Tell me your life story.

[moches]

Originally Posted by moches

I WAS GOING TO DO WORK TODAY.

but here goes. also this is not-yet-finished but hopefully still informative!

I was born May 24, 1995 to two Korean immigrants in Monterey Park, a stone's throw from Los Angeles. My sister (who has a LOT to do with my life) was almost two. My father was in the middle of studying for a PhD, a supposed five-year process that ended up taking something more like fifteen; in the meantime, my mom was working to support him.

Truth be told, I don't remember a lot from my childhood, so a few stories...

My parents tell me that once I ran across a highway and managed to survive. I didn't know it was dangerous at the time. I also jumped into a fake lake at a restaurant, forcing my dad to jump into the water. With his suit on. Whatever other faults my parents have, I owe them for my life.

My first memory is of vomiting my PB&J and grape juice back into my teacher's wastebasket at preschool; apparently it didn't go down well. I still can't stomach that combo. And I still hate white bread. The teachers also told my parents (or so my parents tell me) to enter me into a private school, since my intelligence was above-average or whatevs. My mom wanted to, but my dad worried I wouldn't get proper social interaction and kept me in the public school system.

My elementary school was Marengo, a school of 600-something kids in the suburban paradise of South Pasadena, California. Again, not too far from LA. I got just about all of the social interaction I needed here. And by that I mostly mean that the other kids shat on me since I was in English Language Development, and once my after-school's head counselor humiliated me in front of the entire camp when he found out I had relieved myself in the bushes in front of Marengo while waiting for his bus. I searched for his Yelp page a few months back, and apparently this sort of behavior is a recurring feature: no less than three one-star reviews, all from different parents. Didn't make it any less traumatic when it happened.

There was this other time when the guys in my 3rd grade class were passing around a stupid joke, the one about adding "it" to the end of every phrase. (Spoiler alert: the librarian says "sh--it." Hardee har-har.) Of course it's fine when they share it among themselves, but the moment I tried to share the joke with somebody else, they told the teacher about the dirty joke I was sharing. That basically sums up most of my elementary experience.

Family life, while better, was...frankly kind of awful. It was tied to my dad's church life, since he was a senior pastor, and that meant my behavior got put under the microscope of an entire church. Oftentimes he'd smile tightly while I ran about with the other kids, and then later at home he would beat me and my sister while yelling about the awful things we did. He also tried to get me to drink milk because he wanted me to grow taller (even today, I'm only 5'6"); every day after school he would pour me a tall glass and tell me to drink it in ten seconds, brandishing a wooden spatula he'd use to beat me if I didn't comply. Even the smell of milk makes me throw up, but I held my nose and gulped all of it down.

There were cartoon characters on those glasses. Tweety. And I think the Roadrunner, too.

I also learned what my penis does when I rubbed it for too long. Notably, this was to a cartoon superhero. So the evidence suggests I may have been gay/bisexual from the beginning.

When I look back on this period of my life, there were a few things going on. First of all, I began to see myself as a natural outsider--this made me anxious about social situations, obviously. This is also where I developed a lifelong habit of sticking up for bullying victims. Seriously, FUCK bullies. Second of all, I began falling into negative cycles of behavior where I would be too clingy to anybody who was new or nice to me and end up driving even more people away. Most importantly, I developed a lifelong need for affection in every sense of the word: even now, remarks or gestures that other people would shrug off feel like they cut to my bone. I still sleep with stuffed animals. I'm more openly touchy-feely with my emotions and I HATE giving criticism or being a dick more than anything. It's not a pleasant feeling or a healthy pattern of behavior, but I still struggle to step out of it.

Especially because, well, it's actually beneficial in some ways. In a perverse turn of events, being the target of so much underhanded shit opened me up to my sense of empathy, which I consider to be my strongest point. It also made me more friendly and positive (to escape my dad's wrath and to make friends).

I also started playing Stepmania when I was seven. For the sake of brevity since this is already long as shit, here's a column about that side of things. I'll mostly keep this autobiography to non-Stepmania stuff.

Things started getting better in fifth grade. We started having Knowledge Bowl events, where I found out I was actually pretty smart with math and knew a lot more trivia than most other kids my age. I also developed a strange obsession with ocean liners after watching Titanic and have a relatively extensive knowledge of them to this very day. I also met Ryan, possibly my best friend ever, just because we were seated together and clicked. Before I met him, I thought he was a judgmental snob, but as it turns out he is one of the sweetest souls you could ever meet.

Middle school was pretty awesome. Did math team, met one of the most influential teachers of my life. Found out about the school library and tried to read 50 books in a year (made it to 47, for what it's worth). Became friends with the math team peeps and everybody in Ryan's circle, which is...a lot of awesome people. Yay!

I also jerked off a lot.

All was to change very soon, though. Remember how my dad was in America to study and stuff? Apparently he took fifteen years to do five years' work (less because he was lazy or anything, more because raising kids is serious business), and he finally got a job in Korea with his shining new PhD in 2007, right around when I was in seventh grade. And we had to move to stay with him.

I mean, I could have chosen to stay with any of our family friends, but...at the end of the day, family's family. I don't know. Sometimes I wake up and I want to run away, sometimes I look at my mom and remember everything she's done for me.

Yeah, actually, let me digress a little bit to talk about my family.

The man of the house is kind of a fundamentalist Christian. Hardcore supporter of the Korean Republican Party and basically has beliefs in line with everything the American GOP believes, which has only become a problem for me recently. Spent most of his life physically beating me and has now mostly resorted to verbal warfire. Despite this, he's humorous, occasionally warm, and more affectionate than he lets on. And to be fair, if I were a former Marxist who was arrested by his government, subjected to three years of military service--basically torture--and almost murdered during my tenure, I think I probably would have turned out the same way. This is a complicated story, but I try to forgive him for as much as I can and try to be the bigger person about the rest.

My mother is one of the most beautiful people I know, but sometimes I look at how damaged she is emotionally. She went through more married to my dad than I can really expound on here, and sometimes I feel like she's still trapped.

My sister...wow. She's probably affected me most directly. But I don't feel like writing anymore right now, so I'll stop for today. Part two for tomorrow.

so I told myself over and over I was going to finish this SOMEDAY. I finally decided I would wake up an hour earlier today to finish it (partially because it was nagging at me, partially because my teacher encouraged me to write this as a way to prep for college app essays), and here's the other half of my LIEF STORIEZ:

So it's August 2008, sometime after 6PM. Incheon is a pressure cooker this time of day, and as my sister and I drag who-knows-how-many bags through the turnstiles as we look for our grandparents' faces in the crowd of people waiting, sweat drips down my back. I don't remember much, except for the bus ride to their house. The Beijing Olympics had just started, and I remember the lightweight men's judo competitor from South Korea had just snatched a gold medal. I remember his face: streaked with sweat like mine, exhausted but exhilirated and just about ready to burst into tears. The television played it over and over and...oh, right, over again. I couldn't peel my eyes away from looking at it no matter how many times I saw it.

It proved prophetic.

Two days after I came, I fell sick. Part of it was jet lag, part of it was the fact that I had spent my first full day in Korea hopping around Seoul to put together my application to Seoul Foreign School--where I thought I would finish an uneventful five years before escaping back to the States. Didn't happen, but I'll get to that later. The point is, the first month was utter hell. Everything I looked at made me dizzy, and more often than not I felt like I was going to vomit. My dad, as high-tempered as he was, did his best to be gentle with me, but even he had his limits. During one notably uncomfortable car ride, he spent the entire ride to my house berating me for my frail body. "This only happens because you don't exercise," he snapped. "You are going to start working out the moment you get better. You got it?"

School, as always, started in August. As somebody who was born and raised on public school turf (I can hear the gagging of GOPs in the House of Representatives in the distance as I type this), private school was a completely new experience to me. Rule one: uniforms - white or red polo shirt, well-ironed black pants. Period. Every time I looked down at my outfit, I was reminded of my new life, this alien country I had agreed to come to.

The only comfort in this time was the Internet: every break time, I would rush down to the computer lab and spend the five minutes left perusing forums of my choice. Mostly rhythm game forums (why, hello there, readers). Television, too. MADtv made me laugh like nothing could. And of course, I had my iPod nano to keep me company--and maybe even work as a good conversation starter.

I look back on the time I spent at that school and all of it barely registers. Don't get me wrong because the people were great -- I keep in touch with a few friends, and I met a few of my favorite teachers there -- but...when I think of it, I didn't do much. I honestly don't think it was the right environment for me.

There's a few things about that year (2008-2009 if you're keeping track) that matter a little, I guess:

-My sudden obsession with comedy led me to try my hand at stand-up, which I still consider to be either the best or the worst decision of my life. On one hand, it was a bold move for somebody who still had trouble with his stuttering. On the other...I was an awkward 13-year-old. For whatever reason, my friends liked it, so no harm, I guess?

-I forgot to mention that the school was an hour away, so this was my first time having to wake up early to go to school. And I went with my sister, who was never in the best mood in the morning. We ended up fighting a lot more, and it strangely led to bonding in the end: you learn to handle each other when you spend your entire morning together, right? And that kind of happened.

-Foreign school doesn't come cheap - for the first time, I had to think about the impact I had on my family financially. I remember a lot of times when I overheard my parents discussing the bills (or worse, my parents talking to me about the bills) and feeling this immense guilt that somehow I was already dragging them down.

It was a combination of the third factor plus my lousy, lousy Korean skills (even after taking an intermediate Korean course in my foreign school) that finally led me and my parents to a joint decision: I would drop out of the high school and finish my secondary education in the Korean school system. At first, I hated them for it. How could I not? They had taken me out of my home country, away from my friends and everything I knew, and now they were throwing me into another ocean without a life preserver. My dad told me it was for my own good, but I knew that on some level, it was what was best for everybody, and for once I just had to accept that fact.

My interests began to shift a little this year, too. I discovered the band Rise Against and went through my version of a punk phase: no mascara or piercings involved, just a lot of moping and loneliness. All the pain, none of the pleasure. (Okay, maybe a little smugness, too. Sue me. I was fourteen.) I carry some of that with me to this very day. For some reason, I still enjoy the music of Linkin Park long past any self-respecting/self-conscious music fan should, and it's okay! Those were things I felt and went through once, and maybe I'm embarrassed by them now, but they were legitimate then and they're part of who I am now. Some of it has to do with what I went through earlier in my life, too; ironic that my conservative, strict-as-shit family has bred a goofy bleeding-heart liberal like me, eh?

My interest in music grew, too. I had really gotten into Stepmania by this point, and one song I discovered through the game was 65daysofstatic's "Drove Through Ghosts To Get Here." I remember looking for the album that song was from and then playing the album everywhere I went once I found it: it was life-changing music, dark and apocalyptic but hopeful in its strange little way. It left its mark on me, that's for sure. You could argue that everything I've learned about music since then is just a way of trying to recapture that golden moment, like swinging your net around a bug that just isn't going to die for you, no, not today, motherfucker.

----

Okay, I've talked enough about that year. Korean middle school (one-and-a-half years of my life) is a transitional period. Where I really begin to get in touch with my new country. Where I make some of the best friends of my life. When my exposure to a new educational system shakes my worldview and makes me, for the first time in my life, think about why education matters. It's completely different from the cliquey honors-based system in the States, that's for sure: like it or not, you're thrown in with 35 of your peers, none of whom are anything like you. Have fun. Don't die along the way.

My grades are the worst they've ever been, and not even my parents can really blame me. New language, new standards, right? But what amazes me is how almost nobody around me really gives much of a shit: many kids turn in blank papers. Others sleep through the exams (that is, until the proctors wake 'em up and they get up, grumbling reluctantly). This is not the squeaky-clean middle school from South Pasadena, nor is it the upper-crust foreign school in Seoul I've just abandoned. And the thing is, I can't really blame them, either. This is the state of the Korean education system: nine tiers, and the only people worth a damn are the people who eke their way into the top two. That's 11% of the entire student body. That's just not enough to give some of these kids a chance. For the first time, I woke up to the fact that many people just weren't as privileged as I was. I'd only realize that looking back, though. At the time, I just knew one thing: I was never, never going to college in Korea. I needed to find a way out.

Enter Daewon Foreign Language High School, ostensibly the best high school in the world depending on how you slice 'n dice the stats. To me, it's mostly the school I was lucky enough to stumble ass-backwards into. The first I had heard of the school was a cold February day in 2010, where a banner flapped over the entrance of our middle school congratulating a sunbae (fancy word for our elders we have here) for his acceptance and matriculation into one of the most prestigious foreign language schools in Korea. My uncle noticed the banner on a random visit, and he told my parents, who cooed happily and pressed me for my opinion.

That's where an eight-month sprint towards admission began: haphazardly putting together an application, hastily preparing for the interview (which would be in Korean, how wonderful), and generally cramming every little speck of information that would boost my chances of getting in. In the end, my survival had less to do with my efforts and more to do with the sudden change in education policy. When it turned out that the only subjects Daewon would need from me were English, math, and literature, my generally mediocre grades became a non-issue, and my path was settled.

Let's fast forward a bit to March 2011: today is the first day of something called the Global Leadership Program. I have my sister’s old backpack in one hand, five book reports in the other (three of which I have never read), and eleven other classmates with me, all of whom look much more studious than I could ever dream of being. Oh, and don’t forget the butterflies flittering around in my stomach.

The door opens and a man, six-foot-one at the very least, walks into the room with an impish grin. His messy hair hits that perfect balance between order and chaos, while his tidy suit betrays not a single speck of dust. If you looked up “teacher” in the old Merriam-Webster, this dude would be there. He puts his bag down next to the podium, writes his name (Mr. C) on the board, and faces us. “English is a weird language!” he declares, and my eyes widen in curiosity—and fear.

Fear was the right response: Daewon is the most humbling experience of my life for sure. In Literature, the readings went in one ear and out the other. In Speech and Debate, I learned just how unruly my tongue is in what I retrospectively don the Moses Kim Meltdown of April 2011. I signed up for the debate team, in some vague hope of becoming more eloquent (less useless): the first question the senior captain asked me at my audition was whether I suffer from ADHD. But I kept trying, undeterred by just how much I sucked at everything. Every Tuesday, I grabbed dinner from the local church in a hurry, running back up our school’s hill at 5:45 sharp to study for a grammar quiz that I would almost certainly fail.

On the last day of the first semester, I barely secured an A in Chinese, and the moment I finished I felt a wave of nausea wash over me. I made it about halfway home before I finally lost it, rushing towards the nearest wastebasket and hurling my breakfast. I still don’t remember how I got home after that (just that it was hell), but I remember a lot of porridge, a lot of vomit, and a lot of sleep.

The next day, I went to the ER for the first time in my life. The diagnosis: advanced pneumonia. That's the only time in my life I've ever been hospitalized, but the bigger defeat for me was a psychological one, the cherry on top of a semester full of disappointments. In its way, it was a wake-up call. That was me pushed to my limits, and I had to be more honest about myself.

Shortly afterwards, I posted my very first review of an album:

http://absolutepunk.net/showthread.php?t=2421112

You can tell I've come a long way since then, but at the time it felt like good work to me. Somehow that led to an year-and-a-half working under the supervision of a staff member on that site, another position at a free indie music site (I think I've whored it out to some of you guys long enough for you to know--still in my sig, too!), and my current positions on MuzikDizcovery and Made of Chalk. I loved music and art, but I had never written about it seriously, and learning how to do that has been an integral part of my intellectual development.

One final note: I've only really come to terms with my sexuality in the past two years or so. Part of that's due to meeting a really great classmate/hoobae (she's an year younger than me) who's inspired me to get passionate about LGBT issues, part of it's just been a lifelong war of education against prejudice--sometimes I still wake up and wonder if my God would hate who I am today. But if he hated me, why would he make me like this? Tough questions, tough answers. Still figuring things out.

-----

And then there's Stepmania...

God, I don't even know where to start with Stepmania. I guess I really started becoming a part of the community all the way back in 2008, when I was dumb and started my first community project with FFR Community Pack. Everybody (most of whom were, like, 15, only two or three years older than me at the time) shat on me for being a dumbass, some of it well-deserved, some of it still unfair to me. The community's changed right along with me, weirdy enough: it was around the time of my maturation that I met Gundam-Dude and elitism in the community began to die down a bit. It didn't hurt that I got a lot better at stepcharting by that time, either.

The moment I'm going to end this on is one of my proudest: getting to run FFR Community Pack 4 this winter was one of the best times of my life I've had so far. It truly felt like a culmination of my experiences with you guys, both in coming full-circle with the packs--start your time by running the first pack, end it running the fourth, am I right?--and in interacting with so many different people, both veterans and newbies, to put the damned thing together. I'm dead serious when I say that it's perhaps the best thing I've ever helped create, and I have no idea how it'll be topped in the future.

But it will be, won't it? I've come this far. I'll figure it out. Thanks for reading all of this, guys. <3

[Hakulyte]

Born.
Go to school.
Made some friends.
Got driving license in 2003. Will never touch a car since that day.
Graduate in 2005.
Lose track of nearly all my friends except 4-5.
Get requirements for Computer Science major in 2005.
Go to college in 2006-2007.
Fail cus bad at programming.
Get requirements for another Computer Science major college in 2007.
Go to college 2007-2012
Fail cus still bad at programming/lose interest.
Get requirements for Electronic Engineering major in 2013.
About to fail/slowly losing interest again even if it's different.
I've been working part time for about 6 years at same time, 10~15 hours/week which is paying all my expenses etc. and school cost nearly nothing here so, it's alright.
No girlfriend/etc.
Don't smoke/drugs/drink.
Computer, computer, computer..
Still living at my parent's place. They're married and everyone else in my familly is doing well.
I have no idea what to do.
Actually, I've been considering Spec. Ed. major too, but I'm starting to think I'm only attracted by knowledge behind everything I study and not the work after.
I'm having a hard time to even want to try to succeed in life, I just feel like no matter how much I try, it will never pay off.
If only I was born with more strict parents and they pushed me in the right direction sooner I may have gone somewhere.
I just feel like I messed up in general even if right now I don't really have any problems or issues.
The end.
/rain

Oh yeah, as for Stepmania etc. it was just a way to unleash frustration without doing something stupid. I never particularly had interest for music etc. but I eventually figured that it was more fun in general than other games for me. I don't regret spending time here.

[RNGRX]

I really wanted to join a team on Flash Flash Revolution and thought I was welcome but I was not.

[RB_Spirit]

isolate all day
no desire to socialize
loner4lyfe
play ffr
play other games
no goals
wat more can i say
EAT
PEE
POO
SLEEP
ya