Davie, FL
I was on AOL 1.0, black, grey, and white... just chatting up all the time. I met all my girlfriends online. I was living through an alter ego trying to be a boy named Alex. Alexander was actually my father’s name. At one point, I had a legion of women after me. I was like, “Okay. I am lying but I can be me! I am using my Dad’s name and lying to women, haha, but I CAN BE ME!! Lying to women but I CAN BE ME!!” Needless to say, I broke a lot of hearts. I had my heart broken a lot too.
I was actually engaged when I was seventeen to a twenty-one-year-old woman who I met that way! She was from Singapore and she came over to the states and stayed with me! My family owned a she stayed in the extra room. I never spent the night with her. My family thought we were just friends and we had to keep it that way. Well, I sort of spent the night once, and that’s when she brought the ring and we got engaged. We had sex and we were in bed. I remember hearing my mom and my grandmother and realized they knew I never came back into our home, so they were shuffling outside and trying to peek into the windows and to see what was going on. I was buck naked and jumped out of bed and jumped onto the couch in the living room. As I did this, my engagement ring fell off. I am freaking out, half naked, and my mom comes in and says, “What are you doing?!?” I was like, “Mom, my friend from Singapore is here and felt lonely I wanted to stay here with her.” The next day I was scrambling to find the engagement ring which would have been weird for my mom to find. The ring was incredibly tiny.. I guess like you know in Asian countries the extra-large didn’t fit my Godzilla hands. As an insecure teen I was like, “1-800-Jenny Craig, help me!” So, we found the ring. The relationship was super immature though. She ended up leaving me for her best friend. The depression really hurt me and I ended up losing my Valedictorian status, scholarships and didn’t end up getting into the military.
When I left school, I had some money because I got into a car accident during my sophomore year. I still have glass in my arm from it actually... it’s pretty cool. Sometimes it will just pop out, my doctor says it’ll just come out but it’s been twenty years... so anyhow, like any young adult who has money at the age of eighteen, I wasted it. I spent it mostly on pizza! I was eating pizza literally every day. It was always hard for me to make friends and I used my money to make friends through buying them pizza. I was like the Oprah of pizzas and was like, “You get a pizza! And you get a pizza! Everyone gets a pizza!!” I ended up using this time as an opportunity though to break into my career. I started as a technical representative at a place called “A Job for You, The Massage for You” … now I am a Senior Assistant Test Engineer at a different company.