Hmm... haven't done one of these in years. Not since I stopped frequenting Xanga, at least, so about 5 years ago then. Xanga was my first experience to social networking though, so it had its perks. Did that for most of my sophomore year in high school. Then it was on to Myspace, which I frequented for a year, and finally my senior year of high school I started my Facebook page, and I haven't really moved on from there. But like I said, Xanga was my introduction to how powerful (and dangerous, if you're not careful) blogging and networking can be.
Now I know how intriguing the first post of anything always is. It's like that essay the teacher always made you do in elementary school when you got off summer vacation. You know the one, it always had the breathtaking title "What I Did Over Summer Vacation" or "My Trip to Grandma's House" or, and I remember this vividly because I had to read my paper after the kid who wrote this gem of an essay, "The Summer of Nothingness." Pretty much the kid wrote about how he sat on his fat ass all summer long because his parents took away his N64 (I'm dating myself a bit here), and he had no urge to just go outside and run around. He then ended his speech to the class with, "And now I'm here in school, and I really don't give a shit." The other kids were all laughing at how the kid used a bad word, and the teacher literally dragged him all the way to the principal's office. Now how was the the ten-year-old me supposed to follow an act like that?
I went a bit off topic there, and you'll find that I do that a lot, should I continue writing this blog. But my point was, first posts tend to be boring because the author has no direction where to go, no idea what his audience (should he have one) is looking for. So I suppose I should just get the obligatory "getting to know you" bits out of the way. So, Internet, here I am.
My name is Gene Marquez, and I am a student at Southwestern Illinois College in Belleville, Illinois, which not surprisingly is located in southwestern Illinois. Bet that's a shocking bit of news, that there's a school in Southwestern Illinois called Southwestern Illinois, but you know, some places don't have that. Take New Jersey. There isn't a school called the University of New Jersey. It's called Rutgers. Maybe you've heard of it. But I digress.
I'm 21 years old, and I still live at home. Two parents, one brother, one sister. My dad's Filipino, and Mom... my mother's side of the family has English, Irish, Scotch, German, Dutch, and probably something else from Northern Europe. It's a bit of a mix. My siblings and I are staggered enough in age that we celebrate "milestone" birthdays within a calendar year of each other. When I turned 18, my brother turned 13, and my sister turned 10. Right now, I'm 21, my brother is 16, and my sister is 13. Go figure. Don't think my folks planned it out that way, but that's how it worked out. Just a cute little tidbit I thought I'd share.
What else can I say... my dad's a retired major in the US Air Force. You know what that means... we moved a lot. I was born in California at a base that no longer exists; my parents are both native Californians, so I got to see my family a lot for the first few years of my life. When I was 3, we moved to Montana. Big difference between Cali and Montana. Cold, not a lot of people, cold... but I wasn't complaining. Heck, I lived there between the ages of 3 and 6, I didn't know any better. The city we lived in had about 60,000 people, and was Montana's third largest city. Let's see, what can I say about my experience in Montana... my brother was born there, and I got to see a lot of baseball. At the time, the Dodgers had their rookie league team there, and we went to see a lot of games. That might foreshadow a bit of who I am, a kid gains his love of baseball by watching it in the warm, sunny, thriving metropolis known as Great Falls, Montana. Should've known then I was scarring myself for life.
We moved from Montana to Illinois, just outside of St. Louis, just before my 7th birthday. There, we got to see probably better quality baseball with the St. Louis Cardinals; we got there just in time for the arrival of Mark McGwire, the home run race of '98, and his subsequent fall from grace. But I didn't care, I was hooked. It was also in this first stay in Illinois that I began to foster an interest in music; some of my mom's family is musically inclined, and her parents gave my parents the family piano. Mom could dabble in a few tunes, but not really too much; she can read notes, but I'm not sure how much else she knows. We had a songbook on the piano though, and one day I just kinda sat down on the bench and started to teach myself; I couldn't read notes worth a lick, but for some unknown reason the sheet music had numbers, starting at 1 and going up, and I just sort of started to figure out the music. I had no idea what I was doing, and I wouldn't call myself a prodigy at all, but my parents finally figured out that I should probably start taking piano lessons. So I started those in fourth grade. A year later I tried playing trumpet in the school band, but I didn't really like it that much. The band instructor and me didn't get on too well.
In 2001 we moved from Illinois to Oklahoma. By this time, I was old enough to know that I liked Illinois, and I didn't want to leave. And when I got to Oklahoma, I wanted to go back to Illinois. Compared to where we had been, Oklahoma was another world entirely. That, combined with the fact that the attacks on 9/11 happened about a month after we moved, and that my grandmother suffered a stroke in early 2002 and died a few months later, made me less than a happy camper. I mean, I never became a teenage rebel or anything (in fact, I was one of those squeaky clean teens), but it took me a while to get adjusted to Oklahoma. But I kept up with my two passions, music and baseball. I took up trumpet again, playing in the school band for the 3 years we were in Oklahoma (I quit after that though, when I realized I was a terrible marcher), I continued piano lessons, and I played baseball in summer leagues. Not that I was any good, but I just liked it.
In 2004 my Dad retired and he decided to take the family back to Illinois. I was happy to be back. Good to be with my friends and all, you know. Plus, I would be moving at the start of high school, when everybody at the school would be adjusting to high school, so "new kid syndrome" wouldn't be as bad a problem. Let's see, in high school, I was in Spanish Club, Scholar Bowl (I captained the team my senior year, and we went to state!), National Honor Society, yada yada yada. This is really dry, isn't it?
I graduated from O'Fallon Township High School in 2008. I didn't know what I wanted to do, or where I wanted to go to school. I applied at over ten schools, and I got into most of them. Really wanted to go to Syracuse up in New York, but money at the time wasn't gonna work out, so I chose Saint Louis University, just across the Mississippi from home. Got there, didn't like it, got out, and I ended up at SWIC, where I have been for the past two and a half years. Probably still gonna be there next year, because I have no idea what I want to do. Oh, and I work at Target. So it goes.
So, you might wonder why I'm doing this blog? Because I'm bored, and because my friend has to do this for class, and in my boredom I decided to make one too. Isn't that fun? Anyway, hopefully future posts are a lot more fun than this one. Because I have thoughts too you know.
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