem sharing my intelligence, letting people copy off of me, and I loved sports and was a solid athlete despite my overweight frame.

Random memory insertion here: I hated changing clothes after gym. I always rushed through it as fast as I possibly could as we were all crammed into a very small bathroom that was near the gym. I remember in 8th grade being in there while one of my classmates (sorry Matt Foraker, but I think the statute of limitations has expired on keeping guy talk between the guys) who was very popular recounted his sexual experience with a girl who was one of the "slutty" girls in our class (there were a total of 55ish kids in our grade). I had never heard of such talk before...I mean, I knew the health class idea of what sex was but never had actually heard one of my friends/classmates talk about sex. The idea of it sort of scared me. I was a sweet boy who had nothing more than crushed on a couple of girls for the entirety of my grade school career (hi there Jessica Levi and Tiffany Karpac!) and had no idea that this sort of thing was actually going on already. I had no idea at the time, but the game had changed.

I was a very sensitive boy. I didn't like being made fun of, not for any reason. Because of this, I wanted everything to be perfect. I wanted to be included in everything. I remember crying a lot growing up because people made fun of me and I didn't know how to just laugh at myself and get over it yet. I don't think of my childhood as a childhood because I was so sensitive and pensive most of the time that I didn't do wild and crazy things that kids do, but at least I had my friends.

I had an amazing group of close friends that I spent my summers with: Dave, Erich Krems, his sister Kerry, my next door neighbor Meredith, and the periphery was filled with even more friends like Jason Radzyminski, Joe Selesky, and others that we played ball with, started clubs with, swam, and battled in board games (Hotels FTW). We were amazingly tight from the time I started school until I moved a few miles away and between that and the start of high school it was no longer a daily thing that we could see each other at age 14. I will always hold the Drug Mart and 76 runs to get candy and soda in high regard in my memories. I also remember the first vestiges of list-making (something I still love to this day) when Dave and I helped Erich with his paper route and we talked about the various girls we wanted to date and ranked them.

I had an enemy in our group of friends, Mike Yakubics, who hated me when other people were around but actually was pretty cool when it was just me and him. We played Tecmo Super Bowl together. Innocent times... sadly things wouldn't be so innocent years later when Mike ran down someone in his truck outside a bar. I can't say I never wished ill-will on him but I am certainly sad to have seen this sort of thing happen, so if you're out there Mike, I'm sorry for how things turned out for you.

This post is a lot of fun. I have a ton more ground I want to cover just from these early years alone...and this is the easy part! I am going to try and break this up over multiple posts, as I said, so I'll stop here and next time go into greater detail of my early struggles with women, finish discussing how my natural intelligence carried me through elementary school, and delve into the early part of high school, hopefully at least getting through my Dad's stroke that nearly killed him. Until next time...

Songs of the Second: (1992 edition - Sixth Grade School Dances!)
Stereo MCs - Connected
Kriss Kross - Jump
Pearl Jam - Jeremy
Boyz II Men - End of the Road
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under the Bridge
Spin Doctors - Two Princes