Background : Before journal entries

I was born in November, 1981, in Ottawa, where my family stayed until after my sister was born in 1984. Then we moved to Richmond, a small town outside of Ottawa.

I attended St. Philip’s Elementary School until grade six. I was teased a lot, but I never got into fights. By sixth grade my hair had grown to be very long at the back, and I wrote a speech about the technology of Star Trek. I delivered the speech in sweat pants. I was happy, but not very popular.

After grade six I started at St. Mark High School. I stopped wearing sweatpants and cut my hair shorter, but not really short enough to avoid being teased. The low point of grade seven was being thrown out of the boys’ change room and into the school cafeteria without pants on during lunch.

Also in grade seven, I started listening to music. I remember hearing “Sliver” by Nirvana in home economics class and asking my dad buy me Nevermind and In Utero as my grade seven graduation present. Obsessed with Kurt Cobain, I decided to grow out my bangs.

With few friends at school, I discovered the National Capital FreeNet and became addicted to Internet Relay Chat. I would stay awake until 6:00 am talking to people I’d never met who had become my closest friends. There were few people from these years that I still spoke to even six months after I gave up on FreeNet early in the summer of 1997.

Back in the real world, I spent most of the next year with almost no one to talk to. I listened to a lot of Joy Division and The Smiths while wandering Richmond alone. During the summer I made a Bran Van 3000 web site and played violent videogames to kill time.

I started making more friends at school in 1998. I found a job that summer converting magazine articles into HTML files for a web site. My hair became shorter and shorter, and people started to talk to me more and more.

I spent the summer of 1999 going to raves, but they weren't very much fun because I was always sober. Bored of raves and sick of being asked by kids at school what I thought of being high on ecstasy, I eventually stopped going and started wearing straight edge shirts so people would stop asking me about hard drugs.

In the middle of May, 2000, I started keeping an online journal.