Chapter the First: How I got here, my health, and opinions on how my universe works.
I understand that I lived in Maryland and around DC for the first 2 years of my life while Dad did interesting things for the government. I subsequently moved to the Bay Area, and lived there until I was 8. Dad (who's a retired professor of Chinese history) got a job at EWSC (now EWU) in Cheney, 16 miles southwest of Spokane. We lived there for 4 years, then we moved to Pittsburgh, PA, for a year while Dad taught for a year at Carnegie-Mellon, then off to Tucson and the University of Arizona. I went to Sahuaro High School in Tucson, and then I moved up to Portland to go to Reed College for a year and a half, then down to Eugene for a year, then Sacramento for 2 years, and finally I moved up here to Seattle in 1978 when the woman I'd moved to Sacramento for moved up here to go to Library school at the UW. I've been here ever since. She and I were married for 15 years, we separated in September 1995, and got divorced in December 1996. All sorts of things started breaking free as soon as I got divorced. I've had a flow of old friends (from 20+ years ago) suddenly appearing in my life. Work started flowing in all of a sudden, too: new magazine assignments, publishers talking to me about projects, even some new career possibilities. I've continued to grow ever since. I had a 5-year relationship that ended in 2000 with someone I'd known since the mid-80s. Not long thereafter, I met Marilyn (aka "the Babe") through a dating website and we hit it off right away. We've been together for two years and will be getting married in September. (Wedding information can be found at our website, www.marilynandjohn.com.) on
I've been doing a lot of working out since July 1997 to combat the effects of Type II (non-insulin dependent) diabetes. It's been very successful: I'm off all my glucose meds, my blood sugar is normalized, and I'm developing some incredible muscles. My wind and stamina are vastly improved and I keep having to wear smaller clothes (life's tough like that). I miss eating ice cream whenever I want, but I'll manage. On the other hand, I've found some really good sugar-free ice cream this summer that's filled the need for that "chocolate ice cream" flavor. I'm pumping a lot of iron. I even did some modelling Labor Day weekend 1998 for a coffee-table book of photos that's being developed by a Bay Area photographer. I've been losing weight recently and, as of January 2002, am down from 235 to 215 with a goal of 190 pounds.
My general personal philosophy is "If I were having any more fun, I'd have to be two people." Similarly, my goals are "Having fun and making money... in that order." I didn't have a lot of fun in my life the first half of the 90s, so I spent the rest of the decade doing fun things that I enjoy. My former sweetheart and I went to London and Ireland several times, Venice for two weeks in March 1997, and took frequent short trips to places like Victoria, B.C., San Francisco, Reno, Vancouver, B.C., La Conner, the Orcas Islands... all over! I also did a lot of travelling of my own: the Bay Area in September 1998 for a cousin's wedding, Tucson in October 1998 (for my 25th HS reunion), regular trips to regional and annual STC conferences in Toronto, scenic Anaheim (feh!), Cincinnatti, Orlando, Portland, and Honolulu. Since meeting Marilyn, we've done several small trips but our schedules haven't allowed us anything big yet. We did go to Tucson for my induction into the Sahuaro High School Hall of Fame, Chicago in May 2001 for an annual STC conference, but that's been most of it so far. I also do an average of a trip a month to somewhere in the US to speak to an STC chapter.
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