I used to be a child once. It was a while ago, and I don’t remember it, but I’m told that it happened.

t remember much about my childhood. Like many small children, I had a tendency to be rather irritating when I wanted to be. However, I also grew up in a rural part of North Dakota and was homeschooled from first grade all the way to 12th.

Of the many words I’ve often thought might describe me, and the many (occasionally slightly more colorful) words others have used to describe me, normal or average was never one of them.

Everything about me has always been slightly off: my sense of humor, my social skills, and some of the ways I saw things. However, I made up for all of that by just wanting to be around people.

Living in a rural area, as well as being homeschooled didn’t give me a lot of opportunities to interact with people. I bounced around between a few random extracurricular activities such as music, gymnastics and martial arts, until I reached high school and took an interest in acting.

If you’ve been reading my columns, you might remember that I did not start here at UND, but rather at NDSU. Growing up near Fargo, that was more of a convenience factor than anything else. I started off as a theatre major, but for reasons that are too long to get into in this blog entry, that didn’t quite work out as well as I had initially planned.

Surfing through college can make it easy to get caught up in the minutia of the ever mystical “future.” Photos like this remind me that it is always important to remember where I came from before worrying about where I’m going.

In this photo, I am the small brown boy. The young girl next to me is my truly amazing sister.