I puttered through school. Underacheivement was my best talent. But I always read, and made great efforts to learn when subjects interested me.

I gravitated to respiratory therapy because of my father and a hatred of smoking and lung disease, which killed my Grandfather. I did well in school, despite myself.

I graduated from Community Hospital of Roanoke Valley College of Health Sciences summa cum laude with an Associate Degree in Respiratory Care in 1992. I practiced in the field until 1997 - but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Post-graduation, I practiced RT in the University of Virginia Health Science Center in the Critical Care areas. That experience was the most positive work experience I've ever had. UVa is in Charlottesville, a great town - dynamic and two hours from to Washington.

I love to travel, and have been lucky enough to do so. New York, Washington D.C., Manila, San Francisco, Miami, London, Paris, Rome. The world is a huge wondrous strange and scary place.

After a few years in C-ville, I started to feel the strong pull of California again. I moved back to Los Angeles with the romantic ambition of working in the film business. I worked as an RT while taking all sorts of classes, "expanding my horizons." in film, post-production, computer graphics, and multimedia.

All of which led me, at the end of 1995, to buy a computer.

Unforseen outcome #1: I've learned a snootful of cool stuff about computers: graphics, operating systems, hypertext, file-naming conventions, colors, hexadecimal numbers, browser safe palettes, Bill Gates, Apple, Windows, Steve Jobs, IRC, usenet .... hey ... you still with me? Sorry, I do tend to ramble.

Unforseen outcome #2 (The cooler of the two): I met Jennifer at the beginning of 1996. I was on the net for the first time via AOL.

We met in a public room, a lobby actually. We found a strange rapport, and we started chatting regularly. Soon we were e-mailing up a storm. We exchanged pictures. We began talking on the phone. And talking, and talking, and talking. That first phone bill was more than $900, mostly to Miami, her home town. No kidding.

I had to meet her in person. I flew to Florida soon after, and fell in Love with my Voz37. She moved to la ciudad de Los Angeles a few months later.

We're together now, having a blast. She's in school studying philosophy, while I work as a web designer.

				          * not the ex-dictator of Haiti;
				            but my Dad, who was an Army
				            corpsman and became a father
				            while in the field during
				            his service in the Republic
				            of Vietnam