I’ll bet you’re wondering how I came to this.  Trust me.  I look back and ask myself the same question every day.  There I was…former prom queen.  Aspiring author/illustrator.  I had it all, and this is what it all wound up coming down to.

I could easily blame it on my childhood…I was a pretty lonely kid.  Don’t get me wrong…my parents were great and all.  Well.  They were, you know, present.  Sort of.  My dad spent time with me as a kid, I guess; I mean, I do have this one picture of him teaching me how to walk…

and I remember some wicked awesome pillow fights with Mom, but mostly she was just…well…not really there.  She would sort of hang out with me and then I would say something, or do something, and she would get this real funny look on her face and kind of wander off into the garden to weed the lettuce or something.  Because of her attentiveness to her produce, we had a perfect garlic plant.  

To top it all off, I had THIS for a kid brother:

Yeah I know, total freak, right?  He would spend hours at the table wearing…that…and pretending he was “King of his Dumb Onions.”  Took me years to figure out he meant “dominions.”  

Martin Luther: “I am king! King of all this dumb onion!”

I never really had any friends…it wasn’t that nobody liked me or anything; I was always really friendly and nice to everyone…hello, I did make prom queen, remember?  But honestly, I kinda don’t like being around too many people at one time.  So after school, I liked just sort of doing my own thing and getting away from all the noise and the crowds, and the gossip.  But then I met Cameron, and…well I guess I really should just start from the beginning…